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CHAPTER XII-THE PATH OF THE TIGER

It was near upon the time of sunset when I slowly climbed the hill. I could not take my eyes from the great stones before me, many of which must have been at least ten square yards in surface area, and cut so straight and square that, without cement or mortar, they fitted one against the other as nicely as a child's wooden bricks. I wondered how they had come there, by what means they had been transported and lifted into position; and I marvelled that an ancient people should have been masters of such science.

But it was not this alone that caused my footsteps to become slower and slower as I approached the ruin. Despite myself, I could not help remembering much that the wild man had said to me of ghosts and evil spirits.

In the dim evening light, wreathed in the mist that rose from the surrounding plain, those great pillars of cold, silent stone looked not to belong to this world of common things. Towering, as they did, above the tree-tops of the forest, they made me think of the enchanted palaces of which in childhood my mother had read to me from fairy tales. If there were ghosts anywhere in all the world, they were here-and I was sure of that.

This notion got the strongest hold of me; and presently, a cold sweat broke out upon my forehead, and I wished that I were back with the wild men in their woodland village. However, I had more pride than to retreat, and that at the eleventh hour; and I continued to go forward, though something after the manner of a condemned man towards the gallows.

As it grew darker I became more afraid. Night in those tropic latitudes comes suddenly; darkness falls like a curtain upon a stage; and when I had gained the outer pillars, which formed together an encircling colonnade, there was scarce light enough for me to see a distance of thirty yards.

Within the circumference of these outer pillars-which attained upon an average a height of about fifty feet-was a great roofless building with a floor of flagstones, where the silence quite unnerved me. It was more oppressive than the silence of the forest, where I had always been conscious that one was surrounded by Life in a million forms: plants, insects, and animals-all at war that they might live.

But this place seemed dead, save for vast colonies of small red ants whose bite was poisonous; for I had not been there a full minute before I was bitten from head to foot, and there were painful weals all over me.

It was plain I could not sleep amid the ruins as I had intended. Not only would the ants torture me almost to distraction, but the place was uncanny, and I could now well understand how those ignorant woodlanders believed it to be haunted.

I was about to go, and had actually turned towards the main entrance, which I could see quite clearly in the light of the newly-risen stars, when a sound came to my ears that was so like a groan that I felt my blood run cold.

I stood transfixed, more frightened than bewildered. Looking about me on every side, straining my eyes in the semi-darkness, I could see nothing. I was convinced that there was no one in that vast chamber save myself and the red ants. And yet the groan came again, louder than before.

I tip-toed across the room, my heart throbbing like an engine. And like a frightened child, I hid myself in a corner; for I had no convictions any longer, and I wished only to be somewhere where I could not be seen.

Then a spider descended upon me from somewhere high up the wall. And you may laugh at me when I say that I sprang to my feet and dropped my blow-pipe and let out a cry that was very near a shriek. But you would never have laughed had you been placed as I was, seen that spider, and felt upon your shoulders his restless, furry legs. For this was no common spider that eats flies and gnats, but a bird-devouring brute, the size of a saucer; and this is no exaggeration when one takes into account the full extension of his legs.

As I fled, I picked it from off me with my hand, and threw it away; whereupon I found that it had covered my fingers with a disgusting and sticky saliva. I am only thankful that it had no time to bite me, for I believe the bite of these terrible insects has been known to prove fatal. They build webs of such strength and solidity that birds as large as sparrows are caught in the toils and killed; and I have heard it said that these monsters also ascend trees, drive hens from their nests and then devour their eggs.

However, this is no treatise upon Natural History. He who wishes to know more of this horrid creature may read of it in recognised works of science. For myself, to have felt once its quick, hairy legs upon my bare neck and shoulders is enough for many a day, and the thing may belong to any species and genus that it likes, so long as I never set eyes upon one again.

For I was thoroughly scared; I had become as jumpy as a bean on a hot plate. I trust that I am not by nature a coward; but the atmosphere of that ghostly, misty place, the mysterious groans that I had heard, which had seemed to come from nowhere, and the long-legged, furry spider, had all so played upon my nerves that I knew neither what I was doing nor what would happen next.

I had made, in any case, as much noise as a harlequinade. I had cried out at the top of my voice and had sent my wooden blow-pipe rattling to the ground. And then I stood motionless, breathless, waiting-as it seemed-for some new calamity.

This time it was no groan I heard, but a human voice calling, at first loudly, and then more softly, in a strange foreign tongue.

I listened, and I dared not move. The silence that followed endured for minutes, during which the seconds were punctuated by the violent beating of my heart. And, presently, I began to think. As I mastered my fears, I became capable of reasoning.

It was folly to consider ghosts. Such superstitions were well enough for untutored savages, wild men of the forests, but they would never do for Richard Treadgold, who had lived his years in Sussex-though, of a certainty, I had heard of more than one so-called haunted house between Beachy Head and Selsey Bill.

I was convinced that I had heard a human voice. I had been able even to distinguish words, howbeit in a language that I did not comprehend. And if that were so, it must follow that I was not the only human soul within that gloomy ruin.

I looked about me, and saw in the starlight my blow-pipe, lying on the floor. I picked it up, and placing a dart within the mouthpiece, began to explore the place, starting at the wide entrance and making a tour of the walls.

It was not long before I came upon a square hole in the ground, edged with shallow coping stones to keep out the water when the place was flooded by the rains. It reminded me of a hatchway on board a ship.

Below it was quite dark. I lay down upon the floor at full length with the idea of listening: for I was now sure that I was on the track of the secret of the place. But presently my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and I saw before me a flight of narrow steps, leading downward-as it seemed-into the very bowels of the earth.

I had now mastered my fears. I was determined to be a fool no longer, but to conduct myself like the man I wished I were. I would have descended without a second's thought had it not been for two grave considerations: firstly, I had no means of striking a light; and secondly, the stairway was so narrow that I must leave behind my long Indian blow-pipe, the only means of self-defence I had.

I have set down already much by no means favourable to myself; and therefore I have the less hesitation in recording an incident which goes far to prove that there were moments when I was a worthy pupil and admirer of John Bannister himself. For I went down that black and shallow staircase, half naked as I was and quite unarmed, not knowing what would befall me at the end of it.

Half-way down, the staircase turned, when to my surprise I saw below me the dim reflection of a light. And presently I found myself in a long shallow chamber, where I stood bewildered.

In the centre of the room was a rough stone altar upon which burned an oil lamp of a quaint design and wrought in bronze. Of other such lamps, similar in all respects, I counted five, lying upon the stone flooring, each surrounded by its own pool of oil.

The whole place indeed was in great disorder. Curtains of finely woven hair had been wrenched from the walls and cast upon the ground. Benches and short-legged tables had been overturned, and in some cases broken. Here lay a sword, and there a spear, and here again a pistol, broken at the small of the butt. Nor was all this the worst of it, by any means; for immediately before me, lying in stiff, huddled attitudes-a pathetic and a tragic thing to see-were three stone-dead men, as sure as I first saw the light of day in Sussex.

Dead they were, for they neither moved nor even breathed. And when I sighed aloud at the wonder of it all, a fourth man whom I had not noticed, lying upon the floor at the other end of the room, struggled upon an elbow and cried out to me, and afterwards pointed a finger down his throat.

I was no such fool as to mistake his meaning. He wanted water to drink, and I looked about me to find it. At the foot of the altar was a pool of clear, crystal water, a spring that bubbled from out of the crust of the earth, the overflow being conducted to the far end of the chamber by means of a shallow, wooden trough. I found a drinking vessel which, to my amazement, was of gold; and this I filled in haste, and brought to the wounded man.

For wounded he was, a leg being broken at the thighbone, so that he could not move an inch without suffering the greatest pain. It was this pain I daresay, as much as loss of blood, which had thrown him in a fever; for his skin was burning to the touch.

Three times I filled the cup, and each time he emptied it; and as he drank, he thanked me with his eyes.

Then he lay back and rested, whilst I gazed upon that shambles; for a shambles it was-blood was everywhere.

I went to the dead men, to each in turn, to make sure that there was no spark of life in any. And this was the second time that I looked upon the cold face of death; for, sure enough, each one was dead. And they were shot; they had been killed by leaden bullets: one in the head, another in the heart, whereas the third, poor wretch! had died in agony, with a great wound in his stomach.

But dead though they were, I could not regard them without noticing how different they were in features and in figure from the wild men of the woods.

The savages with whom I had sojourned for so long, for whose simple kindness I shall be ever grateful, were of a Mongolian cast of countenance: they had high cheek-bones, lips thinner than a negro's, and yet thick and loose, and their eyes were almond-shaped, inclining downwards to the nose. Also, their greatly receding foreheads and chins suggested that they belonged to one of the lower and least intelligent species of mankind.

But the three dead men, as well as he who was yet alive, had aquiline noses, thin lips, and rounded eyes. Also they were fully dressed in long tunics of some woven material, open at the throat, and girdled at the waist. They wore their hair long, but cut straight, level with the eyebrows; and above this fringe a broad metal band encircled the head above the ears.

I looked from them to the altar, and saw thereon a graven disc from which rays extended to the extremities of the stone. Beyond doubt this was meant to be the sun; and of a sudden I remembered that the inhabitants of Old Peru had been wont to worship the sun.

So these, perhaps, were those same Peruvian priests of whom Amos Baverstock had spoken, they who shared with John Bannister the secret of the Greater Treasure of the Incas.

And then the truth burst upon me as in a flash-I had struck the pathway traversed by the tiger. The death and destruction by which I was surrounded was the work of Amos Baverstock himself.

I picked up the broken pistol, looked at it in the lamplight, and knew straightway that I had guessed aright. For I recognised it at once. It had belonged to Joshua Trust. It was the same pistol I had seen often in his hands, the one with which he had fired at me upon the Littlehampton road. And if I had had any doubts upon the matter, they would have been dispelled at once; for there were the man's initials, "J.T.," carved with his sailor's jack-knife on the wood.

I just let the broken pistol fall to the ground at my feet; and at the noise, the wounded man, to whom I had given water, struggled again upon an elbow, and spoke to me-in English.

CHAPTER XIII-THE STORY OF ATUPO

"Friend?" said he; and though he pronounced the word in the strangest fashion, I at once took his meaning.

I assured him of my good intentions, that I was no friend of those who had committed so dastardly an outrage. And at that, though in the greatest pain-as I could see-he smiled and thanked me.

I will not repeat word for word the childish broken English that he talked. He knew nouns enough to express his meaning, but this was all of our language that he had, and for verbs he was obliged to fall back upon grimaces and gesticulations. These, however, were so forcible and graphic that I was never at a loss to understand him: and during the six weeks that this man and I lived together in the ruins, whilst his broken leg was mending, he came to speak quite fluently in my language, whereas-to my shame, be it confessed-I learned not a dozen words of his.

I asked him how he had picked up his English; and since I had already guessed his answer, the familiar sound of that fond name was no less pleasant in my ears.

"John Bannister," said he; and then asked me eagerly where Bannister now was.

I shook my head, telling him as simply and as briefly as I could the whole of my adventures, from the time when I was kidnapped a few miles from my home beyond the seas to the day when I took my departure from the habitations of the wild men of the woods.

His story I got from him by degrees, after I had tended to his wounds. I had no knowledge of surgery, but I knew that a broken leg must be made fast to a splint; and, borrowing a knife, I returned that very evening to the forest, and cut a straight branch from a tree, as well as a long coil of liana, which I wound about my shoulders like a garden-hose.

I peeled the bark from two sides of the branch to make it as smooth as possible, and then bound it tightly to the poor man's leg by means of the liana. I bathed his wound daily with the clean water from the spring within the vault; and in a few days the blood ceased to flow and the wound-a rough, ugly rent from a leaden bullet-began to heal.

There was a plentiful supply of food within the chamber-bananas, dried berries, and manioc; and together we lived, this man and I, in uneventful idleness, he flat upon his back on a bed of rushes, I attending to his daily wants.

He claimed direct descent from the incas of Old Peru. He told me much that I already knew: that in the great land which had been discovered by Pizarro there had been two races, the common Peruvians and those of inca stock. The latter was the nobility of the land, being of royal blood; and it was they who had held the important offices of state and formed the priesthood.

Centuries ago, upon the fall of Cuzco, Cahazaxa, one of the greatest nobles in the kingdom, escorted by an army of priests and soldiers, conveyed the Greater Treasure across the mountains, and hid it in the forest that extends across the whole valley of the Upper Amazon and its tributaries. The Spaniards got wind of this, and some years afterwards, in the year 1541, an expedition led by the redoubtable Orellano, a lieutenant of Gonzalo Pizarro, crossed the eastern chain of the Andes in search of El Dorado, or that country which was then but vaguely known as the Land of the Gilded King.

This "Gilded King" was Cahazaxa himself, who, at the time of Orellano's famed expedition, had been for some months dead. But the little civilised colony that he had established in the wilderness survived, and continued to survive until the middle of the last century, when I myself beheld the last of it.

Now, in the narration of historical and other facts, I have the greatest regard for a certain principle, established by the Greeks: the habit of reserving for its proper place each item of information, whether it be of primary or secondary importance. On that account, I ask you, therefore, for the space of a chapter or so, to bear in mind the famous name of Orellano and his search for the Land of the Gilded King-an affair to which I must soon refer again. I set down now only that which the inca himself told me, together with such historical facts as were known to me at the time.

Cahazaxa was dead; and he was buried in a cavern, high amidst the cloud-wrapped mountains, where his soul might rest in peace the nearer to the God he worshipped-the life-giving and almighty Sun, who, as he held, in the very dawn of the ages had sent Manco Copac and Mama Oello Huaco to earth, to make the Incas of Peru glorious and great.

Orellano, the Spaniard, failed to find the Treasure. Undergoing the most terrible privations, he and his gallant followers pierced the forest, and, making one of the most remarkable journeys in the whole history of exploration, descended into the main stream of the great River of Mystery-as I call the Amazon-and, finally, after eight months of hardship and of peril, came within sight of the Atlantic.

The courage of these men is much to be commended. The modern explorer has at his service breech-loading magazine rifles, invaluable geographical and scientific knowledge, and an adequate supply of suitable food and drugs. But these bold Spaniards of the sixteenth century had nothing, save their own stout hearts and strong Toledo blades. Enough has been written concerning their greed, their bigotry and cruelty. The story might be told again and again of their indomitable bravery. Orellano knew not whither he was going. When he decided to shoot the rapids, taking his life in his hands, he might as well have thrown dice with Death. How can we do aught but honour the land that has produced such sons as Cortez and Pizarro, Orellano, Vasco Nunez, and Alonzo de Ojeda?

But, for the present, we are more concerned with Cahazaxa, a hero no less than these doughty Spaniards. He and his followers hid themselves in the wilderness, and there both Orellano and Pizarro himself failed to find them; and in this there is little to wonder at, when we consider the immensity of the great Forest of the Amazon.

They built for themselves a massive temple after the fashion of the sacred palaces of Quito and Cuzco, dedicated to the Sun; and in course of time they constructed roads and bridges across the rivers, founding for themselves a colony where the civilisation of the incas lived for a century or more after their own country across the mountains had fallen under the dominion of the hated Spaniard.

This was the land of the Gilded King, the country of El Dorado. Word of its existence came to Quito, from the lips of savage aborigines prone naturally to exaggeration; but, though party after party of avaricious, bold adventurers crossed the mountains, the Peruvian settlement remained undisturbed. The secret of the "Big Fish" was never discovered either by the Spaniards or the Portuguese, who in the next century came up the great river from the east, traversing the country that is now called Brazil.

I did not learn all this from the inca priest himself; but so much of it as he could not tell me I knew already from what I had read of those golden days when the New World was a land of Mystery and Romance, and men thought and talked of doubloons instead of dollars.

It is true, I never beheld with my own eyes the actual civilisation of ancient Peru as it had existed in Cahazaxa's time, because, many years before, it had died a natural death. The Peruvians, born and bred upon the western sea-board or the great tablelands beyond the Andes, were not able to survive in the humid atmosphere of the tropic forest. In course of time, a colony of several thousands, whom Cahazaxa had led across the mountains, had dwindled to a community of a few families of the old inca stock, the majority of whom served as priests of the Sun in the great ruined temple, constructed by their forefathers, which they were not able to keep in repair.

It was these men, descended in a direct line from the incas whom the Spanish conquerors had driven forth from Cuzco and Quito, who guarded the secret of the Greater Treasure. It was they who were treacherously attacked and foully done to death by Amos Baverstock. And I will now relate the full story of that brutal enterprise as I got it from the lips of the man whom I befriended.

Baverstock, with his three companions, had come to the temple some weeks before, on the day they had tied me to the tree and left me to starve to death.

The priests had been greatly alarmed at the sight of the intruder, whom they recognised at once. They remembered the time when Baverstock and Trust had attacked the temple, and they had been obliged to fight for their lives, and would then and there have been slaughtered, had it not been for John Bannister, who placed himself at their head and drove Amos forth.

But Bannister was no longer with them to fortify them with his courage, to preside at their councils, and to deal death to their enemies with his swift, unerring aim. And they were terrified at the very sight of Amos, as I myself had been when I first set eyes on the man upon the Sussex shore.

He demanded to know where the Greater Treasure was hidden. He reminded them that they had lied to him once, and held forth threats that made their blood run cold. If they lied to him again, he would return, and no man of them would live to fool Amos Baverstock a third time.

Now, they dared not speak the truth, for they were sworn to secrecy before the Sun, which they believed to be the Creator of the Universe; and yet, they dared not lie, for they knew Amos would be as good, or as evil, as his word.

So, swearing upon all things they looked upon as holy, they set Amos and his friends upon the right road to the "Big Fish." They told him to follow a certain track across the grassland, until he came to a range of down-like, grass-clad hills. Thence, to the west, lay a wood in mid-valley, and in a glade in this wood the Treasure was buried, the place being marked by a great red stone, standing forth in the form of a monster fish in the act of leaping from the water. Here, clearly, was the origin of the legend, current among the natives even to this day, of the Big and Little Fishes. And when I heard the story as it was told me by the inca priest, I confess I was conscious that my heart beat more rapidly and the warm blood of my youth was stirred within me.

But Amos Baverstock cared nothing for legend. He lived only to lay hands upon a horde of untold gold; and that same day he left the Temple of Cahazaxa and set forth to the west upon his treasure hunt.

And when he was gone, the priests held conference, demanding of Atupo why he had told their enemy so much of their cherished secret-for Atupo was the name of the surviving priest with whom I talked among the temple ruins. For he it was who devised the scheme whereby he hoped both to save the lives of his friends and to preserve the Greater Treasure; and now that all had failed so dreadfully, to the great pain he suffered from his wound was added anguish and remorse, inasmuch as the blame was his.

He advised them to arm themselves, and took with him ten of the best archers of the little community, ordering them to steep the heads of their arrows in the juice of the venomous weed that grows in the forest-which is nothing more or less than strychnine, one of the most virulent of poisons.

Atupo, with these ten men, who were all young and fleet of foot, traversed the grassland by a series of forced marches by night, so that they outdistanced Amos and reached first the Wood of the Red Fish-for so, with a little latitude, may be translated the old Peruvian name. And there they laid an ambush by a pathway along which Amos, and those with him, would be obliged to pass, and each archer was instructed to pick out his man. Four were detailed to shoot at Amos, three at Trust, and two each at Forsyth and the Spaniard, Vasco.

Now, it seems not possible that a plan so well thought out could fail; and yet, it would seem also that here, at least, the devil helped his own.

For Mr. Forsyth, and not Amos, came first to the ambuscade; and of the two arrows, one struck a silver tobacco tin that he chanced to be carrying that day in the pocket over his heart, and the other sheared off his right ear as cleanly as a tailor snips his cloth with a pair of scissors. And in the fraction of a second, Forsyth, all bleeding from the head, had his revolver from its holster, and had shot down two of the priests.

Thus was the alarm given to Amos and those who followed him; and there was no question of a surprise. It came to a hand-to-hand affair, and then a running fight amid the woodland undergrowth, in which the bow and arrow had but a small chance against modern firearms. One by one, the priests were dropped in their tracks, and only Atupo himself escaped with life, though sorely wounded in the leg.

He got clear of the wood, and lay hidden, day after day, in the long grass of the plain, journeying by night towards the forest, endeavouring to reach the ruined Temple of Cahazaxa. Though his leg was not then broken, he could do no more than crawl a few miles at a time, so that he was long weeks upon the road.

And during all these days, Amos beat the wood from west to east, from south to north, and failing to find the "Red Fish," believed that he had again been sent upon a wild-goose chase; and the more firm was he in this conviction since there had been such treachery on the part of the inca priests.

I heard afterwards that his wrath was like that of a madman; he stamped and raved, and swore that he would return to the temple and put every living soul to death. And yet, they could not move a yard upon their backward journey, until Forsyth's life was out of danger.

Without doubt, Mr. Gilbert Forsyth would have died in torture, there amid the foothills of the distant Andes, had it not been for his own promptitude and courage. For no sooner did he feel the poison working inward from the wound where the arrow had cut off an ear, than he thrust the blade of a hunting-knife into a glowing charcoal camp-fire, and himself placed the red-hot steel upon the lacerated flesh.

And though he fainted at the time, and fell afterwards into a raging fever, this action saved, perhaps, his life. In the wilderness, rough-and-ready methods are often unavoidable; only he who is bold and strong can survive, whilst the weakling falls by the way. That Forsyth, despite his affectations and his London ways, was a man of action who could face pain as well as danger, this deed of his was in itself enough to prove. With his own hand he burned the poison from his flesh.

For all that, he lingered for many days betwixt life and death; and it was the delay caused thereby that gave Atupo time to regain the temple.

He had intended to give warning to his brother priests, and for this purpose he arrived none too soon. Many were so alarmed at the news of the disaster that they departed instantly, seeking shelter in the forest and taking with them their wives and families. But three remained, to collect the sacred lamps and vessels that were within the Temple, meaning to set forth the following day. And these were caught at midnight by Amos, who turned assassin then and there; for it was he who killed them with his own hands, in the great vault beneath the ruins.

Atupo, too, he shot, though the man lay wounded on the ground, exhausted after the effort of his long journey across the grassland, and left him there for dead, his already wounded leg fractured a few inches below the hip.

All this I learned from the man himself, while I nursed him under the Temple-all save the story of the fortitude of Mr. Forsyth, of which I heard afterwards, as in due time I will tell.