_ DEDICATION
My Dear Little,
Some five-and-thirty years ago it was our custom to discuss many
matters, among them, I think, the history and romance of the
vanished Empires of Central America.
In memory of those far-off days will you accept a tale that deals
with one of them, that of the marvellous Incas of Peru; with the
legend also that, long before the Spanish Conquerors entered on
their mission of robbery and ruin, there in that undiscovered land
lived and died a White God risen from the sea?
Ever sincerely yours,
H. Rider Haggard.
Ditchingham,
Oct. 24, 1921.
James Stanley Little, Esq.
THE VIRGIN OF THE SUN
INTRODUCTORY
There are some who find great interest, and even consolation, amid the
worries and anxieties of life in the collection of relics of the past,
drift or long-sunk treasures that the sea of time has washed up upon
our modern shore.
The great collectors are not of this class. Having large sums at their
disposal, these acquire any rarity that comes upon the market and add
it to their store which in due course, perhaps immediately upon their
deaths, also will be put upon the market and pass to the possession of
other connoisseurs. Nor are the dealers who buy to sell again and thus
grow wealthy. Nor are the agents of museums in many lands, who
purchase for the national benefit things that are gathered together in
certain great public buildings which perhaps, some day, though the
thought makes one shiver, will be looted or given to the flames by
enemies or by furious, thieving mobs.
Those that this Editor has in mind, from one of whom indeed he
obtained the history printed in these pages, belong to a quite
different category, men of small means often, who collect old things,
for the most part at out-of-the-way sales or privately, because they
love them, and sometimes sell them again because they must. Frequently
these old things appeal, not because of any intrinsic value that they
may have, not even for their beauty, for they may be quite
unattractive even to the cultivated eye, but rather for their
associations. Such folk love to reflect upon and to speculate about
the long-dead individuals who have owned the relics, who have supped
their soup from the worn Elizabethan spoon, who have sat at the
rickety oak table found in a kitchen or an out-house, or upon the
broken, ancient chair. They love to think of the little children whose
skilful, tired hands wrought the faded sampler and whose bright eyes
smarted over its innumerable stitches.
Who, for instance, was the May Shore ("Fairy" broidered in a bracket
underneath, was her pet name), who finished yonder elaborate example
on her tenth birthday, the 1st of May--doubtless that is where she got
her name--in the year 1702, and on what far shore does she keep her
birthdays now? None will ever know. She has vanished into the great
sea of mystery whence she came, and there she lives and has her being,
forgotten upon earth, or sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. Did she die
young or old, married or single? Did she ever set /her/ children to
work other samplers, or had she none? was she happy or unhappy, was
she homely or beautiful? Was she a sinner or a saint? Again none will
ever know. She was born on the 1st of May, 1692, and certainly she
died on some date unrecorded. So far as human knowledge goes that is
all her history, just as much or as little as will be left of most of
us who breathe to-day when this earth has completed two hundred and
eighteen more revolutions round the sun.
But the kind of collector alluded to can best be exemplified in the
individual instance of him from whom the manuscript was obtained, of
which a somewhat modernized version is printed on these pages. He has
been dead some years, leaving no kin; and under his will, such of his
motley treasures as it cared to accept went to a local museum, while
the rest and his other property were sold for the benefit of a
mystical brotherhood, for the old fellow was a kind of spiritualist.
Therefore, there is no harm in giving his plebeian name, which was
Potts. Mr. Potts had a small draper's shop in an undistinguished and
rarely visited country town in the east of England, which shop he ran
with the help of an assistant almost as old and peculiar as himself.
Whether he made anything out of it or whether he lived upon private
means is now unknown and does not matter. Anyway, when there was
something of antiquarian interest or value to be bought, generally he
had the money to pay for it, though at times, in order to do so, he
was forced to sell something else. Indeed these were the only
occasions when it was possible to purchase anything, indifferent
hosiery excepted, from Mr. Potts.
Now, I, the Editor, who also love old things, and to whom therefore
Mr. Potts was a sympathetic soul, was aware of this fact and entered
into an arrangement with the peculiar assistant to whom I have
alluded, to advise me of such crises which arose whenever the local
bank called Mr. Potts's attention to the state of his account. Thus it
came about that one day I received the following letter:--
Sir,
The Guv'nor has gone a bust upon some cracked china, the ugliest
that ever I saw though no judge. So if you want to get that old
tall clock at the first price or any other of his rubbish, I think
now is your chance. Anyhow, keep this dark as per agreement.
Your obedient,
Tom.
(He always signed himself Tom, I suppose to mystify, although I
believe his real name was Betterly.)
The result of this epistle was a long and disagreeable bicycle ride in
wet autumn weather, and a visit to the shop of Mr. Potts. Tom, alias
Betterly, who was trying to sell some mysterious undergarments to a
fat old woman, caught sight of me, the Editor aforesaid, and winked.
In a shadowed corner of the shop sat Mr. Potts himself upon a high
stool, a wizened little old man with a bent back, a bald head, and a
hooked nose upon which were set a pair of enormous horn-rimmed
spectacles that accentuated his general resemblance to an owl perched
upon the edge of its nest-hole. He was busily engaged in doing
nothing, and in staring into nothingness as, according to Tom, was his
habit when communing with what he, Tom, called his "dratted speerits."
"Customer!" said Tom in a harsh voice. "Sorry to disturb you at your
prayers, Guv'nor, but not having two pair of hands I can't serve a
crowd," meaning the old woman of the undergarments and myself.
Mr. Potts slid off his stool and prepared for action. When he saw,
however, who the customer was he bristled--that is the only word for
it. The truth is that although between us there was an inward and
spiritual sympathy, there was also an outward and visible hostility.
Twice I had outbid Mr. Potts at a local auction for articles which he
desired. Moreover, after the fashion of every good collector he felt
it to be his duty to hate me as another collector. Lastly, several
times I had offered him smaller sums for antiques upon which he set a
certain monetary value. It is true that long ago I had given up this
bargaining for the reason that Mr. Potts would never take less than he
asked. Indeed he followed the example of the vendor of the Sibylline
books in ancient Rome. He did not destroy the goods indeed after the
fashion of that person and demand the price of all of them for the one
that remained, but invariably he put up his figure by 10 per cent. and
nothing would induce him to take off one farthing.
"What do /you/ want, sir?" he said grumpily. "Vests, hose, collars, or
socks?"
"Oh, socks, I think," I replied at hazard, thinking that they would be
easiest to carry, whereupon Mr. Potts produced some peculiarly
objectionable and shapeless woollen articles which he almost threw at
me, saying that they were all he had in stock. Now I detest woollen
socks and never wear them. Still, I made a purchase, thinking with
sympathy of my old gardener whose feet they would soon be scratching,
and while the parcel was being tied up, said in an insinuating voice,
"Anything fresh upstairs, Mr. Potts?"
"No, sir," he answered shortly, "at least, not much, and if there were
what's the use of showing them to you after the business about that
clock?"
"It was £15 you wanted for it, Mr. Potts?" I asked.
"No, sir, it was £17 and now it's 10 per cent. on to that; you can
work out the sum for yourself."
"Well, let's have another look at it, Mr. Potts," I replied humbly,
whereon with a grunt and a muttered injunction to Tom to mind the
shop, he led the way upstairs.
Now the house in which Mr. Potts dwelt had once been of considerable
pretensions and was very, very old, Elizabethan, I should think,
although it had been refronted with a horrible stucco to suit modern
tastes. The oak staircase was good though narrow, and led to numerous
small rooms upon two floors above, some of which rooms were panelled
and had oak beams, now whitewashed like the panelling--at least they
had once been whitewashed, probably in the last generation.
These rooms were literally crammed with every sort of old furniture,
most of it decrepit, though for many of the articles dealers would
have given a good price. But at dealers Mr. Potts drew the line; not
one of them had ever set a foot upon that oaken stair. To the attics
the place was filled with this furniture and other articles such as
books, china, samplers with the glass broken, and I know not what
besides, piled in heaps upon the floor. Indeed where Mr. Potts slept
was a mystery; either it must have been under the counter in his shop,
or perhaps at nights he inhabited a worm-eaten Jacobean bedstead which
stood in an attic, for I observed a kind of pathway to it running
through a number of legless chairs, also some dirty blankets between
the moth-riddled curtains.
Not far from this bedstead, propped in an intoxicated way against the
sloping wall of the old house, stood the clock which I desired. It was
one of the first "regulator" clocks with a wooden pendulum, used by
the maker himself to check the time-keeping of all his other clocks,
and enclosed in a chaste and perfect mahogany case of the very best
style of its period. So beautiful was it, indeed, that it had been an
instance of "love at first sight" between us, and although there was
an estrangement on the matter of settlements, or in other words over
the question of price, now I felt that never more could that clock and
I be parted.
So I agreed to give old Potts the £20 or, to be accurate, £18 14s.
which he asked on the 10 per cent. rise principle, thankful in my
heart that he had not made it more, and prepared to go. As I turned,
however, my eye fell upon a large chest of the almost indestructible
yellow cypress wood of which were made, it is said, the doors of St.
Peter's at Rome that stood for eight hundred years and, for aught I
know, are still standing, as good as on the day when they were put up.
"Marriage coffer," said Potts, answering my unspoken question.
"Italian, about 1600?" I suggested.
"May be so, or perhaps Dutch made by Italian artists; but older than
that, for somebody has burnt 1597 on the lid with a hot iron. Not for
sale, not for sale at all, much too good to sell. Just you look inside
it, the old key is tied to the spring lock. Never saw such poker-work
in my life. Gods and goddesses and I don't know what; and Venus
sitting in the middle in a wreath of flowers with nothing on, and
holding two hearts in her hands, which shows that it was a marriage
chest. Once it was full of some bride's outfit, sheets and linen and
clothes, and God knows what. I wonder where she has got to to-day.
Some place where the moth don't eat clothes, I hope. Bought it at the
break-up of an ancient family who fled to Norfolk on the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes--Huguenot, of course. Years ago, years ago!
Haven't looked into it for many years, indeed, but think there's
nothing there but rubbish now."
Thus he mumbled on while he found and untied the old key. The spring
lock had grown stiff from disuse and want of oil, but at length it
turned and reopened the chest revealing the poker-work glories on the
inner side of the lid and elsewhere. Glories they were indeed, never
had I seen such artistry of the sort.
"Can't see it properly," muttered Potts, "windows want washing,
haven't been done since my wife died, and that's twenty years ago.
Miss her very much, of course, but thank God there's no spring-
cleaning now. The things I've seen broken in spring-cleaning! yes, and
lost, too. It was after one of them that I told my wife that now I
understood why the Mahomedans declare that women have no souls. When
she came to understand what I meant, which it took her a long time to
do, we had a row, a regular row, and she threw a Dresden figure at my
head. Luckily I caught it, having been a cricketer when young. Well,
she's gone now, and no doubt heaven's a tidier place than it used to
be--that is, if they will stand her rummagings there, which I doubt.
Look at that Venus, ain't she a beauty? Might have been done by Titian
when his paints ran out, and he had to take to a hot iron to express
his art. What, you can't see her well? Wait a bit and I'll get a
lantern. Can't have a naked candle here--things too valuable; no money
could buy them again. My wife and I had another row about naked
candles, or it may have been a paraffin lamp. You sit in that old
prayer-stool and look at the work."
Off he went crawling down the dusky stairs and leaving me wondering
what Mrs. Potts, of whom now I heard for the first time, could have
been like. An aggravating woman, I felt sure, for upon whatever points
men differ, as to "spring-cleaning" they are all of one mind. No doubt
he was better without her, for what did that dried-up old artist want
with a wife?
Dismissing Mrs. Potts from my mind, which, to tell the truth, seemed
to have no room for her shadowy and hypothetical entity, I fell to
examining the chest. Oh! it was lovely. In two minutes the clock was
deposed and that chest became the sultana in my seraglio of beauteous
things. The clock had only been the light love of an hour. Here was
the eternal queen, that is, unless there existed a still better chest
somewhere else, and I should happen to find it. Meanwhile, whatever
price that old slave-dealer Potts wanted for it, must be paid to him
even if I had to overdraw my somewhat slender account. Seraglios, of
whatever sort, it must be remembered, are expensive luxuries of the
rich indeed, though, if of antiques, they can be sold again, which
cannot be said of the human kind for who wants to buy a lot of antique
frumps?
There were plenty of things in the chest, such as some odds and ends
of tapestry and old clothes of a Queen Anne character, put here, no
doubt, for preservation, as moth does not like this cypress wood. Also
there were some books and a mysterious bundle tied up in a curious
shawl with stripes of colour running through it. That bundle excited
me, and I drew the fringes of the shawl apart and looked in. So far as
I could see it contained another dress of rich colours, also a thick
packet of what looked like parchment, badly prepared and much rotted
upon one side as though by damp, which parchment appeared to be
covered with faint black-letter writing, done by some careless scribe
with poor ink that had faded very much. There were other things, too,
within the shawl, such as a box made of some red foreign wood, but I
had not time to investigate further for just then I heard old Potts's
foot upon the stair, and thought it best to replace the bundle. He
arrived with the lantern and by its light we examined the chest and
the poker work.
"Very nice," I said, "very nice, though a good deal knocked about."
"Yes, sir," he replied with sarcasm, "I suppose you'd like to see it
neat and new after four hundred years of wear, and if so, I think I
can tell you where you can get one to your liking. I made the designs
for it myself five years ago for a fellow who wanted to learn how to
manufacture antiques. He's in quod now and his antiques are for sale
cheap. I helped to put him there to get him out of the way as a danger
to Society."
"What's the price?" I asked with airy detachment.
"Haven't I told you it ain't for sale. Wait till I'm dead and come and
buy it at my auction. No, you won't, though, for it's going somewhere
else."
I made no answer but continued my examination while Potts took his
seat on the prayer-stool and seemed to go off into one of his fits of
abstraction.
"Well," I said at length when decency told me that I could remain no
longer, "if you won't sell it's no use my looking. No doubt you want
to keep it for a richer man, and of course you are quite right. Will
you arrange with the carrier about sending the clock, Mr. Potts, and I
will let you have a cheque. Now I must be off, as I've ten miles to
ride and it will be dark in an hour."
"Stop where you are," said Potts in a hollow voice. "What's a ride in
the dark compared with a matter like this, even if you haven't a lamp
and get hauled before your own bench? Stop where you are, I'm
listening to something."
So I stopped and began to fill my pipe.
"Put that pipe away," said Potts, coming out of his reverie, "pipes
mean matches; no matches here."
I obeyed, and he went on thinking till at last what between the chest
and the worm-eaten Jacobean bed and old Potts on the prayer-stool, I
began to feel as if I were being mesmerized. At length he rose and
said in the same hollow voice:
"Young man, you may have that chest, and the price is £50. Now for
heaven's sake don't offer me £40, or it will be £100 before you leave
this room."
"With the contents?" I said casually.
"Yes, with the contents. It's the contents I'm told you are to have."
"Look here, Potts," I said, exasperated, "what the devil do you mean?
There's no one in this room except you and me, so who can have told
you anything unless it was old Tom downstairs."
"Tom," he said with unutterable sarcasm, "Tom! Perhaps you mean the
mawkin that was put up to scare birds from the peas in the garden, for
it has more in its head than Tom. No one here? Oh! what fools some men
are. Why, the place is thick with them."
"Thick with whom?"
"Who? why, ghosts, of course, as you would call them in your
ignorance. Spirits of the dead I name them. Beautiful enough, too,
some of them. Look at that one there," and he lifted the lantern and
pointed to a pile of old bed posts of Chippendale design.
"Good day, Potts," I said hastily.
"Stop where you are," repeated Potts. "You don't believe me yet, but
when you are as old as I am you will remember my words and believe--
more than I do and see--clearer than I do, because it's in your soul,
yes, the seed is in your soul, though as yet it is choked by the
world, the flesh, and the devil. Wait till your sins have brought you
trouble; wait till the fires of trouble have burned the flesh away;
wait till you have sought Light and found Light and live in Light,
then you will believe; /then/ you will see."
All this he said very solemnly, and standing there in that dusky room
surrounded by the wreck of things that once had been dear to dead men
and women, waving the lantern in his hand and staring--at what was he
staring?--really old Potts looked most impressive. His twisted shape
and ugly countenance became spiritual; he was one who had "found Light
and lived in Light."
"You won't believe me," he went on, "but I pass on to you what a woman
has been telling me. She's a queer sort of woman; I never saw her like
before, a foreigner and dark-hued with strange rich garments and
something on her head. There, that, /that/," and he pointed through
the dirty window-place to the crescent of a young moon which appeared
in the sky. "A fine figure of a woman," he went on, "and oh! heaven,
what eyes--I never saw such eyes before. Big and tender, something
like those of the deer in the park yonder. Proud, too, she is, one who
has ruled, and a lady, though foreign. Well, I never fell in love
before, but I feel like it now, and so would you, young man, if you
could see her, and so I think did someone else in his day."
"What did she say to you?" I asked, for by now I was interested
enough. Who wouldn't be when old Potts took to describing beautiful
women?
"It's a little difficult to tell you for she spoke in a strange
tongue, and I had to translate it in my head, as it were. But this is
the gist of it. That you were to have that chest and what was in it.
There's a writing there, she says, or part of a writing for some has
gone--rotted away. You are to read that writing or to get it read and
to print it so that the world may read it also. She said that 'Hubert'
wishes you to do so. I am sure the name was Hubert, though she also
spoke of him with some other title which I do not understand. That's
all I can remember, except something about a city, yes, a City of Gold
and a last great battle in which Hubert fell, covered with glory and
conquering. I understood that she wanted to talk about that because it
isn't in the writing, but you interrupted and of course she's gone.
Yes, the price is £50 and not a farthing less, but you can pay it when
you like for I know you're as honest as most, and whether you pay it
or not, you must have that chest and what's in it and no one else."
"All right," I said, "but don't trust it to the carrier. I'll send a
cart for it to-morrow morning. Lock it now and give me the key."
In due course the chest arrived, and I examined the bundle for the
other contents do not matter, although some of them were interesting.
Pinned inside the shawl I found a paper, undated and unsigned, but
which from the character and style of the writing was, I should say,
penned by a lady about sixty years ago. It ran thus:--
"My late father, who was such a great traveller in his young days
and so fond of exploring strange places, brought these things home
from one of his journeys before his marriage, I think from South
America. He told me once that the dress was found upon the body of
a woman in a tomb and that she must have been a great lady, for
she was surrounded by a number of other women, perhaps her
servants who were brought to be buried with her here when they
died. They were all seated about a stone table at the end of which
were the remains of a man. My father saw the bodies near the ruins
of some forest city, in the tomb over which was heaped a great
mound of earth. That of the lady, which had a kind of shroud made
of the skins of long-wooled sheep wrapped about it as though to
preserve the dress beneath, had been embalmed in some way, which
the natives of the place, wherever it was, told him showed that
she was royal. The others were mere skeletons, held together by
the skin, but the man had a long fair beard and hair still hanging
to his skull, and by his side was a great cross-hilted sword that
crumbled to fragments when it was touched, except the hilt and the
knob of amber upon it which had turned almost black with age. I
think my father said that the packet of skins or parchment of
which the underside is badly rotted with damp was set under the
feet of the man. He told me that he gave those who found the tomb
a great deal of money for the dress, gold ornaments, and emerald
necklace, as nothing so perfect had been found before, and the
cloth is all worked with gold thread. My father told me, too, that
he did not wish the things to be sold."
This was the end of the writing.
Having read it I examined the dress. It was of a sort that I had never
seen before, though experts to whom I have shown it say that it is
certainly South American of a very early date, and like the ornaments,
probably pre-Inca Peruvian. It is full of rich colours such as I have
seen in old Indian shawls which give a general effect of crimson. This
crimson robe clearly was worn over a skirt of linen that had a purple
border. In the box that I have spoken of were the ornaments, all of
plain dull gold: a waist-band; a circlet of gold for the head from
which rose the crescent of the young moon and a necklace of emeralds,
uncut stones now much flawed, for what reason I do not know, but
polished and set rather roughly in red gold. Also there were two
rings. Round one of these a bit of paper was wrapped upon which was
written, in another hand, probably that of the father of the writer of
the memorandum:--
"Taken from the first finger of the right hand of a lady's mummy
which I am sorry, in our circumstances, it was quite impossible to
carry away."
This ring is a broad band of gold with a flat bezel upon which
something was once engraved that owing to long and hard wear now
cannot be distinguished. In short, it appears to be a signet of old
European make but of what age and from what country it is impossible
to determine. The other ring was in a small leathery pouch,
elaborately embroidered in gold thread or very thin wire, which I
suppose was part of the lady's costume. It is like a very massive
wedding ring, but six or eight times as thick, and engraved all over
with an embossed conventional design of what look like stars with rays
round them, or possibly petalled flowers. Lastly there was the sword-
hilt, of which presently.
Such were the trinkets, if so they may be called. They are of little
value intrinsically except for their weight in gold, because, as I
have said, the emeralds are flawed as though they have been through a
fire or some other unknown cause. Moreover, there is about them
nothing of the grace and charm of ancient Egyptian jewellery;
evidently they belonged to a ruder age and civilization. Yet they had,
and still have, to my imagining, a certain dignity of their own.
Also--here I became infected with the spirit of the peculiar Potts--
without doubt these things were rich in human associations. Who had
worn that dress of crimson with the crosses worked on it in gold wire
(they cannot have been Christian crosses), and the purple-bordered
skirt underneath, and the emerald necklace and the golden circlet from
which rose the crescent of the young moon? Apparently a mummy in a
tomb, the mummy of some long-dead lady of a strange and alien race.
Was she such a one as that old lunatic Potts had dreamed he saw
standing before him in the filthy, cumbered upper-chamber of a ruinous
house in an England market town, I wondered, one with great eyes like
to those of a doe and a regal bearing?
No, that was nonsense. Potts had lived with shadows until he believed
in shadows that came out of his own imagination and into it returned
again. Still, she was a woman of some sort, and apparently she had a
lover or a husband, a man with a great fair beard. How at this date,
which must have been remote, did a golden-bearded man come to
foregather with a woman who wore such robes and ornaments as these?
And that sword hilt, worn smooth by handling and with an amber knob?
Whence came it? To my mind--this was before expert examination
confirmed my view--it looked very Norse. I had read the Sagas and I
remembered a tale recovered in them of some bold Norsemen who about
the years eight or nine hundred had wandered to the coast of what is
known now to be America--I think a certain Eric was their captain.
Could the fair-haired man in the grave have been one of these?
Thus I speculated before I looked at the pile of parchments so
evidently prepared from sheep skins by one who had only a very
rudimentary knowledge of how to work such stuff, not knowing that in
those parchments was hid the answer to many of my questions. To these
I turned last of all, for we all shrink from parchments; their
contents are generally so dull. There was a great bundle of them that
had been lashed together with a kind of straw rope, fine straw that
reminded me of that used to make Panama hats. But this had rotted
underneath together with all the bottom part of the parchments, many
sheets of them, of which only fragments remained, covered with dry
mould and crumbling. Therefore the rope was easy to remove and beneath
it, holding the sheets in place, was only some stout and comparatively
modern string--it had a red thread in it that marked it as navy cord
of an old pattern.
I slipped these fastenings off and lifted a blank piece of skin set
upon the top. Beneath appeared the first sheet of parchment, closely,
very closely covered with small "black-letter" writing, so faint and
faded that even if I were able to read black-letter, which I cannot,
of it I could have made nothing at all. The thing was hopeless.
Doubtless in that writing lay the key to the mystery, but it could
never be deciphered by me or any one else. The lady with the eyes like
a deer had appeared to old Potts in vain; in vain had she bidden him
to hand over this manuscript to me.
So I thought at the time, not knowing the resources of science.
Afterwards, however, I took that huge bundle to a friend, a learned
friend whose business in life it was and is, to deal with and to
decipher old manuscripts.
"Looks pretty hopeless," he said, after staring at these. "Still,
let's have a try; one never knows till one tries."
Then he went to a cupboard in his muniment room and produced a bottle
full of some straw-coloured fluid into which he dipped an ordinary
painting brush. This charged brush he rubbed backwards and forwards
over the first lines of the writing and waited. Within a minute,
before my astonished eyes, that faint, indistinguishable script turned
coal-black, as black as though it had been written with the best
modern ink yesterday.
"It's all right," he said triumphantly, "it's vegetable ink, and this
stuff has the power to bring it up as it was on the day when it was
used. It will stay like that for a fortnight and then fade away again.
Your manuscript is pretty ancient, my friend, time of Richard II, I
should say, but I can read it easily enough. Look, it begins, 'I,
Hubert de Hastings, write this in the land of Tavantinsuyu, far from
England where I was born, whither I shall never more return, being a
wanderer as the rune upon the sword of my ancestor, Thorgrimmer,
foretold that I should be, which sword my mother gave me on the day of
the burning of Hastings by the French,' and so on." Here he stopped.
"Then for heaven's sake, do read it," I said.
"My dear friend," he answered, "it looks to me as though it would mean
several months' work, and forgive me for saying that I am paid a
salary for my time. Now I'll tell you what you have to do. All this
stuff must be treated, sheet by sheet, and when it turns black it must
be photographed before the writing fades once more. Then a skilled
person--so-and-so, or so-and-so, are two names that occur to me--must
be employed to decipher it again, sheet by sheet. It will cost you
money, but I should say that it was worth while. Where the devil is,
or was, the land of Tavantinsuyu?"
"I know," I answered, glad to be able to show myself superior to my
learned friend in one humble instance. "Tavantinsuyu was the native
name for the Empire of Peru before the Spanish Invasion. But how did
this Hubert get there in the time of Richard II? That is some
centuries earlier than Pizarro set foot upon its shores."
"Go and find out," he answered. "It will amuse you for quite a long
while and perhaps the results may meet the expenses of decipherment,
if they are worth publishing. I expect they are not, but then, I have
read so many old manuscripts and found most of them so jolly dull."
Well, that business was accomplished at a cost that I do not like to
record, and here are the results, more or less modernised, since often
Hubert of Hastings expressed himself in a queer and archaic fashion.
Also sometimes he used Indian words as though he had talked the tongue
of these Peruvians, or rather the Chanca variety of it, so long that
he had begun to forget his own language. Myself I have found his story
very romantic and interesting, and I hope that some others will be of
the same opinion. Let them judge.
But oh, I do wonder what was the end of it, some of which doubtless
was recorded on the rotted sheets though of course there can have been
no account of the great battle in which he fell, since Quilla could
not write at all, least of all in English, though I suppose she
survived it and him.
The only hint of that end is to be found in old Potts's dream or
vision, and what is the worth of dreams and visions? _