The poor Jesuits themselves were in two minds as to the meanings of this attention. At times they would comfort themselves with the idea that it would be all right in the end and that the noble-looking Englishman they had seen in the boat on the lake would take care that no harm came to them. At other moments despair would reign, for, try as they would, they could not get a word out of their captors, good, bad, or indifferent, and this, they were sometimes certain, presaged evil fortune to them, and indicated that they were being taken away to play unpleasantly prominent parts in some hideous rites of human sacrifice. Suddenly, however, their bandages were removed, and to their surprise they found that they were entering a town, pleasantly situated on a slope that inclined to the stream of a river, with a hill at either end guarded by a fort. The houses were neat and the streets regular, but, owing probably to there being so few wheeled vehicles, they were overgrown with grass. In due course they passed a church--a handsome building with a fine tower. The houses themselves were mostly coloured white or yellow, but in the very centre stood a magnificent building of white marble, in style something like a mosque. This proved to be the residence of the Englishman, for no sooner did they arrive in front of its portals than he came out and greeted them. To cut a rather long and tedious story short, it appeared that his name was Joseph Beckworth, a well-known traveller of his time, who was supposed to have been lost in the interior some years earlier. As a matter of fact, he had purposely disappeared, through a disappointment in a love affair, wherein a girl refused to marry him because he was so poor. Vowing hatred against his race he had obtained a written concession of all that country thereabouts, including the ownership of the sacred lake itself, and with the aid of some Indians and negroes he had founded that town, the position of which he would not tell them. Then with wealth secretly obtained from the lake (whose sacred virtues he made all his allies pay golden tribute to) he had made the place what it was.