Chapter Five.

The God of the Catu Indians speaks.

That night, as the two friends sat together discussing supper, Dick learned a few fresh facts concerning his companion. He expressed his surprise and admiration at the skill and dexterity which Earle had displayed when performing the operation upon the panther’s foot; to which the American replied:

“Pooh! my dear chap, that was a mere nothing; one of the simplest surgical operations it is possible to think of. You should have seen some of the operations I have assisted at, and some in which I have been the sole operator. Why, man—but I won’t enter into details. Say! I guess I’ve never told you that I am a full-fledged physician and surgeon, have I? No. Well, I am. Been through my studentship, walked the hospitals, was chief assistant-surgeon at a big hospital in New York for nearly a year, took all my degrees—and then chucked it up and took to travelling and exploration, which was the idea that led me to qualify. Because, you see, when a man ventures beyond the pale of civilisation and has to rely absolutely upon himself, a knowledge of medicine and surgery is a big asset; indeed, had I not possessed such knowledge I should have pegged out in Central Africa, for it was solely by its means that I escaped death upon at least half-a-dozen different occasions. And the same knowledge has enabled me to save the lives of quite a number of natives. There are a few African tribes with whom I am regarded as ‘some’ medicine-man, and who would cheerfully have killed their chief and elected me in his place if I would but have said the word.”

Later on in the evening they went out together to visit their patient, and found the poor beast manifestly much easier and more comfortable. He had consumed all the water and a small portion of the food supplied, but was evidently still partially stupefied by the after effect of the anaesthetic, and showed no resentment at their approach; he even submitted to be touched and gently stroked, seeming to be in that numb and semi-conscious condition in which one cares nothing for whatever may happen. But the fever of almost unendurable suffering had vanished from his eyes, and Earle insisted that the poor brute recognised them, and was in some vague fashion aware that he owed his relief to them. They brought him more water, which he lapped greedily out of the enamelled dish, even while Earle held it; and when at length they left him, the poor brute was tentatively trifling with the remains of the food with which they had supplied him.

With the coming of dawn on the following morning, the two friends issued from their tent, eager to enjoy the now rare luxury of a bath; and on their way they paid another visit to their patient. The brute proved to be markedly better, although still terribly weak from the long period of starvation which he had evidently undergone. He revealed his knowledge of their approach by partially baring his fangs in a sort of semi-snarl, and even made some semblance of an effort to scramble to his feet, but the attempt was clearly too much for his strength, and he subsided again. But he was now lying in a more natural and comfortable position, with his handsome head resting upon his outstretched forepaws, like a great cat, and when Earle unhesitatingly approached, and, placing his hand upon the creature’s head, proceeded gently to caress it, the animal not only endured the touch, but after a minute or two actually began to purr.

From that moment the process of taming the beast synchronised with the progress of its recovery. On the second day of the halt at the rest camp the interesting invalid was able to use his feet and limp the few paces of distance from the camp to the rivulet as often as thirst demanded, but after drinking, the creature always returned to his lair near the tent, where Earle took care to feed him; and when, after a sojourn of five days on the spot, the camp was “broken” and the march was resumed, “King Cole,” as the American had named his new pet, fell in and plodded along between the two white men as naturally as though he had been brought up with them from cubhood.

Thus far, the party, greatly to their own surprise, had encountered no Indians, though they had occasionally met with “signs,” indicating that the country was not absolutely a desert. But on the fifth day of their resumed march they unexpectedly came upon a small party in a clearing, who incontinently fled upon their approach. A halt was at once called, and the party went temporarily into camp, while Earle, unpacking one of his bales, produced therefrom certain small hand-mirrors, a string or two of vari-coloured beads, two gaudy-looking bandanna handkerchiefs, and three cheap pocket-knives. These treasures he entrusted to the care of Inaguy, the headman, and furnishing him with an escort of two men, dispatched him in search of the elusive natives, bidding him find them and by means of the gifts which he carried, open up peaceful communication with them. For up to this time the party had been wandering more or less at random, and their leader was most anxious to get into touch with the inhabitants, so that he might question them and perchance extract some information from them which might aid him in his quest. Then, the ambassador dispatched, the party sat down to await his return with such patience as they possessed.

It was not, however, until past noon on the following day that Inaguy returned to camp alone, with a somewhat disquieting tale. From this it appeared that, having got upon the retreating Indians’ trail, he and his companions had followed it up until close upon sunset, when, while passing through a narrow opening between two high rocks, they had been suddenly set upon from both front and rear, overpowered, and conveyed as captives to a certain spot, where they found the tribe of which they were in search established as dwellers in numerous rock caves in the side of a cliff.

Arrived here, they were at once taken into the presence of the chief and closely questioned as to the why and the wherefore of their presence in that region, how many in number their party were, and so on, the questioning and answering being conducted with considerable difficulty owing to Inaguy’s very imperfect knowledge of the language in which he was addressed. It appeared that the chief listened to Inaguy’s explanation, such as it was, with a good deal of impatience and suspicion, and finally terminated the interview by appropriating the gifts which the man bore, and condemning him and his comrades to be sacrificed, on the following morning, to a certain stone god, by way of propitiation, in the hope that the act might effect the cure of certain persons belonging to the community who were then lying apparently at the point of death, suffering from some mysterious sickness. And so terrified had Inaguy been at the prospect of a sacrificial death, with its accompanying tortures, that it had taken him the whole night to think out an argument which might possibly save the lives of himself and his companions.

This argument he had advanced when, at sunrise, he and his two companions had been led forth to die upon the altar before the great stone god; and it had consisted, first, in the narrative of how the Great White Chief in command of his party had miraculously cured a black panther which had been discovered in the last stage of dissolution, and subsequently tamed it, and secondly, in the confident assertion that the man who could do this thing could likewise cure the sick of the village, if he were approached in a becomingly humble spirit. The humble spirit, Inaguy regretfully reported, had proved conspicuous by its absence; but after much discussion a bargain had been eventually struck whereby the two followers of Inaguy were to be retained as hostages while the headman was to be released upon condition that he returned at once to the Great White Chief, conveying a message that unless the latter and his party turned up at the village before sunset, the hostages would be put to death.

It took Earle not a moment to decide what his action should be, when Inaguy brought his narrative to a conclusion. The men’s lives must be saved at any cost; and since the village was situated at a considerable distance from the camp, and it would mean quick marching for the party to reach it within the stipulated time, the tent was immediately struck, and the march was at once commenced.

They arrived at the village with only a few minutes to spare, so few indeed, that they found the villagers already assembling in preparation for the sacrifice, while the sun’s disc was within less than half of its own apparent diameter from the summits of a range of hills that bounded the horizon.

The first object to attract the visitors’ attention was an enormous figure, some forty feet high, bearing a rude resemblance to that of a seated man, which had evidently at some remote period, been sculptured out of a solid block of black marble seemingly springing vertically out of the ground. There was nothing artistic in the conception or execution of the image, which was a mere travesty of the human figure, every member being absurdly out of proportion, while the only features upon the modelling of which any pains had been taken were those of the face, the expression of which hideously suggested the extremes of mingled cunning and ferocity. An altar of the same black marble, about three feet high and ten feet long, stood at the feet of the figure, and this was already piled with wood in preparation for the anticipated sacrifice.

At the precise moment when the party came within sight of this extraordinary figure they also became conscious of a peculiar taint in the air suggestive of mud and rotting vegetation; and as Earle sniffed it he remarked:

“Umph! Big swamp not far off, I guess, which, apart from anything else, is enough to account for sickness in the village. Swamp fever, most likely. Say, Dick, that’s an ugly-looking guy, that idol, eh. Won’t these ginks get a startler when they hear him speak presently!”

“Speak?” repeated Dick. “How do you mean?”

“You just wait and see, sonny,” returned Earle. “Oh, yes, he’ll speak, you bet. And what he is going to say is— But here comes the chief and his principal headmen to meet us. Now, Inaguy, you be very careful in your interpretation of everything that passes, for a good deal may depend upon it. And let’s hurry; I want to get up as close as possible to that idol before the palaver begins.”

The chief of the tribe was easily distinguishable from all the rest, from the fact that he walked some half a dozen paces in front of the others, and also because of his garb, which consisted of a gaudy head-dress of variously coloured feathers and an enormous jaguar’s skin thrown over his left shoulder, half of it covering the front of his body—and the other half the rear, the two halves united at his right hip by knotting the skin of the left foreleg to the left hinder one. He was, like all the rest of his tribe, coal-black in colour, and, like his followers, was armed with a sheaf of formidable-looking barbed spears, the heads of which appeared to be made of bone or horn. They seemed to be a fine race of men, standing nearly six feet high, and their carriage was suggestive of great strength and agility, but they were undeniably ugly and repulsive of feature, the expression being that of mingled cunning and cruelty. As they drew nearer, King Cole, the black panther, began to snarl and show his fangs in an exceedingly hostile fashion, whereupon Dick hurriedly seized one of the tent ropes and deftly looped it about the animal’s neck in a standing bowline knot, at the same time soothing him by word and touch.

The two parties met and came to a halt at a point some thirty feet from the altar; and as they did so Earle waved his hand in greeting toward the figure, airily remarking as he did so:

“How do, old chap! Glad to have the pleasure of seeing you at last.”

To which, to the stupefaction of everybody, Dick included, the figure replied in a high, thin voice:

“The pleasure is mine, oh wonderful medicine-man, who has come to heal my people. Tell them that ye are my particular friends, and that they must treat you and yours well during your stay among them, upon pain of incurring my lasting anger.”

“Got that, Inaguy?” asked Earle, turning to his headman, who seemed so paralysed with amazement that he could scarcely reply in the affirmative. “Good! Then just translate to the chief and his followers what I said, and what their god answered.”

With chattering teeth and lips that quivered with terror to such an extent that he could scarcely articulate, the thoroughly frightened Inaguy obeyed his master’s order, and his astonishment and terror were so obviously genuine that they only added to the already profound effect produced upon the Indians by the seeming miracle of speech from their hitherto dumb god. Had the chief been a little less astonished than he was, it might have occurred to him to wonder why the idol had chosen to express his will in a language that needed interpretation; but obviously he was altogether too profoundly impressed by the marvellous happening for the smallest shred of suspicion to enter his mind, and upon receiving the message he immediately wheeled round, and prostrating himself with his face to the ground—an example instantly followed by those about him—mumbled a long statement which, upon being translated by Inaguy, proved to be an emphatic assurance that nothing whatever should be done that could provoke the god’s displeasure. This done, he rose to his feet and shouted an order for the immediate release of the hostages; after which he turned to Earle and Dick and reverentially bade them welcome to the village, at the same time requesting them to pitch their camp wherever they pleased.

Earle, having chosen a spot well out in the open, where anything in the nature of a sudden surprise would be difficult—though he explained to Dick that, after what had happened, he had little or no fear of anything of the kind—intimated to the chief his desire to see the sick people at once, and went off with that individual, leaving Dick to supervise the arrangement of the camp.

Meanwhile Dick, who was by no means a fool, had been thinking matters over, and had come to the conclusion that he understood the apparent mystery of the idol’s speech, and chuckled to himself over Earle’s cleverness, which had been so wonderful as to mystify even the young Englishman for the moment.

By the time that Earle reached the camp, after paying his professional visit to the sick, the camp was all in order, and supper was nearly ready. Earle was in fine feather, for not only had he discovered that the invalids were all down with swamp fever, which, severe as it was, he was confident of his ability to cure, but upon questioning the chief with regard to the great object of his quest, he had been informed that a tribe of Indians known as the Mangeromas, occupying territory many days’ march toward the south-west, were believed to possess some knowledge of a wonderful people answering to the description which Earle had given, but that the Catus—the tribe whose guests the party now were—had as little as possible to do with the Mangeromas, since the latter were an exceedingly fierce, warlike and barbarous race, more than suspected of cannibalism. This unsavoury reputation, however, affected Earle not in the least, he was out for adventure, and was determined to have it, moreover he wanted definite information concerning El Dorado and the city of Manoa, and was prepared to take his chance, even among cannibals in order to get it.

“Well,” remarked Dick, “that’s all right; where you go, I go with you, even if it should be into a country where cannibals are as common as blackberries in August. And I have no doubt that, if need be, you can scare them as effectually as you did those niggers this evening. And let me tell you, while I think of it, that you did it remarkably well. Why, you puzzled even me for the moment.”

“Did I, really?” demanded Earle, with every symptom of extreme gratification. “I am glad of that, for, to tell you the truth, I am a bit out of practice, and the idea did not occur to me until Inaguy mentioned the idol this afternoon. Then I thought that if, by means of ventriloquism, I could make the idol speak, it would cause our friends here to sit up and take notice, as it did. Ventriloquism, Dick, is a very useful accomplishment for a man who goes much among savages, as I have done, and it has got me out of an extremely tight corner more than once. It always appealed to me powerfully, from the time when, as a boy of seven years old, I attended a ventriloquial entertainment and heard the guy conversing with unseen people in mid-air, and heard remarks addressed to him by obviously inanimate objects. There seemed to me to be useful possibilities in it, and I started trying to do it at once, finally taking lessons from a wonderfully clever guy, who told me that my throat was specially well adapted for it. Ah! here comes Peter with supper, for which I’m glad, for I happen to be possessed of a ten dollar appetite to-night.”

The meal over, Earle unpacked, his medicine chest and mixed a sufficient quantity of medicine to serve his patients through the night, and took it up to the village, where he remained nearly three hours ministering to the sick, and talking, through Inaguy, to Yahiti, the chief of the Catus. When at length he returned to the camp he was in the highest spirits, for the somewhat incomprehensible reason that Yahiti had informed him that the country lying between the Catu and the Mangeroma territories was extraordinarily difficult, and full of the most weird and terrible perils.

On the following morning the two friends were astir with the dawn, Earle having expressed a desire to inspect the great swamp in the neighbourhood, to which he attributed the epidemic of fever from which the inhabitants of the village were suffering. This swamp was situated at the distance of about a mile south-east from the village, and was of such an extent that whenever the wind blew from either the east or the south—these being the prevailing winds there—the pestiferous odours arising from it were wafted directly toward the village; and Earle’s idea was to investigate, with the view of ascertaining whether anything could be done to reclaim the swamp, failing which he proposed to recommend the Catus to abandon the place and take up their abode elsewhere.

Upon reaching the swamp, it was found to lie in a shallow depression, roughly circular in shape and some three miles in diameter, its deepest part—about eight feet—being nearest the village, while at its upper extremity it was fed by a small stream of a capacity just about sufficient to neutralise the constant process of evaporation without being enough to produce an overflow. Further than that, it occupied such a position that a trench little more than a quarter of a mile in length and averaging a depth of about nine feet was all that was needed to drain the swamp by carrying off the water and discharging it into a valley some three-hundred feet deep.

An alternative scheme which Earle also investigated was the diversion of the stream which supplied the swamp with water; and this was also found possible by cutting a trench about two hundred yards long; but it was open to the objection that, in order to do it, the workers would be obliged to walk a distance of nearly twelve miles daily to and from their work, and he doubted whether the Catus were energetic enough to do it.

The task of convincing the Catus that they must do away with the swamp or abandon the village, unless they were prepared continually to suffer from fever, was a long and troublesome one, the Indians having a strong constitutional objection to anything in the nature of hard work; but Earle succeeded at length, and actually got them started on the work of cutting the drainage ditch, that scheme having been chosen as the one promising the quickest results and involving the least labour. By the time that this was done the invalids were all recovered from their sickness; and ten days after their arrival at the Catu village the exploring party resumed their march, to the loudly expressed regret of the inhabitants, who urgently pressed them to remain, and would quite possibly have detained them by force, but for fear of exciting the anger of the stone god.

The journey was resumed immediately after breakfast on a certain morning, and before the hour for the first halt arrived the party began to realise the truth of Yahiti’s story that the route was full of difficulties, if not of dangers; for it lay over rugged country so thickly bestrewn with enormous boulders that Earle likened the journey to the exploration of San Francisco immediately after the earthquake. Of course, they went round the boulders when such a course was possible, but it very frequently happened that long reefs of rock projected out of the ground for miles on either hand, when, difficult though the task might be, it became easier to climb up one side and down the other, than to pass round. Two miles was the extent of their journey over that kind of country which they were able to accomplish before sunset; and when at length they camped they were little more than eight miles from the Catu village.

To travel over such country was wearisome in the extreme, but there was nothing for it but to push on, or else make a détour of unknown extent; and this idea Earle would not entertain for a moment. On the following day, therefore, they resumed their journey, although with every yard of advance the difficulties appeared to grow more formidable.

It was about mid-morning when they reached the base of a cliff some forty feet high that, being practically vertical, seemed to bar their further progress, and after contemplating it for several minutes, Earle decided to make the spot a halting place while he and Dick explored the cliff in opposite directions in search of a practicable crossing. Accordingly, while the natives were forming camp, the two white men, taking their rifles and a few cartridges, set off along the foot of the cliffs, Earle proceeding in a north-westerly direction, while Dick proceeded toward the south-east.

The rock of which the cliff was formed was, for some considerable distance in the direction followed by Dick, quartzite; but at a point about a mile from the spot where he had parted from Earle it changed to a black, bituminous limestone, studded here and there with ammonites. Dick, who knew little or nothing about geology, merely noticed the change in the character of the rock, and sauntered on, eagerly scanning its face, in the hope of finding a spot where it might be scalable by men carrying moderately heavy burdens. And at length he reached, as he believed, such a spot, where the black rock seemed to have been riven by some mighty natural convulsion, the rift forming a steep and exceedingly narrow gully leading to the summit. Naturally, he at once started to climb this gully, with the object of testing its practicability; and he had traversed nearly two-thirds of its length when, as he scrambled up, his attention was suddenly attracted to a sort of pocket in the rock, which had been laid open by a fall. What particularly attracted his attention toward this pocket was the fact that it contained a considerable number of bright green crystals, which struck him as being peculiar not only from their rich colour, but also from the fact that they were all of practically the same shape, namely hexagonal. So greatly did he admire them that he put a couple of the largest in one of his pockets, intending to show them to Earle and ask him whether perchance they were of any value. Then he pushed on again and soon reached the upper end of the gully, when he found himself, somewhat to his amazement, on a vast tableland, stretching as far as could be seen, with what looked like a big forest at a distance of some ten miles.

Having completed his survey, Dick descended the gully and returned to the camp, to find that Earle was still absent; he therefore set out to seek him and report his success. Some two miles beyond the camp he met the American returning, considerably disgusted, he having failed in his search, and at once Dick reported his triumph, incidentally producing the crystals and asking if Earle happened to know what they were.

“Know what they are?” echoed Earle, after most carefully and interestedly examining the stones. “Why, of course I do. Don’t you?”

“Haven’t the least idea,” answered Dick. “But they struck me as being rather pretty, and I thought I would take them back to my sister as souvenirs of my travels. There are dozens more where these came from.”

“Are there?” caustically remarked Earle. “Then, my dear Cavendish, permit me to congratulate you; for these two crystals are remarkably fine emeralds; and the probability is that you have accidentally stumbled upon an emerald mine rich enough to make the fortunes of a dozen men. Let’s get back to camp and move on to this gully of yours. We’ll overhaul it at once, and if it should prove—as I strongly suspect—to be a true emerald mine, we’ll work it for a few days and ascertain something like its probable worth.”

“But,” protested Dick, “I didn’t know that emeralds were found in South America.”

“What!” ejaculated Earle, in amazement. “You ignorant sailorman! Why, some of the most famous emeralds in the world have been unearthed in this country. The Spaniards, under Pizarro, took enormous quantities of them from the Peruvians, but were never able to learn exactly where they were obtained; and the only mine now known in South America is, I believe, situated near Bogota. But I have long been convinced that this is the country, par excellence , for emeralds—ay, and possibly rubies and sapphires as well. Come along, man; let’s go and have a look at the mine that’s going to make a millionaire of you.”