by Talbot Mundy
“You of the West are mechanical,” he said. “You think in terms of engines. Very well. Let us say one of you wishes to solve a transportation problem. You desire to invent a machine that shall lessen distances. Yet you are ignorant. How long then would you think it reasonable first to study the mechanics of your problem — all the laws of friction, electricity, contraction and expansion, dynamics, metallurgy — and so on? Would you attempt to invent, let us say, an airplane without first studying those laws? And could you learn enough for a beginning, say, in half a lifetime? Nevertheless, you seem to expect me to explain in fifteen minutes how to avoid the malevolence of dugpas, concerning which you are almost entirely ignorant, and how to—” He paused. “What else is it you wish to do?”
“To reach Sham-bha-la,” said Grim, “after rescuing Rait.”
“After doing the impossible, to reach a place whose very existence you can’t prove, and concerning the nature of which you know nothing! All this you wish me to tell you in fifteen minutes.” Grim smiled. “We have until morning,” he suggested amiably.
He whom Grim had called the Father of Conundrums bowed ironically. Then he indicated with a gesture all those seated in a circle around the fire.
“These, too, seek what you seek,” he remarked. “Observe them. Are they young!? Observe her.” (He signified the woman with a nod and a dry glance at her.) “She was a married woman, mother of three children whom she raised to manhood. Then her husband died and she went forth as a sanyassin, wandering all over India, seeking the way, for I forget how many years. Thereafter for what some would think a lifetime she endured austerities in a nunnery of which you have never heard. And now she has come this far, but no farther.” His eyes swept the circle again as he paused. “Not one of these,” he went on, “but has sought at least for twenty years what you are seeking. Thus far only, they have come. And I tell you, they will have to go forth and do what they know, before they can go one step farther. You believe I can instruct you fully before morning?”
“You can try,” said Grim. “I think you can do more than you would like me to believe.”
Chullunder Ghose, rocking himself with excitement, leaped at the breach that he thought Grim had made in the wall of obscurity.
“Surely you can do more! Let me see one evidence of power — great, wise Guru that I know you are — and I shall submit myself, performing all that is required!”
“You would reward me for an exhibition? Is that it? Do you think I wish to buy your submission?”
“Set me a test then! What shall I do to persuade you to accept me as your chela?” asked Chullunder Ghose. A sort of revivalist fervor had seized him.
“Serve those well in whose service you are!” was the answer, prompt and unequivocal.
The babu bowed his head and sighed like a punctured rubber tire. Grim, twitching his eyebrows, picked up the thread of his argument. He knew, as I confess I did not, something of what was required of him before he might expect plain answers to his questions.
“We are men who have no claims on us,” he said, “and we are bent on a definite goal.”
“Is it definite? How definite?” the other asked.
“This much,” said Grim, “that we’re willing to die if we fail. We’re going forward. We intend to rescue Rait, and we intend to find Sham-bha-la. You — I don’t know who you are — convince me — though I don’t know how — that you can help us if you wish. You knew my name without my telling you. Therefore, I’m sure you’ve had word from Lhaten in some way, and that Lhaten told you all about us before we got here. It’s also clear enough that you wished to see us, or you wouldn’t have been here when we came. Furthermore, there was no need to admit us into this wonderful place. We should never have known of its existence unless the woman had brought us down here, and I don’t doubt that she did it by your orders. That convinces me that either Lhaten, or else the more mysterious Rao Singh who came to the cave and cured my friend Ramsden, has told you we’re fit to be trusted. It’s as plain as this hand before my face that you can read me as I have often had to read the savages I’ve dealt with in the way of duty, only I don’t doubt you do it better; probably incomparably better. Savages have often come to me and told me to do my duty and help them because I knew more than they did. I never refused, although I always helped them in my own way, which was frequently successful and occasionally not. I may seem like a savage to you, but you appear to me to know a great deal and it doesn’t make any difference to me how long this circle of chelas has been seeking what I only recently began to seek. I have been busy in my own way. So has Ramsden. So have Chullunder Ghose and Narayan Singh. They’re friends of mine, and I don’t pick friends at random. I can guarantee them. You may say we’re just four savages who have reached this place together. And speaking as a savage, I say to you, Do your duty! You know what it is.”
That was the longest speech I ever heard Grim make. Its effect was magical. The Father of Conundrums (to this day I have not learned his name) stood up and bowed to Grim.
“I recognize you,” he said simply.
All the chelas in the circle rose and looked at Grim with studied curiosity. Some of them smiled, but the majority received the news in silence. The old woman came and, thrusting herself between me and Grim, put over his shoulders her own necklace made of dried red berries. Then she threw more fuel on the fire until the sparks rose in a shower to the roof and the whole cavern glistened and shimmered like mother o’ pearl, in the dew of a mid-summer morning.
CHAPTER XVI. Jeff Ramsden’s Dream
Consider this, my son: this earth-life is a little time, of which a third is spent asleep. What went before it, and what cometh after, are a long time — verily a time too long for measurement. Shall we be of the herd who say that dreams are a delusion because waking we cannot interpret them in terms of common speech? Or shall we, rather than pretend to have more knowledge than the gods, admit that possibly some dreams may link us with that universe from which we came into a temporary world, and into which we must inevitably yield ourselves again? Some dreams are memories, it may be, of experience gained in the infinity of time before the world was. And the wisest — aye, the very wisest of us — is he altogether sure that all earth-life is not a dream.
— from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup
EMOTIONS are not easy to explain in writing. Here, in this draughty cave, where the paper flutters and the ink is freezing, even memory does not function properly. I have to keep warming my fingers by flapping my arms in the way old London cabmen used to do on frosty mornings, and in the intervals it is not easy to recall sensations that occurred a month ago. So much has happened since.
I remember Grim’s face. I remember that once, in Jerusalem, when a high commissioner had sent for him to thank him privately for secret public service that undoubtedly had saved the Near East from a holy war of Moslem against Jew and Christian, he had come out smiling in exactly the same way. Someone had touched the concealed, inner core of his manhood.
Now he stood still, looking straight into the eyes of the old guru, whom he had called Father of Conundrums. Guru is a desecrated word; I use it for lack of another to describe the man whose slowly spoken phrase “I recognize you” opened a door, as it were, through which Grim stepped, and closed the same door in the faces of Narayan Singh, Chullunder Ghose and me.
We were the same men, standing on the same pearl-colored floor of stalagmite. No word, not a gesture of Grim’s so much as hinted at a change in our relationship. The only way I can suggest the feeling I experienced is to say that it may be a woman who sees a better-looking woman speaking to her husband, feels as I did then. I don’t know. But it may be. Chullunder Ghose was jealous and gave tongue:
“Is it not enough that white men should have stolen India? Shall they rob us also of our heritage in spiritual things? Why am I unrecognized?”
“You are better fitted to cheat pilgrims at Benares!” growled Narayan Singh.
“You
— you will die with a sword in your back!” said the babu.
I expected anything to happen, except what actually did. The chelas formed a circle around Grim and the old guru, excluding us three and the woman, who took me by the arm and fairly drove Chullunder Ghose along in front of her, he arguing like a pot-bellied bunnia who has lost a lawsuit. Narayan Singh strode gloomily behind us, muttering to himself.
The woman led us up over the gallery into a dark cavern in which empty barley bags and sheepskins had been piled for use as beds. She found an ordinary box of safety matches and lit half a dozen butter lamps in niches in the wall, which instantly brought great, carved, staring, seated figures out of the surrounding gloom — solemn, serene and majestic, like a conference of prehistoric gods. It was hard to believe that they did not move and were not breathing. She set her box of matches on the lap of one of them.
It looked as if the chamber were prepared for us. There were three cups, three earthen jars of drinking water, three pairs of heavy blankets thrown on three of the heaps of bedding.
“You should not talk. You should sleep,” the woman told us and immediately sat down on a sheepskin by the entrance.
We wanted to ask questions but she shook her head until the gray mane blew out horizontally, then laid a gnarled old finger on her lips. Thereafter, gradually, as if she let her muscles find their proper relaxation one by one, she fell into the attitude in which those images were carved and stayed there motionless as if she herself were hewn out of the rock.
Chullunder Ghose sighed despondently and rolled himself on to a heap of sheepskins, pulling up the blankets over him and belching in the way that Hindus do before they sleep.
“So this is hope!” he grumbled. “Taste it — and it is snatched away at once! That is always my luck. Jim-grim goes forward alone, and we three will be sent back — take my word for it! I should say, let us go and join the dugpas, if I weren’t afraid of them!”
“I go where Jimgrim goes!” announced Narayan Singh. “Whoever can turn me back will have to be a good one! Let us sleep while we may. In the morning Jimgrim will be tired — aye, as a young recruit is tired after his first week on the drill ground — only more! It may be he will need our strength. Let the hag keep watch.”
He fell asleep, as his heavy breathing proved, within five minutes after he had spoken. Chullunder Ghose began to snore not many minutes afterward. I, too, had a feeling that the woman might be trusted to sit sentinel. Her eyes were open, fixed in meditative calm and she looked as if sleep were no part of her plan for the night. Nevertheless, I made up my mind to stay awake; I had a feeling which worried me, that something in the nature of a crack was opening in the intimacy I had long enjoyed with Grim. It was a vague, uncomfortable feeling. There was no explaining it.
So for a while I sat upright on a heap of sheepskins in between the knees of two of the great carved images and with my back against the wall. It was like sitting in a tomb. The little yellow flames of the butter lamps cast leaping shadows that made the great carved figures seem to move, and when a rat ran over the floor I learned that my nerves were in no respectable condition. It was a big rat, but it had no right to startle me in that way. The old woman took no notice of it.
Then the wall grew cold against my back, so I used the blankets; and I had no sooner draped them over my shoulders than I felt an irresistible weight over my eyelids. It was not unnatural; a long march on the first day after convalescence, followed by a hot bath and a full meal could hardly have helped but produce that effect, though I fought it, even forcing my eyelids open with my fingers.
It was not very long, I suppose, before sleep overcame me and I slipped into a dream, so realistic that every single detail of it stands out clear in memory. In the dream I was sitting on that heap of bedding, trying to force myself to stay awake and watching the old woman by the entrance, wondering how she had learned that trick of concentration with her eyes wide open, and what good it did her. I particularly remember I could hear the snoring of Chullunder Ghose.
All at once, silently, in came the man with the savagely masculine features and the womanly black hair, who had sent me reeling backward in Sidiki ben Mohammed’s house. He took no notice of the woman, and she none of him. He came up straight toward where I was sitting and the smile with which he greeted me was of triumph and condescension.
“So you have lost your friend!” he said maliciously.
From first to last throughout the dream my part in it was passive, except insofar as I fought all the while with an intense sleepiness, which I recognized as dangerous. I seemed to be in the power of something that held me speechless and unable to do anything without that individual’s permission, although I could hear, see, obey and understand.
“Do you know what they are doing to your friend Grim?” he asked me. “Come and see.”
I got off the bed and followed him, still conscious of the old woman, who moved her head slowly to follow us with her gaze, but without once blinking. We went out to the gallery from which we had first entered the main cavern, and there we stood side by side looking down at the men who were torturing Grim.
The fire of rough tamarisk knots had been changed to a circle of flame that appeared to come out of the floor of the cavern and around that, in a wider circle, sat the chelas doing something, I could not see what, that increased the flame’s fierceness whenever the old guru spoke to them. The guru was seated outside the circle of chelas on a mat that seemed to have no contact with the floor.
In the midst of the circle of flame stood Grim with his hands tied to a stake behind his back. His face was set like a red Indian’s enduring agony, but I saw that he held the cord that tied his wrists in either hand and could release it if he chose.
“That,” said the man beside me, “is the way they measure mercy. If he were an ordinary chela they would give him no cord and he would have to depend solely on his will. He will burn unless he stands exactly in the middle of the fire. They roast the weakness out of him. When they’ve finished with him he will have no human qualities at all and he might just as well be dead.”
“Does he love?” asked the voice of the guru.
“He loves!” cried the chelas.
“Burn it out of him!”
They did something that made the wall of flame white-hot and I saw Grim nearly fainting in the midst of it. A cloud that looked like smoke went up and when it vanished he no longer resembled the Grim I had known but had the dried-up look of an ascetic. He looked up through the flame and saw me watching him. His face, it seemed to me, was scornful.
“Does he hope?” asked the voice of the guru.
“He hopes!” cried the chelas. “Burn it out of him!”
Again the flame grew white-hot and I saw Grim writhe, while he clung with all his might to the cord that held his wrists fast to the stake. Then smoke, in a sudden great cloud as if something had burst; and when it disappeared there was nothing even likable about Grim; he was stern, contemptuous, emotionless, and when he looked toward me it was as if he wondered why he had ever called himself my friend.
“Does he hate?” asked the voice of the guru.
“Now he hates life!” cried the chelas.
“Burn it out of him!”
Again the white-hot ring of flame, and Grim became invisible. The chelas laughed. The man beside me touched me on the shoulder.
“You have lost your friend,” he said. “When a man can’t hate there is nothing left of him. Now come.”
He led me along the gallery toward an opening that was not there when the old woman led us in that evening. We passed through gloom into a clear sharp light in which everything was finely etched, and Rait sat at a table with a board in front of him on which he was moving things that looked like checkers. Somewhere in the distance there was a maze of tangle-foot fly-papers, and sometimes, when he moved a piece on the board a man got caught by the feet. At each move something happened. He appeared to be controlling forces that obliged men to act in t
his or that way, overwhelming them if they refused.
“This is what Grim missed,” said the voice of my guide. “He took the wrong road — into nothingness.”
Yet I could see that Rait’s game was a losing one. The forces he controlled were taking hold of the men on whom he used them and he had to keep using more and more force to control his victims. I could see him sweating with the effort, his face white with fear; and he could not stop, because the moment he should relax the effort his victims were ready to turn the forces back on him. The thing was horrible. Being a dream, though vivid, the impending cataclysm was beyond the scope of ordinary thought. No words could describe what I saw was coming. My guide screamed, like a wildcat in a trap, and ran to Rait to try to help him with the pieces on the board, moving them swiftly, his eyes glaring; and at each move thousands were obliterated. Then Rait shouted and turned into a monster with fangs and claws, who tried to rend the man who had taken his place at the board. They fought, yelling at each other, as the forces rushed toward them like a returning tide — and I woke up.
Narayan Singh was sitting up and swearing Sikh oaths. Chullunder Ghose was screaming, his head under blankets.
“A bad dream,” said Narayan Singh and threw a folded sheepskin at the babu.
Chullunder Ghose sat up and stared at us, and at the shadows playing on the great carved figures.
“Krishna!” he exclaimed. “I had a dream of dugpas: They were showing me how to grow great on stuff to eat that worked like yeast. I was bursting!”
“Indigestion!” said the Sikh. “If you had paid your reckoning by chopping wood, you would have slept like an honest man. I dreamed of war. It was a good game while it lasted but the dead men would not stay dead, and when they came back they had other weapons. Not good.”