Charles Gilson - Treasure of Kings

Well, the truth was, he who feared neither beast of prey nor painted cannibal was afraid of civilised men. He went once a week to the little inland village a few miles distant to purchase groceries and stores. There-as I found out afterwards-they thought him a madman, though he was always courteous in his manner and paid without question for what he bought. He had few words for any man, and none ever for a woman. Later, when my mother came to learn of my new-found friend who lived alone among the sand-hills, she was anxious to see him, more for my own welfare than from curiosity; but he told me flatly that he had never known any civilised woman save his own mother, who had died when he was young, and he would rather face a wounded lion than pretend to talk to one.

"For it comes to this," said he; "I have gone back, as it were, upon the centuries; I have learned to live as men lived in ancient times. Though I have read much and thought more, and have some claim, I suppose, to be called a scholar, in many ways I am no better than a cave-man. I have forgotten all the niceties of culture. I have neither small-talk nor table manners. So I prefer to live as I do, in my own way; and I offer no welcome to visitors. The farmer who owns this land is glad enough of the little I pay him in the way of rent; but, beyond that and my weekly shopping, I seek no intercourse with strangers. I am content to be alone."

I asked if he were not often lonely, and he laughed.

"Even here," said he, "in Sussex, Nature is a living force. The sea changes almost hour by hour. Birds come and visit me. Even the rabbits in the brake have already learned to know me. They all seem to know-these little, wild things-that I am one of them, and soon cease to fear me. They are my companions and my friends, and I have also books and memory. And I have health and air, the smell of the salt sea and the seaweed, and the sunrise to awaken me before your street-bred friends are stirring. The wind, the rain, and the sun-I welcome each as it comes. Did I want other comrades, I should go and seek them; but I prefer to live like this."

"And yet you talked willingly to me?" I asked.

"Because," he answered slowly-and his words came to me as a surprise-"because you are a cave-man, too."

"I!" I exclaimed.

"Every boy," said he, "every healthy, happy boy. It was the savage in you-though you may not realise it-that brought you out here alone, that took you right away from red bricks and shops and dinner."

I cannot say whether I have conveyed to the reader in the space of this short chapter a true conception of the character of John Bannister, as he was when I knew him first. Of his personal appearance I have yet to write; and if it be a simple matter to describe that which is outwardly apparent, it is by no means easy either to fathom or to portray a man's soul and mind.

Do not imagine that I myself knew aught of him until after we had sojourned together for months, faced the same dangers, stood side by side throughout the great adventure of which I have to tell. I knew from the first that he was wise and generous and kind: I could see with my eyes that he was strong, and his talk charmed the imagination of a dreamy, active boy. In spite of all he knew, of the experiences he had had in all parts of the world, he was one of the simplest men that ever lived. And there was something in him of the poet. I do not mean that he ever tried to set down his thoughts in verse, but that he lived in love with all things beautiful. I have seen him stand stock-still like one transfigured, with eyes illumined, gazing in wonderment upon a purple sunset upon the snow-capped crestline of the distant Andes-and that at a moment when his own life, as well as mine, was not worth a full day's purchase.

Judge all men by their deeds and not their words. Hear this history to the end, and see what like of man was he whose charm and peril led me forth from green and sleepy Sussex to adventure in the darkness of those tropic forests that shut out the source of the great River of Mystery, where there are poison, black ignorance, and fell disease, and a man may no more count the dangers that encompass him than the myriads of stinging insects that drone about his ears.

And one thing more: my own life has not been lived without event. It has been my fate to tell a score of times of the enterprise of others; but of all men of action I have ever known, read or written of, I rank John Bannister as first. Perhaps that may be because I can now seat myself of a winter's evening before my study fire and see him in my fancy as he was in all his strength and manhood, pass through again the dangers and the hardships, and live once more the glorious days that it was my privilege to pass with him, and remember that, had it not been for him, I might have lived all my life in Sussex and seen nothing of the world. But how can I set down the debt I owe him? For I owe him life itself.

After that morning, throughout the summer months when I was at school, there was seldom a Saturday or a Wednesday afternoon when I was not to be seen hastening eastward along the beach to see John Bannister and to listen to his talk.

During those days I learned much of him, of his travels and adventures; but there were certain matters upon which he would never speak in any detail. He would never tell me, for instance, the full story of how he had come by the great scar upon his face-a disfigurement so pronounced as to be at once pathetic and repulsive, which had aroused my boyish curiosity from the first. Had it not been for that scar, Bannister would have been a handsome man, as indeed he was when the left side of his face was to be seen in profile. He had deep-set steel-grey eyes that looked clean through you, and the forehead of a thinker; his hair, in those bygone days, was black, no more than touched with white upon the temples and about the ears, and his moustache the longest I have ever seen. Though there was never a man, I should suppose, who had less of vanity in his composition, I think he grew it thus to hide in part the record of the terrible wound that had extended from his right ear to the corner of his mouth-a scar that was always rough and white, though his face was burnt by the sun to the colour of tan.

"I came by that," he once said to me in answer to my question, "in what might be called an honest cause. A thousand miles from nowhere, where there is neither Law nor Right nor Wrong nor Justice, one-who may or may not have learned the Lord's Prayer at his mother's knee-would have put to death some score of helpless human creatures, slaughtered them like sheep."

"Why?" I asked.

"Why," said he, "there are but few motives that sway the evil that lies in all men, and of these greed of gold is first. And this man of whom I speak was a great force of evil, and is so still, for I never doubt that he is yet alive. For gold he would have murdered those who had never wronged him, who had indeed shown him nothing but kindness and hospitality. Fate decreed that this man's path and mine should cross; and because I stood between him and an ill-gotten fortune, I was struck a coward's blow. You would never guess the weapon, Dick, that gave me my beauty mark for life?"

He paused as if waiting for an answer, though I had none to give.

"Well, then," he continued, "it was a sceptre-the golden sceptre of a bygone dynasty of monarchs, ended four hundred years ago-kings of no naked savages, but emperors, rulers over an ancient civilisation that has crumbled to the dust, of a people who were cultured in their own way, industrious and great. It is something, we may imagine, to carry through life the scar that was given by the symbol of such authority and power."

"And where was this?" I asked.

"Where the mountains overtop the clouds," he answered, "where one may see the last of the sunset beyond the valleys of Peru, and the dawn rises from the dark forests of the Upper Amazon, in which, Dick, there are secrets that no man yet has ever lived to learn."