Before he could get any further the pair threw themselves upon him and bore him to the ground; and while Phil gripped the unfortunate man by the throat to prevent him from crying out and raising an alarm, Dick whipped out the rope which he had been carrying beneath his habit, and trussed up the worthy señor so securely that he could move neither hand nor foot. Then they gagged him very effectively by thrusting the hilt of one of his own daggers between his teeth and securing it there.
“Now, hark ye, friend Cervantes,” admonished Phil, “it is unfortunate for you that you have penetrated our disguises, since it will necessitate your remaining as you are until the morning, when no doubt someone will arrive to release you. We need certain weapons, and we propose to help ourselves to them; but you need not fear that you are about to be robbed; we will pay you generously for whatever we take. Now, Dick,” he continued, turning to Chichester, “pick your weapons, and let us begone, we have none too much time before daylight. I recommend for your choice, a good sword, a musket, a brace of pistols, with a good supply of ammunition for each, a stout dagger, a bow, arrows, and a good strong machete for general purposes. That, I think, will be quite as much as it will be advisable for us to cumber ourselves with.”
“So do I,” agreed Dick, dryly. “For my own part I am not at all sure that we could not dispense with the musket, which is a heavy, cumbersome thing to carry, and we may never need it. Still, I suppose we may as well take one apiece; we can always throw them away if we find them too troublesome. But how do you propose to pay the man, Phil? You know that we have no money.”
“True,” assented Phil; “but we have still the two emerald eyes of the idol which we found in that cave where we slew the monstrous beast: we will give him one of those in payment; and handsome payment it will be, too.”
“Ay, that it will,” agreed Dick. “I had entirely forgotten about those emeralds. Give him one of them, by all means; we can then help ourselves, with a clear conscience, to the best the shop affords.”
Swiftly, yet with the greatest care, the two Englishmen selected the weapons which they required, together with as much ammunition as they considered it wise to cumber themselves with; after which Phil extracted from a pocket in his puma-skin tunic one of the emeralds which he had mentioned, and holding it close to the eyes of the prostrate armourer, said:
“You see that, my friend? It is an emerald; and its value is about one hundred times that of what we have taken from you. Nevertheless, I am going to leave it with you for payment. See, there it is.” And he placed the stone on the floor where Cervantes could see it. “And now, listen to me,” continued Phil. “You probably have it in your mind to go to the authorities to-morrow, as soon as you are released, and inform them of this visit of ours to you. Isn’t that so? Yes, I can see by the expression of your eyes that I have guessed aright. Well, friend, be advised by me: Don’t do it. Remember that we have escaped from the Inquisition; and if the Head of that institution should learn that we have been here, he will certainly hold you responsible for our escape from the town; and it will be useless for you to say that you could not help yourself, that we surprised and overpowered you, and helped ourselves to some of your property; he will simply reply that you ought not to have allowed yourself to be surprised and overpowered, that you knew two prisoners had escaped, and that you should have had wit enough to have seen through our disguise and given the alarm before we had time or opportunity to overpower you. And I suppose I need not remind you of what your fate will be in that case. Therefore, think well over the matter, and do nothing that you may afterward regret. You should be easily able to concoct a story to account for your present plight that should satisfy those who may find you in the morning, without referring to us. And now we will leave you. Farewell!”
Therewith the two friends extinguished the lamps, and, taking the candle, retired from the shop, quietly closing the door behind them. The light of the candle enabled them easily to unfasten the outer door; and, this done, they blew out the light, silently opened the door, and cautiously peered out into the street. It was silent and deserted, therefore, without further ado, they tiptoed down the steps, closing the door behind them as they went, and, keeping within the shadows as much as possible, hastened in the direction which would take them out of the city. An hour later they were clear of Cuzco, and using the stars as their guide, were speeding along a fairly good road which led in a south-easterly direction, intending to strike off to the eastward in search of the river some twenty or thirty miles farther on, since they suspected that the high road would be the last place where their pursuers would be likely to look for them. But about ten o’clock the next morning—having encountered meanwhile only a troop of some thirty loaded llamas with their attendant drivers, whom, having sighted them at a distance, they easily avoided by concealing themselves until the whole had passed—they unexpectedly came upon the river again where a bend brought it close to the road; they therefore deserted the latter at this point, and, although the going was by no means so easy, thenceforward followed the river until at length they reached its source high up among the Andes of Carabaya.
And now ensued a period of incredible hardship and suffering for the adventurous pair; for they were now among the most lofty of those stupendous peaks which run in an almost unbroken chain from one end of the continent to the other, from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the north to within little more than one hundred miles from the Strait of Magellan in the south; and their way lay over boundless snowfields, across enormous glaciers gashed with unfathomable crevasses, up and down stupendous precipices, and along narrow, ice-clad ledges, where a single false step must have hurled them to death thousands of feet below. To journey amid such surroundings was of course bad enough in itself; but the hardship of it was increased tenfold for the two Englishmen, from the fact that they came new to it and without experience, after months of life in the torrid lowlands had thinned their blood and rendered them peculiarly sensitive to the piercing cold of those high altitudes, which was further intensified by the icy winds which seemed to rage continuously about the peaks and come howling at them through the ravines. Add to this the difficulty of obtaining food—for there was no life among those mountain solitudes, save an occasional llama or guanaco, so wild as to be scarcely approachable, and a condor or two soaring aloft at such a height as to be scarcely distinguishable to the unaided eye—and the impossibility of making a fire, and the reader will be able to form some faint idea of what Phil and Dick were called upon to endure while making that awful passage over the mountains. Fortunately for them, it lasted only five days; had it been prolonged to six they must inevitably have perished. Fortunately, also, for them, they had acquired from the Indians a knowledge of the wonderful, almost miraculous, virtue that lay in the coca leaf—with a bountiful supply of which they had been careful to provide themselves—otherwise even their indomitable hardihood and courage must have succumbed to the frightful toil, privation, and exposure which they were obliged to undergo. A detailed description of that five days’ journey over the mountains would of itself suffice to fill a book, for it would be a record of continuous adventure and hairbreadth escapes from avalanches that were constantly threatening to overwhelm them; of treacherous snow-bridges that crumbled away beneath their feet; of furious, icy winds that, seeming to be imbued with demoniac intelligence and malignity, always assailed them in some especially perilous situation, and sought to buffet them from their precarious hold; and of long hours of intolerable suffering when, during the hours of darkness, they were compelled to camp on some snow-patch and build themselves a snow-hut as a partial protection from the howling, marrow-piercing, snow-laden gale. Such a narrative, however, exciting as it might be in its earlier pages, would soon grow wearisome from the rapidity with which one adventure would tread upon the heels of another, and can therefore only be hinted at here. Suffice it to say that early in the afternoon of the fourth day, upon surmounting the crest of a long ridge of ice-encased rock, at a moment when the demon of the mountain had temporarily withdrawn himself elsewhere, and the atmosphere was for a brief space calm and clear, the two weary and exhausted adventurers caught a brief but entrancing glimpse of a long green valley stretching away ahead of them between the two mountain ranges, with an island-dotted lake in the far distance, and Sorata’s dominating ice-clad peak piercing the blue sky to the left of it. At last, at last, their goal was in sight; and incontinently they flung themselves down, gasping, upon the iron-hard rock, and gazed entranced upon the glorious vision—thrice glorious to them after all that they had suffered—until another great snow-cloud evolved itself out of nothing and swooped down upon them in a final effort at destruction.
The gale and snowstorm lasted less than an hour, however, and when at length the atmosphere again cleared the two friends, who had been crouching under the sheltering lee of a great shoulder of rock, rose to their feet and again looked forth toward the land of promise. A vast snowfield, corrugated by the wind as the sand of the seashore is by the rippling advance of the tide, but otherwise smooth of surface, and gently sloping downward, offered them an easy road for the first two miles of their descent; and, weary though they were, they traversed it in half an hour. Then came an almost perpendicular descent of some five hundred feet to another snowfield, where, in a deep recess that might almost have been termed a cave in a great spur of rock, they camped comfortably for the night and enjoyed the sweetest rest that they had known for many a long day.