The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  I thought finally that the two speakers had perhaps gone away from wherever they were talking. I was about to rise, to continue in my search for an opening, a door or a window which would help my love and me to escape—when once more, insistent, sibilant, whispering, the tone waves glided through the hollow tiles.

  It seemed to be the second man who was speaking.

  “We must get him—the foreigner—the Christian—the cannibal of the Holy Cow! Quick—by the heavenly light of Chandra!” and he said it in such a deep, flat, strange voice that I felt something like the letting loose of fate—crashing, terrific—I felt an acrid flavor and taint of death and torture—a crimson undercurrent of gigantic, intolerable horrors!

  Came the first man’s answering whisper: “Yes, for he is dangerous, as dangerous as Prithwi Pala, the servant of Indra the god, of whom the legends speak; and as for Padmavati—” again he was silent—came another flow of words, in Hindustani this time and thus unintelligible to me. But they seemed to be words of command, and they were followed by other voices, other words; then a sharp, ominous hissing and rattling of steel and the faint sound of quick-running feet.

  They’re off, I said to myself, off and away and after me! I rose and looked to right and left. I guess I felt as a fox must feel when it hears the view-halloo of the chase and the baying of the hounds, with nothing in front but a bare hillside and far in the distance, a spinney which it can never reach.

  For where was I to go? Where was I to hide myself?

  Only one thing was certain. I could not let myself be caught in this hall nor in the abutting corridor, both bright with light. Back into the temple then—perhaps into the cobra den—a wild thought flashed through my head that I might have time to change clothes with the priest—a thought quickly given up, for what would I do with the priest himself?—other thoughts followed—but clear above them all rose the stony idea that, whatever happened, I must not lead the chase to the idol, the lotus pedestal where I had hidden the girl who was dearer to me than the dwelling of kings.

  So I ran, with my thoughts gyrating madly, like swirling fog in the brain of a blind world, faster and faster! There was a noise in my temples like running water, like the wind in the wings of birds; it filled my head with huge, tenoring sound waves, and, as I came within sight of the temple door, the bell from the Presbyterian church boomed out—ba-nnnng—a quarter after one—like a gray seal of doom and despair!

  Another rushing steps—already my hand was on the doorknob of the temple—already I was trying to subordinate my physical to my mental action, which seemed both muddled and frantic—for, you see, I know that presently I would have to be capable of one supreme effort of wit to save the girl and myself; battle and struggle it would be, and I did not refute the grim challenge of it; I did not blind myself to the balance of odds which would be against me.

  Fight, and win or lose! Frenzied heroism? Not a bit of it, old man: Simply the law of equal action and reaction—if I remember anything of my scientific course at college—applied to the dim, cruel heart of the Colootallah.

  I had half turned the doorknob—and then—

  Stephen Denton leaned forward in his chair and, for the first time since he had commenced the recital of his mad adventures, he gesticulated—his right hand shot out tensely, dramatically.

  And then from the walls, as if they had been parts of the walls, two men jumped at me, one from each side.

  No, I saw no door, though, of course, there must have been one—two, rather. I only heard the metallic jarring and grating of rusty hinges, and, that same second, they were there, as if a sinister, supernatural power had visualized them from nothing and popped them out at me!

  There they were—two men—with a crackle of naked steel—but wait! Get this right!

  You see—and it sounds incredible, I know it!—but even in that fraction of a moment’s flash my eyes registered what those two men looked like. Strange, isn’t It? But I saw—I actually saw every detail of their persons, their costumes, their facial characteristics: their dark skin, their hooked noses, their broad, thin lips, their flashing purple-black, narrow-lidded eyes, their beards, curled and twisted and parted in the dandified Rajput manner, their voluminous white turbans, with clusters of emeralds, falling over their low, broad foreheads, and, high in the right hand of either, a curved scimitar!

  Why, man, I even saw the curling, glittering lights on the points of their blades as they seemed to meet above my head like a double-barreled, curved guillotine!

  All that, every last bit of it, I saw in that fleeting fraction of a moment, and, speak about quickness of perception, about rushing rapidity of wit, why—

  Stephen Denton was silent. His right hand was still in the air, as if it were trying to pluck the tense, incredible facts of his narrative from the atmosphere.

  Quite suddenly, from upstairs, came once more the twanging of a native guitar; that a soft, silvery woman’s voice, singing in Behari:

  “…chare din ke gaile murga

  Mor ko ke aile…”

  Stephen Denton laughed. “You know the old song, don’t you?” he said. “The cock goes from home for four days only, and returns a peacock!” Same with me that night—in the Colootallah—I left the Hotel Semiramis a plain, prosaic Back Bay Bostonian, and I returned—oh, you’ll see—you bet I returned, in spite of those flashing scimitars! Am I not here—in front of your eyes—in the flesh?

  And he continued with another laugh.

  Yes, the jarring of the doors, the fact of my being able to register what those two bewhiskered ruffians looked like, the ominous crackle of steel as the blades flickered about my head, my own quick-wittedness—all that passed and happened and surged on in a moment. I was too excited, probably to feel ordinary fear. Something flashed through me akin to fear, but, oh, different; there’s no word for it in our language; but with it flashed, also, a certain breathless, sullen audacity that’s it exactly; a sullen audacity—and I—

  Suddenly Stephen Denton burst into a roar of laughter.

  Do you know what I did, old man? Can you guess it? No, no! I didn’t draw my Bowie-knife and give battle! Of course not! First of all, there wasn’t the time—for remember, the whole thing, from the jarring of the unseen door to the end of the little intermezzo, didn’t take more than two seconds; and, furthermore, what chance is there for a quiet Bostonian with a Bowie—a Bowie he isn’t used to handle, on top of it—against two big, hairy roughs with six yards of curved, razor-sharp steel between them? I’d have had as much chance against them with my Bowie as a regiment of volunteers armed with Civil War pop-guns against a battery armed with French forty-five millimeter guns!

  What did I do? But I am coming to that. Don’t get impatient—

  You see—I ducked!

  Yes, sir, I ducked! I threw myself flat on the floor before those two ruffians had a chance to realize what was happening—before they had time to put the brake on their brawny right arms.

  Down came the two scimitars, and—yes, this time you guessed it—they hit each other, instead of hitting little me! They split each other’s turbaned skulls—zzzsh! through the voluminous layers of muslin—with rather a sickening, sharp-crunching noise—and there were two dead Hindus!

  Say, man, speak about Tamerlane and George Washington and Napoleon—speak about the Charmed Life—what?

  I told you—haven’t I?—that from the moment of my swinging across the wall at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully—from the moment, rather, when I felt that my life was one with that of the little Hindu girl—my whole self seemed to have separated itself suddenly and completely from all that it had been in the past; it seemed to have lifted itself with a savage, tearing jerk from the pale, flat dumps of my past life and education and tradition—Boston, in other words—to the flashing, crazy limbos of this new, purple, mysterious India! I realized it, even at that moment, with the two dead men at my feet, one with his features, oh, set in an astonished sort of smile, as if wondering at the dark
blood which was running lazily from the split skull to the floor; the other dead man’s face like a grinning Tibetan devil mask, with the lips drawn back a little over the gleaming, white teeth in an eerie grin, like the fangs of a wolf who sees the victim, jumps, then finds himself in a trap, smells death in the trap in the moment of killing!

  Yes, all that I realized; not emotionally, for I seemed able perfectly to decompose the whole situation into a few negligible elements, as I would decompose a force in a question of abstract dynamics, and I was neither shocked nor even disgusted; and, mind you, this was the first time in my life I had seen death!

  But, you see, I seemed to belong to India, to the terrible, corroding simplicity of India, and I felt like chanting a chant of victory. I felt a brutal, sublimely unselfconscious joy at the sight of those two sprawling, stark-contoured figures.

  Rather beastly, don’t you think? But true!

  The next moment—for in that respect, too, the crouching, grim-clever instincts of all India had got into my blood—I looked about me, silently, carefully.

  I said to myself that there might be more Hindus out after my scalp—for remember, first, I had heard two voices whispering, then a few sharp words of command in Hindustani, and finally several more voices. I had run toward the temple, away from the lights, and I had evidently miscalculated. For if those two dead beggars had located me in the vicinity of the temple it was three to one to assume that the others would reason the same way.

  Away from the temple, then! Back in the direction of the circular hall, in spite of the bright lights, as fast as my legs would carry me! So I ran, and as I ran there came to me the madding, paralyzing sensation that quite near me, inside the walls other footsteps were keeping parallel with my own, and I was afraid.

  But only for a moment. The very next second the terror in my heart gave way to a feeling of indignation. I was cross, and I forgot all about that great, purple India which had picked me up and was shaping me into a molecule of its own strange, throbbing soul. You see, all my life I had been surrounded by the comfortable, machine-made, wire-drawn safeguards of Western life—police, laws, corporation counsels, prosecuting attorneys, municipal writs, regulation standards, regulation opinions. Fetishes I used to call them in my world-storming undergrad days; but I had relied on them. With all the rest of the Western world—socialists, anarchists, and I. W. W.’s included—I had always been in the position of a man who can demand and receive protection from the duly constituted authorities; and here I was suddenly up against life in the raw—in the bloodstained, quivering raw! I was up against a condition of society to which no law applied, no regulation, no standard known to me.

  By ginger, I was mad with utter, impotent fury. Right then I would have liked to have an interview with some of those visionary jackasses who prate against constituted law; and then (Stephen Denton laughed) quite suddenly I quit kicking. Quite suddenly I became convinced once more that I had a charmed life, after all!

  For by that time I had arrived again in the great circular hall where his holiness, the mummified Brahman swami, was sitting in sinister state; and there, not too high up, I saw a window!

  I made for it immediately, as a frightened cat makes for an open cellar; a running jump with every ounce of strength I possessed, I balanced myself precariously on the sill! I didn’t look down. Might have spoiled my nerve. I just closed my eyes and jumped, and I landed on a nice, thick, soft heap of ashes and cinders.

  The moon had come from behind the bank of clouds and was drenching everything with tiny flecks of gold. I looked about me. I found myself in a long, narrow courtyard, with the window through which I had come to the left of me, a high wall with a door to the right, another wall, about fifteen feet high, in front, and in back a fantastic, twisted building which towered up in a wilderness of spires and turrets.

  I had my choice of three ways, since I had no intention of returning to the hall whence I had jumped, naturally. Too, I discarded the building immediately; it looked, oh, too populous. Remained the two walls. First I examined the one with the door. There was a crack in it and I looked through; it seemed to open out into the street—some street.

  Did I try the door? Did I make for the street? You bet I did not! Why?

  But, man, there was the girl, back there somewhere in that maze of buildings; the girl who was all the world to me. No! I took the one remaining choice—the fifteen-foot wall in back of me.

  At first I failed to discover anything by which I could mount; but at last, walking down the length of it, I came upon a shed with a heavy padlock on its wooden door, with its roof inclined at an angle against the wall. It was my only chance, and there was but one way to do it. I stepped back a few paces and took a running leap for the edge of the roof, jumping for the padlock. I tried three times. The third time I got my foot upon the padlock, and caught the edge of the wall with my hands. Exerting all my strength, I drew myself up, and where do you think I found myself?

  I was back on the roof-top at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully! Quite alone, for when I groped beneath the balustrade where I had popped the old Hindu, bound and gagged, over an hour and a half before, I found the space empty.

  CHAPTER VII.

  THE MIRACLE.

  Evil is impossible because it is always rising up into Good.

  —Saint Augustine

  So likewise is Evil the revelation of Good.

  —Cardinal Newman

  * * * *

  I looked about me. It was a peaceful summer night, with the low hum of a sleeping world, and a froth of yellow stars flung over the crest of the heavens. Over to my right, where the lights of Howrah Station were flickering through the river-mist like dirty candle-dips, lay the great cosmopolitan hotels—the Semiramis, the Great Eastern, the Taj Mahal; there crouched the faint outlines of the Presbyterian church, of the Bengal Club, of Government House—peace and civilization and all the rest of the white man’s world. I imagined I could hear them snore across the distance—the commissioners and deputy commissioners, the colonels and adjutants, the big Anglo-Indian merchants, and the American travelers—snoring, peacefully snoring! And I—I was here in the Colootallah, and, yes, I went straight back to my girl.

  Did I think much? But what should I have thought about, old man? The only responsibility I had was the girl—since I loved her. My own life? My own fate? Oh, I guess everybody is the weaver of his own life; and if he wants to entangle the woof and warp of it, it’s up to him, and to him alone, isn’t it? And that isn’t Indian philosophy, either. It’s plain Yankee, out of Boston; if it wasn’t there wouldn’t have been any Mayflower in the first place. Would there?

  So back to the girl I went the same old way; through the door in back of the pillar, down the staircase and the narrow landing, straight up to the cobra’s den. Again I opened the door without much effort; but again, though I tried to keep it open, it slammed shut, and I found it impossible to open it from the inside. There was a bit of hidden machinery there which I could not find, nor had I time to look.

  Carefully groping my way, I found the curved handle in the low ceiling. I jerked it, and the ceiling slid to one side, sending down a flood of light from the temple. The Brahman priest was still where I had dumped him, and—would you believe me?—he was peacefully asleep, sawing wood through his nostrils. Speak about Oriental philosophy and submission to fate! Why, that portly, thrice-born Brahman had an overdose of it. Compared to his plethora of calm, my own quiet Yankee soul seemed to be shrill, noisy, exaggerated.

  The cobra? Yes, she, too, was asleep, curled up in the corner like a huge, coiled thing of watered silk.

  I swung myself up into the temple, shutting the door behind me, and rushed over to the statue of Shiva Natarajah. The little girl—“the Lady Padmavati” as the Hindus had called her—was still lost to the world; the blow against her temple must have been a terrific one, but her breath came evenly.

  Some of the rugs on which she lay had slipped to one side, and I was just abo
ut to bend down to fix her up more comfortably, when—

  But wait! Let me get this right.

  Stephen Denton gave a fleeting, apologetic smile.

  You see, it’s rather difficult to describe a moment which blends the physical with the psychical.

  Well, I had already bent down. Yes, I remember now! My hand was on her soft, narrow shoulder, and, oh, my love seemed to surge upwards with a rush of sweet splendor. That little space in the pedestal seemed charged to the brim with some overpowering loveliness of wild and simple things, like the beauty of stars, and wind, and flowers, with something which all my life, subconsciously, my heart seemed to have craved in vain, beside which my life of yesterday seemed a gray, wretched dream. You know how these thoughts rush through one—suddenly, overwhelmingly—and at the same time music seemed to chime in my ears, rhythmic, glorious music, the music of my heart, of my soul, I thought, and I wasn’t ashamed of the winged, poetical flight.

  And then, all at once, I realized that the music was not the music of my heart. I realized that it had a much more matter-of-fact origin; that in steadily swelling tone waves it came drifting in from the outside. I straightened up. I listened intently. Then I knew: the music came beating and sobbing down the long, magnificent corridor on toward the temple.

  Presently I could make out the different instruments—the clash of the cymbals, the rubbing of tom-toms, the hollow thumping of a drum, the plaintive twanging of native sitars; voices, too, chiming in with a deep, melodious swing, and footsteps, echoing down the length of the corridor—nearer, ever nearer!

  Sort of breathless, that night, wasn’t it? Never knew what was going to happen next. In again, out again, just like the immortal Irishman, and in again it was into the pedestal of Shiva, by the side of the girl, or rather crouching over her. Believe me, it was a very uncomfortable position.

  My heart was pumping heavily, like the heart of a babe in the dark. I didn’t know what was going to happen. But I had a shrewd suspicion that Fate was about to fulminate a whole lot of rusty thunder in my direction.