It was remarkable that we encountered no temporary abodes, no camps, no settlements and no laggard or outpost of the elusive people.
The Professor, invincible in theorizing and pertinacious in assertion, animadverted on our discoveries in this way:
“Well, these Radiumites show a sort of frustrated culture. They have some specialized knowledge, and then again they are in other respects primitive. It’s a very interesting ethnological problem. It’s a well known circumstance that civilizations decline or even degenerate. The modern Indian of Mexico or Peru offers a sad contrast to his ancestors, but in the useful arts, as Tylor remarks, a skill once acquired is seldom or never abandoned or forgotten. If these people could smelt iron they certainly would not resort to stone for felling trees. Races like the New Zealanders have never learned to reduce iron from its ore, though iron ore abounds in their country.”
The trails and roads proved to be labyrinthine, and led us over long and useless journeys, frequently back to our starting point. It was Goritz who solved their apparent confusion and proved that they were parts of intersecting loops or circles, and that each series of circles connected with a succeeding one by roads leading always from the westernmost (or lowest) edge of each circle. These latter roads seemed radial and continuous. The plan was like this (Erickson showed me a drawing) with the circles a mile or half a mile in diameter.
But it was the Professor who detected a remarkable feature which plunged us all into renewed speculations and wondering surmises. In following one of these circular roads he observed that the area enclosed by it was a depression, and this fact, together with a less crowded growth and some previous clearing permitted him to note that an unusually large tree towered among the others, apparently exceeding them greatly in height and, rudely at least, it was at the center of the circular space.
As, at times yielding to a lotos-like influence, we now moved more deliberately, and would remain at one camping spot (this was before Goritz pointed out the more direct line of advance over the radiating roads) twenty or more hours, the Professor would direct his steps to this tree as a landmark. Some abstruse stirrings of suggestion urged him. But it seemed almost a miracle of second sight, for it uncovered an astounding system of combined surveying or charting, associated intricately with religious motives. He diverted our attention indeed to a search which enriched us with some valuable objects, though we were likely to have lost them all later. But it thus led to the denouement of an utterly unparalleled adventure by forcing us sharply upon the mysterious people who lived here, and opening up a chapter of incidents and episodes never otherwise related, except in tales of invention or in the dreams of disturbed and romancing minds.
He found his tree in a small, open, carefully cleared space, and on it were not only carvings of the ubiquitous serpent sign, but with this evidently scripts, which he interpreted as prayers, or sacred utterances and adjurations, and, more astonishingly, conventionalized GOLD images (hardly exceeding three or four inches in height) laid at the bottom of the tree. These images rudely symbolized a human figure enrolled in the coils of a serpent.
When he brought one of these images into our camp—he timidly refrained from disturbing the others—you may imagine our excitement. Goritz gazed and gazed at it in a trance of amazement and gloating. He wanted to set out on an excursion of discovery at once. But we overruled that. The Professor had our attention completely. His exploit gave a real authority to his entertaining disquisition. We were thoroughly interested.
“Yes, here is a stupendous theme—Serpent and Tree worship—developed on an unusual scale and in an unprecedented manner. You see this enormous forest is arranged in a chart-like manner into a series—I might say a Halysites, as it were—of encircling roadways, producing the effect of a garland of wreathed snakes, while in each fold or embrace, some tree, conspicuous for size or height, or some physical perfection, has been selected, about or around which again the serpentine coils are enwrapped, a splendid combination of tree and serpent worship ideographically presented in a park plan. Again the votive objects attached to the trees form a group of subordinated ornamental commemorative or religious symbols, and the whole display is ancestral, archaic, turanian, for Fergusson holds that no Aryan people succumbed to this peculiar cult, dimly shadowed forth in myth, fable and history at the first emergence of racial life.
“Think of the legendary lore connected with the strange prepossessions of early peoples, the myth of Adam and Eve and the Serpent; the brazen serpent lifted up in the wilderness by Moses, the Serpent of Epidaurus in the temple of Aesculapius, the dragon of the Argonauts, the serpent of the oracle at Delphi, in the grove of laurel trees; the serpent inhabiting a cave at Lanuvium, and wrought into religious practices; the ascription to serpents of healing powers and powers of divination; the snake in Indian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Assyrian religions. Think, Goritz and Erickson, of the tree worship of the Scandinavians, culminating in the Yggdrasill, the ash, whose branches spread over the whole world, and even reach up to heaven, the extended and dreadful homage paid to great snakes in America, still existing among the desert Indians of Arizona and New Mexico!