by Talbot Mundy
“They thought they were being too clever for me,” she went on. “They listened to my suggestion that it might be wise to show Athelstan King the mysteries, and send him to America to prepare the way for what is coming. So we set a trap for Athelstan. And Athelstan brought Ganesha with him. So now I have two men who know the secret, in addition to myself and all my women. And I have one man who has skill enough to learn the secret, now that he knows of it. Perhaps both men can learn it, and I know full well that one can.”
“And then?” King suggested.
“You shall conquer the world!” she answered.
King smiled and said nothing.
“I am uncertain yet whether or not I shall choose to be queen of the earth!” she said. “Sometimes I think it would be fun for you and me to be absolute king and queen of everywhere. Sometimes I think it will be better to make some stupid person — say Ganesha here, for instance — king, and for ourselves to be the power behind the throne. What do you think, Athelstan?”
“I think,” he answered.
“And you observe that the Gray Mahatma likewise thinks!” said she. “He thinks what he can do to thwart us! But I am not afraid! Oh dear no, Mahatma-ji, I am not at all fearful! Your secret is not worth ten seconds’ purchase unless it is of use to me!”
“Woman, is your word worth nothing?” asked the Gray Mahatma. “You can not use what you know and keep the secret too. Let those two men escape, and the secret will be blown to the winds within the hour.”
She laughed outright at him.
“They shall not escape, old raven-in-a-robe!”
Just then some of her women brought a table in, and spread it with fruit-laden dishes at the far end of the room. Yasmini rose to see whether all was as she wished it, and I got a chance, not only to look through the curtains, but also to whisper to King. He shook his head in reply to my question.
“Could you manage for two, do you think?” he asked; and by that I knew him for a vastly more than usually brave man. Consenting to what you know is sure to destroy you, if the other fellow fails, calls for courage.
“Makes a two to one chance of it,” I answered.
“Very well, it’s a bet. Give your orders!” said King.
The Mahatma sat rigid in mid-room with closed eyes, as if praying. His hands were crossed on his breast, and his legs twisted into a nearly unimaginable knot. He looked almost comatose.
The shutters and the glass windows were open wide to admit the morning breeze. Nothing was between us and freedom but the fluttering silk curtains and a drop of about seventy feet into an unknown river.
“Hold my hand,” I said, “and jump your limit outward!”
The Gray Mahatma opened one eye and divined our intention.
“Mad!” he exclaimed. “So then that is the end of them!”
He believed what he said, for he sat still. But Yasmini came running, screaming to her women to prevent us.
King and I took off together, hand-in-hand, and I take my Bible oath that I looked up, and saw Yasmini and the Gray Mahatma leaning out of the window to watch us drown!
Of course, seventy feet is nothing much — provided you are used to the take-off, and know the water, and have a boat waiting handy to pick you up. But we had none of these advantages, and in addition to that we had the grievous handicap that King could not swim a stroke.
We took the water feet-first, close together, and that very instant I knew what we were up against. As we plunged under, we were whirled against a sunken pole that whipped and swayed in the current. King was wrenched away from me. When I fought my way to the surface I was already a hundred yards beyond the palace wall, and there was no sign of King, although I could see his turban pursuing mine down-stream. We were caught in the strongest current I had ever striven with.
I don’t know what persuaded me to turn and try to swim against it for a moment. Instinct, I suppose. It was utterly impossible; I was swept along backward almost as fast as I had been traveling before. But what the effort did do was to bring me face-up-stream, and so I caught sight of King clinging to a pole and being bobbed under every time the weight of water caused the pole to duck. I managed to cling to a pole myself, although like King it ducked me repeatedly, and it was perfectly evident that neither of us would be alive in the next ten minutes unless a boat should come or I should produce enough brawn and brain for two of us. And there was no boat in sight.
So between ducks I yelled to King to let go and drift down toward me. He did it; and that, I believe, is the utmost test of cold courage to which I have ever seen any man subjected; for even a strong swimmer becomes panic-stricken when he learns he is no longer master of his element. King had the self-control and pluck to lie still and drift down on me like a corpse, and I let go the pole in the nick of time to seize him as his head went under.
Followed a battle royal. Fight how I might, I could not keep both of our heads out of the water more than half the time, and King very soon lost the little breath that was left in him. Thereafter, he struggled a bit, but that did not last long, and presently he became unconscious. I believed he was dead.
The choice then seemed to lie between drowning too or letting go of him. I did not dare try the shallows, for ninety per cent. of them are quicksands in that river, and more than one army has perished in the effort to force its way across. The only possible safety lay in keeping to mid-stream and sweeping along with the current until something should turn up — a boat — a log — possibly a backwater, or even the breakwater of a bridge.
So I decided to drown, and to annoy the angels of the underworld by taking as long as possible in the process. And I set to work to fight as I had never in my whole life fought before. It was like swimming in a millrace. The current swirled us this and that way, but everlastingly forward.
Sometimes the current rolled us over and over on each other, but for fifty per cent. of the time I managed to keep King on top of me, I swimming on my back and holding him by both arms, head nearly out of the water. I can’t explain exactly why I went to all that trouble, for I was convinced he was dead.
I remember wondering what the next world was going to be like, and whether King and I would meet there, or whether we would each be sent to a sphere suited to our individual requirements — and if so, what my sphere would be like, and whether either of us would ever meet Yasmini, and what she would be doing there. But it never occurred to me once that Athelstan King might be alive yet, or that he and I would be presently treading mother earth again.
I remember several terrific minutes when a big tree came whirling toward us in an eddy, and my legs got tangled up in some part of it that was under water. Then, when I managed to struggle free, King’s cotton loin-cloth became wrapped in a tangle of twigs and I could neither wrench nor break him free; whenever I tried it I merely sent myself under and pulled his head after me.
However, that tree suggested the possibility of prolonging the agony a while.
I seized a branch and tried to take advantage of it, using all my strength and skill to keep the tree from rolling over on King and submerging him completely. I can remember when we whirled under the steel bridge and the tree struck the breakwater of the middle pier; that checked us for a moment, and instead of sending us under, dragged King half out of the water, so that he lay after that on top of a branch.
Then the stream got us going again, and swung the butt end of the tree around so that I was forced by it backward through the arch of the bridge; and after that for more than a mile we were waltzed round and round past sand-banks where the alligators lay on the look-out for half-burned corpses from the burning ghats higher up.
At last we swung round a curve in the river and came on a quiet bay where they were washing elephants. The current swung the tree inshore to a point where it struck a submerged sand-bank and stuck there; and there we lay with the current racing by, and King bobbing up and down with his head out of water, and I too weak by that time to break off the twig around which
his loin-cloth was wrapped.
Well, there we were; but after a few minutes I raised enough steam for the whistle at all events. I yelled until my own ear-drums seemed to be bursting and my lungs ached from the pressure on the water in them, and after what seemed an eternity one of the mahouts on shore heard me.
Hope surged triumphant! I could see him wave his arm, and already I saw visions of dry land again, and a disappointed Yama! But I was overlooking one important point: we were in India, where rescues are not undertaken in a hurry.
He called a conference. I saw all the mahouts gather together in one place and stare at us and talk. They swung their arms as they argued. I don’t know what argument it was that finally appealed to the mahouts, but after an interminable session one of them fetched a long rope and nine or ten of them climbed on the backs of three big elephants. They worked their way a little bit upstream, and then came as close as the elephants dared. One of the big brutes felt his way cautiously to within twenty yards, and then threw up his trunk and refused to budge another inch.
At that a lean, naked, black man stood up on his rump and paid out the rope down-stream. He had to make nine or ten attempts before it finally floated within reach of my hand. Then I made it fast to the tree and, taking King in my right arm, started to work my way along it. It was just as well I did that, and got clear of the branch; for the mahouts passed the rope around the elephant’s neck and set him to hauling; he rolled the tree over and over, and that would surely have been the end of King and me if we had been within reach of the overturning branches. As it was I clung to the rope and the elephant hauled the lot of us high and dry.
CHAPTER IX
THE EARTHQUAKE ELEPHANT
At the end of a minute’s examination I began to suspect that King was not quite dead, so I recalled the old life-saver’s drill and got to work on him. It took time. As King came more and more to his senses, and vomited a bit, and began to behave in all ways like a living man again, I had a chance to talk to the mahouts; and they were just like the members of any other union, preferring conversation to alleged hard labor any day of the week. They told me why the elephants were being washed so early and we enjoyed a regular conversazione on the beach.
It appeared the elephants were wanted to take part in a procession, and for a while they let me guess what sort of a procession. But at last they took compassion on my ignorance.
“She has issued invitations to a party for princesses in her panch mahal!”
Who was she? Everybody knew who she was!
“The Princess Yasmini?” I suggested.
Whereat they all chuckled and made grimaces, and did everything except acknowledge her name in public.
And then suddenly Athelstan King decided to sit up and spat some more water out and tried to laugh. And they thought that was so exquisitely funny that they all laughed too.
Then, when he had coughed a little more —
“We’re going to attend that party!”
“Why?” I asked him.
“Two reasons.” But he had to cough up more water before he could tell them. “One: The Gray Mahatma will never rest until he knows we’re dead, or done for, and the safest place is close to the enemy; and, two: I never will rest until I know the secret of that science of theirs!”
“How in thunder are we going to get back?” I objected.
“Ride!” he suggested.
“How — when — where?”
“Elephant — now — to her palace,” he answered.
“They’re not her elephants.”
“So much the better! She’ll think the Maharajah knows all about us. She’ll have to accord us protection after that.”
He asked a dozen more questions, and finally struggled to his feet.
“My friend,” he said then to the chief mahout, “if you propose to take us two sahibs to her palace, and be back at your master’s stables in time to get ready for the Bibi-kana, you’ll have to hurry!”
“But I did not propose it!” the mahout answered.
“Nay, the gods proposed it. Which is your fastest elephant?”
“That great one yonder — Akbar. But who is giving orders? We are a maharajah’s servants.”
“The gods are ordering all this business!” King assured him. “I wish to ride to her palace.”
“By her leave?”
“By the gods’ leave.”
“Will the gods pay me?”
“Doubtless. But she will pay first — setting the gods a good example.”
The native of India finds it perfectly convenient to ride on a six-inch plank, slung more or less like a house-painter’s platform against an elephant’s bulging ribs, and it does not seem to make much difference to him when more weight is on one side than on the other. But King and I had to stand and hold each other’s hands across the pad; and even so we were by no means too secure, for Akbar resented being taken away from the herd and behaved like a mutinous earthquake.
It was not so far to the city by road, because the river wound a good deal and the road cut straight from point to point. But it was several miles, and we covered it at pretty nearly the speed of a railroad train.
In spite of his rage, Akbar had perfect control of himself. Having missed about half his morning swim, and the herd’s society, he proposed to miss nothing else, and there was not one cart, one ekka, one piled-up load in all those miles that he did not hit and do his utmost to destroy. There was not one yellow dog that he did not give chase to and try to trample on.
He stopped to pull the thatch from the roof of a little house beside the road, but as the plying ankus made his head ache he couldn’t stay long enough to finish that job but scooted uproad again in full pursuit of a Ford car, while an angry man shoved his head through the hole in the roof of the house and cursed all the rumps of all the elephants, together with the forebears and descendants of their owners and their wives.
It seemed that Akbar was fairly well-known thereabouts. The men in the Ford car shouted the news in advance of his coming, and the road into the city began to look like the track of a routed army. Every man and animal took to his heels, and Akbar trumpeted wild hurrahs as he strained all tendons in pursuit. He needed no second wind, because he never lost his first, but he took the whole course as far as the city gate at a speed that would have satisfied Jehu, son of Nimshi, who, the Bible says, made Israel to sin.
That particular city gate consisted of an arch, covered with carvings of outrageous-looking gods, and as a picture display it was perfect, but as an entrance to a crowded city it possessed no virtue. It was so narrow that only one vehicle could pass at a time, and the whole swarm jammed between it and us like sticks in front of a drain.
And not even Akbar’s strength was so great that he could shove them through, so the ancient problem of an irresistible force in contact with an immovable object was presented, and solved by Akbar after a fashion of his own.
He picked the softest spot, which was a wain-load of cotton bales, and upset it, cannoning off that cushion so swiftly as to come within an ace of scattering his four passengers across the landscape; and discerning, with a swift strategic eye that would have done credit to the dashingest cavalry general, that that rout was complete and nothing could be gained by adding to it, he headed for the river and the women’s bathing place, took the broad stone steps at a dead run, and plunged straight in.
No ship was ever launched with more perfect aplomb, nor floated more superbly on an even keel than did Akbar at the women’s bathing ghat. For a moment I thought he proposed to lie down there and finish his interrupted toilet, but he contented himself with squirting water on the sore spot caused by the thumping ankus of the driver’s and set out to swim upstream.
It was not until he had reached the second ghat and climbed the steps there that Akbar put himself in Napoleon’s class. When he reached the top of the steps no amount of whacking with the ankus could make him turn to the right and follow the city street. He turned to the left
, tooted a couple of wild hurrahs through his newly wetted whistle, and raced to meet the traffic as it struggled through the gate in single file!
There was ruin ripe for harvest and it looked like the proper time to jump. But suddenly — with that delightful wheeled panic at his mercy, the big brute stopped, stood still and looked at them, muttering and gurgling to himself. Instantly the mahout began petting him, calling him endearing names and praising his wisdom and discretion. I can’t swear that the beast understood what was said to him, but he acted exactly as if he did. He picked up dust from the street with his trunk, blew a little of it in the general direction of the defeated enemy, blew a little more on himself, and turned his rump toward the gate, as if to signify that hostilities were over!
As he did that, a man who was something of an athlete swung himself up on the off-side footboard, and a second later the proud face of the Gray Mahatma confronted me across the saddle-pad alongside King’s!
“You are heavy enough to balance the two of us,” he said, as if no other comment were necessary. “Why did you run away from me? You can never escape!”
Well, of course anybody could say that after he had found us again.
“Was it you who checked this elephant?” I asked him, remembering what he had done to the black panther and the snakes, but he did not answer.
“Where do you think you are going?” I asked.
“That is what the dry leaves asked of the wind,” he answered. “An observant eye is better than a yearning ear, and patience outwears curiosity!”
Suddenly I recalled a remark that King had made on the beach and it dawned on me that by frightening the mahout into silence the Mahatma might undo the one gain we had made by that plunge and swim. As long as the Maharajah who owned the elephant was to hear about our adventure, all was well. News of us would reach the Government. Most of the maharajahs are pro-British, because their very existence as reigning princes depends on that attitude, and they can be relied on to report to the British authorities any irregularity whatever that comes under their notice and at the same time does not incriminate themselves.