The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon

by S. S. Taylor

  “Please come in,” he said. He stepped aside and we followed him inside. Zander shrugged Pucci off his shoulder, and the parrot found a perch above the door, where I could hear him mumbling.

  The heavy front door closed behind us and immediately I felt chilled. We were in a large, formal entryway. The floor was green marble and the walls were made of some kind of synthetic paneling that reminded me of iced-over glass. The floor gave off a faint green glow. Everything was clean and shiny and smelled of rubbing alcohol, like a doctor’s office. A huge staircase of the same material as the walls curled away from us up to the second floor. There were no windows that I could see, and the light was very low. We could have been underground.

  “This way,” the secretary said, leading us through the foyer toward a door cut into the paneling. He opened it and showed us into a very large room that was, for all intents and purposes, a museum.

  Each of the four walls was lined with glass display cases. There were also freestanding display cases in the middle of the room, and we looked around at them, trying to take it all in. One section of the wall was devoted to trophies: a huge moose head, an elk, a stuffed Grygian bear, a Derudan carnivorous hippo head, a lion head, and many others. There were weapons, too. Guns and rifles and bows and arrows, nestled into the glass display cabinets. More cases contained stuffed birds of many colors—macaws, birds of paradise, pheasants, and other species I couldn’t name.

  Yet another section of the room held wooden masks, fantastic things I knew to be from Africa and the South Pacific and the New Lands.

  “Mr. Mountmorris is at his desk,” Jec Banton said, shutting the door behind him and leaving us in the big room. We looked around, trying to find a desk, but all the glass created a sort of hall of mirrors, and we couldn’t see a thing. It was even colder in here than in the hallway, and I found myself shivering, even in my warm sweater.

  “Please come back this way,” called a high voice from somewhere at the back of the room. We followed it, winding in and out of the display cabinets. “Over here,” the voice said again, and we finally found him sitting behind an enormous wooden desk. The wall above him was adorned with many brass gear clocks, and they tocked along at different speeds, so that it was hard to keep track of the seconds. The desk was covered with glass paperweights, and each one contained a different species of frog—some green, some black, one red, one blue. They stared up at us from their glass prisons.

  The man sitting above them reminded me of a larger version of the creatures on his desk. He was nearly bald, with just a thin, low crown of bright white hair above his ears and a few long pieces stretched across his scalp. His egg-like blue eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. They were bright and I had the feeling that he was watching everything we did. His right ear was pierced with many small lights—all shades of green—and they seemed to flash in response to his speech, as though they could hear him.

  “What a marvelous surprise!” he said. “At last, I meet the children of the great Explorer Alexander West!”

  Nine

  He was the oddest-looking man I’d ever seen, a mixture of Archy and Neo in his shiny green suit and earlights and old-fashioned hair. I didn’t know what to make of him.

  “Now,” he said, “before I ask you why you’re here, I must know, what do you think of my collections?”

  “They’re incredible,” said Zander, looking around. “I see a dodo bird—is that really a dodo? And a silver-billed grub warbler. A crimson night catcher. I’ve never seen a blue diver before. That is a blue diver, isn’t it? I thought you couldn’t have those stuffed anymore.”

  Suddenly, we were all talking at once. “That mask there is Navajo,” I said, gawking at the wall. “Dad has a photograph of one.” I gaped at these incredible things I’d only heard about. “And is that an original Dijkstra map of the world? No one knows where it is…”

  M.K. was gaping, too. “You have an original Peterson steam engine,” she said, staring. If it hadn’t been inside a display case, she would have had it apart in about ten seconds.

  “I am so glad to find an appreciative audience,” said the man behind the desk. “I am Delorme Mountmorris. Sit down so we can talk.”

  We sat in the chairs facing his desk, the three of us lined up in order of descending age, first Zander, then me, then M.K.

  There was a long silence during which he appeared to be studying us. Finally, he said, “I was so sorry to hear about your father. To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit?”

  I took a deep breath and looked at Zander. He nodded and I said, “We read your book, and we were wondering… I mean… do you know if our father ever went to Arizona? On one of his expeditions?”

  Mr. Mountmorris looked up quickly. “Arizona? Not that I can recall, but it’s possible, I suppose. Why do you ask?”

  I could feel my heart pounding. There was a sour taste in my mouth.

  “Well,” I started, unsure what to say. I was suddenly nervous, and I didn’t want to show him the map.

  “Show him,” Zander said.

  “Show me what?” Mr. Mountmorris said it casually, but he was sitting up very straight in his chair.

  I hesitated. M.K. gestured to the backpack. I still wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but I took the half map out of my backpack and spread it out on his desk. “We were wondering if you might know what this is. It was Dad’s and we’re just trying to get some information about it. You wrote about him, so…”

  Mr. Mountmorris tapped his glasses down on his nose and studied it.

  Have you ever seen someone who is very happy or very excited about something try to keep himself from acting happy and excited? That was what Mr. Mountmorris seemed to be doing. As he looked at the map, his hands were almost vibrating over it, as though he could barely stop himself from seizing it and hugging it to his body. But he kept himself very rigid, and after a couple of seconds, he sat straight up in his chair and said, in a calm voice, “This is very interesting. Very interesting indeed. May I ask where you found it?”

  I tried to keep my voice even. “Uh… around. With some of Dad’s things.”

  He smiled, making a little tent of his fingers in front of his face and studying each of our faces in turn. When he came to me, I felt the power of those protruding eyes; he seemed to stare right down into me and I didn’t like it at all.

  “Do you know what it is?” he asked finally.

  “A map,” I said. “Obviously.” His eyes flickered with something, annoyance maybe. He looked at me as though I was two rather than thirteen, which was why I couldn’t help myself—I showed off a little. “It appears to be of the American Southwest. From the topography, I can tell it’s a high desert environment. One of the identified locations is Azure Canyon, which is located in Arizona—the northern part—up near the Grand Canyon. Azure Canyon was one of the early domestic discoveries of the New Modern Age. It is known for its blue pools and waterfalls, but otherwise it wasn’t a particularly exciting discovery. No natural resources or anything like that. What I can’t figure out is what the title is down at the bottom. It’s something Man’s Canyon, but I couldn’t find any references to it. Do you know what it is?”

  Mr. Mountmorris smiled and nodded as if to say touché, and then there was a long silence, as though he was deciding whether or not to tell us something. Finally, he stood up and walked over to one of the display cases. He looked down at something in the case for a few minutes before he started talking. The room was eerily quiet and it struck me that although we were in the middle of the city, we had not heard any sound from the street since we’d stepped into his house.

  Mr. Mountmorris began. “In 1567, a group of Spanish conquistadores—the Spanish soldiers who had come to the New World looking for Aztec gold in what is now Mexico—decided to run off with a fortune in gold ingots and bars, unprocessed nuggets, statues, and jewelry—an incredible treasure in gold.”

  Ten

  “They made it to a remote
area of northern Arizona, where they were stricken with a mysterious illness and died. When their bodies were located, carefully buried in the desert, the gold was missing. The legend went that the Spaniards had been cared for by a group of Indians living nearby and had made a present of the gold to the Indians. The Indians were, shall we say, questioned. But the treasure did not appear.”

  As Mr. Mountmorris talked, I could almost see the wide, hot desert and the glimmer of gold coins. Zander and M.K. were leaning forward, listening intently to the story, and I could feel us all holding our breath as Mr. Mountmorris paused for a moment. I usually thought that Neos’ body lights were kind of weird, but there was something soothing about the way his blinked and flashed as he talked.

  “Nearly three hundred years later, around the time of the invention of the Muller Machines, a prospector named Dan Foley was looking for gold in the region. Gold was highly valued, and with the war with Britain on, well… it was much in demand. Lost in an unexplored canyon, starving and exhausted, Foley made a wrong step and fell through a camouflaged wooden floor into an underground chamber. Later, he said that he thought he would die in the chamber, until, in the distance, he saw the glint of gold. When he explored further, he said he saw piles of gold bars—stamped with Spanish words—gold statues, and jewelry, and a ‘huge pile’ of Spanish gold ingots in another chamber along a tunnel. There was so much debris in front of the treasure that he had no way of getting to it without tools. Motivated by the idea of the fortune, he fought his way out of the mine shaft. When he returned to Flagstaff, he told a… well, a lady friend… about his discovery and bought tools to excavate the old mine. He left Flagstaff to return to the mine on June 15, 1857.”

  For almost a whole minute, Mr. Mountmorris didn’t speak.

  Finally, my curiosity got the better of me. “Well? What happened?”

  He turned to look at me. “He never returned,” he said in a quiet voice. “It began to rain the next day. Very hard. The theory was that a flash flood tore into the remote canyon where he had seen the mine shaft and the gold. He wouldn’t have stood a chance. He is presumed drowned, though his body never washed up. The canyon near where he thought he’d found the Spanish conquistadores’ store of gold, and where he was lost, is now referred to as Drowned Man’s Canyon.”

  “That must have been the title of the map,” I said. “So what happened? Did anyone ever find the gold?”

  Zander and M.K. and I waited for the answer.

  “No,” Mr. Mountmorris said finally. “Scores of men and women have gone looking for Dan Foley’s treasure, but no one has ever found it.” His eyes gleamed with a greedy delight. “But perhaps the great Explorer Alexander West knew where to find the treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon.”

  Eleven

  We all stared at him for a moment. Golden treasure? Spanish conquistadores?

  “I bankrolled an expedition out to Arizona many years ago, after I first heard the story of Drowned Man’s Canyon. But my men had no luck, no luck at all.” Mr. Mountmorris put his fingertips together again and watched the three of us, as though he was making a decision. “So your father never talked to you about going out to Arizona to look for the treasure?”

  “No,” I said. “At least, I don’t remember if he did…”

  I had the feeling again that Mr. Mountmorris was trying to keep himself from getting too excited. “Well, think!” he blurted out before regaining control of himself. “I mean, are you sure?”

  Zander and I glanced at each other.

  I tried to keep my voice neutral. “I’m sure he mentioned Arizona,” I said, “in the course of normal conversation. It is one of the fifty-six states, after all.” I looked at the trapped frogs on his desk to avoid meeting his eyes; I was afraid he’d see how nervous I was all of a sudden. There was something about the way Mr. Mountmorris was acting that made me think we never should have shown him the map. Next to the frogs was a little collection of what looked like religious idols and a stone paperweight engraved with the words For extraordinary services rendered as advisor to ANDLC.

  And then I noticed a framed newspaper clipping on the other side of the desk. It was a picture of Mr. Mountmorris and Francis Foley. They were at some sort of celebration, and they were shaking hands as they smiled into the camera.

  Suddenly, my whole body went numb.

  Zander must have seen something on my face because he glanced at me again before telling Mr. Mountmorris, “There are amazing varieties of hummingbirds in Arizona. He and I talked about birds all the time. If he’d been there, he would have mentioned it.”

  “You are sure?” Mr. Mountmorris asked. “Think carefully now. He never told you about a trip he had taken there? He never talked about the treasure?”

  “No,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I mean, he found that rare emerald in the cave in Acapurna, if you remember, but he never said anything about a golden treasure in Arizona.”

  “Hmm. Yes. Well.”

  There was another long silence. We waited for Mr. Mountmorris to speak.

  Finally he did. “I wonder, what has happened to your dad’s, er… effects. His books and maps and things? Perhaps the other half of the map is among them.”

  “BNDL came and took them,” I said. “But there wasn’t another half. I’m sure of that.”

  “You seem to know something about maps, young man. Kit, is that right?” Mr. Mountmorris watched me for a second with his pale eyes. I felt the way I imagine a fly feels before being caught by a frog.

  “Uh… sort of.”

  “Well,” Zander said, “we really should get going. We should get home.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you for telling us about Drowned Man’s Canyon.” I realized that the half map was still sitting on Mr. Mountmorris’s desk, and I stepped forward to get it.

  He was too quick for me, though, and he picked it up himself, folding it in half before offering it to me. I reached forward to take it and his hand slid back just a bit, just enough to put it out of reach. “You wouldn’t… By any chance… Might you be interested in selling it?” he asked in a quiet, controlled voice. “I would be willing to pay quite a substantial sum. It’s missing the relevant part, of course, the section including Drowned Man’s Canyon. So its value to anyone but me would be… negligible.”

  Zander and I exchanged a worried look, and it was M.K. who put a hand on the knife at her waist and said, in a strong voice, “I don’t think we want to sell it.”

  “Hmm. Well, if you think of anything, shall we say, or change your mind about selling it, you know where to find me.” I took the map from him and instantly, as though he’d pressed a button, Jec Banton was back in the room, ready to usher us out.

  “Goodbye,” Mr. Mountmorris called out. “Goodbye, children.” In a few minutes we were out on the street again. It was going to be a warm, springlike day, and the strong sun felt good on our faces. We stood there for a moment, warming ourselves up after being in that refrigerator of a house. As we crossed the street and entered the park, Pucci caught up to us and alighted on my shoulder. I turned around to look back at the house, and I could swear I saw Jec Banton watching us from one of the first-floor windows.

  “I don’t trust him,” M.K. said.

  “Neither do I,” Zander said. “He was lying.”

  I glanced around to make sure no one else could hear me. “He’s an advisor to ANDLC. Everyone knows that they work with BNDL. And did you see the photograph over his desk? He’s friends with Francis Foley. We never should have shown him the map, Zander.” I remembered Dad talking about how ANDLC might as well have been part of the government because they worked so closely with BNDL.

  “Damn!” said M.K. “That lying, damned, no-good…”

  I started to feel panic set in again. “If he works for BNDL, he’s going to tell Francis Foley about the map. As far as he knows, those agents are with us right now. And they’ll go to the house and find them. This is bad.”

  We were all silen
t for a minute, watching squirrels racing up and down the oak trees that lined the paths. We’d been alone in the little section of the park when we’d entered, but when I looked up, I saw a man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. It seemed crazy, but I had the feeling he was watching us.

  “Zander,” I whispered, “I think we should get going.”

  “Okay,” Zander said, following the direction of my eyes toward the man. He lowered his voice. “But I’ve been thinking and you’re right. We can’t just take off for the Southwest. We need to know whether Dad ever went to Arizona, whether he found this treasure, and whether the map might tell us where it is.”

  “How are we going to do that?” M.K. asked.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Zander said. “I wish we could ask someone. Of course, it would be a risk, but…”

  I knew exactly what he was thinking, and I hesitated for a minute, waiting to see if he was going to say it. But something was stopping him.

  “What?” M.K. asked us. “Of course what?”

  “What he means,” I said after a moment, “is that it might be time for a visit to the Expedition Society.”

  Twelve

  The outside of the big gray stone building looked just like any other city business or association headquarters; the only clue as to the nature of the organization inside was the red globes that decorated the top of each post on the wrought-iron fence along the sidewalk. There was a stone staircase and a small, discreet sign over the double black doors that read The Expedition Society.

  We climbed the stairs and waited there for a moment nervously, looking around to make sure we hadn’t been followed. The agents must have woken up by now. If they’d managed to get out of the closet, there would be agents looking for us at this very moment. Besides which, walking into the Expedition Society was a bit like walking into the lion’s den.

  “Zander,” I whispered, “how are we going to get in?”