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The Aztec Treasure-House, a novel by Thomas A. Janvier |
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Chapter 15. The Temple In The Clouds |
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_ CHAPTER XV. THE TEMPLE IN THE CLOUDS Doubtless the violent strain to which the chain had been subjected by El Sabio's kicking and plunging had loosened the fastenings, centuries old, which held it to the rock; for the chain had not broken, but had come away entire. I sank down on the rock as weak with terror as the poor ass had been; and like him I drank greedily of water, and panted for a while, and at last found my courage coming back to me. Yet my case was a happy one compared with that of Fray Antonio. Howsoever narrow my escape had been, the fact remained that I had come out from my encounter with Death safe and unharmed; but on Fray Antonio's shoulder we could but dread that Death already had laid his hand. And that he knew how close to him Death was standing we could see by a certain elate and confident air of courage in his bearing, and by the wonderful tenderness and sweetness of his smile. Truly, never did I know a man so ready at all times as this man was to lay down the life that God had given him; holding it but as a trust that might at any moment be called back to the source whence it came. Yet because it was a trust, meant to be put to useful purposes, Fray Antonio valued his life and cared for it. And at this time it was he himself who devised a plan by which it might be saved. The ropes which were fastened to the chain, being held stoutly on the one side by Fray Antonio and on the other by Young, fortunately had broken as the great weight of the chain suddenly had come upon them, and had broken so close to the knots which held them that nearly the whole of their length remained. The plan that the monk now devised for coming across to us--and a bold heart was required even to think of this daring enterprise--was that with the two ropes fastened about his body at one end, and held by all of us at the other, he should swing down into the chasm and far under the promontory of rock on which we stood, and then that we should haul him up to us. The great difficulty in the way of executing this plan was in getting the line across between us; its great danger lay in the probability--notwithstanding the depth of the recess beneath us--that he would be dashed against the rocks with such force as to kill him outright. But Young, who usually was ready for any emergency that might arise, roused out a ball of twine that was a part of our stores, and one end of this he made fast to a fragment of rock, and by a strong heave of it landed it safe on the other side; whereafter the rigging of the double rope across was an easy matter. Very carefully, testing the knots as he made them, Fray Antonio fastened the double line about his body, beneath his shoulders, and so stood ready on the edge of the chasm; while we four stood holding the line, with all our muscles braced for the strain that would come upon it as he swung downward. For a moment he paused, with his face turned upward while his lips moved. Then he waved his hand, and smiled as he called across to us, "It is as God wills!" and so dropped away from the ledge, and like a flash went down beyond our range of sight. We felt the jar on the ropes as his body struck against the face of the cliff far below us, and the reflex action as he swung out again, and thereafter the slower motion of the ropes as he swayed back and forth dangling over that black and awful chasm. And as the ropes settled into steadiness we drew him up towards us; yet dreaded, because of the dull weight of it, and because no assuring cry came up to us, that what we lifted was a corpse. And, in truth, as we raised the body of Fray Antonio over the edge of the cliff it seemed as though this dread were realized; for a great bloody gash was upon his temple, and his limbs were limp and lifeless, and his face was deathly pale. At sight of which there came into my heart a bursting pain, as though some one had stabbed me there; and there were tears in Young's eyes; and Rayburn gave vent to his sorrow in a great curse that was half a groan. As for Pablo, whom no danger could daunt, and who would bear without flinching any hurt of his own, this dreadful sight so moved him that he fainted dead away. Yet even in the moment that such deep sorrow seemed to be settling down upon us, Fray Antonio slightly moved his lips, and there came forth from them a low faint sigh--whereupon Young jumped up with a shout and relieved his mind by administering to Pablo a hearty kick, which he accompanied with the remark: "You infernal fool of a Greaser Indian, what do you mean by swoundin'? He ain't dead at all!" As tenderly as I could for the trembling of my hands, I washed away the blood from about the cut and bathed Fray Antonio's pale face, while Rayburn gave him a sup of whiskey from his flask. And then, presently, his eyes opened and energy came into his body once more. In a little while he was on his feet again, and as well as ever, save for the smarting of his cut, and in his head a dizziness and a dull throbbing pain. Just what had happened he could not tell. He knew that he had struck against the rock with his feet, as he had planned to do; but he must have swung around, when the force of the impact had been thus partly broken, and struck his head against some sharp projection, and so have been cut and stunned. But it made no great difference how his hurt had come to him, since it had not proved to be a deadly one; therefore we forbore to question him further concerning it, and sought by quiet talk, that led softly into silence, to take his thoughts away from the peril that he had been in. Indeed, we all were glad to rest quietly where we were for the night, for our bodies were tired and our nerves were racked and strained. We should have been most thankful for a big potful of coffee, but there was no wood with which we could make a fire. The best that we could do, and there was not much comfort in it, was to chew some coffee grains after we had made a supper upon one of our few remaining tins of meat; and then we rolled ourselves in our blankets and lay down upon the bare rock. And I must say that if anybody had asked me at that moment if archaeology was a study that paid for the trouble that it cost, I should have said most unhesitatingly that it was not. Even sleep, which I greatly needed, and for which I earnestly longed, did not come to me easily; for each time that I seemed to be dropping gently away into unconsciousness I would be roused by the feeling that I was holding fast to the chain again, and so was sliding down the long curve among the shadows, with the great walls of the canon towering infinitely above me, and with the black depth below. And in my sleep I made again the dreadful passage, and heard the clinking of the chain as it parted, and the rattle of it as it struck the rocks, and felt the grasp of Rayburn as he caught me, just as the bar was twitched out of my hands--and so woke to find Young shaking me, and to hear him say: "There's no earthly sense in your kickin' around that way, Professor; an', anyhow, it's time t' get up. It's just a wonder how these Mexican mornin's put life into a man. Why, there's a freshness in th' air that's goin' t' waste in this canon that's fit t' make a coffin stand right up on end an' dance a jig!" Even Fray Antonio, but for the soreness of his hurt, felt strong and well; and we ate another tin of meat--which was much less than we wanted to eat--and so started along the path hewn out of the side of the cliff; and what with the brightness and joyfulness of the morning, we certainly were in much higher spirits than was at all reasonable in the case of men who had had such close companionship with Death so short a time before, and who still stood a very fair chance of dying dismally of starvation. The knowledge that, by the falling of the chain, our retreat had been again cut off did not at all trouble us. Even could we have crossed the canon, and so have retraced our steps, we could have gone no farther than the valley of the lake; and we could as well die here as there. And we were stayed by the reasonable conviction that the path which we were travelling upon certainly would lead us out of the mountains at last--even if it did not lead us to the hidden city that we sought. For five or six miles we doubled on our course of the day before, going back along the canon and seeing the path that we had followed a little below us on the other side; then, by a very easy grade, our course began to ascend, and went on rising until the other path was so far below us that it ceased to be distinguishable. Thus we came to within a few hundred feet of the top of the cliffs, when a sudden turn to the left carried us into a narrow cleft in the rock. Here the path was very sharply inclined upward for a little way; and for the remainder of the distance to the top we ascended a long series of rudely cut steps, so steep that our legs fairly cracked under us as we neared the end of them. But we forgot our weariness as we came out upon the summit at last, and a great view of clouds and mountain peaks burst upon us; the like of which I never have seen approached save by the view out over the Gunnison country from the crest of the Marshall Pass. But here we saw all around us what there is seen only in one direction; for we were on a vastly high, square crest--very like that called the Gigante, which the traveller by the Mexican Central Railroad sees to the left as he nears Silao--and clouds and mountain peaks rose up about us on every side. But we did not long contemplate this heroic landscape, for a cloud, which almost enveloped us as we finished our ascent of the stair, was swept still farther away by the brisk wind then blowing; so that suddenly a vast building loomed largely through the flying vapor, and in a moment was clear and distinct before our eyes. To find upon this bare mountain-top, among cloud solitudes so profound as these, such overpowering evidence of the labor and strength of man, sent thrilling through our breasts a wonder that was akin to awe. It seemed unreal, impossible, that in such a place such work could be accomplished; and the very tangible reality of it made it seem to me one of those prodigies of man's creation which old stories tell of as having been wrought by a league with the devil and at the cost of a human soul. Had there been any signs at all of human life about this solemn and majestic building, or upon the mountain-top whereon it stood, the chilling hold that it took upon our imaginations would have been less strong. What wrought upon us was the deadly silence, and the absolute stillness of everything save the drifting clouds. It seemed to us as though we had come out from the living world and our own time into a dead region belonging to a long dead past; and I remembered with a shudder that we had entered this region through that gloomy cavern, where hundreds of the ancient dead were clustered in silent worship about the great silent idol carved in everlasting stone. It seemed as though some evil spell hung over us, that doomed us forever to wander in wild solitudes--which were the more appalling because constantly uprose before us tangible evidence of the strong current of eager human life that had pulsed through them in former times. Young but put into his own rough language the thought that was in all our hearts when he declared, with a great oath, that for the sake of getting safe out of this lonely hole he'd contract to fight Indians three days in every week for the rest of his life, and be glad to do it for the comfort of having somebody around who was alive. _ |
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