King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure

by Talbot Mundy

  A scorpion in a corner stings himself to death. A coward blames the gods. They laugh and let him die A man goes forward --Native Proverb

  As they disappeared after a scramble through the mouth of the sametunnel they had entered by, a roar went up behind them like the birth ofearthquakes. Looking back over his shoulder, King saw Yasmini come backinto the hole's mouth, to stand framed in it and bow acknowledgment.She looked so ravishing in contrast to the huge grim wall, and the blackriver, and the darkness at her back, that Khinjan's thousands tried tostorm the bridge and drag her down to them. The guards were hard put toit, with their backs to the bridge end, for two or three minutes.

  But Ismail would not let him wait and watch from there. He dragged himdown the tunnel and pushed him up on to a ledge where they could bothsee without being seen, through a fissure in the rock.

  For the space of five minutes Yasmini stood in the great hole, smilingand watching the struggle below. Then she went, and the guards began toget the best of it, because the crowd's enthusiasm waned when they couldsee her no more. Then suddenly the guards began to loose random volleysat the roof and brought down hundredweights of splintered stalactite.

  Within a minute there were a hundred men busy on sweeping up thesplinters. In another minute twenty Zakka Khels had begun a sword dance,yelling like the damned. A hundred joined them. In three minutes morethe whole arena was a dinning whirlpool, and the river's voice wasdrowned in shouting and the stamping of naked feet on stone.

  "Come!" urged Ismail, and led the way.

  King's last impression was of earth's womb on fire and of hellionsbrewing wrath. The stalactites and the hurrying river multiplied thedancing lights into a million, and the great roof hurled the din downagain to make confusion with the new din coming up.

  Ismail went like a rat down a run, and King failed to overtake him untilhe found him in the cave of the slippers kicking to right and left atrandom.

  "Choose a good pair!" he growled. "Let late-comers fight for what isleft! Nay, I have thine! Choose thou the next best!"

  The statement being one of fact, and that no time or place for a quarrelwith the only friend in sight, King picked out the best slippers hecould see. The instant he had them on Ismail was off again, running likethe wind.

  They had no torch. They left the little tunnel lamps behind. It becameso dark that King had to follow by ear, and so it happened that hemissed seeing where the tunnel forked. He imagined they were runningback toward the ledge under the waterfall; yet, when Ismail called ahalt at last, panting, groped behind a great rock for a lamp and lit thewick with a common safety match, they were in a cave he had never seenbefore.

  "Where are we?" King asked.

  "Where none dare seek us."

  Ismail held the lamp high, shielding its wick with a hollowed palm andpeering about him as if in doubt, his ragged beard looking like smoke inthe wind; for a wind blew down all the passages in Khinjan.

  King examined the lamp. It was of bronze and almost as surely ancientGreek as it surely was not Indian. There were figures graven on the bowlrepresenting a woman dancing, who looked not unlike Yasmini; but beforehe had time to look very closely Ismail blew the lamp out and was offagain, like a shadow shot into its mother night.

  Confused by the sudden darkness King crashed into a rock as he tried tofollow. Ismail turned back and gave him the end of a cotton girdle thathe unwound from his waist; then he plunged ahead again into Cimmerianblackness, down a passage so narrow that they could touch a wall witheither hand.

  Once he shouted back to duck, and they passed tinder a low roof wherewater dripped on them, and the rock underfoot was the bed of a shallowstream. After that the track began to rise, and the grade grew so steepthat even Ismail, the furious, had to slacken pace.

  They began to climb up titanic stairways all in the dark, feeling theirway through fissures in a mountain's framework, up zigzag ledges, andover great broken lumps of rock from one cave to another; until at lastin one great cave Ismail stopped and relit the lamp. Hunting about withits aid he found an imported "hurricane" lantern and lit that, leavingthe bronze lamp in its place.

  Soon after that they lost sight of walls to their left for a time,although there were no stars, nor any light to suggest the outerworld--nothing but wind. The wind blew a hurricane.

  Their path now was a very narrow ledge formed by a crack that randiagonally down the face of a black cliff on their right. They huggedthe stone because of a sense of fathomless space above--below--on everyside but one. The rock wall was the one thing tangible, and the footingthe crack in it afforded was the gift of God.

  The moaning wind rose to a shriek at intervals and made their clothesflutter like ghosts' shrouds, and in spite of it King's shirt wasdrenched with sweat, and his fingers ached from clinging as if they wereon fire. Crawling against the wind along a wider ledge at the top, theycame to a chasm, crossed by a foot-wide causeway. The wind bowled andmoaned in it, and the futile lantern rays only suggested unimaginable,things--death the least of them.

  "Art thou afraid?" asked Ismail, holding the lantern to King's face.

  "Kuch dar nahin hai!" he answered. "There is no such thing as fear!"

  It was a bold answer, and Ismail laughed, knowing well that neither ofthem believed a word of it at that moment. Only, each thought betterof the other, that the one should have cared to ask, and that the othershould be willing to give the lie to a fear that crawled and could befelt. Too many men are willing to admit they are afraid. Too many wouldrather condemn and despise than ask and laugh. But it is on the edges ofeternity that men find each other out, and sympathize.

  Ismail went down on his hands and knees, lifting the lantern along afoot at a time in front of him and carrying it in his teeth by the bailthe last part of the way. It seemed like an hour before he stood up,nearly a hundred yards away on the far side, and yelled for King tofollow.

  The wind snatched the yells away, but the waving lantern beckoned him,and King knelt down in the dark. It happened that he laid his hand on aloose stone, the size of his head, near the edge. He shoved it over andlistened. He listened for a minute but did not hear it strike anything,and the shudder, that he could not repress, came from the middle of hisbackbone and spread outward through each fiber of his being. If he haddelayed another second his courage would have failed; he began at onceto crawl to where Ismail stood swinging the light.

  There was room on the ledge for his knees and no more. Toes and fingerswere overside. He sat down as on horseback, and transferred bothslippers to his pockets, and then went forward again with bare feet,waiting whenever the wind snatched at him with redoubled fury, to leanagainst it and grip the rock with numb fingers. Ismail swung the lamp,for reasons best known to himself, and half-way over King sat astridethe ridge again to shout to him to hold it still. But Ismail did notunderstand him.

  "Khinjan graves are deep!" he howled back. "Fear and the shadow of deathare one!"

  He swung the lamp even more violently, as if it were a charm that couldexorcise fear and bring a man over safely. The shadows danced untilhis brain reeled, and King swore he would thrash the fool as soon as hecould reach him. He lay belly-downward on the rock and crawled like aninsect the remainder of the way.

  And as if aware of his intention Ismail started to hurry on whilethere was yet a yard or two to crawl, and anger not being a load worthcarrying, nor revenge a thing permitted to interfere with the sirkar'sbusiness, King let both die.

  Hunted by the wind, they ran round a bold shoulder of cliff into anotherblack-dark tunnel. There the wind died, swallowed in a hundred fissures,but the track grew worse and steeper until they had to cling with bothhands and climb and now and then Ismail set the lantern on a ledgeand lowered his girdle to help King up. Sometimes he stood on King'sshoulder in order to reach a higher level. They climbed for an hour anddropped at last panting, on a ledge, after squeezing themselves underthe corner of a boulder.

  The lantern light shone on a tiny trick
le of cold water, and thereIsmail drank deep, like a bull, before signing to King to imitate him.

  "A thirsty throat and a crazy head are one," he counseled. "A man needswit and a wet tongue who would talk with her!"

  "Where is she?" asked King, when he had finished drinking.

  "Go and look!"

  Ismail gave him a sudden shove, that sent him feet first forward overthe edge. He fell a distance rather greater than his own height,to another ledge and stood there looking up. He could see Ismail'sred-rimmed eyes blinking down at him in the lantern light, but suddenlythe Afridi blew the lamp out, and then the darkness became solid.Thought itself left off less than a yard away.

  "Ismail!" he whispered. But Ismail did not answer him.

  He faced about, leaning against the rock, with the flat of both bandspressed tight against it for the sake of its company; and almost at oncehe saw a little bright red light glowing in the distance. It might havebeen a hundred yards, and it might have been a mile away below him; itwas perfectly impossible to judge, for the darkness was not measurable.

  "Flowers turn to the light!" droned Ismail's voice above sententiously,and turning, he thought he could see red eyes peering over the rock. Hejumped, and made a grab for the flowing beard that surely must be belowthem, but he missed.

  "Little fish swim to the light!" droned Ismail. "Moths fly to the light!Who is a man that he should know less than they?"

  He turned again and stared at the light. Dimly, very vaguely be couldmake out that a causeway led downward from almost where he stood. He wasconvinced that should he try to climb back Ismail would merely reach outa hand and shove him down again, and there was no sense in being put tothat indignity. He decided to go forward, for there was even less sensein standing still.

  "Come with me! Come along, Ismail!" he called.

  "Allah! Hear him! Nay, nay, nay! Who was it said a little while ago,'There is no such thing as fear!' I am afraid, but thou and I are twomen! Go thou alone!"

  Reason is a man's only dependable faculty. Reason told him that at aword from Yasmini he would have been flung into "Earth's Drink" hoursago. Therefore, added reason, why should she forego that spectacularopportunity when his death would have amused Khinjan's thousands, onlyto kill him now in the dark alone? He had treated a few dozen sick men,surely she had not been afraid to offend them. Had she not dared forbidthe sick coming to him altogether? "Forward!" says Cocker, in at least adozen places. "Go forward and find out! Better a bed in hell than a seaton the horns of a dilemma! Forward!"

  There was no sound now anywhere. He stretched a leg downward and felta rock two or three feet lower down, and the sound of his slipper soletouching it, being the only noise, made the short hair rise on the backof his neck. Then he took himself, so to speak, by the hand and wentforward and downward, for action is the only curb imagination knows.

  He forgot to count his pulse and judge how long it took him to descendthat causeway in the dark. It was not so very rough, nor so verydangerous, but of course he only knew that fact afterward. He had togrope his way inch by inch, trusting to sense of touch and the Britisharmy's everlasting luck, with an eye all the while on a red light thatwas something like the glow through hell's keyhole.

  When he reached bottom, after perhaps twenty minutes, and stood at laston comparatively level rock, his legs were trembling from tension, andhe had to sit down while he stretched them out and rested. The lightstill looked a quarter of a mile away, although that was guesswork. Itmade scarcely more impression on the surrounding darkness than one coalglowing in a cellar. The silence began to make his head ache.

  He got up and started forward, but just as he did that he thought heheard a footstep. He suspected Ismail might be following after all.

  "Ismail!" he called, trying to peer through the dark.

  But all the darkness had its home there. He could not even see his ownhand stretched out. His own voice made him jump; after a second's pauseit began to crack and rattle from wall to wall and from roof to floor,until at last the echoing word became one again and died with a hisssomewhere in the bowels of the world--Mbisssss!--like the sound of hotiron being plunged into a blacksmith's trough with a little after-murmurof complaining water.

  But then he was sure he heard a footstep! He faced about; and now therewere two red lights where there had been only one. They seemed rathernearer, perhaps because there were two of them.

  "Hullo, King sahib!" said a voice he recognized; and he choked. He feltthat if he had coughed his heart would have lain on the floor!

  "Are you afraid, King sahib?" said the Rangar Rewa Gunga's voice, andhe took a step forward to be closer to his questioner. He found himselfbeside a rock, looking up at the Rangar's turban, that peered over thetop of it. He could dimly make out the Rangar's dark eyes.

  "I would be afraid if I were you!"

  Rewa Gunga flashed a little electric torch into his eyes, but aftera few seconds he shifted it so that both their faces could be seen,although the Rangar's only very faintly.

  "I have come to warn you!"

  "Very good of you, I'm sure!" said King.

  "If she knew I were here, she would jolly well have my liver nailed to awall! I come to advise you to go back!"

  "Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?" King asked him.

  "Never mind, sahib, but listen! I have brought her bracelet! I stole it!She stole it from you, and I stole it back! Take it! Put it on and wearit! Use it as a passport out of Khinjan Caves--for no man dare touch youwhile you wear it--and as a passport down the Khyber into India! Go backto India and stay there! Take it and go! Quick! Take it!"

  "No, thanks!" said King.

  The Rangar laughed mirthlessly, shifting the light a little as Kingstepped aside to get a better view of him. He held the torch morecunningly than a Spanish lady holds a fan.

  "All Englishmen are fools--most of them stiff-necked fools," heasserted. "Bah! Do you think I do not know? Do you think anythingis hidden from her? I know--and she knows--that you think you have asurprise in store for her! You think you will go to her, and she willsay, 'King sahib, why did you throw that head into the river, and put mein danger from my men?' And you will say, will you not, 'Princess, thatwas my brother's head!'? Was that not what you intended? Is it not true?Does she not know it? She knows more than you know, King sahib! Becauseyou showed me certain little courtesies, I have come to warn you to runaway!"

  "Do you suppose she knows you are here?" King asked, and the Rangarlaughed.

  "If she knows so much, and is able to read my mind from a distance,where does she suppose you are?" King insisted.

  The Rangar laughed again, leaning his chin on both fists and switchingout the light.

  "Perhaps she sent me to warn you!"

  "Well," said King, "my brother commanded at Ali Masjid Fort. There arethings I must ask her. How did she know that head was my brother's? Whatpart had she in taking it from his shoulders? What did she mean by thatsong of hers?"

  The Rangar chuckled softly.

  "There are no fools in the world like Englishmen! Listen! You are beingoffered life and liberty! Here is the key to both!"

  He made the gold bracelet ring on the rock by way of explanation.

  "Take the key and go!"

  "No!" said King.

  "Very well, sahib! Hear the other side of it! Beyond those two redlights there is a curtain. This side of that curtain you are AthelstanKing of the Khyber Rifles, or Kurram Khan, or whatever you care to callyourself. Beyond it, you are what she calls you! Choose!"

  King did not answer, so he continued after a pause.

  "You shall pass behind that curtain, if you insist. Beyond it you shallknow what she knows about Ali Masjid and your brother's head! You shallknow all that she knows! There shall be no secrets between you and her!She shall translate the meaning of her song to you! But you shall nevercome out again King of the Khyber Rifles, or Kurram Khan! If you evercome out again, it shall be as you never dreamed, bearing arms you neversaw yet, and you sha
ll cut with your own hand the ties that bind you toEngland! Choose!"

  "I chose long ago," said King.

  "Are the gentle English never serious?" the Rangar asked. "Will you notunderstand that if you pass that curtain you shall know all thingsthat Yasmini knows, but that you shall cease to be yourself?Cease--to--be--yourself! Is my meaning clear?"

  "Not in the least," said King, "but I hope mine is!"

  "You will go forward?"

  "Yes," said King.

  Rewa Gunga made no answer to that, although King waited for an answer.For about a minute there was no sound at all, except the beating ofKing's heart. Then he moved to try and see the Rangar's turban above therock. He could not see it. He found a niche in the rock, set his footin it and mounted three or four feet, until his head was level with thetop. The Rangar was gone!

  He listened for two or three minutes, but the silence began to make hishead ache again; so he stooped to feel the floor with his hand beforedeciding to go forward. There was no mistaking the finish given by thetread of countless feet. He was on a highway, and there are not oftenpitfalls where so many feet have been.

  For all that he went forward as a certain Agag once did, and it was manyminutes before he could see a curtain glowing blood-red in the lightbehind the two lamps, at the top of a flight of ten stone steps. Itwas peculiar to him and to his service that he counted the steps beforegoing nearer.

  When he went quite close he saw carpet down the middle of the steps,so ancient that the stone showed through in places; all the pattern,supposing it ever had any, was worn or faded away. Carpet and stepsglowed red too. His own face, and the hands he held in front of himwere red-hot-poker color. Yet outside the little ellipse of light thedarkness looked like a thing to lean against, and the silence was sointense that he could hear the arteries singing by his ears.

  He saw the curtains move slightly, apparently in a little puff of windthat made the lamps waver. He was very nearly sure he heard a footfallbeyond the curtains and a tinkle--as of a tiny silver bell, or a jewelstriking against another one.

  He kicked his slippers off, because there are no conditions under whichbad manners ever are good policy. Wide history and Cocker's famous code.Then he walked up the steps without treading on the carpet, becauseliving scorpions have been known to be placed under carpets on purposeon occasion. And at the top, being a Secret Service man, he stooped toexamine the lamps.

  They were bronze, cast, polished and graved. All round the circumferenceof each bowl were figures in half-relief, representing a woman dancing.She was the woman of the knife-hilt, and of the lamps in the arena! Shelooked like Yasmini! Only she could not be Yasmini because these lampswere so ancient and so rare that he had never seen any in the least likethem, although he had visited most of the museums of the East.

  Both lamps were alike, for he crossed over to make sure and took each inhis hands in turn. But no two figures of the dance were alike oneither. It was the same woman dancing, but the artist had chosen twentydifferent poses with which to immortalize his skill, and hers. Bothlamps burned sweet oil with a wick, and each had a chimney of horn, notat all unlike a modern lamp-chimney. The horn was stained red.

  As he set the second lamp down he became aware of a subtle interestingsmell, and memory took back at once to Yasmini's room in the ChandniChowk in Delhi where he had smelled it first. It was the peculiar scenthe had been told was Yasmini's own--a blend of scents, like a chord ofmusic, in which musk did not predominate.

  He took three strides and touched the curtains, discovering now for thefirst time that there were two of them, divided down the middle. Theywere about eight feet high, and each three feet wide, of leather, andthough they looked old as the "Hills" themselves the leather was suppleas good cloth. They had once been decorated with figures in gold leaf,but only a little patch of yellow here and there remained to hint atfaded glories.

  He decided to remember his manners again, and at least to makeopportunity for an invitation.

  "Kurram Khan hai!" he announced, forgetting the echo. But the echo wasthe only answer. It cackled at him, cracking back and forth down thecavern to die with a groan in illimitable darkness.

  "Kurram-urram-urram-urram-urram-ahn-hai! Urram-urram-urram-urram-ahn-hai!Urram-urram-urram-ah-hh-ough-ah!"

  There was no sound beyond the curtains. No answer. Only he thought thestrange scent grew stronger. He decided to go forward. With his heart inhis mouth he parted the curtains with both hands, startled by the sharpjangle of metal rings on a rod.

  So he stood, with arms outstretched, staring--staring--staring--witheyes skilled swiftly to take in details, but with a brain that tried toexplain--formed a hundred wild suggestions--and then reeled. He was faceto face with the unexplainable--the riddle of Khinjan Caves.

  Chapter XIII