Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley (page 10)

for proselytizing, but simply for not believing in transubstantiation; racked again and again, and at last adjudged to receive publicly, on Good Friday, 1575, some three hundred, some one hundred stripes, and to serve in the galleys for six or ten years each; while, as the crowning atrocity of the Moloch sacrifice, three of them were burnt alive in the market-place of Mexico; a story no less hideous than true, the details whereof whoso list may read in Hakluyt’s third volume, as told by Philip Miles, one of that hapless crew; as well as the adventures of Job Hortop, a messmate of his, who, after being sent to Spain, and seeing two more of his companions burnt alive at Seville, was sentenced to row in the galleys ten years, and after that to go to the “everlasting prison remediless;” from which doom, after twenty- three years of slavery, he was delivered by the galleon Dudley, and came safely home to Redriff.

The fate of Hortop and his comrades was, of course, still unknown to the rescued men; but the history even of their party was not likely to improve the good feeling of the crew toward the Spanish ship which was two miles to leeward of them, and which must be fought with, or fled from, before a quarter of an hour was past. So, kneeling down upon the deck, as many a brave crew in those days did in like case, they “gave God thanks devoutly for the favor they had found;” and then with one accord, at Jack’s leading, sang one and all the Ninety-fourth Psalm:*

“Oh, Lord, thou dost revenge all wrong; Vengeance belongs to thee,” etc.

* The crew of the Tobie, cast away on the Barbary coast a few years after, “began with heavy hearts to sing the twelfth Psalm, ‘Help, Lord, for good and godly men,’ etc. Howbeit, ere we had finished four verses, the waves of the sea had stopped the breaths of most.”

And then again to quarters; for half the day’s work, or more than half, still remained to be done; and hardly were the decks cleared afresh, and the damage repaired as best it could be, when she came ranging up to leeward, as closehauled as she could.

She was, as I said, a long flush-decked ship of full five hundred tons, more than double the size, in fact, of the Rose, though not so lofty in proportion; and many a bold heart beat loud, and no shame to them, as she began firing away merrily, determined, as all well knew, to wipe out in English blood the disgrace of her late foil.

“Never mind, my merry masters,” said Amyas, “she has quantity and we quality.”

“That’s true,” said one, “for one honest man is worth two rogues.”

“And one culverin three of their footy little ordnance,” said another. “So when you will, captain, and have at her.”

“Let her come abreast of us, and don’t burn powder. We have the wind, and can do what we like with her. Serve the men out a horn of ale all round, steward, and all take your time.”

So they waited for five minutes more, and then set to work quietly, after the fashion of English mastiffs, though, like those mastiffs, they waxed right mad before three rounds were fired, and the white splinters (sight beloved) began to crackle and fly.

Amyas, having, as he had said, the wind, and being able to go nearer it than the Spaniard, kept his place at easy point-blank range for his two eighteen-pounder culverins, which Yeo and his mate worked with terrible effect.

“We are lacking her through and through every shot,” said he. “Leave the small ordnance alone yet awhile, and we shall sink her without them.”

“Whing, whing,” went the Spaniard’s shot, like so many humming- tops, through the rigging far above their heads; for the ill- constructed ports of those days prevented the guns from hulling an enemy who was to windward, unless close alongside.

“Blow, jolly breeze,” cried one, “and lay the Don over all thou canst.–What the murrain is gone, aloft there?”

Alas! a crack, a flap, a rattle; and blank dismay! An unlucky shot had cut the foremast (already wounded) in two, and all forward was a mass of dangling wreck.

“Forward, and cut away the wreck!” said Amyas, unmoved. “Small arm men, be ready. He will be aboard of us in five minutes!”

It was too true. The Rose, unmanageable from the loss of her head- sail, lay at the mercy of the Spaniard; and the archers and musqueteers had hardly time to range themselves to leeward, when the Madre Dolorosa’s chains were grinding against the Rose’s, and grapples tossed on board from stem to stern.

“Don’t cut them loose!” roared Amyas. “Let them stay and see the fun! Now, dogs of Devon, show your teeth, and hurrah for God and the queen!”

And then began a fight most fierce and fell: the Spaniards, according to their fashion, attempting to board, the English, amid fierce shouts of “God and the queen!” “God and St. George for England!” sweeping them back by showers of arrows and musquet balls, thrusting them down with pikes, hurling grenades and stink- pots from the tops; while the swivels on both sides poured their grape, and bar, and chain, and the great main-deck guns, thundering muzzle to muzzle, made both ships quiver and recoil, as they smashed the round shot through and through each other.

So they roared and flashed, fast clenched to each other in that devil’s wedlock, under a cloud of smoke beneath the cloudless tropic sky; while all around, the dolphins gambolled, and the flying-fish shot on from swell to swell, and the rainbow-hued jellies opened and shut their cups of living crystal to the sun, as merrily as if man had never fallen, and hell had never broken loose on earth.

So it raged for an hour or more, till all arms were weary, and all tongues clove to the mouth. And sick men, rotting with scurvy, scrambled up on deck, and fought with the strength of madness; and tiny powder-boys, handing up cartridges from the hold, laughed and cheered as the shots ran past their ears; and old Salvation Yeo, a text upon his lips, and a fury in his heart as of Joshua or Elijah in old time, worked on, calm and grim, but with the energy of a boy at play. And now and then an opening in the smoke showed the Spanish captain, in his suit of black steel armor, standing cool and proud, guiding and pointing, careless of the iron hail, but too lofty a gentleman to soil his glove with aught but a knightly sword-hilt: while Amyas and Will, after the fashion of the English gentlemen, had stripped themselves nearly as bare as their own sailors, and were cheering, thrusting, hewing, and hauling, here, there, and everywhere, like any common mariner, and filling them with a spirit of self-respect, fellow-feeling, and personal daring, which the discipline of the Spaniards, more perfect mechanically, but cold and tyrannous, and crushing spiritually, never could bestow. The black-plumed senor was obeyed; but the golden-locked Amyas was followed, and would have been followed through the jaws of hell.

The Spaniards, ere five minutes had passed, poured en masse into the Rose’s waist, but only to their destruction. Between the poop and forecastle (as was then the fashion) the upper-deck beams were left open and unplanked, with the exception of a narrow gangway on either side; and off that fatal ledge the boarders, thrust on by those behind, fell headlong between the beams to the main-deck below, to be slaughtered helpless in that pit of destruction, by the double fire from the bulkheads fore and aft; while the few who kept their footing on the gangway, after vain attempts to force the stockades on poop and forecastle, leaped overboard again amid a shower of shot and arrows. The fire of the English was as steady as it was quick; and though three-fourths of the crew had never smelt powder before, they proved well the truth of the old chronicler’s saying (since proved again more gloriously than ever, at Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerman), that “the English never fight better than in their first battle.”

Thrice the Spaniards clambered on board, and thrice surged back before that deadly hail. The decks on both sides were very shambles; and Jack Brimblecombe, who had fought as long as his conscience would allow him, found, when he turned to a more clerical occupation, enough to do in carrying poor wretches to the surgeon, without giving that spiritual consolation which he longed to give, and they to receive. At last there was a lull in that wild storm. No shot was heard from the Spaniard’s upper-deck.

Amyas leaped into the mizzen rigging, and looked through the smoke. Dead men he could descry through the blinding veil, rolled in heaps, laid flat; dead men and dying: but no man upon his feet. The last volley had swept the deck clear; one by one had dropped below to escape that fiery shower: and alone at the helm, grinding his teeth with rage, his mustachios curling up to his very eyes, stood the Spanish captain.

Now was the moment for a counter-stroke. Amyas shouted for the boarders, and in two minutes more he was over the side, and clutching at the Spaniard’s mizzen rigging.

What was this? The distance between him and the enemy’s side was widening. Was she sheering off? Yes–and rising too, growing bodily higher every moment, as if by magic. Amyas looked up in astonishment and saw what it was. The Spaniard was heeling fast over to leeward away from him. Her masts were all sloping forward, swifter and swifter–the end was come, then!

“Back! in God’s name back, men! She is sinking by the head!” And with much ado some were dragged back, some leaped back–all but old Michael Heard.

With hair and beard floating in the wind, the bronzed naked figure, like some weird old Indian fakir, still climbed on steadfastly up the mizzen-chains of the Spaniard, hatchet in hand.

“Come back, Michael! Leap while you may!” shouted a dozen voices. Michael turned–

“And what should I come back for, then, to go home where no one knoweth me? I’ll die like an Englishman this day, or I’ll know the rason why!” and turning, he sprang in over the bulwarks, as the huge ship rolled up more and more, like a dying whale, exposing all her long black hulk almost down to the keel, and one of her lower- deck guns, as if in defiance, exploded upright into the air, hurling the ball to the very heavens.

In an instant it was answered from the Rose by a column of smoke, and the eighteen-pound ball crashed through the bottom of the defenceless Spaniard.

“Who fired? Shame to fire on a sinking ship!”

“Gunner Yeo, sir,” shouted a voice up from the main-deck. “He’s like a madman down here.”

“Tell him if he fires again, I’ll put him in irons, if he were my own brother. Cut away the grapples aloft, men. Don’t you see how she drags us over? Cut away, or we shall sink with her.”

They cut away, and the Rose, released from the strain, shook her feathers on the wave-crest like a freed sea-gull, while all men held their breaths.

Suddenly the glorious creature righted herself, and rose again, as if in noble shame, for one last struggle with her doom. Her bows were deep in the water, but her after-deck still dry. Righted: but only for a moment, long enough to let her crew come pouring wildly up on deck, with cries and prayers, and rush aft to the poop, where, under the flag of Spain, stood the tall captain, his left hand on the standard-staff, his sword pointed in his right.

“Back, men!” they heard him cry, “and die like valiant mariners.”

Some of them ran to the bulwarks, and shouted “Mercy! We surrender!” and the English broke into a cheer and called to them to run her alongside.

“Silence!” shouted Amyas. “I take no surrender from mutineers. Senor,” cried he to the captain, springing into the rigging and taking off his hat, “for the love of God and these men, strike! and surrender a buena querra.”

The Spaniard lifted his hat and bowed courteously, and answered, “Impossible, senor. No querra is good which stains my honor.”

“God have mercy on you, then!”

“Amen!” said the Spaniard, crossing himself.

She gave one awful lounge forward, and dived under the coming swell, hurling her crew into the eddies. Nothing but the point of her poop remained, and there stood the stern and steadfast Don, cap-a-pie in his glistening black armor, immovable as a man of iron, while over him the flag, which claimed the empire of both worlds, flaunted its gold aloft and upwards in the glare of the tropic noon.

“He shall not carry that flag to the devil with him; I will have it yet, if I die for it!” said Will Cary, and rushed to the side to leap overboard, but Amyas stopped him.

“Let him die as he has lived, with honor.”

A wild figure sprang out of the mass of sailors who struggled and shrieked amid the foam, and rushed upward at the Spaniard. It was Michael Heard. The Don, who stood above him, plunged his sword into the old man’s body: but the hatchet gleamed, nevertheless: down went the blade through headpiece and through head; and as Heard sprang onward, bleeding, but alive, the steel-clad corpse rattled down the deck into the surge. Two more strokes, struck with the fury of a dying man, and the standard-staff was hewn through. Old Michael collected all his strength, hurled the flag far from the sinking ship, and then stood erect one moment and shouted, “God save Queen Bess!” and the English answered with a “Hurrah!” which rent the welkin.

Another moment and the gulf had swallowed his victim, and the poop, and him; and nothing remained of the Madre Dolorosa but a few floating spars and struggling wretches, while a great awe fell upon all men, and a solemn silence, broken only by the cry

“Of some strong swimmer in his agony.”

And then, suddenly collecting themselves, as men awakened from a dream, half-a-dozen desperate gallants, reckless of sharks and eddies, leaped overboard, swam towards the flag, and towed it alongside in triumph.

“Ah!” said Salvation Yeo, as he helped the trophy up over the side; “ah! it was not for nothing that we found poor Michael! He was always a good comrade–nigh as good a one as William Penberthy of Marazion, whom the Lord grant I meet in bliss! And now, then, my masters, shall we inshore again and burn La Guayra?”

“Art thou never glutted with Spanish blood, thou old wolf?” asked Will Cary.

“Never, sir,” answered Yeo.

“To St. Jago be it,” said Amyas, “if we can get there; but–God help us!”

And he looked round sadly enough; while no one needed that he should finish his sentence, or explain his “but.”

The foremast was gone, the main-yard sprung, the rigging hanging in elf-locks, the hull shot through and through in twenty places, the deck strewn with the bodies of nine good men, beside sixteen wounded down below; while the pitiless sun, right above their heads, poured down a flood of fire upon a sea of glass.

And it would have been well if faintness and weariness had been all that was the matter; but now that the excitement was over, the collapse came; and the men sat down listlessly and sulkily by twos and threes upon the deck, starting and wincing when they heard some poor fellow below cry out under the surgeon’s knife; or murmuring to each other that all was lost. Drew tried in vain to rouse them, telling them that all depended on rigging a jury-mast forward as soon as possible. They answered only by growls; and at last broke into open reproaches. Even Will Cary’s volatile nature, which had kept him up during the fight, gave way, when Yeo and the carpenter came aft, and told Amyas in a low voice–

“We are hit somewhere forward, below the water-line, sir. She leaks a terrible deal, and the Lord will not vouchsafe to us to lay our hands on the place, for all our searching.”

“What are we to do now, Amyas, in the devil’s name?” asked Cary, peevishly.

“What are we to do, in God’s name, rather,” answered Amyas, in a low voice. “Will, Will, what did God make you a gentleman for, but to know better than those poor fickle fellows forward, who blow hot and cold at every change of weather!”

“I wish you’d come forward and speak to them, sir,” said Yeo, who had overheard the last words, “or we shall get naught done.”

Amyas went forward instantly.

“Now then, my brave lads, what’s the matter here, that you are all sitting on your tails like monkeys?”

“Ugh!” grunts one. “Don’t you think our day’s work has been long enough yet, captain?”

“You don’t want us to go in to La Guayra again, sir? There are enough of us thrown away already, I reckon, about that wench there.”

“Best sit here, and sink quietly. There’s no getting home again, that’s plain.”

“Why were we brought out here to be killed?”

“For shame, men!” cries Yeo; “you’re no better than a set of stiff- necked Hebrew Jews, murmuring against Moses the very minute after the Lord has delivered you from the Egyptians.”

Now I do not wish to set Amyas up as a perfect man; for he had his faults, like every one else; nor as better, thank God, than many and many a brave and virtuous captain in her majesty’s service at this very day: but certainly he behaved admirably under that trial. Drake had trained him, as he trained many another excellent officer, to be as stout in discipline, and as dogged of purpose, as he himself was: but he had trained him also to feel with and for his men, to make allowances for them, and to keep his temper with them, as he did this day. True, he had seen Drake in a rage; he had seen him hang one man for a mutiny (and that man his dearest friend), and threaten to hang thirty more; but Amyas remembered well that that explosion took place when having, as Drake said publicly himself, “taken in hand that I know not in the world how to go through with; it passeth my capacity; it hath even bereaved me of my wits to think of it,” . . . and having “now set together by the ears three mighty princes, her majesty and the kings of Spain and Portugal,” he found his whole voyage ready to come to naught, “by mutinies and discords, controversy between the sailors and gentlemen, and stomaching between the gentlemen and sailors.” “But, my masters” (quoth the self-trained hero, and Amyas never forgot his words), “I must have it left; for I must have the gentlemen to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentlemen. I would like to know him that would refuse to set his hand to a rope!”

And now Amyas’s conscience smote him (and his simple and pious soul took the loss of his brother as God’s verdict on his conduct), because he had set his own private affection, even his own private revenge, before the safety of his ship’s company, and the good of his country.

“Ah,” said he to himself, as he listened to his men’s reproaches, “if I had been thinking, like a loyal soldier, of serving my queen, and crippling the Spaniard, I should have taken that great bark three days ago, and in it the very man I sought!”

So “choking down his old man,” as Yeo used to say, he made answer cheerfully–

“Pooh! pooh! brave lads! For shame, for shame! You were lions half-an-hour ago; you are not surely turned sheep already! Why, but yesterday evening you were grumbling because I would not run in and fight those three ships under the batteries of La Guayra, and now you think it too much to have fought them fairly out at sea? What has happened but the chances of war, which might have happened anywhere? Nothing venture, nothing win; and nobody goes bird- nesting without a fall at times. If any one wants to be safe in this life, he’d best stay at home and keep his bed; though even there, who knows but the roof might fall through on him?”

“Ah, it’s all very well for you, captain,” said some grumbling younker, with a vague notion that Amyas must be better off than he, because he was a gentleman. Amyas’s blood rose.

“Yes, sirrah! it is very well for me, as long as God is with me: but He is with every man in this ship, I would have you to know, as much as He is with me. Do you fancy that I have nothing to lose? I who have adventured in this voyage all I am worth, and more; who, if I fail, must return to beggary and scorn? And if I have ventured rashly, sinfully, if you will, the lives of any of you in my own private quarrel, am I not punished? Have I not lost–?”

His voice trembled and stopped there, but he recovered himself in a moment.

“Pish! I can’t stand here chattering. Carpenter! an axe! and help me to cast these spars loose. Get out of my way, there! lumbering the scuppers up like so many moulting fowls! Here, all old friends, lend a hand! Pelican’s men, stand by your captain! Did we sail round the world for nothing?”

This last appeal struck home, and up leaped half-a-dozen of the old Pelicans, and set to work at his side manfully to rig the jury-mast.

“Come along!” cried Cary to the malcontents; “we’re raw longshore fellows, but we won’t be outdone by any old sea-dog of them all.” And setting to work himself, he was soon followed by one and another, till order and work went on well enough.

“And where are we going, when the mast’s up?” shouted some saucy hand from behind.

“Where you daren’t follow us alone by yourself, so you had better keep us company,” replied Yeo.

“I’ll tell you where we are going, lads,” said Amyas, rising from his work. “Like it or leave it as you will, I have no secrets from my crew. We are going inshore there to find a harbor, and careen the ship.”

There was a start and a murmur.

“Inshore? Into the Spaniards’ mouths?”

“All in the Inquisition in a week’s time.”

“Better stay here, and be drowned.”

“You’re right in that last,” shouts Cary. “That’s the right death for blind puppies. Look you! I don’t know in the least where we are, and I hardly know stem from stern aboard ship; and the captain may be right or wrong–that’s nothing to me; but this I know, that I am a soldier, and will obey orders; and where he goes, I go; and whosoever hinders me must walk up my sword to do it.”

Amyas pressed Cary’s hand, and then–

“And here’s my broadside next, men. I’ll go nowhere, and do nothing without the advice of Salvation Yeo and Robert Drew; and if any man in the ship knows better than these two, let him up, and we’ll give him a hearing. Eh, Pelicans?”

There was a grunt of approbation from the Pelicans; and Amyas returned to the charge.

“We have five shot between wind and water, and one somewhere below. Can we face a gale of wind in that state, or can we not?”

Silence.

“Can we get home with a leak in our bottom?”

Silence.

“Then what can we do but run inshore, and take our chance? Speak! It’s a coward’s trick to do nothing because what we must do is not pleasant. Will you be like children, that would sooner die than take nasty physic, or will you not?”

Silence still.

“Come along now! Here’s the wind again round with the sun, and up to the north-west. In with her!”

Sulkily enough, but unable to deny the necessity, the men set to work, and the vessel’s head was put toward the land; but when she began to slip through the water, the leak increased so fast, that they were kept hard at work at the pumps for the rest of the afternoon.

The current had by this time brought them abreast of the bay of Higuerote; and, luckily for them, safe out of the short heavy swell which it causes round Cape Codera. Looking inland, they had now to the south-west that noble headland, backed by the Caracas Mountains, range on range, up to the Silla and the Neguater; while, right ahead of them to the south, the shore sank suddenly into a low line of mangrove-wood, backed by primaeval forest. As they ran inward, all eyes were strained greedily to find some opening in the mangrove belt; but none was to be seen for some time. The lead was kept going; and every fresh heave announced shallower water.

“We shall have very shoal work off those mangroves, Yeo,” said Amyas; “I doubt whether we shall do aught now, unless we find a river’s mouth.”

“If the Lord thinks a river good for us, sir, He’ll show us one.” So on they went, keeping a south-east course, and at last an opening in the mangrove belt was hailed with a cheer from the older hands, though the majority shrugged their shoulders, as men going open-eyed to destruction.

Off the mouth they sent in Drew and Cary with a boat, and watched anxiously for an hour. The boat returned with a good report of two fathoms of water over the bar, impenetrable forests for two miles up, the river sixty yards broad, and no sign of man. The river’s banks were soft and sloping mud, fit for careening.

“Safe quarters, sir,” said Yeo, privately, “as far as Spaniards go. I hope in God it may be as safe from calentures and fevers.”

“Beggars must not be choosers,” said Amyas. So in they went.

They towed the ship up about half-a-mile to a point where she could not be seen from the seaward; and there moored her to the mangrove- stems. Amyas ordered a boat out, and went up the river himself to reconnoitre. He rowed some three miles, till the river narrowed suddenly, and was all but covered in by the interlacing boughs of mighty trees. There was no sign that man had been there since the making of the world.

He dropped down the stream again, thoughtfully and sadly. How many years ago was it that he passed this river’s mouth? Three days. And yet how much had passed in them! Don Guzman found and lost– Rose found and lost–a great victory gained, and yet lost–perhaps his ship lost–above all, his brother lost.

Lost! O God, how should he find his brother?

Some strange bird out of the woods made mournful answer–“Never, never, never!”

How should he face his mother?

“Never, never, never!” wailed the bird again; and Amyas smiled bitterly, and said “Never!” likewise.

The night mist began to steam and wreathe upon the foul beer- colored stream. The loathy floor of liquid mud lay bare beneath the mangrove forest. Upon the endless web of interarching roots great purple crabs were crawling up and down. They would have supped with pleasure upon Amyas’s corpse; perhaps they might sup on him after all; for a heavy sickening graveyard smell made his heart sink within him, and his stomach heave; and his weary body, and more weary soul, gave themselves up helplessly to the depressing influence of that doleful place. The black bank of dingy leathern leaves above his head, the endless labyrinth of stems and withes (for every bough had lowered its own living cord, to take fresh hold of the foul soil below); the web of roots, which stretched away inland till it was lost in the shades of evening–all seemed one horrid complicated trap for him and his; and even where, here and there, he passed the mouth of a lagoon, there was no opening, no relief–nothing but the dark ring of mangroves, and here and there an isolated group of large and small, parents and children, breeding and spreading, as if in hideous haste to choke out air and sky. Wailing sadly, sad-colored mangrove-hens ran off across the mud into the dreary dark. The hoarse night-raven, hid among the roots, startled the voyagers with a sudden shout, and then all was again silent as a grave. The loathly alligators, lounging in the slime, lifted their horny eyelids lazily, and leered upon him as he passed with stupid savageness. Lines of tall herons stood dimly in the growing gloom, like white fantastic ghosts, watching the passage of the doomed boat. All was foul, sullen, weird as witches’ dream. If Amyas had seen a crew of skeletons glide down the stream behind him, with Satan standing at the helm, he would have scarcely been surprised. What fitter craft could haunt that Stygian flood?

That night every man of the boat’s crew, save Amyas, was down with raging fever; before ten the next morning, five more men were taken, and others sickening fast.

CHAPTER XXI

HOW THEY TOOK THE COMMUNION UNDER THE TREE AT HIGUEROTE

“Follow thee? Follow thee? Wha wad na follow thee? Lang hast thou looed and trusted us fairly.”

Amyas would have certainly taken the yellow fever, but for one reason, which he himself gave to Cary. He had no time to be sick while his men were sick; a valid and sufficient reason (as many a noble soul in the Crimea has known too well), as long as the excitement of work is present, but too apt to fail the hero, and to let him sink into the pit which he has so often over-leapt, the moment that his work is done.

He called a council of war, or rather a sanitary commission, the next morning; for he was fairly at his wits’ end. The men were panic-stricken, ready to mutiny: Amyas told them that he could not see any possible good which could accrue to them by killing him, or–(for there were two sides to every question)–being killed by him; and then went below to consult. The doctor talked mere science, or nonscience, about humors, complexions, and animal spirits. Jack Brimblecombe, mere pulpit, about its being the visitation of God. Cary, mere despair, though he jested over it with a smile. Yeo, mere stoic fatalism, though he quoted Scripture to back the same. Drew, the master, had nothing to say. His “business was to sail the ship, and not to cure calentures.”

Whereon Amyas clutched his locks, according to custom; and at last broke forth–“Doctor! a fig for your humors and complexions! Can you cure a man’s humors, or change his complexion? Can an Ethiopian change his skin, or a leopard his spots? Don’t shove off your ignorance on God, sir. I ask you what’s the reason of this sickness, and you don’t know. Jack Brimblecombe, don’t talk to me about God’s visitation; this looks much more like the devil’s visitation, to my mind. We are doing God’s work, Sir John, and He is not likely to hinder us. So down with the devil, say I. Cary, laughing killed the cat, but it won’t cure a Christian. Yeo, when an angel tells me that it’s God’s will that we should all die like dogs in a ditch, I’ll call this God’s will; but not before. Drew, you say your business is to sail the ship; then sail her out of this infernal poison-trap this very morning, if you can, which you can’t. The mischief’s in the air, and nowhere else. I felt it run through me coming down last night, and smelt it like any sewer: and if it was not in the air, why was my boat’s crew taken first, tell me that?”

There was no answer.

“Then I’ll tell you why they were taken first: because the mist, when we came through it, only rose five or six feet above the stream, and we were in it, while you on board were above it. And those that were taken on board this morning, every one of them, slept on the main-deck, and every one of them, too, was in fear of the fever, whereby I judge two things,–Keep as high as you can, and fear nothing but God, and we’re all safe yet.”

“But the fog was up to our round-tops at sunrise this morning,” said Cary.

“I know it: but we who were on the half-deck were not in it so long as those below, and that may have made the difference, let alone our having free air. Beside, I suspect the heat in the evening draws the poison out more, and that when it gets cold toward morning, the venom of it goes off somehow.”

How it went off Amyas could not tell (right in his facts as he was), for nobody on earth knew I suppose, at that day; and it was not till nearly two centuries of fatal experience that the settlers in America discovered the simple laws of these epidemics which now every child knows, or ought to know. But common sense was on his side; and Yeo rose and spoke–

“As I have said before, many a time, the Lord has sent us a very young Daniel for judge. I remember now to have heard the Spaniards say, how these calentures lay always in the low ground, and never came more than a few hundred feet above the sea.”

“Let us go up those few hundred feet, then.”

Every man looked at Amyas, and then at his neighbor.

“Gentlemen, ‘Look the devil straight in the face, if you would hit him in the right place.’ We cannot get the ship to sea as she is; and if we could, we cannot go home empty-handed; and we surely cannot stay here to die of fever.–We must leave the ship and go inland.”

“Inland?” answered every voice but Yeo’s.

“Up those hundred feet which Yeo talks of. Up to the mountains; stockade a camp, and get our sick and provisions thither.”

“And what next?”

“And when we are recruited, march over the mountains, and surprise St. Jago de Leon.”

Cary swore a great oath. “Amyas! you are a daring fellow!”

“Not a bit. It’s the plain path of prudence.”

“So it is, sir,” said old Yeo, “and I follow you in it.”

“And so do I,” squeaked Jack Brimblecombe.

“Nay, then, Jack, thou shalt not outrun me. So I say yes too,” quoth Cary.

“Mr. Drew?”

“At your service, sir, to live or die. I know naught about stockading; but Sir Francis would have given the same counsel, I verily believe, if he had been in your place.”

“Then tell the men that we start in an hour’s time. Win over the Pelicans, Yeo and Drew; and the rest must follow, like sheep over a hedge.”

The Pelicans, and the liberated galley-slaves, joined the project at once; but the rest gave Amyas a stormy hour. The great question was, where were the hills? In that dense mangrove thicket they could not see fifty yards before them.

“The hills are not three miles to the south-west of you at this moment,” said Amyas. “I marked every shoulder of them as we ran in.”

“I suppose you meant to take us there?”

The question set a light to a train–and angry suspicions were blazing up one after another, but Amyas silenced them with a countermine.

“Fools! if I had not wit enow to look ahead a little farther than you do, where would you be? Are you mad as well as reckless, to rise against your own captain because he has two strings to his bow? Go my way, I say, or, as I live, I’ll blow up the ship and every soul on board, and save you the pain of rotting here by inches.”

The men knew that Amyas never said what he did not intend to do; not that Amyas intended to do this, because he knew that the threat would be enough. So they, agreed to go; and were reassured by seeing that the old Pelican’s men turned to the work heartily and cheerfully.

There is no use keeping the reader for five or six weary hours, under a broiling (or rather stewing) sun, stumbling over mangrove roots, hewing his way through thorny thickets, dragging sick men and provisions up mountain steeps, amid disappointment, fatigue, murmurs, curses, snakes, mosquitoes, false alarms of Spaniards, and every misery, save cold, which flesh is heir to. Suffice it that by sunset that evening they had gained a level spot, a full thousand feet above the sea, backed by an inaccessible cliff which formed the upper shoulder of a mighty mountain, defended below by steep wooded slopes, and needing but the felling of a few trees to make it impregnable.

Amyas settled the sick under the arched roots of an enormous cottonwood tree, and made a second journey to the ship, to bring up hammocks and blankets for them; while Yeo’s wisdom and courage were of inestimable value. He, as pioneer, had found the little brook up which they forced their way; he had encouraged them to climb the cliffs over which it fell, arguing rightly that on its course they were sure to find some ground fit for encampment within the reach of water; he had supported Amyas, when again and again the weary crew entreated to be dragged no farther, and had gone back again a dozen times to cheer them upward; while Cary, who brought up the rear, bullied and cheered on the stragglers who sat down and refused to move, drove back at the sword’s point more than one who was beating a retreat, carried their burdens for them, sang them songs on the halt; in all things approving himself the gallant and hopeful soul which he had always been: till Amyas, beside himself with joy at finding that the two men on whom he had counted most were utterly worthy of his trust, went so far as to whisper to them both, in confidence, that very night–

“Cortez burnt his ships when he landed. Why should not we?”

Yeo leapt upright; and then sat down again, and whispered–

“Do you say that, captain? ‘Tis from above, then, that’s certain; for it’s been hanging on my mind too all day.”

“There’s no hurry,” quoth Amyas; “we must clear her out first, you know,” while Cary sat silent and musing. Amyas had evidently more schemes in his head than he chose to tell.

The men were too tired that evening to do much, but ere the sun rose next morning Amyas had them hard at work fortifying their position. It was, as I said, strong enough by nature; for though it was commanded by high cliffs on three sides, yet there was no chance of an enemy coming over the enormous mountain-range behind them, and still less chance that, if he came, he would discover them through the dense mass of trees which crowned the cliff, and clothed the hills for a thousand feet above. The attack, if it took place, would come from below; and against that Amyas guarded by felling the smaller trees, and laying them with their boughs outward over the crest of the slope, thus forming an abatis (as every one who has shot in thick cover knows to his cost) warranted to bring up in two steps, horse, dog, or man. The trunks were sawn into logs, laid lengthwise, and steadied by stakes and mould; and three or four hours’ hard work finished a stockade which would defy anything but artillery. The work done, Amyas scrambled up into the boughs of the enormous ceiba-tree, and there sat inspecting his own handiwork, looking out far and wide over the forest-covered plains and the blue sea beyond, and thinking, in his simple straightforward way, of what was to be done next.

To stay there long was impossible; to avenge himself upon La Guayra was impossible; to go until he had found out whether Frank was alive or dead seemed at first equally impossible. But were Brimblecombe, Cary, and those eighty men to be sacrificed a second time to his private interest? Amyas wept with rage, and then wept again with earnest, honest prayer, before he could make up his mind. But he made it up. There were a hundred chances to one that Frank was dead; and if not, he was equally past their help; for he was–Amyas knew that too well–by this time in the hands of the Inquisition. Who could lift him from that pit? Not Amyas, at least! And crying aloud in his agony, “God help him! for I cannot!” Amyas made up his mind to move. But whither? Many an hour he thought and thought alone, there in his airy nest; and at last he went down, calm and cheerful, and drew Cary and Yeo aside. They could not, he said, refit the ship without dying of fever during the process; an assertion which neither of his hearers was bold enough to deny. Even if they refitted her, they would be pretty certain to have to fight the Spaniards again; for it was impossible to doubt the Indian’s story, that they had been forewarned of the Rose’s coming, or to doubt, either, that Eustace had been the traitor.

“Let us try St. Jago, then; sack it, come down on La Guayra in the rear, take a ship there, and so get home.”

“Nay, Will. If they have strengthened themselves against us at La Guayra, where they had little to lose, surely they have done so at St. Jago, where they have much. I hear the town is large, though new; and besides, how can we get over these mountains without a guide?”

“Or with one?” said Cary, with a sigh, looking up at the vast walls of wood and rock which rose range on range for miles. “But it is strange to find you, at least, throwing cold water on a daring plot.”

“What if I had a still more daring one? Did you ever hear of the golden city of Manoa?”

Yeo laughed a grim but joyful laugh. “I have, sir; and so have the old hands from the Pelican and the Jesus of Lubec, I doubt not.”

“So much the better;” and Amyas began to tell Cary all which he had learned from the Spaniard, while Yeo capped every word thereof with rumors and traditions of his own gathering. Cary sat half aghast as the huge phantasmagoria unfolded itself before his dazzled eyes; and at last–

“So that was why you wanted to burn the ship! Well, after all, nobody needs me at home, and one less at table won’t be missed. So you want to play Cortez, eh?”

“We shall never need to play Cortez (who was not such a bad fellow after all, Will), because we shall have no such cannibal fiends’ tyranny to rid the earth of, as he had. And I trust we shall fear God enough not to play Pizarro.”

So the conversation dropped for the time, but none of them forgot it.

In that mountain-nook the party spent some ten days and more. Several of the sick men died, some from the fever superadded to their wounds; some, probably, from having been bled by the surgeon; the others mended steadily, by the help of certain herbs which Yeo administered, much to the disgust of the doctor, who, of course, wanted to bleed the poor fellows all round, and was all but mutinous when Amyas stayed his hand. In the meanwhile, by dint of daily trips to the ship, provisions were plentiful enough,–beside the raccoons, monkeys, and other small animals, which Yeo and the veterans of Hawkins’s crew knew how to catch, and the fruit and vegetables; above all, the delicious mountain cabbage of the Areca palm, and the fresh milk of the cow-tree, which they brought in daily, paying well thereby for the hospitality they received.

All day long a careful watch was kept among the branches of the mighty ceiba-tree. And what a tree that was! The hugest English oak would have seemed a stunted bush beside it. Borne up on roots, or rather walls, of twisted board, some twelve feet high, between which the whole crew, their ammunitions, and provisions, were housed roomily, rose the enormous trunk full forty feet in girth, towering like some tall lighthouse, smooth for a hundred feet, then crowned with boughs, each of which was a stately tree, whose topmost twigs were full two hundred and fifty feet from the ground. And yet it was easy for the sailors to ascend; so many natural ropes had kind Nature lowered for their use, in the smooth lianes which hung to the very earth, often without a knot or leaf. Once in the tree, you were within a new world, suspended between heaven and earth, and as Cary said, no wonder if, like Jack when he climbed the magic bean-stalk, you had found a castle, a giant, and a few acres of well-stocked park, packed away somewhere amid that labyrinth of timber. Flower-gardens at least were there in plenty; for every limb was covered with pendent cactuses, gorgeous orchises, and wild pines; and while one-half the tree was clothed in rich foliage, the other half, utterly leafless, bore on every twig brilliant yellow flowers, around which humming-birds whirred all day long. Parrots peeped in and out of every cranny, while, within the airy woodland, brilliant lizards basked like living gems upon the bark, gaudy finches flitted and chirruped, butterflies of every size and color hovered over the topmost twigs, innumerable insects hummed from morn till eve; and when the sun went down, tree-toads came out to snore and croak till dawn. There was more life round that one tree than in a whole square mile of English soil.

And Amyas, as he lounged among the branches, felt at moments as if he would be content to stay there forever, and feed his eyes and ears with all its wonders–and then started sighing from his dream, as he recollected that a few days must bring the foe upon them, and force him to decide upon some scheme at which the bravest heart might falter without shame. So there he sat (for he often took the scout’s place himself), looking out over the fantastic tropic forest at his feet, and the flat mangrove-swamps below, and the white sheet of foam-flecked blue; and yet no sail appeared; and the men, as their fear of fever subsided, began to ask when they would go down and refit the ship, and Amyas put them off as best he could, till one noon he saw slipping along the shore from the westward, a large ship under easy sail, and recognized in her, or thought he did so, the ship which they had passed upon their way.

If it was she, she must have run past them to La Guayra in the night, and have now returned, perhaps, to search for them along the coast.

She crept along slowly. He was in hopes that she might pass the river’s mouth: but no. She lay-to close to the shore; and, after a while, Amyas saw two boats pull in from her, and vanish behind the mangroves.

Sliding down a liane, he told what he had seen. The men, tired of inactivity, received the news with a shout of joy, and set to work to make all ready for their guests. Four brass swivels, which they had brought up, were mounted, fixed in logs, so as to command the path; the musketeers and archers clustered round them with their tackle ready, and half-a-dozen good marksmen volunteered into the cotton-tree with their arquebuses, as a post whence “a man might have very pretty shooting.” Prayers followed as a matter of course, and dinner as a matter of course also; but two weary hours passed before there was any sign of the Spaniards.

Presently a wreath of white smoke curled up from the swamp, and then the report of a caliver. Then, amid the growls of the English, the Spanish flag ran up above the trees, and floated– horrible to behold–at the mast-head of the Rose. They were signalling the ship for more hands; and, in effect, a third boat soon pushed off and vanished into the forest.

Another hour, during which the men had thoroughly lost their temper, but not their hearts, by waiting; and talked so loud, and strode up and down so wildly, that Amyas had to warn them that there was no need to betray themselves; that the Spaniards might not find them after all; that they might pass the stockade close without seeing it; that, unless they hit off the track at once, they would probably return to their ship for the present; and exacted a promise from them that they would be perfectly silent till he gave the word to fire.

Which wise commands had scarcely passed his lips, when, in the path below, glanced the headpiece of a Spanish soldier, and then another and another.

“Fools!” whispered Amyas to Cary; “they are coming up in single file, rushing on their own death. Lie close, men!”

The path was so narrow that two could seldom come up abreast, and so steep that the enemy had much ado to struggle and stumble upwards. The men seemed half unwilling to proceed, and hung back more than once; but Amyas could hear an authoritative voice behind, and presently there emerged to the front, sword in hand, a figure at which Amyas and Cary both started.

“Is it he?”

“Surely I know those legs among a thousand, though they are in armor.”

“It is my turn for him, now, Cary, remember! Silence, silence, men!”

The Spaniards seemed to feel that they were leading a forlorn hope. Don Guzman (for there was little doubt that it was he) had much ado to get them on at all.

“The fellows have heard how gently we handled the Guayra squadron,” whispers Cary, “and have no wish to become fellow-martyrs with the captain of the Madre Dolorosa.”

At last the Spaniards get up the steep slope to within forty yards of the stockade, and pause, suspecting a trap, and puzzled by the complete silence. Amyas leaps on the top of it, a white flag in his hand; but his heart beats so fiercely at the sight of that hated figure, that he can hardly get out the words–

“Don Guzman, the quarrel is between you and me, not between your men and mine. I would have sent in a challenge to you at La Guayra, but you were away; I challenge you now to single combat.”

“Lutheran dog, I have a halter for you, but no sword! As you served us at Smerwick, we will serve you now. Pirate and ravisher, you and yours shall share Oxenham’s fate, as you have copied his crimes, and learn what it is to set foot unbidden on the dominions of the king of Spain.”

“The devil take you and the king of Spain together!” shouts Amyas, laughing loudly. “This ground belongs to him no more than it does to me, but to the Queen Elizabeth, in whose name I have taken as lawful possession of it as you ever did of Caracas. Fire, men! and God defend the right!”

Both parties obeyed the order; Amyas dropped down behind the stockade in time to let a caliver bullet whistle over his head; and the Spaniards recoiled as the narrow face of the stockade burst into one blaze of musketry and swivels, raking their long array from front to rear.

The front ranks fell over each other in heaps; the rear ones turned and ran; overtaken, nevertheless, by the English bullets and arrows, which tumbled them headlong down the steep path.

“Out, men, and charge them. See! the Don is running like the rest!” And scrambling over the abattis, Amyas and about thirty followed them fast; for he had hope of learning from some prisoner his brother’s fate.

Amyas was unjust in his last words. Don Guzman, as if by miracle, had been only slightly wounded; and seeing his men run, had rushed back and tried to rally them, but was borne away by the fugitives.

However, the Spaniards were out of sight among the thick bushes before the English could overtake them; and Amyas, afraid lest they should rally and surround his small party, withdrew sorely against his will, and found in the pathway fourteen Spaniards, but all dead. For one of the wounded, with more courage than wisdom, had fired on the English as he lay; and Amyas’s men, whose blood was maddened both by their desperate situation, and the frightful stories of the rescued galley-slaves, had killed them all before their captain could stop them.

“Are you mad?” cries Amyas, as he strikes up one fellow’s sword. “Will you kill an Indian?”

And he drags out of the bushes an Indian lad of sixteen, who, slightly wounded, is crawling away like a copper snake along the ground.

“The black vermin has sent an arrow through my leg; and poisoned too, most like.”

“God grant not: but an Indian is worth his weight in gold to us now,” said Amyas, tucking his prize under his arm like a bundle. The lad, as soon as he saw there was no escape, resigned himself to his fate with true Indian stoicism, was brought in, and treated kindly enough, but refused to eat. For which, after much questioning, he gave as a reason, that he would make them kill him at once; for fat him they should not; and gradually gave them to understand that the English always (so at least the Spaniards said) fatted and ate their prisoners like the Caribs; and till he saw them go out and bury the bodies of the Spaniards, nothing would persuade him that the corpses were not to be cooked for supper.

However, kind words, kind looks, and the present of that inestimable treasure–a knife, brought him to reason; and he told Amyas that he belonged to a Spaniard who had an “encomienda” of Indians some fifteen miles to the south-west; that he had fled from his master, and lived by hunting for some months past; and having seen the ship where she lay moored, and boarded her in hope of plunder, had been surprised therein by the Spaniards, and forced by threats to go with them as a guide in their search for the English. But now came a part of his story which filled the soul of Amyas with delight. He was an Indian of the Llanos, or great savannahs which lay to the southward beyond the mountains, and had actually been upon the Orinoco. He had been stolen as a boy by some Spaniards, who had gone down (as was the fashion of the Jesuits even as late as 1790) for the pious purpose of converting the savages by the simple process of catching, baptizing, and making servants of those whom they could carry off, and murdering those who resisted their gentle method of salvation. Did he know the way back again? Who could ask such a question of an Indian? And the lad’s black eyes flashed fire, as Amyas offered him liberty and iron enough for a dozen Indians, if he would lead them through the passes of the mountains, and southward to the mighty river, where lay their golden hopes. Hernando de Serpa, Amyas knew, had tried the same course, which was supposed to be about one hundred and twenty leagues, and failed, being overthrown utterly by the Wikiri Indians; but Amyas knew enough of the Spaniards’ brutal method of treating those Indians, to be pretty sure that they had brought that catastrophe upon themselves, and that he might avoid it well enough by that common justice and mercy toward the savages which he had learned from his incomparable tutor, Francis Drake.

Now was the time to speak; and, assembling his men around him, Amyas opened his whole heart, simply and manfully. This was their only hope of safety. Some of them had murmured that they should perish like John Oxenham’s crew. This plan was rather the only way to avoid perishing like them. Don Guzman would certainly return to seek them; and not only he, but land-forces from St. Jago. Even if the stockade was not forced, they would be soon starved out; why not move at once, ere the Spaniards could return, and begin a blockade? As for taking St. Jago, it was impossible. The treasure would all be safely hidden, and the town well prepared to meet them. If they wanted gold and glory, they must seek it elsewhere. Neither was there any use in marching along the coast, and trying the ports: ships could outstrip them, and the country was already warned. There was but this one chance; and on it Amyas, the first and last time in his life, waxed eloquent, and set forth the glory of the enterprise, the service to the queen, the salvation of heathens, and the certainty that, if successful, they should win honor and wealth and everlasting fame, beyond that of Cortez or Pizarro, till the men, sulky at first, warmed every moment; and one old Pelican broke out with–

“Yes, sir! we didn’t go round the world with you for naught; and watched your works and ways, which was always those of a gentleman, as you are–who spoke a word for a poor fellow when he was in a scrape, and saw all you ought to see, and naught that you ought not. And we’ll follow you, sir, all alone to ourselves; and let those that know you worse follow after when they’re come to their right mind.”

Man after man capped this brave speech; the minority, who, if they liked little to go, liked still less to be left behind, gave in their consent perforce; and, to make a long story short, Amyas conquered, and the plan was accepted.

“This,” said Amyas, “is indeed the proudest day of my life! I have lost one brother, but I have gained fourscore. God do so to me and more also, if I do not deal with you according to the trust which you have put in me this day!”

We, I suppose, are to believe that we have a right to laugh at Amyas’s scheme as frantic and chimerical. It is easy to amuse ourselves with the premises, after the conclusion has been found for us. We know, now, that he was mistaken: but we have not discovered his mistake for ourselves, and have no right to plume ourselves on other men’s discoveries. Had we lived in Amyas’s days, we should have belonged either to the many wise men who believed as he did, or to the many foolish men, who not only sneered at the story of Manoa, but at a hundred other stories, which we now know to be true. Columbus was laughed at: but he found a new world, nevertheless. Cortez was laughed at: but he found Mexico. Pizarro: but he found Peru. I ask any fair reader of those two charming books, Mr. Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico and his Conquest of Peru, whether the true wonders in them described do not outdo all the false wonders of Manoa.

But what reason was there to think them false? One quarter, perhaps, of America had been explored, and yet in that quarter two empires had been already found, in a state of mechanical, military, and agricultural civilization superior, in many things, to any nation of Europe. Was it not most rational to suppose that in the remaining three-quarters similar empires existed? If a second Mexico had been discovered in the mountains of Parima, and a second Peru in those of Brazil, what right would any man have had to wonder? As for the gold legends, nothing was told of Manoa which had not been seen in Peru and Mexico by the bodily eyes of men then living. Why should not the rocks of Guiana have been as full of the precious metals (we do not know yet that they are not) as the rocks of Peru and Mexico were known to be? Even the details of the story, its standing on a lake, for instance, bore a probability with them. Mexico actually stood in the centre of a lake–why should not Manoa? The Peruvian worship centred round a sacred lake–why not that of Manoa? Pizarro and Cortez, again, were led on to their desperate enterprises by the sight of small quantities of gold among savages, who told them of a civilized gold-country near at hand; and they found that those savages spoke truth. Why was the unanimous report of the Carib tribes of the Orinoco to be disbelieved, when they told a similar tale? Sir Richard Schomburgk’s admirable preface to Raleigh’s Guiana proves, surely, that the Indians themselves were deceived, as well as deceivers. It was known, again, that vast quantities of the Peruvian treasure had been concealed by the priests, and that members of the Inca family had fled across the Andes, and held out against the Spaniards. Barely fifty years had elapsed since then;–what more probable than that this remnant of the Peruvian dynasty and treasure still existed? Even the story of the Amazons, though it may serve Hume as a point for his ungenerous and untruthful attempt to make Raleigh out either fool or villain, has come from Spaniards, who had with their own eyes seen the Indian women fighting by their husbands’ sides, and from Indians, who asserted the existence of an Amazonian tribe. What right had Amyas, or any man, to disbelieve the story? The existence of the Amazons in ancient Asia, and of their intercourse with Alexander the Great, was then an accredited part of history, which it would have been gratuitous impertinence to deny. And what if some stories connected these warlike women with the Emperor of Manoa, and the capital itself? This generation ought surely to be the last to laugh at such a story, at least as long as the Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey continue to outvie the men in that relentless ferocity, with which they have subdued every neighboring tribe, save the Christians of Abbeokuta. In this case, as in a hundred more, fact not only outdoes, but justifies imagination; and Amyas spoke common sense when he said to his men that day–

“Let fools laugh and stay at home. Wise men dare and win. Saul went to look for his father’s asses, and found a kingdom; and Columbus, my men, was called a madman for only going to seek China, and never knew, they say, until his dying day, that he had found a whole new world instead of it. Find Manoa? God only, who made all things, knows what we may find beside!”

So underneath that giant ceiba-tree, those valiant men, reduced by battle and sickness to some eighty, swore a great oath, and kept that oath like men. To search for the golden city for two full years to come, whatever might befall; to stand to each other for weal or woe; to obey their officers to the death; to murmur privately against no man, but bring all complaints to a council of war; to use no profane oaths, but serve God daily with prayer; to take by violence from no man, save from their natural enemies the Spaniards; to be civil and merciful to all savages, and chaste and courteous to all women; to bring all booty and all food into the common stock, and observe to the utmost their faith with the adventurers who had fitted out the ship; and finally, to march at sunrise the next morning toward the south, trusting in God to be their guide.

“It is a great oath, and a hard one,” said Brimblecombe; “but God will give us strength to keep it.” And they knelt all together and received the Holy Communion, and then rose to pack provisions and ammunition, and lay down again to sleep and to dream that they were sailing home up Torridge stream–as Cavendish, returning from round the world, did actually sail home up Thames but five years afterwards–“with mariners and soldiers clothed in silk, with sails of damask, and topsails of cloth of gold, and the richest prize which ever was brought at one time unto English shores.”

. . . . . . .

The Cross stands upright in the southern sky. It is the middle of the night. Cary and Yeo glide silently up the hill and into the camp, and whisper to Amyas that they have done the deed. The sleepers are awakened, and the train sets forth.

Upward and southward ever: but whither, who can tell? They hardly think of the whither; but go like sleep-walkers, shaken out of one land of dreams, only to find themselves in another and stranger one. All around is fantastic and unearthly; now each man starts as he sees the figures of his fellows, clothed from head to foot in golden filigree; looks up, and sees the yellow moonlight through the fronds of the huge tree-ferns overhead, as through a cloud of glittering lace. Now they are hewing their way through a thicket of enormous flags; now through bamboos forty feet high; now they are stumbling over boulders, waist-deep in cushions of club-moss; now they are struggling through shrubberies of heaths and rhododendrons, and woolly incense-trees, where every leaf, as they brush past, dashes some fresh scent into their faces, and

“The winds, with musky wing,
About the cedarn alleys fling
Nard and cassia’s balmy smells.”

Now they open upon some craggy brow, from whence they can see far below an ocean of soft cloud, whose silver billows, girdled by the mountain sides, hide the lowland from their sight.

And from beneath the cloud strange voices rise; the screams of thousand night-birds, and wild howls, which they used at first to fancy were the cries of ravenous beasts, till they found them to proceed from nothing fiercer than an ape. But what is that deeper note, like a series of muffled explosions,–arquebuses fired within some subterranean cavern,–the heavy pulse of which rolls up through the depths of the unseen forest? They hear it now for the first time, but they will hear it many a time again; and the Indian lad is hushed, and cowers close to them, and then takes heart, as he looks upon their swords and arquebuses; for that is the roar of the jaguar, “seeking his meat from God.”

But what is that glare away to the northward? The yellow moon is ringed with gay rainbows; but that light is far too red to be the reflection of any beams of hers. Now through the cloud rises a column of black and lurid smoke; the fog clears away right and left around it, and shows beneath, a mighty fire.

The men look at each other with questioning eyes, each half suspecting, and yet not daring to confess their own suspicions; and Amyas whispers to Yeo–

“You took care to flood the powder?”

“Ay, ay, sir, and to unload the ordnance too. No use in making a noise to tell the Spaniards our whereabouts.”

Yes; that glare rises from the good ship Rose. Amyas, like Cortez of old, has burnt his ship, and retreat is now impossible. Forward into the unknown abyss of the New World, and God be with them as they go!

The Indian knows a cunning path: it winds along the highest ridges of the mountains; but the travelling is far more open and easy.

They have passed the head of a valley which leads down to St. Jago. Beneath that long shining river of mist, which ends at the foot of the great Silla, lies (so says the Indian lad) the rich capital of Venezuela; and beyond, the gold-mines of Los Teques and Baruta, which first attracted the founder Diego de Losada; and many a longing eye is turned towards it as they pass the saddle at the valley head; but the attempt is hopeless, they turn again to the left, and so down towards the rancho, taking care (so the prudent Amyas had commanded) to break down, after crossing, the frail rope bridge which spans each torrent and ravine.

They are at the rancho long before daybreak, and have secured there, not only fourteen mules, but eight or nine Indians stolen from off the Llanos, like their guide, who are glad enough to escape from their tyrants by taking service with them. And now southward and away, with lightened shoulders and hearts; for they are all but safe from pursuit. The broken bridges prevent the news of their raid reaching St. Jago until nightfall; and in the meanwhile, Don Guzman returns to the river mouth the next day to find the ship a blackened wreck, and the camp empty; follows their trail over the hills till he is stopped by a broken bridge; surmounts that difficulty, and meets a second; his men are worn out with heat, and a little afraid of stumbling on the heretic desperadoes, and he returns by land to St. Jago; and when he arrives there, has news from home which gives him other things to think of than following those mad Englishmen, who have vanished into the wilderness. “What need, after all, to follow them?” asked the Spaniards of each other. “Blinded by the devil, whom they serve, they rush on in search of certain death, as many a larger company has before them, and they will find it, and will trouble La Guayra no more forever.” “Lutheran dogs and enemies of God,” said Don Guzman to his soldiers, “they will leave their bones to whiten on the Llanos, as may every heretic who sets foot on Spanish soil!”

Will they do so, Don Guzman? Or wilt thou and Amyas meet again upon a mightier battlefield, to learn a lesson which neither of you yet has learned?

CHAPTER XXII

THE INQUISITION IN THE INDIES

My next chapter is perhaps too sad; it shall be at least as short as I can make it; but it was needful to be written, that readers may judge fairly for themselves what sort of enemies the English nation had to face in those stern days.

Three weeks have passed, and the scene is shifted to a long, low range of cells in a dark corridor in the city of Cartagena. The door of one is open; and within stand two cloaked figures, one of whom we know. It is Eustace Leigh. The other is a familiar of the Holy Office.

He holds in his hand a lamp, from which the light falls on a bed of straw, and on the sleeping figure of a man. The high white brow, the pale and delicate features–them too we know, for they are those of Frank. Saved half-dead from the fury of the savage negroes, he has been reserved for the more delicate cruelty of civilized and Christian men. He underwent the question but this afternoon; and now Eustace, his betrayer, is come to persuade him– or to entrap him? Eustace himself hardly knows whether of the two.

And yet he would give his life to save his cousin.

His life? He has long since ceased to care for that. He has done what he has done, because it is his duty; and now he is to do his duty once more, and wake the sleeper, and argue, coax, threaten him into recantation while “his heart is still tender from the torture,” so Eustace’s employers phrase it.

And yet how calmly he is sleeping! Is it but a freak of the lamplight, or is there a smile upon his lips? Eustace takes the lamp and bends over him to see; and as he bends he hears Frank whispering in his dreams his mother’s name, and a name higher and holier still.

Eustace cannot find the heart to wake him.

“Let him rest,” whispers he to his companion. “After all, I fear my words will be of little use.”

“I fear so too, sir. Never did I behold a more obdurate heretic. He did not scruple to scoff openly at their holinesses.”

“Ah!” said Eustace; “great is the pravity of the human heart, and the power of Satan! Let us go for the present.”

“Where is she?”

“The elder sorceress, or the younger?”

“The younger–the–“

“The Senora de Soto? Ah, poor thing! One could be sorry for her, were she not a heretic.” And the man eyed Eustace keenly, and then quietly added, “She is at present with the notary; to the benefit of her soul, I trust–“

Eustace half stopped, shuddering. He could hardly collect himself enough to gasp out an “Amen!”

“Within there,” said the man, pointing carelessly to a door as they went down the corridor. “We can listen a moment, if you like; but don’t betray me, senor.”

Eustace knows well enough that the fellow is probably on the watch to betray him, if he shows any signs of compunction; at least to report faithfully to his superiors the slightest expression of sympathy with a heretic; but a horrible curiosity prevails over fear, and he pauses close to the fatal door. His face is all of a flame, his knees knock together, his ears are ringing, his heart bursting through his ribs, as he supports himself against the wall, hiding his convulsed face as well as he can from his companion.

A man’s voice is plainly audible within; low, but distinct. The notary is trying that old charge of witchcraft, which the Inquisitors, whether to justify themselves to their own consciences, or to whiten their villainy somewhat in the eyes of the mob, so often brought against their victims. And then Eustace’s heart sinks within him as he hears a woman’s voice reply, sharpened by indignation and agony–

“Witchcraft against Don Guzman? What need of that, oh God! what need?”

“You deny it then, senora? we are sorry for you; but–“

A confused choking murmur from the victim, mingled with words which might mean anything or nothing.

“She has confessed!” whispered Eustace; “saints, I thank you!–she–“

A wail which rings through Eustace’s ears, and brain, and heart! He would have torn at the door to open it; but his companion forces him away. Another, and another wail, while the wretched man hurries off, stopping his ears in vain against those piercing cries, which follow him, like avenging angels, through the dreadful vaults.

He escaped into the fragrant open air, and the golden tropic moonlight, and a garden which might have served as a model for Eden; but man’s hell followed into God’s heaven, and still those wails seemed to ring through his ears.

“Oh, misery, misery, misery!” murmured he to himself through grinding teeth; “and I have brought her to this! I have had to bring her to it! What else could I? Who dare blame me? And yet what devilish sin can I have committed, that requires to be punished thus? Was there no one to be found but me? No one? And yet it may save her soul. It may bring her to repentance!”

“It may, indeed; for she is delicate, and cannot endure much. You ought to know as well as I, senor, the merciful disposition of the Holy Office.”

“I know it, I know it,” interrupted poor Eustace, trembling now for himself. “All in love–all in love.–A paternal chastisement–“

“And the proofs of heresy are patent, beside the strong suspicion of enchantment, and the known character of the elder sorceress. You yourself, you must remember, senor, told us that she had been a notorious witch in England, before the senora brought her hither as her attendant.”

“Of course she was; of course. Yes; there was no other course open. And though the flesh may be weak, sir, in my case, yet none can have proved better to the Holy Office how willing is the spirit!”

And so Eustace departed; and ere another sun had set, he had gone to the principal of the Jesuits; told him his whole heart, or as much of it, poor wretch, as he dare tell to himself; and entreated to be allowed to finish his novitiate, and enter the order, on the understanding that he was to be sent at once back to Europe, or anywhere else; “Otherwise,” as he said frankly, “he should go mad, even if he were not mad already.” The Jesuit, who was a kindly man enough, went to the Holy Office, and settled all with the Inquisitors, recounting to them, to set him above all suspicion, Eustace’s past valiant services to the Church. His testimony was no longer needed; he left Cartagena for Nombre that very night, and sailed the next week I know not whither.

I say, I know not whither. Eustace Leigh vanishes henceforth from these pages. He may have ended as General of his Order. He may have worn out his years in some tropic forest, “conquering the souls” (including, of course, the bodies) of Indians; he may have gone back to his old work in England, and been the very Ballard who was hanged and quartered three years afterwards for his share in Babington’s villainous conspiracy: I know not. This book is a history of men,–of men’s virtues and sins, victories and defeats; and Eustace is a man no longer: he is become a thing, a tool, a Jesuit; which goes only where it is sent, and does good or evil indifferently as it is bid; which, by an act of moral suicide, has lost its soul, in the hope of saving it; without a will, a conscience, a responsibility (as it fancies), to God or man, but only to “The Society.” In a word, Eustace, as he says himself, is “dead.” Twice dead, I fear. Let the dead bury their dead. We have no more concern with Eustace Leigh.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE BANKS OF THE META

“My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me– Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods!”

TENNYSON’S Ulysses.

Nearly three years are past and gone since that little band had knelt at evensong beneath the giant tree of Guayra–years of seeming blank, through which they are to be tracked only by scattered notes and mis-spelt names. Through untrodden hills and forests, over a space of some eight hundred miles in length by four hundred in breadth, they had been seeking for the Golden City, and they had sought in vain. They had sought it along the wooded banks of the Orinoco, and beyond the roaring foam-world of Maypures, and on the upper waters of the mighty Amazon. They had gone up the streams even into Peru itself, and had trodden the cinchona groves of Loxa, ignorant, as all the world was then, of their healing virtues. They had seen the virgin snows of Chimborazo towering white above the thundercloud, and the giant cone of Cotopaxi blackening in its sullen wrath, before the fiery streams rolled down its sides. Foiled in their search at the back of the Andes, they had turned eastward once more, and plunged from the alpine cliffs into “the green and misty ocean of the Montana.” Slowly and painfully they had worked their way northward again, along the eastern foot of the inland Cordillera, and now they were bivouacking, as it seems, upon one of the many feeders of the Meta, which flow down from the Suma Paz into the forest-covered plains. There they sat, their watch-fires glittering on the stream, beneath the shadow of enormous trees, Amyas and Cary, Brimblecombe, Yeo, and the Indian lad, who has followed them in all their wanderings, alive and well: but as far as ever from Manoa, and its fairy lake, and golden palaces, and all the wonders of the Indian’s tale. Again and again in their wanderings they had heard faint rumors of its existence, and started off in some fresh direction, to meet only a fresh disappointment, and hope deferred, which maketh sick the heart.

There they sit at last–four-and-forty men out of the eighty-four who left the tree of Guayra:–where are the rest?

“Their bones are scatter’d far and wide, By mount, by stream, and sea.”

Drew, the master, lies on the banks of the Rio Negro, and five brave fellows by him, slain in fight by the poisoned arrows of the Indians, in a vain attempt to penetrate the mountain-gorges of the Parima. Two more lie amid the valleys of the Andes, frozen to death by the fierce slaty hail which sweeps down from the condor’s eyrie; four more were drowned at one of the rapids of the Orinoco; five or six more wounded men are left behind at another rapid among friendly Indians, to be recovered when they can be: perhaps never. Fever, snakes, jaguars, alligators, cannibal fish, electric eels, have thinned their ranks month by month, and of their march through the primeval wilderness no track remains, except those lonely graves.

And there the survivors sit, beside the silent stream, beneath the tropic moon; sun-dried and lean, but strong and bold as ever, with the quiet fire of English courage burning undimmed in every eye, and the genial smile of English mirth fresh on every lip; making a jest of danger and a sport of toil, as cheerily as when they sailed over the bar of Bideford, in days which seem to belong to some antenatal life. Their beards have grown down upon their breasts; their long hair is knotted on their heads, like women’s, to keep off the burning sunshine; their leggings are of the skin of the delicate Guazu-puti deer; their shirts are patched with Indian cotton web; the spoils of jaguar, puma, and ape hang from their shoulders. Their ammunition is long since spent, their muskets, spoilt by the perpetual vapor-bath of the steaming woods, are left behind as useless in a cave by some cataract of the Orinoco: but their swords are bright and terrible as ever; and they carry bows of a strength which no Indian arm can bend, and arrows pointed with the remnants of their armor; many of them, too, are armed with the pocuna or blowgun of the Indians–more deadly, because more silent, than the firearms which they have left behind them. So they have wandered, and so they will wander still, the lords of the forest and its beasts; terrible to all hostile Indians, but kindly, just, and generous to all who will deal faithfully with them; and many a smooth-chinned Carib and Ature, Solimo and Guahiba, recounts with wonder and admiration the righteousness of the bearded heroes, who proclaimed themselves the deadly foes of the faithless and murderous Spaniard, and spoke to them of the great and good queen beyond the seas, who would send her warriors to deliver and avenge the oppressed Indian.

The men are sleeping among the trees, some on the ground, and some in grass-hammocks slung between the stems. All is silent, save the heavy plunge of the tapir in the river, as he tears up the water- weeds for his night’s repast. Sometimes, indeed, the jaguar, as he climbs from one tree-top to another after his prey, wakens the monkeys clustered on the boughs, and they again arouse the birds, and ten minutes of unearthly roars, howls, shrieks, and cacklings make the forest ring as if all pandemonium had broke loose; but that soon dies away again; and, even while it lasts, it is too common a matter to awaken the sleepers, much less to interrupt the council of war which is going on beside the watch-fire, between the three adventurers and the faithful Yeo. A hundred times have they held such a council, and in vain; and, for aught they know, this one will be as fruitless as those which have gone before it. Nevertheless, it is a more solemn one than usual; for the two years during which they had agreed to search for Manoa are long past, and some new place must be determined on, unless they intend to spend the rest of their lives in that green wilderness.

“Well,” says Will Cary, taking his cigar out of his mouth, “at least we have got something out of those last Indians. It is a comfort to have a puff at tobacco once more, after three weeks’ fasting.”

“For me,” said Jack Brimblecombe, “Heaven forgive me! but when I get the magical leaf between my teeth again, I feel tempted to sit as still as a chimney, and smoke till my dying day, without stirring hand or foot.”

“Then I shall forbid you tobacco, Master Parson,” said Amyas; “for we must be up and away again to-morrow. We have been idling here three mortal days, and nothing done.”

“Shall we ever do anything? I think the gold of Manoa is like the gold which lies where the rainbow touches the ground, always a field beyond you.”

Amyas was silent awhile, and so were the rest. There was no denying that their hopes were all but gone. In the immense circuit which they had made, they had met with nothing but disappointment.

“There is but one more chance,” said he at length, “and that is, the mountains to the east of the Orinoco, where we failed the first time. The Incas may have moved on to them when they escaped.”

“Why not?” said Cary; “they would so put all the forests, beside the Llanos and half-a-dozen great rivers, between them and those dogs of Spaniards.”

“Shall we try it once more?” said Amyas. “This river ought to run into the Orinoco; and once there, we are again at the very foot of the mountains. What say you, Yeo?”

“I cannot but mind, your worship, that when we came up the Orinoco, the Indians told us terrible stories of those mountains, how far they stretched, and how difficult they were to cross, by reason of the cliffs aloft, and the thick forests in the valleys. And have we not lost five good men there already?”

“What care we? No forests can be thicker than those we have bored through already; why, if one had had but a tail, like a monkey, for an extra warp, one might have gone a hundred miles on end along the tree-tops, and found it far pleasanter walking than tripping in withes, and being eaten up with creeping things, from morn till night.”

“But remember, too,” said Jack, “how they told us to beware of the Amazons.”

“What, Jack, afraid of a parcel of women?”

“Why not?” said Jack, “I wouldn’t run from a man, as you know; but a woman–it’s not natural, like. They must be witches or devils. See how the Caribs feared them. And there were men there without necks, and with their eyes in their breasts, they said. Now how could a Christian tackle such customers as them?”

“He couldn’t cut off their heads, that’s certain; but, I suppose, a poke in the ribs will do as much for them as for their neighbors.”

“Well,” said Jack, “if I fight, let me fight honest flesh and blood, that’s all, and none of these outlandish monsters. How do you know but that they are invulnerable by art-magic?”

“How do you know that they are? And as for the Amazons,” said Cary, “woman’s woman, all the world over. I’ll bet that you may wheedle them round with a compliment or two, just as if they were so many burghers’ wives. Pity I have not a court-suit and a Spanish hat. I would have taken an orange in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, gone all alone to them as ambassador, and been in a week as great with Queen Blackfacealinda as ever Raleigh is at Whitehall.”

“Gentlemen!” said Yeo, “where you go, I go; and not only I, but every man of us, I doubt not; but we have lost now half our company, and spent our ammunition, so we are no better men, were it not for our swords, than these naked heathens round us. Now it was, as you all know, by the wonder and noise of their ordnance (let alone their horses, which is a break-neck beast I put no faith in) that both Cortez and Pizarro, those imps of Satan, made their golden conquests, with which if we could have astounded the people of Manoa–“

“Having first found the said people,” laughed Amyas. “It is like the old fable. Every craftsman thinks his own trade the one pillar of the commonweal.”

“Well! your worship,” quoth Yeo, “it may be that being a gunner I overprize guns. But it don’t need slate and pencil to do this sum– Are forty men without shot as good as eighty with?”

“Thou art right, old fellow, right enough, and I was only jesting for very sorrow, and must needs laugh about it lest I weep about it. Our chance is over, I believe, though I dare not confess as much to the men.”

“Sir,” said Yeo, “I have a feeling on me that the Lord’s hand is against us in this matter. Whether He means to keep this wealth for worthier men than us, or whether it is His will to hide this great city in the secret place of His presence from the strife of tongues, and so to spare them from sinful man’s covetousness, and England from that sin and luxury which I have seen gold beget among the Spaniards, I know not, sir; for who knoweth the counsels of the Lord? But I have long had a voice within which saith, ‘Salvation Yeo, thou shalt never behold the Golden City which is on earth, where heathens worship sun and moon and the hosts of heaven; be content, therefore, to see that Golden City which is above, where is neither sun nor moon, but the Lord God and the Lamb are the light thereof.’

There was a simple majesty about old Yeo when he broke forth in utterances like these, which made his comrades, and even Amyas and Cary, look on him as Mussulmans look on madmen, as possessed of mysterious knowledge and flashes of inspiration; and Brimblecombe, whose pious soul looked up to the old hero with a reverence which had overcome all his Churchman’s prejudices against Anabaptists, answered gently,–

“Amen! amen! my masters all: and it has been on my mind, too, this long time, that there is a providence against our going east; for see how this two years past, whenever we have pushed eastward, we have fallen into trouble, and lost good men; and whenever we went Westward-ho, we have prospered; and do prosper to this day.”

“And what is more, gentlemen,” said Yeo, if, as Scripture says, dreams are from the Lord, I verily believe mine last night came from Him; for as I lay by the fire, sirs, I heard my little maid’s voice calling of me, as plain as ever I heard in my life; and the very same words, sirs, which she learned from me and my good comrade William Penberthy to say, ‘Westward-ho! jolly mariners all!’ a bit of an ungodly song, my masters, which we sang in our wild days; but she stood and called it as plain as ever mortal ears heard, and called again till I answered, ‘Coming! my maid, coming!’ and after that the dear chuck called no more–God grant I find her yet!–and so I woke.”

Cary had long since given up laughing at Yeo about the “little maid;” and Amyas answered,–

“So let it be, Yeo, if the rest agree: but what shall we do to the westward?”

“Do?” said Cary; “there’s plenty to do; for there’s plenty of gold, and plenty of Spaniards, too, they say, on the other side of these mountains: so that our swords will not rust for lack of adventures, my gay knights-errant all.”

So they chatted on; and before night was half through a plan was matured, desperate enough–but what cared those brave hearts for that? They would cross the Cordillera to Santa Fe de Bogota, of the wealth whereof both Yeo and Amyas had often heard in the Pacific: try to seize either the town or some convoy of gold going from it; make for the nearest river (there was said to be a large one which ran northward thence), build canoes, and try to reach the Northern Sea once more; and then, if Heaven prospered them, they might seize a Spanish ship, and make their way home to England, not, indeed, with the wealth of Manoa, but with a fair booty of Spanish gold. This was their new dream. It was a wild one: but hardly more wild than the one which Drake had fulfilled, and not as wild as the one which Oxenham might have fulfilled, but for his own fatal folly.

Amyas sat watching late that night, sad of heart. To give up the cherished dream of years was hard; to face his mother, harder still: but it must be done, for the men’s sake. So the new plan was proposed next day, and accepted joyfully. They would go up to the mountains and rest awhile; if possible, bring up the wounded whom they had left behind; and then, try a new venture, with new hopes, perhaps new dangers; they were inured to the latter.

They started next morning cheerfully enough, and for three hours or more paddled easily up the glassy and windless reaches, between two green flower-bespangled walls of forest, gay with innumerable birds and insects; while down from the branches which overhung the stream long trailers hung to the water’s edge, and seemed admiring in the clear mirror the images of their own gorgeous flowers. River, trees, flowers, birds, insects,–it was all a fairy-land: but it was a colossal one; and yet the voyagers took little note of it. It was now to them an everyday occurrence, to see trees full two hundred feet high one mass of yellow or purple blossom to the highest twigs, and every branch and stem one hanging garden of crimson and orange orchids or vanillas. Common to them were all the fantastic and enormous shapes with which Nature bedecks her robes beneath the fierce suns and fattening rains of the tropic forest. Common were forms and colors of bird, and fish, and butterfly, more strange and bright than ever opium-eater dreamed. The long processions of monkeys, who kept pace with them along the tree-tops, and proclaimed their wonder in every imaginable whistle, and grunt, and howl, had ceased to move their laughter, as much as the roar of the jaguar and the rustle of the boa had ceased to move their fear; and when a brilliant green and rose-colored fish, flat- bodied like a bream, flab-finned like a salmon, and saw-toothed like a shark, leapt clean on board of the canoe to escape the rush of the huge alligator (whose loathsome snout, ere he could stop, actually rattled against the canoe within a foot of Jack Brimblecombe’s hand), Jack, instead of turning pale, as he had done at the sharks upon a certain memorable occasion, coolly picked up the fish, and said, “He’s four pound weight! If you can catch ‘pirai’ for us like that, old fellow, just keep in our wake, and we’ll give you the cleanings for wages.”

Yes. The mind of man is not so “infinite,” in the vulgar sense of that word, as people fancy; and however greedy the appetite for wonder may be, while it remains unsatisfied in everyday European life, it is as easily satiated as any other appetite, and then leaves the senses of its possessor as dull as those of a city gourmand after a lord mayor’s feast. Only the highest minds–our Humboldts, and Bonplands, and Schomburgks (and they only when quickened to an almost unhealthy activity by civilization)–can go on long appreciating where Nature is insatiable, imperious, maddening, in her demands on our admiration. The very power of observing wears out under the rush of ever new objects; and the dizzy spectator is fain at last to shut the eyes of his soul, and take refuge (as West Indian Spaniards do) in tobacco and stupidity. The man, too, who has not only eyes but utterance,–what shall he do where all words fail him? Superlatives are but inarticulate, after all, and give no pictures even of size any more than do numbers of feet and yards: and yet what else can we do, but heap superlative on superlative, and cry, “Wonderful, wonderful!” and after that, “wonderful, past all whooping”? What Humboldt’s self cannot paint, we will not try to daub. The voyagers were in a South American forest, readers. Fill up the meaning of those words, each as your knowledge enables you, for I cannot do it for you.

Certainly those adventurers could not. The absence of any attempt at word-painting, even of admiration at the glorious things which they saw, is most remarkable in all early voyagers, both Spanish and English. The only two exceptions which I recollect are Columbus–(but then all was new, and he was bound to tell what he had seen)–and Raleigh; the two most gifted men, perhaps, with the exception of Humboldt, who ever set foot in tropical America; but even they dare nothing but a few feeble hints in passing. Their souls had been dazzled and stunned by a great glory. Coming out of our European Nature into that tropic one, they had felt like Plato’s men, bred in the twilight cavern, and then suddenly turned round to the broad blaze of day; they had seen things awful and unspeakable: why talk of them, except to say with the Turks, “God is great!”

So it was with these men. Among the higher-hearted of them, the grandeur and the glory around had attuned their spirits to itself, and kept up in them a lofty, heroical, reverent frame of mind; but they knew as little about the trees and animals in an “artistic” or “critical” point of view, as in a scientific one. This tree the Indians called one unpronounceable name, and it made good bows; that, some other name, and it made good canoes; of that, you could eat the fruit; that produced the caoutchouc gum, useful for a hundred matters; that was what the Indians (and they likewise) used to poison their arrows with; from the ashes of those palm-nuts you could make good salt; that tree, again, was full of good milk if you bored the stem: they drank it, and gave God thanks, and were not astonished. God was great: but that they had discovered long before they came into the tropics. Noble old child-hearted heroes, with just romance and superstition enough about them to keep them from that prurient hysterical wonder and enthusiasm, which is simply, one often fears, a product of our scepticism! We do not trust enough in God, we do not really believe His power enough, to be ready, as they were, as every one ought to be on a God-made earth, for anything and everything being possible; and then, when a wonder is discovered, we go into ecstasies and shrieks over it, and take to ourselves credit for being susceptible of so lofty a feeling, true index, forsooth, of a refined and cultivated mind.

They paddled onward hour after hour, sheltering themselves as best they could under the shadow of the southern bank, while on their right hand the full sun-glare lay upon the enormous wall of mimosas, figs, and laurels, which formed the northern forest, broken by the slender shafts of bamboo tufts, and decked with a thousand gaudy parasites; bank upon bank of gorgeous bloom piled upward to the sky, till where its outline cut the blue, flowers and leaves, too lofty to be distinguished by the eye, formed a broken rainbow of all hues quivering in the ascending streams of azure mist, until they seemed to melt and mingle with the very heavens.

And as the sun rose higher and higher, a great stillness fell upon the forest. The jaguars and the monkeys had hidden themselves in the darkest depths of the woods. The birds’ notes died out one by one; the very butterflies ceased their flitting over the tree-tops, and slept with outspread wings upon the glossy leaves, undistinguishable from the flowers around them. Now and then a colibri whirred downward toward the water, hummed for a moment around some pendent flower, and then the living gem was lost in the deep blackness of the inner wood, among tree-trunks as huge and dark as the pillars of some Hindoo shrine; or a parrot swung and screamed at them from an overhanging bough; or a thirsty monkey slid lazily down a liana to the surface of the stream, dipped up the water in his tiny hand, and started chattering back, as his eyes met those of some foul alligator peering upward through the clear depths below. In shaded nooks beneath the boughs, the capybaras, rabbits as large as sheep, went paddling sleepily round and round, thrusting up their unwieldy heads among the blooms of the blue water-lilies; while black and purple water-hens ran up and down upon the rafts of floating leaves. The shining snout of a freshwater dolphin rose slowly to the surface; a jet of spray whirred up; a rainbow hung upon it for a moment; and the black snout sank lazily again. Here and there, too, upon some shallow pebbly shore, scarlet flamingoes stood dreaming knee-deep, on one leg; crested cranes pranced up and down, admiring their own finery; and ibises and egrets dipped their bills under water in search of prey: but before noon even those had slipped away, and there reigned a stillness which might be heard–such a stillness (to compare small things with great) as broods beneath the rich shadows of Amyas’s own Devon woods, or among the lonely sweeps of Exmoor, when the heather is in flower–a stillness in which, as Humboldt says, “If beyond the silence we listen for the faintest undertones, we detect a stifled, continuous hum of insects, which crowd the air close to the earth; a confused swarming murmur which hangs round every bush, in the cracked bark of trees, in the soil undermined by lizards, millepedes, and bees; a voice proclaiming to us that all Nature breathes, that under a thousand different forms life swarms in the gaping and dusty earth, as much as in the bosom of the waters, and the air which breathes around.”

At last a soft and distant murmur, increasing gradually to a heavy roar, announced that they were nearing some cataract; till turning a point, where the deep alluvial soil rose into a low cliff fringed with delicate ferns, they came full in sight of a scene at which all paused: not with astonishment, but with something very like disgust.

“Rapids again!” grumbled one. “I thought we had had enough of them on the Orinoco.”

“We shall have to get out, and draw the canoes overland, I suppose. Three hours will be lost, and in the very hottest of the day, too.”

“There’s worse behind; don’t you see the spray behind the palms?”

“Stop grumbling, my masters, and don’t cry out before you are hurt. Paddle right up to the largest of those islands, and let us look about us.”

In front of them was a snow-white bar of raging foam, some ten feet high, along which were ranged three or four islands of black rock. Each was crested with a knot of lofty palms, whose green tops stood out clear against the bright sky, while the lower half of their stems loomed hazy through a luminous veil of rainbowed mist. The banks right and left of the fall were so densely fringed with a low hedge of shrubs, that landing seemed all but impossible; and their Indian guide, suddenly looking round him and whispering, bade them beware of savages; and pointed to a canoe which lay swinging in the eddies under the largest island, moored apparently to the root of some tree.

“Silence all!” cried Amyas, “and paddle up thither and seize the canoe. If there be an Indian on the island, we will have speech of him: but mind and treat him friendly; and on your lives, neither strike nor shoot, even if he offers to fight.”

So, choosing a line of smooth backwater just in the wake of the island, they drove their canoes up by main force, and fastened them safely by the side of the Indian’s, while Amyas, always the foremost, sprang boldly on shore, whispering to the Indian boy to follow him.

Once on the island, Amyas felt sure enough, that if its wild tenant had not seen them approach, he certainly had not heard them, so deafening was the noise which filled his brain, and seemed to make the very leaves upon the bushes quiver, and the solid stone beneath his feet to reel and ring. For two hundred yards and more above the fall nothing met his eye but one white waste of raging foam, with here and there a transverse dyke of rock, which hurled columns of spray and surges of beaded water high into the air,–strangely contrasting with the still and silent cliffs of green leaves which walled the river right and left, and more strangely still with the knots of enormous palms upon the islets, which reared their polished shafts a hundred feet into the air, straight and upright as masts, while their broad plumes and golden-clustered fruit slept in the sunshine far aloft, the image of the stateliest repose amid the wildest wrath of Nature.

He looked round anxiously for the expected Indian; but he was nowhere to be seen; and, in the meanwhile, as he stept cautiously along the island, which was some fifty yards in length and breadth, his senses, accustomed as they were to such sights, could not help dwelling on the exquisite beauty of the scene; on the garden of gay flowers, of every imaginable form and hue, which fringed every boulder at his feet, peeping out amid delicate fern-fans and luxuriant cushions of moss; on the chequered shade of the palms, and the cool air, which wafted down from the cataracts above the scents of a thousand flowers. Gradually his ear became accustomed to the roar, and, above its mighty undertone, he could hear the whisper of the wind among the shrubs, and the hum of myriad insects; while the rock manakin, with its saffron plumage, flitted before him from stone to stone, calling cheerily, and seeming to lead him on. Suddenly, scrambling over the rocky flower-beds to