We passed over trails where the tired animals stumbled, and once we aroused a chorus of dog protests as if we had disturbed a village. Ixtual seemed ever anxious that we hasten our pace, and sometimes was impatient because we made no faster progress; but when the dawn burst and broke with the speed it always has in those latitudes, the Maya seemed relieved that we had come to the borders of what appeared to be a virgin jungle. He sought a place that permitted us to enter it, found it, and led us through what was nothing more than a narrow path into its depths, where we rested. Looking back as if through the egress of a tunnel, I saw plantations below me, the occasional thatched roof of a nipa hut, the stretch of a gentle declivity up which we had climbed in the darkness, and, far away to the right, the morning light on something that looked like a temple in the heart of greenery. It was very distant, almost obscure, tantalizing in its want of detail. Yet somehow I surmised when Doctor Morgano stared at it for a moment with distended eyes that for him it carried trying recollections. He shivered, then turned away toward the jungle as if eager to forget that distant edifice and all that it meant to him. We paused merely long enough to make cocoa and eat some biscuit, and then Ixtual insisted upon our resumption of toil; for it was that and nothing less. Toil of a most distressing character.
For some hours we made our way in half darkness through tunnels of fern and vegetation, over what seemed to have once been a road but was now nothing better than a game path. Creepers festooned across our way until cut; fallen trees necessitated detours; sometimes the trail diverged into a dozen paths, and we waited while Ixtual examined each one. And then when it was nearly noon and the sun beating upon the jungle roof with hammers of white rays we emerged into what had sometime, I opine, been a clearing, and waded through pampas grass higher than our heads although we were mounted, and came to the ruins of a house.
“We are safe now,” grunted Ixtual as if vastly relieved because he had found the way to this spot. “Here we will rest until to-morrow.”
And if I can speak for the others of the party, I think no one at all was inclined to object. I know I didn’t; for after we had killed a few snakes, and thrown out a section of fallen roof from the once-on-a-time house, we had a real meal, and fell into our hammocks exhausted. We needed the rest. And I was even sorry for the poor lathered burros and ponies that drank so feverishly of the water we gave them, and plunged their noses so ravenously into the food we heaped before them.
We felt like new men the next morning when it was time to start. It was but little beyond sunrise, and yet Ixtual had been long awake and exploring the sole path from the central clearing.
“This is the way,” he said to us, when the last ax had been slid beneath harness, and the last pot tied on the pack. “We cannot travel so far to-day. It will be hard work.”
He spoke plain truth if ever a man did. I vouch for that. I have learned what hard work is. All day long we struggled and fought, twisted and curved, through a jungle that seemed ever to grow more obdurate and dense. We labored with machetes now and then, slashing and cutting at tangles of vines as if they were living enemies. Sometimes we fairly bored our way through the vegetable enemy by sheer weight and driving power. Sometimes, exhausted, we sat dripping in sullen silence, finding momentary solace in pipe or cigarette, only to resume that heartbreaking toil of trying to force our way through an interminable and malevolent jungle. Ixtual was conducting us now through the aid of a compass alone.
“We are too far to the left.” Or, “we must bear to the right, señores,” he said, and yet I cheerfully admit that the soul of the man was ever brave and determined. And that night when we found a tiny open spot and made camp he said, as if satisfied: “This is far beyond any place that any man within our time has ever reached. If we can keep on long enough, we shall pass the jungle that holds, and fights, and keeps all men away, and beyond it find places where travel is easier; where no man for hundreds of years has passed. It is well!”