Part 12

There was ample warrant for Una's enthusiasm. From the stifling atmosphere of the tunnel the explorers had entered a great rock chamber that widened as they advanced, opening up vistas of majestic spaciousness that contrasted strangely with the straitened path they had first followed. Overhead the outlines of a vast arching roof could be dimly made out by the flickering light from the lamps. At either side the dusky walls, with their flanking pinnacles and fantastic gargoyles, suggested the ornate escarpment of some Gothic cathedral. More noticeable even than these architectural features, was the delightful atmosphere, mild, fragrant, invigorating, pervading the great silent spaces. Usually the air in the famous caves familiar to tourists, although pure enough, is chilly and damp, so much so that the explorer is forced to exercise in order to keep warm. Here, on the contrary, one enjoyed the temperature of a perfect day in early summer--a fact that had called forth Una's praise, and was silently noted by Harold Leighton as one of the novel features of the Guatavita cave.

"Of course we must go on," Leighton decided impatiently. "If Mrs. Quayle is nervous, she had better wait for us outside."

"Perhaps I will be only in the way here," said that lady contritely. "But what will you do without me, Una?"

"I will take her," interposed Miranda in a chivalric outburst. "Come!" he added, turning unceremoniously to retrace his steps to the opening of the tunnel, a point that could not be far away, although not near enough to be revealed by the light thrown from their lamps.

In spite of the extended area of the subterranean chamber in which they were standing, it was easy to return to the tunnel by simply retracing the path they were on. This path was marked by a depression in the uneven rocky floor across which it was laid. It was fairly smooth and overspread by a fine sand that bore the impress of many sandaled feet. There was no danger of losing one's way, and the energetic doctor, hurried along so as to spend the least possible time on his self-appointed mission. He did not notice that the terrified Mrs. Quayle, convinced that his invitation concealed a plot to rob her of her jewels, failed to accompany him. The others, amused at his abrupt departure, patiently awaited his return, watching the speck of light made by his lamp bobbing about in the distance. Presently the light disappeared, and they concluded that Miranda had entered the tunnel. But in this they were mistaken. In a few minutes they were startled by an explosive "Caramba!" followed shortly by the apparition of the doctor running towards them, breathless from his exertions, and exploding with mingled wrath and consternation.

"It has gone--lost! I cannot find him!" he shouted in an incoherent torrent of Spanish and English.

"What has gone?" demanded Leighton.

"We are lost! We are lost! The tunnel has gone!"

"Nonsense!"

"It is true! I go there. I not lie. I find the tunnel where we come--and it has gone!"

"Impossible! What did you find?"

"I not find it. It is true! I find there what this fellow say," he replied, turning savagely on Raoul. "It is--what you call?--one dead wall!"

XIII

MRS. QUAYLE TAKES THE LEAD

Miranda was not dreaming--the tunnel had vanished. That may be a strong word for it; but anyway, whatever had happened, the tunnel was not to be found.

Returning by the path upon which they had entered the subterranean chamber, they were confronted by a wall of rock where the entrance to the tunnel should have been. They were perfectly certain that when they passed out of the tunnel, less than half an hour before, into the main body of the cave, this wall had not been there. Where it had come from, why they had not seen it before, were posers too puzzling to waste time over. No one had seen it, of that they were certain; and they couldn't have helped seeing it if it had been there. Hence they were forced to the astonishing conclusion that this wall had moved into its present position during the last half hour through some invisible, superhuman agency. The whole thing, in fact, was incomprehensible, ridiculous, absurd. But there it was, for all that--and it had its depressing consequences.

"You know that crocodile on the river," said Miranda impressively; "he open the mouth--the bird walk in. He shut the mouth--the bird is in one trap. So it is to us."

Terrified by this picture of what had happened, Mrs. Quayle involuntarily clutched the jewels encircling her neck as if to protect them from some invisible brigand. The schoolmaster, also, seemed to suffer additional discomfort. Miranda's way of putting it, however, failed to satisfy the others. Leighton stoutly refused to believe in magic. Herran, in voluble Spanish, insisted that magic alone could explain the affair. Miranda repeated his alligator theory.

"This cave is alive," he added. "You see the mark of the feets?"

"Where is Mr. Arthur?" suddenly asked Una.

They had been so absorbed in the mystery of the vanishing tunnel that the absence of one of their number had not been noticed. Una's startled query brought them face to face with another puzzle, as baffling and uncanny, in a way, as the wall of rock that had come from nowhere and planted itself between them and the entrance to the cave. Raoul had disappeared; search as they might, call as loudly as they could, no trace of him was to be found. Had he deliberately deserted them, or had he suddenly been spirited away by the same invisible agency that had prevented their leaving the cave? The more credulous of the party believed he had been spirited away.

"But it is impossible," insisted Miranda angrily. "I see him now--and now he is not here. The canaille!"

"There is only one thing to be done," declared Leighton emphatically. "We can't get out of here; we must go on."

"Yes! Yes!" exclaimed Una.

"Caramba! What for we go on?" remonstrated Miranda. "We are lost, we starve, if we leave this place."

"You mean, we are lost if we stay here," reasoned Leighton. "There is nothing to be gained by staring at this rock. The fact that Arthur has disappeared, that the entrance to the tunnel has been closed, that there are fresh footprints besides our own all about us, proves that this cave is inhabited. Whoever they are, we must find these people."

Leighton's way of putting things was effective. It at least prevented a panic. Even Miranda admitted the necessity of the course proposed by the savant, and as Herran had nothing else to offer in its place, it was decided to press on with the exploration of the cave without delay.

Fortunately, they had a fair amount of provisions and enough oil to keep their lamps going for several days. Before starting on their expedition--when it promised to be nothing more than a "picnic"--this supply of food and fuel seemed far beyond any possible need. Now, thanks to the fussiness of Mrs. Quayle, who had insisted on these abundant preparations, there was no immediate danger of starvation. Each carried his or her portion of food in a light, capacious sack. These sacks, woven by the natives from vegetable fiber, swung easily from the shoulders. The oil for the lamps was in two cans, one of which Andrew carried, Raoul the other. Whatever had become of Raoul, his can of oil had not disappeared with him. It was found near the spot in the large cave where Miranda had turned back to take Mrs. Quayle to the tunnel. Here, then, Raoul had left them. Hoping for a clew, they examined the ground for his footprints, but could discover nothing. The path beyond showed the impress of sandaled feet only--and Raoul, they agreed, did not wear sandals. Either he had left the path and chosen the rocky floor of the cavern in its stead--in which case it would be impossible to discover his trail--or he had followed them to the tunnel and gone off on one of the side tracks that they had noticed and partially explored there. Why he should have done either of these things was quite beyond them to answer. At any rate, they tried every means to find him, and their failure left them more despondent than ever. All except Leighton and Una.

Failure did not daunt Leighton. He was convinced that by persevering in their exploration they would solve the mystery of the cave, gain tidings of David, and run down Raoul. Una shared his optimistic view, and both chafed at the reluctance of their companions to go ahead with the energy their plight demanded. The fact is, the feeling that they were caught in a cavern of unknown extent, connected with certain mysterious happenings in the immediate past, mixed up in the legendary history of a vanished race, and inhabited even now by strange beings in outlandish costumes, had a blighting effect upon them. Mrs. Quayle refused to be comforted and, as it was out of the question to go on without her, Leighton, like an astute general, proposed having lunch before doing anything else. Every one brightened up at the idea; it was one of those masterstrokes of policy that, when all else fails, saves the day. Miranda declared emphatically that food was "good for the estomach," and, as no one thought otherwise, they fell to with an appetite sharpened by their exertions and made fairly razor-like--although this they did not realize--by the bracing atmosphere of the cave.

There were bollos of corn and yucca--yellow, white, brown--variously flavored, soggy, solid. This was a concentrated food that just hit the need of a party of marooned picknickers. And there were large flat disks of cassava, a native bread that Mrs. Quayle declared, with some reason, resembled chips of wood, more than anything else, in taste and toughness. This, too, furnished the maximum of nourishment in a small space. These foods, with such fruits as the almond-like sapoti, the juicy nispera, the delicate chirimoyo, furnished a meal that aroused Miranda's enthusiasm, although to the untrained New England palate it was not quite so satisfying as it might be. The thought, too, that after this supply of food was exhausted, there would be nothing to eat, and no way of getting anything to eat, spoiled just that part of the picnic that should be most enjoyable. And then, worse than all, unthought of until now, there was the appalling problem of--water. In the lunch bags of Doctor Miranda and General Herran there were two small bottles of red wine; but when this was offered to Mrs. Quayle that unhappy lady's thirst for water reached an acute stage. She declared that all wine was poison, and that she would die if she couldn't get a drink of water. Even Leighton was disturbed. Water they must have, but--did it exist in a cave that was, apparently, caused by fire and not--as all respectable caves are--by water?

"Guatavita!" exclaimed Miranda, smacking his lips after a deep draught of claret.

"Guatavita!" echoed Leighton irritably. "Why not say the river Magdalena? How are we to reach Guatavita?"

"It is near," was the complacent reply. "It come into the cave."

"How do you know that?"

"Always there is water in the cave. And here--there is the lake outside."

"Yes, outside," said Leighton bitterly.

"But first it is inside."

Miranda's confident assertion was worth considering. That there might be--that there probably was--some subterranean connection between the cave and the lake--even if the former did come from fire--was a plausible theory. As he went over the matter in his own mind, Leighton's respect for Miranda's common sense jumped from zero to a comparatively high figure. But he was not convinced.

"You forget; we are above the level of the lake," he argued.

"That is true," agreed the doctor, who, in the meantime, bottle in hand, had been nervously walking about, peering into the darkness that surrounded them. "Yes, that is true. We come in over there; and always we walk up, up. The lake is always below. This path it never go down. But here--aha! Caramba!--is one other path--and it go down."

Miranda's voice shrilled with excitement. He was elated with the importance of his discovery. And it was important. The spot they had chosen for their lunch was the furthest point they had reached in their explorations, the point where Miranda had turned back to take Mrs. Quayle out of the cave and where they had last seen Raoul Arthur. It was marked by a huge pyramidal rock rising from the floor of the cave. Along one side of this rock the path they had followed went on indefinitely, in a gradual upward incline. It was to the other side that Miranda eagerly called attention. Placing his bottle of claret down on the rock beside him, he got on his knees and, with his nose almost touching the ground, made a minute study of the floor of the cave.

Even Andrew felt the contagion of the doctor's excitement. Fruits, bollos, cassavas were abandoned pell mell as one and all scrambled to their feet eager to find out what new puzzle Miranda had managed to pick up. The light from their lamps cast huge, uncertain shadows on the irregular masses of rock that everywhere blocked the view. At first there was nothing to be seen that differed essentially from what they had grown accustomed to in this subterranean world. There was the same chaos of jagged pinnacles and bowlders, the same display of irresistible energy that had been let loose and played itself out here ages ago. But in the midst of it all, zigzagging through this maze of dusty forms, there was the new path announced by Miranda. It led away from the central rock, or pillar, where they had taken their lunch, and formed an acute angle with the path they had already traversed. It was not so plainly marked as the latter, and appeared little more than a rift among the rocks that strewed the floor of the cave. But it was a path, there was no mistaking that. Among the evidences that it had been recently used was one that particularly delighted Miranda and justified his prolonged microscopic examination of the path itself--the footprints of a man wearing, not sandals, but shoes.

"Raoul Arthur!" exclaimed Leighton.

"Perhaps," agreed Miranda.

"Where could he have gone?" asked Una. "This path runs in nearly the same direction as the one we followed."

"We will see."

As a matter of fact, the two paths, starting together at the central rock and going thence in the same general direction, gradually diverged from each other, much as do the two lines that form the letter V. Then, another difference was noticeable. The first path followed a comparatively uniform level; the second dipped steadily downward. This peculiarity, first noted by Miranda, appealed particularly to Herran. Gloom had been the dominant mood with the general ever since he had entered the cave. He had made mental notes of things as they had happened, but he had not shared in the discussions of the others. This was partly due to his ignorance of English, partly to a sense of responsibility that he felt as a citizen of Bogota whose duty it was to guide a party of foreigners safely through one of the difficult regions of his native land. But now, at last, he had something to say, something that was due from him as their leader. Tugging at his beard in characteristic fashion, he gave the result of his observations in terse Spanish.

"At first we go away from the lake. Then we come back to it, just a little. Then we go away. Now this path take us right there again."

"That is it," agreed Miranda.

It sounded rather mixed up, and no one paid much attention to it. But at least it put General Herran in a better humor.

"Perhaps this will take us out of the cave," suggested Andrew. "The path is nearly in the right direction."

"I hope it means water, anyway," said Una, thinking of Mrs. Quayle.

They gathered up what was left of their provisions and set off again, single file, down the new path, General Herran in the lead, Andrew bringing up the rear. They had not gone many yards before they noticed the marked difference in the two paths. At first the change in level was scarcely perceptible; but now the descent became more and more abrupt, and as there was less sand and gravel for a foothold, they found the smooth surface of the rocks, tilted often at a sharp angle, anything but easy going. Another peculiarity that soon caught their attention was the lessening height of the cave's roof. Until now this roof had been so far above them that they had to throw their heads way back to see it, and even then it appeared in only vague outlines. Now it took a downward curve that brought it nearer and nearer to them. Following the same descending sweep it was evident that floor and roof would shortly come together and the confines, at least of that portion of the cave, would be reached.

Along with this new architectural feature in the structure of the cave, there was a noticeable change in the character of the rock forming it. Walls and floor had, until now, been sharp and jagged in contour, dull, almost black, in color. But the unevenness of surface was disappearing. The rocks were smoother, as if worn and rounded by constant rubbing. Vivid colors gleamed from wall and column with a pristine freshness suggesting that this part of the cave belonged to a far more distant period than the great rock chamber in which they had stopped to take their luncheon. Finally, they were surrounded at every hand by those spear-like formations, thrust upwards from the floor or depending from the roof, that give to the interiors of most caves their fantastic appearance--the stalactites and stalagmites about whose origin in the workshop of Nature there can be no doubt.

This change had an invigorating effect upon the explorers. Passing from the unrelieved gloom of the first cavern into this fairy-built grotto, with its bright hues and pleasing shapes, they began to forget their fears and felt instead something like the real enjoyment that belongs to unexpected adventure. Everything in the way of glorious surprise seemed possible. For one thing, Miranda's confident prediction was apparently about to be realized, a probability that the doctor celebrated by alternate chuckles and grunts of satisfaction.

"If we don't find water, there is at least no doubt that water has once been here," declared Leighton. "These stalactites make that certain."

"You will see--you will see," persisted Miranda. "It is the Lake Guatavita."

"How can that be?" argued Leighton. "No opening of the lake into this cave has ever been discovered."

"You will see."

One might almost imagine that the intricacies of the cave were as familiar to the doctor as the formula for his celebrated pills. But his confident attitude was only one part genuine to three parts bravado. He enjoyed opposing a scientist showing such supreme self-possession as Leighton, and he delighted in startling statements of fact that merely bewildered his hearers. But he was by no means sure in his own mind of the truth, or even the probability of the theory he was advancing. General Herran, however, who had heard as far back as he could remember the strange tales of mystery regarding Lake Guatavita, and had often speculated with other Bogotanos on the disappearance beneath its waters of the fabulous wealth of the ancient Chibchas, was keenly alive to the possibilities lying before them now that they were on the very spot haunted by so many fascinating traditions of his race. Like most natives of Bogota the Spanish blood in his veins was mixed with the blood of the Chibchas--and it was an infusion he was proud to own. Hence, he readily believed that at any moment they would stumble upon a perfect mountain of treasure, all the lost gold and emeralds that Spanish romancers had dreamed about and travelers of the old heroic times had risked their lives for.

They had now reached the end of the precipitous incline down which the path had led them, thankful to exchange the slipping and sliding, to which the tilted rocks had treated them, for the firm footing offered by a comparatively level floor. Here the roof hung only a few feet above their heads, whence it curved downward, glistening with the delicate fretwork that the subterranean torrents of bygone ages had carved upon it, until it became a part of the rock-strewn ground beneath. The chamber thus formed became a long, spacious corridor, one side of which was open to the vast amphitheater they had just left, the other side stoutly hemmed in by a maze of stalactites and stalagmites looming up as sentinels in front of a wall that could be dimly seen behind them. Down the middle of this corridor lay the path they had been following, wider now and showing the imprint of many sandaled feet. Before them, at the end of the corridor, they could distinguish the outlines of another wall, apparently marking the limit of this portion of the cave.

"There is your lake," said Leighton ironically to Miranda, who shrugged his shoulders in reply.

"At any rate, Uncle Harold," said Una reproachfully, "there must be an opening here. And the air is just heavenly! Instead of walking, one could dance."

The others appeared to feel the truth of Una's observation, for they moved along with a briskness, a snap, they had not shown before. This was particularly noticeable in Mrs. Quayle, who seemed to be propelled by some inner gayety of spirit that quite changed her usually sedate manner and appearance. The transformation was not lost on Una, who was both amused and puzzled by it.

"Look at Mrs. Quayle's jewelry!" she exclaimed. "It is dancing about as if it were moved by a breeze from somewhere."

"What do you mean? I can't feel any breeze," declared Leighton. "The singular fluttering of Mrs. Quayle's jewelry simply means, I suppose, that the wearer is, as usual, agitated."

That Mrs. Quayle was agitated, and not in the joyous frame of mind that Una at first supposed, began to be painfully evident. Ever since she had come into the cave agitation had been a chronic condition with her. But in this instance it hardly explained the eccentric activity that had suddenly developed among the ancient heirlooms that she guarded so jealously. The large gold pendants that dangled from her necklace beat an unaccountable tattoo upon her neck and shoulders, while the massive brooch fastened to her bodice showed an obstinate tendency to break away from its moorings. Even the gold rings on her fingers seemed possessed with a rebellious spirit, a mischievous desire to dance in unison with brooch and necklace, while two heavy bracelets, made of links and chains, clicked and snapped like castanets under the prevailing terpsichorean influence.

For several minutes before Una drew attention to these strange antics Mrs. Quayle had been unhappily aware of the insurrection that had broken out among her treasures and had clutched frantically at them in an unavailing attempt to quiet their ill-timed frenzy. She dabbed at them with one hand and caressed them with the other, only to find that as soon as they were freed from her restraining touch they flapped and jingled and tugged at her with renewed energy. Finally, with the eyes of all the party upon her, the terrified lady gave up in despair.

"I don't know what is the matter with them," she wailed; "they never acted this way before. I am not agitated," she added irritably, "as Mr. Leighton says. And I don't think it is a breeze either. It takes more than a breeze to make bracelets and brooches dance. They are just possessed, and for no reason at all. Oh, why did I wear these precious things on this terrible journey!"

Doctor Miranda, with the steadfast gaze of an exorcist, planting himself firmly in front of her, his arms crossed on his chest Bonaparte-fashion, added to Mrs. Quayle's dismay.

"I think she have the malaria," he announced solemnly. "I give her my pills----"