LITMIR.BIZ

      VIII

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      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 held his pistol, but he had left his police carbine at the bivouac while the newcomer had no weapon at all. “What do want with a gun?” he had said lightly in reply to his companion’s question. “We are going into the Poison Country—El Pais 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 high peaks. It was fed by many affluents, and presently became a considerable river, running in a broad grassy 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 cascade 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 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

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