Джек Лондон - Hearts of Three [С англо-русским словарем]

‘And that’s a Devonshire man if ever I saw one,’ Henry whispered back. ‘Perforated dimes to pieces-of eight that he poached the fallow deer and fled the king’s wrath in the first forecastle for the Spanish Main. [37] The Spanish Main — прибрежные территории испанской Америки (Карибский регион). ’

‘Br-r-r!’ Leoncia shivered, clinging to both men. ‘The sacred things of the Mayas are deadly and ghastly. And there is a classic vengeance about it. The would-be robbers of the treasure-house have become its defenders, guarding it with their unperishing clay.’

They were loath to proceed. The garmented specters of the ancient dead held them temporarily spell-bound. Henry grew melodramatic.

‘Even to this far, mad place,’ he said, ‘as early as the beginning of the Conquest, their true-hound noses led them on the treasure-scent. Even though they could not get away with it, they won unerringly to it. My hat is off to you, pirates and conquistadores! I salute you, old gallant plunderers, whose noses smelt out gold, and whose hearts were brave sufficient to fight for it!’

‘Huh!’ Francis concurred, as he urged the other two to traverse the avenue of the ancient adventurers. ‘Old Sir Henry himself ought to be here at the head of the procession.’

Thirty paces they took, ere the passage elbowed as before, and, at the very end of the double-row of mummies, Henry brought his companions to a halt as he pointed and said:

‘I don’t know about Sir Henry, but there’s Alvarez Torres.’

Under a Spanish helmet, in decapitated medieval Spanish dress, a big Spanish sword in its brown and withered hand, stood a mummy whose lean brown face for all the world was the lean brown face of Alvarez Torres. Leoncia gasped, shrank back, and crossed herself at the sight.

Francis released her to Henry, advanced, and fingered the cheeks and lips and forehead of the thing, and laughed reassuringly:

‘I only wish Alvarez Torres were as dead as this dead one is. I haven’t the slightest doubt, however, but what Torres descended from him I mean before he came here to take up his final earthly residence as a member of the Maya Treasure Guard.’

Leoncia passed the grim figure shudderingly. This time, the elbow passage was very dark, compelling Henry, who had changed into the lead, to light numerous matches.

‘Hello!’ he said, as he paused at the end of a couple of hundred feet. ‘Gaze on that for workmanship! Look at the dressing of that stone!’

From beyond, gray light streamed into the passage, making matches unnecessary to see. Half into a niche was thrust a stone the size of the passage. It was apparent that it had been used to block the passage. The dressing was exquisite, the sides and edges of the block precisely aligned with the place in the wall into which it was made to dovetail.

‘I’ll wager here’s where the old Maya’s father died,’ Francis exclaimed. ‘He knew the secret of the balances and leverages that pivoted the stone, and it was only partly pivoted, as you’ll observe — ’

‘Hell’s bells!’ Henry interrupted, pointing before him on the floor at a scattered skeleton. ‘It must be what’s left of him. It’s fairly recent, or he would have been mummified. Most likely he was the last visitor before us.’

‘The old priest said his father led men of the tierra caliente here,’ Leoncia reminded Henry.

‘Also,’ Francis supplemented, ‘he said that none returned.’

Henry, who had located the skull and picked it up, uttered another exclamation and lighted a match to show the others what he had discovered. Not only was the skull dented with what must have been a blow from a sword or a machete, but a shattered hole in the back of the skull showed the unmistakable entrance of a bullet. Henry shook the skull, was rewarded by an interior rattling, shook again, and shook out a partly flattened bullet. Francis examined it.

‘From a horse-pistol,’ he concluded aloud. ‘With weak or greatly deteriorated powder, because, in a place like this, it must have been fired pretty close to point blank range and yet failed to go all the way through. And it’s an aboriginal skull all right.’

A right-angled turn completed the elbow and gave them access to a small but well-lighted rock chamber. From a window, high up and barred with vertical bars of stone a foot thick and half as wide, poured gray daylight. The floor of the place was littered with white-picked bones of men. An examination of the skulls showed them to be those of Europeans. Scattered among them were rifles, pistols, and knives, with, here and there, a machete.

‘Thus far they won, across the very threshold to the treasure,’ Francis said, ‘and, from the looks, began to fight for its possession before they laid hands on it. Too bad the old man isn’t here to see what happened to his father.

‘Might there not have been survivors who managed to get away with the loot?’ suggested Henry.

But at that moment, casting, his eyes from the bones to a survey of the chamber, Francis saw what made him say: ‘Without doubt, no. See those gems in those eyes. Rubies, or I never saw a ruby!’

They followed his gaze to the stone statue of a squat and heavy female who stared at them red-eyed and openmouthed. So large was the mouth that it made a caricature of the rest of the face. Beside it, carved similarly of stone, and on somewhat more heroic lines, was a more obscene and hideous male statue, with one ear of proportioned size and the other ear as grotesquely large as the female’s mouth.

‘The beauteous dame must be Chia all right,’ Henry grinned. ‘But who’s her gentleman friend with the elephant ear and the green eyes?’

‘Search me,’ Francis laughed. ‘But this I do know: those green eyes of the elephant-eared one are the largest emeralds I’ve ever seen or dreamed of. Each of them is really too large to possess fair carat value. They should be crown jewels or nothing.’

‘But a couple of emeralds and a couple of rubies, no matter what size, should not constitute the totality of the Maya treasure,’ Henry contended. ‘We’re across the threshold of it, and yet we lack the key’

‘Which the old Maya, back on the barking sands, undoubtedly holds in that sacred tassel of his,’ Leoncia said. ‘Except for these two statues and the bones on the floor, the place is bare.’

As she spoke, she advanced to look the male statue over more closely. The grotesque ear centered her attention, and she pointed into it as she added: ‘I don’t know about the key, but there is the key-hole.’

True enough, the elephantine ear, instead of enfolding an orifice as an ear of such size should, was completely blocked up save for a small aperture that not too remotely resembled a key-hole. They wandered vainly about the chamber, tapping the walls and floor, seeking for cunningly hidden passageways or unguessable clues to the hiding place of the treasure.

‘Bones of tierra caliente men, two idols, two emeralds of enormous size, two rubies ditto, and ourselves, are all the place contains,’ Francis summed up. ‘Only a couple of things remain for us to do: go back and bring up Ricardo and the mules to make camp outside; and bring up the old gentleman and his sacred knots if we have to carry him.’

‘You wait with Leoncia, and I’ll go back and bring them up,’ Henry volunteered, when they had threaded the long passages and the avenues of the erect dead and won to the sunshine and the sky outside the face of the cliff.

Back on the barking sands the peón and his father knelt in the circle so noisily drawn by the old man’s forefinger. A local rain squall beat upon them, and, though the peón shivered, the old man prayed on oblivious to what might happen to his skin in the way of wind and water. It was because the peón shivered and was uncomfortable that he observed two things which his father missed. First, he saw Alvarez Torres and Jose Mancheno cautiously venture out from the jungle upon the sand. Next, he saw a miracle. The miracle was that the pair of them trudged steadily across the sand without causing the slightest sound to arise from their progress. When they had disappeared ahead, he touched his finger tentatively to the sand, and aroused no ghostly whisperings. He thrust his finger into the sand, yet all was silent, as was it silent when he buffeted the sand heartily with the flat of his palm. The passing shower had rendered the sand dumb.