Oh, frustration! As when a book stops and you don’t like the ending, I watched episode twenty-seven of searching for the Dutchman’s gold and couldn’t believe it. No, no, no. Surely, that wasn’t all.
The last episode was the best of all. The five intrepid hunters approached the mountain from a river. Beautiful scenery. Wild, untamed, scary, forbidding, but mesmerizing. They had glimpsed a cross painted on a rock high above them, and surely it was significant. The cross was their guide and goal.
The two oldest explorers stayed with the boat while the three younger ones began a climb up a mountain which was almost perpendicular. They were struggling up a dry gulch and rain began. They had to get out of that dry creek bed because flash floods could arrive suddenly and with a vengeance.
They battled on, rain blinding them and a misstep meaning a tumble down the mountain. Laboring ever upward, unbelievably, they glimpsed an old ladder dangling down the rocky face of the mountain. This ladder was beside a huge cave.
The ladder hung several feet above their reach, but another, rusty iron ladder lay on the ground. This gave them the extra boost to reach the wood one. Bravely, or foolishly, the youngest man began climbing, rung by shaky rung. The cave was home to thousands of bats who fluttered and screeched at being disturbed. The stench from bat guano made them physically sick. Yet, the climber kept on. When he reached the top of the cave, there, imbedded in the wall was an iron cross–undoubtedly a Jesuit cross.
Excitement ran like fever among them, as they realized they were on the verge of finding the Jesuit cache of gold, worth even more than Jacob Waltz’s.
However, they received warnings. Unmistakable, direct-to-the-point threats–symbols left in the rocks and on the rocks that if they continued, they would all die.
These five men, brave and dauntless, who had faced rattlesnakes, storms, scorpions, spiders and death by plunging down a precipe, paused. Somebody had been watching them. Somebody knew just where they were and what they had found, and somebody would make sure that they never left the mountain with gold. There were silent and unseen guardians who also knew about the gold. So, these five backed off. They went back down the mountain and left the secret as it had been for centuries.
No, I said. Is that all? Surely not. But, yes. They got into the boat, started it up, and roared back to civilization. In a hurry, I might add. They looked pretty serious and I believe they were glad to be alive, realizing how close they had come to perishing.
Will there be other episodes? I have no idea. What would I do if I were faced with the lure of untold wealth in the face of extreme danger? I watched the beautiful scenery disappear as the men gave up on their dream. Perhaps I, too, would have counted the adventure as victory in itself and maybe I would have looked forward, wisely, to re-orienting my goals into writing a book about the search for gold.
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