by Talbot Mundy
“Aye, and the world is full of fools!” Chullunder Ghose confessed. “Self being one! Are there snakes?”
“No snakes!” Ghandava answered.
“Insects?”
“None!”
“Lost souls?”
“No. They would find no rest here!”
“We are going down — down!” The babu’s voice boomed hollow. “We are surely in Gunga’s womb!”
“Not yet!”
“Oh — , where are we then? I hear the rushing of waters!”
“Only air — good air,” Ghandava called back.
“I hear water boiling!”
“No, for there is none.”
The babu’s trepidation served to keep the women from hysterics, since he voiced another fear than theirs and the two disputed mastery instead of blending into panic and hysteria. Guided by Ghandava’s voice and the feel of cool, smooth masonry now on one hand, now the other, they hurried in single file along a tunnel whose floor felt polished under-foot as if a hundred generations has passed over it.
“No bats!” Chullunder Ghose complained. “So there must be devils!”
“No, no devils,” said Ghandava.
“Krishna! What then? Look! See! I am blind! I saw another world! I cannot see! I am blinded! I swim in fire! Why do I not burn?”
They stopped. They had all seen one flash, and then nothing but its aching image in the retina — light to which a blow-pipe flame would have been gloaming!
“Watch! Wait!” called Ghandava.
“Not again! Not again!” cried the babu, and his cry re-echoed in imprisoned space— “Again, again, again, again, again!” Then the light — three flashes.
“God!”
That was King, clapping both hands to eyes that had been overstrained on active service.
“Allah! I saw devils!” (That was Ali.)
“Holy One, where are we?” (That was the babu.)
“Under the bed of Ganges!”
“The fire? Is it Agni?*”
“Electricity!” said Ramsden, speaking from memory of fuses blown out in the wilderness.
“No.” Ghandava was about to explain, but three more blinding flashes interrupted.
“What then?” asked Ramsden, positive, from memory.
“Gold!” fell the answer on breathless silence, in which they could all hear Ali and his two sons loosening their Khyber knives.
CHAPTER XX. “Nevertheless, I will take my sword with me!”
A PALE-GREEN astral-looking light developed gradually, turning the heart of darkness into twilight. They discerned the shadowy outlines of a cave buttressed with titanic masonry. There were no images, no carvings on walls, nor anything to mar simplicity. The proportions expressed restful, pure and final peace.
There was no smell of dampness, although Ghandava said they were under the bed of Ganges. There were no bats, no filth, no occupants. There was nothing in there — in an acre of earth’s foundations — but one square altar set against a wall; and thence the light came, seemingly.
Ghandava led to the altar with no more outward reverence than the vergers use who show the crowds around cathedrals. It was of some green substance so like jade to the eye that Ramsden, advancing an incautious finger, touched it. He drew it back with an oath.
“Pardon! I should have warned you. Are you hurt?” Ghandava examined Jeff’s finger. “It burns like radium.”
“Oh, buncombe!” said Jeremy, breaking an hour’s silence. “I’ve carried gold in my belt for years. My belly hasn’t got a mark on it!”
Everyone laughed, even Ali, and the women who knew no English. But Ghandava continued as much at ease as if he stood before a blackboard.
“You see?” he said, and pointed to where the wall arched over the altar in the shape of a shovel, base to the ground, with the apex leaning out above the center of the green stone. Exactly in the middle of the arch emerged what might have been a pipe of some unrecognizable substance, and for a space of two or three feet around it the stone wall seemed to have the consistency of pumice, as if its life had been burned out.
“Hot gold drips from that opening, drops on the stone below, and dissipates into electrons!”
“Hell!” said Jeremy.
“Men could raise hell with it, couldn’t they!” Ghandava answered. “There is more force in one drop than in a box of dynamite — more in a ton of it than in Vesuvius!”
“Who tends it?” asked Jeremy.
“Those whose turn it is,” Ghandava answered. “They are beyond that wall.”
“Where is the store of gold?” demanded Ali hoarsely.
“Gone! Removed!”
“There can never have been much gold, or who could have moved it in haste?” the Hillman sneered, nudging his two sons.
“Never more than enough at one time in this place than to keep the drops dripping,” Ghandava answered. “It has been dripping since long before Atlantis disappeared. Calculate it! There is enough in store to continue the process for as long again. But it must continue elsewhere. We must find another way of purging Gunga.”
“Riddles! Forever riddles!” Ali grumbled. “Who believes a word of all this? Allah—”
Ghandava interrupted him:
“Have you ever thought how many thousands bathe in Gunga daily? How many dead, who died of sickness, are laid on the banks for the stream to wash them? How many drink as they stand waist-deep in Gunga? And how few die?”
“They say it’s the sunlight,” King objected. “I’ve read that germs of sickness can’t live in Ganges water because of the strong sun.”
“And you believe it?” asked Ghandava. “If so, why does the sun not kill germs in the Amazon, or the Congo River, or the Jumna or the Irrawaddy?”
“Damned if I know!” said Grim. “Go on, Ghandava. Tell.”
“Billions of people have drunk Ganges water, since the pilgrimages began so long ago that there is no record of them. None ever died of drinking it. They have come with cholera, and plague, and small-pox. For lack of fuel for the pyres they have thrown their dead unburned into the stream. And beside the dead they have drunk the Ganges water, taking no harm. That is because of this.”
He signified the altar-stone and paused:
“Gold is the greatest purifying agent in the universe. In the words of the Hermetic Mystery: ‘AS ABOVE, SO BELOW.’ Gold is thus also the root of every evil. Gold, resolved into electrons, is the greatest force available to men. It is also by the same law men’s greatest weakness. Released it could abolish labor, lack, necessity for digging coal — or it could obliterate! There is gold enough in the world to usher in the golden age, or to wipe out civilization!”
He paused again dramatically, then added:
“Nine men know the secret!”
“The devil they do!” said Jeremy.
“Many have sought for the secret until a few of them know nearly where to look. A week — a month — a year and they would find this place. It is wisdom to let them find it now. So say those who have commissioned me.”
“By Allah, I weary of words!” shouted Ali, all his patience vanishing into its elements as gold had done. His voice reverberated overhead. “Show me as much gold as I can bear away, I and my sons, or—”
In the dim green light he met Narayan Singh’s eyes — could not avoid them. The big Sikh leaned and shoved a shoulder under his chin, shoving him backward so that he could use his right eye only with difficulty; and his sons could not have helped their sire without first passing King and Grim, with Ramsden on King’s left-hand and Grim against the wall.
“Friend Ali, peace, I pray thee!” said the Sikh.
There was no alternative. The hilt of something underneath the Sikh’s long smock made that fact clear.
Ghandava looked up at the spout above the green altar, listening. He said nothing, but started to walk away, and they followed in a frightened group, the women hurrying past him and the men, especially Ali, trying to disguise fear by striding measured
ly. Chullunder Ghose gave up that effort.
“Lo! I claim merit! My share of the gold is a gift to Mother Gunga!” he blustered, struggling to the last to make a joke of it, and ran. Shoving the women in front of him he disappeared into the dark and they could hear his heavy footsteps stampeding until the echoing noise was swallowed in a tunnel-gurgle sounding like a laugh.
“The gold is uncontrollable when it begins to drip,” Ghandava explained. “The process can be started but not stopped. It has been so for a hundred centuries. Not even they who keep the secrets could exist inside the cavern when the drops fall.”
As they left the cave a blinding flash burst behind them, casting their shadows forward into the tunnel like the fragments of shelled infantry. Even so, facing away from it, their eyes were hurt. Intellect itself seemed stupefied, and was restored by a breath of indrawn air that reeked of hot Benares, all decaying flowers, humanity and grease.
“It ventilates the tunnel,” said Ghandava. “That air, drawn in, will be burned up in the next explosion.”
“Where does the product go?” Grim asked him.
“It is used.”
“Why doesn’t the explosion burst the cave?”
“It would, but the quantity is measured.”
That was all they could extract from hint by way of information. When they asked more questions he reminded them that these were ancient secrets and himself no more than a man commissioned for a task.
“Already you have seen more than uninitiated individuals ever saw and lived to tell about ,” he assured them. “And this is only one of very many wonders that are done with gold. This is only a trifling matter compared to what can be — what is — done daily.”
“Then you are an initiate?” asked Grim. But he did not answer that.
Another flash behind them that sent tattered shadows leaping into the dark ahead showed an opening in the right-hand wall, set at such an angle and so narrow that they had passed it on their way down without being aware of its existence. Ghandava led through it now, ignoring the babu and the women, who by then were ascending the circular stair in the panic that will yield to nothing less than daylight.
“You shall see, because you must say you have seen,” he explained, taking Ramsden and Narayan Singh each by the arm, as the passage widened and turned back nearly in the same direction they had just cone. Evidently they had only made a circuit to pass through the end wall of the cave. “Say nothing that is not true, even to the enemy!” he added.
And now it felt like entering the workshop where the gloaming is woven of green and golden ether. They approached a cavern — not too close, for he restrained them — in which three men watched as if attending looms, only that these looms were invisible and the shuttles resembled fish that darted to and fro forever on the sane course, each swallowing the other as they met. The pale green light resembled water — the men, great hooded seals — and the silence finished the illusion, so that the ears strained for a sound of waves on some imaginary beach.
But there was no sound — not even a foot-fall; and of gold they saw no more than one bar that a man in a hood brought down steps from a gallery hewn overhead. Even the steps resembled submarine rocks, and the whole illusion was so perfect that they caught themselves not breathing, and wondering how long they could stay submerged.
When Grim started to speak Ghandava held a hand up and restrained him. Silence, it seemed, was part of the twilight mystery. There was no heat, it was cooler there than in the other cave; no light but the dim opalescence in which shuttles made of other light swam. Nothing to understand. It stripped incomprehension naked and left it aware of itself.
“Come!” said Ghandava. “You have seen a workshop older than Benares! You have seen enough!”
Ali had seen enough to stir cupidity, and it controlled him. He brushed by with his hand on his knife-hilt and was for plunging into the cavern with his left arm hiding his face. The illusion of green water was too real to be faced without subconscious precaution of some sort. He walked forward with the sidewise pendulum motion of one who wades into the surf — threw up both hands suddenly — turned — and came hurrying back with eyes and tongue protruding. “No air!” he gasped.
But something else had terrified him — something he could not, and never tried to explain. Followed by his two sons he took to his heels, pursuing Chullunder Ghose and the women up toward daylight; and was first out on the summit of the tower with a view of all Benares, in spite of the others’ long start, thanks to the legs and the wind of a mountaineer.
“Behold, who would worship Allah?” asked Narayan Singh; and there being no more Moslems there, none answered.
Slowly, with Ghandava in the lead, they returned by the tunnel and the steps within the tower, none saying much because of breathlessness, nor any climbing better than Ghandava, much the eldest, who waited at least a dozen times for them to overtake him. Up near the summit of the tower he opened a door that admitted to a gallery with a pierced stone screen around it; and there in full sunlight, with eyes aching, and with the sound of Ali’s voice arguing above, they squatted down facing the Ganges to learn what more Ghandava had in store for them. He sat meditating for ten minutes before he spoke. Then:
“Only Truth persists. All things are relative, and pass when they have seen their day. Truth is and all phenomena are Maya.* It is nothing, then, that what you have just seen must vanish. Benares has vanished ten times. The river below you has swallowed city on top of city, and the cavern we were in lies under the foundations of a temple whose steps the Ganges laved long before Egypt grew beside the Nile. This was the Temple of the Mysteries before the Pyramids were built. And now it perishes. But Truth remains.”
“Were the men we saw below there any of the Nine Unknown?” demanded Ramsden.
“None of them,” Ghandava answered, looking him full in the face. “The men you saw are chelas . You will never see the Nine Unknown.”
He was growing restless, for Ghandava. There was still the air of contact with eternity that made him so courteous and earned respect for him without his claiming it. But there was a subtle change, nevertheless, though he waited to speak again until he had their absolute attention. Then:
“The appointed time is now. I will instruct Mr. Jeremy and those who are to work with him. Are you two ready?”
Ramsden and Narayan Singh met each other’s eyes and nodded gravely.
“There is a chela below, who will lead you to the place where the Kali-worshipers make ready. He will leave you there. Gauri, in a minute, taking words from my mouth, will give you a message to deliver. They will believe the message, but will keep you with them unless they are more mad than there is reason to believe. There are grades of madness. Theirs is familiar, and understood. All then that will remain for you to do will be to persuade them to watch Mr. Jeremy, and to follow him to the woman. You will be cared for. Play your parts, tell only truth, say no more than you must, and remember you are rendering a service to humanity.”
“Nevertheless, I will take my sword with me,” announced Narayan Singh.
CHAPTER XXI. “My house is clean again!”
IT was noon when Narayan Singh and Ramsden, following a chela fifty years of age, chose what shadows were available in streets that baked like ovens between the stifling walls. The chela led them past an opening in a carved wall and gave the agreed signal, passing on as if unconscious of them. They turned and walked boldly into a ruinous temple, whose floor was deep with the dung of sacred bulls and whose only light was from little oil-dishes swung by wires from a roof invisible in gloom.
As the eyes grew used to the dark they were aware of the big bronze man in yellow who had been their prisoner, standing with his back to an inner-door with arms folded over his breast. They could see the white teeth glistening between thick lips, and the whites of his eyes with a glow behind them.
He in no way resembled a spider, yet Jeff thought of him as one. Imagination painted in the web. He looked as if he
expected them and, saying nothing, beckoned, with his other hand behind him on the handle of the wooden door. When they were near enough he threw the door open and stood aside to let them pass in.
Jeff led the way with the nerves of his neck all tingling in expectation of a silken handkerchief from ambush. The only thought in his head just then was whether his neck-muscles might not be strong enough to resist the handkerchief for the necessary fraction of a second until his fists could come in play. Imagination! For in step behind him strode the Sikh, who, if nothing more, would have given the alarm in time.
They were in a round room lighted by kerosene lanterns and scant rays filtered through old sacking stretched across openings in the gloom overhead. The walls were the base of a dome, whose arch was dimly visible, and around the walls not less than seventy men in yellow sat facing the center, where a plain stone platform a yard high stood in the midst of pillars that rose up in the form of a pentagon into the dark — a pillar to the apex of each angle.
They wore no masks, but the faces of all alike were stamped with evil and it would have been next to impossible to memorize the varying features. Proud, confident, deliberate crime was the key-note according unity, and it might have been four-score reflections of one face for all that a man could remember otherwise. The enormous bronze man leered at Jeff, thrusting his face so close that it was all that Jeff could do to refrain from punching him again; but all he did was to lead Jeff and Narayan Singh to the platform, where he left them to face whichever way they chose.
“You may sit down!” said a voice in English.
But they continued standing. To have sat or squatted would have betrayed the long sword under the Sikh’s smock — their only weapon. Jeff had left his automatic behind on Ghandava’s advice, since — as Ghandava phrased it— “it is easier not to kill when the means are absent. He who interferes with no man’s karma is wisest.”
They turned around, peering through the pillars to discover from which face the voice had come. He who had spoken waited until they both faced him, then spoke again —