“That girl,” said Fredericks quietly, “was not dead. No wonder her ‘remains’ appeared to be in a lifelike state of preservation. She was a victim of sleeping sickness, or at least a jungle malady very close to it in form. She was fed intravenously, not only during the whole trip down from the mountains, but also during the entire shipboard voyage to the United States. Furthermore, the ‘official inspection’ of the mummy case was quickened, you might say greased, by payment of five hundred American dollars to five various officials who granted the export license. The lid was just lifted, then put right back on again.”
The minister poured himself a drink. It made a lump in his throat going down. His collar still bothered him. He found it warm; his forehead had a satin gloss.
“Wha-what are you saying?” he croaked. “How can you know this? Who are you?”
“Because I am the archaeologist involved, I am one of those two men who brought her out of there in that mummy case. She was not dead then, but she was at least comatose. And she is not dead today, and very far from comatose. She is as much alive as you are, sitting there, or as I am sitting here. Furthermore, I am here to report to you that she has gone back there, to where we first brought her from, and dragged with her a poor unfortunate devil who, according to the civil law of the United States, is her legally married husband!”
The minister was no longer sitting. The minister was very much on his feet, and in a state of gesticulating excitement’ almost bordering on frenzy. They had to keep switching their heads this way and that to keep his face and figure in front of their eyes.
“But my official capacity is involved!” he spluttered. “This comes under the jurisdiction of my department! This must not come out! This must go no further! A five-hundred-dollar bribe! A living girl taken out of a region that I have reported over and over to my superiors is uninhabited! Are you trying to get me dismissed? Are you trying to make me a liar, a grafter?”
“She’s not the only one,” Fredericks said, clenching his jaw grimly. “There’s a whole tribe of others in there. Small but complete. Anywhere from three hundred to five hundred souls. If you didn’t know it before, I’m telling you now.”
“It’s not true! It’s a lie!” the minister thundered, banging his desk. “My department never took five hundred dollars from anyone! Nobody living was ever brought out of there, because nobody living is in there! My department says so! I say so! I will back that up to the full extent of my authority!”
He dashed off something on a slip of paper, went to the door, handed it to the soldier standing out there, and came back again.
“Wait outside. Cotter,” Fredericks said in an undertone to his companion. “I don’t like the turn this is taking. I think one of us ought to safeguard his freedom of movement, to be in a position to help the other if it should become necessary.”
“Who’s he?” the minister demanded suspiciously, as Cotter made the move to get up and go.
“Just a traveling acquaintance,” Fredericks said. “He’s not involved. He doesn’t know of the affair.”
“He overheard this conversation, didn’t he?” the minister suggested craftily.
“He doesn’t understand Spanish.” Fredericks signaled surreptitiously to Cotter to hasten his departure, while the chance was still available.
Cotter closed the door after him and sat down on the bench outside in the hall again.
Suddenly the soldier who had been sent with the message returned at a jog trot. Behind him, in grim intentness, came a number of other people, not soldiers, but wearing some less identifiable garb. Two of these were carrying a pair of poles between them, underarm, with furled canvas around them.
There was a brief, voiceless, but strenuous scuffle from the minister’s office, moments after they had all gone in there. But when Cotter rose and tried to re-enter, the soldier suddenly presented his rifle, muzzle forward. “Keep out,” he warned.
Suddenly the party came out again. The two poles had been expanded to the width of a stretcher, and within the canvas belly of this, strapped to the point of contortion, and even gagged, lay the helpless, heaving form of Fredericks.
Cotter tried to halt them, only to be violently shoved aside and flattened against the wall.
“What are they doing to my friend? Where are they taking him?”
“To San Lázaro,” was the ominous, tight-lipped answer from the man trailing at the rear of the grim procession.
“What’s San Lázaro?” Cotter caught him by the arm to make him stand a moment and answer. “The jail here?”
“Much worse. From the jail they come out again, sooner or later. From San Lázaro, never. It’s the house of the one-way doors. The asylum for the hopelessly insane.”
“But he’s not insane!” Cotter cried out in desperation.
“He will be,” the man said. “So what’s the difference — now or later?”
“And him,” said the livid-faced minister, who had been listening from the doorway, “you can take to the jail.”
Two soldiers promptly pinioned Cotter by the shoulders. “For how long, sir?”
“That is difficult to say,” admitted the minister. “Until he forgets the Spanish that he did not know when he was a witness to this unforgivable scene. Three years? Five? Who can tell? It takes longer to forget a language than it does to learn one.”
“I’m an American citizen!” Cotter bawled in terror from the far end of the corridor.
“Just enter him under the name of some inmate who has already passed away,” the minister added. “If he’s not booked under an American name, who can tell whether he’s an American or not? These little mistakes will happen.”
Chapter Twenty
It seemed as if this journey through darkness into the center of the earth had been going on forever, and would never end. And yet it might only have been an hour or less. The trend of the tunnel was steadily downward. The angle was not too acute to maintain equilibrium, but just enough to throw the upper body slightly off balance and give the effect of hastening the footsteps involuntarily, so that they had to be checked.
It was man-made, there seemed no doubt of that. Perhaps an original fissure or fault had been made use of here and there; these had been broadened, hewn to rectangular shape, linked together to form a continuous passage.
The darkness wasn’t absolute any longer. Those at the head of the procession had long ago, as soon as the aperture was closed behind them, lighted wandlike tapers, perhaps formed of some sort of slow-burning reeds or dried stalks. To Jones, from where he was, these small, separate petal-like lights blurred into one single haze of radiance, for they were borne single file and hence tended to coalesce. At least they lighted the way. Though they gave off very little smoke, still even that little was enough to alter the already stagnant air for the worse. He coughed repeatedly, but whether from the effect of these small flame tongues far to the front, or merely from the desiccated dust raised throughout this unaired passage by the trampling of the many feet before him, he could not tell.