When they arose on the following morning, rested and refreshed by their long night’s sheltered sleep, but weak and famished with hunger which even their coca leaves could now but partially relieve, nature was again kind to them, for the air was still and so crystalline clear that they were able to determine accurately their road for many miles ahead; while, most welcome sight of all, in a little sheltered valley, some six miles away, on a small patch of green, they perceived a flock of some twenty vicuña grazing. Here, at last was food for them once more, if they could but reach within bowshot without alarming the animals; and to this task they bent all their energies, with such success that three hours later they were gorging themselves to repletion on the raw flesh of one of the animals, being still without the materials wherewith to kindle a fire. But this marked the end of their troubles; for before the night again closed down upon them they had not only passed below the snow-line, but were also fortunate enough to encounter an Indian who was herding a flock of llama; and upon Phil addressing the man in his own language—of which, it will be remembered, Stukely had acquired a knowledge in some extraordinary and quite incomprehensible manner—the fellow received them with open arms, conducted them to his hut, fed them as they had not been fed since they had fallen into the hands of the Spaniards, and not only lodged them for the night, but gave them minute instructions how they were to proceed during the following day. Four days later they arrived at the northern extremity of the Sacred Lake.
They reached its margin at the precise moment that the sun sank beyond the long line of lofty, rugged, snow-clad peaks that ran parallel to the lake on its western side. The evening was perfectly calm and cloudless, save in the west, where an agglomeration of delicate rosy-purple streaks and patches of vapour lay softly upon a clear background of palest blue-green sky, forming the picture of a fairy archipelago of thickly clustering islands, intersected by a bewildering maze of channels winding hither and thither, with the thin sickle of the young moon, gleaming softly silver-white, hanging just above the whole. It was one of those skies that set the imaginative dreamer’s fancy free to wander afar into the realms of fairyland and to picture all sorts of strange, unreal happenings; the sort of sky that probably suggested to the simple mind of the Indian the poetic idea that when gazing upon it he was vouchsafed a vision of the Isles of the Blessed where dwell the souls of the departed in everlasting bliss; and for full five minutes after the two Englishmen had halted by the margin of the lake, the smooth, unruffled surface of which repeated the picture as in a mirror, they stood gazing, entranced, upon the loveliness of the scene that lay spread out before them.
In front of them and almost at their feet lay the placid waters of the lake, bordered with reeds and rushes just where they happened to stand, its glassy, mirrorlike surface faithfully reproducing every soft, delicate tint of the overarching sky, the bank of rosy clouds in the west, the cold, pure blue of the snow-capped sierras on their right, the ruddy blush of the peaks on their left—upon the summits of which the last rays of the vanished sun still lingered, to change to purest white even as they gazed—and every clump of sombre olive vegetation between. To the right and left of them, a few miles apart, two streams, having their sources in the neighbouring mountains, discharged into the lake; and so perfectly still was the air that the murmur of their waters came faint but clear to the ears of the two comrades who had travelled so many hundreds of miles with that scene as their goal. To right and left of them the shores of the lake swept away in many a curve and bay and indentation clear to the horizon, and far beyond it; and in the whole of that fair landscape never a sign of life, human or animal! Yet, stay; what was that dark film, like a tiny cloud, that came sweeping down toward them from far up the lake? Dick, the practical, was the first to catch sight of it, for Phil was standing like one in a trance gazing at the scene with a retrospective look in his eyes that seemed to say his thoughts were far away. As Dick watched the approaching cloud-like film it resolved itself into a flock of wild ducks, making, as it seemed, directly for the patch of rushes near which the two were standing, and, with the momentous question of supper looming large in his mind, Chichester plucked his companion by the sleeve, pointed to the approaching wild ducks, and suggested the propriety of immediately seeking some hiding-place until the birds had settled.
“A murrain on you and your ducks, Dick!” exclaimed Stukely, in a tone half-pettish, half-playful; “you have jolted me out of a reverie in which I was endeavouring to account for the extraordinary feeling that sometime in the past I have beheld this very scene, even as I behold it now. Of course I know that it is only a fancy; I know that I have never before stood on the soil which my feet are pressing at this moment; yet, believe me or not, as you please, all this”—he waved his right hand before him to right and left—“is absolutely familiar to me, as familiar as though I had lived here all my life! Nothing is changed, except that the clumps of bush seem to have approached a little closer to the margin of the lake, and—yes, you see that low bluff yonder? Well, when I last looked upon it—oh, well! never mind; you are laughing at me, and I have no right to be surprised that you should do so; but, all the same, I know exactly where we are now; I know that there are islands out there on the lake, beyond the horizon, and I know which of them it is that we must visit—I shall recognise it instantly when I see it; remember my words. And now, come along, and let us see whether we can get one or two of those ducks; they seem to be making for the reeds yonder.”
The pair crept down to the margin of the patch of reeds, and concealed themselves therein; and scarcely had they done so when the flock came sweeping along with a great rush of wings, wheeled, and finally settled, with loud quacks—probably of satisfaction that their day’s work was over, and that they were once more back in their haven of rest. Then the two muskets—which the wanderers had tenaciously retained throughout their perilous journey across the mountains—barked out their death message simultaneously, and the flock rose again with loud squawks of alarm, leaving a round dozen of their number, either dead or badly wounded, behind them. Ten minutes later, as the brief twilight was rapidly deepening into night, the nude figures of the two Englishmen scrambled out of the water, each bearing his quota of dead wild duck, and, laying their spoils upon the ground, nonchalantly proceeded to resume the quaint garments of skins that now constituted their only clothing.
Long into the night sat the pair, crouching over their camp fire, for though the days were hot the nights were bitterly cold, even in that valley between the two ranges of mountains; and while Dick gazed abstractedly aloft into the velvet blackness at the innumerable stars that glittered above him through the frosty atmosphere, Phil spoke of the strange dreams—which he persisted, half-jestingly and half in earnest, in regarding as memories—that visited him so frequently, of curious scenes that he had witnessed and remarkable deeds that he had done in the far past, either in imagination or reality, he could not possibly say which. And while he talked and Dick listened, vacillating between amusement and conviction, some twenty stalwart figures, thin and aquiline of feature, copper-hued of skin, and strangely clothed, came creeping up out of the darkness until they reached a clump of bush within earshot of the pair, where they lurked, waiting patiently until the audacious intruders upon their most sacred territory should resign themselves to sleep—and to a captivity which, as planned by the chief figure of the group, was to be of but brief duration, ending in a death of unspeakable horror.