Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 452
The party, guided by the Indian, kept high above 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 eerie world, as if they were trunk 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 id 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 deftness of deer. Three were Indians, not of the pueblas of 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 mantelpiece 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, an their voices had so low a pitch that their slow, soft speed 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 Pais 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 nigh 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 cry 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 the methods by which those whom they called the Conquistadors worked. Then on the last night came a deluge 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 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 foetid 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 Indian 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.”
IX
When Archie and Janet came down to dinner that evening at Veiro they found Don Luis de Marzaniga, a little thinner and browner than before, but spruce and composed as if he were about to dine at his Olifa club. He kissed Janet’s hand, and asked Archie if he had enjoyed the weeks since his return from the Gran Seco.
“I’ve been obeying orders,” was the answer. “There is my commander-in-chief. She’ll tell you how docile I’ve been, and how I’ve never bothered her with questions, though Janet and I are sick with curiosity.”
The tall girl, whose name was Barbara Dasent, smiled. “I’ll testify that he has been a good boy.”
She was very slim, and at first sight the delicate lines her neck and her small head gave her an air of fragility — an impression presently corrected by the vigour and grace of her movements. Her face was a classic oval, but without the classic sculptural heaviness, her dark hair clustered about her head in childish curls, her clear skin had a healthy pallor which intensified the colouring of her lips and eyes. These eyes were a miracle — deep and dark, at once brooding and kindling, as full of changes as a pool in the sunlight, and yet holding, like a pool, some elemental profundity. The lashes were long and the eyebrows a slender crescent. Janet ad crossed the room and stood beside her, and each was to the other a perfect foil. Yet, though they had no feature in common, there was an odd kinship, due perhaps to the young freedom of each, their candid regard and a certain boyish gallantry of bearing.
At dinner, under the Sanfuentes Murillo, Luis cross-examined Archie about his recent doings. It appeared that, on Miss Dasent’s instructions, he had been travelling widely in the coastal flats of Olifa. He had been given introductions from the Minister of Defence, and had been the guest of several regiments, attended an infantry camp of instruction, and taken part in cavalry manoeuvres. Also he had visited various flying-stations, and had made several flights. The result was unqualified admiration.
“I can’t claim to be a military pundit,” he said, “but I now a first-class thing when I meet it. All I have to say that Olifa has got the most completely professional outfit have ever seen. There isn’t one lesson of the Great War he hasn’t learned. Her infantry tactics are the sort of thing we were feeling our way to before the Armistice. Her tanks are the latest pattern, better than anything I’ve seen in England, and, by Jove, she knows how to use them. Her army is mechanised to the full, but not too far, for she has the sense to see that cavalry rightly handled will never be out of date. And she has an amazing good staff, picked from up and down the earth, all as keen as mustard-like what we used to imagine the German staff to be, but less hidebound. Of course I don’t know what strength she has in the way of reserves, and I can’t speak of the fighting spirit, but there’s no doubt she has a most efficient standing army for a nucleus. What puzzles me is why she should want anything so good when she’s so secure.”
Luis asked about the Air Force.
“That was the only thing with which I was a little disappointed,” Archie replied. “It’s extraordinarily good in the scientific way — the last word in machines and engines and all that sort of thing — but just a little lacking in life. Those chaps don’t spend enough hours in the air. They’ve got all the theory and expert knowledge they can carry, but they haven’t got as much devil as we have. Too serious, I should say. Keener about the theory than the game.”
Luis had been listening closely. “You are very near the truth, Senor Roylance,” he said. “We in Olifa have al that science and money can give us, but we have not enough soul. What is your English word — guts?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that.”
“But will say it. And it is perhaps fortunate. I would not blame my nation, for our army is not national, since its leaders are mercenaries.”
“I’m still puzzled. What do you want it for? I never got any figures of man-power and reserves, but if you’ve an adequate shaft behind this spear-head, you’ve a superb fighting-machine. What do you mean to use it against?”
Luis laughed. “It is the conventional insurance premium which our rich Olifa pays. Pays carelessly and without conviction. That is why, as you truly say, our army is made up chiefly of mercenaries. We have collected the best soldiers of Europe who were out of a job. It is a police, if you choose. If a little political war came with a neighbour, Olifa would use her pretty toy and ask only that she got her money’s worth...Unless, of course, it was war which touched her heart, and then she would fight the old way — with her people.”
They sat late at table, Archie answering Luis’s questions and illustrating his views by diagrams on the backs of envelopes. Presently Miss Dasent left the room, and on her return said something to Don Mario. He rose and the way to his sitting-room, where, according to custom a wood fire crackled on the wide hearth. The curtain, usually left untouched to reveal the luminous night, was now closely drawn. A man in a flannel suit stood with his back to the fireplace.
Janet blinked at him for a moment, and then ran up to him with both hands outstretched.
“Oh, Sandy dear, I have been miserable about you. Thank God, you’re safely back. You’re desperately thin. You’re not ill?”
“I’m perfectly well, thank you. But I’ve been pushed up to the limit of my strength. It’s all right. I’ve done it often before, you know. I only want to lie fallow for a bit. It’s good to see you and Archie...I feel as if had come home.”
“Are you safe here?” Janet asked anxiously.
Luis answered. “Perfectly — at present. The Gobernador must suspect something or he would not have been here yesterday. But he can know nothing. We have pickets out, and at the worst we shall get ample warning. To-night, the any rate, we can sleep sound.”
“We have asked no questions,” said Janet. “For the last week Archie has been behaving like the intelligent tourist, and I have been sketching in water-colours. We want to be enlightened, Sandy dear.”
The man addressed — he looked very young in the dim light, for his hair had grown long and was tousled like a boy’s over his forehead — flung himself into an armchair and stretched his lean shanks to the blaze. He slowly filled an old pipe and looked round at the audience — Don Mario erect and prim, Luis sprawling on a couch, Archie swinging his long legs from a corner of the table, Miss Dasent very quiet in the shadow, Janet standing on the tiger-skin rug, an incarnate note of interrogation. He looked round and laughed.
“You ask a good deal. Luis knows everything, and Miss Dasent. Don Mario knows as much as he wants to. But you two are newcomers, so I must begin from the beginning. Sit down on that stool, Janet, and, Archie, get off the table. I’m going to make a second-reading speech, as they say in your little Parliament. After that the House can go into committee...
