“It is Guatavita!” he said.
Of course, that was it! Herran and Leighton gasped for a moment as they took in the idea, and then they agreed that Miranda was right. Raoul smiled enigmatically as they discussed the problem in detail.
“Well, do you understand it now?” he asked. “Have you discovered Guatavita’s secret? I wish I had known it three years ago!” he added bitterly.
“Ah! I see—I see!” shouted the doctor excitedly. “There is the well that come out at the bottom of the lake. Here is the magnet that go down there just when the people throw in all the gold. And then it come back here—and no one know except the king and his family. So, every year, they take all the gold of the country. Ah! they are very wise leetle fellows, those kings!”
“Then, if this is true,” said Leighton meditatively; “if this well has its outlet at the bottom of the lake, and was made and used secretly to collect, by means of the Black Magnet, the treasure offered by the people in the Feast of El Dorado, to-day there is no gold left in Guatavita.”
“If it were drained of all its waters,” remarked Raoul, “I believe that the emptied basin would be found to contain nothing more than a few stray gold ornaments—like the one you fished up just now—that failed to reach the Black Magnet when they were flung into the lake centuries ago.”
“Your plans to empty the lake, then, are useless?”
“After what I have learned to-day, added to what I have long suspected, I should say—quite useless.”
“But the fabulous amount of treasure those deluded people threw into the lake for centuries——?”
“Has all come up here, where we are standing now, caught by the Black Magnet.”