“Surely, not ‘Adios,’ but—until the next time, Sajipona,” he replied, as he bowed himself from the sala.
Raoul’s belief in the legend involved in Sajipona’s name marked a radical change which he had undergone since he arrived in Bogota. To his keen, logical mind the proposal to enlist in a quest for the long lost El Dorado seemed, at first, far too quixotic to be taken seriously. But he humored the idea, originating in David’s fondness for studies touching the borderlands of romance, in the hope that he would divert a purely fanciful project into more profitable channels. Later on, however, he was himself caught by the practical possibilities lurking in the old Chibcha legend. Hence, it followed that while David was enjoying the picturesque life of the little mountain capital, Raoul was delving in musty records, running down old traditions, and studying the topography of the Bogota tableland with a degree of patience as to details that the subject had rarely received. For days at a time he burrowed in the crumbling archives of the Museo Nacional, an unpretentious little edifice, not far from the palace of San Carlos, in which were stored, pell-mell, practically every evidence that remained of Colombia’s prehistoric civilization. Here, with only the grey, shrivelled mummies of two ancient kings of the Chibchas to watch him, he had reconstructed, as best he could, the past of this vanished race of people, had convinced himself of their wealth, scarcely any of which had fallen into the hands of the Spanish, and had laid his plans for discovering a treasure which had balked every explorer before him.
Combined with these studies in the National Museum and in the vicinity of Lake Guatavita, Raoul had busied himself with the peons of the neighborhood. From these primitive people he learned enough to corroborate the main features in the Chibcha tradition as handed down by Castellanos, Pedro Simon, Piedrahita, and other chroniclers of the Spanish Conquest. In addition, he unearthed the curious legend that the Sacred Lake would never yield up its treasure except to one in whose veins flowed the blood of the Chibcha kings. This bit of prophetic romance had come, it was said, from father to son through the four centuries following the martyrdom of the last of the zipas. He was told, also—and it added to the fantastic character of the prophecy—that a secret, known only to the zipas and their direct descendants, attached to Lake Guatavita, and that by means of this secret the treasure hidden beneath its waters would be discovered.
Raoul at first paid little heed to this part of the legend. It had too strong a flavor of latter-day romance to go for more than a recent addition to the main story of the wealth of the Chibcha kings and their peculiar religious customs. The persistence of the idea, however, the belief in its truth on the part of those repeating it, gradually excited his interest and led him into all kinds of theories as to the existence and recovery of the Guatavita treasure.
That so fanciful a legend could have won even the partial belief of so ingrained a skeptic as Raoul seems at first absurd on the face of it. But most of us can recall instances enough of similar lapses from the hypercritical to the over-superstitious to make this one not altogether incredible. As often happens, also, in such cases—as with those otherwise reasonable persons who believe in fortune-telling, omens, apparitions, etc.,—this bit of superstition, having once lodged itself in Raoul’s mind, increased in importance, opening up an absorbing field for his love of psychological novelties, until it finally became a monomania, an obsession, as the scientists call it.
These ancient zipas, he argued, were the chieftains of a superior race of people. In the annual tribute from the royal treasury to the national god, who was supposed to live at the bottom of Lake Guatavita, they catered to the credulity of their subjects while, in reality, laughing in their sleeves at them, so to speak, all the time. Men of their intelligence were not apt literally to throw away wealth they had themselves amassed, and which they must consider as belonging to them and to their descendants. But as they—apparently—did throw it away, it was more than likely that they used some kind of hocus-pocus, known only to themselves, by means of which the God Chibchacum—in whose existence they did not believe—was cheated of his annual tribute. How they practiced this deception they must surely have told their children. The coming of the Spaniards, however, and the overthrow of the ancient dynasty, had made of the whole affair a greater secret than ever. It would be handed down from one generation to another so long as there were descendants of the zipas; but these survivors of the royal line would find it increasingly difficult, owing to the presence of the Spaniards, to take the steps needed to recover their ancestral treasure.
There was some plausibility in Raoul’s reasoning, enough, perhaps, to excite the romancer’s interest, but scarcely that of the practical man of affairs to whom are broached the details of a mining venture. Conviction grew, however, with Raoul, whose investigations were confined thenceforward less to the archæological aspects of the problem and more to the task of discovering the whereabouts of the living descendants of the zipas.
These speculations and the singular inquiry into which they had drawn his companion excited only a mild interest in David. The latter, strangely enough, enchanted with the picturesque novelty of the cloud-city in which he found himself, felt less of the antiquarian’s zeal than when Bogota was a remote geographical possibility. Perhaps it was the stimulus of mountain air, a bracing climate, that got him out of his habitual bookishness. Here, at any rate, there was neither the warmth nor the color of the tropics to entice him to the indolent dreaming that one of his temperament might easily yield to in the lowlands of Colombia. The peculiar lustre of the grey-green Bogota tableland, the cool crystalline atmosphere, invited him to continual physical exercise. For days at a time he went on long horseback rides. Then, tiring of this, and feeling something of the restraint experienced by the stranger who exerts himself abnormally in the rarefied air of the higher Andes, he fell into the easy habits of the pleasure-loving Bogotano. Muffled warmly in a ruana, he strolled comfortably about the streets of the city, amused by the chaffering of peons in the market place, enchanted by the quaint and varied architecture of the houses and public buildings, the grotesque paintings and bas-reliefs in the churches; or else he would sit by the hour in the open window of some cafe on the Cathedral Esplanade, watching the gay throng of idlers and politicians for whom this is a favorite rendezvous. The dust and cobwebs of the Museo did not attract this former dabbler in antiquities, who abandoned himself eagerly to the fleeting impressions gathered from an altogether pleasing environment. And Raoul, naturally secretive, gave him the vaguest outline only of the course and the result of his studies.
The discovery that made the deepest impression on Raoul took place under circumstances which intensified his superstitious feeling in regard to everything connected with the buried treasure. He was on one of numerous trips to Lake Guatavita. Riding alone, he reached the gloomy body of water toward nightfall. Tethering his horse near the trail at the edge of the plain over which he had ridden, he approached the lake on foot, his mind penetrated by the absolute silence of the place. He had come for no specific purpose except to examine further the old Spanish cutting that gashes the great hill which originally rose, a solid wall of rock, above the unknown depths of the waters. Through this narrow cleft, on the instant that it was completed three centuries ago, a mighty torrent had hurled itself into the valley beyond. As this torrent subsided and the lake shrank to its present compass, a wide margin of precipitous shore was left bare to the scrutiny of treasure seekers. Even after the lapse of centuries this portion of the lake’s basin still shows the ravages wrought by the Spaniards. It remains a gaunt, jagged surface of rock and flinty gravel, unclothed by tree or shrub—an ancient sanctuary whose violation defies the repairs of time.
Raoul smiled contemptuously at these evidences of the rude labors of the early Spaniards. With modern science to back him he would not attack the problem in this way. He would pierce this ancient secret to its heart by subtlety, not brute force. For the hundredth time he went over the system of lines and levels by which he and David planned to tunnel their way to the coveted prize, indicating to himself the various points from which they proposed to start their work, and noting and comparing the obstacles they would encounter by each route.