“It isn’t true,” she would say. “But you have no religion, and you don’t understand––as yet.”
“Don’t understand? And it isn’t true, eh? Well, you have mighty strange beliefs, young lady!”
“But not as strange and illogical as those you hold,” she replied.
“Oh, I don’t believe anything,” he answered, with a shrug of his shoulders. “I’m an agnostic, you know.”
“There is just where you mistake, Mr. Harris,” she returned gravely. “For, instead of not believing anything, you firmly believe in the presence and power of evil. It is just those very people who boast that they do not believe in anything who believe most thoroughly in evil and its omnipotence and omnipresence.”
Yes, even the animals which she saw about her were but the human mind’s concepts of God’s ideas––not real. Adam 370 had named them. In the Bible allegory, or dream, the human, mortal mind names all its own material concepts.
The days wore on with dull regularity. From the rippling Tiguicito, which they reached choking with thirst and utterly exhausted, they dropped down again to the Boque, where they established camps and began to prospect the Molino company’s “near-mines,” as Harris called them after the first few unsuccessful attempts to get “colors” out of the barren soil. At certain points, where there seemed a more likely prospect, they remained for days, until the men, under Rosendo’s guidance, could sink pits to the underlying bedrock. Such work was done with the crudest of tools––an iron bar, wooden scrapers in lieu of shovels, and wooden bateas in which the men handed the loosened dirt up from one stage to another and out to the surface. It was slow, torturing work. The men grew restive. The food ran low, and they complained.
Then Harris one evening stumbled upon a tapir, just as the great animal had forded the river and was shambling into the bush opposite. He emptied his rifle magazine into the beast. It fell with a broken hip, and the men finished it with their machetes. Its hide was nearly a half inch in thickness, and covered with garrapatas––fierce, burrowing vermin, with hooked claws, which came upon the travelers and caused them intense annoyance throughout the remainder of the journey.
Then Reed shot a deer, a delicate, big-eyed creature that had never seen a human being and was too surprised to flee. Later, Fidel Avila felled another with a large stone. And, finally, monkeys became so plentiful that the men all but refused to eat them any longer.
Two weeks were spent around the mouth of the Tiguicito and the Boque cañon. Then Reed gave the order to advance. The little party shouldered their packs and began the ascent of the ragged gorge. For days they clambered up and down the jagged walls of the cut, or skirted its densely covered margin. Twice Harris fell into the brawling stream below, and was fished out by Rosendo, his eyes popping, and his mouth choked with uncomplimentary opinion regarding mountain travel in the tropics. Once, seizing a slender vine to aid him in climbing, he gave a sudden lurch and swung out unexpectedly over the gorge, hundreds of feet deep. Again Rosendo, who by this time had learned to keep one eye on the ground and the other on the irresponsible Harris, rescued him from his perilous position.