by Talbot Mundy
To me that has always been the most wonderful overture in the world anyhow, for it seems to describe creation when the worlds took form in the void; but with that light, each tone and semi-tone and chord and harmony expressed in the absolutely pure color that belonged to it, it was utterly beyond the scope of words. It was a new unearthly language, more like a glimpse of the next world than anything in this.
The combination of color and music was having a highly desirable effect on me. Nothing could have done more to counteract the effects of the godless din that bowled me over in the other cavern.
But King was having a rotten time. He was heaving now as he tried to master himself. I heard him exclaiming —
“Oh my God!” as if the physical torture were unbearable.
The Gray Mahatma was not troubling about King. He had shifted his position so as to watch me, and he seemed to expect me to collapse. So I showed as little as possible of my real feelings, and shut my eyes at intervals as if bewildered. Then he cried out just as the gray-beard on the ledge had done.
The overture to Leonore ceased. The colors gave place to the restful golden light. King had not collapsed yet, and his usual Spartan self-mastery prevented him then from betraying much in the way of symptoms. So I clutched my head and tried to look all-in, which gave me a chance to whisper to King under my arm.
“Can you hang on?”
“Dunno. How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
The Gray Mahatma seemed to think that I was appealing to King for help. He looked delighted. Between my fingers I could see him signaling to the gray-beard on the ledge. The golden light vanished again. And now once more they gave us Eastern music, awful stuff, pulsating with a distant drumbeat like the tramp of an army of devils. The colors were angry and glowering now. The shapes they took as they plaited and wove themselves into one another were all involuted, everything turning itself inside out, and the end of every separate movement was blood-red.
King groaned aloud and rolled over on his side, just as the stuff became so dim and dreadful that you could hardly see your hand before your face, and a noise like the rushing of the wind between the worlds made every inch of your skin prickly with goose-flesh. Low though the colors were, when you shut your eyes you could still see them, but I could not see the Gray Mahatma, and I was sure he could not see me. He would not know which of us was down and out.
So I seized King and dragged him across the floor to the point where the irregular stone steps provided the only way of escape. There I hove him like a sack on to my shoulders. In that drunken, throbbing twilight it would have been easy for some of the gray-beard’s crew to lean from the ledge and send me reeling back again; the best chance was to climb quickly before they were aware of me.
When I reached the ledge it was deserted. There was nothing whatever to indicate where the gray-beard and his crew were. I could not remember exactly the direction of the entrance, but made for the wall, intending to feel my way along it; and just as I started to do that I heard the Gray Mahatma climbing up behind me.
He made hardly more noise than a cat. But though the Mahatma was stealthy, he came swiftly, and in a moment I felt his hand touch me. That was exactly at the moment when the music and colors were subdued to a sort of hell-brew twilight — the kind of glow you might expect before the overwhelming of the world.
“You are as strong as the buffalo himself,” he said, mistaking me for King. “Leave that fool here, and come with me.”
My right hand was free, but the Gray Mahatma had plenty of assistance at his beck and call.
So I put my hand in the small of his back and shoved him along in front of me. If he should learn too soon that King, and not I, was down and out he might decide to have done with us both there and then. My task was to get out of that cavern before the golden light came on again.
The Gray Mahatma led the way to the door, and it was just as well that he did, for there was some secret way of opening it that I should almost certainly have failed to find. I pushed him through ahead of me.
And then we were in pitch darkness. There was neither light, nor room to turn, and nothing for it but for the Mahatma to lead the way along, and I had to be careful in carrying King not to injure him against the rock in the places where the passage narrowed.
However, he began to recover gradually as we neared the end of the long passage, regaining consciousness by fits and starts like a man coming out of anesthesia, and commencing to kick so that I had hard work to preserve him from injury. When his feet were not striking out against the walls his head was, and I finally shook him violently. That had the desired effect. It was just as if fumes had gone out of his head. His body grew warmer almost in a moment, and I felt him break out into a sweat. Then he groaned, and asked me where we were; and a moment later he seemed to understand what was happening, for he struggled to free himself.
“All right,” he whispered. “Let me walk.”
So I let him slip down to his feet in front of me, and holding him beneath the armpits repeated our lock-step trick with positions reversed; and when we reached the outer door that gave on to the narrow main passage he was going fairly strong. The Mahatma opened the door and stepped out into the light; but it was the strange peculiarity of that light that it did not flow beyond its appointed boundaries, and we continued to be in darkness as long as we did not follow him through the door.
So when King stepped out ahead of me, the Mahatma had no means of knowing what a mistake he had been making all along. He naturally jumped to the conclusion that King had been carrying me.
When I stepped out of the pitch blackness he looked more than a little surprised at my appearance, and I grinned back at him as sheepishly as I could manage, hoping he would not see the red patch on my shoulder caused by the pressure of King’s weight, or the scratches made by King’s fingernails when he was beginning to recover consciousness. Nevertheless, he did see, and understood.
“Lead on, MacDuff!” I said in plain English, and perhaps he did not dislike me so immensely after all, for he smiled as he turned his back to lead the way.
We passed, without meeting anybody, out through the narrow door where the first tall speechless showman had admitted us, into the cave where the lingam reposed on its stone altar; and there the Mahatma resumed the lantern he had left.
When we climbed the oval stairway and emerged on the platform under the cupola the dawn was just about to break. The Gray Mahatma raised the stone lid with an ease that betrayed unsuspected strength and dropped it into place, where it fitted so exactly that no one ignorant of the secret would ever have guessed the existence of a hidden stairway.
Swinging his lantern the Mahatma led into the temple, where the enormous idols loomed in quivering shadow, and made straight for the biggest one of all — the four-headed one that faced the marble screen. I thought he was going to bow down and worship it. He actually did go down on hands and knees, and I turned to King in amazement, thus missing my chance to see what he was really up to.
So I don’t know how he managed it; but suddenly the whole lower part of the idol, including the thighs, swung outward and disclosed a dark passage, into which he led us, and the stone swung back into place at our backs as if balanced by weights.
At the far end the Mahatma led into a square-mouthed tunnel, darker if that were possible than the vaulted gloom we had left, and as we entered in single file I thought I heard the splashing of water underneath.
About a minute after that the Mahatma stopped and let King draw abreast; then, continuing to swing the lantern he started forward again. I don’t know whether it was fear, intuition, or just curiosity that made me wonder why he should change the formation in that way, but quite absurdly I deduced that he wished King to walk into a trap. It was that that saved me.
“Look out, King!” I warned.
Exactly as I spoke I set my foot on a yielding stone trap-door — felt a blast of cool air — and heard water unmistakably. The air broug
ht a stagnant smell with it. I slid forward and downward, but sprang simultaneously, managing to get my fingers on the edge of the stone in front. But the balanced trap-door, resuming its equilibrium, caught me on the back of the head, half-stunning me, and in another second I would have gone down into the dark among the alligators. I just had enough consciousness left to realize that I was hanging over the covered end of the alligator tank.
But the faint outer circle of light cast by the Mahatma’s lantern just reached me, and as King turned his head to acknowledge my warning he saw me fall. He sprang back, and seized my wrists, just as my fingers began slipping on the smooth stone; but my weight was almost too much for him, and I came so near to dragging him through after me that the stone trap got past my head and jammed against my elbows.
Then I heard King yelling for the Mahatma to bring the lantern back, and after what seemed an interminable interval the Mahatma came and set one foot on the stone, so that it swung past my head again, nearly braining me in its descent. I don’t know whether he intended that or not.
“There is more in this than accident,” he said, his voice booming hollow as he bent to let the light fall on me. “Very well; pull up your buffalo, and you shall have him!”
It was no easy task for the two of them to haul me up, because the moment the Mahatma removed his foot from the lid of the trap the thing swung upward and acted like the tongue of a buckle to keep me from coming through. When he set his foot on it again, the other foot did not give him sufficient purchase. Finally King managed to pull his loin-cloth off and pass it around under my armpits, after which the two together hauled me clear, minus in the aggregate about a half square foot of skin that I left on the edge of the stone.
Off the Mahatma went alone again, swinging his lantern, and apparently at peace with himself and the whole universe.
Thereafter, King and I walked arm-in-arm, thinking in that way to lessen the risk of further pitfalls. But there was no more. The Mahatma reached at last what looked like a blind stone wall at the end of the tunnel; but there was a flagstone missing from the floor in front of it, and he disappeared down a black-dark flight of steps.
We followed him into a cellar, whose walls wept moisture, but we saw no cobras; and then up another flight of steps on the far side into a chamber that I thought I recognized. He disappeared through a door in the corner of that, and by the time we had groped our way after him he was sitting in the old black panther’s cage with the brute’s head in his lap, stroking and twisting its ears as if it were a kitten. The cage door was wide open, and the day was already growing hot and brassy in the east.
King and I hurried out of the cage, for the panther showed his fangs at us; the Mahatma followed us out and snapped the door shut. Instantly the panther sprang at us, trying to bend the bars together. Failing in that, he lay close and shoved his whole shoulder through, clawing at us. It was hardly any wonder that that secret, yet so simply discoverable door between Yasmini’s palace and the temple-caverns was unknown.
We swung along through the great bronze gate and into the courtyard where the shrubs all stood reflected along with the marble stairway in a square pool. We plunged right in without as much as hesitating on the brink, dragging the Mahatma with us — not that he made the least objection. He laughed, and seemed to regard it as thoroughly good fun.
We splashed and fooled for a few minutes, standing neck-deep and kicking at an occasional fish as it darted by, stirring up mud with our toes until the water was so cloudy that we could see the fish no longer. Then King thought of clothes. He stood on tiptoe and shouted.
“Ismail! O — Ismail!”
Ismail came, like a yellow-fanged wolf, bowed to the Mahatma as if nakedness and royalty were one, and stood eyeing the water curiously.
“Get us garments!” King ordered testily.
“I was not staring at thee, little King sahib,” he answered. “I was marveling!”
But he went off without explaining what he had been marveling at, and we went on with our ablutions, the job of getting ashes out of your hair not being quite so easy as it might appear. I daresay it was fifteen minutes before Ismail came back carrying two complete native costumes for King and me, and a long saffron robe for the Mahatma. Then we came out of the water and the Gray Mahatma smiled.
“I said there were no more traps, and it seems I spoke the truth,” he said wonderingly. “Moreover, I did not set this trap, but it was you yourselves who led me into it.”
“Which trap?” we demanded with one voice.
“You have stirred the mud, my friends, to a condition in which the mugger who lives in that pool is not visible. But the mugger is there, and I don’t know why he did not seize one of you!”
In the center of the pool there was a rockery, for the benefit of plant-roots and breeding fish. I walked around it to look, and there, sure enough, lay a brute about twenty feet long, snoozing with his chin on a corner of the rock. I picked up a pole to prod him and he snapped and broke it, coming close to the edge to clatter his jaws at me. Prodding him a last time, I turned round to look for the Mahatma. He had vanished — gone as utterly and silently as a myth. King had not seen him go. We inquired of Ismail. He laughed.
“There is only one place to go — here,” he answered.
“To the Princess?”
“There is nowhere else! Who shall disobey her? I have orders to unloose the panther if the sahibs take any other way than straight into her presence!”
CHAPTER VIII
THE RIVER OF DEATH
Dressed now in the Punjabi costume with gorgeous silk turbans, we walked side by side up the marble steps and knocked on the brass-bound, teak front door at the top. Exactly as when we arrived on the previous day, the door was immediately opened by two women.
The Mahatma was in there ahead of us, and had evidently told Yasmini sufficient of our adventures to make her laugh. She squealed with delight at sight of us.
“Come! Sit beside me in the window, both of you! My women will bring food. Afterward you shall sleep — poor things, you look as if you need it! O, what is that, Ganesha-ji? Blood on your linen? Were you hurt?”
Her swift, restless fingers drew the cloth aside and showed a few inches of where my bare skin should have been.
“It is nothing. My women shall dress it. They have oils that will cause the skin to grow again within a week. A week is nothing; you and Athelstan will be here longer than a week! And you crossed the Pool of Terrors? I have crossed that too! we three are initiates now!”
“Ye are three who will die unless discretion is the very law ye live by!” said the Gray Mahatma. He seemed annoyed about something.
“Old Dust-and-ashes!” laughed Yasmini, snapping her fingers at him. “Hah!” She laughed delightedly. “They have seen enough to make them believe what I shall tell them!”
“Woman, you woo your own destruction. None has ever set out to betray that secret and survived the first offense!” he answered.
“It was you who betrayed it to me,” she said, with another golden laugh. Then, turning to King again:
“I have sought for that secret day and night! India has always known of its existence; and in every generation some have fought their way in through the outer mysteries to the knowledge within. But those who enter always become initiates, and keep the secret. I was puzzled how to begin, until I heard how, in England, a woman once overheard the secrets of Freemasonry, and was made a Freemason in consequence.
“Now behold this man they call the Gray Mahatma! He does as I tell him! You must know that these Knowers of Royal Knowledge, as they call themselves, are not the little birds in one nest that they would like to be; they quarrel among themselves, and there is a rival faction that knows only street-corner magic, but is more deadly bent on knowing Royal Knowledge than a wolf is determined to get lamb.”
The Gray Mahatma saw fit to challenge some of that statement.
“It is true, that there are wolves who seek to break in,” he
said quietly, “but it is false that there are quarrels among ourselves.”
“Hah!” That little laugh of hers was like the exclamation of a fellow who has got home with his rapier point.
“Quarrels or not,” she answered, “there is a faction that was more than willing to use the ancient passage under my palace grounds, and to hold secret meetings in a room that I made ready for them.”
“Faction!” The Gray Mahatma sneered. “Faithful seniors determined to expel unfaithful upstarts are not a faction!”
“At any rate,” she chuckled, “they wished to hold a meeting unbeknown to the others, and they wished to make wonderful preparations for not being overheard. And I helped them — is that not so, Mahatma-ji? You see, they were scornful of women — then.”
“Peace, woman!” the Mahatma growled. “Does a bee sting while it gathers honey? You spied on our secrets, but did we harm you for it?”
“You did not dare!” she retorted. “If I had been alone, you would have destroyed me along with those unfortunates on whose account you held the meeting. It would have been easy to throw me to the mugger. But you did not know how many women had overheard your secrets! You only knew, that more than one had, and that at least ten women witnessed the fate of your victims. Is that not so?”
“Victims is the wrong word. Call them culprits!” said the Gray Mahatma.
“What would the Government call them?” she retorted.
The Gray Mahatma curled his lip, but made no answer to that. Yasmini turned to King.
“So I knew enough of their secrets to oblige them either to kill me or else teach me all. And they did not dare kill me, because they could not kill all my women too, for fear of Government. So first they took me through that ordeal that you went through last night. And ever since then I have been trying to learn; but this science of theirs is difficult, and I suspect them of increasing the difficulty for my benefit. Nevertheless, I have mastered some of it.”
“You have mastered none of it!” the Gray Mahatma retorted discourteously. “The golden light is the first step. Show me some.”