, and kept that
oath like men. To search for the golden city for two full years to come,
whatever might befall; to stand to each other for weal or woe; to obey
their officers to the death; to murmur privately against no man, but
bring all complaints to a council of war; to use no profane oaths, but
serve God daily with prayer; to take by violence from no man, save from
their natural enemies the Spaniards; to be civil and merciful to all
savages, and chaste and courteous to all women; to bring all booty and
all food into the common stock, and observe to the utmost their faith
with the adventurers who had fitted out the ship; and finally, to march
at sunrise the next morning toward the south, trusting in God to be
their guide.

"It is a great oath, and a hard one," said Brimblecombe; "but God will
give us strength to keep it." And they knelt all together and received
the Holy Communion, and then rose to pack provisions and ammunition,
and lay down again to sleep and to dream that they were sailing home
up Torridge stream--as Cavendish, returning from round the world, did
actually sail home up Thames but five years afterwards--"with mariners
and soldiers clothed in silk, with sails of damask, and topsails of
cloth of gold, and the richest prize which ever was brought at one time
unto English shores."

* * * * *

The Cross stands upright in the southern sky. It is the middle of the
night. Cary and Yeo glide silently up the hill and into the camp,
and whisper to Amyas that they have done the deed. The sleepers are
awakened, and the train sets forth.

Upward and southward ever: but whither, who can tell? They hardly think
of the whither; but go like sleep-walkers, shaken out of one land of
dreams, only to find themselves in another and stranger one. All around
is fantastic and unearthly; now each man starts as he sees the figures
of his fellows, clothed from head to foot in golden filigree; looks up,
and sees the yellow moonlight through the fronds of the huge tree-ferns
overhead, as through a cloud of glittering lace. Now they are hewing
their way through a thicket of enormous flags; now through bamboos forty
feet high; now they are stumbling over boulders, waist-deep in cushions
of club-moss; now they are struggling through shrubberies of heaths and
rhododendrons, and woolly incense-trees, where every leaf, as they brush
past, dashes some fresh scent into their faces, and

"The winds, with musky