"You seem worried, John. I hope I'm not intruding on more important business with this pestiferous affair of my own?"
"Not at all," Ransome hastened to reassure him. At the moment he was devising his reply to Miss Tappan s rather frantic appeal for help. "Well, Charles, what do you make of it?"
"Simply this, John. Vartan has sent Shane back without any legitimate excuse."
"Two broken ankles not a fair reason for abandoning a mountain climb?" Ransome questioned, raising his brows. "Pretty strong, that, Charles."
"If he was well enough to be carried back in a journey that took six weeks, he was well enough to be carried forward the same way. Broken bones don't turn men back when they want to go on. Why, there was Parmalee, on our 1920 expedition to Tibet, who was helpless on his back for six months with a fractured thigh. Yet he carried on and directed the men from his litter."
"In short, Charles, you are beginning to suspect Vartan? Shane was sent back on the first pretext, so that Vartan can go on alone and get all the kudos?"
"It is not impossible."
"But we agreed that Vartan's record assayed a hundred per cent pure gold. Again, what of Miss Driscott?"
"Yes," Brassey muttered uneasily. "What of her?"
"Can't she take care of herself?"
"Don't torture me, John, Oh, why did I send her off with no protection on this terrible journey? But she begged to go."
"She'll be all right," Ransome asserted with conviction. "And she will see that Vartan keeps his contract."
"I trust she will, for her own sake as much as mine."
"Look here, Charles, you're only borrowing trouble. I'll cable to Brathwaites' and find out the exact nature of Shane's injuries. If the doctor in charge agrees that Shane did the only sensible thing in returning to Srinagar, your suspicions are proved groundless. Go back to your office and I'll telephone when the answer comes."
Instead of cabling to Brathwaites', Ransome coded a message to Miss Tappan which read: "Use your brains and keep out of his way. Report progress."
The unforeseen turn of events had not even jarred Inspector Ransome's rock-ribbed conviction that he had 'got his man'. It merely put a new angle on one drive of his general campaign. Confident that Miss Tappan would rise to the crisis and turn it to their mutual advantage, Ransome coolly went on with his routine work. When a sufficient interval had elapsed, he called Brassey on the telephone.
"I have just heard from Brathwaites'. The physician in charge says that Shane could not possibly have continued with the expedition without incurring a strong risk of being crippled for life. The bones will have to be reset as it is."
"Thank God!" Brassey ejaculated at the other end of the wire.
"Eh? What was that? Shake up your instrument."
"I was just saying how thankful I am. Miss Driscott, I feel now, is in no danger."
"Of course not," Ransome asserted. "Vartan's record is pure gold, as I have always said. What will you cable to Shane?"
"Regrets, of course. I'll arrange with Brathwaites' to have him properly taken care of till he can come home. I suppose he is out of the expedition for good now?"
"Oh, undoubtedly. It will be months before he can walk again."
As he hung up the receiver, Ransome smiled. "Charles is too suspicious for his own good, and not suspicious enough by half for mine. If Shane goes tramping in the Himalayas next week, I'll have to explain that the doctor's first diagnosis was contradicted by the X-ray, and that poor Shane's ankles didn't have to be broken again."
The truth lay between Ransome's extremes. One bone had to be reset, and Shane would probably spend at least a week in bed before being released to the comparative freedom of a wheel chair. All this Miss Tappan learned without the slightest exertion of her professional talents. These she reserved for the chambermaid, the nurse, and Dr. Wemyss. From the last she learned to her satisfaction that Shane had begged the doctor to lend him his microscope, 'to kill this deadly week ahead of me'. The doctor kindly offered to send him the best microscope in Srinagar, the property of a colleague whose mania was diatoms. Shane blessed him, and Miss Tappan blessed them both. She knew that she could learn almost as much as Shane himself, by using the eyes of the nurse and the chambermaid. The enthusiast with a microscope always insists on making the nearest bystander peer through the lenses at his latest find. The week that had threatened to be so tedious passed quite pleasantly.
While Shane was sharing the excitements of microscopical exploration with his nurse – and incidentally but unconsciously with Miss Tappan – Marjorie and Vartan made a number of discoveries of the deepest significance.
First there was Vartan's disturbing discovery that, given a free and honorable field, he might easily fall in love with Marjorie Driscott. When he began to suspect that she was not entirely indifferent to him, he pulled up as short as if he had just been about to step over a precipice. Quick to sense his change in manner, and respecting him for the reason of it, which she guessed, she instantly responded in kind. They had been practically alone together for nearly five weeks, as the discrete and taciturn Ali Baba made himself as inconspicuous on the march as the humblest porter. Whether or not Marjorie had intended by her revelation of her true character, when she read the last of Brassey's confession, to arouse Vartan's interest, she had, and the mischief was done. She, no less than he, realized that their hour together under the sky, with only the winds and the mountains as witnesses, must be forgotten. With something like relief, they resumed the formal relationship they had had before Shane's accident. There remained however at least the afterglow of a warmer understanding, which made their companionship more human.
Their second discovery was less pleasant. Three weeks after Shane left the party, old Ali reported that the pack ponies were showing signs of distress. High altitude – they were trudging through snowfields in a desolate plateau of about fourteen thousand feet elevation at the time – did not account for the sickness of the heavily laden beasts. Vartan at first was disposed to blame the pack saddles and faulty loading, until Ali pointed out that the distressing sores were not confined to the ponies' backs. Indeed their legs seemed to be affected the worst. The disease – if it could be called such – manifested itself in boils and what looked like burns, painful to the touch, and apparently slow in healing. The absolutely pure, rarefied air should have hastened the disinfection of any ordinary wound; these seemed to be of a different kind. There was nothing to be done but to ease the animals as far as possible by shifting fractions of their loads to the backs of the porters. This was less inhuman than it sounds, as the porters' loads had lightened considerably in the past weeks.
The next discovery which Vartan and Marjorie made surprised both of them; Marjorie because it seemed to contradict all she had ever read of life at high altitudes, Vartan because it reminded him of a similar find at a much lower altitude on the slopes of Chimborazo. Scientifically he had expected to find nothing of the kind at nearly fifteen thousand feet in the Karakorum range. When he grasped the actual facts of his unintentional discovery, he was even more surprised.
They had been painfully plowing their way through soft snow all day, oppressed by the stupendous blue-black precipices of sheer rock, too steep to lodge a particle of snow or ice, on either hand, and they were thoroughly disheartened and chilled by their forbidding surroundings.
"If there were only a dead tree, or the bones of a mountain goat, or something, to relieve this everlasting snow and those uncompromising cliffs," Vartan sighed, "it wouldn't be bad. But it is so utterly dead that it makes my spine creep."
"We're far above the timberline," Marjorie laughed to encourage him, "and no goat ever grazed up here. They say mountain sheep sometimes stray into these awful blind alleys to get away from human beings."
"Are we as bad as all that? What worries me is the lack of fuel. Frozen beans and no coffee again tonight."
"I prefer tea, anyway."
"You're a cheerful soul, Miss Driscott. just
for that, I'll promise to get you out of this tomorrow at sunset."
"You really know where you are going?" she quizzed with a touch of seriousness.
"Good Lord, I hope so. Why do you look at me like that?"
"Let us get out the map," she answered quietly.
Without a word of protest, Vartan unfolded the map of the Marsden-Enright Central Asiatic Expedition, and spread it for her inspection.
"Where are we now?" she asked.
He indicated a spot on the lower left hand corner of the map.
"Did Marsden and Enright come this way?"
"No. I'm taking a short cut to the place I wish to reach first – certain fossil beds down here."
"I thought so," she remarked. "You're lost."
"I'm not, and I'll prove it to you."
"But this place where you say we are now is all white on Marsden and Enright's map. They knew nothing about it."
"Granted. But this is a geological map, principally. Now, if you know how to read such a map properly, you don't need a mass of details. All that is necessary is a carefully laid down set of contours in the neighborhood of where you are. Look at these. Continue them up through the white part of the map in the most natural way you can think of, and you find what? These parallel ranges of precipices that are hemming us in now. It's all as plain as an automobile club sign in California. I came this way deliberately, to avoid some of the hardships and difficulties that nearly sent Marsden and Enright home empty handed."
"Geology is a mystery to me," she sighed. "I'll have to take your word for it. But I would give half of my kingdom at this moment for one large, steaming cup of tea."
"Follow your leader," he laughed, "and I will show you the promised land tomorrow evening at five-thirty."
"From a high place? Don't tempt me."
"If it's high, I'll jump off. No; we shall walk down a long, gentle slope into a pleasant valley, flowing with milk-goats' milk, probably – and tea."
"You swear you are not lost?"
"On my honor."
"Then I shall be more comfortable. Aren't those black precipices frightful? I feel as if they were about to come crashing down to bury us under millions of tons of rock colder than ice."
"I'm awfully sorry, Miss Driscott, about that cup of tea. But really we must conserve our supply of canned heat for emergencies."
"I know. Don't mind me. I was only teasing you."
They trudged on in silence for some minutes, when Vartan, glancing up, sighted something which made his heart leap.
"Look," he said, painting to a spot about five miles distant at the base of a stupendous precipice of bare black rock. "Fog."
"Is that a miracle?" she laughed.
"Almost. Where there's fog there's warmth; where there's warmth there may be heat. We shall camp there tonight."
"It will be rather cheerless in the mist, won't it?"
"Not half so much so as a sleeping bag on this snow when it freezes hard again. Ali! To the left; over by the big black cliff."
Vartan's optimistic guess proved correct. As the caravan neared the terrific mass of rock, soaring up above their creeping ant-train in one appalling surge of colossal, massive strength to the steely sky, every man in the caravan felt his spirits rise, and the tired ponies made one last, slushing spurt through the half, melted snow as they plunged into the mist.
"It must be a hot spring," Vartan prophesied.
He was right. From the base of the black cliff a gurgling, tumbling confusion of boiling water gushed out on a level platform Of black talus, a mile broad and five miles long, to sink steaming down into the rocky drift and seek its subterranean lakes and rivers three miles or more beneath the perpetual snows. For nearly an hour they stood spellbound, gazing at the play of the huge black water bubbles that burst up from the roots of the cliff, glistened for a second like massive, sculptured domes of obsidian, to flatten and gush out over the racing river in majestic cohorts of ever widening waves.
Their frozen bones thawed out, and by tacit consent they separated, both with the same thought. A warm bath in a city flat is sometimes no better than a necessary bore, part of the dreary routine; in the right conditions it is the supreme luxury. The porters were already shouting their ecstasy in the steaming water.
The cup of tea was next. That duly enjoyed, Vartan strolled off alone, to revel in the sheer wonder and delight of this oasis of warmth in a desert of cold. As he stood watching the steaming river vanish as if by magic under the unmelting snow, a fairy touch brushed his cheek, and he looked up involuntarily. A cloud of downy white butterflies, large as deathshead moths, was fluttering and wheeling about his head. He put out his hand, and first one, then another, attracted by the unusual color, alit, until in all seven of the exquisite creatures were half resting, half flying on his outstretched fingers and palm. Lost in their perfect grace and airy beauty, he did not try to observe them or to speculate on their visit to this inaccessible chasm of the mountains. Then, subconsciously, he noticed the eyes of two of them. The eyes of the first glowed like a pair of tiny rubies set in its velvety head; those of the other were flaming emeralds.
"I've got it!" he shouted, unaware that he had uttered a word.
Marjorie came running up, breathless.
"Look! Aren't they perfect? See their eyes! Ah – that one has stayed long enough, and wants to be off. Never mind." He spread out both hands. "Here come a dozen more. The red of my hands seems to fascinate them. But not half so much as their eyes and wings fascinate me. Look at that princess on my little finger. Her eyes are a pale topaz. The prince sitting on my left thumb has eyes of amethyst. And the king perched on my middle finger prefers a sort of catseye. Fourteen pairs of eyes, and all different. And look at their wings – every conceivable shape and loop and airfoil, from blunt, stunted stubs to sweeping trains of satin like a queen's white robe of state. Look, I say! These beautiful things prove that we are not lost. We know where we are going."
"Do you?" she smiled. "Mr. Shane thought his black ice would give Mr. Brassey what he wanted."
In the excitement of the moment Vartan failed to grasp the full significance of her remark.
"I wasn't thinking of Brassey," he confessed. "My own preposterous hypothesis, as old Grimsby calls it, was in my mind. The mystery of those inconceivably rich fossil beds of our 1914 expedition is practically solved. Brassey's delphinium will be next. By the way," he exclaimed, "what do these butterflies live on, away up here?"
"Tea," she suggested. "There's plenty of hot water."
"No, but seriously, Miss Driscott. Have you seen any signs of plant life?"
"Not one. I'll explain your white butterflies when you explain my rainbow beetles."
Opening her left hand she disclosed what looked at first like a flashing heap of jewels.
I found these just now under the snow, on top of the warm rocks, is a solid layer of them at least like dried currants. Aren't they superb, even if they are so tiny?"
He was about to reply when old Ali Baba rushed up, breathless and gesticulating. Pointing to the sheer black cliff at the left of the main stream gushing from the rocks, he insisted that they follow him and inspect his discovery. They did so, wondering what new surprise this enchanted spot could offer.
Their way to the cliff led over the easiest, broadest ascent. It was precisely the route that any ordinary human being would have chosen to reach the head of the springs. The smooth wall of glassy black rock at the top of the declivity might have been designed from the beginning of time to receive an inscription, and the men who had passed that way before Vartan ever thought of taking a shortcut to the fossil beds of his dreams, had evidently thought the same. As Ali, bursting with importance, underlined the short record with his moving finger, Vartan and Marjorie read their predecessors' modest carte de visite.
Antoon Heindricks and Johannes Van Sluys camped here, outward bound, December 18, 1934. Botanical Expedition, Haarlem Academy of Natural Sciences. Camped here, homeward bound,
December 21, 1934.
Underneath, the same information was repeated in Dutch.
CHAPTER 10
MUTINY
"They turned back rather abruptly," Vartan remarked. "December 18th to the 21st. That gave them time for just one march on from here and back. I wonder what happened?"
"Perhaps they were stopped," Marjorie suggested naively.
"By whom? These white butterfles? Or your crown jewels – those beetles?"
"Neither, I think," she smiled. "Pardon my woman's obstinacy, but I don't think much of your map. Or is it your geology that is too confident?"
"You wait till tomorrow evening," he retorted, ruffling. "Then you'll see."
"What? Why Heindricks and Van Sluys turned back so suddenly? They were competent explorers, Mr. Vartan."
"Never heard of either of them. Still," he admitted generously, "that means nothing, either for or against. If it were a question of South America I would know all about them. But, until I started for London in answer to Mr. Brassey's cable, I never took the slightest interest in explorations in this region, except of course, to study the geological records of our own 1914 expedition. I'll bet those two Dutchmen simply got tired of the scenery and turned back."
"That wouldn't be like either Heindricks or Van Sluys," she demurred. "'Intrepid' is a bold word to use, but it describes both of them."
"You have heard of these men?"
"Certainly. It was part of my work at Brassey House to abstract the records of all explorations in the Himalayas, the Karakorum and Tian Shan ranges – to say nothing of less easily reached places, where new plants may be looked for – so that our expeditions might profit by the experiences of others. Heindricks and Van Sluys made a journey through the Karakorum ranges that is almost a classic."
"Was this it?"
"The date – 1934 – settles that. This place must have been on their itinerary."
"What were they looking for?" he asked curiously.
"Nothing in particular, so far as their report shows. They were just exploring the mountains and high plateaus for the Haarlem Academy. Of course the botany of the region they traversed was their main concern."
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