I say, I know not whither.  Eustace Leigh vanishes henceforth from these pages.  He may have ended as General of his Order.  He may have worn out his years in some tropic forest, “conquering the souls” (including, of course, the bodies) of Indians; he may have gone back to his old work in England, and been the very Ballard who was hanged and quartered three years afterwards for his share in Babington’s villainous conspiracy:  I know not.  This book is a history of men,—­of men’s virtues and sins, victories and defeats; and Eustace is a man no longer:  he is become a thing, a tool, a Jesuit; which goes only where it is sent, and does good or evil indifferently as it is bid; which, by an act of moral suicide, has lost its soul, in the hope of saving it; without a will, a conscience, a responsibility (as it fancies), to God or man, but only to “The Society.”  In a word, Eustace, as he says himself, is “dead.”  Twice dead, I fear.  Let the dead bury their dead.  We have no more concern with Eustace Leigh.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE BANKS OF THE META

“My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with
me—­Death closes all:  but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods!”

TENNYSON’S Ulysses.

Nearly three years are past and gone since that little band had knelt at evensong beneath the giant tree of Guayra—­years of seeming blank, through which they are to be tracked only by scattered notes and mis-spelt names.  Through untrodden hills and forests, over a space of some eight hundred miles in length by four hundred in breadth, they had been seeking for the Golden City, and they had sought in vain.  They had sought it along the wooded banks of the Orinoco, and beyond the roaring foam-world of Maypures, and on the upper waters of the mighty Amazon.  They had gone up the streams even into Peru itself, and had trodden the cinchona groves of Loxa, ignorant, as all the world was then, of their healing virtues.  They had seen the virgin snows of Chimborazo towering white above the thundercloud, and the giant cone of Cotopaxi blackening in its sullen wrath, before the fiery streams rolled down its sides.  Foiled in their search at the back of the Andes, they had turned eastward once more, and plunged from the alpine cliffs into “the green and misty ocean of the Montana.”  Slowly and painfully they had worked their way northward again, along the eastern foot of the inland Cordillera, and now they were bivouacking, as it seems, upon one of the many feeders of the Meta, which flow down from the Suma Paz into the forest-covered plains.  There they sat, their watch-fires glittering on the stream, beneath the shadow of enormous trees, Amyas and Cary, Brimblecombe, Yeo, and the Indian lad, who has followed them in all their wanderings, alive and well:  but as far as ever from Manoa, and its fairy lake, and golden palaces, and all the wonders of the Indian’s tale.  Again and again in their wanderings they had heard faint rumors of its existence, and started off in some fresh direction, to meet only a fresh disappointment, and hope deferred, which maketh sick the heart.