THE THIRD SACRED WELL OF THE TEMPLE

IN THE EARLY 1960s, Davidson and his wife and young son lived in the small village of Amecameca, Mexico, high on the slopes of the great active volcano, Popocatepetl. The rent for eight rooms in the rear garden patio of Sra. Susanna’s pleasant hacienda was $16 per month. How do I know? Because I was Avram’s wife back then.

Life in Amecameca was a grand adventure. The town was once named “Ameca.” Then it collapsed in an earthquake, and after it was rebuilt it was called “Amecameca.” The shy Indians, who came from the surrounding hills to sell their wares at the colorful Sunday market, spoke a language that was closer to Aztec than to Spanish. Very few gringos ever found their way to Amecameca.

“The Third Sacred Well of the Temple” was published in 1965. Avram’s story notes said, “Here is the first story I’ve written in Mexico. What prompted it was all those Islands in the Sun–type books. This is what happened to both San Miguel and Puerto Vallarta—people wrote them up all over the place, tourists pour in, and the rents raise.”

—GD

 

… Whose name, Santo Domingo Alburnosi—note the Moorish influence, if you please: The Man with the Burnoose!—might give some indication as to just why the alcalde himself was not over-anxious to entertain an official of the Holy Office. No matter that he was the founder of the settlement and had built two churches entirely with his own funds and at least partly with his own hands. No matter that his religious orthodoxy was locally irreproachable. No matter, no matter. For the expected Inquisitor was bound to be suspicious of a man only two generations removed from a Morisco ancestor.

“Who could know that no trace of Moslem sentiment still beat in such a heart?—I am, of course, speculating, conjecturing. What is, however, beyond conjecture or speculation, is that the Inquisitor—armed with documents of special power, before which the Viceroy trembled and the Captain-General turned pale, and even the good Archbishop himself was utterly helpless—the Inquisitor, I say, with his mules and his men and his moneybags and his documents, left the port of Santa Luisa and headed for our own beloved Monte del Incarnacion.

“He never arrived. No trace of him was ever found. Robbery—of those moneybags of which I spoke, for there were no banks, no traveler’s checks in those days—robbery. Thus, the verdict of history. But I might be bold enough to suggest my own verdict, based on my personal researches over some period of time. This, however, must wait upon another occasion, for I see by our hostess’s charming old ormolu clock that I must now cease from boring you further. This lovely timepiece, like our cherished Mountain itself, often seems to keep its own time—but it is not to be heeded the less for that, is it? Thank you for your patience.”

The speaker, Richard Stanley, sat down to applause as hearty as the other three men and two women present could make it. A slight flush of pleasure came over his round face and was visible even in the part of his silky white hair. He looked around, still a trifle hesitant, then began to beam.

“Richard, you always make everything sound so fascinating!” exclaimed the hostess, Helen, a slender woman of late middle-age, whose face still testified to the sometime presence of beauty. “What did really happen to that old Inquisitor? Won’t you even give us a hint?”

“Richard, old boy, you even had me interested,” a thickset man with a dark red beard commented, eagerly taking a mug from the tray offered by a smiling, silent servant. “Helen, I say! I thought I was the champion local drink-mixer, but this tops anything I’ve ever concocted!”

A man and a woman, both still young, came up and offered their hands to the white-haired Richard Stanley. Their manner was shy and they were slow to speak, but—patiently and wordlessly—he encouraged them.

“We both enjoyed your talk tonight,” the young woman said at last. Her husband nodded, smiling.

“I am so glad. You didn’t think my prose a little too purple?”

They shook their heads simultaneously, their faces reproaching the very suggestion. But an older man, big of body though slightly stooped, clapped Richard on the back.

“Purple? Of course it was purple. All the greatest prose ever written is purple. Dr. Johnson, Lafcadio Hearn…”

Richard’s face became even pinker with pleasure. In the momentary silence, the hostess’s soft voice was heard, explaining her success with the mixed drink.

“…the juice of one quarter. That’s all. I have never really been sure, you know, Captain, if they are lemons or limes, or perhaps a hybrid. And if you ask, they just smile and shrug, of course. And of course they are right. What does it really matter?”

The Captain nodded, his slightly rufous eyes peering over the rim of the blue pottery mug as he took another swallow. “I’m glad to hear they’re ripe again. The seasons seem to pass so quickly. I wish there were more of them, whatever they are. But maybe this way is best, with just enough to go around.…” His voice ebbed, contentedly.

At one end of the room a fire of native cedar burned brightly, a faint odor of its scented flesh perfuming the air. The fireplace was raised, and a rounded hood of stone and plaster blended gently into the wall, tinted with a cream-colored wash. Dark old wooden beams stretched across the ceiling, ochreous leather chairs stood here and there, and in the center was a settee which seemed only the sturdier for its two hundred years.

On the tiled floors were Indian rugs, with a few choicer specimens hanging on the wall. One showed Achichihuatzl, the local myth-hero, in victorious combat with the evil serpent Ixtitihuango—both so highly stylized as to be unrecognizable to the unfamiliar.

And facing them was a long and narrow 18th-century picture of St. George slaying the dragon. It was painted on a single piece of wood, presumably by a local artist, for although the santo wore the clothes and armor and ceremonial regalia of a Spanish officer, at the temples of his helmet were the bird-wings of Achichihuatzl, and the dragon had more in him than a hint of Ixtitihuango; the feet of the victor were thrust into stirrups of the sort still to be seen in the equipage of every horseman in Monte del Incarnacion and environs—though nowhere else—and the lance piercing the scaly hide of Evil might have been modeled after the ancient one hanging over the fireplace.

Outside a very gentle rain was falling. The scent of clean wet earth, mingled with that of night flowers and blossoming trees, came through the little triangular window under the eaves, and mingled again, not at all unpleasantly, with the pleasant and savory smells from the kitchen—of bits of meat grilling over embers, and over the sauce into which they would presently be dipped: chili powder and fresh-chopped chili, honey, tart fruit, and the rich juice and dripping of the meat itself.

Somewhere, in a nearby quinta, a voice accompanied by a guitar and the Indian tompillo, began a song—the high ornate notes of antique Hispanic cantilation; then, suddenly, but somehow appropriately, the deeper and steadier melody of the oaxixen.

The guests and hostess listened, silent, pleased. They exchanged looks of deep satisfaction. The servants came in with trays of food, the voice and its accompaniment ended, and a night bird sounded its few sweet notes in the lemon grove.…

*   *   *

RICHARD STANLEY HAD for some years taught history at a small college, but found that he was increasingly unable to cope with his work. Some men would have found it bearable, even soothing, to go through the same scheduled subjects year after year; to receive the same answers to the same questions and to issue the same grades; to arise at fixed hours and lecture at fixed hours; to parry semester after semester the unripe rudeness of adolescent students; to engage in the unvarying hypocrisy of rigid and petty small-college faculty politics and socializing.

It was not out of any resolved attitude or principle that Richard Stanley found any or all of this unbearable. Something in his metabolism seemed to be at fault—ceased, so to speak, to secrete the necessary hormones or enzymes. Conscientiously he reported this to his president.

“We can’t have any nervous breakdowns on our faculty,” the man said helpfully. “Tell you what you better do. Better see Dr. Wombaugh, the students’ psychologist—he can help you decide what you’re going to do next year.”

Thus subtly informed that he need expect no renewal of contract (and, in fact, desiring none), Richard Stanley obediently reported to the office of Dr. Wombaugh. There he found a copy of The Literary Digest (predicting the election of Alf M. Landon by a landslide), a copy of a soon-to-be-extinct humor magazine full of He/She jokes, and a copy of The National Geographic.

He thumbed listlessly through a pictorial account of the nesting habits of the bulbul of the Hindu Kush, an article on Picturesque Patagonia, another on New Insights to Old Zeeland, and came, finally, to a description of the Republic of Hidalgo—Where the Palm and the Pine Meet.

By the time the doctor’s assistant got around to looking into the waiting room, Mr. Richard Stanley was no longer there. His savings were not large, but travel was cheap in those days. The port of Santa Luisa, where the banana boat left him, was full of unshaven customs officials with rude manners, demanding cab drivers with worse, and swarms of street gamins with none at all. In short, a larger, tropical, and equally uncopeable version of a small college.

The fact was obvious: the Palm would not do. Would the Pine? Richard Stanley had to see.

It took him three days, in that not very large country, to get by railroad, riverboat, and narrow-gauge railroad to his destination. He did not know, then, that it was his destination. He knew that he seemed suddenly to come alive one afternoon when the toy train jerked to a stop in front of a toy station. He was no longer hot, no longer torpid. Not only was there not a palm in sight, there—not twenty feet away—was the great-grandfather of all pines.

Richard Stanley seized his bag and got off the train. The sign on the tiny depot read Monte del Incarnacion. He could see no mountain. Only one person in sight seemed to be moving, an old Indian lady draped all in black. He followed her.

On the other side of the station, in a tiny plaza flanked by a tiny church, sat a large brown man on the driver’s seat of a curious vehicle, half stage-coach, half diligence, with sides bulging out and a pair of folding steps behind. The old woman clambered up the steps. Richard Stanley followed. They were presently joined by a man in a linen suit and a large black mustache.

After a while the train whistled and tooted and chuffed away. The four mules stopped trying to bite off their harness and broke into something vaguely resembling a gallop. The road went up steadily. A stone marker said Monte del I K 10. Now and then a gap in the trees lining the road showed a glimpse of the countryside. It was quite beautiful—hills and valleys and forests and lakes and farms, with blue mountains in the distance and green ones near at hand.

“I think this is it,” Stanley said, half aloud. “I really do.”

Late in the afternoon the mules ambled into the town of which the railroad station was merely … the railroad station. “Oh!” Richard exclaimed. “Oh, my!”

Above the town the great Mountain of the Incarnation raised its massy peak, wreathed in but not obscured by fleecy clouds. There was only one automobile in sight, but there were a good many horses. The plaza itself was cobbled, but nothing else was paved. The air was clear and fresh and sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight. A group of Indian men came by, clad in a sort of white kilted costume belted by a sash of red and purple which went over one shoulder. They smiled at him, greeted him in a language which was not Spanish. Richard smiled back.

The town which surrounded him was totally Spanish—or, rather, totally Spanish Colonial. With the solitary exception of a two-story red brick building—evidently a convent and school of the time of Pius IX—there did not seem to be a single structure which had been built in the Republican period.

On one side of the plaza was a building which looked like an inn. Suddenly aware of hunger, Richard went in and sat down at a table. He was served, with grave courtesy, a large clean meal; and after a few long and tranquil hours over coffee, rum, and mild cigars, he was shown to a large clean room. The room had a window at each end, one opening onto the courtyard and the other onto the plaza. The Mountain showed at both.

“I do not believe,” Richard Stanley said, shortly after he had wakened and washed, “that I will ever leave.”

And he never did.

*   *   *

THE MORNING AFTER the gathering at which he had read the latest of his papers on the history of the Monte del Incarnacion region, Richard Stanley was at the side of his room which served as a study, examining an old map lent to him by his friend, the Director of the little-visited library and museum, when the proprietor of the inn entered. Stanley anticipated the familiar questions by praising his recently eaten breakfast: the eggs were exquisitely fresh, the coffee deliciously hot, the fruit perfectly ripe—in short, a rich and succulent meal.

Don Nestor beamed, bowed, and eventually came to the point of his visit. There was in the dining room of the inn a stranger, either an Englisher or a Northamericano, who desired to know if there were any other Englishers or Northamericanos in the community. And, as Don Ricardo was the nearest such, he, Don Nestor had—

“Perfectly,” said Stanley. “I will go down to see him in a little moment.”

“Ah, you are very genteel. I will tell him. With permission…”

“Pass, your mercy.”

Stanley took a last fond look at the old map, covered with old-fashioned Spanish calligraphy and Indian symbols or pictographs, and at length walked down the winding stairs to the first floor of the inn.

An informal but decently dressed man of early middle-age was drinking coffee. He looked up and waved.

“You must be the English-speaking fellow the owner was telling me about,” he said.

“I am Richard Stanley.”

“Bob Pepper. Know how I knew? The complexion. I can tell it every time.”

Stanley took the proferred seat. “There are many natives of the area,” he said, “who are lighter or ruddier than I am. Let us not forget that the Goths were in Spain, the Celts before them, and as for the Iberians—”

“I can tell it every time. Something about the complexion. Isn’t this a great little town? Beautiful, unspoiled, a lovely climate—”

Stanley nodded, smiling assent to every point.

“—lovely people—AND—do you know what I paid for breakfast? I. Paid. One. Dolar. One, I tell you, count them, one. For eggs, steak, coffee, toast, damned good jelly, some kind of fruit, very good fruit—for all this I paid one dolar! Isn’t that incredible? All that for only twelve and a half cents, U.S.A. Wow!”

Warming to all this appreciation of his chosen residence, Stanley invited the visitor, Bob Pepper, to take a walk around the town. “If you’d like. That is, if you can spare the time.”

“I’d like nothing better. If you can spare the time.”

A wagon ornamented with pictures illustrative of the history and miracles of St. Fransico, and loaded with corn for one of the small mills in the town, passed by, its horse-bells jingling. The driver, removing his hat, greeted Stanley and his companion.

“Oh, I can always spare time,” Stanley said, putting his own hat back on. “That’s one reason why I love it so here. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Heeber College in New Wurtemburg, Nebraska.… I thought not. I could never spare time there. The local citizens here regard time only as something which is sounded by the church bells. The bells only sound noon, midnight, and the ecclesiastical hours. And those of us who hail from more bustling climes have fallen—happily, I will say—into the local ways of thought.”

He showed Bob Pepper the bull ring, with its quaint and unusual carved wooden balconies; the now-disused bear pit—bears had been brought, on occasion, from as far away as California, at great cost; the Little Market, which had once been enlarged so that ever since it had been bigger than the Big Market; the baroque church, La Parroquia; and the ancient and original church of the founding father.

“What are those people doing on the steps of those little-bitty churches next to that big wild pink one?” demanded Bob Pepper. And he was so struck by the reply that he hastily pulled a notebook and jotted it down. Chapels dedicated to The Seven Wise Virgins of the Parable! Which the Indians identified with The Seven Sweet Sisters of their own mythology! Said their Christian prayers properly inside! Then came outside and made their pagan offerings on the steps! Incense, cornmeal, rose petals, honey, parrot feathers—and whatnot!

Wow!

Bob Pepper was completely enamored of all that Richard Stanley had to say about Monte del Incarnacion.

*   *   *

AFTER LUNCH—A lunch so big with a price so small that Pepper could scarcely eat it all from excitement—the newcomer declared that he had some pictures to take. He invited, he even pressed his guide to come along; but Stanley explained that he paid a call every Friday afternoon on his friend, Captain Stone.

“We have a rather funny, odd custom here, Mr. Pepper—Bob. We visit each other only once a week, and we have a once-a-week get-together where we all meet. We—by we I mean the other English-speaking people here in town—there are only six of us, so it works out quite well, giving all of us periodic days entirely to ourselves and preventing our getting on each other’s nerves—and so we remain very happy and contented here, you see.”

Bob Pepper nodded and agreed to meet him later on at Captain Stone’s quinta. “Gee, this is a peach of a place!” he exclaimed deliriously, arranging his photographic equipment, and starting out into the clean picturesque streets. Then a sudden thought occurred to Stanley, and he called the visitor back.

“Are you—would you be interested perhaps…” he said haltingly, rather wistfully, “…in old Indian ruins?”

“Would I!”

Stanley, in a rush of words, explained to him that the remains of the Temple of Achichihuatzl lay higher up the Mountain, deep in the woods. He could hardly say that he had “discovered” them; they had never been lost, only neglected.…

“…and he said he would very much like to see the Temple, so I promised to take him tomorrow,” Stanley finished his account of the newcomer to the red-bearded Captain Stone.

The Captain, who had been nodding and grunting and showing other signs of following the narrative, gave a little start as Stanley finished. He raised his rufous eyebrows. “What? Sun over the yard-arm? Let’s see what there is to drink, then I want to show you my scale model of the Battle of Jutland. Gin! Gin! Good old genebra! And you, old boy, I suppose you’ll want yours fancied up with pomegranate juice and other foo-foo waters.”

Stanley nodded delightedly.

The Captain hummed a naughty, nautical song to himself, off-key, as he raised bottle and glass. Then he stopped humming. A puzzled, unhappy look came over his face. For a moment he stood still, then he lowered glass and bottle.

“Richard, forgive me. I’m afraid I was not following all you said with the attention which courtesy requires. But did I hear—did you say that this fellow’s name was Pepper?”

“Why, yes. Why?”

The Captain stared at him, and uttered a groan of deepest misery. Then, swiftly, he poured a tumbler half full of straight gin and drank it down in three swallows. Then he looked at his astonished guest and pronounced a religious phrase in a most profane tone.

“This is the end,” he said. “This is the end.”

*   *   *

ONCE AGAIN THE San Jorge looked down on a gathering of the tiny English-speaking colony of Monte del Incarnacion; but this time the atmosphere was quite different. It was late afternoon; there were no songs, no spicy smells from the kitchen, and no one was smiling. Captain Stone had the floor.

“All right, let’s get on with it,” the Captain said. “We have a bitter draft to swallow, and what the antidote might be—if there is any—I do not know…”

He paused, shifted his eyes to a point where the rafters and ceiling met, and went on in a stiff, painful tone of voice. “Briefly, my story is this: I was commander of one of His Majesty’s ships and one night—a night which I should like to forget—I put that ship on the Goodwin Sands. Two tugs were required to get her off. Charges were made against me—charges ranging from incompetence to intoxication. I was spared the disgrace of being cashiered. I was allowed to resign. Naturally, I was expected to remove myself as far from England as I could, and so I did.”

He did not suppose, the Captain said, that any of them had ever heard at that time of Olang Batto. He himself had located it with some difficulty. Picture to yourselves (he asked his friends) an island only half a day’s journey by sea from Singapore, yet on no regular shipping route and known to hardly anyone in that great city. Clean sea breezes, yellow sands, rents so small as to be almost invisible by civilized standards, ample and inexpensive provisions, competent servants at ridiculously low salaries. Malay fishing villages and a trading town which was a small Chinese city in miniature.

“There I lived,” the Captain said, “for twenty years in perfect peace, in perfect contentment. My slender income was not only sufficient, I was even able to save a bit. No one had ever heard of my past, or would have cared about it. And then one day—”

He paused. His throat worked. “One day, as I was walking along the boat landing to see if my copies of The Times had come in, a young man stepped ashore from a sampan and hailed me in English. I greeted him courteously, invited him to my place, gave him drinks and tiffin, and escorted him all round the island. There being no hotel, I lodged him and fed him for two days until a trading vessel heading for Kuala Lampur chanced to put in and took him aboard. I heard nothing further from him for some months.

“Further intelligence came like a burst of thunder upon my heretofore peaceful existence. The man, it seemed, was not a mere wanderer as I had thought, not even a mere tripper or beachcomber. He was a journalist, I learned to my horror. He had written up his experiences in articles variously describing Olang Batto as The Poor Man’s Shanghai or The Tahiti of the Malayan Archipelago. This article was syndicated—I believe that is the term—and consequently appeared in newspapers published in Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Bombay, Calcutta, Capetown, London, New York, Los Angeles, and every large city in the Republic of Texas.”

The results were catastrophic. Within two years Olang Batto had become a port of call. Tourists thronged its once little-frequented lanes. Hotels were built, restaurants, cabarets. The nights, formerly disturbed only by the booming of the surf and the occasional roar of a bull crocodile, now became hideous with jazz music. Rents went up 1000 and even 2000%. Servants betook themselves to high-paid positions in the expensive villas of newcomers. Tailors who had once been happy to make a suit of pongees for five Straits dollars now demanded fifty—and were insolent and dilatory. Farmers ceased to bring their produce to private dwellings and sold them at inflated prices to the multitude of establishments erected to cater to the needs of tourists.

“I was even recognized on the street by a newspaper photographer from The Daily Mail,” Captain Stone continued bitterly. “I packed my belongings and fled into the night, obtaining passage on a sea junk engaged in the pearl shell and bêche-de-mer trade.” A single tear slipped down into his red beard. He plucked a large handkerchief from his sleeve and blew his rufous nose resoundingly. “Need I say,” he concluded, “that the man who had brought all this about was the infamous scribbler and penny-a-line spy, Robert Pepper?”

The somber silence which followed was finally broken by the soft voice of the hostess. “I was born and raised in Canada,” she said, “and had an uneventful but rather happy life, particularly with my husband and only child. I lost them both—under tragic and well-publicized circumstances which I cannot bear to describe. You must excuse me.

“Most of my income perished with my husband. I had and have no commercial talents. Not caring much what happened to myself, but being under the necessity of sustaining life and finding some occupation or preoccupation, I went to Newfoundland, and settled in the smallest, most remote community I could find which offered some minimum of amenities.

“The place was called Little York Cove. The people fished for cod, hunted seal, raised potatoes. In the nearby rivers were salmon and trout. It was a rather severe life, but it was simple and clean. I became an amateur fisherwoman of some skill, and I learned to make the most of the brief winter days as well as the long, long ones of summer. I could not afford to buy a house, but I rented one for a moderate sum and gradually fixed it up to my liking. I was happy.”

Happy, that is, until a brief but searching visit by a man she did not know. His visit resulted in a series of newspaper and magazine articles describing Little York Cove as a Fisherman’s Paradise and a New Low-Priced Vacationland. The village was not adequate to house and supply the swarms of people attracted by the articles. So new buildings were erected, but even so there was an inevitable increase in rents.

Helen’s landlady informed her, regretfully, that she could no longer let her have the house for its current price as she had been offered five times that amount by a Montreal Sporting Club. And then a story appeared in the St. John’s newspaper (which circulated locally), describing the boom at Little York Cove, and incidentally mentioning that among the residents was a woman who had lost her husband and child under tragic and once well-known circumstances, which it proceeded to recapitulate in gory detail.

Helen left the next week.

The name of the writer whose report had worked these far-reaching changes was Robert Pepper.

*   *   *

THE STORY TOLD—slowly, painfully—by Don and Donna Smith was not too dissimilar. All their lives they had suffered from extreme shyness. They had met, in fact, at a party to which they had been dragged by different sets of friends, and found each other huddling diffidently in the same corner.

After their marriage they acted on a mutual resolve to avoid crowds, and believing that in a country of a different language their bashfulness would be less obvious and hence less troublesome, they moved to a town in the Cape Verde Islands. They obtained a lease, at a most moderate sum, on one of the many splendid old houses that dated from the period when the town was an outpost of Portuguese empire. Food was equally inexpensive; they kept several horses and they swam a good deal. Also resident in the town were an Indo-Chinese ex-King and a family of exiled Balkan nobles.

The shy Smiths smiled politely at them in passing and were in turn politely smiled at. They did not so much invite Robert Pepper into their facienda as suffer his presumptive presence; they were infinitely relieved when he left.

Pepper thoughtfully sent them clippings in several languages which commended the Smiths for their “hospitality” and spared no detail, however slight, about San Jao—Hideway Home of Princes and Potentates and Sun-kissed Shangri-la.

At first it meant little to the Smiths. Bewildered when the flowering tree-lined streets of the old town began to swarm with visitors, they retreated behind their walls, refusing in terror to answer the repeated calls of the bell, or—when the bell was disconnected—trying not to hear the constant pounding on the gate. Isolation proved impossible when they were informed that their sea-near facienda had been sold as a nucleus of a posh residential hotel to be erected by a syndicate of Scotch herring smokers in search of a better climate and a more diversified portfolio.

The last to tell his story was a thin dry grayish man who in a thin dry grayish voice briefly related a like account.

Arthur Clay had settled in the neighboring Republic of Santa Anna “before”—as he put it—“any of these countries had signed extradition treaties with the United States.” Making botany his new interest, he had classified over 1,800 species of plant life unknown to taxonomical science before the questing eye of R. Pepper had lighted on the pleasant piedmont area called Las Mesas, where Mr. Clay was making his home.

Enlarging on the picturesqueness of the native costumes and festivals, the fertility of the soil, the amiability of the population, and the low tax policy of the Santa Anna government, Pepper’s widely syndicated column had brought such an influx of new people to Las Mesas that before long Arthur Clay beheld, vanishing before his eyes, the wild plant life he could no longer afford to study and catalogue.…

Captain Stone’s deep and angry voice jerked them out of their profound silence.

There was, he declared, a sort of fourfold pattern visible in this whole ironic business. First (he counted on a huge hairy finger), a group of people who, for one good reason or another, were unable to live in their original homes and societies. Second, this same group of people had the useful talent of being able to locate little-known, remote, and pleasant places in which they were able to live. Third, this filthy swine, Robert Pepper, seemed to possess a similar talent for nosing out such places, but only after they had originally been discovered by the same group.

“Fourth, and most damnable,” the Captain trumpeted, “is that every ‘discovery’ he makes is—for everyone except himself—utterly self-defeating! He writes about places which are little-known; directly they become famous! He writes about places which are cheap; immediately they become expensive! He advertises places which are unspoiled, and in a short time they are spoiled into corruption. He is, in short, a cuckoo laying his cockatrice’s eggs in nests which he invariably fouls as a reward for hospitality!”

When the echo of his voice had died away Helen said, hopeless beyond despair, “And there is nothing we can do about it.”

“Yes, there is! There is!” cried Captain Stone. “We can at least refuse to help the rogue! We can refuse to assist him in spying out the land! We can—”

He fell into a fit of coughing, toward the subsidence of which Richard Stanley was heard to say, “But I promised.”

“Promised what?” Arthur Clay asked.

Promised to show Pepper the ruins of the Temple of Achichihuatzl, Richard Stanley said. The next morning.

In vain it was pointed out to him, in tones most urgent, that this was just the sort of thing on which Pepper doted. Ruins! Temples! Picturesque antiquities! He would lap it up, spread the news far and wide.

“What do you think will happen to all of us when he gets done?” Captain Stone demanded, face redder than his beard. “What do you suppose will happen to you? You told me yourself that you live on the $750 a year you get from two non-amortizing mortgages your sister gave you. Could you live on that anywhere else in the world?

“Do you know how much Coca-Cola a thousand tourists a month can drink? They won’t be satisfied to drink it tempo as the locals do, they’ll want it frio—and not from an ice bucket, either, because they’ll be afraid of bugs in the ice. No, they’ll want it chilled in a refrigerator, and nice old Don Nestor will have to buy one—he’ll have to buy a big one—he’ll have to borrow money to pay for it—and he won’t be able to go on lodging you and feeding you at the bargain-basement rates he’s charging now.

“What will you do when he raises your rent, Richard? Where will you go? How will you live?”

They all looked at him—the furious Captain Stone, the hopeless Helen, the grim Arthur Clay, and the terrified Smiths.

He had no answer. All he could say, over and over again, was, “But I promised, I promised…”

The next morning he met Bob Pepper, already bubbling over with enthusiasm. “How far are these ruined temples of yours, Dicky-boy? Very far?” He was festooned with cameras and such impedimenta.

“Not really. Not if you don’t mind a rather long walk.”

“I don’t mind! I’ll take lots of shots on the way. Love that scenery! Hey, see that muchacha? What a pair of legs! Hey?”

He did not take many shots after all, for the trail along which Stanley led him was a narrow track between thick growths of trees; so Pepper began to ask questions about the ruins and who built them. Stanley warmed to the subject.

The local Indians (he said), though not comparable in the level of their culture and technology with the Aztecs, Mayas, or Incas, had nevertheless achieved a rather high degree of both. They worked well in stone and metal, had a complex and extremely interesting code of manners, and were opposed to shedding human blood.

“Red-skin Quakers!” Pepper exclaimed, pushing aside an obtrusive branch. “You must have made quite a study of all this, huh?”

“Oh, I have. For years. And I’ve learned things which—it sounds romantic but it’s true—no other living white man knows.”

Bob Pepper grinned happily. He’d have to get all this down on paper. No other living white man—great! Simply great! Such as what?

They had come now to the ruins themselves. Stone statues green with moss leaned at crazy angles, and native pines grew in the courtyard, thrusting up great slabs of stone and covering others with a thick layer of pine needles.

“Well,” said Stanley, shy and proud at the same time, “legend refers to The Three Sacred Wells of the Temple. But only two of them—the locations of only two of them, I mean—are known.”

“Sacred Wells! Great!”

One—Stanley pointed it out—was The Well of Good Wishes. The other was The Well of Secret Sorrows. And the third—

“It took me over ten years of consulting old accounts and very old maps, and gaining the confidence of the Indians. But in the end, Mr. Pepper—Bob—I finally found it.”

Past the area of stone floors and statues they went, and finally stopped under a huge and stately old pine. With his feet Stanley scraped and scraped. The pine needles fell away in heaps to reveal a circular stone engraved with petroglyphs.

“Don’t try to lift it—you couldn’t,” said Stanley. “But I can.”

Deftly Stanley pressed down at a certain point. Smoothly the stone lid swung up on its pivot. The well gaped ancient and black. Bob Pepper rubbed his hands and peered down.

“Won’t the schoolteachers from Des Moines go for this!” he exclaimed. “What’s this one called?—don’t tell me—it’s The Well of the Virgins, right?”

“No,” said Stanley. “It isn’t. It’s called The Well of the Messenger of Evil Tidings.”

And Stanley put his right foot diagonally behind Pepper’s ankles at the Achilles tendons, and pushed. The irrepressible journalist went straight down without touching the sides. There was no outcry, and only after a long time, a muffled, echoing splash.

Richard Stanley scuffed back the heaps of pine needles and brushed them with a handy fallen branch. Once again the stone cover lay hidden from sight.

He turned and began to walk briskly back to town. If he did not dawdle along the way he would be just in time for lunch. Don Nestor’s lunches were as enormous as they were delicious. And, perhaps not least of all, they were so very, very cheap.