by Talbot Mundy
Grim went in on all-fours like a weird animal, with my shirt dancing on its frame above his back. Goodenough went next, peering through that window-pane monocle like a deep-sea fish. All the rest of the Sikhs went after him in Indian file, dragging their rifle-butts along the tunnel floor and making noise enough to remind you of the New York subway.
I went in at the tail end, trying at intervals to peer around a khaki-covered Punjaub rump, alternately getting my head and fingers bruised by heels I could not see and a rifle-butt that only moved in jerks when you didn’t expect it to. My nose was bleeding at the end of ten yards.
But you couldn’t keep your distance. Whenever the men in front checked at some obstruction or paused to listen, all those behind closed up; and by the time those behind had run their noses against iron-shod heels the men in front were on their way again. You couldn’t see a thing until you rammed your head into it, and then the sense of touch gave you a sort of sight suggestion, as when you see things in a dream. As for sound, the tunnel acted like a whispering gallery, mixing all the noises up together, so that you could not guess whether a man had spoken, or a stone had fallen, or a pistol had gone off, or all three.
Once or twice, when the line closed up on itself caterpillar- fashion, I was able to make out my white shirt dancing dimly; and once, where some trick of the tunnel sorted out the sounds, I caught a scrap of conversation.
“D’you suppose they’ll be able to see the shirt?”
“God knows. I can hardly make it out from here.”
“When it looks like the right time to you, sir, turn the flashlight on it.”
“All right. God damn! Keep on going — you nearly knocked out my eye-glass!”
Even over my shoulder, looking backward, I could see practically nothing, for what little light came in through the opening was swallowed by the first few yards. There was a suspicion of paleness in the gloom behind, and the occasional suggestion of an outline of rough wall; no more.
Nor was the tunnel straight by any means. It turned and twisted constantly; and at every bend the men who originally closed it had built up a wall of heavy masonry that Scharnhoff had had to force his way through. In those places the broken stones were now lying in the fairway, as you knew by the suffering when you came in contact with them; some of the split-off edges were as sharp as glass.
It was good fun, all the same, while it lasted. If we had been crawling down a sewer, or a modern passage of any kind, the sense of danger and discomfort would, no doubt, have overwhelmed all other considerations. But, even supposing Scharnhoff had been on a vain hunt, and the veritable Tomb of the Kings of Judah did not lie somewhere in the dark ahead of us, we were nevertheless under the foundations of Solomon’s temple, groping our way into mysteries that had not been disclosed, perhaps, since the days when the Queen of Sheba came and paid her homage to the most wise king. You could feel afraid, but you couldn’t wish you weren’t there.
I have no idea how long it took to crawl the length of that black passage. It seemed like hours. I heard heavy footsteps behind me after a while. Some one following in a hurry, who could see no better than we could, kept stumbling over the falling masonry; and once, when he fell headlong, I heard him swear titanically in a foreign tongue. I called back to whoever it was to crawl unless he wanted to be shot, but probably the words were all mixed up in the tunnel echoes, for he came on as before.
Then all at once Goodenough flashed on the light for a fraction of a second and the shirt showed like a phantom out of blackness. The instant answer to that was a regular volley of shots from in front. The flash of several pistols lit up the tunnel, and bullets rattled off the walls and roof. The shirt fell, shot loose from its moorings, and the leading Sikhs gave a shout as they started to rush forward.
We all surged after them, but there was a sudden check, followed by a babel worse than when a dozen pi-dogs fight over a rubbish- heap. You couldn’t make head or tail of it, except that something desperate was happening in front, until suddenly a man with a knife in his hand, too wild with fear to use it, came leaping and scrambling over the backs of Sikhs, like a forward bucking the line. The Sikh in front of me knelt upright and collared him round the knees. The two went down together, I on top of both of them with blood running down my arm, for the man had started to use his knife at last, slashing out at random, and I rather think that slight cut he gave me saved the Sikh’s life. But you can make any kind of calculation afterwards, about what took place in absolute darkness, without the least fear of being proven wrong. And since the Sikh and I agreed on that point no other opinion matters.
I think that between the two of us we had that man about nonplused, although we couldn’t see. I had his knife, and the Sikh was kneeling on his stomach, when a hundred and eighty pounds of bone and muscle catapulted at us from the rear and sprawled on us headlong, saved by only a miracle from skewering some one with a bayonet as he fell.
He laughed while he fought, this newcomer, and even asked questions in the Sikh tongue. He had my arm in a grip like a vise and wrenched at it until I cursed him. Then he found a leg in the dark and nearly broke that, only to discover it was the other Sikh’s. Still laughing, as if blindfolded fighting was his meat and drink, he reached again, and this time his fingers closed on enemy flesh. Judging by the yells, they hurt, too.
There must have been at least another minute of cat-and-dog-fight struggling — hands being stepped on and throats clutched — before Goodenough rolled himself free from an antagonist in front and, groping for the flashlight, found it and flashed it on. The first thing I recognized by its light was the face of Narayan Singh, with wonderful white teeth grinning through his black beard within six inches of my nose.
“Damn you!” I laughed. “You weigh a ton. Get off — you nearly killed me!”
“Nearly, in war-time, means a whole new life to lose, sahib. Be pleased to make the most of it!” he answered.
Within two minutes after that we had eight prisoners disarmed and subdued, some of them rather the worse for battery. The amazing thing was that we hadn’t a serious casualty among the lot of us. We could have totaled a square yard of skin, no doubt, and a bushel of bruises (if that is the way you measure them) but mine was the only knife-wound. I felt beastly proud.
By the light of the electric torch we dragged and prodded the prisoners back whence they had come, and presently Grim or somebody found a lantern and lit it. We found ourselves in a square cavern — a perfect cube it looked like — about thirty feet wide each way.
In the midst was a plain stone coffer with its lid removed and set on end against it. In the coffer lay a tall man’s skeleton, with the chin still bound in linen browned with age. There were other fragments of linen here and there, but the skeleton’s bones had been disturbed and had fallen more or less apart.
Over in one corner were two large bundles done up in modern gunny- bags, and Grim went over to examine them.
“Hello!” he said. “Here’s Scharnhoff and his lady friend!”
He ripped the lashings of both bundles and disclosed the Austrian and the woman, gagged and tied, both almost unconscious from inability to breathe, but not much hurt otherwise.
The Sikhs herded the prisoners, old alligator-eyes among them, into another corner. Grim tore my shirt into strips to bandage my arm with. Goodenough talked with Narayan Singh, while we waited for Scharnhoff to recover full consciousness.
“Those murderers!” he gasped at last. “Schweinehunde!”
“Better spill the beans, old boy,” Grim said, smiling down at him. “You’ll hang at the same time they do, if you can’t tell a straight story.”
“Ach! I do not care! There were no manuscripts — nothing! I don’t know whose skeleton that is — some old king David, perhaps; for that is not David’s real tomb that the guides show. Hang those murderers and I am satisfied!”
“Your story may help hang them. Come on, out with it!”
“Have you caught Noureddin Ali?”
>
“Never mind!”
“But I do mind! And you should mind!”
Scharnhoff sat up excitedly. He was dressed in the Arab garments I had seen in his cupboard that day when Grim and I called on him, with a scholar’s turban that made him look very distinguished in spite of his disarray.
“That Noureddin Ali is a devil! Together we would look for the Tomb of the Kings. Together we would smuggle out the manuscripts — translate them together — publish the result together. He lent me money. He promised to bring explosives. Oh, he was full of enthusiasm! It was not until last night, when I had broken that last obstruction down and discovered nothing but this coffin, that I learned his real plan. The devil intended all along to fill this tomb with high explosive and to destroy the mosque above, with everybody in it! Curse him!”
“Never mind cursing him,” said Grim, “tell us the story.”
“He sent oranges here, all marked with the labels of a Zionist colony. When I told him that the explosive would arrive too late, he said I should use it to smash these walls and find another tomb. He himself disappeared, and when I questioned his men they told me the explosive would be brought in hidden under fruit in baskets. I waited then in the hope of killing him myself—”
“Hah-hah!” laughed Grim.
“That is true! But they bound me, and later on bound the woman, and laid us here to be blown up together with the mosque.”
Grim turned to Goodenough, who had been listening.
“Do I win the bet, sir?”
“Ten piastoes!” said Goodenough. “Yes. Narayan Singh says
Noureddin Ali was gone by the time they reached the wall.”
“Sure, or he’d have brought Noureddin Ali. I’ve been thinking, sir. We’ve one chance left to bag that buzzard. Will you give me carte blanche?”
“Yes. Go ahead.”
Grim crossed the place to the corner where old alligator-eyes stood herded with the other prisoners.
“Are you guilty?” he demanded.
“No. Guilty of nothing. I came out of curiosity to see what was happening here.”
“Thought so. Can you hold your tongue? Then go! Get out of here!”
Alligator-eyes didn’t wait for a second urging, nor stay to question his good luck, but went off in a shambling hurry.
“You are mad!” exclaimed Scharnhoff. “That man is the next-worst!”
“Grim, are you sure that’s wise?” asked Goodenough.
“We can get him any time we want him, sir,” Grim answered. “He lacks Noureddin Ali’s gift of slipperiness.”
He turned to Narayan Singh.
“Follow that man, but don’t let him know he’s followed. He’ll show you where Noureddin Ali is. Get him this time!”
“Dead or alive, sahib?”
“Either.”
Chapter Twenty
“All men are equal in the dark.”
The first thing Goodenough did after Grim had sent Narayan Singh off on his deadly mission was to summon the sheikh of the Dome of the Rock. He himself went to fetch him rather than risk having the sheikh bring a crowd of witnesses, who would be sure to talk afterwards. The all-important thing was to conceal the fact that sacrilege had been committed. But it was also necessary to establish the fact that Zionists had had no hand in it.
“You see,” Grim explained, sitting on the edge of the stone coffin, “we could hold Jerusalem. But if word of this business were to spread far and wide, you couldn’t hold two or three hundred million fanatics; and believe me, they’d cut loose!”
“The sheikh must realize that,” said I. “What do you bet me he won’t try to black-mail the Administration on the strength of it?”
“I’ll bet you my job! Watch the old bird. Listen in. He’s downy. He knows a chance when he sees it, and he might try to cheat you at dominoes. But in a big crisis he’s a number one man.”
While we waited we tried to get an opinion out of Scharnhoff about the coffin and the skeleton inside it. But the old fellow was heart-broken. I think he told the truth when he said he couldn’t explain it.
“What is there to say of it, except that it is very ancient? There is no decoration. The coffin is beautifully shaped out of one solid piece of stone, but that is all. The skeleton is that of an old man, who seems to have been wounded once or twice in battle. The linen is good, but there is no jewelry; no ornaments. And it is buried here in a very sacred place, so probably, it is one of the Jewish kings, or else one of the prophets. It might be King David — who knows? And what do I care? It is what a man sets down on parchment, and not his bones that interest me!”
The sheikh arrived at last, following Goodenough down the dark passage with the supreme nonchalance of the priest too long familiar with sacred places to be thrilled or frightened by them. He stood in the entrance gazing about him, blinking speculatively through the folds of fat surrounding his bright eyes. Goodenough took the lantern and held it close to the prisoners’ faces one by one.
“You see?” he said. “All Syrians. All Moslems. Not a Jew among them. I’ll take you and show you the others presently.”
“What will you do with them?”
“That’s for a court to decide. Hang them, most likely. They were plotting murder.”
“They will talk at the trial.”
“Behind closed doors!” said Goodenough.
“Ahum!” said the sheikh, stroking his beard. It would not have been compatible with either his religion or his racial consciousness not to try to make the utmost of the situation. “This would be a bad thing for all the Christian governments if the tale leaked out. Religious places have been desecrated. There would be inflammation of Moslem prejudices everywhere.”
“It would be worse for you!” Grim retorted. The sheikh stared hard at him, stroking his beard again,
“How so, Jimgrim? Have I had a hand in this?”
“This is your famous Bir-el-Arwah, where, as you tell your faithful, the souls of the dead come to pray twice a week. This is the gulf beneath the Rock of Abraham that you tell them reaches to the middle of the world. Look at it! Shall we publish flashlight photographs?”
The sheikh’s eyes twinkled as he recognized the force of that argument. He turned it over in his mind for a full minute before he answered.
“You cannot be expected to understand spiritual things,” he said at last. “However,” looking up, “this is not under the Rock. This is another place.”
Goodenough pulled a compass from his pocket, but Grim shook his head.
“Go on,” said Grim. “What of it?”
“It is better to close up this place and say nothing.”
“Except this.” Goodenough retorted: “you will say at the first and every succeeding opportunity that you know it is not true that Zionists tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock.”
“How do I know they did not try?”
“Perhaps we’d better ask the Administrator to come and inspect this place officially and put the exact facts on the record,” Goodenough retorted.
“You understand, don’t you?” said Grim.
“Everything we’ve done until now has been strictly unofficial.
There’s a difference.”
“And this effendi?” he asked, staring at me. “What of him?”
“He is commended to your special benevolence,” Grim answered. “The way to keep a man like him discreet is to make a friend of him. Treat him as you do me, then we three shall be friends.”
The sheikh nodded, and that proved to be the beginning of a rather intimate acquaintance with him that stood me in good stead more than once afterwards. The influence that a man in his position can exert, if he cares to, is almost beyond the belief of those who pin their faith to money and mere officialdom.
The prisoners were marched out. All except Scharnhoff and the woman were confirmed temporarily in the room in which Grim and I had breakfasted. The woman was taken to the jail until an American missionary could be found to take charge of he
r. They always hand the awkward cases over to Americans, partly because they have a gift for that sort of thing, but also because, in case of need, you can blame Americans without much risk of a reaction.
Goodenough left a guard of Sikhs outside the street entrance, to keep out all intruders until the sheikh could collect a few trustworthy masons to seal up the passage again. Grim, Scharnhoff and I walked quite leisurely to Grim’s quarters, where Grim left the two of us together in the room downstairs while he changed into uniform.
“What will they do with me?” asked Scharnhoff. He was not far from collapse. He lay back in the armchair with his mouth open. I got him some of Grim’s whiskey.
“Nothing ungenerous,” I said. “If you were going to be hanged
Grim would have told you.”
“Do you — do you think he will let me go?”
“Not until he’s through with you,” said I, “if I’m any judge of him.”
“What use can I be to him? My life is not worth a minute’s purchase if Noureddin Ali finds me — he or that other whom they let go. Oh, what idiots to let Noureddin Ali give them the slip, and then to turn the second-worst one loose as well! Those English are all mad. That man Grim has been corrupted by them!”
Grim hardly looked corrupted, rather iron-hard and energetic when he returned presently in his major’s uniform. You could tell the color of his eyes now; they were blue-gray, and there was a light in them that should warn the wary not to oppose him unless a real fight was wanted. His manner was brisk, brusk, striding over trifles. He nodded to me.
“You sick of this?” he asked me.
“How many times? I want to see it through.”
“All right. Your own risk.”
He turned on Scharnhoff, standing straight in front of him, with both arms behind his back.
“Look here. Have you any decency in that body of yours? Do you want to prove it? Or would you rather hang like a common scoundrel? Which is it to be?”