Chapter Eleven.

A Definite Clue at last.

This final communication from the god Anamac was received by the vast multitude with great shouts of rejoicing, for it was accepted as putting an end finally and for ever to the practice of offering annually human sacrifices to him. And upon those occasions the choice of victims was usually made jointly by the king and the chief priest; and the choice was always of so capricious a character that, when invited to attend the festival, no man could ever know whether he would survive to return from it. Therefore the substitution of a single animal for several human victims—seldom less in number than half a dozen—was regarded as a national boon; and never, perhaps, was Anamac worshipped with more sincerity, or with more gratitude, than he was upon the day when Dick Cavendish and Wilfrid Earle so narrowly escaped dying upon his altar.

The festivities not only lasted through the entire day, but were continued far into the night, some fifty oxen being slaughtered and roasted to provide a feast for the numerous visitors whom King Jiravai had invited to Yacoahite to participate in the great annual festival; and when at length it was all over, and the guests had departed to their respective homes, everybody agreed in the opinion that it had been the most joyous and successful festival within living experience. As for Dick and Earle, they were lodged in the king’s own house, with Inaguy to act as their interpreter—that astute individual having soon made up his mind that service with the white men was safer, and likely to be more profitable in the end, than even the position of chief of the Mangeroma priests. And on the night of the festival, when the great square of Yacoahite was given up to the populace, and all the great chiefs were being entertained at a banquet given by the king, Earle, “the white man with the black hair,” availed himself of the opportunity to demonstrate his capabilities as a great medicine-man by performing a few very clever conjuring tricks before the king and his guests, which the simple Mangeromas regarded as absolute miracles. It was a stroke of sound policy on Earle’s part; for after seeing him cause a pack of cards to vanish into thin air, extract coins—a few of which he still had in his pocket—from the hair, ears and noses of great warriors, and perform sundry other marvels, there was not a Mangeroma in all that great assemblage who did not regard the American as something superhuman, or who would have ventured, even in the most secret recesses of his soul, to meditate treachery to him or anybody connected with him.

Taken altogether, the day had been a rather trying one for both Dick and Earle, for, to start with, neither of them had slept at all during the previous night, their minds having been in a state of extreme tension with regard to the events of the coming hours; and when at length the suspense was over and they knew that they had escaped a terrible fate by the bare skin of their teeth, the reaction, combined with the necessity to preserve during several hours a perfectly calm and unruffled demeanour in the presence of those about them, had told upon both rather severely, and especially upon Earle, upon whose cleverness and readiness of resource the safety of the entire party depended. Therefore it was with a sense of profound relief that the two friends at length found themselves alone together and free to throw off the strain to which they had been obliged to subject themselves all day.

It was well past midnight when the king’s banquet having come to an end, the two white men were conducted with much deference and ceremony to an apartment in the king’s house, in which, to their great delight, they found the whole of their belongings, including their two camp beds, which some thoughtful individual—who afterwards proved to have been Peter—had fixed up and prepared for their occupation. They lost no time in discarding their clothing and flinging themselves upon their pallets, for both were feeling utterly exhausted; but before surrendering themselves to sleep they exchanged a few remarks relative to the events of the past day.

“Yes,” agreed Earle, in response to an observation of Dick’s, “we have had an exceedingly narrow escape, Dick, and don’t you forget it, a more narrow escape, indeed, than you probably realise. For example, do you know the name of this tribe of Indians?”

“Certainly,” answered Dick. “I heard the king call the idol, this morning, ‘Anamac, god of the Mangeromas,’ so I suppose these johnnies are the Mangeromas.”

“Correct, my son; they are,” returned Earle. “Remember ever hearing anything about the Mangeromas?”

“Of course,” returned Dick. “They are the tribe with the bad name that those Catu Indians told us about, and whom we have been looking for ever since, because they are supposed to know something of the whereabouts of the city of Manoa. Isn’t that it?”

“That is it, Dick,” assented Earle. “And you knew it? Well, you were so cool, so apparently unconcerned, during the whole time that our fate was hanging in the balance, that I thought you had missed the point of the king’s remark.”

“Not much,” retorted Dick. “But why shouldn’t I keep cool? What would have been the use of getting excited and anxious? That would only have given our show away and spoiled everything. But, although I may not have shown it, I don’t mind admitting now, old chap, that I was most confoundedly anxious. For I knew that if your ventriloquial trick had been discovered, it would have been all up with us.”

“You bet it would,” agreed Earle. “And that was just where our narrow escape came in; for I was so nervous that, when the critical moment came, it was only by an almost superhuman effort that I was able to control my voice. However, here we are, still alive and well, thank God! And—Dick—after all, I’m glad that you are with me. A chap with a nerve like yours is worth a whole regiment of soldiers. Good-night!”

The two white men slept the sleep of exhaustion that night, to awake refreshed and re-invigorated on the following morning, with scarcely a trace remaining of the stress and strain through which they had passed on the preceding day. Inaguy and Peter presented themselves at daylight with the accustomed morning cup of chocolate; and the former, who was by this time well acquainted with his master’s habits, mentioned that he had learned by inquiry, that there was a stream just outside the town in which the white lords might safely venture to bathe. Whereupon the pair sallied forth and enjoyed the now rare luxury of a swim, receiving, as they went and returned, the respectful salutations of the populace. Upon their return they found an excellent breakfast awaiting them, prepared by the indefatigable Peter from viands supplied by the king’s especial order.

Earle announced his intention of accepting the king’s proffered hospitality and remaining several days in Yacoahite, not only to afford his men time to recover from the hardships and sufferings which they had experienced while filling the rôle of prisoners doomed to the sacrifice, but also to enable him to prosecute the inquiries which he wished to make regarding the whereabouts of the city of Manoa. And he was not less anxious to stay than the king was to entertain him and get the benefit of his advice and guidance upon several burning questions which had of late been causing him uneasiness. For now that the great god Anamac had made it clear that the white strangers enjoyed his especial favour and protection, and were therefore not to be molested, but, on the contrary, were to be treated with the utmost honour and distinction, the astute Jiravai immediately arrived at the conclusion that they must certainly be something more than mere ordinary men—as witness the marvels which Earle had performed during the progress of the feast—and that consequently their advice and assistance must be of more than ordinary value, and well worth securing. Therefore the king took Earle and Dick unreservedly into his confidence and, with the help of Inaguy as interpreter, fully laid before the pair a number of exceedingly delicate and difficult problems which were just then confronting him. And Earle, being a born diplomatist, entered into the thing with keen zest, taking the problems one by one and asking question after question until, as he put it, he had fairly “got the hang of the thing,” when, by a judicious admixture of his own diplomatic instinct with Dick’s shrewd common sense, it became not very difficult to find solutions of the several problems, which not only effected a general clearing of the air, but also ultimately added considerable lustre to Jiravai’s name as that of a wise and powerful monarch.

The settlement of these matters of high and intricate policy took time; so that it was not until some ten days after the festival of Anamac that Earle was able to introduce to the king’s notice the subject of Manoa, to ask what his majesty knew about it and its precise situation, and to request his assistance to enable the expedition to find the place.

But no sooner was Earle’s project mentioned than Jiravai began to throw cold water upon it. First of all, he denied all knowledge whatsoever of any city named Manoa; and when Earle met this denial with the admission that there might possibly be some mistake in the matter of the name, explaining that it was not this that was of importance, but the fact that there was a city distinguished by certain curious and remarkable characteristics that he was anxious to find and visit, the king, while reluctantly admitting that he had certainly heard of such a city, most earnestly besought Earle at once and for ever to abandon his intention of visiting the place, since rumour had it that the inhabitants so strongly objected to the intrusion of strangers among them that, of the few who had been known to force a way in, not one had ever been known to come out again. Jiravai asserted that he knew nothing whatever about the city, beyond the above-named peculiarity, and the fact that its actual name was Ulua—bluntly adding that he desired to know no more—and he greatly doubted whether there was any Mangeroma now living who possessed more information on the subject than himself; yet, if the white lords very particularly desired it, he would cause immediate inquiries to be made. To which statement Earle replied that the white lords desired the information in question more than anything else, except to find themselves within the walls of Ulua itself; and that the king could not more conclusively demonstrate his friendship than by causing the most exhaustive inquiries to be made forthwith. And there the matter rested for nearly a fortnight, during which Earle and Dick wandered about the district together, shooting, but finding very little game; for they soon discovered that the Mangeroma country was pretty thickly inhabited, and that, between hunting and the clearing of the land for cultivation, the game had been nearly all driven away or exterminated.

At length, however, in response to the inquiries which the king caused to be made, an old man was found who asserted that, many years ago, when he was but a lad, he had been lost while engaged in a hunting expedition, and in his wanderings had actually seen, from the summit of a high hill, a great city of palaces, which he believed could be none other than the legendary city of Ulua, but that he had made no attempt to approach it, being afraid that, if he did so, he would fall into the hands of the inhabitants, and never more see his kith and kin. Asked whether he believed it possible, after all those years, to find his way back to the spot from which he had beheld the city, he replied in the affirmative, provided that he could be carried thither and back again, but not otherwise, the way being altogether too long and rough for his old limbs to traverse unaided. Arrangements were accordingly made for the construction of a litter for the accommodation of the old man, and on a certain morning the expedition set out from Yacoahite, the party now consisting of thirty men all told, including the old man, Busa, who was to serve as guide, his eight bearers, and ten additional bearers to assist in the transport of the white men’s baggage.

As Busa had warned them, the way proved both long and difficult, leading as it did up and down wild ravines, along the dry and stony beds of mountain torrents, through rough and narrow passes, and by the edge of dizzy precipices where a single false step would have meant a fall of hundreds of feet through space; but after ten days of arduous travel the journey was accomplished without accident, and without any very startling adventure, the party arriving, late in a certain afternoon at a “divide,” from which they looked down upon a vast basin containing a lake some thirty miles long by twenty broad, on the northern shore of which stood a city which Busa had not misrepresented when he spoke of it as a city of palaces. For a city it certainly was, covering an area of ground about four miles long by three broad, and many of its buildings seemed palatial, if one might judge by their lofty white walls and glittering roofs, shining like gold in the rays of the declining sun. Of course, it was not possible to judge very accurately the character of the buildings, or to see much detail, for the city was some twenty miles distant from the spot to which Busa had conducted the party, while the rarefaction of the atmosphere rendered even the field-glasses of little use. But that the city was actually there before their eyes was indisputable, and it was a city consisting not of a mere agglomeration of mud huts with thatched roofs, but of stately buildings of solid masonry, possessing such architectural adornments as towers, pinnacles, and domes, evidencing on the part of the inhabitants a condition of high civilisation and refinement.

From his knapsack Earle produced a folded map of the northern portion of South America which he opened and spread out on a rock. It was the most modern and up-to-date map that he had been able to procure, and it was drawn to a scale large enough to show not only every town of any importance but also innumerable villages, some of them so small that, as the party had themselves proved, they contained less than a hundred inhabitants. Yet on the part of the map upon which Earle now placed his finger, and for hundreds of miles in every direction therefrom, there was no indication of town or village, and only a mere suggestion of the mountain range through which they had lately been travelling, while even the courses of rivers were merely indicated by dotted lines; in short, the party were now, and had been for several weeks, in a region which had not been explored. But by means of astronomical observations made and worked out by Dick, the track of the party had each day been plotted upon the map, and such details as the forests they had passed through, the rivers they had crossed, the Indian villages they had met with, the great swamp, and the mountain ranges, had all been carefully plotted.

“Now,” remarked Earle, pointing to a pencil mark on the map, “that is where we were at noon to-day, and we are somewhere about here now. There is no indication of a town or village of any sort anywhere near, yet just about there”—laying his finger on another point of the map—“stands yonder city on the shore of a lake, in a great basin surrounded on all sides by mountains, of the existence of which this map affords no indication. What do I deduce from that? you will ask. I will tell you, Dick. I deduce from it that yonder city is the one which, though our friend Jiravai says it is named Ulua, has been spoken of ever since the Spanish conquest, and diligently sought, as the city of Manoa; and to us has fallen the honour and glory of having actually found it! Just think of the wonder of it, Dick. For over three and a half centuries the legend of the existence of that city has persisted, yet there is no absolutely authentic account of it having ever been reached, although hundreds, possibly thousands—if one could but know the whole truth—have most diligently and painfully sought it. And at last its discovery falls to the lot of two very undistinguished people, an Englishman and an American, as is quite in accordance with the fitness of things. Now let us make use of our remaining daylight to get down to a lower level, for, with the setting of the sun, it will be bitterly cold up here, and I have no fancy for spending the night in a temperature that will probably fall below freezing point.”

So saying, Earle folded up his map and, replacing it in his knapsack, gave the word for the party to proceed, Dick and himself taking the lead. Picking their way among towering rocks and along narrow ledges, they travelled a distance of some three miles and effected a descent of about two thousand feet before night overtook them, finally pitching their camp on a little rocky plateau under the lee of an enormous vertical cliff, which effectually sheltered them from the icy wind which sprang up and roared overhead with the force of a gale almost immediately after sunset.

Notwithstanding the shelter afforded by the cliff, however, the cold was intense, and the party, acclimatised by this time to the hot, humid atmosphere of the plains, suffered severely, the more so that they were camped among bare rocks without a vestige of vegetation of any kind, and were therefore without the materials for a fire; the return of daylight therefore found them more than ready to resume the march, in the hope that before long they would reach a region where fuel of some sort would allow them to kindle a fire and prepare a much-needed hot breakfast.

They reached such a spot after about an hour’s march, camping in the shelter of a small clump of stunted pines; and here, after breakfast, Busa approached the two white men with the request that, having performed his task of guiding the party to a spot from which the “city of palaces,” could be seen, he and his bearers might now be permitted to set out upon the return journey, he and they being anxious to recross the divide during the hours of daylight, and so escape the bitter cold from which they had suffered so severely during the preceding night. The request seemed a reasonable one, for the old man’s services were no longer needed; Earle therefore liberally rewarded the old fellow and his eight bearers, and dismissed them with a message of greeting and thanks to the king.

The two parties broke camp simultaneously, Busa and his bearers taking the back trail up the path which they had all descended an hour earlier, while the others, under Earle’s leadership, proceeded down the mountain side at their best speed, being impatient to reach the fertile, cultivated country bordering the lake below.

But the task was not by any means so easy as it had first appeared, for they had scarcely gone a mile when they unexpectedly found themselves at the verge of a long line of precipitous cliffs overlooking the great basin in which lay the lake and the city. It was by no means a pleasant situation in which they found themselves, for they were standing upon a steep slope, clad with short, dry grass, almost as slippery as ice to walk upon, and this steep slope ended abruptly in a precipice which Earle, going down upon his stomach and peering cautiously over the edge, declared could be not less than six or seven thousand feet high. So terrible was the shock it gave him to find himself overhanging and gazing down into that dizzy void, that it induced a violent attack of vertigo, causing him to scream out that he was falling, and to beg those who were holding him to pull him back. They, of course, did so at once; but several minutes elapsed before the adventurous gazer sufficiently recovered his nerve to stand, and when he did so he was bathed in a cold perspiration, while his teeth chattered to such an extent that it was some time before he could distinctly articulate.

“Never had such a fearful shock in my life,” he afterwards explained to Dick. “Of course, I knew that the valley was an enormous depth below us, but when I undertook to peer over the edge of the cliff I did not for a moment anticipate that I was going to find myself hanging over a sheer void, thousands of feet deep. I expected to find below me a precipitous cliff seamed and scarred with innumerable irregularities and projections, by means of which an ordinarily active man might easily make his way down; but, man alive, this precipice is sheer, from top to bottom like the wall of a house, without a single projection, so far as I could see, big enough for a fly to settle upon. It was awful to find myself lying there, with my heels higher than my head, gazing down into that dizzy hollow, at the bottom of which tall trees looked no higher than pins, and to feel that if I dared to move a muscle I should inevitably go sliding over, head first!”

“Ay,” assented Dick. “I think I know the kind of feeling. I experienced something very like it myself the first time I climbed to the height of the royal yard. The hull of the ship below me looked so small, and so utterly inadequate to sustain the substantial spars about me, that, quite unconsciously, I found myself moving with the utmost precaution, lest my additional weight should capsize the ship.”

“Yes,” assented Earle. “I guess that was something like what I felt, except that, in my case, I was convinced I should never be able to get back to safety. Nevertheless, here I am, safe and sound. And now the question arises: How are we going to get down into that valley? So far as I can see the cliffs are everywhere vertical, like this one; yet there must be a way down somewhere; else how did the inhabitants of the city get there?”

“Oh yes, of course there is a way down, somewhere,” agreed Dick. “We’d better camp, hadn’t we, and pursue our usual tactics, you going one way, and I the other, exploring?”

“Yes,” assented Earle. “But we won’t camp just here, thank you. I should be afraid that some of us would go sliding over that cliff edge before we knew it. We will go along yonder, to the eastward, a bit. The ground looks less steep in that direction, and probably we shall find a suitable camping place before long.”

They did, about a mile and a half to the eastward; and the camp having been pitched, Earle accompanied by Inaguy, set off in one direction, while Dick, accompanied by another Indian, named Moquit, went in the other, in search of a practicable route down to the plain and the shore of the lake, the two white men taking their rifles, as usual, and each carrying a pair of powerful binoculars slung over his shoulder.

The way taken by Dick led him back along the edge of the cliff by the route which they had traversed shortly before; and having reached the spot where Earle had taken his thrilling peep down into the abyss, the young man continued on, eventually entering a fir wood, through which he passed, bagging two brace of a species of pheasant as he went. Emerging from the wood, which was about a mile long, he found himself approaching a spot where the cliff seemed to dip somewhat, and halting for a moment to reconnoitre the prospect through his field-glasses, he became aware of the fact that work in the valley had begun for the day; for he observed smoke issuing from the chimneys of a number of detached buildings which he took to be farmhouses; while, studying the scene more intently, he was presently able to pick out the forms of numerous people apparently engaged in tilling the wide fields and at work in the orchards—as he took them to be—dotted here and there in the valley far below. Farther away, he perceived a number of small dots on the bosom of the lake, carefully watching which he at length became convinced that they were canoes, or some similar kind of craft, crossing the lake, some heading towards the city and others from it.

Some two hours later, Dick called a halt in a small pine wood, and ordered Moquit to kindle a fire and prepare a brace of the shot birds for their mid-day meal; and while this was being done the young Englishman sauntered off a little way in search of another spot from which he might advantageously effect a further reconnaissance of the valley. He found such a spot at no great distance and, unslinging his glasses, proceeded to search the valley and the face of the neighbouring cliffs from his new view point. But, look where he would, it everywhere seemed the same: vertical unscalable precipices of appalling height, and nowhere anything suggesting the existence of a road by means of which the valley might be reached.

Yet stay! As he was in the very act of removing the binoculars from his eyes his keen sight detected what appeared to be an infinitesimally small moving dot against the bare drab face of the cliff, some two miles away. Focussing his glasses afresh upon the spot, Dick watched it steadily for two or three minutes until he became certain that it was moving. Yes, moving downward along the cliff face toward the valley. Precisely what it was, he could not determine with any certainty, but he judged it to be a vehicle of some sort, a slow moving vehicle; and if so, it was of necessity travelling over a road, and that road, although it was indistinguishable from where Dick stood, was one of very easy gradient, judging from the movements of the object upon it. Satisfied now that he had made an important discovery, the lad carefully noted his surroundings, noted with equal care a number of objects which would enable him to fix the position of the road, and closing his glasses, walked briskly back to his temporary camp, where he found Moquit anxiously awaiting his return, with the birds cooked to a turn and just ready for eating.

Hurriedly dispatching his meal, Dick, with Moquit at his heels, resumed his task of exploration, proceeding first to the spot from which he had just observed the moving object, and there treating the face of the cliff to a further close scrutiny. But the object, whatever it may have been, was no longer to be seen; and, satisfied of this, Dick pressed on. Two miles farther on, still following the edge of the cliff as closely as was prudent, he halted, arrested by the sight of what, at the distance of about half a mile, had the appearance of a structure of some sort, clinging to the very verge of the cliff; and inspecting it through his binoculars, he saw that he was right in his surmise. It was a building, something in the nature of a wall, with what looked like a closed gateway in its centre. And on the parapet immediately above the gateway, there was a figure, apparently that of a sentinel, stalking slowly to and fro!

It was enough; the structure before him was undoubtedly the gateway at the head of the road giving access to the valley, and his mission was accomplished. His first impulse was to go on and view the gateway, or whatever it might be, at close quarters; but the inhabitants of the valley were evidently jealous of the intrusion of strangers, as was clear from the presence of the sentinel on the parapet; and giving the matter a few moments’ consideration, Dick came to the conclusion that, before revealing his presence, it would be well to return to Earle and report. He therefore faced about forthwith and, keeping under cover as well as he could, retired in good order, pretty confident that, up to that moment, he and his follower had not been seen.

The sun was just sinking behind the mountain ridges to the westward of the mysterious city when Dick reached the camp. Earle, he found, had not yet returned, but he arrived some ten minutes later, greatly disgusted at his own want of success. He had searched the northern cliffs for a distance of some twelve miles, it appeared, and nowhere had found a spot where even a goat or a monkey might have passed up or down them. But he had penetrated to within some eight or nine miles of the city, and having viewed it at that distance and from a great height through the lenses of his powerful glasses, was fully persuaded that, let the name of the city be what it might, it was none other than that which, crowned with the halo of legend and romance, had been spoken and written of and sought for as “Manoa.”

“It is a magnificent city, Dick,” he exclaimed, enthusiastically; “a city of palaces embowered in gardens; and the roofs of many of its buildings are covered with gold. They must be,” he insisted, in reply to Dick’s incredulous shrug of the shoulders, “otherwise they would not gleam so brilliantly in the sun as they do. And to-morrow night, please God, we will rest our weary limbs in that same city, and perhaps, if luck is with us, make the acquaintance of El Dorado himself, or at all events, his successor.”