e of these
mountains: so that our swords will not rust for lack of adventures, my
gay knights-errant all."

So they chatted on; and before night was half through a plan was
matured, desperate enough--but what cared those brave hearts for that?
They would cross the Cordillera to Santa Fe de Bogota, of the wealth
whereof both Yeo and Amyas had often heard in the Pacific: try to seize
either the town or some convoy of gold going from it; make for the
nearest river (there was said to be a large one which ran northward
thence), build canoes, and try to reach the Northern Sea once more; and
then, if Heaven prospered them, they might seize a Spanish ship, and
make their way home to England, not, indeed, with the wealth of Manoa,
but with a fair booty of Spanish gold. This was their new dream. It was
a wild one: but hardly more wild than the one which Drake had fulfilled,
and not as wild as the one which Oxenham might have fulfilled, but for
his own fatal folly.

Amyas sat watching late that night, sad of heart. To give up the
cherished dream of years was hard; to face his mother, harder still: but
it must be done, for the men's sake. So the new plan was proposed next
day, and accepted joyfully. They would go up to the mountains and rest
awhile; if possible, bring up the wounded whom they had left behind; and
then, try a new venture, with new hopes, perhaps new dangers; they were
inured to the latter.

They started next morning cheerfully enough, and for three hours or more
paddled easily up the glassy and windless reaches, between two green
flower-bespangled walls of forest, gay with innumerable birds and
insects; while down from the branches which overhung the stream long
trailers hung to the water's edge, and seemed admiring in the clear
mirror the images of their own gorgeous flowers. River, trees, flowers,
birds, insects,--it was all a fairy-land: but it was a colossal one; and
yet the voyagers took little note of it. It was now to them an everyday
occurrence, to see trees full two hundred feet high one mass of yellow
or purple blossom to the highest twigs, and every branch and stem one
hanging garden of crimson and orange orchids or vanillas. Common to them
were all the fantastic and enormous shapes with which Nature bedecks her
robes beneath the fierce suns and fattening rains of the tropic forest.
Common were forms and colors of bird, and fish, and butterfly, more
strange and bright than ever opium-eater dreamed. The