An International Mission to the Moon

by Jean Petithuguenin

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “On the other side of the precipice, as on this one, there are two solid spikes to either side of the route, which serve as attachments for the principal cables of the suspended bridge. If we can fix the extremity of our cord to those spikes, the rest will be child’s play.”

  “Indeed! But it’s a matter of fixing the cord first, without moving from here, sand as we don’t know how to throw a lasso….”

  “A demonstration will be better than an explanation,” Jacques declared.

  He took the cord, made out of all the pieces that he had taken from the tents and assembled with knots, attached to the extremity of one of the iron pegs that he had also brought, and then made a series of loops along the cord about fifty centimeters apart. That formed a kind of rudimentary rope-ladder, prolonged by some fifteen meters of thread.

  Jacques gripped the peg, fixed crosswise at the end of the cord, the other end of which he had confided to his companions, and launched it over the precipice. His first attempt having failed, he pulled the peg back, and threw it a second time. After several attempts, he succeeded in throwing it in such a way that the cord was caught between two of the spikes fixed in the ground on the other side of the gulf. It was sufficient for him to pull it toward him slightly to fix it definitively, thanks to the crosspiece of the peg to which it was attached, which was wedged behind the spikes.

  A light, fragile bridge was now extended between the edges.

  “Now,” said Jacques, “it’s a matter of making a solid cable, with the aid of which I can draw the suspended bridge toward me.

  The explorers began by hoisting on to the edge the tangled maguez that was hanging down into the abyss. They observed that the light construction had retained its ingenious design; two strong cables sustained, by means of a series of threads as thick as a finger, a kind of floor made of interwoven woody fibers. It was reminiscent of a broad V-shaped gutter, at the bottom of which humans and animals could pass in Indian file.

  Jacques and his companions were able, without seriously damaging the ensemble, to detach a certain number of threads, which they assembled into a solid cable.

  When that task was concluded, Jacques put his foot into the final loop of the cord that was attached to the other side of the ravine, put his arm in the second loop, and had the thread that his friends were holding attached around his waist. Then he let himself slide into the gulf, suspended on the one hand by the mooring-rope, which Robert and Pierre paid out slowly, and the other by the cord furnished with loops, which united the two sides of the abyss.

  He could not help shivering when he found himself suspended a hundred meters above the bottom of the gorge, like a spider at the end of a thread, and his friends shivered at the thought that the cord might break.

  As they let him down carefully, Jacques gradually drew away from the edge he had just abandoned and drew closer to the opposite wall.

  In the end, the bold pioneer made contact with the wall. He had no more to do than climb up the ten meters of his improvised rope ladder to reach the ledge on the far side of the ravine.

  “Bravo!” cried Pierre, enthusiastically. “You’re a marvelous fellow, Jacques! The mission owes you a unanimous vote of congratulation.”

  “Patience! My task isn’t finished.”

  “Bah! The rest’s nothing. Forgive me for having doubted your ingenuity momentarily.”

  Robert had attached the fibrous cable to the end of the cord. Jacques pulled it toward him and made use of it to weave the extremity of the maguez bridge.

  That was the most difficult part, because, in spite of the lightness of the materials that had served for its construction, the bridge was nevertheless quite heavy, and the strength of one man was scarcely adequate to lift it. Jacques had to start again several times, being careful to moor the cable to the spikes fixed in the ground.

  Finally, he was able to grasp the extremity of the bridge and attach it solidly.

  The passage was reestablished!

  Jacques rejoined his companions.

  “With a fellow like you, we’ll never be stuck, even in the most difficult circumstances, and I no longer doubt our success.

  The reestablishment of the bridge had required considerable time; the explorers calculated, by means of the position of the sun, that it was at least two o’clock in the afternoon. They were fatigued by the heat and the efforts they had made, and were beginning to suffer, above all, from hunger, for the tunas thy had eaten in the morning did not constitute very substantial nourishment.

  They decided to open a tin of corned beef

  “Too bad if it diminishes our reserves,” said Pierre. “I’m as hungry as an ogre.”

  “Me too,” said Jacques.

  “And me,” agreed Robert.

  “After this, my dear Jacques,” Pierre went on, “we’re counting on you to restock the larder. Another opportunity to distinguish yourself!”

  III

  When they set forth again, after two hours of well-earned rest, having crossed over the precipice on the bridge so audaciously reconstructed, the voyagers, still following the ancient Inca road, went into a valley in which they did not enjoy the magnificent view that they had had while moving alongside the ravine. A few trickles of water running along the edge of the road, however, maintained a rich vegetation dotted with brightly-colored flowers. There were sunflowers there, red begonias, daturas, the entire spectrum of poisonous Solanaceae and abundant specimens of the carmine-tinted cornflowers that the Indians call chihuahuas.28 Among the Incas, the chihuahua was a sacred flower from which crowns were woven for adolescents promoted to the rank of warriors.

  Frightened birds with brilliant plumage flew away from the bosom of flowering bushes as the men approached.

  The archeologists found a spring from which they refilled their flasks and drank with delight.

  A little further on, they dug up a few tubers of a wild species of potato.

  “These could take the place of bread for us,” said Jacques. “It’s a pity that we don’t have a few kilos of them.”

  “It would be necessary to cook them,” said Robert, “and we don’t have anything with which to make a fire.”

  The Indians had, in fact, stolen the explorers’ lighters as well as their watches. Further maledictions were pronounced with regard to the deserters, but Jacques smiled.

  “I’ll wager that you have a trick for lighting a fire,” said Pierre. “Perhaps you know how to produce a flame by rubbing two sticks together, as the Redskins do.”

  “No,” said Jacques, “I haven’t yet readapted well enough to the savage life, but I remember the way the Incas lit the sacred fire in the Temple of the Sun.”

  “They made use of a concave mirror,” said Robert, “with which they concentrated the sun’s rays on a small tuft of cotton.”

  “We don’t have a concave mirror, but, by way of compensation I have a magnifying glass, of which we occasionally made use for map-reading. Fortunately, it was in my knapsack and escaped the cupidity of our thieves.”

  “Perfect!” said Pierre. “But if it’s the sun that’s going to give us fire, we need to hurry to take advantage of its rays. In an hour, it’ll be too low to set fire to a fragment of tinder through a lens.”

  The attention of Pierre and Jacques was deflected by an exclamation from Robert: “Ruins!”

  The leader of the mission extended his hand toward a ruddy mass projecting from the verdure: the vestiges of a brick wall that must once have been part of a large building.

  The friends ran in that direction.

  The ruins rose from rocky ground in which the brushwood had hardly been able to take root, so they were sufficiently disengaged to be easy to explore. The friends discovered the traces of four sections of wall, comprising a huge rectangular enclosure.

  “A tambo!” said Robert.

  Tambos were the hostelries that the Incas had taken care to build along the routes in order to lodge there
with their retinues when traveling

  “I propose that we establish ourselves here for the night. We’ve had a good deal of trouble today, and we ought not to abuse our strength. Let’s stop and set up camp. These sections of wall will shield us from the cold wind that blows from the mountains by night and will serve as a rampart if necessary, if brigands take it into their heads to seek to harm us.

  Robert’s proposal having been approved, Jacques left his two friends to proceed with sitting up camp while he collected dry grass and set about lighting a fire by focusing the sun’s rays on it with his magnifying glass. Soon, the flame rose up. As soon as a little ash had formed, Jacques buried the potatoes in it. A few twigs thrown on top stimulated the fire. Twenty minutes later, the tubers were cooked and ready to eat. The explorers combined them with the remainder of the corned beef they had opened earlier in the day, and had a true feast.

  When they had finished their meal, the sun was almost touching the horizon. They hastened to complete their preparations for the night, for twilight is brief in the tropics.

  With bricks and stones they constructed a little wall in a corner of the tambo, in such a way as to fashion a redoubt, which they covered with a roof of foliage. It formed a kind of cabin well sheltered from the wind and the dew.

  It was agreed that the three men would take turns on watch, revolver in hand, because, since their misadventure, they were afraid of what the Indians might do. If the latter had abandoned them specifically in order to prevent them reaching the holy city, they might well be spying on them. They would have seen them persevere in their expedition, reconstruct the bridge and cross over the gorge; perhaps they were meditating setting an ambush for those they regarded as profaners.

  It would therefore be prudent to remain on their guard.

  Jacques took advantage of the last rays of the sun to effect to make a brief patrol in the vicinity of the tambo and to make sure that no immediate danger was threatening the little company.

  That brief reconnaissance permitted him to discover, a hundred meters from the ancient Inca hostelry, the ruins of a small stone edifice that a curtain of trees and bushes had previously hidden from view.

  The four walls were quite well-preserved but the roof and wooden beams had disappeared. Like the majority of edifices of Inca times, it had no windows; the doorway was narrow and tapered from top to bottom; above it the traces of a sculpted figure could still be made out, surrounded by rays, which suggested that the ruins were those of a small temple to the sun.

  Nothing any longer remained inside except a crude idol devoid of arms and legs with a flat forehead and brutal features, mounted in a pedestal. It had an open mouth and, passing through the hole, the end of a stick broken from a bush. Jacques deduced that the statue was hollow.

  Is that one of the tricks that the priests employed to make the divinity speak? An oracle hidden in the statue making prophetic words resound?

  But the tall stone figure was backed up against the wall, and no apparent passage allowed communication with the outside. Jacques thought that the passage might be subterranean, but must be filled in by now. All the same, when he came out of the temple, however, he was curious enough to make a tour of it, and clicked his tongue in satisfaction when he discovered a cavity invaded by grass behind the wall, at the place where the statue stood.

  I’ll wager that that hole communicates with the interior of the idol, he said to himself.

  He promised himself that he would come back the next day with his companions, in order to study the curious little temple at leisure, but at present, night was falling and it was prudent to return to the camp.

  “Nothing suspect,” he said to his friends when he rejoined them. “I think we can sleep tranquilly. But I’ve found a curious ruin, which we can visit tomorrow morning.”

  “Have you picked up the trail of a vicuna?” asked Pierre. “We need to think seriously about shooting some game. Hunger is lying in wait for us.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” said Jacques, with apparent insouciance. “I’m conscious of my responsibility; it’s me who persuaded you to continue our voyage, so I ought to nourish you.” Ironically, he added: “Nevertheless, remember that yours is to help me if the opportunity arises.”

  Jacques was more anxious than he wanted to appear. The hope he had conceived of being able to kill a wild llama was beginning to ebb away. No game had showed itself apart from a few birds that only Buffalo Bill could have brought down with a bullet.

  If that continues, Jacques thought, we’ll be reduced to eating worms and insects.

  The setting sun was darkening rapidly. In its last gleams, a star appeared near the horizon. It was the planet Venus, which the Incas called Chasca, the page of the sun, and represented as a young man with long curly hair.

  IV

  In consideration of the difficult efforts and fatigues he had imposed on himself during the day, Jacques had been allocated the third turn on watch. When Pierre extracted him from his slumber to confide the guard of the camp to him, he was in the middle of a dream about Redskins, Incas and llamas.

  Enveloped in his poncho, he initially sat down in front of the redoubt that the explorers had made to shelter them.

  The sky was resplendent with all its stars and the full moon, descending in the west, was spreading its silvery light over the earth: the moon, Mama Quilla, the sister and spouse of the sun, whom the priests of the Inca Empire represented by a silver disk with a human face

  The view was limited by the ruined wall of the tambo, so Jacques, a lover of logic, immediately looked around or a better observatory.

  The first condition of being a good sentry, he thought, is that of being able to see a long way.

  The damaged wall was riddled with holes, which formed as many footholds. It was not difficult to hoist himself up to the summit of the enclosure, which was about a meter thick. Revolver in hand, Jacques took up a position on the crest of the wall, a veritable terrace, and said down on a spur. From there he could see a vast extent, and distinguish in the moonlight, above the trees and bushes, the ruins of the little temple that he had discovered the previous evening.

  The time went by slowly, talking the great circle of the moon and the stars westwards. The shadows lengthened, becoming increasingly opaque as Mama Quilla sank toward the horizon. The silence was only troubled by the gusts of the breeze blowing through the jungle. Once, however, Jacques thought he heard the hoarse cry of a jaguar. That made him hopeful; if the redoubtable feline was prowling in the vicinity, it must have sniffed a herd of vicuna. The country could not be completely devoid of game.

  The temperature dropped, the cold becoming increasingly intense—a sign that daybreak was not far away.

  Jacques, who felt himself shivering in spite of his poncho, was about to stand up and get down from his observatory in order to move around a little when he saw shadows moving, some distance away, on the Incas’ paved road. Immobilizing himself again, he gazed more attentively, and recognized men who were advancing, driving a heard of llamas in front of them. They were coming from the same direction as the explorers. Were they Quichua herdsmen or the deserters of the mission?

  If they were herdsmen, it might be possible to obtain their aid, or at least buy a llama from them; but if they were the deserters, it would be as well only to approach them prudently, for there was no way of knowing how far hatred and fear of punishment might push them.

  Having observed for a minute, Jacques got down, in order to wake his companions and bring them up to date with what was happening.

  “Get up. Indians are coming, with a herd of llamas. We need to take advantage of it to renew our provisions, whatever the cost.”

  “Let’s go offer to buy one of their animals from them,” said Pierre. “If they refuse, we’ll take it from them by force.”

  “Let’s be cleverer and avoid a fight. Dawn’s breaking. Let’s follow them, sliding through the brushwood. We’ll eventually find an opportunity
to take possession of a llama without being seen.”

  The three men left their luggage in the camp, only taking their weapons, and set out on campaign.

  They drew nearer to the road, sneaking through the long grass, and watched the Indians go past. This time, there was no doubt; they were definitely dealing with their deserters. Since these were now behind them, they must have stopped on the road the day before and had hidden when they saw the explorers arriving. They must think, in consequence, that the Frenchmen were still ahead of them. The fact that they had no hesitation in following in their tracks, at the risk of catching up with them and having to quarrel with them did not imply that they were animated by the best intentions.

  “I’m going to jump into the midst of those rascals and constrain them to obedience. If one of them resists, I’ll blow his brains out.”

  Jacques intervened to calm his friends.

  “Don’t risk a battle, I beg you. We’re too weak to be sure of victory. Even if the Indians pretend to yield, they won’t take long to take their revenge.”

  The explorers were already discussing whether they ought not to return to the camp and fetch their baggage when the Indians called a halt and started arguing animatedly in their Quichua dialect, which Robert and his friends spoke.

  Although they were too far away to hear everything, they gathered that it was a question of Inti—which means “the Lord” and indicates the sun—a llama and a sacrifice.

  Then the troop headed toward the little temple that Jacques had discovered the day before.

  “I’ve got it!” said Jacques. “In accordance with the custom of the ancient Quichuas, they’re going to sacrifice a llama in order to render the gods propitious in the war of cunning or violence that they’re going to undertake against us. Well, let me see—I’ll do them a bad turn in my fashion. Stay here and watch, and only come to my aid if I fire a revolver shot.”

  “What are you going to do?” Robert murmured anxiously. “Don’t let them catch you.”