by Talbot Mundy
There was a short halt, hardly remembered afterward, at a place where Rahman left the horses to be fed and brought along later; meanwhile they were stabled for a good night’s sleep in a low, warm hut well hidden behind one of those fantastic limestone spurs that look as if Titans had built them to keep mountains from falling in and filling the Himalayan gorges. Black-bearded men with rifles and bandoliers, and with unexpected khaki uniforms beneath their sheepskin coats, appeared from nowhere, answered Rahman’s greeting with curt monosyllables, did their appointed task, and vanished. Somebody brought Gup a stale chupatty that he munched without tasting, eating without knowing that he ate. Then on again.
Interminable, echoing darkness — sky invisible — a hint, perhaps subconscious, of enormous walls on either hand — sense, rather than sight revealing measureless chasms, now to the right, now to the left, that echoed to the rattle of stones displaced by the camel’s footfall — hollow, lonely echoes, sounding like voices of souls in search of the bodies that no friend had buried. Once in a while came a burst like laughter as the wind struck the mouth of an unseen cave and blustered, buffeting the back-flow. Now and then Rahman, over-shoulder, always repeating the same phrase: “Soon — soon now, Huzoor! Aiee — what camels!” There was a hint of daylight, very cold and dimly driving through a gray mist into the ravine, when Rahman at last turned near a bridge once thrown by British army engineers across a chasm in one of the never-ending border wars. The bridge had long ago fallen in. Rahman turned toward a mass of tumbled boulders, where no road led. Ages ago a limestone cliff had fallen, leaving a slope with neither track nor foothold, except where the larger boulders lay around the base. The mother of all fallen rocks lay nearly smothered under débris at the north edge, close against the cliff, and it was toward that, urging the grumbling camels, who hate uneven ground, that Rahman guided the procession.
Presently, in the dim light, Gup could see there had been recent blasting. Earth and débris had been scattered to hide the new, raw, telltale splintered rock, but the weather had not had time to work on it and town eyes could have seen there was a new cave, or a tunnel or shaft of some kind driven into the cliff-face somewhere close at hand. There was almost a mine dump in miniature, although some one had been at great pains to disguise it, and it might not be long before wind and rain should make it unnoticeable. Rahman grinned. He gestured. Here was a keyhole such as pleased his Afghan heart — a new way, not on survey maps, that penetrated into unknown vitals of an unseen mystery. Eyes that were bleary and red from lack of sleep revealed a glitter in their depths, and even Pepul Das, bone-weary and chilled to speechlessness, stiffened his back on his camel and found the grace to grin. Gup saw no signs of human life, although he stared about him when he thought he heard a breech-lock click.
Between the huge, square fallen rock and the face of the cliff, as they drew nearer, a narrow cleft opened. It was barely wide enough to let a loaded camel pass. They followed that for fifty yards; it was V-shaped, open to the sky, and on the left-hand side, some twenty feet above the ground, was a ledge on which boulders and stones had been placed ready to be pushed over, either with the idea of crushing unwelcome intruders or, as seemed more likely, to conceal the roadbed. It was at the end of that fifty yards that all the blasting had been done. A hole, very skilfully masked by a dike in the face of the cliff, had been hewn and blasted until it reached a natural, wide fissure, whose smooth floor proved it once had been a subterranean watercourse until volcanic upheaval or earthquake turned the water elsewhere, or dried it up.
It was long and winding, but not totally dark because in places the fissure opened to the sky. In those places further blasting had been done, to get rid of rocks that had fallen in. In two or three places they were obliged to duck their heads to avoid a low roof, but there was generally ample head-room and in places the echoing darkness overhead sounded and felt like the hollow core of a vast mountain, black with bats. The ceaseless moaning of a chill wind deadened the camels’ foot-fall; it blew in their faces, slightly tainted with the smell of dung and wood-smoke, and the smell suggested welcome warmth — a suggestion that made sleepiness a torturing, almost overwhelming weight on watery eyes.
Gup estimated the length of that passage at nearly half a mile before it opened into a draughty cavern, water-worn and glistening with stalactite.
“The Serpent’s Mouth!” Rahman shouted. “And by Allah, was there ever such a serpent?”
The shout seemed hardly louder than normal speech; most of the sound was swallowed by the strange acoustics of the domed roof. Except for the height, the cavern was not unlike a hollow snake’s head: light streamed in through the low, wide mouth and there were gleaming fangs of stalactite to strengthen the illusion. The long passage they had traversed resembled a snake as much as was necessary to set Moslem imagination working. Rahman began reeling off an endless myth concerning a saint-devouring serpent that had lain there since the dawn of time, only to be slain by a descendant of the Prophet who had charged on horseback into the fire-belching mouth and had been coughed forth into paradise by the dying reptile’s final spasm.
“Jonah and the big fish were nothing compared to it. And I will show you this saint’s grave,” said Rahman.
Gup hardly listened. Riding between two stalactites, on a camel that slipped on glass-smooth stone, he stared three thousand feet into a gorge whose edges were a mile apart, and whose length and breadth was strewn with rocks that looked like monstrous, lime-white skeletons. It was only for a few minutes that he could bear to look at them; then the sun peered in over the rim of the gorge and the whole interior became a furnace of white fire, intolerable.
“Cover the eyes!” commanded Rahman. “By Allah, there is many a blind man begging bread, who looked too long on this sight. Cover the eyes. I lead the way.”
He even tied cloths on the camels’ heads, making fast the nose of Gup’s beast to the crupper of his own, but he left Pepul Das to take care of himself. He found a long stick in a crevice, and with that in the same hand that held the camel’s nose-rope, guarding his eyes with a cloth hung over his left forearm, he gingerly led the way downward along a track fit for goats. It varied in width from one to three feet. There were places where a camel’s right flank rubbed the wall while his left flank overhung the precipice.
“And they are bad brutes at this down-hill work,” said Rahman, grumbling over-shoulder. “Put a foot wrong and they perish! Below there are the bones of a hundred camels — and of horses many — but of mules not one! Irish’allah [if God wills] we shall nevertheless not die until the appointed hour.”
On a ledge where there was room for all three camels to stand side by side and Rahman paused to rest himself Gup saw fit to demand more knowledge.
“Do you mean to tell me my tents and horses came by this road.”
“By my beard, no! There is another way in, easier, though much more difficult to find.”
He led on, crossing a crevasse by a bank of débris two feet wide, where a false step by man or camel would have dropped them on to crags a thousand feet below. An eagle flew alongside, watching them, poised like a swimmer, his bright eye hungry for warm, rock-broken carcases.
“Many a camel and man that beak has ripped!” said Rahman, stooping to throw stones that made the eagle swerve and rise a hundred feet. “May Allah slay the lousy bird and let me live!”
As he led he kicked loose stones over the edge, until Gup cursed him because of the irresistible fascination of watching the stones descend, but Rahman shed the hot speech like a boxer avoiding a blow, with a duck of the knees and a roll of the neck.
“And if I kick them not away, how long will a blinded camel go before he slips on one of those? And then what?”
On another ledge he said his prayers, spreading out his saddle-cloth for mat and turning toward Mecca, first using dust from the cliff in place of water for the ritual ablutions and then reprimanding Pepul Das for lack of piety.
“Ungodly fool! If Allah ple
ases, we be all three dead men at the next turn! Pray, thou, that this unbeliever bring no judgment on our heads!”
He prayed with dignity, with the devout, wholehearted candor of a strong man on his knees confessing his own weakness in the face of the Inscrutable. Then:
“Lie-abed sots and infidels are those sons of unwashed swine below there! No fires — none to greet us! Self-respecting men — aye, even sons of emperors would have come thus far to meet us on the way!”
Gup mentioned that he had smelled smoke in the passage that led to the “Serpent’s Mouth.” Rahman chuckled:
“Look back and upward, Huzoor. If you and I had such a hiding-place as this, would we leave it unguarded? There were a hundred rifles within ten strides of where we looked into the gorge just now to see the sun rise. There were ten men watching when we turned into the Serpent’s Tail. Look backward now.”
On a ledge like a giant’s out thrust lower lip, in silhouette against a bright blue sky Gup saw the shapes of skin-clad rifle-men, like vultures squatting in a row.
Curiosity swept over him then and awakened in him something almost like interest in living. At first he resented it, in the way that some sick men resent attention, but every wholesome natural instinct rallied to his aid and within a few moments he was actually hoping he might get safely to the bottom of that ghastly trail, in order to learn the secret of this guarded valley — or rather chasm; he could see no inlet or outlet. It appeared to be a huge hole several miles in circumference, with a floor of quartz and mica, and with walls of discolored limestone. As they drew nearer the bottom the glare grew less because of the shadow from the eastern wall and it became possible to distinguish objects, notably an irregular line of dead trees that appeared to follow a dried-up watercourse. What from the summit had looked like giant skeletons became enormous boulders lying in confusion. There was not a vestige of life anywhere in sight, except for those guards on the ledge near the summit; even the lone eagle had vanished.
However, presently, almost a thousand feet yet from the bottom, the track they were painfully following plunged into a wide dark hole and the camels seemed to know that place; they hurried, the one in front so close oh Rahman’s heels that he had to use the stick to hold it back. The camel pranced, backing away from the stick, crowding the beast that Gup was riding, forcing him to the edge of the track, where a rock rolled loose under his weight. For a second he hung by the nose-rope. Gup jumped for his life, seizing the other camel’s leg and swinging himself up on to the track. The camel resented that leg-hold and kicked, but the kick went wild because the nose-rope broke that same instant. Gup’s camel dropped into space, a somersaulting incredible-looking nightmare of neck and legs. The sudden release of the strain sent the kicking camel reeling against the wall, where he almost fell on Rahman, who said something about kismet.
Within a minute there were vultures visible against the raw-blue sky. Rahman leaned over the edge of the precipice, staring. He spat, then glanced swiftly side-wise to see what effect the narrow escape had had on Gup, who was busily rubbing a bruised knee.
“By Allah, what is bad for camels may be good for men!” he muttered.
Gup was actually feeling better. The shock had revived his nerves and sent blood surging through his veins again. He got to his feet and mounted Rahman’s camel, swinging himself up without waiting for the beast to kneel. Not even many camel-men can do that.
“Lead on,” he commanded.
“Allah!” The accent was on the ascending note of the final syllable. Rahman led the way in silence, and Pepul Das, on the camel behind, began singing a high falsetto Hindu song about the birth of Krishna until Rahman turned and cursed him into silence.
Then they plunged into darkness through the hole in the face of the cliff and the camels had to be struck to prevent them from trotting off toward some cavern that they knew, where food awaited them. There was a sound of rushing water and a smell of stables. Long before Gup’s eyes had grown used to the darkness Rahman was whacking the camels to make them pass a narrow cavern-mouth instead of turning in. Then firelight flickered on a rock wall where the tunnel turned toward the right. A hand appeared, holding a lantern, and a hairy face peered around the bend. “Salaam!” said a horse voice, and the word went cannoning along the tunnel until it vanished in the outer air.
And now there was no smell of stables but the sharp clean tang of wood-smoke and the aroma of coffee. Around the bend the tunnel opened into a great dry cave in which six fires were burning. There were several bearded Hillmen around each fire, one man cooking and the others offering advice. The camels knelt but none took any notice of them; Rahman and Pepul Das undid the girths and dragged the saddles off; then Rahman, shuffling off his slippers, kicked both creatures on the nose and sent them hurrying to find their own way to the stable. Gup felt in his pocket for a cigarette. He had none. Rahman handed him a package.
“I ask pardon for this discourtesy,” he said. “I will attend to it.”
He strode into the space between the fires, where he kicked away the empty cooking vessels and the coats of half a dozen men, one coat falling into a fire where it was partly burned before its owner rescued it. All eyes were on Rahman then.
“Now, by my beard!” he thundered. “I will kill the man who does not pay his Honor homage — aye, and before my words cease echoing!”
“He has no rifle. He has no sword,” said some one, in the harsh, gruff, Hillman dialect.
“He needs nothing when he rides as my guest!” Rahman retorted. “Whose time has come? Who dies first?” He produced an automatic pistol.
One by one they passed before Gup McLeod and did him homage in the sly-eyed, upstanding Hillman fashion that reserves opinion but recognizes force majeure. There were tall men and strong men among them, but there was none so tall as he, nor any one who stood so straight or whose eyes were so unflinching. He acknowledged their salutes with only a slight inclination of the head.
“Speak!” muttered Rahman, for he knew that Gup’s voice had the sonorous depth that Hillmen consider a sign of manhood.
“I will speak when I have anything I care to say,” said Gup, and his voice went booming amid the echoes in the smoke-filled roof. “Is there no food in all these hills?”
They hurried then to serve him, spreading a rug on the floor and bringing low stools on which to set coffee, cakes and jam in imported tins — three sorts of it. He sat with his back to the wall and tried to eat his fill before falling asleep, and he noticed that Rahman, for the sake of implied compliment, ate his own breakfast apart, as if unworthy to be seated on the same rug with his guest. And Pepul Das, in turn, was fed apart from Rahman, served from stolen tableware of a much less expensive make. Then Rahman spoke again, when he had cleaned his beard and finished belching:
“Is his Honor’s room not ready?”
A man who had done nothing yet but stand and stare took a lantern and led the way along a passage hewn into the rock. They came to a wooden door that had an iron bolt on the inside. He kicked it open. It led into a cave as comfortably furnished as a hotel bedroom, only that the bed was built of rough-hewn wood and rawhide thongs, with fleeces heaped on it. There were enough blankets there for a dozen men — soap, water in a big brass ewer, towels, shaving tackle taken from Gup’s own camp equipment, and his own clean underwear spread on a bench, with thumb-marks on the linen in proof that Hillmen had examined and remarked on every detail.
“Your Honor’s life is on my head. I will sleep outside the door,” said Rahman.
“You may sleep in here,” Gup answered.
The Afghan laughed. “Not if I value peace!” he remarked. “An order is an order.”
Gup was too weary to care who had ordered that he should sleep alone. He bolted the door behind Rahman, cleaned himself and rolled on the bed, where he fell asleep almost instantly.
It was not written he shall blunder without help
So be he blunder manly. Though he meet
All evil; t
hough the grim, insatiable yelp
Of hell-hounds following foretell defeat,
Nor in the dreadful darkness can he see new ways;
That very syren-voice that bade him sin
Is vibrant with the Law that law obeys.
The man’s Redeemer is not yonder, but within.
CHAPTER NINE
“I am known to the police — unfavorably known to them.”
GUP MCLEOD awoke without the slightest notion of what the time might be. He lay for a long time without moving and with his eyes closed, going over his impressions of the past two days and nights. It seemed to him he had been mad. He checked over every detail of his memory, absorbed by the dread that he might have acted in some way unbecoming to a gentleman — his standard of living, lower than which he refused to stoop, higher than which he knew no way of reaching, since he knew of nothing higher. It was nothing he would have cared to talk about; it was one of those conversations that a man holds with himself in solitude. He decided, that if he was not dreaming, if his memory was accurate and his brain not playing tricks he could pass his own scrutiny, which was probably more severe than that of other people. It remained to be discovered whether he was awake or dreaming — sane or insane. So he opened his eyes.