The Glyphs/Chapter 3

When it came down to the practical side of our venture, the doctor didn’t know a single fact regarding Guatemala that could be of the slightest assistance to me. I sometimes doubt if he had any very exact knowledge as to its location. All that he knew about it was that it was some place where there were jungles, and that it had numerous ruins. He could tell a lot about those. Wardrop knew exactly where it was, and how to get there, but didn’t care to be bored with investigations as to its climate or what sort of equipment we should carry. He knew all about big-game shooting and had made some most extraordinary trips; but always he had left it to some one else to get the outfits together. It’s a fact that, sitting one night in a London club, he got interested in Lhassa, which was then a Forbidden City, walked to his apartments, where he arrived at three, decided he would like to go there, and at five took a train from Charing Cross with nothing but a hand valise containing a change of linen, three cases of rifles and shot guns, and a bass viol. Had I known this latter caprice before we started, I should have jibbed; but I didn’t.

Fortunately for the party I found a Guatemalean in the steamship office who did know a little about his own country, and who gave me much advice—most of it bad. But it enabled me to purchase a lot of plunder that afterward proved useful; and a lot that didn’t. I never knew until we reached the dock at Cherbourg, where we were to board a tramp steamer, that Wardrop was taking Benny with him. Also a bass viol in its case, which took up more room than a small moving van. Furthermore, he had a portable bath tub, a motion-picture camera that neither he nor any other of us ever knew how to operate, and a gramophone. The only joyous possession he left behind was his dog, the reason for that being that he didn’t care to have Monty suffer any hardships. I think he put him in a boarding house.

Doctor Morgano’s luggage consisted of a tin cylinder filled with maps, and a dozen notebooks; but his waistcoat bulged. One upper pocket contained a toothbrush and a razor, the other a shaving stick and some tooth soap.

“About luggage, doctor,” I asked solicitously, when he stepped off the train, “I suppose your trunk was checked through to here?”

“Trunk? Trunk? I have no trunk,” he replied.

“But what about changes of linen, extra equipment of that sort?” I asked hopefully.

“Never thought of them!” he said, looking troubled. “But—what do they matter? It is a great quest, my friend. That is all that counts now.” And he waved his hands as if dismissing an entirely immaterial obstacle. Wardrop roared with delight. I could have cursed fluently; but we fortunately had time to buy the doctor a few things for the voyage before the steamer sailed.

And in time it did, with our menagerie aboard. We were the sole voyagers. Wardrop was too seasoned a traveler to be at all disconcerted by the sea, and his man Benny might have been a sailor. The doctor was too much absorbed in the books he had brought aboard at Cherbourg to have time for seasickness, and we made a propitious start. It is true that when Wardrop first tried the bass viol the crew was panic-stricken; but I can’t blame the men. So was I. I rushed to his cabin—stalked it—to learn the cause of the trouble. Wardrop was sawing away with evident pleasure. He couldn’t play at all.

“Why do you do it?” I asked solicitously.

“Because it kicks up such an infernal noise,” he replied, which was all the satisfaction I ever got. And I honestly believe he played it for that sole reason. And so, in time, we came within sight of Barrios. We got our outfit together and checked it in a wretched wooden hotel to the accompaniment of the humming of mosquitoes that seemed to be a part and fit into that mosaic of swamp and houses that was reached by wooden bridges. We thanked Heaven when we reached Livingston, which lay clean, well ordered, and white on its low bluff. But in conversation with some of the residents, I began to wonder if our outfit was quite such as we required. It appeared that all that portion of Guatemala where there were ruins was about as much of a wilderness as Piccadilly Circus in London, or the Place de l’Opera in Paris. However, there was nothing for it but to continue this journey of wild exploration, and so we shipped the stuff and took a railway train to the nearest point by Quirigua, where the doctor said he would first attack this lost civilization of which he could no longer speak without tears in his eyes.

We got there all right because it was but fifty-seven miles from Barrios. We put up at a hotel, where Wardrop passed hours in oiling his stock of weapons, and Benny took his first lesson in that accursed American game of draw poker. The doctor was wildly excited.

I shall never forget our first trip into the wilderness.

We got a permit from an American fruit company that owned it. We took a sort of cab from the manager’s office, and drove through a magnificent plantation until we reached what might have been an exquisite tropical park. The big ceibas and other trees were rivaled by the size of banana plants. The roads and paths were very nice. I looked for the band stand but couldn’t find it. I hope they have built it by now. Also, some sort of a refreshment bar might assist other explorers in that terrifying spot. James Dalrymple Wardrop, sitting with a gun on his knees, grinned malevolently when he descended from our conveyance and sought a nicely sheltered path which should lead us to the archæological director of research in the long-dead city of Quirigua, of which the doctor had talked constantly for the preceding week.

We met the director. He was a gentleman all right, and an archæologist of distinction. He had a lot of plans for excavation that he was carrying out. I think the doctor would, in his delight at meeting a kindred spirit, have unbosomed his secret if I had not opportunely stepped on his toe. The director showed us where they had begun to dig out a lot of old ruins on Temple Court. There were several very nice tramways there to carry away the rubbish, and already they had unearthed spine stuff that looked to me like chunks of stone, but over which the doctor threatened to weep large tears of excitement. Wardrop yawned, and I determined then and there to decoy the doctor to some place where we could have a few minutes undisturbed conversation. It was after we had returned to our quarters and the doctor and I were alone.

“Are you going to tell that professor chap there at the ruins what you have discovered?” I asked pointedly.

“Science, my friend, preserves no secrets,” replied the doctor grandiosely.

“All right, that settles it!” said I. “You can stay here. I’ll get Wardrop and find out when the next seamer [sic] sails.”

“Why?” the doctor queried, blinking his eyes.

“Why just this: Wardrop came over here for sport, adventure, exploration, and all that sort of thing. I came over here because I hoped you had the secret to where the chaps who carved all those rocks hid their boodle when they moved on, or died, or were massacred, or whatever it was that wiped them out. It’s not fair to us to rob us of our chances,” I concluded, in no very good humor.

The doctor seemed to consider this for a long time.

“I’ll promise,” he said, “provided you keep away from me! You have no knowledge of the important things of life. You are too unimaginative. But there is no reason why I shouldn’t keep what I know to myself until your claims are satisfied. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” I said, secretly pleased by his promise, for I knew that he would keep his word. But it looked as if Wardrop and I might remain there a long, long time while our partner in enterprise luxuriated in ruins.

“Hereafter,” the doctor announced, “I shall conduct some private explorations. I have engaged the services of a Maya Indian named Ixtual to assist me.”

“What does he cost and who is to pay him?” I queried, somewhat ironically, I fear.

“I think I promised him a dollar a day; but have forgotten the exact figures. And you, of course, will pay him, because I have no money,” replied the doctor, airily dismissing the subject. “Oh, by the way, he is waiting outside for me now. I must be going.”

I had no chance to protest, but accompanied the doctor to the door. There, standing by the side of a pillar, I saw for the first time Ixtual. Lean and lithe, his body and pose suggested the very jaguar, or American tiger, that his ancestors had held to be the king of beasts. He was as straight as a pampas plume on a windless day, yet as ready to quiver and move. I think that I must have appraised him with a careless eye that took in his proportions first, even as a horseman glances admiringly at the form of a beautiful animal before studying its head, and then with something akin to a start, my eyes met his. I have never seen such in a human head! Veiled, they seemed, but filled with unutterable qualities; grief, power, ambition, disdain, courtesy, kindliness, and cruelty were all brooding there in their somber depths. His face was finely and resolutely featured—finer cut, indeed, than that of any Indian I had ever met. I felt that he had measured me in one swift, flashing survey, and then he gravely bowed to me, and turned away with the little doctor. I stood watching them depart, strangely disturbed.

“What an extraordinary man!” I exclaimed aloud, thinking that Wardy had come up behind me.

“That exactly describes him,” replied a voice behind me, and I turned to discover that it was the manager for the fruit company, who, as he sometimes did, had dropped in to pay us a visit. He, too, was staring contemplatively at the doctor and his companion with a speculative frown.

“That is one man—that chap Ixtual—I don’t quite understand and never shall,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ve never quite made him out. The Maya Indians that come down from up around Coban are the best and most industrious laborers I can hire. I pay them higher wages than have ever been paid here. I like them. I house some of them; but this Indian Ixtual has never yet worked for me. I don’t know what it is. He never works but always has money enough to pay his bills—if he ever makes any—which I doubt! The others seem to pay him a mysterious sort of deference. He always strikes me as a cross between an irreconcilable savage and a perfect gentleman, if you can dope out what I mean.”

“That’s about the way he impressed me,” I agreed as we went inside to find Wardy.

Three or four days went by with nothing at all interesting developing from the doctor’s new and individual efforts, save that while prodding around one day at his behest Ixtual was bitten by one of the small venomous snakes with which the country abounds, and, I doubt not, would have begun to chant his death song had not the doctor applied a tourniquet, gashed the wound, sucked the poison therefrom, and applied an antitoxin. Inasmuch as the recipient of that sort of snakely attention usually hastened to the pearly gates, I think that Ixtual thereafter regarded the doctor as a medicine man beyond compare. Either that or—I don’t know what tie developed between them that caused the taciturn Maya to become the savant’s shadow. Perhaps it was the fact that the doctor speedily developed a surprising facility in the Maya tongue which, in the course of his researches, he had assiduously studied for years and now required nothing more than practice for perfection. Or could it have been that Ixtual himself, for reasons of his own, perhaps as the last hope of his race, had been striving, with laborious pathos, to interpret the long-lost meaning of those strange records and symbols? I presume I shall never know.

Yet I do know this, that when, on a hot mid-afternoon, the doctor, hatless, begrimed with dirt, burst into the room where Wardy and I were playing piquet, Ixtual was at his heels, dark, haughty, and vainly striving to coneal [sic] a pronounced exultation.

“I’ve found it!” the doctor cried, shaking a paper covered with rude drawings. “I've found what is probably the last stone ever cut before Quirigua became secondary. The Maya chronology was based on Katuns which numbered seven thousand two hundred days; or nearly twenty years each. Twenty Katuns constituted a cycle. Thus the temple which my scientific colleague is now excavating was built in 9.19.0.0.0:9 Ahau 19 Mol, of Maya records, which would be about the year 320 A. D. of ours. Now, you see in those times this particular place was devoted to human sacrifices. Was called the “Place of Sacrifice” for the nation, as each cornice of a temple proclaimed in sculptured hieroglyphics.”

He had been raving in his rapid Italian but was now interrupted by Wardy’s drawling voice.

“Pardon me, doctor. While I do speak and understand some Italian, you go too fast for me. You use words that are unknown to my vocabulary.”

The doctor at first threatened a frenzy, then, catching sight of Ixtual’s inquiring look, seemed suddenly and unaccountably to feel the necessity for restraint. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He looked at his watch, at his grimy hands, and then, turning to Ixtual, said something in the Maya tongue that caused Ixtual to bow obediently, almost deferentially, and leave the room. The doctor watched until the Indian was well on his way, then turned to us and in muttered French said: “I told him we would work no more to-day. I sent him back to put away the tools and bring my hat. He must not know all that I have learned. I have found what I think is the last record of Quirigua, which I surmise was abandoned with the advent to power of some more enlightened priest-king who declared against further human sacrifices, or because the place was cursed with fevers or similar plagues owing to climatic changes. In any event, Ixtual and I unearthed this record.”

He pulled the dirty slip of paper from his pocket and read:

“By decree of the Highest God Icopan, communicated through His High Priest and Mouthpiece’—and so forth and so forth in the Mol—Ummh! and so forth and so forth.” He mumbled hurriedly a long string of titles and dates. “‘And for the guidance of those who have not hitherto heard, the Place of Sacrifice is on this date abandoned and its priests and dwellers retired past the Mountains of the Mines—to the Sacred City, carrying with them to the Temple of Treasure all of value hitherto herein. To those who know not the way but would communicate with any who here dwelt; to those barbaric seekers after truth who would find the true and only gods of our people and would journey thither; six days’ journey to the westward must ye go upon the highway, and three days to the northward, where ye shall find the sacred twin peaks to which the sun is tied, and beneath it those who guard the way.”

He stopped reading, refolded the note and replaced it in his pocket, with the air of one who had given explicit information.

“Well, it seems as if there was some other place to go,” said Wardy, “and as if there was some place where one might find treasure. But there’s nothing particularly sporting about it. It doesn’t say whether there was any big game, or shooting of any sort, and”

“Listen to him! Listen to him!” screamed the doctor in exasperation. “Shooting! He talks of shooting when I have discovered the solution of the great historical mystery of ages!”

“But,” said I in what I hoped was a conciliatory tone, “your information is, you must grant, a trifle indefinite. There are a thousand twin peaks in this country. The great highway, in a country where vegetation grows by inches per night, would have been obliterated by the jungle a thousand years ago. All that we know is that over it one traveled so many days to the westward and so many to the north.”

“But there must be some peaks that are different from others,” the doctor protested.

“Then suppose you tell us where they are,” I demanded dryly, foreseeing a hopeless task.

“Very well. I will,” angrily retorted the doctor, and fell to pacing backward and forward through the room, cracking his finger joints and muttering to himself.

“The señor’s hat!” said a voice from the doorway in Spanish, and Ixtual had reappeared.

“Ixtual,” questioned the doctor peremptorily, “where are the sacred twin peaks of your people?”

The Indian started as if he had been aroused from sleep. He stared from the doctor to us and then back at the savant as if troubled by this abrupt demand for information. For the only time in our acquaintance that I ever knew him to do so, he stammered, hesitated, and appeared undecided. The doctor said something to him in the Maya tongue that had the effect of relieving him; for he slowly and patiently made a long reply. For a long time they talked. Now and then the doctor referred to us, I am confident, for his gestures indicated that he was speaking of us, perhaps arguing in our behalf. He evidently refused some offer of Ixtual’s, and then asked a question. The Indian did not immediately reply but turned and almost rudely stared at me for a long time, then shifted his scrutiny to Wardy as if pondering over some terrible problem which he must decide. The doctor again spoke what I inferred was a plea—quite as if overcoming some objection made by his strange henchman, and the latter somewhat reluctantly gave way.

“May I tell them?” the doctor asked, reverting to that Spanish which was common to Ixtual as well as ourselves.

“If the great reader of mysteries vouches for them as for himself,” Ixtual declared.

“He says there is a legend among his people that in a spur of the Sierra Chuchumatlane mountains are two peaks beyond which no living man has ever looked and that they were sacred to those who built the temples here,” the doctor answered concisely enough, and still speaking in Spanish as if to make certain that Ixtual might understand. But the latter was not satisfied.

“Señores,” he said gravely, “those peaks are sacred to my people and were once a part of their religion. A man does not betray his religion, does he?”

“But I saw you kneeling in the Catholic church!” Wardy exclaimed, and for a moment the Indian looked troubled.

“There may be other gods than mine, and in which some of my people who work for the white man believe,” was his unanswerable argument. “For the sake of those, I do propitiate them. Listen! I do not know that beyond the great peaks are either mounds or ruins. I know that they are guarded by jungles more terrible than you have ever seen and through which my people believe that none may pass lest he incur the anger of our ancient gods. Not within the knowledge of man has any one ever gone through them. Men of your race who cared for nothing but gold tried and” He shrugged his shoulders and added: “Died! In later years my people have killed those who made the attempt.”

He paused as if to let this sink in, stared out through the open door at the languid palms as if still undecided, and then turned upon us almost fiercely and with harsh resolution manifest in every line of him, from flashing eyes, gesturing hands, and tensed body. With something between vow, threat, and promise, he said:

“But for reasons of my own I will try to take you there. The Great One for whom the Maya has long waited asks it and answers for you.”

He turned toward Doctor Morgano—that besoiled, frowsy, unkempt savant who with long, black, straight and neglected hair stood there eagerly blinking as if he were a Maya god, and with the utmost deference bowed to him. “But this I say,” he declared, confronting Wardy and me, “that if harm comes to my people; that if upon them is turned a horde of those heartless ones who seek for naught but gold; that if the Maya is again overrun by white barbarians who debauch with words our women and with drink our men, then may all my gods give me the means and way to kill you; may my days be prolonged though it be to the life of the oldest man to slay you, and may all the curses of the hereafter rest on your souls when you are dead!” Suddenly all his half-concealed air of hatred was dropped as if exhausted by vehemence, his face softened, his lips twitched, and his hands were thrust out in appeal. “Understand my position, señores,” he said in a totally different tone. “I am Maya. My people have suffered. They have been beaten. Once they ruled, but now they are ruled by those who are not worthy. By those whose skins are white. I ask you not to betray my people through me who am but trying to repay one who saved his life, and who hopes through him to lift his people from bondage. You as men would do this for your own. I beg you help me do it for mine.”

There was something almost pathetic about him as he stood there before us; something dignified as if he were a man ennobled by high purpose; something that commanded respect. Indian that he was—and mark you I am without either sentiment or poesy—I saw in him a brave and worthy advocate for the few and pitiful survivors of a great nation which had flourished when my people were unborn, or mere barbarians.

I think I put my hand out to meet his. I do not remember whether he accepted it; but I do know that I stood in front of him and said: “Ixtual, I give you my word of honor that no harm shall ever come to you or yours through me. No matter what we may learn, I shall never lead any one to where you may guide us. Is that sufficient?”

“That is also my pledge,” said Wardy solemnly.

“It is enough,” said Ixtual. “To-morrow morning we start,” and turned and walked away as if, having once made a decision, it was irrevocable. And neither in this nor anything after did I know him to break his word.