Roy Norton

“ We felt like new men the next morning when it was time to start. It was but little beyond sunrise, and yet Ixtual had been long awake and exploring the sole path from the central clearing.
“This is the way,” he said to us, when the last ax had been slid beneath harness, and the last pot tied on the pack. “We cannot travel so far to-day. It will be hard work.”
He spoke plain truth if ever a man did. I vouch for that. I have learned what hard work is. All day long we struggled and fought, twisted and curved, through a jungle that seemed ever to grow more obdurate and dense. ”

“ We came to an open spot, cut through a thin tangle of creeper, came to a wider open glade, found a way around an upjutting clump of forest, found a narrow water course, another tangle of less stalwart vine, creeper, and tree, and then forged suddenly out upon bare and ascending rock. The half-dead pack animals, urged on by blows and thrusts and prods that in less strained times would have been unthought of, staggered on behind us as we human beings, driven by will power alone, mounted those slopes. Together, men and animals, we threw ourselves upon the sparse grass. ”

“ Ixtual was conducting us now through the aid of a compass alone.
“We are too far to the left.” Or, “we must bear to the right, señores,” he said, and yet I cheerfully admit that the soul of the man was ever brave and determined. And that night when we found a tiny open spot and made camp he said, as if satisfied: “This is far beyond any place that any man within our time has ever reached. If we can keep on long enough, we shall pass the jungle that holds, and fights, and keeps all men away, and beyond it find places where travel is easier; where no man for hundreds of years has passed. ”