Читать книгу The Courts of the Morning - John Buchan - Страница 15

Black slept soundly all night, and next morning rose renewed in body and mind. The party set out down the glen of the stream, one of the Indians carrying food and blankets, while the other remained behind with the horses. Black had his pistol, but he had left his police carbine at the bivouac, while the newcomer had no weapon at all. "What do I want with a gun?" he had said lightly in reply to his companion's question. "We are going into the Poison Country--El País de Venenos--where lead and powder are trivial things. A gun is of as little use as a single lifebelt would be to a man proposing to cross the Atlantic in a skiff. We are now in the hands of the older gods."

It was a strange land which they entered, when the stream which they were descending plunged into the shadow of the high peaks. It was fed by many affluents, and presently became a considerable river, running in a broad grassy vale on which the dew lay like hoar-frost. Suddenly the hills closed in like a wall, and the stream leaped in a great spout into a profound ravine, where in pot-holes and cascades it poured its way from shelf to shelf of the mountain ribs. The sides of the glen were cloaked with bush, which in the lower levels became tall timber trees. In the woody recesses the freshness went out of the air, mosses and creepers muffled the tree-trunks, gaudy birds and butterflies flitted through the branches, and a hot, headachy languor seemed to well out of the sodden ground.

The party, guided by the Indian, kept high above the stream, following paths no wider than a fox's track. As they advanced they descended, the ravine opened, and from a promontory they looked into a great cup among the cliffs, brimming with forest, with above on the periphery the hard bright line of the snows. Black, who was apparently something of a scholar, quoted Latin. It was a sight which held the two men breathless for a moment. Then Luis shook his head. "It is beautiful, but devilish," he said. "The malevolence rises like a fog," and Black nodded assent.

They found themselves in an eery world, as if they were sunk deep in a hot sea. Moisture streamed from every twig and blade and tendril, and a sickening sweetness, like the decaying vegetation of a marsh, rose from whatever their feet crushed. Black remarked that it was like some infernal chemist's shop. Under the Indian's direction they took curious precautions. Each man drew on leather gauntlets which strapped tight on the wrist. Each shrouded his face and neck with what looked like a fine-meshed mosquito-curtain. Also they advanced with extreme caution. The Indian would scout ahead, while the other two waited in the sweltering vapour-bath. Then he would return and lead them by minute tracks, now climbing, now descending, and they followed blindly, for in that steaming maze there was neither prospect nor landmark.

That there was need for caution was shown by one incident. The Indian hurriedly drew them off the trail into the cover of what looked like a monstrous cactus, and from their hiding-place they watched four men pass with the softness of deer. Three were Indians, not of the pueblas in the Tierra Caliente, for they were tall and lean as the Shilluks of the Upper Nile. The fourth was a white man in shirt and breeches, gauntleted and hooded, and his breeches were the type worn by the Mines Police. But he was not an ordinary policeman, for, as seen under the veil, his face had the pallor and his eyes the unseeing concentration of the magnates of the Gran Seco.

Black looked inquiringly at Luis, who grinned behind his mosquito-mask. "One of the Conquistadors," he whispered, and the other seemed to understand.

In that long, torrid day the party neither ate nor drank. Just before nightfall they descended almost to the floor of the cup, where they were within hearing of the noise of the river. Here they moved with redoubled caution. Once they came out on the stream bank, and Black thought that he had never seen stranger waters. They were clear, but with purple glooms in them, and the foam in the eddies was not the spume of beaten water, but more like the bubbling of molten lead. Then they struck inland, climbed a tortuous gully, and came into a clearing where they had a glimpse of a cone of snow flaming like a lamp in the sunset.

The place was cunningly hidden, being a little mantel-piece between two precipitous ravines--on the eyebrow of a cliff, so that from below it was not suspected--and protected above by a screen of jungle. An empty hut stood there, and the Indian proceeded to make camp. A fire was lit in a corner, and water from the nearest rivulet put on to boil. It might have been a Jewish feast, for all three went through elaborate purification ceremonies. Food had been brought with them, but no morsel of it was touched till the hands of each had been washed with a chemical solution. The food-box was then sealed up again as carefully as if it were to be cached for months. The hut floor was swept, and before the bedding was laid down it was sprayed with a disinfectant. There was no window, and the door was kept tightly shut, all but a grating in it over which Luis fastened a square of thick gauze netting. The place would have been abominably stuffy but for the fact that with nightfall a chill like death had crept over the land, as if with the darkness the high snows had asserted their dominion.

Later in the night men came to the hut, silently as ghosts, brought by the Indian, who, though not of their tribe, seemed to know them and speak their tongue. They were of the same race as the three whom the travellers had encountered in the forest that afternoon and had stepped aside to avoid. Strange figures they were, lean and tall, and in the lantern light their cheek-bones stood out so sharp that their faces looked like skulls. Their eyes were not dull, like those of the Gran Seco magnates, but unnaturally bright, and their voices had so low a pitch that their slow, soft speech sounded like the purring of cats. Luis spoke to them in their own language and translated for Black's benefit. When they had gone, he turned to his companion.

"You have seen the people of the País de Venenos. An interesting case of adaptation to environment? What would the scientists of Europe not give to investigate this curiosity? These men during long generations have become immune to the rankest poison in the world."

"They terrify me," said Black. "I have seen men very near to the brutes, but these fellows are uncannier than any beast. They are not inhuman, they are unnatural. How on earth did you get a graft here?"

"They have their virtues," said Luis, "and one of them is faithfulness. My graft is ancestral. Centuries ago one of my family came here and did them a service, and the memory is handed down so that only a Marzaniga can go among them. Indeed, I think that my blood has something of their immunity. I take precautions, as you see, but I do not know if in my case they are so needful."

Black asked about the poison.

"They are many," he was told. "There is poison here in earth and water, in a hundred plants, in a thousand insects, in the very air we breathe. But the chief is what they call astura--the drug of our friends the Conquistadors. Once this country was guarded like a leper-settlement, so that nothing came out of it. Now, as you know, its chief product is being exploited. The Gran Seco has brought it within its beneficent civilisation."

The Indian was already asleep, and, as the two white men adjusted their blankets, Black commented on the utter stillness. "We might be buried deep under the ground," he said.

"There is no animal life in the forest," was the answer, "except insects. There are no birds or deer or even reptiles. The poison is too strong. But there is one exception. Listen!"

He held up his hand, and from somewhere in the thickets came a harsh bark, which in the silence had a horrid savagery.

"Jackal?" Black asked.

"No. That is one of our foxes. They are immune, like the men, and they hunt on the uplands above the forest where there is plenty of animal life. I think they are the chief horror of the place. Picture your English fox, with his sharp muzzle and prick ears, but picture him as big as a wolf, and a cannibal, who will rend and eat his own kind."

As Black fell asleep, he heard again the snarling bark and he shivered. It was as if the devilishness of the Poison Country had found its appropriate voice.

They stayed there for four days, and in all that time they did not move from the little mantelpiece. Every night ghosts which were men slipped out of the jungle and talked with them in the hut. Black fell ill again, with his old fever, and Luis looked grave and took the Indian aside. The result was that on the third night, when the men came and Black lay tossing on his couch, there was a consultation, and one of the visitors rolled in his hands a small pellet. It began by being a greyish paste, but when rolled it became translucent like a flawed pearl. Black was made to swallow it, and presently fell into a torpor so deep that all the night Luis anxiously felt his heart-beats. But in the morning the sickness had gone. Black woke with a clear eye and a clean tongue, and announced that he felt years younger, and in the best of spirits.

"You have tasted astura," said Luis, "and that is more than I have ever done, for I am afraid. You will have no more, my friend. It cures fever, but it makes too soon its own diseases."

The four days were cloudless and very warm. The forest reeked in the sunshine, and wafts of odours drifted up to the mantelpiece, odours such as Black had never before known in nature. The place seemed a crucible in some infernal laboratory, where through the ages Natura Maligna had been distilling her dreadful potions. His dreams were bad, and they were often broken by the yelp of the cannibal foxes. Horror of this abyss came on him, and even Luis, who had been there before and had grown up with the knowledge of it, became uneasy as the hours passed. These days were not idle. Information was collected, and presently they had a fairly complete knowledge of the methods by which those whom they called the Conquistadors worked. Then on the last night came a deluge of rain, and Luis looked grave. "If this continues," he said, "we may be trapped; and if we are trapped here, we shall die. Then it will be farewell to the Courts of the Morning, my friend."

But in the night the rain stopped, and at dawn they hooded and gauntleted themselves and started back. It was a nightmare journey, for the track had become slime, and the queer smells had increased to a miasma. Their feet slipped, and they made shrinking contact with fœtid mud and obscene plants whose pallid leaves seemed like limbs of the dead. The heat was intense, and the place was loud with the noise of swollen rivulets and the buzz of maleficent insects. Black grew very weary, but Luis would permit of no halt, and even the Indians seemed eager to get the journey over.

They did not reach their old camp till the darkness had long fallen, but the last hour was for Black like an awakening from a bad dream. For he smelt clean earth and herbage and pure water again, and he could have buried his face in the cool grass.

The next day they left the Indians behind and rode over the mountains by intricate passes farther to the south, which brought them to a long valley inclining to the south-west. Three nights later they slept in an upland meadow, and by the following evening had crossed a further pass and reached a grassy vale which looked westward to the plains. Luis pointed out a blue scarp to the north.

"That is the Gran Seco frontier," he said. "It is guarded by patrols and blockhouses, but we have outflanked them. I have brought you by a way which the Gobernador does not know--only those of my family and perhaps two others. We may relax now, for our immediate troubles are over."

They slept at a camp of vaqueros, and in the morning Black had several surprises. The first was an ancient Ford car which stood under a tarpaulin in the corner of one of the cattle-pens. The second was the change in his garb upon which Luis insisted. The uniform of the Mines Police was carefully packed in the car, and in its place he was given the cotton trousers and dark-blue shirt of an ordinary peon on the estancias. Luis drove the Ford all day through rolling savannah, with beside him a lean mestizo servant, to whom he talked earnestly, except when they halted for food at an inn or met other travellers. In the evening they came to a big hacienda, low and white, with wide corrals for cattle, and red-roofed stables which suggested Newmarket.

Half a mile from the place a girl, who had seen them approaching, cantered up to them on a young Arab mare. The car slowed down, and driver and peon took off their hats.

"You are a day behind time," she said.

"Well, what about it, Miss Dasent?" It was the peon who spoke, and there was anxiety in his tone.

"Only that you have missed his Excellency the Gobernador," said the girl in her pleasant Southern voice. "He paid us a visit of ceremony yesterday, to talk about horses. Curious that he should have chosen the day you were expected. Don Mario thinks that Lord Clanroyden had better not sleep in the house. If he will get out at the gate of the cattle-yard, I will show him the way to the overseer's quarters."