"'Moriturus te saluto,' he says, and then he fell to babbling in Spanish, which we understood the better.Food, such as we had, he would not touch, nor the sweet well-water.'I will drink no cup,' he said, 'till I drink the new wine with Christ in His Father's Kingdom.For I have seen what mortal eyes have not seen, and I have spoken with God's ministers, and am anointed into a new priesthood.'
"I mind how he sat on the grass, his voice drifting faint and small like a babe's crying.He told us nothing of what he was or whence he came, for his soul was possessed of a revelation.'These be the hills of God,' he cried.
'In a little you will come to a city of the old kings where gold is as plentiful as sand of the sea.There they sit frozen in metal waiting the judgment.Yet they are already judged, and, I take it, justified, for the dead men sit as warders of a greater treasurehouse.
"I think that we eleven--and two of us near death--were already half out of the body, for weariness and longing shift the mind from its moorings.I can hear yet Captain Bovill asking very gently of this greater treasure-house, and I can hear the priest, like one in a trance, speaking high and strange.
'It is the Mountain of God, he said, 'which lies a little way further.
There may be seen the heavenly angels ascending and descending.'"Raleigh shook his head."Madness, Jasper--the madness begot of too much toil...I know it...And yet I do not know.'Tis not for me to set limits to the marvels that are hid in that western land.What next, man?""In the small hours of the morning the priest died.Likewise our two sick.
We dug graves for them, and the Captain bade me say prayers over them.The nine of us left were shaking with a great awe.We felt lifted up in bodily strength, as if for a holy labour.Captain Bovill's stout countenance wore an air of humility.'We be dedicate,' he said, 'to some high fortune.Let us go humbly and praise God.' The first steps we took that morning we walked like men going into church.Up a green valley we journeyed, where every fruit grew and choirs of birds sang--up a crystal river to a cup in the hills.And I think there was no one of us but had his mind more on the angels whom the priest had told of than on the golden kings."Raleigh had raised himself from the couch, and sat with both elbows on the table, staring hard at the speaker."You found them? The gold kings?""We found them.Before noon we came into a city of tombs.Grass grew in the streets and courts, and the bronze doors hung broken on their hinges.But no wild things had laired there.The place was clean and swept and silent.
In each dwelling the roof was of beaten gold, and the square pillars were covered with gold plates, and where the dead sat was a wilderness of jewels....I tell you, all the riches that Spain has drawn from all her Indies since the first conquistador set foot in them would not vie with the preciousness of a single one among those dead kings' houses.""And the kings ?" Raleigh interjected.
"They sat stiff in gold on their thrones, their bodies fashioned in the likeness of men.But they had no faces only golden plates set with gems'""What fortune! What fortune! And what did you then?
"We went mad." The seaman's voice was slow and melancholy."We, who an hour before had been filled with high contemplations, went mad like common bravos at the sight of plunder.No man thought of the greater treasure which these gold things warded.We laughed and cried like children, and tore at the plated dead....I mind how I wrenched off one jewelled face with the haft of my dagger, and a thin trickle of bones fell inside....
And yet, as we ravened and plundered we would fall into fits of shivering, for the thing was not of this world.Often a man would stop and fall to weeping.But the lust of gold consumed us, and presently we only sorrowed because we had no sumpter mules to aid its transit, and had a terror of the infernal plain and valley we had travelled....
"Captain Bovill made camp in a mead outside the city, and one of us shot a deer, so that we supped full.He unfolded his purpose, which was that we should pack about our persons such jewels as were the smallest and most precious, and some gold likewise as an earnest, and by striking northward through the mountains seek to reach at a higher point in its course the river by which we had entered from the sea.I mistrusted the plan, for the chart had shown but the one way, but the terror of the road we had come was strong on me and I made no protest.So we packed our treasure, so that each man staggered under it, and before noon left the place of the kings.""And then? Was the road desperate?" Raleigh's pale eyes had the ardour of a boy's.
