The Venus of Konpara

by John Masters

  Mohan looked at his companions and saw that they were all smiling, even the headman. He was smiling himself.

  ‘The Hall of Contemplation,’ Rukmini said.

  ‘Or of Peace,’ Barbara Kendrick said.

  ‘Much later than the first,’ Smith said. ‘Centuries later. The technique of the carving is quite different, more sophisticated.’

  They came to a third plinth, leading into a third hall. Mohan heard Barbara Kendrick’s short gasp... The man on the wall waited for a woman, a subtle smile on his face, knees braced and eyes wide, the phallus enormous against the smooth skin of his belly. On the opposite wall the woman smiled at the man, breasts raised, mouth loose, arms spread, hips thrust forward, legs wide, knees slightly bent.

  Rukmini’s arm gently enfolded his waist, her head caressed his shoulders. Walking thus, they moved forward. A hundred lovers made pause in their proud coupling as they passed. Pyramids of male and female united over them, standing, sitting, kneeling, lying. Here, unmistakable, was the Rainbow Fall, with Indra’s Bow arched above it and the arrested spears of water falling on the upturned faces of a score of young men and women. Hands wandered lovingly over breast and nipple and thigh and phallus. The heat of a thousand ecstasies possessed him. Rukmini’s flesh trembled where he touched it. The headman stood alone, his thin, thumbless left hand supporting him against a pillar. Jim Foster and Barbara Kendrick stood with arms round each other’s waists.

  Smith raised the lantern. The light showed that they were almost at the far end of the hall. The colour changed, and Mohan saw that inside a small area, enclosed by three pillars and a length of the back wall, the carved stone had been coated with gold - everything, the pillars, and the walls, and the ceiling, and all that had been carved upon them.

  Freestanding - not carved in relief, but a full statue - stood a tall gold man, naked and erect, his smile half proud, half voluptuous. To right and left, on the other pillars and on the back wall, stood or knelt many men and women, all naked, all in attitudes of adoration, all carved in relief, and all smaller than the golden hero.

  ‘The Suvala’ Rukmini cried in a loud voice.

  All - the hero and the adorers - were gazing at the centre of the back wall. Here a huge cobra, delicately carved and plated with gold, writhed up the wall and, a little below the ceiling, spread out its hood to form a canopy four feet in extent. On the floor directly below the canopy there was a low, round platform of the same size. The platform was unoccupied.

  Mohan looked about. Rukmini had slipped away from him into the darkness but he hardly noticed. Something was missing. Surely all these men and women were not adoring the golden cobra? He started violently . . . There was a man standing close beside the cobra, almost invisible in the subtle shadow, but when you looked he was there, right arm outstretched in the action of giving. He was a man in middle age, his expression fatherly and proud. His left arm lay against his thigh, and the hand had no thumb.

  For a moment Mohan, thinking he was dreaming, struggled to find some fact that would prove to him, one way or the other, whether he waked or slept. His mind tried to move logically forward from one observed, tangible event to another; but the realisation that there was now no absolute difference between dream and reality, between flesh and stone, between: past and present, came upon him unseen from behind, overtaking and absorbing the halting process of logic. His astonishment that the stone elder should have no thumb faded into acceptance of a single reality that could not be divided by dimension, substance, or time.

  Thus he saw, beyond the man with the outstretched hand - Gonds, half a score of them, unmistakable, with bows and quivers of poisoned arrows. The jungle trees twined about them; their dark, aboriginal faces peered out in wonder and friendship at the empty platform, and mingled with them in the leafy shadow were a leopard, a wild pig, a mongoose, two monkeys, a jackal, and two tigers.

  Now certain of what he would see, and his understanding released from the bondage of time, Mohan looked to the other side of the cobra. There stood villagers with axes in their hands, babies on the women’s hips, a silent anonymous multitude, and their cattle under yoke among them. Nearest to the cobra stood a pair of lovers, naked, arms twined round each other, the woman’s head lolling blissfully on the man’s strong shoulder. Beyond the villagers, alone, a lean ascetic figure watched, long staff and begging bowl and antelope skin in band. He stood on one leg, naked like all the rest, the other leg twined round his staff, every rib showing stark against the thinness of his body, the deep-set eyes gazing, like the rest, at the empty platform.

  Mohan searched everywhere with his eyes. Where was he, the last one? He must be here! ‘Behind you,’ Smith said in a deep, strange voice. Mohan turned.

  The pillar against which he stood, the one closest to the golden hero, was carved with a terrible scene. On top of a great cliff a three-headed, six-legged, six-armed monster wrestled with itself. One head was that of a man, one of a snake, one of a jackal. The arms ended variously in talons, paws, and hands. It was Indra’s Rock on which they fought He recognised the shape, seen from below, as though he were looking up at it now from the fiery pit. He saw that there could only be one end to the struggle taking place on the bare summit Whichever part of the monster won, in its hate and triumph it would hurl the others into the pit; but all three were irrevocably joined together.

  ‘No,’ Smith said in the same strange voice. ‘It is no one man. It is the demon that had to the before the scenes in the first hall could become the scenes in the second and third - the three-headed demon of hate, pride, and fear. It is the demon that cannot be conquered. It can only be recognised - and then it destroys itself.’ Mohan remembered that Kendrick was carrying the haversack, where he had put the poisoned arrowheads. Later, later! Let the fears and doubts resolve themselves later. He stared hungrily at the empty platform under the cobra hood. ‘What was there?’ he cried. ‘What are they adoring?’ Without sound Rukmini glided out of the darkness, across the floor, one light step on to the platform, naked.

  Thus she moves also across the grass, dancing, and the triumphal mating of the lingam and the yoni is stated in her walk, without possibility of knowing whether it has happened, is happening, or will happen, and three weeks are the same as three thousand years, and three thousand years as an instant, this instant.

  Turning to face them she raises her arms. Her elbows bend subtly one way, her wrists another. Each finger, one by one, takes attitude, and stays. Balanced firmly on one square-planted foot, the other knee rises, the foreleg bends down and across, the toes stiffen. Her head tilts, her eyes open wide. Her breasts rise, swell to perfect roundness, and still. A patina of non-motion, of arrest of living, spreads over her, and she does not breathe. Dancing, unmovable, she hangs between the golden cobra hood and the red floor.

  No one moves. Flesh and stone stand together, without knowledge of difference in substance between them, time flowing in one direction for some, for some in another, for others, motionless. The headman’s arm is outstretched, and behind the Venus of Konpara, her father, hand outstretched gives his daughter to the king in marriage. Smith stands, hands spread, and the wandering beggar stands, one leg twined about his staff. Jim and Barbara stand close, and the loving couple. The villagers watch, with the Gonds, and the beasts of the jungle and field. The giant golden figure of Indra sweeps across the ceiling above them all, one hand raised in blessing, the huge bow fast in the other. All are focused on, all emanate from the magnificent naked generosity of the dancing woman,

  Mohan, and each one there, came to a swooning crisis of love as overpowering as a sexual ecstasy, but total, releasing the tension of spirit, flesh, and soul in a single spasm, like the release of a full-stretched bow. In the long-drawn, shuddering harmonies of the aftermath Rukmini glided off the platform.

  Mohan waited, head erect, while she stooped low before him, touched her right hand in turn to her forehead and to the inside , of each of his calves. Gently he raised her, and she sto
od a moment looking at him. Then, making the deep namasti once more, she passed into the darkness.

  The headman broke the Silence. ‘We did not steal the gold, Suvala.’ We had authority from the Suvala to use it for the guarding of the cave.’ His voice was weak but firm.

  Mohan shook his head, recalling himself from the timeless ecstasy of understanding to the less real realities of the moment ‘What Suvala?’he asked.

  ‘That, I do not know,’ Huttoo Lall said.

  Smith said, ‘The one who reigned in 147 B.C. It is his mark on the gold near the mouth of the tunnel,’

  ‘The others, the bars found under the leg of the statue,’ the headman said, ‘of those we knew nothing - neither of the gold nor of the leg. We have done wrong, Suvala, and will gladly accept punishment. If any of us had known what was here.... None of us has ever entered the tunnel past the corner beyond the gold.’ He spread his hands, palms upward.

  Rukmini appeared, clothed, and touched him. ‘Sit down, lambardar-ji. There.’ She helped him and he sat back against a pillar, his eyes closed.

  ‘But why?’ Jim Foster broke out, ‘Why did you guard the cave so... so desperately? Why didn’t you go into it?’

  The headman whispered, ‘Death, sahib. Death, for us of the old race.’ He sighed, and looked at Smith. ‘Tell them, sahib. You know the past.’

  Smith said, ‘The villagers of Konpara are Dravidians. It was their ancestors who fled to Deori before the Aryans, and then to Konpara. It was their ancient civilisation which the Aryans destroyed. They were the slaves who were forced to hew out the tunnel, and make the first cave, the Hall of Human Felony. When? 1000 B.C. - not later. It was their ancestors who were thrown off Indra’s Rock to preserve the secret of the cave. No one of their race, who once entered here, ever returned alive. For nearly three thousand years the men of Konpara - and the Gonds - have known that what lay concealed here was evil, and only evil, and that its evil worked against them. When the dam was to be built they knew that the cave would be flooded, destroying that evil. Then the leg was found, and we began our search. The vital point, which we could not guess at until now, is that they were determined to preserve the secret in order that the caves be destroyed.’

  ‘And the rest of the Venus never was down here,’ Barbara Kendrick said slowly. ‘I wonder where she is?’

  ‘I don’t suppose we shall ever know? Smith said. ‘For myself, I shall search no more. I do not want to see any other Venus of Konpara.’

  The headman nodded at the carved figure beside the cobra, and held out his thumbless left hand. ‘My ancestors have ruled here as long as yours, Suvala.’

  ‘And from a time before caste,’ Mohan said humbly. ‘Will you give me, again, a daughter of your people for my queen?’

  The headman stretched out his hand. ‘Take her, Suvala. Treat her as a queen, for we were kings here when your fathers herded cattle beyond the mountains. Have no fear. There will be rejoicing among us all over your kingdom. As for the Brahmins ... did she not discover the cave, through a miracle of their gods?’ He smiled faintly, with a shrewd cynicism that spoke of five thousand years of civilisation. ‘Our gods were conquered, as were our people. But our gods live ...’ His hand swept the room, where the goddess of the first hall, there dying a thousand deaths, now ruled her conquerors. ‘And so do our people.’

  A heavy, dull hammering reverberated through the hall. Foster started and, held up his hand for silence. The sound continued, paused, and began again. Foster hurried along the back wall, past the golden group. ‘Bring the lantern,’ he called. Smith took the lantern to him and held it high. Foster pointed to a thin crevice in the stone, which began half-way up the wall and continued back for a short distance along the ceiling. It had been there when the cave was made, for two members of an intertwined group were holding the edges for support.

  ‘That’s the crevice we have been blasting into,’ Foster said. He listened carefully. ‘Hard to tell... I suppose we were about fifteen feet off.’

  The headman called weakly. ‘It is my people, sahib. They are preparing to blow in the crevice.’

  ‘They’re doing the same at the far end, near the mouth of the cave,’ Foster cried. ‘We’d better get back, quick.’

  They lifted the headman between them and hurried back through the three halls. At the entrance in the tunnel Kendrick swung round sharply as they appeared. It’s all right,’ Mohan said briefly. ‘We must get up to the entrance before they blow it in.’

  ‘What... what has the headman said?’ Kendrick said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Smith said. ‘He is going to call the villagers off, and accept punishment He said nothing more, nor will he ever.’

  There will be no punishment,’ Mohan said.

  They hurried on up the passage, Kendrick now in the rear.

  Chapter 32

  The afternoon smelled of water and earth and damped fires. Rivulets gurgled down the ridge, but it had stopped raining. The villagers stood huddled over their picks and shovels and crowbars. Behind them boxes of dynamite stood in an ordered row, and, on one side, the detonators and the fuses. The black Gonds stood in another group, bows in their hands. All their faces were informed by fear, not the old true fear that could be appeased by rites and actions, but modem fear, of courts, of laws, of hangmen and ships that would, transport them to imprisonment on distant islands. The headman had spoken to them from the mouth of the cave, and the little party had been given a hesitant permission to emerge. The Gonds had arrows fitted to their bows.

  Now Mohan stepped forward. ‘It is all over,’ he said gently. . ‘Let none speak again of this time. I am the Suvala, and this is my promise. Your queen, too, greets you, with peace.’

  Rukmini, at his side, made a namasti towards them all, turning slowly with palms joined. One by one every man and woman returned the salutation. An extraordinary lightening of the atmosphere took place on the instant. Fear vanished, and relief came, to be followed immediately by joy. Someone shouted a wild greeting - hail to the Suvala, Heir of Indra!’

  Rukmini raised her hand. ‘Go now to your own places, in. peace,’ she said, smiling. ‘The time to celebrate will come... The cave will be preserved, and the dam built. After three years, as promised, you of Konpara shall go to new land in the valley which once was yours.’

  Aitu, standing in front of the Gonds, said, ‘And we shall remain in our own home.’ His slow hand swept over the unburned jungles on the upper plateau. ‘Let the fields of Konpara return to Jungle, also. Let not the jungle be cut. It is our home.’

  Gradually they began to disperse. The group outside the cave mouth stood watching them. Mohan began to think of the present. All the bungalows had burned down. It was about four o’clock. He’d better tell Huttoo Lall to get some horses back, and then everyone could go to Deori. He turned towards the headman, who was leaning against the rock near the cave mouth, weak but transfigured with happiness.

  Kendrick suddenly shouted, ‘Look out! Cobra! There!’

  Mohan swung round. Rukmini stood still, looking at the ground near her feet, where Kendrick had pointed. Smith broke into a run, but towards Kendrick.

  ‘Where?’ Mohan cried. ‘Keep still, everyone!’

  A heavy thud and a gasp behind him made him turn. Smith was still a pace or two away from Kendrick, but Foster had reached him, and they were wrestling on the ground, Foster’s hand grasping Kendrick’s near the wrist, twisting and turning furiously. ‘You bastard,’ Foster shouted. You...’

  The rifle fell from Kendrick’s hand. His struggles ceased. Foster picked up the rifle. ‘He was aiming at me headman,’ he said. ‘It would have been an accident.’

  Smith groaned aloud. ‘I told you, sir, everyone has told you - there will be no more talking, and no punishment!’ he cried in a tortured voice. ‘You could have started again!’

  Kendrick stood up, panting, his cheek twitching violently. ‘Do you expect me to believe that!’ he cried. Do you think I don’t know you were just waiting to
get his evidence down in writing, trying to make me feel safe in the meantime?’ He raised a shaking hand and pointed it ‘It won’t do you any good! His word against mine! Every one of you is against me, and always have been. Every single one. All my life.’

  Barbara Kendrick threw one long horror-struck look at Jim Foster and then took a step forward. ‘Charles,’ she said. Her voice was low and husky. She took another step. ‘Charles... I’m not against you.’

  ‘Barbara!’ Jim cried.

  ‘Whore!’ Kendrick screamed. ‘You’re going to leave me, too. Do you think I don’t know?’

  Mohan thought Barbara would faint. ‘I shall not leave you,’ she said. ‘I will stay with you, and stand with you, for ever, whatever you do.’ Jim Foster, his eyes closed, his face white, leaned against the rock spine.

  Kendrick said, ‘Do you think I’m going to believe that,’ He turned on Rukmini. ‘You started it. You planned it. You set Mohan against me, turned Barbara into a whore... ‘

  He leaped suddenly at her, one hand fumbling in the haversack at his side. The hand came out, the broken shaft and dull head of a Gond arrow in it Foster raised the rifle. The headman of Konpara moved half a pace forward and put out his foot Kendrick tripped, and fell heavily. He climbed slowly to his feet, bleeding from the right hand. Foster held the rifle aimed at his heart Kendrick opened his hand, the poisoned, arrowhead fell to the ground.

  He looked at his palm, and muttered, ‘Of course.’ Barbara stood stiff, watching him, unable to move.

  It was Rukmini who ran to him, and held him fast as he sagged slowly back against the rock, close to the cave mouth. He turned his face up to her and she held the glazing eyes on her own, so that they seemed to be lovers, her arms wrapped around him, until very soon, he gave a deep, shuddering groan, and died.