“The wool of the vicuña, only,” he mumbled, disappointedly, but with the expert’s air. “But why should they ceil that up? Perhaps there is also cloth.”
In went the brown fist again; and rummaging down through the silken fleece, his fingers met something firmer. In a moment he had it out—a long bundle of that matchless weaving of old Peru; of cloth as soft and strong as silk, woven with strange figures of men and gods and beasts; such fabrics as never unthinking loom has woven, nor any machine less wondrous than the fingers of a man.
“Ay! It will be worth twenty soles!” cried Faquo softly. “But it is so heavy! Perhaps they have wound it on a stone.”
Very tenderly he unrolled it, that none of those bright threads—stronger than all the centuries, but brittle to a careless touch—might be broken. But when the last fold came off, this very stupid Indian boy fell down on his knees in the sand, and cried and cried. For it was not a stone at all.
If you will go to the Exposicion in Lima, among the bewildering collections of Peruvian antiquities, you can see two priceless idols, each big as a large doll. They are like human figures, excellently sculptured; and the strangest thing about them is that they are made of alternate zones of gold and silver from feet to head, so that they remind one of that great image we read of in Revelations.
That is the nearest Faquito ever came to finding the Pez Grande—and quite near enough for one poor boy. And that is what took my breath away when I had wakened and hauled up with my reata the little, ragged cholo I accidentally spied in the trap where he had cried himself to sleep over something hugged in his arms.
When he had laid the precious images and the spade on the broad top of the wall, and told me all about it, he insisted on being lowered again on the rope to get the owl, which he loosed and let go, saying, in the tone of an old man:
“Taita Diós—God our Father—sends us friends we know not. For the owl brought me here and showed me the place, so that now we are very rich. And even so, I could have died there without the help of you. So I think your grace may be even as wise as the owl, which knows where is the Pez Grande.”