Part 32 (2/2)

”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 cohers' 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 thereat with Queen Blackfacealinda as ever Raleigh is at Whitehall”

”Gentleo; 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 Noas, 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 iolden conquests, hich 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 worshi+p,” quoth Yeo, ”it uns But it don't need slate and pencil to do this suhty with?”

”Thou art right, old fellow, right enough, and I was only jesting for very sorrow, and h about it lest I weep about it Our chance is over, I believe, though I dare not confess ason ainst us in this matter Whether He means to keep this wealth for worthier reat city in the secret place of His presence froues, and so to spare theland fro 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 worshi+p sun and moon and the hosts of heaven; be content, therefore, to see that Golden City which is above, where is neither sun nor ht 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 Mussule and flashes of inspiration; and Brimblecombe, whose pious soul looked up to the old hero with a reverence which had overcoainst Anabaptists, answered gently,-- ”Amen! amen!ti east; for see how this two years past, whenever we have pushed eastward, we have fallen into trouble, and lost good men; and whenever ent Westward-ho, we have prospered; and do prosper to this day”

”And what is entlemen,” said Yeo, if, as Scripture says, dreaht came from Him; for as I lay by the fire, sirs, I heardof me, as plain as ever I heard in my life; and the very saood comrade William Penberthy to say, 'Westward-ho! jolly ,in our wild days; but she stood and called it as plain as ever ! !' and after that the dear chuck called no rant I find her yet!--and so I woke”

Cary had long since given up laughing at Yeo about the ”little maid;” and Aree: but what shall we do to the ard?”

”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, hts-errant all”

So they chatted on; and before night was half through a plan was h--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 so froe one which ran northward thence), build canoes, and try to reach the Northern Sea once ht seize a Spanish shi+p, and land, 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 Oxenhaht have fulfilled, but for his own fatal folly

Aive 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 theup 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 h, and for three hours or lassy and windless reaches, between two green flower-bespangled walls of forest, gay with innumerable birds and insects; while down fro to the water's edge, and seeeous 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 s, and every branch and stee orchids or vanillas Common to them were all the fantastic and enormous shapes hich Nature bedecks her robes beneath the fierce suns and fattening rains of the tropic forest Common were fore and bright than ever opiu processions ofthe tree-tops, and proclairunt, and howl, had ceased to uar and the rustle of the boa had ceased to reen 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 loathsoainst the canoe within a foot of Jack Bri 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 ar 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 gourhest ks (and they only when quickened to an al appreciating where Nature is insatiable, i, in her de 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 hiive 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 Huers were in a South A 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 attes which they saw, is lish 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 ifted men, perhaps, with the exception of Humboldt, who ever set foot in tropical A but a few feeble hints in passing Their souls had been dazzled and stunned by a great glory Co out of our European Nature into that tropic one, they had felt like Plato's ht cavern, and then suddenly turned round to the broad blaze of day; they had seen things awful and unspeakable: why talk of thereat!”

So it ith these lory 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 naood bows; that, soood canoes; of that, you could eat the fruit; that produced the caoutchouc gum, useful for a hundred matters; that hat the Indians (and they likewise) used to poison their arroith; froood salt; that tree, again, was full of good ave 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 roh about them to keep them from that prurient hysterical wonder and enthusiasm, which is simply, one often fears, a product of our scepticish 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- 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 cultivatedthemselves as best they could under the shadow of the southern bank, while on their right hand the full sun-glare lay upon the enors, and laurels, which formed the northern forest, broken by the slender shafts of baaudy 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, for streale 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 doard toward the water, hummed for a e tree-trunks as huge and dark as the pillars of so and screah; 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 h 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 a the blooms of the blue water-lilies; while black and purple water-hens ran up and down upon the rafts of floating leaves The shi+ning snout of a freshwater dolphin rose slowly to the surface; a jet of spray whirred up; a rainbow hung upon it for a ain Here and there, too, upon so knee-deep, on one leg; crested cranes pranced up and down, adrets dipped their bills under water in search of prey: but before noon even those had slipped away, and there reigned a stillness which s with great) as broods beneath the rich shadows of A 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 swars round every bush, in the cracked bark of trees, in the soil under to us that all Nature breathes, that under a thousand different for and dusty earth, as much as in the bosom of the waters, and the air which breathes around”

At last a soft and distant radually to a heavy roar, announced that they were nearing so a point, where the deep alluvial soil rose into a low cliff fringed with delicate ferns, they caht of a scene at which all paused: not with astonishain!” gruh of theet 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 pal, ht up to the largest of those islands, and let us look about us”

In front of theh, along which were ranged three or four islands of black rock Each was crested with a knot of lofty palht sky, while the lower half of their steh a luht and left of the fall were so densely fringed with a low hedge of shrubs, that landing seeuide, suddenly looking round hies; 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, ill 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 A boldly on shore, whispering to the Indian boy to follow hih, that if its wild tenant had not seen the 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 andfoam, with here and there a transverse dyke of rock, which hurled coluh into the air,--strangely contrasting with the still and silent cliffs of green leaves which walled the river right and left, and ely 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 olden-clustered fruit slept in the sunshi+ne far aloft, the ie 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 thethe island, which was soth and breadth, his senses, accusto on the exquisite beauty of the scene; on the garden of gay flowers, of every ied every boulder at his feet, peeping out amid delicate fern-fans and luxuriant cushi+ons 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 becahty undertone, he could hear the whisper of the wind a the shrubs, and the hum of myriad insects; while the rock e, flitted before hi to lead hi over the rocky flower-beds to the other side of the isle, he came upon a little shady beach, which, beneath a bank of stone solassy bay Ten yards farther, the cataract fell sheer in thunder: but a high fern-fringed rock turned its force away fro slowly round and round in glassy dark-green rings, a for every fly and hich spun and quivered on the eddy Here, if anywhere, was the place to find the owner of the canoe He leapt down upon the pebbles; and as he did so, a figure rose fro rock, and irl; and yet, when he looked again,--was it an Indian girl? Ahters of the forest, but never such a one as this Her stature was taller, her lih tanned by light, was fairer by far than his own sunburnt face; her hair, croith a garland of white flowers, was not lank, and straight, and black, like an Indian's, but of a rich, glossy brown, and curling richly and crisply froh loas upright and aht and small; her lips, the lips of a European; her whole face of the highest and richest type of Spanish beauty; a collar of gold olden bracelets were on her wrists All the strange and diher race than Carib, or Arrowak, or Solimo, which Amyas had ever heard, rose up in his reat cacique, perhaps of the lost Incas theazed upon that fairy vision, while she, unabashed in her free innocence, gazed fearlessly in return, as Eve hty stature, and the strange gar yellow locks of the Englishently and sht she caught up froround a bow, and held it fiercely toward hi arrohich, as he could see, she had been striking fish, for a line of twisted grass hung from its barbed head Amyas stopped, laid down his o and sword, andall Indian signs of aht at his breast, and he knew the h to stand still and call for the Indian boy; too proud to retreat, but in the unco everybetween his ribs

The boy, who had been peering froan, as the safeston his nose upon the pebbles, while he tried two or three dialects; one of which at last she seemed to understand, and answered in a tone of evident suspicion and anger

”What does she say?”

”That you are a Spaniard and a robber, because you have a beard”

”Tell her that we are no Spaniards, but that we hate thereat waters to help the Indians to kill them”

The boy translated his speech The nymph answered by a contemptuous shake of the head

”Tell her, that if she will send her tribe to us, ill do theht the Spaniards, and ant them to show us the way”

The boy had no sooner spoken, than, ni up the rocks, and darted between the pallish boat, and stopped with a cry of fear and rage

”Let her pass!” shouted Amyas, who had followed her close ”Push your boat off, and let her pass Boy, tell her to go on; they will not come near her”

But she hesitated still, and with arron to the head, faced first on the boat's crew, and then on Alish into her tiny piragua, she darted into the wildest whirl of the eddies, shooting along with vigorous strokes, while the English tre a- toothed trout: but with the swiftness of an arrow she reached the northern bank, drove her canoe ah so in the bush, and vanished like a dreao have you unearthed?” cried Cary, as they toiled up again to the landing-place

”Beshrew me,” quoth Jack, ”but we are in the very land of the nymphs, and I shall expect to see Diana herself next, with the moon on her forehead”

”Take care, then, where you wander hereabouts, Sir John: lest you end as Actaeon did, by turning into a stag, and being eaten by a jaguar”

”Actaeon was eaten by his own hounds, Mr Cary, so the parallel don't hold But surely she was a very wonder of beauty!”

Why was it that Amyas did not like this har; as if that fair vision was his property, and the ht to have even seen her And he spoke quite surlily as he said-- ”You may leave the women to the: so get your canoes up on the rock, and keep good watch”

”Hillo!” shouted one in a few h to feed us all round I suppose that young cat-a-mountain left it behind her in her hurry I wish she had left her golden chains and ouches into the bargain”

”Well,” said another, ” we'll take it as fair payain to let her ladyshi+p pass”

”Leave that fish alone,” said Amyas; ”it is none of yours”

”Why, sir!” quoth the finder in a tone of sulky deprecation

”If we are to in by stealing their goods There are plenty o and catch them, and let the Indians have their own”

The h to strict and stern justice in their dealings with the savages: but they could not help looking slyly at each other, and hinting, when out of sight, that the captain seehty fuss about his new acquaintance