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,