by Talbot Mundy
There was a candle burning in the room, or rather cave. He remembered he had gone to bed in darkness, arguing that if unknown enemies proposed to kill him he would be no safer even though ten lights should trouble his sleep. The next thing that his eyes met was a table near the bed, on which somebody had laid his revolver and the wallet containing his money, that had been locked in the steel trunk in his tent. He supposed they had burst off the hinges to rifle the trunk. He reached out and counted the money. It was all there.
“Nothing missing?” asked a voice in English.
He refused to seem startled. He looked in the wallet again for cards and odds and ends, his identification paper and two letters that he valued.
“No,” he said. “Everything’s there.” Then he looked into the eyes of a man with a shaven skull but with a stiff black beard, who squatted against the wall on a Persian prayer-mat. “How did you get in here?” he demanded, remembering the thick door and the strong bolt on the inside.
“I am human. I came through a hole. Though I have studied all philosophies and quite a little science, I have yet to learn how to pass myself through solid barriers. Did you think me a phantom?”
“Who are you?”
“Ah-h-h! The proper answer would be, none of your damned business. But the proprieties are ill-observed in these disgraceful days. Suppose then, I lie to you. What shall I say my name is? Would Alam Khan do? Would that make you any wiser?”
Gup got out of bed and pulled his boots on. He was as naked as on the day he was born, but a man can fight if his feet are covered.
“You propose to use fists?”
“No, my feet. I propose to kick you through the hole you entered by.”
“When you have a revolver? The weapon would be much more dignified and practical, because I would put my hands up if you threatened me with it, and then I could say I was forced to tell the truth. Not that anybody would believe that; I am too well known to lie in almost any circumstances — an invaluable reputation! It enables me to tell the truth without shaming the devil. Why should I shame the devil? And why should I not enjoy the thrill of being aimed at, without the danger of being shot?”
“Is this a madhouse?” Gup demanded.
“Yes, Bahadur! One of countless madhouses conducted by Allah for the discipline of men — and women. These are known as the Doab caves — Doab meaning two rivers — doubtless so called because there are no rivers — not nowadays. There never were any but streams that three women could carry off home in a jar. But I annoy you. May I beg you to be calm?”
“What do you want?” Gup demanded.
“To avoid boredom, difficulties, punishment and hunger. I am like all other men, in that respect. I also want to be amused, and to flatter myself, since none other does that for me. As to why I am here, that is another question altogether. Business and pleasure are so seldom united in lawful wedlock.”
“All right, why are you here?”
“Bahadur, I bring bad news.”
Gup let forth a mirthless laugh. He could imagine no news bad enough to make his state worse. He began to dress himself. “Spill it,” he said, pulling off his boots again to pull on socks.
“But suppose I should lie to you?”
“What should I care? Suit yourself: lie, tell the truth or get out of here.”
“And if I say nothing?”
“I will kick you out.”
“Then I will tell the truth, anticipating you will not believe it, although I so seldom tell the truth that the task will be difficult. There is only one person to whom I never lie because I don’t dare, and that person is not myself, either. I deceive myself whenever possible, since the truth is almost always disagreeable and we learn it in any event too soon. But would you not like to know why I am to tell you this? How shall I make you feel as wretched as I wish unless you believe what I tell you? And why should you believe what I say, unless you know why I say it? And if why I say, then also how I know. Which leads us in a circle back again to: Who am I?”
“I asked who you are.”
“And I said Alam Khan, which was nearly the truth. It is one of my alibi-pseudonyms. I am known to the police — unfavorably known to them — by that name in three provinces of India. But I wrote another name upon the rolls of Jesus College, Oxford, where I took a bachelor’s degree as a spur toward matrimony — anything, my dear sir, to escape the literary-leather flavor of your classics — even four wives and the scandalous title of mullah! I am known as the mullah Ghulam Jan throughout these hills, and as a hajji, having been to Mecca, but in Moscow I am known as Faiz Wali — red — red — crimson with the unshed blood of un-born millionaires! I made a speech in Moscow for which Lenin himself embraced me, and in proof of it I have his watch that I stole while his cheek was against my whiskers. I would have taken the watch-guard also, but he might have missed it too soon. I am known in Paris as Syad Mahmud, and in the United States as Hakim Khan; there, if you should consult the records, you would find that they did me the honor of booting me out of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, St. Louis and New Orleans. To put it mildly, our opinions differed. I was what I think they call deported finally, but I preferred to pay my own first-class fare because it annoys me to be seasick among third-class passengers.”
“Very well. You’re a blackguard. I understand that. Now what’s the news?” Gup asked him, pulling on his shirt.
“One piece of news — to you — is that I am the agent of her adorable Highness the ex-Ranee of Jullunder.”
“Thought so. Go on.” Gup arranged his necktie, whistling to himself. He was ready for anything now — knew storms were coming — trapped again, perhaps, but a different person from the fool who had a reputation still to lose. All lost, he had it all to win again. Let the struggle begin, and the sooner the better. He pulled his tie so tight he nearly choked himself.
“You can get to hell out of here, if you wish.”
“That would be disobedience to her — lacking, that is to say, even rudiments of wisdom! You have seen her eyes? Her lips? The way her head rests on the regal neck? Her hands? And you suggest disobedience? Oh, my enemy! May Allah with the milk of charity dilute the venom of your mind! I tell the truth instead. The truth is this, Bahadur: That the Indian Government, well knowing there is discontent from Kabul all the way to Amritsar and the Dekkan and Madras — well knowing there is unrest in the Hills and that the Khyber might be rushed at almost any minute — knowing, too, that one whose familiar name is Gup McLeod has abandoned allegiance, forsaken his friends and vanished northward after whipping the skin from an officer’s back — that crafty and secretive government, notorious for mystifying moves, has sent its ablest spy to track you down and gather evidence against you — possibly to shoot you in the back — who knows?”
“Who is he?” Gup demanded. “Know his name?”
“The ruthless, red-haired Tom O’Hara — he who pulled the camels’ noses, as we say, in Waziristan while the war was raging — fooled them so that half an army corps of half-trained men held India, while a half-million riflemen sat scratching their heads in the mountains wondering what magic Tom O’Hara would do next. You have to hide from Tom O’Hara!”
“Tom’s a friend of mine,” said Gup. “I’d rather talk with Tom than any man I know.”
He cursed himself for saying that. The moment after he had said it he would have given all the money in his wallet to recall the words. He was in a land now where money is to be had for the mere trouble of shooting its owner, but where secrets are the stuff that keeps men’s souls inside their bodies, because dead men tell no tales but there is always a chance to coax a secret from a living one. If they had not known that he knew Tom O’Hara, he might have found Tom and talked with him secretly.
“Damn!” he exploded. Then he pulled on his coat. He was ready — perhaps more ready than he might have been if he had not let out that secret. Now he was as wide awake and nervously alert as he had ever been in No Man’s Land in Flande
rs. Sometimes a man must pay a high price for the lessons that he learns, and there is no recovering the value given in exchange, nor anything to gain by grudging it. “What next?” he demanded.
“Ham and eggs! Pig’s props embalmed and hen-fruit looking at you — so reproachful and so wistful, yet so savory and toothsome! Coffee! Can you smell it in imagination? Come.”
He led the way toward a corner of the cave where blankets had been heaped the day before.
“My watch has stopped. What time is it?” Gup asked him.
“Midnight,” he answered cheerfully, with a gesture of indifference to time that made his long smock sway like a woman’s skirt. He stooped and dragged the blankets farther away from the hole they had covered.
“If I go first, will you promise not to jump on me?” he asked.
“Where is Rahman? I will speak to Rahman before I go anywhere,” said Gup.
“Then, either you will follow him northward, or you will stay where you are for a long time. Rahman and Pepul Das have been sent on a mission to convert some sluggards from the evil of their ways. Bahadur, there is nothing more remarkable in this world than some people’s objection to being hurried into the next, where heaven or hell await them. Would not hell, where we knew it was hell, be better than this uncertainty? And as for heaven — oh, the ladies in our Moslem paradise! And oh, the emerald trees with golden fruit, by fountains that sparkle with diamond water! Oh, the lazy lordly life for ever amid elegance in useless bliss! How exquisite! And yet men hesitate to kill one another in the hope of being killed! Why live when we may die so easily? Is that why you leave your revolver behind?”
Gup had also left his money on the table, reasoning not unshrewdly. Amid savagery, Moslem virtues are as prominent as their peculiar vices and the law of hospitality is Law One, never broken except by men so lost to all sense of honor and religion that they rank below animals in the scale of consideration. He was a guest, not a prisoner. The more the guest trusts his Moslem host, the more sacred his life and belongings are, but let him make a gesture to protect himself, or let him betray a moment’s doubt of his host’s integrity, as regards that law of hospitality, and the law may cease to function, being two-sided like all other human ideas.
“Lead on,” he commanded.
“Put not your trust in money or revolvers, eh? Well, that is not such idiotic counsel as it sounds. Will you pardon me, though, if I make myself responsible? I dread the consequences to myself of some one else’s lapse from dreamy altruism. You see, I am a Moslem. You are not. Ich kenne meine Pappenheimer, as the Germans say.”
He took the wallet and revolver, hiding them within the voluminous folds of his sash. Then he stepped into the hole and in a moment there was nothing of him visible except his shaven, shiny head. It looked like John the Baptist’s on a black platter, the stiff black beard, combed splay-shape, seeming to spread outward because of the weight imposed on it.
“Pass me the candle,” he said. “I forgot the candle. Or rather, I should say, perhaps, that I forgot your nerves.”
Gup gave him the candle and followed him into the hole, where it was easy going for the first few moments. There were rough steps hewn in dry rock; it was neither slippery nor tortuous. But presently they reached a level platform a few feet long, at the end of which the passage turned abruptly. There, at the round of the turn, the candle fluttered and died in a gust of warm wind. The ensuing darkness was unearthly. For a while Gup saw the image of the candle flame projected, as it were by memory, from the retina of each eye. Then that ceased and the blackness became solid. He could hear the footsteps of the man who led the way, but sound was relative to nothing and was consequently as confusing as chaos itself. He could feel a wall on one side, nothing on the other; and presently, on his right, from beneath, came murmurings as if there were water flowing at the bottom of a deep well. Panic suggested itself, but Gup could manage that stuff; he had a will like molded iron whenever fear assumed physical manifestation.
“Follow the wall,” said the voice in front of him. “One stride to your right and you will learn how hanged men feel before the rope tightens! Step off into nothing — then the next world! Are you curious? Or can you wait until death selects you for the ordeal? Then follow the wall on your left hand and don’t stumble. No, I have no matches. Have you? Would you like me to wait while you go back and get some? I wouldn’t wait, but I would like to know how you feel about it! No? Well then, follow the wall.”
Imagination invented paralyzing dangers, but the will can control imagination and the reason functions logically when the will prevails. Gup argued that his guide would hardly risk his own neck. Also, he remembered seeing prisoners of war subjected to the torture of imagined danger in order to get them to tell what they knew. If that was the idea, there was a surprise in store for some one. He set his teeth, but he rather wished he had kept the revolver; he could have fired it and scared that play-actor who led the way, the flash would have shown him his bearings. However, it was too late to think of that now, and there was no obligation to lose breath or balance, he could take his time. So he set both hands against the wall and felt with each foot for solid rock before he moved forward.
That way he made reasonably good progress as long as the passage descended gradually and the wall was there to lean against. But presently the downward trend grew sharper and more uneven. Then the wall vanished; there was an irregular, sharp edge and beyond that nothing. Warm air wafted upward, strong enough to move his hair and dry the sweat on his neck and temples. Water-murmuring grew louder and he wondered why there had been no dampness on the wall he could no longer reach. He noticed a change in the feel of the rock underfoot and stooped to touch it with his fingers, squatting, using both hands for the sake of balance. He found a loose piece and thought it felt like shale but knew it was no use guessing. He tossed the piece away — not far. It seemed minutes before he heard it rattle against rock beneath him, somewhere in the bowels of the earth. Then fear did grip him for a moment; it burst on his consciousness that he could no longer hear the footsteps of his guide.
“Where are you?” he demanded, and his voice went echoing and rumbling like the mutterings of an earthquake into unseen tunnels.
“If I knew where we are I would rewrite history!” The voice came almost from between his feet; it was as startling as his own had been. “We are in some sort of mine, but I don’t know what sort, nor who dug it, nor when, nor what they did with what they took out, nor why. But did you think I would leave you alone, to fall down winzes and chutes and shafts, to break your legs and arms unless you were lucky and broke your neck first? By Allah, if you thought that, you don’t give me enough credit for intelligence!
I have enough brains to understand the attitude of my employer and oh, you don’t know how I dislike punishment! This is the place where you hold my shoulders — one hand rather lightly on each shoulder and don’t shove — don’t cling — above all, don’t grip my throat! On the right there is a chasm leading to the middle of the world, and on the left there is one of those vacuums nature abhors; it leads directly to the center of the universe. You notice I exaggerate with truly Oriental restraint, but that is because the path we must tread is less than two feet wide and I am almost as scared as you are. Wait a moment, let me show it to you — watch!”
He fired three shots from Gup’s revolver, from a narrow ledge where he was crouching almost out of reach from where Gup stood. They were like three lightning flashes, thunder following. Fantastic crags and chasms shook, flashed, leaped into vivid being and ceased as suddenly in cataclysmic night. Din like the raging of devils at war with God screamed, shouted, thundered, volleying — revolleying an agony of chaos.
It multiplied even its suddenness. It ceased in a silence so utterly still, in a darkness so intense, that all existence seemed to have been wiped out. Absolute negation, without form or future, for a moment seemed all that was left. But there was a sharp smell of burned gunpowder to stir one sense into functio
n, and Gup’s eyes remembered. Photographed, sharp and distinct on his brain and now developing as the shock began to lose its potency, was a glimpse of a ribboning path of quartz or malachite, like the top of a wall between two ghastly underworlds, that descended in curves until it vanished in a black hole amid crags in a measureless distance. He had to use that path. He might as well begin.
He felt with his foot, groped his way down the ledge where his guide was waiting and laid a hand on each of the man’s shoulders.
“Lead on,” he commanded. “And if you shoot again without giving me warning I’ll strangle you and push you over!”
“Keep step,” said the Moslem. “Left — right — slowly! Don’t forget, the path winds and goes downward. I have to feel my way. Left — now wait — right — wait again — left....”
Eternities are also relative. A man can live through one of them in one swift dream. Imagination can invent more horrors in a second than a thousand men can perpetrate in a whole lifetime. Gup imagined bayonets and barbed-wire — hooks on the wall of the chasm to catch and rend the sinews of a falling body — eyes, whose light was night itself — hands in the dark, outreaching — hands without substance — shadowy shapes of abstract malice seeking to push him side-wise over the abyss....
“Left — now wait again — wait while I feel the way — right — follow slowly — you are pressing too hard on my shoulders, it bothers me — left..”
At last solider night and the welcoming, stuffier air of a hole in the face of a cliff, with room to stand at ease and take the strain off tautened sinews.
“All easy and simple now,” the guide said, in a voice that Gup thought forced. He was glad the other man had felt the strain, too; it made him less self-critical. “Only a long rope-ladder now, and the rope is new — a good rope, stolen from the Indian army engineers. Hold my shoulders till we reach the edge, then wait for me until I call from below. If there are two on the ladder at one time it sways and shakes too badly.”