Julian Hawthorne

“ The devil-bird, sailing with careless indolence in advance, as if he had assumed the function of guide temporarily relinquished by Yotalu, responded at times with his harsh cry, and my brain, intoxicated by vigorous motion in that fine air, amused itself with fancies of a secret bond between us, and even played with the odd notion, which is perhaps common to many, that by a slight additional exaltation of the will I would be enabled to rise from the solid earth and float like a soap bubble. ”

“ Glendower, for all his potential efficiency, was personally only a man, and not a man of the highest type; it had been easy to resist him. But this Glendower of gold was the thing itself that the other stood for—the naked, undeniable, brutal fact. The dominion of the earth could not be offered in a shape more direct and defiant. Let me but follow back the stream to the open air, return to civilization, choose a body of helpers (Glendower himself by preference) , and all that this god of gold could bestow would be mine. ”

“ A reluctant fighter, never offering offence and seldom called on to defend myself, when need comes I am not insensible to the lust of battle. But I thought that I might make a rush through this blind crowd to the bolsa, once in which the stream could bear me out of their reach. A knife I had, but I shrank from killing the wretched victims of a monstrous wrong, who but acted out a nature which others had perverted. ”

“ I went on again, and soon the recession of the wall on my left and the tread of my foot on the naked rock told me that I had arrived at the exit of the tunnel and was on the threshold of another chamber. I secured the bolsa and had recourse to the matches. The astounding scene which the light revealed paints itself in its every detail in my memory at this moment.
The chamber—floor, walls, and dome—was of white quartz, pure and sparkling: it was oval, about a hundred paces in length by thirty in width and of such regularity of form that art must have assisted nature. ”

“ The stream which I had been following flowed across its southern end and passed out beneath an archway in the eastern side. The domed ceiling, which rose to ten times my height above the floor, displayed an emblem evidently designed to represent the sun; there was a broad disk of gold, from which descended with regularity long rays, reaching nearly to the base of the walls. At the north end of the hall rose a dais, or throne, on which knelt or squatted a figure about eight feet in height, with a long beard and barbaric ornaments, the whole carved grotesquely but powerfully in pure gold. ”

“ The sun had sunk below the giant shoulder of Illimani, and the entire western slope of the Andes lay in twilight. The profounder depths of the ravines were already obscure. The silence filled the ears like adamant; even the whisper of the stream was hushed' it had apparently passed into an underground channel. Directly athwart the trail lay a rent-off fragment of the cliff, which might have fallen from above or might have been heaved into its position by some seismic spasm, comparatively recent. ”

“ Glendower, with his professional bogy mask off, is a good man wasted. This game of business is an inhuman game, as I told him, and renders solitary and unsocial those who assiduously play it. I was touched by the boyish fervor with which this world-worn old slave of the very means whereby he sought to rule mankind grasped at the companionship of a man absolutely alien from all that was the substance of his life. ”

“ The foolishness that is bound up in the heart of a child reappears occasionally in the man; fasting and nervous tension play tricks with will and judgment. In that black, bewildered, treacherous tunnel in the bowels of the mountain I had a silent but energetic struggle with the traitor that lurks in every man. ”

“ If a man have any imagination, such perceptions in the solitude of desolate mountains lose none of their effect. I had laughed at Yotalu's extravaganza, but I knew that there are strange things in the world. And the spirit in a man has its epochs, in which unlikely contingencies and remote associations assume a significance which reason cannot interpret.
I found the compass where I had left it, and I lost no time in beginning my return. The condor, stretching his wings, preceded me. ”

“ Glendower is regarded as the head organizer and field marshal of high finance in this country and is one of the (so called) , busiest men in the world. This does not mean that he has ever in his life been worthily and beneficently busy, but only that he is one of our most inveterate and successful players at the great, fashionable game of money-making, possessing as he does a brain and temperament singularly adapted to that sort of misdirection of human energy. He is, in short, a chief factor and victim—both, in our prevalent wealth illusion. ”

“ Whatever I might think of the devil-bird, there was nothing supernatural about the raft, which turned out upon investigation to be an Indian bolsa, a sort of double canoe, made of inflated sealskins, a vehicle common enough in the lowlands, but unheard of at this altitude. There it swung, however, as if provided for my need, and at the stern was the two-ended paddle with which the natives steer and propel such craft. ”

“ My immortal birthright was worth more to me than the contents of this Andean cavern.
Yet I compromised so far (being myself very full of human nature) , as to resolve to take away with me some concrete evidence of the reality of this experience. The old Incas, for whose glory their slaves of the mine had, as I supposed, erected this image, had done with earthly riches and would not grudge me a memento. So, leaving the bolsa on the bank, I crossed the floor to the throne. ”

“ I feel genuine kindness for my fellow creatures, but have few friends, and of them one only who commands my whole confidence—a woman, of whom it is not now my cue to speak. Nor will I say more of my spiritual and religious complexion than that, in my theory and experience of life, the material world plays but a minor role. I love and seek untamed nature in men and things ”

“ This parapet—though I could hardly credit the testimony of my eyes—was likewise of gold, so that upon consideration I was impelled to the conclusion that throne and parapet, and possibly the statue also, were in truth bodily hewn out of a pure vein of the metal, which crossed the chamber and had been wrought in situ. If so, I stood in the presence of a mass of treasure equal perhaps in value to all the rest that men had collected since history began. A veta madre, indeed! This, then, was the mine of the ancient Incas and doubtless of the more ancient Piruas, in the twilight of old time. ”

“ The human spirit, till now an atom hung in blind space, regained dimension and locality. An irregular dome arched high above me, covered with sparkling points and diversified with pendent, tapering masses. ”

“ The motion was swift and often much agitated; it was punctuated by collisions, and thrice I passed over rapids which were practically falls; no other craft could have survived such treatment. I was swung this way and that and I was wetted to the skin, but I was not thrown out and I stuck to the steering paddle. Meanwhile the black walls on either hand seemed to grow taller and closer together; at length the star vanished and the altered sound made by the waters apprised me that I had entered a cavern. ”

“ At early dawn, however, going to the river bank for water, he had noticed a bolsa with no visible occupant drifting down the current, turning this way and that as it came, and indolently delayed by here a snag and there a shallow. He captured it, and lo! my lifeless body in the bottom of it, defaced by many wounds, with but the shreds of my hickory shirt remaining and with a great black bruise across my forehead. Upon further examination it turned out that the demons had not altogether made an end of me, and he made me the subject of his savage therapeutics. ”

“ The darkness was now absolute, but there was still the sense of forward movement. Presently, however, this seemed to slacken, and on dipping my hand over the side I found that the canoe was nearly at rest. I gave a few tentative strokes with the paddle, and with a light, grating noise the canoe grounded on a low bank.
VII.
Perfect darkness and silence act upon the mind somewhat as physical pressure does upon the body. Kneeling motionless in the bolsa, I felt as if I were in bonds. ”

“ Goldsmiths tell me that they contain gold enough to make between twenty-five and thirty thousand gold dollars, but I do not need the money and should regret to lose the wings, recalling as they do an episode exceptionally stirring in the life of a man uniformly peaceable.
The other day I accompanied Glendower to the gallery of the Stock Exchange. "What do you think of it?" he asked me after a my first visit.
"Let us get out," said I, turning away from the maniac uproar. "I saw something almost as bad up in the Andes; and I barely escaped with my life. Is Uiracocha any relation of yours?" ”

“ All was now well, but where, he wondered, did I procure the bolsa?
To this problem I could suggest no solution more plausible than that the demons had used it as a bait for possible victims. As a matter of fact, it remains a riddle to this day. I told him so much of my adventures as I deemed it expedient he should hear, and we agreed that the bump on my head must have been given by the low brow of the archway through which the stream made its exit from the cavern, miles above. ”

“ Chili's best revenue is from the nitrate beds on the east side of the Tarapaca pampas, between the coast Cordilleras and the Andes. At present rates of working they'll be exhausted in fifty years, but the peculiarity of nitrates is that moisture dissipates 'em like snow, and if the drought that has lasted in that valley for twenty thousand years were broken the wealth of Chili would be gone like mist. ”

“ I asked.
"Chili's neighbors are her enemies," he said, "and would co-operate to down her. Money and a few engineers could let in those streams upon the desert—then vegetation, clouds, rain, and the end of the nitrates and Chili!" ”

“ I left La Paz the last day of October, meaning to journey across Brazil to Para, at the mouth of the Amazon, and thence work up to the west of the Guianas to examine the region of the great buttes. I set out with a single mule and a Bolivian Indian, Yotalu, a short, lithe-bodied, big-headed fellow, with a flat, good-humored face and a ragged sheaf of coal-black hair. He wore a poncho and a loin cloth and carried a bow and arrows and a knife. I had a hickory shirt and deerskin leggings under my poncho, and a long rawhide lariat wound about my waist ”

“ A nameless instinct, persisting and increasing through ages from parent to offspring, correllated with the sense of sight, had remained within the sightless eyeballs, causing them to project more and more and endowing them with abnormal powers of motion, until now where eyes had been were soft white tentacles, like those of a snail, with similar retractile and protrusive faculty. ”

“ They have it that the great kings—the Incas—in order to reserve to themselves the secret of the big lode had isolated in the mine a number of workmen, with women, so as to establish a sort of hereditary caste, born, bred, and dying underground, with nothing to do but to get out the metal, seeing and knowing nothing of the outside world. This race, they say, still exists, cut off from the rest of mankind by the slipping of the strata, ages ago, blocking up the means of exit. In this seclusion they had acquired the character of gnomes, or demons, with supernatural powers. ”

“ Important interests are involved, possible political complications, and hundreds of millions of capital. Your reasonable expenses will be paid; if your results prove satisfactory; you may become independent for life ”