Chapter XI: Part THREE (6)

But the figure said, “I am the _Pathfinder_. I can find a path for you.” She lead on up the rock and Sard followed. He could see her in front of him; he followed where she trod. There was a great star above the crags. The crags were thick with greenish ice, the star shone upon the ice, till it glittered like a crown. Sard said, “I’ll put my hand on the crown of the mountain.”

At daybreak he came out on a wild place near a brook.

There was grass there whistling in the wind. There was a little bird somewhere, not far away, crying a double note that sounded like a curse, continually repeated. Sard drank of the brook, sheltered from the wind and slept; nor did he know when the woman had passed from there. Afterwards, he was puzzled about that part of his march; sometimes it was in his mind all blurred, like the events of a fever, sometimes it seemed the only reality among things dreamed.

When he woke he was out in the snowfields. He thought that he had reached the summit, but he found that he was only on the top of a small shoulder. Beyond and above him were crags, sprinkled, heaped or overwhelmed with snow, some of it dirty from fallings of rock, some of it violet from shadow, the rest of it glittering. There was no sign of any living thing. If he looked up, there were peaks glittering against the sky; if he looked down, there were glittering snowfields, crags and chasms.

He could not see the country from which he had come, because greyness was hiding it from him. Grey shapes, like the leaders of a herd, were moving into it. A herd of mists followed their leaders, so like oxen that he expected them to bellow. They jostled on in myriads till all the lower slopes of the mountains were blotted out. Soon a sea of mist washed all about those miles of Sierras; the peaks stood out of this sea like islands. “If that sea rises,” Sard thought, “I shall be drowned up here. I must move while I have light.”

He had his direction from the sun. He pushed on, now up, now down, over snow of every degree of rottenness. He had a little food left in his wallet. He guarded this, but slaked his thirst with snow and chewed upon a piece of his belt.

In the evening it began to blow bitterly cold with a small snow. In one of the whirls of the gale he found himself upon a piece of a made road. He could hardly believe his eyes; but there was no doubt: it had been made by men. It had been cut out of the side of the crag; the crag at its side had been carven with the figures of the gods. A tall god with his tongue transfixed by a bramble was pouring libation on an altar; beyond the altar was a door leading into the crag. As he stood there, the sun shone out through a rift to light the eyrie he was perched upon. Used as he was to heights, it made him sick to think of the will that had spent men, like water, to hew that rock at that height. The sun shone into the doorway. Looking within, he saw two figures upon a throne. They sat side by side, holding each other’s hands. They were staring straight at him.

“Yes,” he said, “what are you? Who are you there?”

Peering in, he saw that they were the bodies of a king and queen who had been buried there in that mountain tomb, perhaps centuries before the Spaniards came. He crept into the tomb to look at them. Once the door of a slab of stone had been mortared flush with the face of the crag, but it had fallen like most of the road that led to it. The mummies sat side by side, holding each other’s hands. Masks of gold still covered their faces. The masks had, no doubt, been modelled on the dead faces and preserved likenesses of that king and queen. Both were tiny; they looked like children to Sard. They were the rulers who had driven men up the mountain to make that road. All about the walls were paintings of the lives of those two.

“Ah,” Sard thought, “he was a king and when he died the kingdom fell to pieces. She knew that it would be so, so when he died she killed herself.”

The sun, which had been shining, was now suddenly blotted out again. A cloud of intense blackness seemed to rush out of the heaven to engulf the crag. The air was filled with crying and small snow. Sard sat there in the darkness and fell asleep at the feet of the king and queen.

He woke often, because it was so cold. Whenever he woke, he heard the gale full of bells tolling, or voices crying to him: often he answered them. Once or twice he went to the door to answer voices; but no one was there except the gale, full of small snow. He wondered if he were alive, or if this were death; not final death, but the leaving of the body which is the prelude to it.

In the morning the wind dropped: the snow ceased: the storm went bodily off across heaven like an army that had been beaten, in a sullen mass, with rearguards of sulphurous smoke followed fast by the angels of heaven with light. The sun followed hot upon it with fire, till presently it was far, far away, engaged upon the southern horizon.

As Sard came out into the sun, he saw a name cut or scratched upon the lintel of the door of the tomb. The letters were lastingly but rudely graven by a strong illiterate.

Gonzalez Medina.
1795.

“Gonzalez Medina,” he said. “That woman’s grandfather. The only man who ever crossed these mountains. Here I am upon his track. If he blazed his trail thus, I may still find my way out.”

The finding of that blaze was companionship to him all that day, which was a hard day, one of his hardest.

* * * * *

One of the worst of the hardships was the knowledge that all was not well with the _Pathfinder_. He had put so much of his virtue into that ship, that she was almost part of him. He felt that things were going wrong on board her. Sometimes, as he struggled on, he knew that someone was in his place, making evil, and that Captain Cary wanted him. He kept thinking that Father Garsinton had brought the evil.

He could not remember Father Garsinton clearly, yet he stayed in his mind, like a blur of evil.

* * * * *

Long afterwards, in thinking over his climbing of the Sierra, some things came back into his mind as pictures or dreams or happenings; he never knew really which they were. Often it seemed to him that at this point in his journey he heard a beating of pans and the murmuring of bees: he saw bees swarming and a big Spanish woman beating pans to make them settle. He asked to be allowed to beat pans; afterwards he hived the bees into a straw basket.

Then the woman suggested that he should drink some honey drink, and took him to a house where she and her husband, a much older and much yellower person, gave him drink in a strange cup and asked him what he saw after he had drunk.

He said, “I see a path leading upwards.”

They said, “Go along the path. Now what do you see?”

He said, “I see a little house at the end of the path, shining as though it was made of some white metal.”

They said, “Is the door open?”

He said, “No, the door is locked.”

They said, “Go and put your hand on the sill of the door and see if the key is there.”

He said, “It is there.”

They said, “Open the door and go in.”

He opened the door, but inside all was darkness with a smell of carib leaf which choked his throat and made his head stupid.

They said to him, “What do you see?”

He said, “Nothing but a brazier burning carib leaf, which throws out a thick smoke which chokes me.”

They said, “No; but to right and left of the brazier what do you see?”

He said, “Two pillars and a person bound to each pillar.”

They said, “Look well; who are the people bound to the pillars?”

He looked with all his strength into the thickness of the smoke. It was agony to him not to be able to see clearly, but he said, “One is Juanita de la Torre and the other is myself, and we are being choked by the smoke.”

They said, “It is not the smoke, it is something coming from the brazier.”

Then from the brazier the little tongues of flame, writhing among the carib leaves, changed to red snakes which were arms and hands that came twining about the throats of the two bound figures. The fire in the brazier glowed into the likeness of a human soul with the face of Father Garsinton, who laughed and said, “I crush you lesser spirits as a sacrifice to my master.”

Then all became dim with carib smoke choking and stupefying, but the words, “I crush you lesser spirits” were repeated many times, while the house, the honey-cup, and the Spanish man and woman faded and disappeared.

* * * * *

Soon after this he climbed a spine of rock, expecting to find on the further side a dip of snow with a higher spine beyond it. To his amazement, there was no such dip nor spine; but the slope of the mountain falling below him into a different world. On this ocean side of the Sierra there was no desert. Instead of a chaos of rock blasted by the sun to rottenness, there were heaves of hill flinging their waters to the forests. Forests covered the valleys like a fleece. In places where there was no forest Sard could see little white houses. The smoke of a train ran like a caterpillar along the valley beneath the foothills. Beyond the foothills was a dark mass, like a bar of metal, yet not like a bar of metal, because it seemed to be alive, it gave Sard the thought that it trembled: it was the sea.

Far away, on the brink of this darkness, was a smudge or cloud in which some chimneys stood like stalks. The smoke merged into the air so that a tiny golden dome glittered: it was the cathedral in San Agostino. Almost at once, quite clearly, though faintly, in some chance channel of upper air or freak of sound, the chimes from the dome reached Sard. It was a familiar Spanish chime to which Sard always put the words of the poet:

“Gloria in las alturas,
Cantad in vuestra jaula, criaturas.”

Worn, footsore, more than half-starved as he was, he could not see his goal nor hear that chime without “singing in his cage.” There was his desired haven, within how many hours of march? He could not tell how many hours; perhaps very many hours; but no matter what his pains were, he felt sure that having seen his goal, he could reach it.

Going down was like soul’s delivery after the toils of the last days. In a few miles he was in the timber, going down a glen of great trees towards a smell of honey which came thickly upon the air to him. Sometimes he missed it for a few yards, but it always returned on the next gust. Sometimes it brought to him memories of tea in England, but more often the intense memory of a picnic at Yapavai, where he had sat near a field of the yellow melilotis hovered over by countless blue butterflies.

At the end of the glen he came out on to a heave of the hill, where he found the cause of the honey scent: eleven great trees lay broken on the ground.

Nine of the eleven were hollow from the ground to the upper branches. In all these, for perhaps centuries, the wild bees had nested, till now many hundreds weight of honey lay broken or spilt upon the ground. Over this, in some places, the bees were still flying confusedly, but by this time most of them had gone with their queens to new shelters. Gorged bee-eaters sat on neighbouring boughs. Some small mountain bears boldly foraged in the tree-boles. They clawed out great paws-full of comb which they plastered into their muzzles in spite of the stings. Sard found a piece of broken yellow comb the size of a bathsponge. On this he fed with thoughts of the prophets fed miraculously in the wilderness. After this, the miseries of the wilderness fell from him as though they had never been. Perhaps the honey had in it some drug of excitement or of comfort. He wandered on happily, feeling sure that all his troubles were at an end. He bathed in the pool of a mountain stream on the banks of which wild strawberries grew so thickly that the ground looked like the foot of a red hawthorn tree after a storm in June. After this he went on through a forest of big timber which grew on easy slopes with little undergrowth.

The moon had risen before he came to any trace of men. He came to a clearing and followed wheel-tracks downhill till he saw the lights of huts. Men in the huts were beating tin pans and singing:

“Is that Mr. Riley
Who sets such a styley?
Is that Mr. Riley who keeps the hotel?
Is that Mr. Riley they speak of so highly?
How d’ye do, Mr. Riley, are you doing quite well?”

As he came to the door of the first hut, a man who was tapping out his pipe there, hailed him:

“Hello, sport! where in hell do you come from?”

“Over the mountain.”

“Mountain, hell! Are you looking for a job?”

“No.”

“Doing it for a bet, then?”

“No. Trying to rejoin my ship.”

“Hell!” the man said. “Here, boys, here’s a son of a gun come across the mountain, trying to rejoin his ship. Come in, son, and have one on the house.”

* * * * *

At noon the next day Sard was in San Agostino, washed, shaven, fed, reclad, and with money in his pocket. He walked in the crowded street, listening to speech, hearing the bells. Shops were full of food, drink, shoes and clothes; women were looking into shops; work was going on; men with places in life were filling them.

He had no place. He knew now how little a thing will put a man out of a place, into the wilderness beyond, where to be at all is to be an outlaw.

He stopped on the steps of the Consulate to look at the ships in port: among them was the big English steam yacht, the _Yuba_, which he had seen in Las Palomas, as it seemed in another life. A man hailed him by name.

“Hullo, Harker!”

It was Billy Binge, his old captain of the main.

“I say, Harker,” he said, “are you ashore here? Yes? What topping luck! Could you take the _Yuba_ to Santa Barbara?”

“Yes.”

“Sir James has sacked his old man for crooking his little finger: going on the jag, in other words. He wants a new old man, muy pronto, and the worst of it is all the masters on the beach here are out at elbows.”

“So am I,” Sard said.

“Only in your gear,” Billy said. “These other fellows are in their souls. I can vouch for you personally. So if you really can take her, come along, I’ll fit you out a bit and then I’ll take you to Sir James.”

“One minute,” said Sard. “Have you heard anything of an abduction case at Las Palomas?”

“Abduction of Miss Kingsborough?” Billy said. “We’ve heard nothing else. She’s been carried clean away.”

“Where to?” Sard asked.

“Search me,” Billy said. “Some damned trader in Eve’s flesh; but there’s a fine old breeze about it. Now come along.”

“What brings you to San Agostino?”

Sard told him in few words.

* * * * *

Billy Binge’s recommendation was sufficient; Sir James engaged Sard to command the _Yuba_. She sailed late that night, up the coast to the Recalde reef to take some dredgings. After a few days at the reef, she sailed for Santa Barbara, where she arrived at noon just nineteen days from Sard’s going ashore at Las Palomas.

Sir James stood at his side as he brought the _Yuba_ into Santa Barbara harbour.

“You’ve not been here recently, Captain Harker,” he said. “You’ll not know the place; it’s a different place: almost a different city. They’re making this place the Athens of the West: I say _they_, but it’s really _he_, the Dictator, Don Manuel. Look at the cathedral; there’ll be nothing so beautiful in the New World when it’s finished. Do you see your ship, the _Pathfinder_?”

“No, Sir James, she isn’t in the sailing ship berths.”

“That is unfortunate for you,” Sir James said, “as I suppose it means that she has both come and gone; but it is fortunate for me, for I hope it will mean that you will come home with us in the _Yuba_.”

* * * * *