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Page 34
By this time the sunlight was pouring its cold rays, for here they
were cold, straight into the mouth of the cave. Suddenly I heard an
exclamation of fear from someone, and turned my head.
And this is what I saw: Sitting at the end of the cavern--it was not
more than twenty feet long--was another form, of which the head rested
on its chest and the long arms hung down. I stared at it, and saw that
this too was a /dead man/, and, what was more, a white man.
The others saw also, and the sight proved too much for our shattered
nerves. One and all we scrambled out of the cave as fast as our half-
frozen limbs would carry us.
CHAPTER VII
SOLOMON'S ROAD
Outside the cavern we halted, feeling rather foolish.
"I am going back," said Sir Henry.
"Why?" asked Good.
"Because it has struck me that--what we saw--may be my brother."
This was a new idea, and we re-entered the place to put it to the
proof. After the bright light outside, our eyes, weak as they were
with staring at the snow, could not pierce the gloom of the cave for a
while. Presently, however, they grew accustomed to the semi-darkness,
and we advanced towards the dead man.
Sir Henry knelt down and peered into his face.
"Thank God," he said, with a sigh of relief, "it is /not/ my brother."
Then I drew near and looked. The body was that of a tall man in middle
life with aquiline features, grizzled hair, and a long black
moustache. The skin was perfectly yellow, and stretched tightly over
the bones. Its clothing, with the exception of what seemed to be the
remains of a woollen pair of hose, had been removed, leaving the
skeleton-like frame naked. Round the neck of the corpse, which was
frozen perfectly stiff, hung a yellow ivory crucifix.
"Who on earth can it be?" said I.
"Can't you guess?" asked Good.
I shook my head.
"Why, the old Dom, Jos� da Silvestra, of course--who else?"
"Impossible," I gasped; "he died three hundred years ago."
"And what is there to prevent him from lasting for three thousand
years in this atmosphere, I should like to know?" asked Good. "If only
the temperature is sufficiently low, flesh and blood will keep fresh
as New Zealand mutton for ever, and Heaven knows it is cold enough
here. The sun never gets in here; no animal comes here to tear or
destroy. No doubt his slave, of whom he speaks on the writing, took
off his clothes and left him. He could not have buried him alone.
Look!" he went on, stooping down to pick up a queerly-shaped bone
scraped at the end into a sharp point, "here is the 'cleft bone' that
Silvestra used to draw the map with."
We gazed for a moment astonished, forgetting our own miseries in this
extraordinary and, as it seemed to us, semi-miraculous sight.
"Ay," said Sir Henry, "and this is where he got his ink from," and he
pointed to a small wound on the Dom's left arm. "Did ever man see such
a thing before?"
There was no longer any doubt about the matter, which for my own part
I confess perfectly appalled me. There he sat, the dead man, whose
directions, written some ten generations ago, had led us to this spot.
Here in my own hand was the rude pen with which he had written them,
and about his neck hung the crucifix that his dying lips had kissed.
Gazing at him, my imagination could reconstruct the last scene of the
drama, the traveller dying of cold and starvation, yet striving to
convey to the world the great secret which he had discovered:--the
awful loneliness of his death, of which the evidence sat before us. It
even seemed to me that I could trace in his strongly-marked features a
likeness to those of my poor friend Silvestre his descendant, who had
died twenty years before in my arms, but perhaps that was fancy. At
any rate, there he sat, a sad memento of the fate that so often
overtakes those who would penetrate into the unknown; and there
doubtless he will still sit, crowned with the dread majesty of death,
for centuries yet unborn, to startle the eyes of wanderers like
ourselves, if ever any such should come again to invade his
loneliness. The thing overpowered us, already almost perished as we
were with cold and hunger.
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