The Inca Emerald Part 11

"I guess we all need it," interrupted Will, tactfully, before Jud could express his indignation further.

Picking handfuls of the little fruit, each one of the party dipped his hands into a pool near the river bank. The waxy surface of the rosy b.a.l.l.s dissolved in a froth of lather which left their hands as clean and white as the best of soap could have done.

As the day waned and the coolness of the late afternoon stole through the heat, the montaria was again loosed from the bank. All that night, under the light of another glorious full moon, they traveled fast and far. At last, just as the sun rose, there sounded a distant boom. It became louder and louder until the air quivered and the dark surface of the river showed here and there flecks and blobs of foam. Then, as they swept around a bend in the black stream, there appeared before them a sight of unearthly beauty not seen of white men for twice two hundred years.

CHAPTER VII

THE YELLOW SNAKE

Over a vast horseshoe of towering crags, with a drumming roar, the dark, resistless river rushed in a ma.s.s of snowy foam and broken rainbows down into the whirling caldron below.

"The Falls of Utiarity," whispered Pinto, as he guided the boat into a little bend by the bank just above where the terrible downward glide of the river began. Making fast to a tree on sh.o.r.e, the whole party stared across at the most beautiful waterfall on earth, as if they could never see enough of its beauty. Something seemed to give way in Will's brain, and for a long minute he felt as if he were entering a new and strange world. Dim, unearthly images seemed to float before him. He thought of the great white throne in Revelation--the mystic emerald circled by a rainbow and the pavement of a single sapphire-stone. Before him was the beautiful water, sinking into the abyss, yet flowing on forever, while a great rainbow trembled, faded, then came again through the mist and spray like a beautiful spirit walking the waters. With the terror, the rush, and the roar of the crashing waters, was a beauty not of earth that took away all fear, until he seemed to be gazing into the seventh heaven and seeing that which was unlawful for mortal man to look upon.

Only a moment, and once more he was back in the body and found himself looking confusedly into the faces of his companions, all of whom had felt something of the same uplift. Without a word, the Indian edged the canoe along the sh.o.r.e and into the mouth of a deep lagoon, half-hidden by overhanging trees. Beyond these it widened out and ended in a high, bare bank. Back from this stretched a narrow path, showing like a long line through the dark green of the jungle. Its surface was trodden ominously hard and smooth, as if crossed and recrossed by many bare feet.

"The Trail," said Pinto, softly.

"The Trail," echoed Professor Ditson, as they all stared along the thin line which pierced the forest and led away and across the vast basin of the Amazon and on and past the guarded heights of Peru until it reached the mines from which Spain had dug the gold which enabled her to conquer and hold half the world. Only the cruel, fierce, dogged fighters of Spain as she was four hundred years ago could have cut this path. Even then, when men thought little of life or of accomplishing the impossible, the Trail stood forth as a great achievement, every mile of which had cost the lives of men.

For a time, the adventurers stared in silence at the brown line athwart the green, the sign and seal of an empire long pa.s.sed away. Then Pinto grounded the montaria at the edge of the bank, and, after all of the party had disembarked with their scanty equipment, pulled the boat, with Hen's help, back of a screen of tangled vines, marked by a slender a.s.sai-palm, until it was completely hidden from sight.

"If we are successful," remarked Professor Ditson, "we'll never see that boat again. If we are driven back along this trail, it may save our lives."

There was a silence. For the first time the boys and Jud realized that their leader definitely expected perils other than those ever present from the wild creatures that guarded the beautiful, treacherous, mysterious forests of this southern continent.

"Are the Injuns down here dangerous?" inquired Jud, at last.

"The personal habits of some of them do not commend themselves even to the most broad-minded investigators," returned the professor, precisely.

"Such as--" questioned Jud, again.

"Well," replied the scientist, slowly, "for one thing, the wild tribes of this part of the Amazon basin invariably eat any captives they make.

Then--"

"That's enough," broke in Jud. "After I've been eaten I don't care what they do next. What might be the names of these gentlemen?"

"The Mayas, I think, are the tribe we shall be most likely to meet,"

said Professor Ditson, reflectively. "They have no fixed homes, but wander through the forest, guiding themselves by the sun, and sleep in the tree-tops like monkeys wherever they happen to be when night comes.

They hunt men, red, white, or black," he went on; "yet, if Indian traditions can be depended upon, we do not need to be afraid of them so long as we keep to the Trail."

"How's that?" inquired Will, intensely interested.

"Every tribe which refers to the Trail," the scientist informed them, "speaks of a custom called the 'Truce of the Trail,' under which travelers along that road are safe from attack."

"Does that there truce," interposed Jud, "take in white men, or is it only for redskins?"

"That," returned the professor, "is not certain. Some say yes, some say no."

"The question is," murmured Jud, "what do the Mayas say?"

"If we pa.s.s the Trail in safety," went on Professor Ditson, "we still may expect trouble from Dawson after we get into the Peruvian highlands.

He has great influence with a band of Indian outlaws who call themselves the Miranhas, or Killers, and may persuade them to ambush us in order to secure the map."

"I sure am lookin' forward to this pleasure-trip of ours," confided Jud to Will.

During the first day along the trail, Will, who was next to Pinto, tried to pa.s.s away the time by learning a few words of Mundurucu. His first lessons in that language, however, were somewhat discouraging, since the dialects of the South American Indians contain perhaps more syllables to a word than any other language on earth.

"Pinto," he began, "I'll point to things, and you tell me what they are in Indian, and keep on saying it over and over until I learn it."

"All right," agreed the Mundurucu.

"Professor Pinto," went on Will solemnly, pointing to his hand, "what's that?"

"In-tee-ti-pix-tee-e-toke-kee-kee-tay-gaw," clattered Pinto, in a breath.

"Hey, hold up there," said Will. "Try it in low."

Half an hour later found him still working on that single word.

"Whew!" he remarked when he finally had it memorized, "I've heard it takes eight years to learn Eskimo. It's liable to take me eighty before I can talk Mundurucu. What about this one?" he went on, undiscouraged, pointing to a curious tree with a mahogany-red bark--which, if he had but known it, was a stranger whose seeds had in some way drifted down from much farther north.

"E-lit-ta-pix-tee-e-fa-cho-to-kee-not-e," said Pinto, slowly and distinctly.

For fifteen minutes Will wrestled with this new word.

"Do you know what he said?" at last interrupted Professor Ditson, who had been listening to the lesson.

"He gave me the name for that tree, didn't he?" returned Will, a little peevishly.

"Not at all," said the scientist. "He simply said, 'I don't know.'"

"Not so blame simply, either," murmured Jud, who had also been following the lesson.

"Our own language is full of similar mistakes imported from native dialects," lectured Professor Ditson. "'Kangaroo' simply means 'I don't know' in Bushman; so do 'mosquito' and 'quinine' and 'c.o.c.katoo' in different Indian languages."

"Well," said Will, "I'm going to pa.s.s up Mundurucu. Here I've spent the better part of an hour in learning two words--and one of them isn't right."

"It's a gift, my boy," said Jud, patronizingly. "As for myself, I once learned three Indian languages, Apache, Comanche, an' Sioux, in less than a month."

"Indeed!" broke in Professor Ditson, cuttingly. "You surprise me. Won't you favor me with a few sentences in Apache?"

"Surely," returned Jud, generously. "Ask me anything you like in Apache, an' I'll be glad to answer it in the same language."

The appearance of a small pond ahead put a stop to further adventure in linguistics, since Pinto had promised to catch some fish from the next water they met. As they came to the sh.o.r.e, suddenly, before Jud's astonished eyes, a fish about a foot long thrust its head out of the dark water, opened its mouth, and breathed like any mammal. A moment later it meowed like a cat, growled like a dog, and then went under.