Amos came often to the hut, and Mr. Forsyth was always with him; and, as I knew, it was the last-named who had paid for all. That, however, was all one to me. I was safely caught, thousands of miles from dear, silly Sussex; and even if I was so fortunate as to escape from Joshua Trust, what was I to do in that foreign land, where I could not speak a word of the language and had no friend to whom to go?
On the fourth day of my captivity came six mules, and with them three men whom I took to be half-castes of a sort, for they were no more than two parts black and spoke Spanish, shouting at one another when they conversed. But I was more interested in the mules, which were of a kind that I had never seen before; for they were small animals, little larger than donkeys, with mouse-grey woolly coats like sheep. Each of these was provided with a pack-saddle; and when they were loaded for the inspection of Amos Baverstock and Forsyth, I was amazed at the great weight that such slender and seemingly fragile beasts could carry.
On the fifth day after we had left the ship, we set forth upon our great march towards the south. Our party numbered eight in all: Amos, Forsyth, and Trust (the first the acknowledged leader of the expedition); myself and the three mulemen, whilst the other was a guide--a lean, cadaverous Spaniard, black as a raven, whom I never heard called by any other name than that of Vasco. I do not think this fellow was an evil man by nature, except in so far as he was capable of doing almost anything for money. In that, at any rate, he was honest: he served his masters faithfully, no matter who they were.
And now we come to the march itself that, step by step, led me farther and farther from the confines of civilisation and into the heart of a cruel and magic wilderness where things happened that I should not believe, had I not seen them with my eyes.
The first stage of our journey was uneventful enough; and the scenery--especially on the mountains we were obliged to cross--surprisingly beautiful. We first climbed to a great height, following a zig-zag road, along which the little mules struggled gallantly with their heavy loads. I had thought that, on gaining the crestline, we must again descend to something approaching the level of the sea. But this was not so; for the mountains proved to consist of a series of parallel chains, and no sooner had we negotiated one valley than we found ourselves upon the watershed of another.
These valleys were thickly populated. We were seldom out of sight of villages and towns, many of which contained considerable buildings. The country had the aspect of being extremely fertile and prosperous. There were plantations of coffee and cocoa, tobacco and cotton, but a far greater area of the valley regions was given over to the cultivation of manioc and maize. For all I could ever learn, there was no flour in the land, for I never tasted bread, but subsisted upon hot maize cakes, made by Vasco, the guide, which I found as good as hot-cross buns.
When we were clear of the mountains, we began to descend into the valley of a great river which, had I learned more geography when I was at school, I would have known to be the Orinoco. The course of this great stream we followed for many days, marching in a south-westerly direction, against the current. The climate was now a great deal hotter than it had been near the coast, and towns and villages were few and far between. One thing that I observed was the courteous behaviour of the inhabitants, who seldom failed to wave their hands to us and pass the time of day.
We came to a vast sea of grass where, here and there, were scattered woods; and finally, after crossing a river of some importance, a tributary of the Orinoco, we sighted a great mountain that overtopped the surrounding hills like a giant in the midst of pygmies.
Amos, who had been unusually reticent upon the line-of-march, now became talkative, almost hilarious. He carried constantly a grin upon his fox-like countenance, and would often chuckle to himself.
For the great mountain in front of us might be described as the gateway of the road to the Treasure we were seeking, and was marked upon the left-hand top corner of the map. It was called Mount Tigro, but by that name I have never been able to trace it upon any modern map, though it was shown to be about twenty miles south of the Rio Guaviare.