Chapter 9

TALAITI DE TALT.

I woke with daylight, and roused Haigh. "We should get away at once," I said to him. "We've dawdled woefully. If we'd possessed a grain of sense between us we should have started the moment we stepped ashore. Weems may be cooped up still, but that's only guess-work on our parts. It's quite possible he cleared himself directly after you left, and went to the Talayot straight away."

Haigh blinked at me sleepily. "You're in the deuce of a flurry, old man. Been having evil dreams? That's the rancid oil they cook with here. It always has that effect at first. But you'll get used to it soon and like it, and think ordinary oil insipid."

"Oh, confound you, dry up. Look here, we must start at once."

"How?"

"Tramp it. Funds won't run to a vehicle."

"My dear chappie, you don't know the extent of my feebleness. I couldn't walk two miles to save my life. Nature may have intended me for a pirate or a highwayman, because on shipboard or horse-back I can do tolerable service. But the good dame never built me to be a footpad. So if this old pyramid place is to be looted, you must go and do it yourself."

"But, my good fellow, think what there is at stake. Dash it all, man, how do you know I shan't collar the thing and make a clean bolt with it?"

Haigh grinned. "I'll take my chance of that."

"You'd better not. I've never set up for being obtrusively honest."

"Oh, go to Aden."

"But really, I'd take it as a favour if you would come."

"Well, if you make a point of it, I suppose I must, though I fail to see the necessity for a pair of us making ourselves uncomfortable. Look out of window. The sky's Prussian blue, and there isn't a breath of wind. It's going to be a broiling day. However, dear boy, at your behest I'll make a martyr of myself; and if transport is to be procured on tick, I'll overhaul you. Only understand clearly that neither for you nor any one else can I do a physical impossibility. It is absolutely out of the question for me to walk."

That was all I could get out of him, and so I set off, very uncertain as to whether or no he would follow.

I walked out through the clean uneven streets just as the townspeople were beginning to stir, passed under the massive towered gateway in the old walls, and got on to the level road which reaches half-way across the island. The waking hour was earlier here. The hawks and eagles were patrolling the morning air with diligent sweeps. The country-folk were bringing in loads of farm-produce on big brown donkeys and little gray donkeys. These last all gave a courteous "Bon di tenga,"[1] and I noticed that most of them stared at me somewhat curiously. It was not my dress that they looked at--it was my face that drew their stares; and after a mile or so's pacing it was borne in upon me that anxious thoughts had caused my forehead to knit and my mouth to pucker. I made the discovery with some contempt. Haigh had told me more than once that I should never make a gambler, and he was right. In principle I accepted the theory that "what was written was written," but in practice I couldn't help imagining that a ready-penned Fate might be partly erased by much rubbing.

[1] The common salutation throughout the Balearic Islands is _Bon di tenga_ from an inferior to a superior, to which the reply would be _Bon di_. Frequently, however, the first of these is clipped down to the last word, which is pronounced "T[=a][=i]n-g[)a]." After dark it becomes _Bon nit_, or _Bon nit tenga_, according to social standing.

I refilled my pipe and looked around me. Old Lully had shown some _nous_ in choosing a country to carry his secret. There is small fear of Minorca's population ever growing excessive. Not even Connemara can show such stone heaps. The walls which divide up the tiny fields are often ten feet thick; there are rubble cairns on all the many outcrops of rock; there are boulder-girdles round the trees; and yet, despite these collections, the corn and the beans and the grass grow more in stone than soil. One almost wonders that the Minorcan does not build up stone circles round the cows' legs whilst they are grazing. Perhaps the _Doctor Illuminatus_ might have hesitated if his prophetic eye had seen an invasion of British; for the Briton is a destructive animal with pig-like instincts of rootling up everything. But the foreigner's tenure of the soil (and stones) was not a long one, and I fancy that the country's face, save for some of the better roads that seam it, is much the same as it was in the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and nothing.

Now, the Minorcan is not possessed of the slenderest reverence for the prehistoric monuments that spot his island, and if he wanted them for domestic purposes, he would not hesitate to take the top from a duolithic stone altar, or the roofing flags from a subterranean gallery. And he would quarry from the pyramids to find the wherewithal for his pig-yard gateposts without the smallest flush of shame, for vandalism is a word that has no Minorquin equivalent. But the abundance of stone elsewhere has saved the fashioned stone that those dead races piled up when this world was young, and the gray Talayots squat upon their old sites in undiminished numbers. Indeed, in a way, one might say that there are more of them now than there were in the venerable alchemist's time, for spurious Talayots may be seen in every direction. These latter-day edifices have one advantage over the hoary prototypes. Their purpose is clearly defined. We know that they were not intended for the burial-places of kings, or for temples to conceal sacerdotal rights, or for observatories, or even for granaries. They were simply run up by men who wanted to build shelters for cattle or pigs or sheep on some plan which would expend a maximum of material on a minimum of basement. They simply represent an incident in the perpetual war against the stones, and show the way in which crude minds attain their ends. If Minorca had been peopled by Americans (as once, indeed, nearly happened), light tramways would be laid down in every direction, and the stones carted to the edges of the island, and there tipped into the sea; and then the ground would be free, the farmer rich and unhappy. But as matters are ordered at present, these things are beyond the man of the soil's grasp; and so he remains poor and hard-working and contented.

The broad road led on past whitewashed farm-houses and pink-flowered almond gardens, past peasants and mule-teams scratching up the rocky soil with primitive one-handled ploughs, past patches of brown vine-stumps and gnarled olive-trees squirming out from among the boulders; and close on either hand ran the low wooded hills, with their burden of ilexes still filmy with the morning mists. The road was a road a London suburb might have felt pride in, so smart was the engineering that made cuttings and embankments to reduce the gradients, and culverts to carry off the side-water, and dressed freestone bridges to cross the many streamlets. But at the eighth kilometre post (I think it was the eighth) this road showed itself worthy of the sunny government of Spain by ending abruptly in a fence of wheelbarrows and gang-planks. The continuation was to be gone on with, _mañana_; meanwhile young wheat had sprouted eight green inches in the track.

At this point the diligence course to Ciudadella branches off to the northward, turning again after a while due west on to General Stanhope's road. But that was nothing to me then. Turning my back upon it, I took another path, in woeful disrepair, which led me down by many windings between high stone walls and straggling clumps of prickly pear. There were few houses to stop the view--only some two or three farm buildings. Cottages can scarcely be said to exist. The labourer either lives in the towns, or else he lodges under his master's roof. But the high walls and the hummocks shut one in, and I was perpetually having to climb one or the other to make sure of my whereabouts, for my sailing directions to the Talayot had been rather vague ones.

The air was still and close, and already the sun had crept high and was burning fiercely. It was blazing hot, but in spite of that, and the ruggedness of the track, I was walking my fastest. Talaiti de Talt was somewhere close ahead, and the knowledge made me tingle from ear to toe. Forced stoicism wouldn't act.

At last, getting on a rise of the road where I could see over the winding walls ahead, I made out a Talayot sprouting gray from amid its green jacketing, barely half a kilometre away; and from the description given at Mahon, that must be the very one I had worked so hard to reach.

The limit of self-containment was passed. Excitement bubbled over. I picked up my feet and ran for all I was worth.

Just past the bottom of the slope was a small farmhouse, lying a little way back from the road. The Talayot was close beyond. A thought struck me, and I pulled up, panting and, in spite of myself, laughing. A new complication seemed to crop up. From the moment of reading old Lully's journal in the Genovese _caffè_, it had never occurred to me till then that the Talayot belonged less to me than to anybody else. Now, seeing the whitewashed farm buildings close beside this old pyramid I had come to loot, the idea that the modern owner might raise objections came upon me in a flash; and although the matter was serious enough, as Heaven knows, still its grimly humorous side cropped uppermost, and for the life of me I could not help being tickled.

Of course any one will see that I might have waited till dark, and have done my searching when all the world of provincial Minorca was snugly slumbering. But that idea did not occur to me then, and if it had done, I should not have listened to it. I was far too keen on going ahead without further stoppages. The grasping fingers of Weems loomed always in the near distance.

If I had only possessed a spare dollar or two, the thing would have been simple; but not owning a peseta, I had tremors. Still there was no help for it, and so following the _en avant_ principle, I swung the gate, and walked up between the orange-bushes to the little farmhouse. Two dogs sprang out from somewhere, barking furiously; but I like dogs, and never feared one yet, and that pair were soon reduced to oppressive civility. A small girl appeared, drawn by the uproar; but the sight of a stranger made her bolt mutely within doors. And then a woman came--a fat, tall, slatternly woman, whose husband was dead (she said), and who owned the farm which circled Talaiti de Talt.

She was garrulous to a degree, and her voice--as is usual with the voices of cats and women out there--was harsh and grating. But I did not dam the flood of her eloquence (outwardly, at any rate), and so she went on till she was tired. Then I thanked her, and blarneyed her as well as I was able, although that wasn't much, as I never have been much of a hand with women. But the outcome of it all was that I might most certainly overhaul the old stone heap (which was her irreverent name for the historical pyramid) as much as ever I chose. And when she had given the permission, it struck me that I could have got it just as easily without having spent an hour and a half in the baking sun-blaze beating about the bush. But then, you see, I was so confoundedly nervous, and didn't guess that beforehand.

However, as I was turning off down the orange grove again, the bulky señora seemed to think that something might be made out of it after all, for she called out to know whether I wouldn't like Isabelita to accompany me--Isabelita being the small girl, then engaged at unravelling a bamboo for a whitewash brush under the shade of the family date-palm. Or was there nothing else she could do for me? Everything of her poor stock was entirely at my disposition. My thanks were profuse--most profuse--but I would not rob her of anything, not even of the _hermosita's_ time. It would be my great pleasure to make that little angel some trifling present as I came back that way toward Mahon; at which time I might also wish to buy an orange or two. So until then.

"_'Tenga_," said the woman, with a large fat smile.

"_Bon di, señora_," said I, with a sweep of the hat, and turned off down the path and into the road again. Gad! wasn't I feeling jubilant then?

I felt that the woman was following me with her eyes, and didn't dare to hurry; for it seemed to me, so worked up was I, that if I had broken into a run she would have seen at once what I had come for, and would have contrived to get this great thing for herself. The mere fact of my displaying any interest at all in such a useless cumbersome hulk as a Talayot must have filled her with suspicion. But then I had thought of this, and had corrected her when she guessed me for French, telling her my true nationality, knowing that the Continental reputation of the Englishman stands good for any unexplainable eccentricity. And so I clogged my feet with an effort, and walked on, soberly looking ahead of me.

So great was the maze of walls that it was difficult to tell where the road ran for more than a score or so of yards ahead. But at last I traced its sweep close by where a great single-slab altar stood on its massive pillar, with a sacred stone-circle jutting out of the bushes around it. On the other side was the pyramid, sorely broken by man and the weather, but still showing dressed gray stone courses in patches amongst the rank scrub which bristled over it. Even from there I could make out that the general contour of its base was circular, and not square as I had somehow or other expected, and I began to see trouble in finding that side "nearest the sea" where Lully had dug into the entrance-way.

As I drew nearer, the tumbled nature of the stone-work disclosed itself further, and I began to have fears lest the central chamber should have caved in and hidden the Recipe effectually and for always by crumbling its lettering into dust. But then I called to mind other Talayots I had seen before near Mahon and Alayor and Mercadal and Ciudadella, where the entering passage led from aboveground by a rapid incline, and where the cavity, when it existed, had doubtless been near the apex; and from this I took heart, thinking that whether or no there had been a chamber in the upper part of the building, and whether or no it existed still, didn't particularly matter to me. The Diary had certainly pointed to a room stowed away beneath the very keel of the edifice; and as long as that stood firm, the rest might telescope to any extent for all I cared.

By this time my leisurely pace had brought me up alongside the Talayot, which loomed big and squat at the other side of the wall. I turned and looked behind me. The fat woman at the farm was out of sight. Then I climbed the wall, and from the top glanced down the road which led from Alayor, and saw a sight which made me curse like a kicked _arriero_. Walking briskly up the stony track was a little man in unmistakably British tweeds. "An infernal prying tourist," thought I, "by all the powers of evil. Bear-led by a native, and coming to see Talaiti de Talt for a thousand. If he sees me he'll spot me at once and want to chum, and then he'll get inquisitive and won't go away."

Down I dropped into cover.