the poor llama did die, and I was mortally frostbitten.'
'Was it very painful, Doctor?' asked Pullings, looking grave.
'Not at all, at all, until the feeling began to return. And even then the whole lesion was less severe than I had expected. At one time I thought to have lost my leg below the knee, but in the event it was no more than a couple of unimportant toes. For you are to consider,' he observed, addressing his words to Reade, 'that your foot bases its impulse and equilibrium on the great toe and the least: the loss of either is a sad state of affairs entirely, but with the two one does very well. The ostrich has but two the whole length of her life, and yet she outruns the wind.'
'Certainly, sir,' said Reade, bowing.
'Yet though the leg was spared, I could not well travel; above all after I had removed the peccant members.'
'How did you do that, sir?' asked Reade, unwilling to hear though eager to be told.
'Why, with a chisel, as soon as we came down to the village. They could not be left to mortify, with gangrene spreading, the grief and the sorrow. But for a while I was reduced to immobility; and that was where my noble friend Eduardo showed his magnanimity. He caused a framework to be made, fitting over a man's chest fore and aft - fore and aft,' he repeated with a certain satisfaction, 'and allowing me to be carried on his shoulders or somewhat lower, sitting at my ease and facing backwards. They call it an Inca chair; and in this Inca chair I was carried over those terrible Inca bridges that span stupendous chasms - hanging bridges that sway - and I was always carried by fresh and powerful Indians recruited by my friend an Indian himself and a descendant of the Incas too. He generally travelled by my chair, except when the path led along the rocky side of a precipice, which it did far, far too often, where there was no room for two abreast, and a great deal did he tell me about the ancient empire of Peru and the magnificence of its rulers. Surely,' he said, breaking off to listen to the run of the water along the ship's side and the general voice of taut rigging, masts, blocks, sails and yards, 'surely we are going very fast?'
'About eight knots, I believe, sir,' said Pullings, filling Stephen's glass. 'Pray tell us about the magnificence of Peru.'
'Well, if gold is magnificent, and sure there is something imperial about gold in the mass, then Eduardo's account of Huayna Capac, the Great Inca, and his chain will please you. It was made when the birth of his son Huascar was to be celebrated in a ceremony at which the court went through the motions of a formal dance, joining hands, making a circle and moving two steps forward, then one back, thus drawing closer and closer until they were at a proper distance for making their obeisance. The Inca however disapproved of this holding of hands; he thought it too familiar, quite improper, and he gave orders for a chain to be made, a chain which the dancers could hold, thus keeping their formation but avoiding direct physical contact, which might lead to irregularities. Naturally the chain was made of gold. The links were as thick as a man's wrist; the length twice that of the great square at Cuzco, which makes upwards of seven hundred feet; and its weight was such that two hundred Indians could only just lift it from the ground.'
'Oh!' cried his listeners, who naturally enough included Killick and his mate Grimshaw: and while their mouths were still rounded, young Wedell came in with Mr Grainger's compliments and duty to the Captain and might he set the weather studdingsails? The breeze had veered half a point and he reckoned they would stand.
'Oh, by all means, Mr Wedell,' cried Jack. 'Let him crack on till all sneers again.'
Just how it became known throughout the ship that the Captain's chase had a beast in view, and that it was not only the joy of being homeward-bound that caused him to spread so much canvas, to spend so much time on deck, taking every possible advantage of the wind and whipping jibs and staysails in and out, could not be clearly stated; yet known it was, and no officer or master's mate ever had to emphasize, still less repeat, any order that might carry the barky more briskly to the high south latitudes.
Some of the knowledge derived from the obvious fact that the Doctor, though incapable of telling a barque from a ship or a bowline from a midshipman's hitch, was not as simple as he looked - that indeed would have been difficult - and that he did not spend all his time on shore in bowsing up his jib or inspecting ladies in their shifts, but sometimes picked up valuable news: yet this did not account for the 'two or three China ships out of Boston' or the 'south of Diego Ramirez' that could so often be heard on the lower deck, together with the calculation that a steady five knots from noon to noon, day after day, would get them there with time and to spare, which could only come from deliberate eavesdropping or very close attention to all possible clues, such as the Captain's poring over his charts of the desolate regions south of the Horn.
Yet this eagerness for a prize, so natural in the crew of a man-of-war, was curiously coloured and accentuated by Stephen's account of the Inca's great chain, an account that had nothing whatsoever to do with Boston merchantmen launched two hundred and fifty years later: it nevertheless suffused the whole ship's collective state of mind.
'How much do you suppose a tolerably stout Indian could lift?' asked Reade.
'They are natives, you know,' said Wedell, 'and everyone knows that natives can raise prodigious great burdens, though not much above five feet tall.'
'Say two hundredweight,' said Norton.
'That makes four hundred hundredweight for two hundred Indians,' said Reade, writing it on the slate used for his rough day's work. 'Which is twenty tons, or forty-four thousand eight hundred pounds. Which is seven hundred and sixteen thousand eight hundred ounces. What is gold worth an ounce?'
'Three pounds seventeen and ten pence halfpenny,' said Norton. That was what Mr Adams reckoned when last prize money was shared out; and all hands agreed.'
'Three, seventeen, ten and a half to be multiplied by seven hundred and sixteen thousand eight hundred,' said Reade. 'There ain't room enough for it on the slate, and anyhow they are avoirdupois ounces instead of Troy. But whichever way you look at it the answer is well over two millions of money. Can you imagine two millions of money?'
Yes, they could - a deer-park, bow windows, a pack of hounds, a private band in a genteel conservatory - and so could others, before the mast and abaft; and although no one was so simple as to confuse these two quite separate ideas, the hypothetical prizes far to the south tended to glow with an additional and quite charming lustre, in spite of the fact that almost every man aboard was already richer than he had ever been in his life from the earlier captures, and that neither the frigate's captain nor her surgeon really needed any more at all.
'There is something profoundly discreditable about this delight in taking other men's property away from them by force,' observed Stephen, tuning his long neglected 'cello, 'taking it away openly, legally, and being praised, caressed and even decorated for doing so. I quell, or attempt to quell, the feeling every time it rises in my bosom;
