In Search of El Dorado

by Harry Collingwood

The meal over, Earle unpacked, his medicine chest and mixed a sufficient quantity of medicine to serve his patients through the night, and took it up to the village, where he remained nearly three hours ministering to the sick, and talking, through Inaguy, to Yahiti, the chief of the Catus. When at length he returned to the camp he was in the highest spirits, for the somewhat incomprehensible reason that Yahiti had informed him that the country lying between the Catu and the Mangeroma territories was extraordinarily difficult, and full of the most weird and terrible perils.

On the following morning the two friends were astir with the dawn, Earle having expressed a desire to inspect the great swamp in the neighbourhood, to which he attributed the epidemic of fever from which the inhabitants of the village were suffering. This swamp was situated at the distance of about a mile south-east from the village, and was of such an extent that whenever the wind blew from either the east or the south—these being the prevailing winds there—the pestiferous odours arising from it were wafted directly toward the village; and Earle’s idea was to investigate, with the view of ascertaining whether anything could be done to reclaim the swamp, failing which he proposed to recommend the Catus to abandon the place and take up their abode elsewhere.

Upon reaching the swamp, it was found to lie in a shallow depression, roughly circular in shape and some three miles in diameter, its deepest part—about eight feet—being nearest the village, while at its upper extremity it was fed by a small stream of a capacity just about sufficient to neutralise the constant process of evaporation without being enough to produce an overflow. Further than that, it occupied such a position that a trench little more than a quarter of a mile in length and averaging a depth of about nine feet was all that was needed to drain the swamp by carrying off the water and discharging it into a valley some three-hundred feet deep.

An alternative scheme which Earle also investigated was the diversion of the stream which supplied the swamp with water; and this was also found possible by cutting a trench about two hundred yards long; but it was open to the objection that, in order to do it, the workers would be obliged to walk a distance of nearly twelve miles daily to and from their work, and he doubted whether the Catus were energetic enough to do it.

The task of convincing the Catus that they must do away with the swamp or abandon the village, unless they were prepared continually to suffer from fever, was a long and troublesome one, the Indians having a strong constitutional objection to anything in the nature of hard work; but Earle succeeded at length, and actually got them started on the work of cutting the drainage ditch, that scheme having been chosen as the one promising the quickest results and involving the least labour. By the time that this was done the invalids were all recovered from their sickness; and ten days after their arrival at the Catu village the exploring party resumed their march, to the loudly expressed regret of the inhabitants, who urgently pressed them to remain, and would quite possibly have detained them by force, but for fear of exciting the anger of the stone god.

The journey was resumed immediately after breakfast on a certain morning, and before the hour for the first halt arrived the party began to realise the truth of Yahiti’s story that the route was full of difficulties, if not of dangers; for it lay over rugged country so thickly bestrewn with enormous boulders that Earle likened the journey to the exploration of San Francisco immediately after the earthquake. Of course, they went round the boulders when such a course was possible, but it very frequently happened that long reefs of rock projected out of the ground for miles on either hand, when, difficult though the task might be, it became easier to climb up one side and down the other, than to pass round. Two miles was the extent of their journey over that kind of country which they were able to accomplish before sunset; and when at length they camped they were little more than eight miles from the Catu village.

To travel over such country was wearisome in the extreme, but there was nothing for it but to push on, or else make a détour of unknown extent; and this idea Earle would not entertain for a moment. On the following day, therefore, they resumed their journey, although with every yard of advance the difficulties appeared to grow more formidable.

It was about mid-morning when they reached the base of a cliff some forty feet high that, being practically vertical, seemed to bar their further progress, and after contemplating it for several minutes, Earle decided to make the spot a halting place while he and Dick explored the cliff in opposite directions in search of a practicable crossing. Accordingly, while the natives were forming camp, the two white men, taking their rifles and a few cartridges, set off along the foot of the cliffs, Earle proceeding in a north-westerly direction, while Dick proceeded toward the south-east.

The rock of which the cliff was formed was, for some considerable distance in the direction followed by Dick, quartzite; but at a point about a mile from the spot where he had parted from Earle it changed to a black, bituminous limestone, studded here and there with ammonites. Dick, who knew little or nothing about geology, merely noticed the change in the character of the rock, and sauntered on, eagerly scanning its face, in the hope of finding a spot where it might be scalable by men carrying moderately heavy burdens. And at length he reached, as he believed, such a spot, where the black rock seemed to have been riven by some mighty natural convulsion, the rift forming a steep and exceedingly narrow gully leading to the summit. Naturally, he at once started to climb this gully, with the object of testing its practicability; and he had traversed nearly two-thirds of its length when, as he scrambled up, his attention was suddenly attracted to a sort of pocket in the rock, which had been laid open by a fall. What particularly attracted his attention toward this pocket was the fact that it contained a considerable number of bright green crystals, which struck him as being peculiar not only from their rich colour, but also from the fact that they were all of practically the same shape, namely hexagonal. So greatly did he admire them that he put a couple of the largest in one of his pockets, intending to show them to Earle and ask him whether perchance they were of any value. Then he pushed on again and soon reached the upper end of the gully, when he found himself, somewhat to his amazement, on a vast tableland, stretching as far as could be seen, with what looked like a big forest at a distance of some ten miles.

Having completed his survey, Dick descended the gully and returned to the camp, to find that Earle was still absent; he therefore set out to seek him and report his success. Some two miles beyond the camp he met the American returning, considerably disgusted, he having failed in his search, and at once Dick reported his triumph, incidentally producing the crystals and asking if Earle happened to know what they were.