The Men of the Dark

Front matter

THE MEN OF THE DARK

By Julian Hawthorne

ILLUSTRATED BY H. C. WALL

II II

That afternoon I left New York, and while I am on the ocean I will say a few words about myself necessary to make this narrative intelligible.

Meeting me in London, Cairo, Melbourne, Yeddo, or where not, you would give me no second glance; there is no disguise better than a suit of everyday clothes. I am under six feet, not noticeably broad-shouldered, of quiet demeanor, taciturn and low-voiced, and my face shows only the lean, aquiline contours of my New England ancestry. The rudiments of my mental training were got in a New England college; spontaneous reading has familiarized me with the literature of imagination of all ages, and I have theoretical and practical acquaintance with arts and sciences, including engineering and navigation (my title of captain is nautical, not military). Of diplomacy, too, I know something, and can speak the language and adopt the customs well enough for ordinary purposes of most countries that I visit. I feel genuine kindness for my fellow creatures, but have few friends, and of them one only who commands my whole confidence—a woman, of whom it is not now my cue to speak. Nor will I say more of my spiritual and religious complexion than that, in my theory and experience of life, the material world plays but a minor role. I love and seek untamed nature in men and things; ambition I have, but it is of the abstracted kind. I may as well add, to explain some passages further on, that I have never met a man, savage or civilized, who was, at all points, my match in physical strength, activity, and endurance. In this I take no pride, since, in serious emergencies I rely upon powers other than physical, but I do take real pleasure in it: it is often convenient, affords me healthy pastime, and surprises and amuses my friends. All this I set down here, so as to be quit of the topic and also to account for my introduction to Glendower, who is understood to be particular about the qualifications of the persons whom he selects to use in his enterprises.

III III

Three days after reaching London Glendower's card was handed to me at my lodgings in Gower Street, and in he walked, with his hand held out. I saw at once that this was the man and not the financier. He was smiling, but there was a curious earnestness and anxiety in his expression.

"I apologize," were his first words. "and this isn't about business, anyhow, not chiefly, but you're the first man who's snubbed me since I was a boy in college, and I had to make sure you were real. When I found you'd left New York I shut my desk and came after you. Going on to Africa, eh? Well, I'd have followed you there. This means more to me than you might believe."

We had a long talk—in fact, we were together thirty-six hours, after which he went back to New York, and I sailed, not for Kabinda, but for Buenos Ayres.

Glendower, with his professional bogy mask off, is a good man wasted. This game of business is an inhuman game, as I told him, and renders solitary and unsocial those who assiduously play it. I was touched by the boyish fervor with which this world-worn old slave of the very means whereby he sought to rule mankind grasped at the companionship of a man absolutely alien from all that was the substance of his life. With incoherent and awkward energy he poured forth thoughts and feelings long moribund in him, in which for years he himself had lost faith. It was pathetic. "I once met Chinese Gordon," he remarked. "You remind me of him in some way; you and he would have been a pair! With either of you within my reach I'd have been another man." On my side. I was frank with him. and we became friends.

Of the "business" he said: "Chili's best revenue is from the nitrate beds on the east side of the Tarapaca pampas, between the coast Cordilleras and the Andes. At present rates of working they'll be exhausted in fifty years, but the peculiarity of nitrates is that moisture dissipates 'em like snow, and if the drought that has lasted in that valley for twenty thousand years were broken the wealth of Chili would be gone like mist. But then the soil of the pampas—it used to be the bed of a sea—would develop immense fertility—grow fruit and vegetables enough to supply a continent. Millions of people could live paradisaical lives there, and the circumstances could be created."

"Yes," said I, "by tapping the Andean lakes on the north and west."

"It would pay better than nitrates in the long run," he went on; "only the Chilians aren't thinking of the long run, but of Now, especially as they calculate on having the Paradise after the nitrates are done with."

"Well, what are your calculations?" I asked.

"Chili's neighbors are her enemies," he said, "and would co-operate to down her. Money and a few engineers could let in those streams upon the desert—then vegetation, clouds, rain, and the end of the nitrates and Chili!"

"How will you do it? And what will you get from it?"

Thereupon he unfolded a project of really Napoleonic daring and ingenuity, of which the world may presently hear more, though not from me. Finally I told him that I would go over the ground for him and make a report, "but for private reasons of my own, different from yours," I added. When he began to make distant hints about remuneration I explained to him that I had inherited from my father a little money, which was invested in the fisheries and brought me an income of about four thousand dollars. So I could not accept even my "expenses," not to speak of the ridiculous fortune he had in mind. I had learned how to travel cheap, and, unless free-footed, I could accomplish nothing. Upon this understanding we parted, and now you know how I happened at this time to visit South America, where I had an adventure which, among many odd ones of mine, seems to me unique. It has nothing to do with that project of Glendower's, at least, not logically, but it discloses one of the many mysteries of the Andean chain, for a solution of which we might have to go back to a time antedating the Pizzarros, when the power of the Incas was supreme.

IV IV

On the Glendower affair I saw persons and things in Buenos Ayres, Santiago, the Tarapaca, Lima, and other Peruvian places, and rounded up in La Paz, more than two miles above sea level, in the Bolivian Andes. There, having been occupied nearly a year, I made up my last report and was released to my own devices.

My chief crony in La Paz was an old German named Dichter, who had lived thirty years in the country and spoke Spanish with a strong Fatherland accent. Small, dry, and stooping was he to look at, with a round head stuffed full of sagacity; a Senator of the Republic and also eminent in the rubber trade. But on his human side he was sentimental and romantic, a student and a collector of old Spanish traditions and Indian legends. On such topics I was an indefatigable listener.

"All accounts agree," quoth he in his slow, emphatic, gutteral tones, "that somewhere in these mountains east of Illimani there is a veta madre surpassing any other in the world. Once in about a hundred years turns up somebody who has seen it. The last one, I knew him—Juan Coama; it was twenty years ago. But he—" Herr Dichter tapped his bulging forehead and shook his bony hand—"he was crazed, mein Lieber; nothing could he tell straight, only that there was treasure, immense, the mine of the Incas. How came he upon it, what happened then, he could not tell, but he spoke of demons who guarded it and tried to kill him. So also say the Indians of this place; it is one of their Maerchen!"

"That there are demon guardians?" said I, resting my elbows on the table.

"Well, it is like this," rejoined the Senator, after relighting the last inch of his cigar. "They have it that the great kings—the Incas—in order to reserve to themselves the secret of the big lode had isolated in the mine a number of workmen, with women, so as to establish a sort of hereditary caste, born, bred, and dying underground, with nothing to do but to get out the metal, seeing and knowing nothing of the outside world. This race, they say, still exists, cut off from the rest of mankind by the slipping of the strata, ages ago, blocking up the means of exit. In this seclusion they had acquired the character of gnomes, or demons, with supernatural powers."

"What do they live on?" I asked.

"Partly on their own old people and on a certain proportion of the children," replied Herr Dichter. "They also, no doubt, devour chance travelers who may fall into their clutches. But we may dismiss all that as foolishness; it is the veta madre that ..."

"There is only too much gold circulating in the world already," said I; "I care nothing about that, but the troglodytes"—I rubbed my fingers in my hair, the roots of which were crinkling at the conception which my imagination had drawn of them—"I would give all the gold for a sight of them!"

Others matters retired this conversation to the back of my mind, but I had occasion to recall it a few months later.

V

V

I left La Paz the last day of October, meaning to journey across Brazil to Para, at the mouth of the Amazon, and thence work up to the west of the Guianas to examine the region of the great buttes. I set out with a single mule and a Bolivian Indian, Yotalu, a short, lithe-bodied, big-headed fellow, with a flat, good-humored face and a ragged sheaf of coal-black hair. He wore a poncho and a loin cloth and carried a bow and arrows and a knife. I had a hickory shirt and deerskin leggings under my poncho, and a long rawhide lariat wound about my waist; with the exception of a stout cudgel, I carried no arms, having found that savages can be controlled by the eye and the bearing. On the mule were packed a shelter tent, cooking utensils, beads and knickknacks for barter, and a few changes of clothing. In a belt under my shirt were some gold and silver coin and my letter of credit. Dichter and my other friends were astonished at the smallness of my outfit, but I relied upon my bodily efficiency and my experience. I expected to make the journey of about two thousand miles in from six to eight months, using the Madeira and Amazon rivers as carriers, as occasion served.

We took the trail in the early dawn, though the summit of Illimani, ten thousand feet above our heads, had already caught the rays of the sun. We turned his huge flank and set our faces northeastward. The road led down deep quebradas, or ravines, and the scene was sterile, naked, and sublime. Amid the prevailing masses of gray granite and black basalt I noticed a good deal of quartz and limestone, in some places showing the porous formation with which I was familiar in the West Indies. Yotalu went ahead, leading the mule, and I came after, rejoicing and expanding in the vastness and wildness of the surroundings. I was exhilarated by the thought that for more than half a year I should not look upon the face of a civilized man. Yotalu was to accompany me for a hundred miles or so only, afterward handing me over to another tribe with which he had affiliations. But I looked forward to making the greater part of my journey entirely alone.

At noon we stopped for dinner on a shelf of rock overhanging an almost vertical gorge, at the bottom of which a torrent rolled in music. We had brought from La Paz enough fresh provisions to last two days and a quantity of concentrated food in tins. There was no timber at this altitude for a fire, but Yotalu had gathered some jarilla scrub here and there, and as he squatted at his cooking I climbed to the top of a pinnacle of rock hard by, which hung on the side of the precipice like a turret on a medieval castle. Through a gap in the range this gave me a glimpse of the great valley below, palpitating in the heat of a tropical sun. The air I breathed was, in the shadow, as keen as that of Labrador.

I wore, strapped by a leather thong round my wrist, a small compass, two inches in diameter, but of excellent make, set in platinum. I unfastened it and placed it upon a level surface of the rock to get my bearings. The quebrada which we were following seemed to bear to the south, below, but still further down I could see what appeared to be its continuation, again deploying to the east and north. Doubtless, however, it would be easy to go astray in these tortuous defiles.

A condor, sailing down from the southwest, unconscious of my presence on what was perhaps one of his accustomed perches, alighted so near me that I could have seized his leg with my outstretched hand. But before I could make the attempt Votalu called to me from below that dinner was ready, whereupon the great bird, with a deep croak of surprise, pitched forward from his station and flapped heavily away. As he did so he revealed something that brought a croak of surprise from me—a broad gold ring riveted round his naked shank, with a bit of chain of the same metal attached to it. The next moment he had sailed away through empty space a hundred yards eastward; then, with a tilt of his wings, he disappeared round a gray profile of the ravine, a quarter of a mile off.

Thinking curious thoughts, I clambered down to Yotalu's dining room, and we ate our meal with good appetite. The Indian was an admirable table companion; he smiled much, confined his remarks to approving and congratulating grunts, and ate stupendously. It was not until dinner was done and we were readjusting the mule's load for departure that I asked him whether the people of his tribe were in the habit of taming condors and chaining them up with gold chains; it was an enlargement of falconry new to me.

Great and instantaneous was the change wrought in Yotalu by my inquiry. His amiable countenance was overcast with trouble and dismay, and he broke forth into ejaculations and utterances most voluble in his native tongue, different from the semi-Spanish jargon which we had been wont to use in our intercourse, the purport whereof was only partially intelligible to me. His smiles were gone, his gestures and bearing denoted lively uneasiness, and this excitement was succeeded by a mood of heavy depression.

By rallying him and breaking jests upon him I tried to restore his spirits, but it was long before he recovered any part of his composure. My Yankee curiosity is, however, insatiable under certain circumstances, and by degrees I began to get light upon the grounds of his manifest agitation.

These gold-ringed condors, it appeared, were not unknown to the local Indians, who called them devil-birds. There were a great many of them and they were trained to seize and carry off lambs and other small domestic animals and occasionally even Indian babies. They were never seen to devour their prey, but bore it away to some inaccessible retreat in the recesses of the mountains, where they delivered it to their masters, a hideous and bloodthirsty horde of fiends, or possibly—but this was a point I could not determine—the birds were themselves the fiends, temporarily disguised under the form of condors. Yotalu added that any person upon whom one of the devil-birds cast its eye was foreordained to calamity, and my adventure consequently made him augur ill for the prosperity of our journey. Verily, he looked to me as though he would fain embrace any pretext for getting quit of me and the burden of my sinister fortunes.

And it was at this juncture that I missed my compass from my wrist and remembered having left it on the rock turret at our noon camp, which was by this time some five miles in our rear. It was an instrument too useful to be abandoned, but it would not be safe to send back Yotalu for it in his present disaffected condition; it would be the last both of the compass and of him. I must, then, retrieve it myself, and by so doing I should gain the advantage of blocking his retreat back to La Paz, which I suspected him to be meditating. He would have no alternative but to proceed in our present direction, and it would be easy for me to overtake him before dusk—it was now near three o'clock. I was in my usual sound condition of w ind and limb and was confident of making an average of five miles an hour.

In telling him my purpose I added the suggestion that it was I, not himself, that the devil-bird was after, and that my temporary absence would therefore conduce to his own safety. My explanations did not put him at his ease, but he probably felt that there was nothing better to be looked for, and he dejectedly acquiesced.

As provision against accident I took from our stores before starting a waterproof box of matches and a roll of Italian moccolo. In one of my pockets I always carried a large clasp-knife with several blades. Thus equipped I felt equal to any emergency, but I did not know then as well as afterward what secrets those Andean ravines concealed.

At the bend of the path I turned and saw Yotalu standing beside the mule, observing me with a serious and even portentous air. I waved him encouragement, to which he responded by silently lifting his right arm, and the next moment I had the Andes all to myself.

VI VI

To lighten my labor I had left my poncho behind with the Indian and the mule, and the cool, thin air, reaching my body through my shirt, made exercise delightful. I maintained a jog-trot up the rugged acclivity, and it was barely an hour when I saw the turret jutting out from the wall of the gray cañon.

Meanwhile, I had observed that a condor, though whether it were the same with which I had already made acquaintance I could not determine, was accompanying me in my ascent; sometimes he hung in the air over my head, with no perceptible movement of his wings; sometimes he would alight on a point of rock ahead of me, resuming his flight as I drew near. I was not unprepared, therefore, to find him perched upon the turret when I came in sight of it round a curve of the way. Nor did he forsake his position until I had actually begun to climb toward him. He then launched himself leisurely into the void and brought up, with much waving of his huge pinions, on the brink of the path below which I had lately traversed. As he swept past me at close range I caught the glint of gold upon his leg, and the moment's glance he sent me recalled by a fantastic freak the inquisitory look of Glendower when I first entered his office a year before.

If a man have any imagination, such perceptions in the solitude of desolate mountains lose none of their effect. I had laughed at Yotalu's extravaganza, but I knew that there are strange things in the world. And the spirit in a man has its epochs, in which unlikely contingencies and remote associations assume a significance which reason cannot interpret.

I found the compass where I had left it, and I lost no time in beginning my return. The condor, stretching his wings, preceded me. The sun, long past the zenith, was declining toward the west, and it threw his gigantic shadow wheeling along the cliffs. I was shod for the rocks and I held my way at a round pace, the steel rivets in my heels striking sparks from the granite, each impact driving a flat echo into the stillness. There were places where a slip would have had evil results, but I was under the sway of an exhilaration which seemed more psychical than physical; I never slackened my speed and made leaps which appeared preposterous. I shouted with delight and whirled my cudgel round my head like an Irishman at Donnybrook. The devil-bird, sailing with careless indolence in advance, as if he had assumed the function of guide temporarily relinquished by Yotalu, responded at times with his harsh cry, and my brain, intoxicated by vigorous motion in that fine air, amused itself with fancies of a secret bond between us, and even played with the odd notion, which is perhaps common to many, that by a slight additional exaltation of the will I would be enabled to rise from the solid earth and float like a soap bubble. Once or twice, indeed, this suggestion gained such power as nearly to lure me over the precipitous verge of the path, following insensibly the capricious of the condor, but another influence (to which I have already alluded and which is always present in the deepest part of my consciousness), warned me back in season. But as I went on the prevailing rhythm of my movement gradually led my thoughts to the contemplation of interior scenes, until it was only my exterior faculties that took note of the actual environment—the snow-whitened peaks, the shadow-haunted abysses, the steep declivity of the winding trail, and the persistent winged creature ever suspended before me, like the mystic emblem of the Egyptian Osiris. So passed an hour, and another hour, and I was beginning to anticipate overhauling Yotalu, when of a sudden a vast boulder blocked my path and I came to a halt. At the same moment the condor uttered a cry and, plunging downward, disappeared in the lower recesses of the gorge.

The abrupt cessation of motion was confusing for a few minutes, an interval during which my soul resumed her accustomed seat and my sounding pulses subsided to their normal flow. My intoxication was past and I became fully cognizant of my situation.

The sun had sunk below the giant shoulder of Illimani, and the entire western slope of the Andes lay in twilight. The profounder depths of the ravines were already obscure. The silence filled the ears like adamant; even the whisper of the stream was hushed' it had apparently passed into an underground channel. Directly athwart the trail lay a rent-off fragment of the cliff, which might have fallen from above or might have been heaved into its position by some seismic spasm, comparatively recent. It rose several times as high as my head; the right end of it was jammed against the wall of the cañon; the other descended into the dry bed of the torrent. I looked back up the way I had come, but all seemed distorted and perplexed; the trail was lost in the general incline of the mountainside, roughened with the tumultuous tumble of amorphous rock-masses. The devil-bird had misled me, after all.

I thought it over. Plainly I had diverged from the right path; for Yotalu and the mule could not have passed this barrier. The point at which I had left it was indeterminable; it might be miles back. Should I return or go forward? Darkness was coming on; the attempt to recover the right trail might lead me more astray than ever, and I should not know it even if I found it. On the other hand, to go on would at least bring me down the mountain; it was probable that this had been a real trail before the obstruction occurred and could be taken up further down, and it was possible that it might rejoin at some lower level the road which Yotalu had followed. The choice I made must be made quickly. I resolved, if it were practicable, to go on.

A short scramble brought me to the top of the barrier. From there I looked down a vertical drop of about one hundred feet, but I saw that by edging along toward the north the height would be lessened. It took me ten somewhat risky minutes to reach the most favorable spot; a protuberance of the rock prevented me from seeing the bottom of the channel, but I estimated that it could not be more than seventy feet. My lariat was fifty feet long; by attaching one end to a projecting knob and sliding down, the fall could be chanced; there was no other way. I should have to leave the lariat, but that was one of the conditions to be accepted in this duel between the Andes and me.

I spent some time in finding a reasonably safe holding-place for my line; then very cautiously having unwound the slender thong from my body, I made it fast and began my descent. By and by I hung suspended over an abyss whose depth I could only conjecture. Certain memories and hopes near to my heart passed through my mind and I let go and dropped through the air. I seemed to drop a long way.

However, I alighted in a roughly circular basin, ten feet in diameter, filled to the brim with sand and accumulated rubbish, deposited there in past times by the torrent. It was a hard cushion, but it saved broken bones, and I rose none the worse for a few bruises. The loose end of the lariat dangled fifteen feet above my head. It may serve the turn of the next adventurer who follows my trail. Meanwhile, in my first bout with the mountain I had fared well and was ready for the next.

But my path now lay directly down the bed of the stream, which was much encumbered and prevented speed, especially in the gathering darkness. As I advanced the walls of the cañon approached each other and became steeper, leaving overhead a strip of sky, in which hung a bright star, which I took for Antares. I had made up my mind that I must camp alone and fasting, when I heard in the distances a murmurous sound, which grew louder as I went on, the sound of rushing water. The stream, which had passed underground above, had again risen to the surface. I deemed it of good augury; if I could keep to the water it must in time bring me to the great watersheds below and the tropical forest. In half an hour, after not a few stumbles and minor falls, I had reached the spot where the torrent welled up from the ground. It showed black, with whirling eddies streaked with lines of foam. It formed a wide pool, perhaps fifty yards across, from the further side of which the stream apparently pursued its regular course north and east.

I began picking my way round the margin to the right, when I came upon an oblong object floating out upon the surface, a short tether connecting it with the shore. It was a raft of some kind, and near it upon a boulder was squatting an odd figure, which I took to be a dwarfish man, black, with high shoulders and with no visible head. But as my feet crunched upon the loose gravel this questionable figure emitted a throaty screech and hurtled upward into the air—evidently my old companion, the devil-bird. I lost sight of him almost immediately, but he had given my nerves a twang that recalled the supernatural terrors of my infancy.

Whatever I might think of the devil-bird, there was nothing supernatural about the raft, which turned out upon investigation to be an Indian bolsa, a sort of double canoe, made of inflated sealskins, a vehicle common enough in the lowlands, but unheard of at this altitude. There it swung, however, as if provided for my need, and at the stern was the two-ended paddle with which the natives steer and propel such craft.

I reasoned thus: The bolsa could not have come down from above; it must have ascended from below; there must therefore be a possibility of making the return trip. It might be the property of the devil-bird, who might be a gnome in disguise, but even so he had done me a service of which I would not hesitate to avail myself. There was the contingency, of course, that I might be carried over some cataract and be dashed to pieces, but I had the courage of my extremity. I stepped into the canoe, slipped the painter and was off.

Of the features of this voyage I can give no circumstantial account, inasmuch as I could see very little and was conscious mainly of motion. The motion was swift and often much agitated; it was punctuated by collisions, and thrice I passed over rapids which were practically falls; no other craft could have survived such treatment. I was swung this way and that and I was wetted to the skin, but I was not thrown out and I stuck to the steering paddle. Meanwhile the black walls on either hand seemed to grow taller and closer together; at length the star vanished and the altered sound made by the waters apprised me that I had entered a cavern. The darkness was now absolute, but there was still the sense of forward movement. Presently, however, this seemed to slacken, and on dipping my hand over the side I found that the canoe was nearly at rest. I gave a few tentative strokes with the paddle, and with a light, grating noise the canoe grounded on a low bank.