by John Buchan
The waiter did not spend his leisure hours in his attic bedroom, which was like an oven after the sun had beat all day on the slatted roof. Once or twice he joined his fellow-employees in a visit to the cinema or to a shabby little gaming-room where one drank cheap aguardiente and played a languid kind of poker. But generally he seemed to have business of his own, and the negro porter at the back entrance grew familiar with his figure arriving punctually on the stroke of midnight, and chaffed him heavily about an imaginary girl. It was no one’s business to keep watch on this humble half-caste, whose blood showed so dearly in his shadowy finger-nails and dull yellow skin, But if he had been followed, curious things might have been noted...
He generally made for a new block of flats on the edge of the dry hollow which separated the smelting works from the city, and he frequently varied his route thither. This place, with its concrete stairs and white-washed walls, was not unlike a penitentiary, but it housed many of the work engineers and foremen. He would stop at a door on the third landing, consult his watch as to the hour, wait a minute or two, and then knock, and he was instantly admitted Thence he would emerge in half an hour, generally accompanied by someone, and always in a new guise. Sometime he was a dapper Olifero clerk with a spruce collar and an attache case; sometimes in rough clothes with big spectacles so that his former half-caste air disappeared, and he might have been an engineer from Europe; sometimes a workman indistinguishable from an ordinary hand in the furnaces. He always returned to the same door about half past eleven, and issued from it once more the waiter at the Regina.
Between the hours of 7.30 and 11 p.m. the waiter seemed to have a surprising variety of duties. Occasionally he would pass the evening in one of the flats, or in a room in another block which adjoined the costing department. There he would meet silent people who slipped in one by one, and the conversation would be in low tones. Maps and papers would lie on the table, and there would be much talk of the names on certain lists, and notes would be pencilled alongside them. Sometimes there would be a colloquy on one or two, and then the waiter would do most of the talking — but not in Spanish. Sometimes the meeting would be at a cafe in a back street, which could only be entered by devious ways, and there, over glasses of indifferent beer, the waiter would make new acquaintances. His manners were odd, for he would regard these newcomers as sergeant regards recruits, questioning them with an air of authority. There were strange ceremonies on these occasions, so that the spectator might have thought them meetings of some demented Masonic lodge. Sometimes, the waiter in one of the rooms of the big block of flats would meet a figure with the scorched face of a countryman and the dust of the hills on his clothes — often in the dour form of the Mines Police and once or twice dressed like mestizo farmer. Then the talk would be hard to follow — strings of uncouth names, torrents of excited description, and a perpetual recourse to maps.
But the waiter’s most curious visits — and they happened only twice during his time at the Regina — were to a big house behind the Administration Headquarters, which stood in what for the Gran Seco was a respectable garden. At such times the waiter became the conventional clerk, very dapper in a brown flannel suit, yellow boots, and a green satin tie with a garnet pin. He was evidently expected, for, on giving his name, he was admitted without question, and taken to a little room on the first floor which looked like the owner’s study. “Senor Garcia from the Universum” — thus he was ushered in, and the occupant greeted him gruffly with “Come along, Garcia. Say, you’re late. Have you brought the figures I asked for?” — followed by the injunction to the servant, “I can’t be disturbed for the next two hours, so I guess you’d better disconnect the telephone. If anyone calls, say I’m mighty busy.”
Then the occupant of the room would lock the door and pay some attention to the windows, after which he would greet the waiter like a long-lost brother. He was a big man, with a sallow face but a clear healthy eye — a man who looked as if he would have put on flesh but for some specially arduous work which kept him thin. He would catch the so-called Garcia by the shoulder as if he would hug him, then he would pat his back, and produce such refreshments is are not usually offered to a junior clerk. Strangely enough, there would be no mention of the awaited figures from the Universum.
“How much longer can you stick it?” he asked on the second occasion. “You’re looking peaked.”
“I’ve another week here. Then I break for the open. I doubt if I could keep it up for more than a week, for people are asking questions. Have you squared it with old Josephs and notified the Universum people?”
The big man nodded. “But after that you’re beyond my jurisdiction. Peters in the Police is prepared for you, but it’s up to you to slip over to him without exciting comment. The cook-boy at the Universum has got to perish. Can you manage that neatly?”
“I’ll try. I’ll have to do a lot of perishing in the next fortnight, before Luis picks me up. I’m terrified of going sick, you know. The Regina hasn’t done me any good, and the Tierra Caliente isn’t exactly a health-resort.”
The other looked at him with affectionate anxiety.
“That’s too bad...I haven’t an easy row to hoe, but yours is hell with the lid off, and the almighty vexation is that I can’t do much to help you. Just at present the game’s with you. For the love of Mike keep on your feet, sonnie. You don’t mean to go far into the Poison Country?”
“Not a yard farther than I can help. But Luis says I must be at least a couple of days there. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of myself.”
After that the conversation was conducted in low tones, as if even the locked door and the guarded window might have ears. But had that talk been overheard, one phrase would have puzzled the eavesdropper, a phrase which constantly recurred and was spoken by both with a certain hesitation, even in that secret room. It was “Los Patios de la Manana,” which, being translated, means “The Courts of the Morning.” It might have been a mere password, or the name of some authority to which the speaker was subject, or a poetic description of a place. Most likely the last, for a map was produced — an amateur map neatly drawn and coloured, inscribed not with names but with letters. It showed steep gradients, so it must have referred to some mountain district.
At their parting the Roylances were mentioned. “They’re back in Olifa,” said the big man, “and Babs is looking after them good and sure. I’m mighty relieved that Babs has got a wise lady to keep her company. You’re certain you can make use of Sir Archibald?”
“I can use him right enough,” was the answer; “if he’ll stay quiet on the ice till I want him.”
A week later the waiter Miguel was seen no more at the Regina. When the occupants of the big table in the north window inquired of M. Josephs, the proprietor, as to his absence, they were told that he had been lent to the mess at the Universum Mine.
Miguel was four days at the Universum. He had a variety of tasks, for not only did he wait at table in the big adobe mess-room, but he lent a hand in the kitchen, for he was the soul of friendliness. Indeed he carried his willingness too far, for he was found in the kitchens of the compounds, where the Indian miners were fed like pigs at troughs, and was peremptorily ordered back. He had little leisure these days, but he managed to do various things not quite within the sphere of his duties. For one thing, he became intimate with the engineering staff, which contained two Scots, one American, and three Italians, and he used to gossip with them at their table when the room emptied at the end of meals. Also he was found sometimes in their office among blue prints and specimens of ore, and on these occasions the door happened to be locked. If he was not permitted inside the compounds, he used to fossick about the mines themselves, when the shifts of sallow, hollow-eyed labourers were going up or down. Occasionally he talked to them when no overseer was at hand, and he seemed to know something of their patois, for they replied, furtively, and once or twice volubly, when no one was looking.
The cheerful inquisitiveness of the
mess waiter was his undoing. For on the evening of the fourth day there was a sad accident. Through a mysterious blunder a small packet of bentonite was detonated, and a corner of the compound wall was blown down and a great crater made in the earth. For some inexplicable reason Miguel seemed to have been in the neighbourhood at the time and he was the only casualty. Fragments of his clothing were found, and a bit of a hat which he was known to be wearing, and it was assumed that his remains were dispersed among the two acres of debris. The fatality was duly reported to the administration and to M. Josephs, and the agreeable half-caste waiter ceased to be on the register of the Gran Seco.
Next morning a certain Featherstone Peters, a captain of the Mines Police, whose station was ten miles or so from the Universum, introduced at breakfast to his troopers a new recruit, who had just arrived to report. Peters was a tough, grizzled fellow of fifty, who had fought for the Boers in the South African War, had been in the Macedonian gendarmerie, and was believed by his friends to have done a good deal of gunrunning in Morocco. The new recruit, whose name was Black, was a sallow young man, who looked as if he had fever in his blood. He spoke English fluently but ungrammatically, and gave out that his father had been in the Italian Consulate at Alexandria. He was good company, and entertained the men with yarns which enthralled even that collection of hard citizens.
For the next week Black was engaged on patrols far into the Indian country. The map shows that east of the city of Gran Seco lies the land of rolling desert hills where the copper is mined, but beyond that the traveller enters a region of deep-cut desiccated valleys — a plateau, but with the contours of highlands. It is the Indian territory, where the Mines’ labourers are drawn, a place of sparse tillage but much pasturage, a place, too, which in recent centuries has been drying up, since the wretched pueblas are often the site of what, from the ruins, must once have been considerable cities. It is called the Tierra Caliente, for there is little shade from a merciless sun, and the stages are long from water to water. The midday heat falls like a suffocating curtain, and does not lift till night arrives with the speed of a wind from the far snows.
It was patrol not escort duty, but the new recruit saw many of his fellow-policemen engaged in the latter task. The processions of labourers had the melancholy of funeral cortege, and Black, who was well-read for one his position, was reminded of the pictures of the Zanzibar slave-caravans in old books of African travel. It was a sight which visitors to the Gran Seco were not allowed see, for there were no permits for the Indian country. The gangs bound for the Mines were not shackled, but they were closely shepherded by armed police escorts, and the faces of the men showed every degree of sullen and hopeless ferocity. But the gangs returning from the Mines to the villages were a spectacle to send a man to his prayers.
“Returned empties,” Peters called them. Young men crawled and tottered like dotards, all were terribly emaciated, their eyes had lost every human quality and had the blank impassiveness of beasts. Yet the Mines were a business concern, famed for feeding their workers well and for utilising the latest scientific conclusions on hygiene and industrial fatigue. Had not the intelligent press of America and Europe borne testimony to their progressiveness?
As Black and Peters watched one gang pass, the latter spat vigorously and observed: “I’ve never taken stock in all that meeting-house stuff about individual liberty and the rights of man. But I guess there may be something in it. That outfit kind of makes one think.”
Black said nothing, but his bright feverish eyes seemed to miss little. He was obviously on good terms with his officer, for he was constantly going off on little journeys of his own, which could scarcely be interpreted as police duty.
These journeys took him generally into the Indian pueblas, and on two occasions he did not return to the police bivouac all the following day. He was obviously a sick man, and when the patrol reached the limit of its journey, Peters was heard to complain loudly that the new recruit should be in hospital. By this time they were nearing the eastern ridge of the Indian country, with the peaks of the Cordilleras within a day’s march. The land was changing, for they had come to a watershed. The line of the great mountains was not the watershed, for, as in the case of the Nepaul Himalaya, they stood a little beyond it. It was a country of running waters, and the streams flowed east, cutting a path through the range in deep gorges on their way to the distant Orazon.
They arrived at a ruined village of mud where a couple of Indians had made their camp-hunters they seemed, tall active fellows of a different stamp from the broken men if the pueblas. Peters appeared to know them, for he called them by their names, and addressed them in pidgin Spanish which they understood. That night he told his troopers that the patrol was ended. He had been instructed to report on this eastern frontier of the Gran Seco, and next morning they would turn back. All to the east, he told them, was a God-forgotten country, which nature and man had combined to make unhealthy for Christians. He asked questions of the Indians and expounded their replies. There was fever there, and much poison, and very bad men, and valleys so deep that from the bottom one could see by day the stars and the moon. The troopers were impressed, and looked anxiously at the menacing mountain wall, with its coronal of snowfields now rosy in the after-glow.
But next morning Black was in no state to travel. Peters condemned the cussedness of things and declared that he could not afford to wait another hour. He was not unkind, and he did his best to ease the sufferer, but duty was duty and his called him back to headquarters. Black must be made as comfortable as possible, and the two Indians, whom he knew to be trustworthy, would look after him till the bout of fever had passed, and put him on his way home.
After breakfast the patrol jingled off up the slope, and left Black wrapped in a foxskin kaross, drowsing in a corner of the ruins, while the Indians twenty yards off sat hunched and meditative beside their brushwood fire.
Black was really sick, but not with malaria. His vitality had run down like a clock, since too much had been demanded of it, and his trouble was partly a low nervous fever, and partly a deep fatigue. When the police had been gone an hour, the two Indians held a consultation on his case. Then they proceeded to strange remedies. They seemed to be friends of his, for he grinned when they bent over him and submitted readily to their ministrations. This country was volcanic, and close at hand, hidden in a crinkle of the hills, a hot sulphur spring bubbled from the rocks, They undressed him, and carried him, wrapped in the kaross to the pool, where they plunged him into the most violent bath which he had ever encountered. Then they dried him roughly with a fine leather poncho, and rubbed the skin of his back and chest with an aromatic ointment. After that one of them massaged him for the space of an hour, a cunning massage which seemed to remould flaccid muscles and adjust disordered nerves and put him into a state of delicious stupor. Lastly, he was given a bitter brew to drink, and then permitted to sleep. This he proceeded to do for eighteen hours, and when he awoke in broad daylight the following morning his head was cool and his eye was clear, though he was still shaky on his feet. Peters had left enough provisions, and he ate the first enjoyable meal he had known for weeks.
There was another figure at breakfast, a fair young man with a golden brown skin, who, judging by the dust on his boots and breeches, had ridden far that morning.
“My felicitations, Senor,” the newcomer said. “I do not think you have taken any hurt in the last weeks, and that is a miracle. But where we are now going we must go on our feet, and for that you are not yet able. I am in command for the moment, and my orders are that to-day you rest.”
So Black slept again and awoke in the afternoon with a most healthy hunger. The newcomer sat by him and rolled and smoked many cigarettes, but he would not permit his patient to talk. “Time enough, my friend. We do not part company for a little while. But I will show you this to cheer you.”
He exhibited a small tinsel medal, such as humble pilgrims purchase at some famous shrine. On one side it wore a
face which was clearly that of the Gobernador of the Gran Seco.
Black puzzled over it, for he was still dazed, and asked whose was the head.
“It is that of our noble leader,” the young man laughed. “Yours and mine — he who is to lead this unhappy people to freedom.”
Black seemed to see the obscure joke, for he too laughed. “Jesucristo!” said the young man, “but that is a chief to fight for!”
VIII
Black slept soundly all night, and next morning rose renewed in body and mind. The party set out down the glen of the stream, one of the Indians carrying food and blankets while the other remained behind with the horses. Black held his pistol, but he had left his police carbine at the bivouac while the newcomer had no weapon at all. “What do want with a gun?” he had said lightly in reply to his companion’s question. “We are going into the Poison Country — El Pais de Venenos — where lead and powder are trivial things. A gun is of as little use as a single lifebelt would be to a man proposing to cross the Atlantic in a skiff. We are now in the hands of the older gods.”
It was a strange land which they entered, when the stream which they were descending plunged into the shadow of high peaks. It was fed by many affluents, and presently became a considerable river, running in a broad grassy on which the dew lay like hoar-frost. Suddenly the hills closed in like a wall, and the stream leaped in a great spout into a profound ravine, where in pot-holes and cascade it poured its way from shelf to shelf of the mountain ribs. The sides of the glen were cloaked with bush, which in the lower levels became tall timber trees. In the woody recesses the freshness went out of the air, mosses and creepers muffled the tree-trunks, gaudy birds and butterflies flitted through the branches, and a hot, headachy languor seemed to well out of the sodden ground.