“I understood then. The murder of her husband and child had driven her mad, and that madness had taken a certain form. She had had all the native women killed, so that she could be the only woman in the tribe. She had all the adult males killed too, murdered asleep by the boys, and her escorts were youths of about sixteen. But that was fifteen years ago.
“Thus, for a madwoman, it was not so difficult to create that new religion, with herself as a mother-goddess, a wife-goddess, the only woman. You understand, Mr. Darrell?”
“But three hundred men!” protested Darrell.
“Not so difficult for her,” grunted Beyers. “Not with that phase of madness. A system of rewards and punishments, and the psychology of anticipation, ja? They are mad too. I have told Mynheer, the governor, that, when our plane arrives, they must be wiped out like wild beasts. It is immoral—amoral, horrible!”
“But as for your plane,” said the governor, “it could not cross the mountains, and you are forbidden to attempt it. There is no oil in that region, and your commission to locate oilfields for your American company might take you to many parts where the natives are orderly.”
Which sounded reasonable to Jim, as he made his way back to the field where he had landed after his flight to Borneo. The plane, beside his tent, was guarded by six native policemen. All that afternoon it had been surrounded by a chattering crowd, but these had melted away at nightfall.
Jim entered his tent. Reasonable—yes. But he hadn’t spoken of the message, scrawled on a dry leaf in what looked like blood, evidently from the madwoman:
“I am an English woman. Come and save me. Bearer will show you the secret way into the mountains.”
There was a diagram of the mountain range, and a crude representation of the way.
The bearer, a primitive savage, had secretly handed the leaf to Jim, apparently under the impression that he was the chief man in the settlement. He was crouching inside the tent now, like a dog, guarding Jim’s baggage.
When Jim beckoned him out, he came, gibbering something in his own language. Jim pointed toward the plane. He planned to get as near as possible to the mountains, thirty miles away, before descending. If he couldn’t top them, then he’d go by the secret trail.
The nights were almost as hot as the days on the sea coast, and the motor started almost instantly. Jim indicated to the boy to get upon one wing. He started back for the tent to get his baggage.
That was when he fell foul of the native soldiers. They were not just to guard him and his plane against curiosity-mongers. They were to keep him from taking off. Mynheer must have shrewdly read his intentions, and issued special orders. They swarmed about the plane, evidently determined not to let him enter. Two of them tried to pull the native off the wing, but quick thrusts of a previously hidden dirk made them draw back.
Jim saw it all in a flash. His baggage would have to be left behind. Likewise his linen coat, for it was being pulled from his back. He sent one man reeling with a right to the jaw, drew his revolver, held the rest at bay, leaped into the cockpit. No time to adjust his safety-belt. Stick forward, tail up, bump, bump, and skip over the uneven ground. For a moment it looked as if one of the fools would connect with the propeller.
And then the old crate had taken the air, and Jim pulled back the stick and gave her the gun, sending her shooting upward at almost a stalling angle.
Then he had leveled off, and was circling above the settlement, and Government House, starkly silhouetted in the moonlight. And now he was heading toward the mountains, working the stick nicely to counterbalance the weight of the native who clung, petrified with terror, to his strut.
After that, Jim winged his way northward, until the mighty range began to cap his horizon. Then upward, slowly upward, feeling his way through an atmosphere peculiarly bumpy. Once he turned toward the boy and swept his hand out in a gesture. The boy understood, and indicated a mighty cliff behind which Jim had already gathered the hidden valley lay.
Upward and upward, clearing minor peaks, up into the frigid air. The great cliff was not far away now, but Jim would need an elevation of seven thousand to clear it. Not much—in most places. But already the motor was protesting. Then it conked, with an expiring cough. It was through. The Dutchman had been right, hadn’t been stalling, as Jim had supposed. The only hope now was to find a landing-place in that tangle of ravine and scrub.
The nose was pointing down, the tail beginning to spin. Jim went into neutral and right-ruddered, came out of the dive two thousand feet above the scrub. No landing-place. He was almost at the base of the great cliff, itself set three or four thousand feet above the flats beyond the base of the mountains. Slowly down, circling, till the giant rattans almost brushed the fuselage.
Crash into the rattans, splintering fuselage and folding wings!
Jim stepped out of the wreckage, snapped his thumb joint back where it belonged, and yanked the chattering native to his feet. The native hadn’t a single scratch upon him.
* * * *
Dawn was breaking as the two emerged from the pass and saw the long, green valley stretching away before them, entirely girdled with mountains, unapproachable, save by that track up which the two men had labored all night.
Dawn, and a sudden rush of spearmen out of the mists, and a woman at their head. A woman as brown as them, but with a crown of brightest hair that hung down to her waist. A woman of perhaps forty years, nude, like her spearmen, save for a loin-cloth. Two breasts superbly moulded, body a little fleshy, but lithe as a cat’s, wide hips that strained against their covering, brown legs and bare brown feet that scrambled over the stones and thorns as if they were shod.
No time for friendly gestures. As the first spears began to fly, Jim let loose with his revolver. At the crack, at the sight of their leaders falling, the natives drew back. And simultaneously the mists rose, revealing a body of perhaps two hundred, crowding forward in a thick mass.
Screeching like the madwoman she was supposed to be, the woman leaped forward, and drove the spear she carried through the native’s throat. He toppled and dropped, his death-cry drowned in the gurgle of blood. Then the woman had withdrawn the spear and turned upon Jim.
There was—there ought to be another cartridge in Jim’s revolver, but Jim couldn’t shoot her. Was it in a moment of madness that the woman failed to recognize him as the man she had sent for?
As Jim hesitated, the woman leaped. Two strong arms encircled him and pressed his to his sides. She grappled with him madly, her breasts flattening against his chest, one knee hooked behind Jim’s, trying to throw him, and her hair a cascade of gold over them both. The grip of that woman-body took his strength, filled him with mingled loathing and weakness.
Then he was down, and the revolver torn from his hand. Helpless in the grasp of half-a-dozen natives, Jim was frogmarched, despite his struggles, toward an ancient stone building that looked like one of the prehistoric fortresses scattered all over the East Indies.
Two natives came running up with lengths of plaited rattan cord, pliant as silk, strong as steel. In a few moments Jim was securely trussed, and helpless.
If the place had been a fort, it was a temple too, for the stone entrance was carved with vile figures of the Hindu gods. A reed curtain hung before it. But it was not through the entrance that Jim was carried. Through a small doorway to one side of it, and along a stone corridor, lit faintly by oil or butter lamps. Then a turn, the lifting of another curtain, and Jim guessed that he was in the temple.
It was a great rectangle, all of stone, divided half-way across by a wide curtain, so that the front part was invisible. But the portion into which Jim was carried contained no altar, nothing except an enormous bed.
A lamp on either side of it faintly illuminated this chamber, showing that the bed had once been the state bed of some dead and forgotten Rajah, for the four posts were carved with the Hindu symbols of fe
rtility. Mattress and pillows were of plaited grasses.
Jim’s captors flung him down and salaamed deeply to this piece of furniture, knocking their heads against the ground with curious writhings of their bodies. Then, at the woman’s crisp command, they were gone, and she seated herself upon the bed beside Jim and looked at him fixedly.
“I am Marian Curtis,” she said, as one who is trying to remember a half-forgotten language. “How did you come into my kingdom?”
Some instinct kept Jim from referring to the chit that the native boy had brought him. If Marian had forgotten writing it, it might be as well not to remind her yet.
“Ah, I know!” she cried in sudden frenzy. “That boy escaped and betrayed me. So you think to spy on me, do you? I have a law that is never broken. All strangers who come here die. You are only the third.
“The first who found the way—the young Englishman, Crandall. Ah, that was long ago, before they took the brains out of the goddess Kali, and put them into mine. He wanted me to go away with him, and I almost yielded. His skin was white as a girl’s, and yet he was a man. So I cut his throat while he slept, because the goddess Kali ordered me to do it.
“And the second was the Dutch hunter, Smidt. Forty years old, and strong as a bull, and hairy as an ape. He cried like a baby and begged me for mercy, and he almost broke his bonds before I plunged my knife into his heart.
“So you must die, too, but you shall love me before I die, as Smidt and the Englishman did. See, look at me! Do I not offer you a glorious gift before I sacrifice you to the Mother-goddess?”
She drew herself to her full height, posing there, conscious of what her beauty was doing to him, for a moment. Then she had flung herself upon him, and her hot mouth was glued on Jim’s, and he could feel her breath, moist and sweet.
“Love me,” she panted. “I am tired of these brown Malays. You are the first white man in years and years. Love me, if you are a man!”
And she clasped him furiously to her, but now sheer pity for her left Jim cold as ice. It was clear that the moment of lucidity in which she had written that note had been forgotten.
“Love me!” she whispered into Jim’s, ear. “This is the sacred bed of Kali, the Mother-goddess!”
Jim’s pity changed to horror. Here, then—here was the center of the abominable religion that this madwoman had invented!
Suddenly her mood changed She sprang to her feet, her heavy breasts swaying, and struck him in the face with her clenched fist.
“You refuse me!” she screamed. “Is it because you are afraid of the death that shall come afterward. I would only have cut your throat, but now I swear you shall be tortured horribly, flayed alive, and torn into a thousand pieces!”
She struck him again and again, with all a man’s force behind her blows, until Jim’s lips and nose were bleeding. She drew a short, wavy kris from her loincloth, and held it at his throat.
Then horrible laughter broke from her lips. “You shall love me when you drink the love-draught tonight,” she shrieked. “You shall forget the death that waits for you, and think it a little thing when the divine madness of the goddess comes upon you! Lie there and dream of me. Look at me! Am I not beautiful? But when you drink the potion, you shall look upon me as if I were Mother Kali herself.”
Softly, sinuously she glided from the chamber, leaving Jim lying there, feeling the blood running down his face.
Desperately he tried to free himself from his bonds, but the flexible rattan merely bit more deeply into his flesh, and he could not loosen them at all. Trussed, helpless, arms bound to his sides, legs tied at thighs, knees, and ankles, he tried to roll off the bed, and discovered that his feet and shoulders were fastened to the unyielding framework.
The heat within the temple was fearful. The sweat was pouring down Jim’s face and body, seeping into the rags that his shirt and trousers had become after his struggle.
Hours seemed to pass. No one entered, and not a sound was to be heard.
Jim would have sold his soul for a drink of water.
It must have been in the full heat of the day when a click in the wall opposite the curtain focused Jim’s eyes upon the spot.
Two great blocks in the temple wall were slowly revolving. Now there was a gap, and in that gap there stood a woman’s figure.
For an instant Jim thought it was the madwoman come back. But then, faint though the light was, he saw that this was a younger, smaller, slighter figure, a girl, hardly a woman, even.
As she came stealthily forward, Jim saw that she was white. She wore a single garment of some native fibre, reaching to the knees. Soft girlish breasts pressed against it from beneath, revealing their rounded contours; under the skirt the white of feminine thighs and slender legs gleamed in the lamplight. In her hand was a jar of water.
Jim drank greedily, drained it, let her set it down, looked at her in wonder, and suddenly understood.
“You sent me that message?” he whispered.
“I sent Hassan to find some strong white Tuan who would save me,” answered the girl, and again the words, though perfectly pronounced, seemed unaccustomed. “He brought you here, and they killed him. You should have brought an army.”
“I was a fool,” Jim muttered.
“Because they killed him, I shall never forgive her, though she is my mother.”
“Your mother?” whispered Jim in amazement, recalling Mynheer’s story.
“I am Mary Alice Curtis, and my father was a big white Tuan. He was ship-wrecked and killed, and my mother and I were captured and brought here. Then she went mad, and became the ruler of these people. We are the only two women here. These Dyaks do not know for sure that there are other women in the world, for they are maddened with the draft when they go out to kill, and then they kill every living thing.
“My mother is the only woman they know, and so they worship her, because each of them thinks himself her husband.”
“God!” muttered Jim.
“Each night they drink the love-draught, which is made from a tree, and then she rewards her favored ones. But she was not always mad. When she was sane, she managed to hide me in a secret treasure-room, and gave out that I was dead, and only Hassan discovered me. He told me about the secret way, and he would have helped me escape, but I told him to seek out a white Tuan like my father. I thought he would bring an army with him, for my father had more soldiers than he could count.”
“You have been hidden since you were a child?”
“Only my mother knows. Sometimes, when she ceased to he mad, she would cry, and plan to escape with me. But of late years she has understood nothing, save that I must still be hidden, for fear that the Dyaks will turn from her to me. And of late I think she has planned to kill me.”
Jim set his teeth hard. “Not if I can help you. Can you cut these ropes?” he said.
The girl bent over him. “It is simple,” she answered. “No kriss could cut them, but they can be untied. See, now, but do not move.”
Her fingers moved deftly in the rattan web for a few moments, and suddenly it loosened, fell apart upon the bed. Jim sat up, rubbing his bruised limbs.
“When will she come back?” he asked.
“Not until nightfall. All day she sleeps. But tonight she will choose you for her first husband, and afterward the Dyaks will tear you limb from limb.”
Jim took the girl’s slender hand in his. “Mary Alice, if we can escape, will you come with me?” he asked. But there was no need of any answer.
As he drew her toward him, the garment gaped at the top, and the two small breasts were momentarily free. Suddenly an immense reaction of emotion, a recklessness of the future, came upon Jim. If they won free, she would be his forever; if not, she would have short shrift from the madwoman. The sweet perfume of her maddened him as he drew her, unresisting, into his arms.
Soft panting s
ighs came from her lips, and her whole body quivered; suddenly she flung her arms about his neck and clung to him tautly.
“I am yours, Tuan. I was afraid of love, but now I know that it is beautiful,” she whispered, pressing her mouth to his.
And later, when the storm had passed, Jim knew, somehow, that he could not fail. The gods hadn’t sent him this girl that he might lose her again. Even the dread Kali couldn’t be so cruel as that.
* * * *
Hours must have passed again before Mary Alice detached herself gently. From her garment she withdrew a wavy-edged kriss which she handed Jim. For a moment she stood before him in the light of the butter-lamps, elusive, fragrant, feminine, then she drew the sarong more closely about her.
“We must wait till it grows dark,” she said, “or they would catch us before we reached the secret pass. Hide this.” She slipped the kriss beneath him, and rearranged the rattan ropes, so that they looked as if they had not been tampered with. “Lie still, and do not let her see that you are free,” she said.
“And then?”
“Tonight the Dyaks will be maddened with the love-draught, and she will select those whom she intends to honor, and, after she has done with you, they will tear you to pieces. Such is her plan, for Hassan has told me what they did to the two other white men who came here.”
“Then she lied to me about them,” thought Jim.
“When she has chosen her husbands, and the rest are mad with the draught, you must choose your time, cut your way through to that wall, and I shall be waiting there. I shall open it for you. If we can close it in their faces, they cannot open it from the temple side, and there will be a chance, just one little chance. But do not taste the love-draught.”
“You’re a wonderful girl,” said Jim. “Bend down and kiss me.”
Again his senses reeled as he felt her warm, fragrant form in his arms, and the moist pressure of her lips on his. Then she had rearranged the rattan, picked up the water-jar, and glided like a wraith from the temple.
The noise was beginning now, the A droning of many voices in a monotonous, hoarse chant, somewhere outside, and gradually growing louder and coming nearer.
The Spicy-Adventure Page 26