Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Then the cart. Then Ali and his two sons, not pleased with playing Hindu, looking like dark spirits of the night whom men might well avoid. Wayfarers beg rides in India even as in the West, but none did that night. None stole a ride. And the multitude, who make it their profession to extort alms by the ancient processes — who watch the highways and by day or dark flock forth like bugs to pester — not recognizing innocence, desisted.

  All one night they trudged the highway with the geometrical designs of irrigation ditches glinting in the moonlight all about them; and at dawn they were offered bed and board by a Brahman, who called the green-lined chela “holy one.” At one end of the garden-compound, of which his house formed the front, was a long shelter subdivided into stalls, in which he said it was his privilege to acquire merit by entertaining pilgrims. He asked no questions — only offered food and asked a blessing in return — so there they slept on string-cots, three to a stall, the women-folk remaining in the closed cart, angrily complaining of the heat.

  Then night again and another march, the women, too, on foot; for they left the ox-cart with the Brahman — six or eight miles’ walk in mellow moonlight to a wayside station, where a Hindu station-master said they honored his poor roof, and where, by dint of lies along the wire, he finally secured a whole reserved compartment for them on a through train for Benares.

  CHAPTER XIX. “Once, when they who keep the secrets—”

  BENARES! Mother Gunga, who if she would, could tell of the birth of half-a-world, lapping the steps below the ghats . Crimson fire and leaping flame where they cremate the dead. Moonlight on a hundred thousand heads and shoulders, as the “heathen” stand breast-deep reflected in the stream and pray for blessedness. Built on Benares! For the temples that have stood a thousand years are crumbling above foundations that were ancient cities before Hermes was Hierophant of Mysteries. Troy seven times rebuilt on Troy is but a new thing to Benares.

  The train rolled in, panting at the end of awful night; and it was no more to Benares than a new bird added to the hordes of feathered scavengers.

  Under the hot iron roof the train disgorged its crowd, itself impersonal, they seeking abstract bliss — an iron-age implement subserving Manu and His laws. It was no more to Benares than the flies that drone around the ghats at dawn.

  The green-lined chela led, threading the swarm that checked and gathered itself, bleating for its females and its young like sheep, demanding neither food nor sleep but the view of Mother Gunga and the privilege of plunging in at sunrise.

  Gauri and her maid walked beside Chullunder Ghose, both veiled.

  “One sees us!” said the babu. “Let the veil fall open.”

  On the journey they had labored over it, cutting and stitching until if loosed it fell so perfectly that her face could be seen in profile — which was best — and be covered again instantly. Gauri saw a man in yellow staring at her, and snatched the veil together.

  “He is big, and I am afraid of him!”

  “Good,” said the babu.

  “But he saw I am afraid!”

  “Better! He knows you are not a goddess! You should be afraid of him! Now, not knowing, he will go and say he knows, same being excellent in politics but no good when up against Jimgrim and the green-lined chela — latter being devil very likely, though I think not. Woman, behave fearfully! He turns again and looks.”

  So Gauri hid behind Chullunder Ghose’s bulk, as if she were a merchant’s wife out for the first time far from home. And the very tall man who had turned and looked beckoned another, shorter, nearly naked one, who came and followed the party, presently beckoning others to keep him company.

  So, though they threaded a score of streets not wider than an ox-cart, turning this and that way almost incomprehensibly like ants, and entered at last a high door in a wall, which slammed behind them and was bolted and barred by someone in a cabin like a sentry-box, who performed his task unseen, they knew they were not lost to knowledge. They could hear the footsteps of the spies, who ran to tell their whereabouts to whom it might concern.

  And here — in a quiet clean oasis — the green-lined chela seemed no longer in authority. He accepted orders from a man in white, whose bald, bare head was fleshless — skin on bone, as if it had died but still was needed by the body. Only his eyes lived, burning, down deep in the sockets. It seemed he was host.

  “Introduce us. What’s his name?” Grim asked.

  “No name,” the chela answered.

  Only then they all remembered that the green-lined chela , too, had given no name, then or at any time.

  “What’s yours?” Grim asked him, but he laughed and shook his head.

  So, failing introduction, Grim lined up the party, named them, and began to speak about Ghandava. That name, too apparently meant nothing here. The living skeleton in white took no account of it. He turned on his heel and led them indoors, into an ancient palace, nowadays as plainly furnished as a monastery, and up-stairs to the first floor. There, saying nothing, he made a gesture, signifying that the floor was theirs and, turning to the chela , who had followed, dismissed him with a monosyllable. The chela neither spoke nor displayed the least emotion, but turned and went.

  Nevertheless there was an atmosphere of comfort, and even of friendliness. The man in white stood waiting by the door until silent servants brought water and a heap of clean sheets. Others brought food — bread, vegetables, milk — and then, but not till then, the man in white left them, not having said one word except to the chela to dismiss him, yet contriving to convey the thought that they were welcome.

  “And why not welcome?” wondered Jeremy. “Bemares looks to me to need jazzing.”

  “My God!” Chullunder Ghose exploded.

  All the long front of that floor was a veranda, cool and deep, facing the Mother of Rivers above ancient roofs. They had five separate vistas between temple domes, and down one lane of ancientry could see the granite steps, and thousands of naked men, and women veiled in lightest muslin, descending to bathe and pray; for sunrise is the holiest hour of all.

  Rafts on the river’s bosom swarmed with Brahmins sitting rigid in the act of meditation. Between the rafts the stream flowed spread with flowers, because none of the thousands had come empty-handed, but with garlands, loose blossoms and plaited strings of buds by way of offering:

  The cooing of doves was all about them, and the music of temple-bells. The breath of Mother Gunga, who gives life and takes it, pervaded all — miasmic say the scientists, ignoring truth of a millennium. (They drink the water where the ashes of the dead are strewn, and take no hurt.) Birds everywhere, especially crows lining the ridges of temple roofs with jet black; and down the granite steps to the river’s brink, between the men’s bare legs and over the gaudy garments laid aside, monkeys scampering to drink, unfearful and unnoticed.

  “Good!” said Jeremy, sniffing and filling his lungs.

  Along a street below them caste-less bearers were carrying the dead on litters, to be bathed a last time at the river brink before being laid out on their funeral pyres. None noticed. In Benares it is life that counts, not death, and life is of the spirit not the senses. When a pilgrim shuffles off his mortal coil they make away with it and burn it swiftly, lest it hamper his efforts to climb higher.

  Down another vista lay the ruins of a temple like an island in the stream; for centuries ago, when Gunga rose in spate, she underswept the walls and rooted in among them till the whole enormous building tumbled into the flood. Now a naked fakir stood on the highest stone of its ruins — young, with long hair on his shoulders — poised against the blue sky —

  “Fancy free!” suggested Jeremy. “That lad looks happy. Nothing to wear, nor do but stand still! How many meals a day, I wonder?”

  “One,” said a voice; and there Ghandava stood, among them, unannounced!

  “I have creeps!” remarked Chullunder Ghose.

  He glanced at the door. It was locked on the inside, but Ghandava might have done that �
� only the lock squeaked badly, and nobody had heard it.

  “There are three of them. The three are one,” Ghandava went on, taking no notice of the babu’s nervousness. “They stand on that stone all day and all night, taking turns, relieving one another.”

  “Why?” demanded Jeremy.

  “It always was so,” he answered. “But their vigil is nearly ended.”

  Ghandava was bright-eyed; not from opium, that is a feverish glow, but with the light of the ecstasy men earn, who by denying self attain self-knowledge. Harder work than laying bricks!

  “Why?” demanded Jeremy a second time.

  “Seek, and to every question you shall know the answer, if you seek well enough, my friend,” Ghandava replied. “There are others who seek answers,” he added cryptically.

  Whereat Chullunder Ghose recounted how a man in yellow had set spies to follow them through the streets. Ghandava smiled.

  “You are protected,” he said quietly. “You shall decoy them to another place.”

  “For that they may attack us in the other place?” Chullunder Ghose asked in consternation.

  “Because their time is come.”

  But Ali of Sikunderam grew angry at answers in the shape of conundrums. The Hindu garb and his losses fretted him. He paced the floor like a Hillman, which is a wholly different stride from any Hindu’s, and rounded on Ghandava at the end of a turn — head and shoulders over him — his fingers on the hilt of something underneath the smock.

  “By Allah, I have paid already more than all these! Five sons I have given!” he exclaimed. “Shall my life follow theirs without a reason? Name thy intentions step by step, Mahatma-ji !”

  He used the word Mahatma as soldiers of fortune of the Middle Ages used the word monk — insultingly, and Ghandava, it seemed, knew better than to smile at him. An air of patronage night have been a spark to fire the tinder of the Hillman’s wrath.

  “Sit down then. I will tell you,” said Ghandava, choosing a stool for himself and pausing until all were seated on chairs and mats.

  He let it appear that Ali’s protest was what moved him, and Ali made sly grimaces at his sons to signify that they should learn a lesson in deportment from their sire.

  “Lo, we listen. By Allah, we have ears,” said Ali at last importantly.

  “You were seen to arrive in Benares,” Ghandava began, “because the prisoner you let go from my house in Delhi forewarned those who are interested. You were seen to have this woman with you, and they are saying now that their priestess has wormed her way into your confidence, as otherwise she would surely have escaped and returned to them. Now, if one of you were to meet with one of them, and were not afraid, and should confirm that theory, taking an actual message perhaps from Gauri to them, using the formula, ‘She says ‘—”

  “I am not afraid!” Narayan Singh said, interrupting. He stood up, and all who saw him knew he told the truth. He was afraid of neither death nor devils.

  Ghandava nodded.

  “I spoke to you all of the Wheel,” he said quietly. “The Wheel turns and unless we are alert an opportunity is snatched or taken, for us or against us. In a place, which you shall see, the Nine have preserved for centuries a truth — knowledge of a truth, that is; for truth is like skill, unless used constantly it disappears. The time will cone, but is not yet, when that truth may be given to the world with safety. Those in whose hands the ancient secrets are, being human, have made mistakes. Knowledge in the hands of criminals and fools is worse than ignorance. Let me illustrate:

  “You have heard of the scientist who, seeking without wisdom for the knowledge he could neither weigh nor measure, introduced into America a moth that killed the trees? So. Once, when they who keep the secrets thought the time had come, they entrusted to some chosen individuals instruction concerning the scope of man’s mind. But the time was not ripe. They who learned were faithless and self-seeking, so that from that one secret that escaped there sprang the whole evil of witchcraft, sorcery, necromancy, black magic, hypnotism, what is now called ‘mob psychology,’ the black art of propoganda, and inventions that are even worse.

  “Again: Surgeons and doctors know no more anatomy than a mechanic knows of alchemy. They who keep the secrets once taught certain men the rudiments of what was common knowledge long before Aesculapius. Those, though, turned the knowledge to their own account, so that it died again of selfishness — which is all-destroying; and all that remains of the art, that it was sought to heal the world with, is the trick by which practitioners of Thuggee kill their victims with a silken handkerchief!

  “Chemical dyes mean poison gas. The art of flying, which was understood in India ten thousand years ago, means bombing of defenseless cities. Alcohol means drunkenness. Morphia, which is an anodyne, means vice. Only very rarely do the men appear in whose hands knowledge may be trusted. Then, and not until then, the world goes forward.

  “But those who seek knowledge for selfish ends persist. In that way they are faithful! They seek it like prospectors — at times alone, at times in hordes. And because of the Wheel and the Law, as men unearth gold so these lawless seekers after knowledge draw near at times to the discovery. They would discover. They would possess themselves of secrets and destroy the world, unless they who keep the secrets were alert.

  “Through alertness it is possible to see that they destroy themselves, as the hosts of Korah, Dathan and Abiram did in your Bible days — as Babylon destroyed itself, from too much wealth — as he who discovered gunpowder destroyed himself; only swiftly, and secretly, lest the world learn too much and inquire for more.

  “The lawless Nines who hide under the mask of Kali-worship, by elimination and persistence have come near to discovering the place where the secret of gold is kept. The place must be changed — nay is changed; but lest they learn that, they shall be allowed to find the former place and to take the consequences. It is there that the Wheel turns and you enter in.”

  “How so?” demanded Ali truculently; but none took any notice of him, which seemed to set him thinking on his own account. He listened attentively, but with a changed expression, while Ghandava went on with his story.

  Suddenly Chullunder Ghose threw up his hands in consternation.

  “Holy one!” he exclaimed. “Emolument is more than pleasing, same is necessary on this plane on which we function! Is profit barred? Is all excluded but the risk? Myself am text-book of scientific ignorance and not proud, but — family and dependents — impoverished babu — verb. sap. , Most Holy One!”

  Ghandava chuckled.

  “You shall see, and may help yourself,” he answered.

  “When shall I go with my message to these people?” Narayan Singh asked, standing up again.

  Ramsden rose, too, stretching himself, nearly as tall as the Sikh and half-again as heavy — a man to count on in tight places.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said quietly, meeting the Sikh’s eyes.

  Narayan Singh bowed, smiling a little. It was just the smallest inclination of the head, but a whole song set to music could never have answered half as much. He said no word. They understood each other.

  “When shall we go?” asked Ramsden.

  “When you have seen,” Ghandava answered. “You must see; and every word you subsequently say to them the woman must say first to you. It is essential that these criminals destroy themselves. All you are asked to do is to make that simple for them!”

  They ate breakfast all together on the deep veranda, Gauri and her maid as anxious as Chullunder Ghose about the rules of caste they broke, yet none of the three willing to pose as holier than Ghandava, who ate with them and had been a “heaven-born” until he abandoned caste altogether. Gauri consoled herself with the sight of the plundered emeralds.

  “I shall have enough to pay the priests,” she said aloud, as if answering the voice of conscience.

  She did not see Ali’s flint eyes blazing, nor the sly, secretive acquiescence of his sons; nor did she know why, when
the meal was done, the sons threw dice on the veranda floor. No money passed between them, but they threw three times, watching each main breathlessly, and he who lost swore acridly in the name of Allah.

  Ghandava watched it all but made no comment, unless, about five minutes later as he faced the Ganges, an adaptation of two of the Apostle Paul’s most wholesome axioms that he let fall had bearing on Ali’s attitude:

  “Since all things work together for our good, and now is the appointed time, why not? Shall we be going?”

  He did not say where they were going. They followed curiously, both women keeping close to him and Ali bringing up the rear with his two sons. It was as plain as clay that the North was in the mood of those old Highlanders who followed Prince Charlie once as far as Preston Pans. The rear, where they can do least demoralizing, is the right place for those gentry.

  Ghandava led up-stairs — the last way anyone expected — out on to a roof, and up by a winding flight of steps that circled about a tower, with a stone curtain on their right that rendered them invisible from anywhere unless so distant that their heads would be unrecognizable. And then down — through a door at the summit of the tower — round and round a circular stairway in the tower’s core, with ample air to breathe, but in darkness so deep that Ghandava’s reassuring voice seemed to come from another world:

  “This way! This way!”

  And the echoes rumbled down into infinity like the voice of an underground stream. Ghandava’s spirits seemed to rise as they descended.

  Both women screamed at intervals, but there was always somebody for them to cling to, and the voice of Ali behind them proving his own fearlessness — to himself at least — by lecturing his sons.

  “A man is a man in the dark! A man is a man in the devil’s face! A man dies fighting, and Allah receives him into Paradise! Fear is a fool’s religion, sons of Ali!”