The Belted Seas Part 6

There's a long promontory, that the coasters see on the West Coast of South America near the Line, with a square white tower on a bit of high rock at the head of it. The promontory is called Mituas, and the point, Punta Ananias. That may be because some one ran aground sometime on the sand-bar off the end, and thought it deceitful. Some people say the tower was built as an outlook against pirates long ago, but I judge the facts are everybody has forgotten who built it or what he did it for.

It's a lighthouse now. If a man doesn't mind a curve in his view and a few pin-head islands, there's nothing particular to interrupt his view half round the world. The Andes make a jagged line on the east, and ten of them are volcanoes. Those snow mountains and two or three ocean currents got together, and arranged it with the equator that one part of the year should be a good deal like another there, and all the months behave respectful, and the Tower of Ananias have a breeze. It's a handsome position with a picked climate.

The scurvy is a disease not so common now, but it used to act as if all the bad salt pork you'd eaten were coming out through the skin, till you looked like a Stilton cheese, and what you wanted was to be fed on vegetables, and put ash.o.r.e so as to get the bilge-water dried out.

Probably that wouldn't be possible, and you'd be sewed up in canvas, and resemble an exclamation point, and be dropped overboard to punctuate the end of the story. Chunk! you goes, and that's the end of you.

Ship's fever is a nautical brand of typhoid, due to bad conditions aboard. The best thing for it is to get out of those conditions. Craney had the scurvy, and I had ship's fever. Sometimes I was out of my head.

But when we sighted Punta Ananias, I was clear enough to tell Captain Rickhart he'd have a burial shortly, or put me on sh.o.r.e.

"I've got no fancy for that," he says, and took a look at me. I didn't suppose he'd haul up, but he did. He'd buried two men already down the coast, and the thing must have got on his nerves, for he anch.o.r.ed overnight, and sent Craney and me to the lighthouse in a boat.

"You forfeit your pa.s.sage money," he says, and told the mate to buy what truck he could, and tell the Dago in the lighthouse he could keep our remains.

Rickhart was a rough man, and his ship was a rotten ship. I never knew a meaner ship, though I've known meaner men than Rickhart on the whole.

Stevey Todd said he was going with us, and there Rickhart disagreed with him again, and his argument was the same as before.

"You ain't," he says, and seemed to prove it, though Stevey Todd claimed he wasn't convinced.

CHAPTER VI.

TORRE ANANIAS. WHY CAPTAIN BUCKINGHAM DID NOT GO BACK TO GREENOUGH.

When we got under the lee of the lighthouse, the keeper came stalking down the rocks to meet us. He was a tall man with a long moustache, and a narrow grey beard, and a black coat and sombrero.

I heard the mate say:

"Here's the King of Castile come to Craney's funeral. Blamed if he ain't a whole hea.r.s.e!"

"Without doubt" says the keeper, grave and deep, being asked about the fruit. Regarding sick boarders, he broke out sharp, "Since when has my house----But I ask your pardon! You are strange to me. No more. The gentlemen will do me the honour to be my guests."

n.o.body appeared to have anything to say to that, but he looked too lean to recommend his board. His Spanish wasn't the kind I was used to. It was neither West Coast nor Mexican. I judged it was just Spanish.

They left us in canvas hammocks on the ground floor of the Tower of Ananias. It was three stories high, the top story opened to seaward, with its lanterns and tin reflectors.

The darkness came on, as its habits are in the tropics, like a lamp blown out. I could see the stars through the square seaward window of the tower, and heard the keeper go softly up the stairs, and I went to sleep, very weak and faint.

When morning came, and I pulled myself up to look through the square window, and saw the ship making sail, it seemed to me I was some sick and far away from everybody. I rubbed my eyes and looked around.

The door and stairway filled one side of the room. There were two wooden benches and a pile of earthen and tin ware on one of them. The hammocks hung between the windows, and in one of them lay Craney, looking like mouldy cheese, for his hair, eyebrows, and complexion were yellowish by nature, and he was some spotted at that time.

Beyond the door was a banana tree, with ten-foot leaves, and a little black monkey loping around under it, sort of indifferent. Beyond the banana tree came thick woods. A woman came out of them with a basket on her head, up the path to the tower. The monkey yelped and went up the banana tree. "Dios!" says the woman, when she came to the door, and she put down the basket and ran. The keeper came down the stone stairs and ran silently after her. The little black monkey dropped from his tree and loped after the keeper, and the woods swallowed them all. A sea-breeze was blowing into the tower, and below I could hear the pound of the surf. Craney slept as innocent as if he'd been fresh cheese, and I felt better.

Then the keeper came back with the woman, who appeared to be a scared Indian and screeched some. He said her name was t.i.tiaca, and she would look after us, but otherwise had no culture. Craney woke up and took a look at things.

"I have already," the keeper says very solemn, "the advantage of your honourable names. My own is Gaspero Raphael de Avila y Mituas." He stated it so, and went up the stairs. I dropped one leg out of the hammock, and I says thoughtful:

"I always had hard luck. They just named me Tom and chucked me."

t.i.tiaca knocked her head on the floor and screeched, but at that time I didn't see what for. She appeared to think the keeper was displeased.

It was monotonous lying all day in the tower, seeing only t.i.tiaca, and now and then the black-cloaked keeper, stiff, silent, and solemn, and polite. But the days went by, and by-and-by we began to crawl out and lie in the seaward shadow, and sometimes under the banana tree, where the little black monkey loped around melancholy. We grew better. t.i.tiaca gossiped, and told us the keeper was a magician, and master of the winds, and probably the bestower of rain and sunshine, and certain his light in the tower was connected underground with one of the volcanoes, so that he could tap different grades of earthquakes, graded as "motors, trembloritos, and tremblors," according to size.

"For, see!" she says; "at night it is the red smoke of the mountain--all night! it is the light in the tower--all night! it is himself in the tower--all night--all day! He speaks not. Is it not so? The ground shivers. He says nothing. It is the magic. Ah-h-h! The magic!"

Craney grew so well and restless after a week or two that he began strolling, and finally one day he went down the path that t.i.tiaca came by. For she said there was a village, and, beyond other villages and cocoa plantations, fishermen along the sh.o.r.e, many people, though only footpaths ran through the woods. Her gossip lacked variety, and the little black monkey took no interest in me at all. It appeared to me things were unnatural dull, and I went to the tower and called. The keeper answered, and I went up, and hoped I wasn't in his way. The middle story was like the one below, except for a table, chair, bed, and a few plain articles.

"On the contrary," he says, "if you will do me the honour to precede,"

and motioned to the stair leading to the lantern story, which was roofed, but open on all sides, and along the seaward wall was a stone bench.

It's good, now and then, as a man lives on, if something or some one comes along that gives him a new notion of things. At first it surprises him; then he thinks there might be something in it; and then maybe he gets so waterlogged and cosmopolitan as to admit an oyster's notions might be as reasonable as his.

As near as I could come to it the keeper was a Spaniard of a run-down family,--at least one branch of it was run down to him. It was old and uncommon proud, and had different kinds of decorated names. It began with being a legend; then it seemed to have a deal of trouble with Moors, and got rich with the results of trouble; then it owned some of that section of the New World, including twenty to thirty thousand natives in the property. That was the story of the family. But what they had they spent, or lost, or had confiscated, till there was nothing much but the story. Now here's what surprised me. For the thought of his race was in his bones, same as the sea is in mine. For instance, it seems to me I'm more to the point than my ancestors, on account of being alive.

I don't much know who they were. I'm a separate island, with maybe a few other islands, close by. My continental connections appear to be sort of submerged. That's the average American way of looking at it, and he wants to be a credit to himself, if he does to anybody. But the keeper's notion was to be a credit to all the grandfathers he could find between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Conquest of Peru. Those of the last hundred years or so he wasn't particular about, but if they'd been dead long enough he'd do anything to satisfy them. I didn't seem to surround the idea so as to find it reasonable, but I got so far as to see it was a large one, and there was some kind of a handsomeness in it.

Speaking of points of view, it seemed to me, so long as a man thought a heap of something besides himself, there was a good deal of leeway as to what the thing was; maybe his children and the folks that were coming after him; maybe the folks that went before him; maybe his country, or a machine he had invented, or a ship and those aboard he was responsible for, or the copper image of one of his G.o.ds. So long as he stood to stake his life on it, I wasn't prepared to sniff at him.

For a while he listened to my talk and said nothing. Then he began and went off like a bottle of beer that's been corked over-long. From what he said I gathered the facts just stated.

"The stream goes dry," he says slowly at last. "Therefore I came from Spain. What do I know of the new laws of the colonists, their republic?

These lands are to my race in me, from the point to the bay, and north twenty leagues; so runs the charter: so witnesses my name, Mituas, given and decreed by Charles, the king and emperor, to Juan de Avila y Mituas, the friend of Francisco Pizarro, who was an upstart indeed, but a valiant man. They say to me: 'There is a lighthouse on Punta Ananias.

For the keeping of the light is paid this much. Sir, be pleased in this manner to occupy your estate.' Do I care for their mocking? Is it the buzz of insects that is heard in Spain? Good, then! I wait for my end.

But to hear an Avila mocked at in Spain I could not endure. You do not understand? It is natural. You were so kind as to tell me of your life--believe me, most interesting--a courtesy which has tempted me to fatigue you in this way."

I thought his yarn a sight more interesting than mine, and said so, and he looked sort of blank, as if he didn't see how you could get the stories of an Avila and a Yankee seaman near enough together to compare them, more than a dozen eggs with a parallel of lat.i.tude. But his manners stayed by him. He said I was so polite as to say so, and then was silent, sitting on his end of the stone bench and looking grim at the sea.

"Well," I says, "I've got nothing to speak of,--a little money, no relations,--but I'd hate to give up the idea of seeing Long Island Sound again, and the town of Greenough."

"Your hope is a possession excellent," he says very quiet. "I shall not see again my Madrid, nor those vineyards of Aragon."

By-and-by the keeper seemed too melancholy to be sociable, I went back to the banana tree.

t.i.tiaca came. She said Craney had gone inland.

He didn't come back that night, and not till late afternoon of the next day. Then he came out of the woods, strolling along, and sat down under the banana tree, and acted as if he had something on his mind. I told him about the keeper, and laid out my theory about his having a handsome point of view, but one that needed property to keep cheerful with.

Craney was thoughtful.

"Property, Tommy!" he says at last. "This is the remarkablest community I ever got to. The old man told you right, so far as he knew. I guess he applied for four hundred square miles of ancestral estate and they told him he could have the lighthouse job. That's so! But see here. He don't really know what his job is. Lighthouse keeper! My galluses and garters!

He's the tin G.o.d of ten or fifteen thousand Injuns and half-breeds. I've been holding camp-meetings with them. Why, he's sitting on a liquid gold mine that's aching to run. I'll tell you. I went from here to t.i.tiaca's village. It's on the sh.o.r.e and some of the people are fishermen, and I talked with them. Then I got a donkey and rode over by plantations where they raise cocoa, which appears to be a red cuc.u.mber full of beans, and growing on an apple tree. They dry it, and take it in boat-loads up a bay about forty miles, and get from five cents a pound upwards. I talked with them. Then I met an old priest, who was fat and slow and peaceable.

I went in a sailboat with him up the coast to his house, and spent the night. He said the Injuns of this neighbourhood were more'n half heathen in their minds, but he was too old, and settled down now, and couldn't help it. It didn't appear to trouble him much. He wondered if Senor de Avila knew he was that gruesome and popular; and then he mooned along, talking sort of wandering, till near midnight. The Injuns don't think his credit with the G.o.ds and the elements amounts to much, anyway.

This morning I crossed to the north sh.o.r.e and saw more villages and plantations, and came back to t.i.tiaca's village in a catamaran rigged with a sprit-sail. Now, this is a business opening, Tommy. And look here! The old man's notions, as he put 'em to you, they're a good thing.

I didn't know how he'd take it, but I guess we can fix it. You see, this section--why, Padre Filippo says it used to belong to that family more or less, but the t.i.tles were called off when the country set up for itself, and whether they'd collected rent up to that time he didn't know. He thought they hadn't regular or much. But the section's grown well-to-do lately on account of the cocoa trade, and I gather what the Injuns pay on it now is about ordinary taxes. Now, if the Injuns pay the old man a sort of blackmail to get him to moderate his earthquakes, and he calls it his proper rents, why, I say, a rose by any name'll smell as sweet, supposing the commission for collecting is the same. That's the idea. Why not? All he's got to do is to stay in his tower, or look like a cross between the devil and a prophet when he does show himself, same as usual, and leave us to work his tribute. It's what his tenth grandfather did. I guess it'll be mostly dried cocoa beans. The shed where the old man keeps his oil will do for a warehouse."

I says, "What's all this, anyway?"

"Oh," he says, "you'll see it's reasonable by-and-by. Why not? Why, the campaign's begun. Some of the stuff is coming in to-morrow. You've no notion how they cottoned to the idea. I says to 'em this way. 'Course,'