The Glyphs/Chapter 5

We passed over trails where the tired animals stumbled, and once we aroused a chorus of dog protests as if we had disturbed a village. Ixtual seemed ever anxious that we hasten our pace, and sometimes was impatient because we made no faster progress; but when the dawn burst and broke with the speed it always has in those latitudes, the Maya seemed relieved that we had come to the borders of what appeared to be a virgin jungle. He sought a place that permitted us to enter it, found it, and led us through what was nothing more than a narrow path into its depths, where we rested. Looking back as if through the egress of a tunnel, I saw plantations below me, the occasional thatched roof of a nipa hut, the stretch of a gentle declivity up which we had climbed in the darkness, and, far away to the right, the morning light on something that looked like a temple in the heart of greenery. It was very distant, almost obscure, tantalizing in its want of detail. Yet somehow I surmised when Doctor Morgano stared at it for a moment with distended eyes that for him it carried trying recollections. He shivered, then turned away toward the jungle as if eager to forget that distant edifice and all that it meant to him. We paused merely long enough to make cocoa and eat some biscuit, and then Ixtual insisted upon our resumption of toil; for it was that and nothing less. Toil of a most distressing character.

For some hours we made our way in half darkness through tunnels of fern and vegetation, over what seemed to have once been a road but was now nothing better than a game path. Creepers festooned across our way until cut; fallen trees necessitated detours; sometimes the trail diverged into a dozen paths, and we waited while Ixtual examined each one. And then when it was nearly noon and the sun beating upon the jungle roof with hammers of white rays we emerged into what had sometime, I opine, been a clearing, and waded through pampas grass higher than our heads although we were mounted, and came to the ruins of a house.

“We are safe now,” grunted Ixtual as if vastly relieved because he had found the way to this spot. “Here we will rest until to-morrow.”

And if I can speak for the others of the party, I think no one at all was inclined to object. I know I didn’t; for after we had killed a few snakes, and thrown out a section of fallen roof from the once-on-a-time house, we had a real meal, and fell into our hammocks exhausted. We needed the rest. And I was even sorry for the poor lathered burros and ponies that drank so feverishly of the water we gave them, and plunged their noses so ravenously into the food we heaped before them.

We felt like new men the next morning when it was time to start. It was but little beyond sunrise, and yet Ixtual had been long awake and exploring the sole path from the central clearing.

“This is the way,” he said to us, when the last ax had been slid beneath harness, and the last pot tied on the pack. “We cannot travel so far to-day. It will be hard work.”

He spoke plain truth if ever a man did. I vouch for that. I have learned what hard work is. All day long we struggled and fought, twisted and curved, through a jungle that seemed ever to grow more obdurate and dense. We labored with machetes now and then, slashing and cutting at tangles of vines as if they were living enemies. Sometimes we fairly bored our way through the vegetable enemy by sheer weight and driving power. Sometimes, exhausted, we sat dripping in sullen silence, finding momentary solace in pipe or cigarette, only to resume that heartbreaking toil of trying to force our way through an interminable and malevolent jungle. Ixtual was conducting us now through the aid of a compass alone.

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

I am certain we liked him for that. It at least gave us something to hope for. It was fortunate for his reputation as a prognosticator that he didn’t venture on how long we were to continue such heartbreaking and muscle-aching effort. Otherwise, I doubt not, we should have given it up as a hopeless task. We thought we might get through within a day or two. Had we known that we were to work this hard for sixteen days, we might have quit in despair! A recountal of physical agonies endured through sweltering heat, stinking fermentation of dead vegetation, innumerable pests of insects, and the constant danger of small deadly vipers and more noble constrictors of the boa tribe, that occasionally sought to embrace one of us or a mule, the insane chattering of monkeys, parrots, and a million other nerve-racking birds, would be useless; but this I assert, that on the day when the jungle thinned and we again saw daylight above us, we were a party of hollowed-eyed, unshaven, unkempt madmen. Men so exhausted they could not speak; men who were ready to murder over imagined insults; men who cared not whether they lived or died, so long as they might find rest! And then, when it seemed that even the fatalistic Oriental stoicism of Benny must break under the strain, and when that giant Wardrop, never complaining, never relinquishing, but ever doggedly beating his way forward came to the final end of strength, we broke through.

We came to an open spot, cut through a thin tangle of creeper, came to a wider open glade, found a way around an upjutting clump of forest, found a narrow water course, another tangle of less stalwart vine, creeper, and tree, and then forged suddenly out upon bare and ascending rock. The half-dead pack animals, urged on by blows and thrusts and prods that in less strained times would have been unthought of, staggered on behind us as we human beings, driven by will power alone, mounted those slopes. Together, men and animals, we threw ourselves upon the sparse grass. Together we looked downward over that barrier of green that we had cleft, traversed, and conquered. It lay behind us, malignant, sullen, brooding, and motionless, bathed by a sympathetic and helpless sun.

To our left a narrow strip of bushes and shrubs seemed laid like a belt up the mountain side, and conjecturing that there we might find water, we turned laboredly toward it. A beautiful stream of water, clear and cold, proved that but a little farther it gushed from the earth; otherwise it would have been heated by the sun’s rays. We decided to follow the stream upward to the spring. We climbed the hillside that was now becoming constantly steeper, and stopped with exclamations of surprise. The spring was in a barren spot of rock and was conducted to an elaborately carved and wrought basin through a pipe shaped like an enormous snake from whose huge, distended mouth the water gushed in a four-inch stream. For more than forty feet that curiously carved serpent lay stretched in graceful curves, a solid piece cut from the solid rock beneath, and this rock itself bore a long series of inscriptions. Instantly Doctor Morgano forgot his fatigue and literally threw himself upon these records, digging away the patches of lichen and moss with his fingers for all the world like a man gone suddenly mad.

“We may as well camp here, it strikes me,” said Wardrop with a significant look at the savant.

“There’s not the slightest use in trying to drag him away until he has deciphered the whole caboodle,” I agreed, and spoke to Ixtual, who assented to our making camp.

I observed, however, that he placed it in such a position that by night no flame of fire nor reflection therefrom might be visible to those who dwelt beyond the jungle. I spoke to him of this fact and he replied: “None but the chiefs of my people know that any man has come this way. The people might be angry if they knew. It is not wise to enrage a people.”

“But why shouldn’t your people be glad to learn all that can be learned of their history?” I asked curiously.

“My people,” he said with great aloofness, “believe these peaks guard something sacred, and that until a sign is given them by the Great Priest who passed countless of hundreds of years ago, no one may come here to disturb the rest of the gods, who do but slumber.”

“But haven’t they been asleep a long time?” dryly asked Wardy, who had been listening.

“What is a sleep of a thousand or five thousand years to those whose lives are eternal?” Ixtual demanded scornfully, and then to put an end to a conversation that to him was becoming distasteful, turned and walked away to where the doctor was still pawing the inscriptions. Wardrop and I were contented to rest, but Benny decided to take a hand, and when I fell asleep in the shade of a tent fly, mentally thanking Heaven that at last we had reached an altitude where mosquitoes and gnats were not so pestiferous, he was patiently gouging away here and there, with the doctor occasionally cautioning him to be careful.

I was awakened by a gunshot, and found that it was nearly dusk. Wardy, who had disappeared, returned after a while with three very palatable game birds that he declared were of the grouse variety, and a wild guinea fowl. Also, he was happier than he had been at any time since we started. He carefully looked over his rifles by the firelight after our evening meal was finished and I chaffed him about it.

“That’s all right,” he said, puffing away at his pipe, and looking up at me through his monocle that in the reflection looked as if he had a mirror patched over one eye. “I have my reasons!”

“Seen any big game? Got wind of any pumas or black jaguars yet?” I asked banteringly; but he merely grunted in a self-satisfied way and continued his everlasting rubbing and oiling. The doctor was working away at some cabalistic work of his own, lying flat on his belly and painfully writing in a huge notebook with a fountain pen. Benny and Juan, the stolid muleteer from the lowlands, were gambling with some card game they alone understood and I think the astute Benny was steadily winning as usual, and Ixtual sat hunched up and dreaming, with wide-open eyes in the fire. I wondered what he saw there. I was the first to turn in, and was not disturbed when the others retired from their diversions. A good night’s rest was all I now required to make me fit again.

I was dreaming of a girl I met one time in Bombay when my dream was suddenly ended by a terrific, blood-stirring scream. Instantly afterward there was the deafening report of a rifle fired not more than a foot or two above my head, then another animal scream and the furious sounds of something rolling, snarling and clawing the grass and rocks, together with the panic-stricken snorts of the pack mules and ponies as they tried to break loose from the raw-hide reatas with which they had been fastened to convenient rocks.

“A light, Benny, you scoundrel! Where’s my other electric torch? I’ve just smashed this one. For the love of Allah, thou ivory-headed one, a light!” Wardrop’s voice was roaring, and Benny soon flashed an electric torch.

“This way—this way, fool!” Wardy again yelled, and I knew that he had gone in the direction of the animal snarls. Juan was now in the midst of the rodeo pacifying his animals, and Ixtual was heaping the kindling prepared for the morning’s fire on a heap of embers he had hastily kicked together. The blaze climbed higher. There was another shot, and stillness. I ran over to where the giant Englishman was now dancing around in ecstasy.

“Look at him—look at the beauty! I’ve got one at last. The trip has paid for itself as far as I’m concerned!” he shouted.

And in the light from the electric torch and fire I saw, stretched out and still, the first jaguar I had ever seen, and the finest I was ever to see, a magnificent cat whose glossy, sheeny fur was as black and glistening as the coat of Erebus. My old hunter instinct awoke, and for the moment I envied Wardrop.

“You lucky beggar!” I exclaimed.

“That’s what made me get ready,” chortled Wardy. “I saw spoor this afternoon. Laugh when I clean up my rifles next time, will you? It’s lucky!”

And then we were given another fine treatment for a good night’s rest.

“By the mother of riddles!” cried the doctor, who after a single glance at the rare jaguar had strolled indifferently away toward the camp fire, “I’ve got it!”

“Now what on earth do you suppose he’s got?” I asked Wardy, who could not tear himself from his kill.

“Oh, probably the colic. Whatever it is, it’s not so important as this.”

“I’ve got the key to the left-hand inscription,” roared Doctor Morgano. “The one I was puzzled by this afternoon. It’s inspiration—that’s what it is. I’m a genius. It’s a combination of the glyphs of the first and second cycles, and perhaps antedates either. It is a most marvelous discovery! Prodigiously valuable. It opens a new record, it does!”

“By Gad!” said I to the muleteer, who was the only one in that camp who seemed sane. “If you and I aren’t turned loose in a wilderness with a lot of maniacs on a vacation!”