Chapter Fifteen.
The Monsters that haunted the Lake.
These matters attended to, Escombe summoned the Council of Seven to the palace, and held what might be considered his first official conference. He began by laying before them his views as to the steps necessary to be taken in order to carry out successfully the desire of the people to become a regenerated nation, instructing them to cause several different kinds of information to be obtained for him, and finally pointing out to them the necessity for free communication with the outside world, and the consequent establishment of something in the nature of a regular postal and transport service between the valley and two or three points on the railway system.
Long before he had finished all that he had to say it was perfectly evident to the young Inca that the members of the Council—or at least some of them—were entirely out of sympathy with many of his views and ideas, and that he would have to contend with a vast amount of ignorance and prejudice. To indicate a few out of many points where this lack of sympathy most strongly manifested itself, Harry had commented upon the necessity for establishing an army and providing it with the most modern and efficient weapons and equipment. To this Huanacocha and his supporters strongly objected, arguing that the State already possessed an army in the shape of the Inca’s bodyguard, horse and foot, which, in their opinion, ought to be amply sufficient to reconquer the country in view of the fact that Pizarro’s army numbered less than two hundred men when he captured Atahuallpa and thus achieved the conquest of Peru. And, as to the importation of modern weapons, they were altogether opposed to the proposal for many reasons, the chief of which were the difficulty and delay attendant upon the procuring of them and of their introduction into the country, and the further delay involved in training the troops to use them. Moreover, the weapons with which the existing troops were armed were such as they had always been accustomed to, and in the use of which they were already thoroughly skilled. Such a radical change as was proposed must of necessity involve an enormous delay, and for their part they were unable to see any advantage in the proposal. They looked with equal disfavour upon the proposal to establish a postal and transport service, arguing that there was no need for anything of the kind, the fundamental idea governing the settlement of their forefathers in the valley and the founding of the City of the Sun being that its inhabitants and the resources of the valley itself would be amply sufficient to achieve the reconquest of the country. It was not until Harry had very nearly lost his temper in arguing with these men that he learned that not one of them had ever been outside the valley, and that their very meagre knowledge of the outside world had been derived from the few individuals who at rare intervals had been obliged to make short and hasty journeys outside the confines of the encircling mountains upon State business. As soon as Harry had thoroughly grasped this fact he gave them to understand, as politely as possible, that none of them knew in the least what they were talking about, and for that reason he would feel himself compelled to dispense with their advice for the future, forming his own plans in accordance with the knowledge which he had acquired during a residence of several years in the biggest, busiest, and best-informed city in the world; and that henceforth he would ask of them nothing more than loyal wholehearted obedience to his commands. He finally dismissed them with instructions to establish immediately a service of postal runners between the valley and the town of Juliaca on the Santa Rosa, Puno, Arequipa, and Mollendo railway; with further instructions to arrange for the establishment of a thoroughly trustworthy agent at Juliaca, whose sole business it should be to see that all letters for Europe and other parts of the world were duly stamped and posted upon receipt by him; and to the care of whom all letters for the valley might be addressed. This done, Escombe summoned Arima to his presence and, handing him all the coin that he happened to have in his possession, delivered to him the letters which he had written, together with the gold bar—by this time securely packed and ready for posting—and directed him to proceed with all possible speed to Islay—using the railway as far as possible in order to save time—and there post the letters and the box containing the bar. Then he suddenly bethought himself and, before dismissing Arima upon his journey, sat down and wrote a long letter to Mr John Firmin, of Lima, he who had been a fellow-passenger from England with Harry on board the Rimac, In this letter he told Firmin as much of his story as he thought it necessary for him to know, and made certain arrangements whereby Firmin was to undertake certain business transactions from time to time, and to supply immediately certain necessaries, for the due delivery of which Harry gave his friend the most minute instructions. This completed what the Inca was pleased to regard as a very excellent and satisfactory day’s work.
And now the young Englishman began to find his time very fully occupied, so much so, indeed, that the days seemed not nearly long enough to enable him to accomplish the half of what he wished to do. There was, for instance, the learning of the Quichua language. Harry had not been domiciled in his palace twenty-four hours before it had become patent to him that this was the first task which he must undertake; for very few of the nobles had any knowledge whatever of Spanish, and the inconvenience and loss of time involved in conversing through an interpreter were far too great to be passively endured. And, since he could do very little else as satisfactorily as he would wish until he had mastered this rich and expressive language, he devoted four hours of every day—two in the morning and two in the evening—to its study. Then he soon learned that, exclusive of the inhabitants of the Valley of the Sun, there were some three hundred and fifty thousand Indians scattered up and down the country, at least one in every ten of whom might be counted as a fighting man. These people had to be brought into the valley, housed, fed, disciplined, in preparation for the time when arms should be put into their hands; also—what was more difficult still—matters had to be so arranged that the families of these men, and all dependent upon them, should suffer neither loss nor inconvenience from the drafting of the able-bodied into the valley. Then the arrangements and preparations for the importation of arms and ammunition into the country—everything connected with which had, of course, to be done entirely without the knowledge of the authorities—involved a tremendous amount of hard and intricate work. It is therefore not to be wondered at that during the first six months of his reign the young Inca was unable to spare a single hour for amusement.
But the moment was at hand when Harry was to enjoy some sport of a quite unique character; and the way in which it came about was thus. As he stood one morning in the palace garden, gazing out over the lake, with his faithful henchman Arima close at hand, an idea suddenly occurred to him, and, turning, he remarked:
“The lake looks particularly enticing this morning, Arima. Are there any balsas near at hand? Because, if so, you shall fetch me one, and we will go out together to deep water and indulge in a glorious swim.”
“A swim, Lord, in the deep water of the lake?” ejaculated Arima in horror-stricken accents. “Nay, that is impossible.”
“Impossible!” repeated Harry. “And why, pray?”
“Because of the monsters, Lord,” answered Arima. “Were we to venture to plunge into the lake we should almost certainly be devoured.”
“Indeed!” answered Harry. “So there are monsters in the lake, are there? I was not aware of that. And what are those ‘monsters’? Are they alligators, or voracious fish, or what are they? I should hardly have supposed that the water of the lake was warm enough for alligators to flourish in it.”
“Nay, Lord,” answered Arima, “they are not alligators. I have seen alligators in some of the northern rivers, and know them well enough to be able to distinguish between them and the monsters which haunt our lake. Nor are they fish; or if they be, they are quite unlike any other fish that these eyes of mine have ever beheld. We call them ‘monsters’ because our forefathers did so, and because we have no other name for them; also because of their exceeding size and malevolence.”
“Ah!” commented Harry. “Well, what are these creatures—these monsters—like, and how big are they? Have you ever seen them?”
“Yes, Lord,” was the answer. “I have seen them no less than three times at close quarters, and always with the same disastrous results. The first time was when, during my passage of the lake on a balsa, one of my companions had the misfortune to fall into the water. Ere the balsa could be stopped and paddled back to where the man was struggling, two of the monsters appeared and tore him limb from limb. The resemblance to an alligator lies chiefly in the shape of the head, which, however, is longer in proportion and more pointed than that of the alligator. Also, our monsters have smooth skins, nearly black in colour, and instead of feet and legs they have fins. The tail also is differently shaped from that of an alligator, being wide and flat at the end.”
“By Jove!” exclaimed Harry in astonishment, “they must be queer and formidable-looking creatures indeed; and fins in place of legs and feet! I’ll be shot if I can place them at all. Are there many of them?”
“We do not generally see more than two, or three at most, although it is on record that on one occasion, many years ago, four were seen, two of them being obviously young ones,” answered Arima.
“Upon my word, this all sounds exceedingly interesting,” commented Harry. “I should dearly like to see the creatures myself. Do they often show themselves?”
“Very rarely, Lord, save in the case of such accidents as those of which I have told you,” answered Arima. “Yet,” he continued, “if my Lord desires to see the monsters it could doubtless be managed. If the carcass of an animal were deposited upon yonder rock,”—the Indian pointed to a rock showing slightly above the water’s surface about a mile from the shore—“and another were cast into the water quite near it, the monsters would doubtless be attracted to the place; and if my Lord were close at hand at the time, upon a large and safe balsa, he would see them when they crawl up on the rock to reach the carcass exposed there.”
“Ah!” ejaculated Harry; “you think so? Then let the matter be arranged for to-morrow, Arima. I confess that your description of the creatures has powerfully excited my curiosity, and made me very anxious to see them.”
And on the morrow the young Inca’s curiosity was fully gratified, and with something to spare.
Oh, those monsters! Harry believed he possessed a passably fair general knowledge of natural history, but these creatures—monsters truly—were entirely new to him. In no natural history had he ever seen a representation of anything like them. And yet, when he came to think of it again, singular and terrifying as was their appearance, it was not altogether unfamiliar. He believed he had seen them portrayed somewhere, although he could not for the moment remember where. Fully forty feet long from the snout to the tip of the tail, with a head shaped midway between that of a pike and a crocodile, with enormous protruding eyes, with a smooth somewhat fish-shaped body almost black above and shading off to a dirty whitish-grey beneath, with a long tail broad and flat at its extremity, and with four seal-like flippers instead of legs and feet, the monsters looked more like nightmare creatures, evolved by reading a book on antediluvian animals after a—. Of course, that was it, Escombe decided, as his thoughts took some such turn as above. He now distinctly remembered having read some years ago a most interesting illustrated magazine article upon extinct animals, and one of the pictures portrayed these identical monsters, labelling them “Plesiosaurus”! Yes, the more Harry thought about it the less room did he find for doubt that these so-called monsters haunting the lake in the Valley of the Sun were actually survivors—most probably the only ones—of the antediluvian plesiosaurus. How they got there was a most interesting problem, yet it seemed by no means a difficult one to solve. The conclusion at which Escombe speedily arrived—rightly or wrongly—was that upon the subsidence of the waters of the Deluge a pair of plesiosauri had found themselves imprisoned in the great basin of the valley, where, the conditions presumably being exceptionally favourable, they had not only survived but had actually contrived to perpetuate their species to a very limited extent. And the reason why the lake was not swarming with them, instead of containing probably only three or four specimens at the utmost, was doubtless that the waters were too circumscribed in extent, and too unproductive in the matter of fish, to support more than that number.
The problem of how they came to be where they were was, however, not one of very great importance; the thing that really mattered was, in Escombe’s opinion, that their presence in the lake constituted a horrible danger to those who were obliged to traffic upon its waters, and they must be destroyed. They must not be permitted to exist another day longer than was absolutely necessary. Why, when one came to think of it, how many hundreds of lives might not already have fallen victims to the savage voracity of those creatures? What hope for his life would a man have if he chanced to fall off his balsa at a moment when one of those monsters happened to be close at hand? Positively none. Escombe shuddered as he reflected that, ignorant as he had hitherto been of the presence of the plesiosauri in the lake, it had only been by a series of fortuitous circumstances—or was it the intervention of a merciful Providence?—that he had been from time to time prevented from bathing in the lake, ay, and actually swimming out to the distant rock, as he had several times been strongly tempted to do.
Yes, those implacably ferocious monsters must be destroyed forthwith; and the only point remaining to be settled was, how was the work of destruction to be accomplished?
The plan which first suggested itself to the young Inca was the very obvious one of fishing for them with a baited hook and line, even as sharks were fished for. True, it would need a very big hook and a very strong line to capture a creature of the size and strength of a plesiosaurus; but to manufacture them was surely not beyond the resources of the inhabitants of the valley. Yes; but there was another matter to be considered. What about a craft from which to do the fishing? The largest balsa that Harry had ever seen upon the lake was not nearly big enough for the purpose; a hooked plesiosaurus would drag it under water without an effort, and then what would become of its occupants? The probabilities were too awful for contemplation, and the idea was not to be entertained for a moment. Besides, a balsa was not at all the kind of craft on which to engage in so dangerous a form of sport, even though it were possible to build one big enough; what was needed was a good stanch sturdy boat of, say, twenty tons or so. And, having arrived at this point in his meditations, Escombe was naturally reminded that he had often wished that he possessed a small yacht wherein to disport himself on the lake. Why should he not have one? His will was law; he had but to speak the word and the best and most skilled workers in the valley would be at his disposal for the construction of the vessel. And as to her design, why, he had always been an enthusiastic yacht sailor, and knew, as well as most amateurs, what the shape of such a craft should be, and was quite capable of putting that shape on paper in a form that could be worked from.
Escombe’s mind was made up: he would destroy those plesiosauri, and to destroy them a suitable boat was necessary. That boat might be so designed and built as to also afford him a great deal of pleasure, and he would have her. And thereupon he set to work and devoted every minute he could spare to the preparation of her design, which, a week later, was in the hands of a small army of carpenters, eager to show what they could do in a line of work that was entirely new to them.