Charles Fletcher Lummis

“ How much longer this accursed power tormented the miserable monarch the myth does not tell us; but he was cured at last by bathing in the river Pactolus, and the washing away of his magic power filled the sands of the stream with golden grains.
The Midases are not dead yet—for the one of ancient fable there are thousands to-day, at whose very touch all turns to gold. Their food does not become metal between their lips—but often it might as well, for all the joy they have of it. ”

“ Suddenly the brown llama turned with a snort of disgust, and strode off up the trail. The white one hesitated a moment, snorted, and followed. “That way they get tired, sirs,” said the boy, emptying his hat and pulling it down upon his thatch of black hair.
“I’d take a good club to them!” growled Barton, who had great confidence in the Saxon way of forcing things.
“No, the boy is quite right. It is another case wherein you must not try to be smarter than nature. The llama is the stubbornest brute alive—a mule is vacillating compared to him. ”

“ But now the face seemed not quite so heavy; for again he was looking toward the pueblo and bending his head as one who listens for a far whisper. There it came again—a faint, faint air which not one of us could have heard, but to this Indian boy it told of shouts and mingled wails.
“What will be?” cried Lelo, stamping his hoe upon the barrier, and with unwonted fire in his eyes. “For surely I hear the voice of women lamenting, and there are men’s shouts as in anger. Something heavy it will be—and perhaps I am needed.” ”

“ A Duel in the Desert.
Of the innumerable tragedies of the wilderness—the grim procession of life and death, the irreconcilable conflict of the animals as bounden as we are to appetite and passion and self-preservation—probably every hunter of considerable experience has seen the eloquent tokens; and every reader has heard at least of the sensational cases. The wonder is, perhaps, that these latter are so few; that only one death out of a million is so far outside the vast inclusive rule as to be of interest to us dull-eyed observers. For the law of conflict is inexorable. ”

“ Pablo fished out the little stone image, which he had never shown to man before, and T’bó-deh inhaled from its lips.
“It is so!” he said angrily; and prying out the turquoise heart he showed the hunter that from beneath it the sacred meal was gone, and in its place a tiny black feather. “It is no wonder that thy hunting was ill,” he cried, “for the witches have changed the heart of Keem-eé-deh! But I will give thee a strong wahr that none can kill,” and breaking the polluted image with a rock, he covered the fragments with a cloth and chanted a sacred song. ”

“ And when both had proved themselves by eating the last grain, the elders took them out to the sacred running-place and put them side by side, and marked the course, and gave them the road. Then Pablo went running like a strong antelope, but the girl like a scared fawn; and up the sacred hill they flew, and turned at the Stone of the Bell, and came flying back. But now Pablo was slower, for it is not well to surpass one’s bride in the marrying race, as if one would rob her of respect; and if they come in equal, there is no marriage. ”

“ The only one who remembers much of that grim journey is Ramon, and as he is [60] not much given to talking, no one knows just what he does think of it. The Professor’s clear recollection begins with finding himself on board the train at Casapalca—a train of that most wonderful railroad in the world, the railroad above the clouds, that clambers up and burrows through the cordillera of Peru. Before that are only hazy memories of a vast mountain wall leaning over to crush him; a winding path in the air; a queer, boy’s voice, coming from nowhere, with little Spanish words of cheer. ”

“ Half-way to arms-length it met that furry avalanche, and broke its force. The cat landed full against my side.
Its sharp hind claws sank into my thigh, and the sharper fore claws clutched me in the pectoral muscles in front and between the shoulder-blades behind. The pain was cruel, but I had no time even to cry out. At the instant I expected to feel those merciless jaws on my neck, and that would be the last.
The wildcat knows where the jugular vein is as well as the best surgeon of them all; and it is for that that he invariably jumps. ”

“ In went the brown fist again; and rummaging down through the silken fleece, his fingers met something firmer. In a moment he had it out—a long bundle of that matchless weaving of old Peru; of cloth as soft and strong as silk, woven with strange figures of men and gods and beasts; such fabrics as never unthinking loom has woven, nor any machine less wondrous than the fingers of a man.
“Ay! It will be worth twenty soles!” cried Faquo softly. “But it is so heavy! Perhaps they have wound it on a stone.” ”

“ Take the heart of a man, and go!”
Pablo looked at the pitiful little heap in the corner, and turning, manfully strode out through the broad portal and went stumbling westward in the darkness, over mounds and hollows and fallen walls. Down the long, steep ridge, across the undulant plain, knee-deep in dry and whispering grass, and up the western slope of the valley he trudged; and at last in the darkness ran up against a smooth, straight face of rock. “It is the cliff,” he shivered—for he feared greatly. ”

“ Fifteen feet away, barefoot, Narigudo stood in the door of the ore-shed, with an ugly smile.
“Young Excellency,” he drawled, insolently, “you have locked me in. Give me the keys to go!”
At this Alberto found his voice. “In this hacienda,” said he, steadily, “it is accustomed to obey the administrador, and not to command him. I will let you out when I go to the gate.”
“Ah, it’s the administrador, is it? Then give me the keys before I eat an administrador!” The tone had changed from insolence to rage, and the angry fellow sprang forward. ”

“ Bidding me squat forward, the boy settled back on his knees and began to ply his pole. The loftiest great lake in the world has no timber on its shores, and with the mighty forests of the Yungas five days off no one is going to think of paddles. Plain contorted poles of the iron cupi are far more easily brought over the Andean passes, and they have to suffice.
Slowly, with Pablo poling into the mud behind, the clumsy balsa slid through the totora, whispering as it went with its brother rushes—for itself was simply a great bundle of totora, totora bound, with totora sail and sheets. ”

“ The wind butted the harder in our face; the waves—no longer tamed by the rushen breakwater of the inshore—came running at us like a stampede. The slow prow kicked them and stumbled on them and pounded them into a coarse rain that pelted hard and icy. I wriggled out of my coat of oiled horsehide and bound it over the camera box to protect that from the spray—for it had been well strained by a fall of the pack mule in crossing the pass of Sorata, and was no longer so waterproof as might be wished. Pablo could now no more touch bottom ”

“ I never knew him to fry eggs in a stove-pipe hat, nor to pick twenty-dollar gold pieces out of people’s eyes, nor to chop off a man’s head and then stick it on again, nor any of those threadbare sensations, though he sometimes practices simple illusions like making things appear where they are not, or causing them to seem not to be where you really know they are. But those are trifles, just to keep his hand in; his claim as champion conjurer of the world rests on very different accomplishments. ”

“ He is as far from being what I would soberly call a hunter as the fellow whose only notion of whist is to play trumps at every lead is far from being a whist player. One who knows as well as anyone, and as well loves, the wild thrill of the chase, who has hunted and been hunted, and found the keenest “sport” when the “game” turned the tables and he had to fight hand-to-hand for his own life, is not apt to be foolishly sentimental. But he is very apt to pity those who have never learned the higher side of hunting. ”

“ Only, a few rods farther to the left, and where Lelo could not see for the wall at his back, the tall, white ears of a burro were moving quietly along in the bushes, which hid the rest of its body. Now and then the animal stopped and cocked up its ears, as if to listen; and its eyes rose over the bush, shining with a deep, strange light. Just beyond was the low adobe wall which separated Reyes’s garden from the next—running from the foot of the cliff down past the old house.
To go on to the field needed even more courage than to keep from fleeing for home ”

“ Pablo unrolled the bundle from his head, wriggled, wet-skinned, into the red print shirt and snowy calzoncillos, wrapped their flapping folds about his calf with the buckskin leggings of rich maroon; belted these at either knee with a wee, gay sash from the looms of Moqui, fastened the moccasins with their silver buttons, and, with the tawny sheath of bow and arrows slung across his back, started at a swift walk. Once only he stopped, after a scramble up the gravel hills that scalloped the plateau, to look back a moment. ”

“ But no one but Andrés, I am sure, would have said it here. By the time you get up to 16,000 feet in the Andes, if you are not dead altogether, you certainly have no breath to spare—not even so much as to say, “This mouth is mine.” As for exhorting a pack-mule to “get up” or trying to make it ashamed of its blood relations, why, you couldn’t if you would. If some one were to stand at the head of the pass offering you a dollar a word for remarks, the chances are a hundred to one that you would find yourself without either the ambition or the lungs to earn a nickel. ”

“ There at the foot of the cliff they were found; desiccated by the furnace airs of the desert, light as mummies, but unbroken; their very eyeballs dried in their sockets; the plumage of the owl practically complete, and enough fur of the wildcat’s muzzle and paws left by the moths to identify it even to those who could not recognize its unequivocal anatomy. ”

“ Fear not, sisterling, for the goblins touch not those that are true. Remember, it is for Spain!” And pushing her gently inside their own doorway, and stooping to kiss her, he hurried down the street.
Lina dared not climb the noisy stairs to the deserted rooms. She crouched in the hall, shivering, drawing the manta about her shoulders as if with cold, but shutting her teeth bravely. The shuffle of Vicente’s broken shoes had already died away; and it seemed as if the whole world had slipped past with him. Ages and ages she waited, till she was ready to scream with fear ”

“ When the people of Shee-eh-huíb-bak were making clean for the Noche Buena, Pablo came to the cacique, and said: “Tata, there is another year, and I am tired to be alone.”
“But canst thou keep a wife?”
“Thou knowest, tata, that none kill more game. As for my fields, they are good, and the careless-weed never grows there.”
“It is truth, my son. And who is good in thine eyes?”
“There is only one, tatita, and that is Deer-Maiden, the child of the Hoo-máh-no. She is very good.” ”

“ The beautiful red gold gets its color from a large alloy of copper.
It is an odd fact that the sea is full of gold. No doubt at the bottom of that stupendous basin which has received for all time the washings of all the world, there is an incalculable wealth of golden dust; but the strange ocean mine is not all so deep down as that. The sea water itself carries gold in solution—a grain of gold to every ton of water, as a famous chemist has shown.
Among the historical big nuggets found in various parts of the world, there have been some wonderful yellow lumps. ”

“ It is not so much the clay wall that holds them, as the authority of law, which no Pueblo ever yet questioned.
“’Colás’s burro” was soon in every mouth. The strange story of its death and its reappearance to Lelo were not to be mocked at. So it used to be, that the animals were as people; and every one knew that there were witches still who took the forms of brutes and flew by night to work mischief. Perhaps it was some wizard of the Cumanche who thus, by the aid of the evil ones, was avenging the long-haired horse-thieves who had fallen at Tajique. ”

“ Probably it never occurred to the lad to be comforted with thinking that the greatest conqueror of the Americas was called Faquito, too, when he was herding his pigs in Truxillo; and that if one Faquo could grow up to be Don Francisco, so [26] might another. These consolations of philosophy never do come to us until we are too old to need them so much.
But perhaps you are thinking: “Well, why should a twelve-year-old cholo boy look antiquated? Are lads of that age in Peru expected to be ancient, any more than in New York or Boston?” ”

“ Even before Europeans knew of America, the remarkable Indians of Peru half worshiped the Misti; and so Arequipa gets its name, an Aymará word which means “with the peak behind it.” Far up its deadly sides they toiled to make their sacrifices to Those Above; and even in the elder crater I have counted the ruins of aboriginal shrines. It is so isolated, so individual, so majestic in its awful stature; and above all, while its neighbor brothers [68] are just mountains, it has a soul—the wondrous fire-soul of the volcano.
A stern father is the Misti. ”