that
thought, for, as he pored over these books, his heart expanded
with gratitude to the brusque explorer whom he had met in Cartagena,
that genial, odd medley of blunt honesty, unquibbling candor, and
hatred of dissimulation, whose ridicule of the religious fetishism
of the human mentality tore up the last root of educated orthodox
belief that remained struggling for life in the altered soil of his
mind.

But, though they tore down with ruthless hand, _these books did not
reconstruct_. Jose turned from them with something of disappointment.
He could understand why the trembling heart, searching wearily for
truth, turned always from such as they with sinking hope. They were
violently iconoclastic--they up-rooted--they overthrew--they swept
aside with unsparing hand--but they robbed the starving mortal of his
once cherished beliefs--they snatched the stale and feebly nourishing
bread from his mouth, and gave nothing in return. They emptied his
heart, and left it starving. What did it boot to tell a man that the
orthodox dream of eternal bliss beyond the gates of death was but a
hoax, if no substitute be offered? Why point out the fallacies, the
puerile conceptions, the worse than childish thought expressed in the
religious creeds of men, if they were not to be replaced by
life-sustaining truth? If the demolition of cherished beliefs be not
followed by reconstruction upon a sure foundation of demonstrable
truth, then is the resulting state of mind worse than before, for the
trusting, though deceived, soul has no recourse but to fall into the
agnosticism of despair, or the black atheism of positive negation.

"Happily for me," he sighed, as he closed his books at length, "that
Carmen entered my empty life in time with the truth that she hourly
demonstrates!"

CHAPTER 24

Days melted into weeks, and these in turn into months. Simiti, drab
and shabby, a crumbling and abandoned relique of ancient Spanish pride
and arrogance, drowsed undisturbed in the ardent embrace of the
tropical sun. Don Jorge returned, unsuccessful, from his long quest in
the San Lucas mountains, and departed again down the Magdalena river.

"It is a marvelous country up there," he told Jose. "I do not wonder
that it has given rise to legends. I felt myself in a land of
enchantment while I was roaming those quiet mountains. When, after
days of steady traveling, I would chance upon a little group of
natives hidden away in some dense thicket