To the Indies (16 page)
Authors: C. S. Forester
Tags: #Inquisition, #treasure, #Caribbean, #Indian islands, #Indians, #aristocrats, #Conquistadors, #Orinoco, #Haiti, #Spain, #natives
“Orinoco,” he said, and the other eagerly echoed the word, “Orinoco.”
“Orinoco?” asked Rich.
The Indians were delighted, and gesticulated more vehemently than ever. This Orinoco, whatever it was, was something very big, and was somehow connected with the river by which they were. One of the Indians hissed and shushed, swinging his arms horizontally with twittering fingers — the Orinoco must be a rushing river, and, judging by the way the other Indian pointed and spread his arms, far wider somewhere in the interior than this arm of it. The Indians chattered together and then one of them turned back to Rich; he was clearly faced with a difficult explanation but that could not account for the reverent solemnity of their expressions. He was about to try to describe something which they considered very important, perhaps connected with some god of theirs. He held his hands high, the fingers dancing, and moved slowly along — this was the steady course of a wavelet-capped river.
“
Whoosh
!” he said, and his hands dropped suddenly to the level of his knees. “
Whoosh
!”
His hands indicated a turmoil in the water at a lower level.
“A waterfall!” said Osorio.
“Of course,” said Rich. “How far?”
He made a gesture of walking towards this Orinoco waterfall, and the Indian dissented emphatically. The Indian closed his eyes and inclined his head sideways against his folded hands in a gesture of sleep. Then he held up his finger. He slept again, and held up his finger again, and then again. After that repetition he gave up the effort of trying to convey the exact number, and spread all his fingers, over and over again. A man would have to sleep many nights before he penetrated as far as this waterfall. Two more vivid gestures disclosed the fact that he had himself seen this marvelous phenomenon, while his companion had not.
“Are there people to be found on the way?” asked Rich. “Many people?”
The Indians presumably grasped the meaning of his signs, and dissented doubtfully. There were some people, a few people, apparently, along the river — but apparently these Indians had no notion of an uneven distribution of population.
“
Guanin
?” asked Rich.
The Indians were puzzled. There might be gold there, a little, but clearly they were not interested in gold, and could not understand this persistent questioning about the existence of gold. Rich tried to work by analogy in his effort to understand their mentality. Supposing a Negro of unknown tongue landed in Catalonia, and was not interested in the service of God or in money, and yet persistently asked about the existence of, say, sandstone — or even birds’ nests — something of no special appeal — his questions might be received with the same blank look of sympathy.
One of the Indians was examining Pedro’s crossbow with more interest. Pedro was always glad of the opportunity of demonstrating the effectiveness of his weapon. He wound the thing up, making great play of the amount of strength necessary to turn the windlass, while the Indians looked on, deeply interested but entirely without understanding. When the cord clicked over the catch and the windlass spun free they actually thought the demonstration was complete, and smiled politely.
“No,” said Pedro; he was one of the school which believed that people who did not understand good Spanish might understand bad Spanish. ‘’Big shooting. Look. See.”
He laid a heavy bolt into the groove against the string and looked round for a target. A few score yards away, out on the broad surface of the river, a sea bird drifted with the current. Pedro called their attention to it, raised his heavy weapon, took careful aim, and shot. The bolt splashed into the water not more than a couple of yards from the bird, which squawked with surprise. Such an amazing result naturally impressed the Indians as much as did the clatter of the released bow. They looked with reverence upon the man who could do such extraordinary things, and these Spaniards who manned the longboat took a childish delight in displaying their powers — the sharpness of their heavy swords, and the impenetrability of their armor, and the way their clothes fastened with brooches and buttons. Rich allowed them plenty of time for it before he suggested a move.
They would have to turn back and seek the ships now, and it was with a curious sinking of heart that he directed the longboat’s course away from the mouth of the Orinoco, and northward, with the easterly wind just fair enough to enable them to proceed under sail. As they coasted along, leaving on their left the flat delta which they had explored, Rich looked across at the land with this persistent feeling of unhappiness. He might never return here, to this land of the laughing Indians, he might never explore the vast Orinoco, and he felt that it was this that he wanted to do, despite the heat, and the rain, and the insect pests, and the vampire bats. Whatever might be the wonders awaiting him in Española, he felt as if this vast new land where he had been the first Spaniard to set foot were peculiarly his own. He hardly paid attention when Osorio announced, after cautious experiments, that even out here the water was hardly brackish.
The Admiral listened courteously to Rich’s report. His eyes brightened at the sight of the gold and the pearls which Rich handed over, and he seemed pleased at the news that the longboat was full of fresh food. The Admiral had no interest in food himself — his bad teeth alone would have limited it — and with him it was an article of faith, not of knowledge, that weaker men found benefit in a varied diet. He laughed at Rich’s account of how they had attacked a caiman under the impression that it was an iguana.
“It is a pity you had no men with you with experience of the Indies,” he said, and then his face hardened as he realized what he said. When the squadron sailed from Spain no inducement offered had been great enough to tempt a single one of those survivors of the previous expedition who had returned to Spain to sail again for the Indies.
Rich noticed the Admiral’s hurt expression, and went on hastily with his report so as to smooth over the difficulty.
“It is a vast land, Your Excellency,” he said, and the Admiral nodded doubtfully. “The rivers are huge.”
“You mean the channels between the islands?”
“Rivers, Your Excellency. Vast rivers of fresh water. So vast that they freshen the water far out in this inland sea.”
“That freshness is interesting — we have noticed it here, near the ships, while you have been away. I have decided on the cause.”
“It is caused by these big rivers, Your Excellency.”
“Oh no. There is no land near which could support a river of that size. It is far more likely that — ”
“We found a river the Indians called Orinoco, Your Excellency,” said Rich. He was desperate enough to interrupt in his anxiety not to hear the theory. “They said one could ascend it for many days’ journey, as far as a great waterfall.”
“There is nothing so easy to misunderstand as the signs these Indians make,” said the Admiral, kindly. “Believe me on that point; I have had sufficient experience to know.”
Rich remembered the Admiral’s early reports and their frequent mentions of the consequences of such misunderstandings, and yet he was sure that on this occasion there had been no misunderstanding.
“Their gestures left me in no doubt,” he said.
“That is often enough the case, believe me. Could they have been referring to a fountain, perhaps? The Fountain of Youth? What did you say this river was called?”
“Orinoco, Your Excellency.”
“There were four rivers in Eden: Euphrates, Hiddekel, Pishon, and Gihon.” The Admiral thought for a while; Rich could see the struggle in his face as he gave up the attempt to reconcile one of the last three names with ‘Orinoco’. “No matter. These Indians often have several different names for their rivers. Let us hear more.”
Rich told of the oysters which grew upon trees.
“Ah, that is the source of these pearls. Pliny has a passage on the subject. Did you notice any clinging with their shells open?”
“No, Your Excellency.”
“Pliny tells that oysters exposed by the tide open their shells to receive drops of dew from the skies, and then solidify these drops into pearls. It is natural to meet with confirmation here.”
Rich kept his mouth tight shut. He was not going to risk a further snub by advancing the further information given him by the Indians about the pearls. And then with a shock he realized that the Admiral was right. He remembered perfectly plainly now the passage in Historia Naturalis that dealt with the point. He certainly must have mistaken the Indians’ gestures in this case, at least. Pliny could not be wrong; Rich withdrew in horror from the brink of the abyss of freethinking into which he had been about to plunge.
“What is the matter, Don Narciso?” asked the Admiral politely. “You look unwell.”
“Oh no, Your Excellency, thank you,” said Rich, hastily. Not for worlds would he confess to a proximity to heretical unbelief. “I am perfectly well.”
“Then let us hear more.”
Rich told of the endless marshy channels, of the vampire bat, of their eventual recognition of the Isle of Grace as they emerged beside the Serpent’s Mouth.
“So that between here and the Isle of Grace you think the channels impracticable for the squadron, then?”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
That was one way of saying that he thought the Isle of Grace a peninsula jutting out from a vast continent, and it was one which saved argument. Besides, after the incident of Pliny and the pearls Rich was in a bewilderment of doubt again.
“Then we shall have to risk the passage of the Dragon’s Mouths. We have no more time to spare at the moment — my presence is probably urgently needed in Española. We shall make the passage tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
Rich had foreseen this development some time back — he was coming to know the Admiral so well and to anticipate his reactions. It was the Admiral’s way to touch lightly upon one subject of investigation and then dash on to the next, to formulate a theory and neglect the confirmation of it, to find the distant prospect always more alluring than the present — an extraordinary trait in a man with the obstinacy and firmness of character to pursue, as the Admiral had done, a single aim through eighteen early years of rebuffs and poverty. It was as if that effort had drained him of all his single-purposedness.
“My brother, I hope, will have reduced the colony to order, and will have several shiploads of treasure awaiting us. As
Adelantado
, I left him full powers.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
Bartholomew Columbus was one of the few men whom the Admiral trusted — but these clannish Genoese could be of course expected to trust their brothers. And Bartholomew had sailed with Diaz to the Cape of Good Hope, and was generally reputed to be a man of parts. With the powers of
Adelantado
— deputy to the Viceroy — he certainly might by now have effected a change in the colony since the date of the last depressing reports; but Rich was aware that it would call for a man of vast ability and courage to enforce an orderly government on the adventurers and gaolbirds who had accompanied the Admiral to Española on his second voyage. He hoped it had been done.
“If all is well in Española, Your Excellency,” ventured Rich, “I hope you will consider it advisable to dispatch a new expedition to explore these parts.”
“I hope I shall,” said the Admiral. “But there is so much to explore — there is so much to do.”
The Admiral sighed, and his heavy lids drooped over his blue eyes; the man was weary.
“But here there is so much to discover,” said Rich.
“Yes, indeed,” agreed the Admiral with more animation; his face brightened as he spoke. “I have written it all in the report I am sending to Their Highnesses. The Earthly Paradise, the mines of Ophir, the Fountain of Youth — I am glad that you are with me, Don Narciso, to confirm me in all these matters.”
Rich had not the least intention of affirming to King Ferdinand the presence of any such phenomena on these parts; he wanted a great deal more evidence before he could do that, even though he knew that the counter-theories at the back of his mind were ridiculous and dangerous enough to call for instant repression with nothing to replace them. But he had to swallow twice before his innate honesty forced him to hint as much to the Admiral.