"We are not, then, to be shot?" I asked, as a gleam of hope brightened before me.
"No," said he, with an icy smile, as his dark fierce face came close to mine, like that of a handsome spectre in the moonlight and as the whole band began to move; "we will give you to drink of the Rio de Muerte."
The River of Death!—our blood ran cold at these words; but no time was left us for expostulation, as we were hurried up the hills, over wild and furzy banks, where the laurel, the vine, and the fair yellow paunch of the gourd grew together in luxuriance; and among rocks, where the nimble goat browsed, and the untamed porker flew before us, squeaking from his lair, among the aromatic plants, the long reedy grass, the giant fern, and the broad-leaved dock. Up, up we went, alternately clambering, or being pushed and dragged, until we gained the brow of a steep hill, from which we saw beneath us in the broad, clear, liquid moonlight, the waters of the Guadalquiver winding away between groves of the orange and the olive, to San Lucar, and in the middle distance, but far down below us, the white houses of Trohniona clustered round their little church.
CHAPTER XIII.
PEDRO THE CONTRABANDISTA.
After a painful and anxious hour elapsed, and we had traversed about two miles of a steep and craggy ascent, until we reached a part of the mountain range which was entirely covered by a little forest of laurels. Above us, in the dark blue sky, the moon was hanging like a large silver globe, and the flood of clear cold light it diffused over the distant landscape enabled us to distinguish objects with great minuteness. Thus I could trace the gleaming course of the Guadalquiver, as it wound down from Seville past Borminos, the mouth of the Guadamar, and the hills that overhang Dos Hermanos; while other sierras in the distance undulated afar off, like the waves of a petrified sea, if such a simile may be allowed me. Light glinted at times upon the river. It came from a passing steamer. Down there in the valley was the civilisation of our own time; yet we were about to perish by the hands of outlaws, whose bearing and character were worthy of the middle ages, or the mistier time that lies beyond them.
Jack Slingsby and I had scarcely spoken during our steep and rapid clamber, but our thoughts were the same; anxiety—intense anxiety—for our fate; repugnance for our captors, and a natural horror of dying a barbarous death at their hands, on these remote and lonely mountains; far from help, far from justice and from civilisation; a death, of which our friends, our relations, and our comrades would never hear—would never know; for our fate would become a mystery, which all the captains general, the ambassadors, the chargés des affaires, and even the correspondents of the "Times" would be unable to clear up or unravel,—as it was the purpose of these wretches, whose prey we had become, to hide for ever our remains, and the very means of our death, as completely as if we had been flung into Mount Etna.
In this sequestered part of the mountain chain, hidden among the thickly-twined laurels, the wild and straggling vines, and the densely-matted jungle of gourds, and other luxuriant creepers, there suddenly yawned a chasm in the granite rocks—a black profundity of unknown depth. The gaping rent was about twenty feet broad by some hundred in length, but its mouth was greatly diminished by the bordering foliage and wild plants that overhung it. Far down, perhaps five hundred feet below (for the bottom was unseen), there rolled with a deep, hoarse, roaring sound the Rio de Muerte—the River of Death—a subterranean tributary of the Guadalquiver; and its strange and hollow voice as it gurgled, surged, and bellowed through the clefts and fissures in the heart of the mountains, filled me with a pang of horror. Here we paused, and our captors muttered one to another under their thick beards, smoked their paper cigaritos, and leaned leisurely on their short escapetas, or long-barrelled muskets, and seemed to await the approach of Fabrique de Urquija, who was some yards behind us, and came up very much at his ease.
"My God!" said my friend, "if it be their purpose to—to——"
"To throw us down there, you would say? My dear Slingsby, such seems indeed to be their dreadful purpose, and I see here but little hope of mercy or of charity, where bribes greater than those of that infamous major have failed before a savage idea of honour and the fulfilment of a villanous trust."