From time to time he took a brief rest and, at about midnight, a long one during which he made a meal off a strip of bacon and a tortilla, washed down with a draught of water from his flask, for which he again blessed Juanita, as she had had the forethought to fill it for him.
An hour later he came to a township, skirted round it and lost the road again. Another hour went by without his succeeding in finding it. Judging by the moon, he knew that there was still a long time to go until dawn; but he felt too tired to go any further, so dossed down under a hedge. At first light he woke and covered another two miles, by which time the peasants were coming out into the fields and, as he was most averse to risking an encounter, he began to look about for a hideout. Soon afterwards he came upon a burned out shack. Settling himself in a corner, he ate some of the chocolate and tried to sleep, but found that he could not get off.
The day seemed never ending, but at last sundown came and he was able to go on his way. Again, after walking for some eight hours, he had to give up and spent the rest of the night sleeping among some bushes.
And so, with little variation, matters continued. Each night, when fatigue forced him to stop and sleep, he grudged losing the hours of darkness during which he might have covered another eight or ten miles. But the days were the worst.
Again and again he went over in his thoughts scenes through which he had lived since his arrival in Mexico: Chela tall, broad shouldered, superbly gowned and incredibly lovely as she had made her entrance in her father's penthouse on that first evening they had spent in each other's company; Alberuque hawk faced, cynically smiling at the moment he had admitted that he was a reincarnation of Itzechuatl; the top of the pyramid at San Luis Caliente with the slaughtered pig and the smell of its hot blood; Chela, naked, laughing, utterly adorable, as he had known her in her villa at Acapulco; Jacko strangling the wounded warder; Alberuque, his dull black eyes radiating evil when he had threatened to sacrifice Chela; the crowd, the smell and the
mosquitoes at Merida airport; Jeremy Hunterscombe lying hors de combat in the cave; Ramon playing the gracious host at the Bankers' Club; the Zupango family falling on their knees, believing him to be Quetzalcoatl; Alberuque's face showing stark terror as he was thrown from the helicopter to die in the boiling lava of the volcano; Father Lopez discoursing genially on the life of Cortes beside the swimming pool of the Hacienda Hotel at Uxmal; Chela, wan and still under the herbal drug, as he had last seen her at the farmhouse.
These and many other memories kept passing through his mind like the pictures made by a Victorian revolving silhouette wheel. Utterly weary of them, he tried to pass the time by thinking out plots for stories, reciting all the poems he could remember, repeating the multiplication tables, endeavouring to do intricate sums in his head, playing noughts and crosses against himself and inventing other games.
Several times he succeeded in sending his spirit back to the past and lived again for a while either as Ord the Red Handed or Quetzalcoatl, whom he now knew to be one and the same. On one such occasion he found himself as the Man God, alone, tired and hungry, making his way by night through a forest. He was lost, yet dared not go into a village to ask his way in case the inhabitants proved to be enemies. Eight days earlier he had succeeded in escaping from Itzechuatl and was now about two hundred miles from Tenochtitlan; but he still had a long way to go before he could hope to rejoin his own people. He was not only still in danger from the warriors whom he knew must have been sent in pursuit of him, but sad at heart because he had fallen in love at first sight with the beautiful Mirolitlit and knew it to be most unlikely that he would ever see her again.
When Adam came out of his dream he thought how strange it was that he should have made his present journey, or a very similar one, in that long past life and in almost identical circumstances; for in this present incarnation he was again tired, hungry, lost, pursued by enemies with little hope of ever again seeing the great love whom he had had to leave behind. Nevertheless, this vision gave him new courage to endure. As Ord the Viking become Quetzalcoatl, he had succeeded in reaching Yucatan; so he should be ashamed of himself now if, as Adam Gordon, he failed to reach Vera Cruz, which was nowhere near so great a distance.
None of his other returns to the past was of any special interest and, although they gave him something to think about, they were useless for killing time. The many hours, or even days, they seemed to cover were an illusion; when he came out of his visions the sun had not perceptibly moved in the heavens, so, in fact, he had not left his body for more than a few minutes.
Travelling mainly over rough ground eight hours out of twenty four was as much as he could manage and the discomfort of his resting places made it impossible to sleep for more than six hours; the remaining ten had to be got through somehow. His every thought grew stale and, day after day, waiting for darkness to fall again so that he could go on his way almost drove him mad with impatience and frustration.
At no time could he with certainty have put a pin point on a map within twenty miles of where he was. No road led directly towards the east for more than a few miles, then it curved either to north or south. After a time the cultivated lands gave way to jungle. Often he found difficulty in finding a stream of fresh water from which he could refill his flask and sluice his face. To eke out his rations, he stole fruit from trees growing on the outskirts of villages and twice ran down chickens which he afterwards encased in mud and baked over a wood fire. Once he trod on a snake and narrowly escaped being bitten, another time when the moon was hidden by clouds he fell headlong into a pond and he was bitten by mosquitoes until he thought he would go mad.
But one thing buoyed him up. Day after day during his wearying journey he managed to avoid coming face to face with any human being. In the early morning of the twelfth day he emerged from a patch of mimosa bushes to see the sun rising over the sea.
Hardly able to believe that he had at last reached the Atlantic, he retreated into the bushes and considered his next move. The past fortnight had greatly changed his appearance. Three times during his journey he had shaved and trimmed his hair as short as he could with the scissors; but he had allowed his moustache to grow and, by feeling the bristles, he knew that it must now be an obvious feature. Even though he had remained in hiding for the greater part of each day, the torrid sun baking the lower lands had considerably increased his tan; his face was puffy from mosquito bites and his fingernails were black with grime. As he now looked, and in his cheap Indian clothes, he thought it very unlikely that anyone he had met while in Mexico, except perhaps Chela, would recognise him; so he need no longer fear to enter a town.
The great port of Vera Cruz was the obvious place to try to get aboard a ship, but the problem was how to set about it. Without a passport, he could not sail as a passenger, even had he had the money to buy a ticket. Out of the money with which Hunterscombe had provided him he had given Juanita three hundred pesos. That left him with six hundred and fifty and some small change about
nineteen pounds. Far too little to offer a sea captain as a bribe for getting him out of the country illegally.
Taking out the remaining jewels that he had worn as Quetzalcoatl, he looked them over. In addition to the beautiful jeweled serpent, there were five thick gold bracelets studded with fair sized but ill cut gems. As he examined them they brought back to his mind the treasure he had found in Scotland when a boy. So many things had happened to him since that that seemed a whole lifetime ago, although, actually, it was only a little over fourteen years. Crude as they were, these stones were much larger and, if recut, would be worth a lot of money. But no buyer would be such a fool as to remove the stones from their settings. As genuine antiques, the bracelets must be worth a small fortune and the serpent symbol be almost priceless. To dispose of them, though, was another matter. No jeweller would consider such a purchase unless he had first checked up on where they had come from, so to sell them in Mexico was impossible. With a sigh, Adam put the jewels back in his pocket.