Heart of the World by H. Rider Haggard - HTML preview

ENVOI.

MY friend, now I, Ignatio, have finished writing that story of how I came to visit the Golden City of the Indians, which so many have believed to be fabulous, and that to-day exists no more. It is a strange story, and I trust that it may interest you to read it when I am dead and buried.

Perhaps you would like to know the details of our homeward journey, but in truth I have neither the strength nor the patience to set them down. It was a terrible journey, and once we both of us fell ill with fever from which I thought that we should not recover; but recover we did by the help of some wandering Indians who nursed us, and at length reached this place from which we had fled for our lives nearly two years before. We found the hacienda deserted, for it had the reputation of being haunted, though some of the Indian dependents, or rather slaves, of that great villain, Don Pedro Moreno, still worked patches of the land. Well, the señor took a fancy to stay in the place, for it was here that he had first seen his wife, and so we sold that girdle of emeralds which Maya took from the chest of ornaments and gave to me when we were imprisoned for the first time in the hall of the pyramid (do not lose the clasp, friend, for it is the only remaining relic of the People of the Heart), and with the proceeds we bought at a cheap rate from the government of the day, who had entered into possession of them, this house and the wide lands round it, that I have cultivated ever since. For, my friend, now my ambitions were finished. I had played my last card and it had failed me, and, albeit with a sorrowful mind, I abandoned my hopes for the regeneration of the Indians which I had no longer the means or the health and vigour to attempt. Also, I was no more Lord of the Heart, for with its counterpart it was lost in the Sanctuary yonder beneath the waters of the Holy Lake, and with the ancient symbol went much of my power.

For five years the señor and I lived here together, but I think that during all this time he was dying. He, who used to be so strong in body and merry in mind, never regained his health or spirits from that hour when Maya passed upon the pyramid, and though he seldom spoke of her, I know that night and day she was always present in his thoughts. Twice in the spring seasons he suffered from calenturas, as we call the fever of the country, which left him sallow in face and shrunken in body; and when the spring came round for the third time, I begged him to go to Mexico for change, returning to the hacienda in the summer. In vain; he would not do it, indeed I do not think that he cared whether he lived or died. So the end of it was that the calentura took him again, and die he did in my arms, happily as a child that falls asleep.

Now my days are accomplished also, and, having failed in all things and known much sorrow and disappointment, I go to join him. My friend, farewell. Perhaps you will think of me from time to time, and, though you are a heretic, send up a prayer to heaven for the welfare of the soul of the old Indian—

IGNATIO.

THE END.