THEFORBIDDENGARDEN

by The Forbidden Garden(Lit)

  "Halt!" she cried, for the last time, raising her revolver and taking careful aim. The man was less than forty feet away; she could scarcely miss her mark, although it was the first time in her life that she had pulled a trigger.

  The mutineer grasped the pony's halter. There was a deafening report, the man reeled, and collapsed on the snow. For five seconds there was a dead silence, part horror, part fear.

  "Ali," Marjorie commanded in a firm voice, "tell two men to attend to him. I aimed at the thick part of his leg, and I hit him. Don't tell them he is not badly hurt. Say I will shoot the next one dead."

  It was pitch dark before the man's wound was bandaged.

  "Herd them into a small circle," she ordered. "Tell them to get their sleeping things and lie down for the night. You too," she added, "or I'll shoot."

  Not a word was spoken as the men, crunching over the fast freezing snow, lugged up their sleeping gear to the designated spot. Even voluble Ali was dumb. He knew an order when he heard one, and he was a good judge of human nature. That, coupled with the fact that he did not know how straight Marjorie could shoot by starlight, may have accounted for his passive attempt to sleep with the others.

  Although she could hardly stand from weariness and exhaustion after her sickness, Marjorie stood guard all night. Her hand holding the revolver seemed to become a lump of ice, and her feet kept freezing to the ice on which she stood; but she never relaxed for an instant her rigid attention to the black human lumps on the ice at her feet. Once a man stirred and muttered threateningly in his sleep. She stealthily tightened her finger on the trigger, and slowly raised her arm. The man turned over and snored. With a sigh of relief she lowered her arm. To shoot to kill in self-defense may be justifiable, but it is not pleasant.

  The night that had seemed as if it would never end, ended. Again the icy crags glittered like fools' gold in the rising sun, and again, mercifully, the frozen air, in five seconds, lost its deathly, penetrating chill. The men, used all their lives to getting up at sunrise, slouched into sitting postures. One by one they rubbed the sleep from their eyes and saw the woman holding them prisoners. They remembered their wounded companion, and their faces hardened in rage and hate. Unable longer to restrain his frenzy, one man leaped shouting to his feet. Ali tried to drag him down, but the man was beyond control. Instantly the thirty odd men were a brainless mob yelling for vengeance.

  Ali did his best. It was useless. The porters seemed to focus all their superstitious fear and hate on the white woman who had stood guard over them all through their unwilling sleep. Marjorie, shaken for a moment, fled. Then, realizing that the pack was after her, she turned and faced them.

  They halted irresolutely, remembering their wounded comrade. Ali, in the background, cursed and prayed at them to come back. They hesitated. Then one fanatic, driven frantic by superstitious fear and the pain of his ripening boils, lunged forward. She had no time to aim. Wildly raising her arm, she fired at the man's feet, and, by blessed luck, just grazed his calf.

  Once more they retreated, as they had the night before, hopelessly beaten by a show of will power. This time they seemed to realize that the woman would, if necessary, shoot to kill. Ali spoke up.

  . "Let me start them back to Srinagar. I will lie to them. You wait here till Vartan sahib comes. Then follow us. He will know how to make them obey."

  "No," she answered. "Vartan sahib ordered me to shoot any man who attempts to leave this camp. Order two men to help the man I just wounded."

  Again the porters drew into a huddled knot on the ice, and again Marjorie stood rigidly on guard, the revolver poised in her hand.

  Two hours passed, and the clear sunlight thawed out her frozen body. She began to doze on her feet. Suddenly she started, fully awake, aware that Ali was trying to attract her attention. She stared as in a dream in the direction of his arm. A black dot on the distant ice seemed to move. Raising her arm she fired three shots, and tumbled forward, face down on the ice, in a dead faint.

  CHAPTER 11

  FORWARD

  It was a full twenty minutes before Vartan, slushing through the soft snow, his lungs laboring to the point of agony to take in sufficient oxygen from the rarefied air, got within shouting distance of the camp. Keeping his head, he halted, pressed his hands against his heaving sides, he waited till the wandering spots of black and red cleared from the void air before his eyes, and shouted.

  "Shoot!"

  Ali had rushed forward and wrenched the revolver from Marjorie's frozen grip when she collapsed. At first he had experienced no difficulty in keeping the maddened mob away from the object of their brainless rage; his lashing tongue had sufficed. But, as the tense minutes crawled by, and the porters began to believe that either Ali could not shoot, or would not, they had become bolder, creeping up a step at a time to their goal. What they might do when they reached it was perhaps a mystery even to themselves. The whole mad mutiny was an exhibition of sudden, unaccountable insanity. These sturdy hillmen, in their right minds, could no more have rebelled against reasonable authority, or have sought to attack a white woman, than they could have cut their own throats. The boldest of them had just lunged forward to clutch with both of his hands at Marjorie's head, when Vartan's shouted order ended Ali's indecision, and he fired.

  Ali was cool. Although the attacker was obviously out of his mind, and as dangerous as a wild beast, Ali aimed only to disable, not to kill. With remarkable and unexpected precision for a man who, presumably, was unused to firearms, he neatly shot the man through both hands, just as they clutched at Marjorie's throat. It was so neat a shot that it looked like blind luck. The mob halted. Ali glanced at the revolver and found it empty. He had used the last shell. To reload he must stoop and extract shells from the belt about Marjorie's waist.

  Stunned for a moment by the unexpected shot, the mob hesitated irresolutely. The howls of their wounded comrade almost instantly roused them to fury. Before Ali's stiff fingers could extract the first shell from Marjorie's belt, he was bowled over and trampled into the slush under twenty milling feet, just as Vartan hurled himself into the fight.

  He was unarmed. Planting himself across Marjorie's body, he used nature's weapons, his fists. The desperate crisis multiplied his muscles by ten. Not under any ordinary lash would he have fought as he fought then. It was all or nothing, life or death, and he had only his empty hands. That brief, terrific struggle was the supreme expression of his animal instinct for self-preservation. He tapped the great reservoir of strength and endurance that is in every man, and spent it to the limit. He was fighting madmen.

  They took their terrific punishment unfeelingly. Blows that would have crumpled a sane adversary, glanced from their jaws, though more than one fractured with a crack that could have been heard a hundred feet in that clear air. Instinctively Vartan knew that his enemies were mad, and an impersonal third personality in his own consciousness, sitting aloof and apart from the brutal conflict, calmly reiterated the appalling fact that he, the defender, was also out of his mind. This cold observer, however, offered wise counsel: "Fight, and wait your chance."

  The chance came. Two of the assailants were knocked out within a second of each other. In a flash Vartan had unbuckled his heavy belt. Armed with this he swung and slashed at the ferocious blotches of red that seethed up to confront him – he no longer distinguished human faces – till one savage cut after another told, and the flickering mist of crimson steadied before his eyes. Some hard, icy object was thrust into his left hand. Automatically he transferred it to his right, not losing a slash with the flailing belt. Ali had recovered sufficiently to retrieve and load the revolver.

  Vartan fired, wildly, but in the air, high over the men's heads. The aloof monitor, who had told him that he also was mad, guided his arm.

  The shattering volley of six shots routed the enemy, utterly, irrationally. Howling in superstitious fear, they fled over the slushy snow to the colossal black walls that hemmed them in like rats in a sewer. They we
re beaten, finally and completely. Vartan started to pursue, and desisted. His mind was coming back to him in overwhelming bursts of blinding sanity. The violence of the struggle had purged his blood of the last trace of poison. His legs gave way, and he sat down suddenly, laughing uncontrollably, in the wet snow. For the first time he realized that he had been clean out of his head since he, like all of the party, had bathed in the steaming black waters of the hot springs. The whole of his conversation with Marjorie before he tramped off alone to reconnoitre, flashed back on his memory. The sheer insanity of it all sobered him, and he rose unsteadily to his feet. To have left a woman in charge of thirty-two men on the verge of mutiny now stood out in its true light as the act of a dangerous lunatic.

  Curiously enough, Vartan's first thought was not of Marjorie, but of Ali Baba. He looked up, to find the old fellow's eyes staring calmly, curiously, into his own.

  "Well, Ali?"

  Ali's reply was an unintelligible grunt, which might have meant anything from repressed applause to disgusted disapproval. A sudden suspicion struck Vartan.

  "Did you bathe in the hot water the night before last when I ordered you to?"

  "No, sahib."

  "Why the devil not?" Vartan snapped.

  "I was clean," Ali replied conclusively.

  Vartan eyed him with suspicion.

  "You're no fool," he said. "Still, you saved Miss Driscott's life, and probably mine too. So I shan't make you wash yourself against your holy will." For the first time he realized that Marjorie was in desperate need of help. He staggered to his feet. "Are you all right, Miss Driscott?"

  "Yes," she moaned.

  "What's wrong? Hurt anywhere?" He bent over her. "They didn't touch you?"

  "No. But I fainted like a fool."

  "Your face is all cut and bleeding. Ali! Make coffee and boil me some water. Use two tins of canned heat."

  Ali scuttled off, and Vartan unbuckled the holster and cartridge belt around Marjorie's waist.

  "I shan't apologise for my outrageous conduct," he said, buckling on the belt. "That would only make it worse. We were all out of our heads after bathing in that infernal water. All except Ali, that is."

  "Ali?" she echoed in alarm. "I warned you to watch him."

  "I did. He saved your life."

  "Did he? Then I must have been wrong. Ali–" her voice trailed off. "I can't think clearly. What is the matter with me?"

  "You'll be all right when the coffee comes," he soothed. "Old Ali has a regular bonfire going."

  "Where are the porters?"

  "Hanged if I know. Over there, trying to burrow into one of those big black cliffs, I suppose. I'll attend to them later."

  "What will you do?"

  "Never mind, till you've had your coffee. I want your advice. Head all right?"

  "Oh, I feel so wretched," she confessed, almost sobbing. "I'm no good for anything."

  "Steady. You've been a perfect brick. What seems to be the trouble?"

  "My brain goes round. It was all right last night while I stood up. "Want to get on your feet?" He scrutinized the snow which had melted under the warmth of her body. "Better get up," he said, "and come over by the fire, such as it is. Come on; it won't be so bad once you are up."

  As he half led, half dragged her off to the insignificant fire, he turned his head and stared attentively at the outline of her body as it had lain in the snow. The deeper impressions were seething ferments of green slime which bubbled and boiled in the stark sunshine like corrupt yeast.

  "Algae of some sort," he remarked. "Probably as poisonous as concentrated toadstools. This is a cheerful spot, I must say. No wonder Heindricks and Van Sluys turned back. Virulent water, boils, burns and blisters, fetid slime, and a jumping-off place. I have half a mind to follow the porters back to Srinagar."

  Her convulsive clutch on his arm tightened.

  "Algae? Do you mean there are plants here?"

  "Millions – billions them, he replied, watching her face closely. "You seem surprised?"

  Physical illness had all but conquered her. She rallied, however, drawing on her second reserve, as Vartan, to save her life, had drawn on his.

  "Of course," she said, with a sorry attempt at a laugh. "Algae grow at practically all temperatures in which life is possible. So why not here?"

  "Why not? These one-celled plants are the stuff on which perhaps my mutated white butterflies and your jewelled beetles feed. I'm right, Miss Driscott. In spite of myself, I'm on the right track of James Brassey's seeds and my own fossils."

  "You mean you are lost?"

  "Hopelessly – if I go on. I was all wrong about the white spot on Marsden and Enright's map. The contours I counted on don't exist. Marsden and Enright left their map blank here for two sufficient reasons. First, they did not come this way. Second, if they had, they would have turned back, like Heindricks and Van Sluys. I'm going on."

  "With the porters?"

  "No. After this row it would be impossible, even if they agreed to follow."

  "Then how will you continue?"

  "Alone."

  She made no reply, but stood groggily watching Ali endeavoring to boil a quart of water. The old chap succeeding at last, Vartan took the steam kettle from him, and stalked off to the medicine chest to fetch some sterile gauze and to disinfect his hands, before touching the cuts on Marjorie's chin and forehead. She watched his preparations lazily.

  "You needn't go to all that bother," she remarked. "The air must be practically sterile at this altitude."

  "Possibly," he admitted. "But what about those algae? They didn't look particularly dead to me."

  With expert skill he attended to her cuts, and covered them with adhesive tape.

  "This isn't the first time I've done this," he observed. "The halfbreeds on my jaunts in the Andes were always skinning their hands and faces just for the fun of the medical show afterward. Well, the next on the program is the porters. I can't do anything for their bums and boils, but I can do a lot for their souls. Ali! Find all the men and send them here. You won't need my gun. They're beaten."

  Ali trudged off toward the black wall, chanting mournfully in his own tongue. It was not long before the mutineers answered the recall, and trailed slowly out from the black shadow of the cliff to learn their fate and beg for mercy. The violent exertions of their recent battle had sweated the last of the poison out of their systems. Lamenting in a minor key, they followed Ali to the place of judgment.

  Vartan's sentence was brief. Through Ali he ordered them to return to Srinagar, and take the ponies with them, as soon as their bums healed sufficiently to make rapid travel possible.

  The men were stunned. Their contrition was pitiable, but Vartan refused to rescind his command. Through their spokesman they protested that they were honest men; that they would serve Vartan faithfully to the death, and that their recent outburst was the mad sport of evil spirits of the accursed valley in which they were then encamped. Get them out of the valley, they implored, and they would do a march and a half a day for so long as Vartan sahib should desire.

  Vartan disdained to reply. For reasons of his own he was through with them, and he welcomed this perfectly legitimate reason for dismissing them from his service. Ali took it for granted that the whole party was to return to Srinagar by the route they had already travelled. Vartan's present occupation therefore was incomprehensible to him. The leader of the expedition, with his own hands, was carefully selecting from the porters' packs a wide assortment of the most highly concentrated foods in the stores. These he proceeded to pack expertly. This part of his incomprehensible labor accomplished, Vartan rolled up his sleeping bag, strapped it to the heavy pack, hoisting the whole onto his shoulders, and marched off down the narrow valley in the direction from which he had come.

  "Where are you going?" Marjorie called in alarm.

  "I don't know."

  "You're not going on alone?"

  "Yes." He resumed his march.

  "But what ab
out me?"

  "Return to Srinagar with the party," he called over his shoulder. "Ali will take care of you."

  It was plain that he meant exactly what he said. She ran after him.

  "You can't go on alone," she panted, catching up with him, and keeping step.

  "I don't know whether I can or not until I try. I'm trying."

  "What of me?"

  "You will be perfectly safe with Ali. There's another revolver and plenty of ammunition in my kit, which I've left behind. Strap it on, if you feel doubtful. But it will be unnecessary. You didn't see Ali fight to save your life."

  "Mr. Vartan," she pleaded, "you don't understand me. We are of the same race. If you go on alone, I am disgraced forever."

  "If you were a man, that would be true. But you are a woman."

  "Haven't I kept up with you? Have I ever whined?"

  "No," he admitted. "Still, the fact remains that you are a woman. If I let you go on, I should never dare show my face in a civilized country again."

  "Nonsense! The Countess Lohenwald did just as much."

  "She had porters."

  "What of it?" Seeing that she made no impression on his obduracy, Marjorie changed her attack. "I have told you," she said with slow emphasis, "that I do not trust Ali. If you send me back with him, you are deliberately exposing me to great danger."

  Her tone caused him to halt.

  "Will you swear," he demanded, "by whatever you hold sacred, that you are speaking the truth?"

  "I swear."

  "Even after all that Ali did for you? He risked his own life to protect yours."

  "That makes no difference. I do not trust him."

  "But he is an old man, Miss Driscott."

  "Oh, why can't you see?" she burst out passionately.

  "What?"

  "Who your real friends are, and who are your enemies. Ali does not like you, and he hates me. Why are men so stupid? Any woman could see that I am right with her eyes shut. You distrust me?"

  Vartan nodded.