Sir Francis and Topsie were the first to rise, and they beheld a strange sight indeed. A great landslip had taken place, and that which had but a moment before been a wide-stretching cave full of gold, was now a confused heap of rocks, and earth, and uprooted trees, lying pell-mell on the top of each other, and completely filling up the crater mouth of the wonderful mine. The raft had disappeared, and in its place a heap of earth, some twenty feet high by forty long, rose from out the river, entirely hiding the entrance. Wreck and ruin had indeed fallen above the vast store of gold.
“Merciful Providence!” exclaimed Sir Francis, as he gazed on the scene with deep awe. “Had it not been for Thy Almighty mercy, the great gold mine of Or would have been our grave and sepulchre. My children,” he continued, in a voice which trembled with feeling, “let us thank God from the bottom of our hearts for this almost miraculous deliverance.”
So this was the end of the mine of wealth which had lured James Outram to destruction, in which Miriam Vane and her child had met their death, and in which, nearly seventy years later, Sir Harry Vane had died? There, beneath those rocks, piled high above each other, slept the Trauco queen, and as Harry and Topsie looked on the old familiar scene, now so distorted, and thanked God for their strange deliverance, they could not help shuddering as they thought how near to hers had been their fate likewise.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Undisturbed, the travellers had made their way through the primeval forests which girt the Andes, and guided by Harry and Topsie, had at length reached the lonely hut, far up the mountain side, in which for so many years Sir Harry Vane had dwelt, and where Topsie, and Harry, and Aniwee in former wanderings had come upon him, living the life of a hermit, dead to that world to which he had died more than half a century before his young relatives had found him.
The hut still stood, yet in and around it the thick semi-tropical vegetation of those parts had grown up, almost obscuring it from view, and busy with the work of decay within. But all else Harry and Topsie had found unchanged. The broad green slope on the borders of which the hut stood, and which opened from the jungle around, was the same, and on it herds of wild cattle and horses were pasturing as of yore, while vicuña and deer made free with the rich grass which abounded thereon. And much as the party required meat, Sir Francis had forbidden these trusting animals to be attacked. It would have been a desecration in his eyes to have brought carnage and slaughter into a scene so peaceful, where the old hermit had taught the beasts of Nature to confide in, rather than fear man, and whose lesson still held sway amongst them, as was evidenced by their perfect trustfulness in the new-comers.
Only a short stay had been made in these parts, as Piñone was fidgeting to regain his own country, averring that unless they fell in with Tehuelche Indians in the Patagonian pampas, for which they were heading, the journey to the land of the Araucanians would be long and wearying.