The Treasure of the Incas: A Story of Adventure in Peru by G. A. Henty (reading list TXT) 📖

"It certainly looks like it, Dias. The rocks widen out too, so that however strong the rush of water may be it will always go over in a regular sheet. Let us follow it along a little way."

Fifty yards farther on, the gorge widened out suddenly, and they paused with an exclamation of astonishment. Before them was a wide valley, filled to the spot where they were standing with a placid sheet of water four or five hundred yards wide, and extending to another gorge fully a mile away. Bertie was the first to find his voice.

"Here's a go! Who would have thought of finding a lake up in the hills here?"

"I did not know there was one," Dias said. "I have never heard of it. But that is not strange, for no one who came up the valley would dream that there was anything beyond that fall."

Harry had sat down and thought for some minutes, looking over the lake without speaking.

"I am afraid, Dias," he said at last, "that your tradition was a true one after all, and that the gold lay in the bed of a stream in the valley we now see filled up."

"But it must always have been a lake, se�or," Dias said after thinking for a minute, "and could not have been shallower, for there is no other escape than the waterfall; and however heavy the rains it could not have risen higher, except a few feet, as one can see by the face of the rock."

"It may have had some other way out," Harry said.

Dias looked carefully round the side of the valley. "There is no break in the hills that I can see, se�or."

"No; but my firm conviction is that the top of that cave that we found behind the fall is really the top of a natural tunnel through which the stream originally flowed. There are two or three reasons for this. In the first place, it is certainly remarkable that there should be a cave immediately behind that fall. I thought at first that the stream above might have been diverted to hide it, but the ravine is so narrow that that could not be possible. In the next place, your tradition has proved absolutely true in the matter of the star, and in the hour of its appearance in the exact line to the mouth of that cave. How correctly the details have been handed down from generation to generation! If they are right on that point it is hardly likely that they can be inaccurate on other points, and that the tale of an extraordinarily rich treasure could have been converted into one of an exceptional deposit of gold in the bed of a river.

"I think that the passage was probably closed by the old people when they were first threatened by the invasion of the Incas. No doubt they would choose a season when the stream was almost dry. They had, as the remains of their vast buildings will show, an unlimited supply of labour. They would first partially block up the tunnel, perhaps for the first fifty yards in, leaving only a small passage for the water to run through. They might then close the farther end with sacks of sand, and having the other stones all cut, and any number of hands, build it up behind the sacks, and then go on with the work till it was solid; then no doubt they would heap stones and boulders against the face of the wall. By the time the Incas had conquered the country the valley would be a lake many feet deep. The Incas, having gained an abundant supply of treasure elsewhere, would take no steps towards opening the tunnel, which in any case would have been a terrible business, for the pressure of water would drive everything before it. Having plenty of slave labour at their disposal, they knew that it could be done at any time in case of great necessity, when the loss of the lives of those concerned in it would be nothing to them. When the valley became full the water began to pour out through this gap, which perhaps happened to be immediately over the mouth of the tunnel, or it may have been altered by a few yards to suit, for they were, as we know from some of their buildings, such good workmen that they could fit slabs of the hardest stone so perfectly together that it is hardly possible to see the joints. Therefore they would only have to widen the mouth of the gorge a little, and fit rocks in on either side so that they would seem to have been there for all time; and indeed the natural growth of ferns and mosses would soon hide the joints, even if they had been roughly done."

"And that all means, Harry—?" Bertie asked.

"That all means that we have no more chance of getting at the gold than if it were lying in the deepest soundings in the Pacific."

Bertie sat down with a gasp.

"There is no way of getting that water out," Harry went on quietly, "except by either cutting a channel here as deep as the bottom of the lake, or by blasting the stone in the tunnel. The one would require years of work, with two or three hundred experienced miners, and ten times as many labourers. The other would need twenty or thirty miners, and a hundred or two labourers. There is possibly another way; but as that would require an immense iron siphon going down to the bottom of the lake, along one side of this ravine, and down into the bottom of the pool, with a powerful engine to exhaust the air in the first place and set it going, it is as impracticable, as far as we are concerned, as the other two.

"In the same way I have no doubt that, with a thousand-horse-power engine, the lake could be pumped dry in time; but to transport the plant for such an engine and its boiler across the mountains would be an enormous undertaking; and even were it here, and put up and going, the difficulty of supplying it with fuel would be enormous. Certainly one could not get up a company with capital enough to carry out any one of the schemes merely on the strength of an Indian tradition; and with the uncertainty, even if they believed the tradition, whether the amount of gold recovered would be sufficient to repay the cost incurred.

"Well, we may as well go down to dinner."

He shouldered his pick and led the way back. Scarce a word was spoken on the way. Bertie tried to follow the example of his brother, and take the matter coolly. Dias walked with his head down and the air of a criminal going to execution. The disappointment to him was terrible. He had all along felt so confident that they should be successful, and that he should be enabled to enrich those he considered as the preservers of his life, that he was utterly broken down with the total failure of his hopes.