by Talbot Mundy
A gust of warm air announced the end of a short tunnel. The guide knelt, groped, seized two steel pins driven into the rock floor, swung himself over and vanished. His voice came from below:
“When I shout, take the pins in your hands and let your body swing downward. Then grope with your feet for the rungs — there is nearly a yard from rung to rung — one hundred and twenty of them altogether.”
Gup held the rope and felt it swing jerkily. Apparently it was not made fast to anything below, and it was also apparent that the face of the cliff receded so that there was nothing to touch that might have steadied the pendulum swing as the weight went lower. Thinking about climbing down that thing was worse than doing it; he lay and sweated at the prospect; he would almost have been willing to retrace his steps, except for that ghastly causeway with a precipice on either hand. Arguing that he was stronger and more capable than the man making the descent only seemed to intensify the sense of horror that made him alternately sweat and tremble until a kind of mountain sickness seized him and he lay half-paralyzed by nerves that were in rebellion against his will.
And it was worse when at last the guide called to him. He peered over. Somebody had lighted a red light and it served to make the depth look even deeper than it was — a red pin-point like a distant danger signal on a railroad track. The longer he stared at it the farther away it seemed, until at last it appeared like the tail-light of some monstrous thing descending into black eternity. It moved. The guide called him again, but the words were indistinguishable, all mixed up with echoes and misshapen from their contact with crag and hollow.
“Here goes!” he remarked to himself, wondering whether his hands had strength enough to hold his weight as he seized the steel pins and began to work himself over the edge. It seemed to him he had no physical strength remaining, only will-power, and the worst moment he ever experienced was when he lowered himself and began to grope with his feet for the topmost rung. He found it, and the first half-dozen rungs were a maniac’s nightmare, until he discovered that the ladder was not swinging as it had done when the other man descended. Somebody had made the lower end fast and, though it sagged and shook and swayed, it was not so terrifying as he expected. Nevertheless, he died about three deaths before he reached the bottom and stood trying to look self-possessed.
The guide had vanished. It was not a red lantern but a white one — an ordinary export lantern with a wire bail, standing on the smooth rock floor. The red light came reflected from a crimson velvet curtain that hung by brass rings from a brass rod set into the face of the rock in a recess six paces away from the foot of the ladder. He picked up the lantern to try to see what sort of shaft he had descended but could make out nothing; the walls, of a stone he did not recognize, rose sheer from an almost perfect octagonal floor for a distance of twenty or thirty feet, after which they appeared to lean outward and were lost to sight.
He examined the curtain. It divided down the middle, revealing a door made of rare wood, unpainted and unpolished; it seemed centuries old but still perfect and had neither knocker, bell nor keyhole. After a moment’s hesitation he decided to use his knuckles and beat a tattoo on it. There was no answer. He tried again, louder. Suddenly the door swung open and there stepped forth, framed by the crimson curtain, the same Pathan who had admitted him and Rahman two nights ago into the fort below the border. He was the same, but more handsomely dressed; the same, but more sure of himself, more truculent, less genial. He stood with folded arms and with a heavy tulwar at his waist, looking rather like a Viking.
“And your Honor’s wishes?” he demanded.
“Get out of my way before I smash you!” Gup said simply.
The Pathan saluted. “In the name of God, bakheir braiyed!” he said. “Come safely! May your Honor’s shadow touch none but friends, and may your Honor’s enemies see shame!”
But evil seeks strong oxen for its yoke;
How shall it plough with weaklings? Thus the Will
That would not yield to wantonness awoke
New plausible seducing voices. In the still
First quiet of retreating night
A voice asked: shall the warrior who lives
Lie idle? Victor, lo, these others’ plight!
Thy sword! He only keeps what he has won, who gives!
CHAPTER TEN
“I remember the old commandments.”
LIGHT after all that darkness was bewildering and moments passed before Gup’s senses could interpret what he saw. There was nothing normal that his mind could fasten on; no sensation that he had any right to experience in a cavern underneath a mountain in a range of the Himalayas. A subtle, musky scent assailed his nostrils. Music, of wood-wind and stringed instruments and muted drum-beat, pulsed in his ears with a rhythm and melody more fascinating than the scent. It was cool, but without the clammy moisture of the Indian thermantidote that steals the virtue from the sunlight but reveals its dread. And there was electric light — not ill-placed, frugally issued bulbs such as even some modem Indian villages can boast, but floods of light upstreaming against a roof of rare. hand-finished rock from niches hewn into the walls. The wires were hidden, probably beneath the serpents, carved out of ebony, that coiled along the walls.
Crimson curtains again at the end of a long passage. A carpet like a beam of yellow moonlight, woven in one piece, reaching from end to end down the exact center of a hewn-rock floor, whose vague irregularities suggested ripples on a wine-dark stream. Great shields, like bosses, on the walls at measured intervals, and between those spears, of an unknown pattern, upright in groups of three. Blue-robed, with golden sari, at the end of the passage, standing between the crimson curtains, the same young woman who had met him in the passage in the fort below the border.
“Salaam,” said Gup, a little startled by the vibrance of his own voice that he had intended should sound matter-of-fact and calm. He possessed in full measure the British instinct to seem indifferent to climax, and it annoyed him when his voice betrayed his dignity.
Her lips moved. She smiled and stood waiting. If she had had a thousand eyes he could not have been more uncomfortable as he strode toward her down the center of the golden carpet, wondering whether his clothes looked half-presentable and aware that civilization and pants have robbed men of the art of walking gracefully. Few strong men, possessed of a resolute stride, appreciate the value even of their awkwardness, and Gup felt as self-conscious as on the day when he walked up the aisle of a cathedral to be married to the woman who afterward betrayed his trust. That made him savagely polite, discourtesy exuding through the outer film and made ridiculous, as he was aware, by the scent, the strains of music, the artistic setting and his own complete helplessness.
“Will you kindly tell me where I am and who owns this place?” he demanded. “I have no desire to trespass into anybody’s quarters. My guide has left me.”
The young woman, smiling again, turned and led the way between the curtains. Following, he found himself in a square antechamber, three times higher than its width, well lighted by a group of dragons hanging from the roof, that sprayed from their mouths and eyes a golden glow on polished walls. Now the music was louder but not aggressive; it was wonderful ancient stuff, composed for instruments that had neither the speed nor range of modern devices, so that its beauty had to be expressed in simple sequence and its variety was longitudinal, not heaped into vertical, clamoring chords. It annoyed Gup. It was peaceful. He was spoiling for a fight. The lilting skirl of bagpipes might have calmed him.
An opening in each wall was concealed by crimson curtains. There was a rug on the floor from a loom long perished, woven by women whose fingers disappeared into the dust of mid-Asian history, and whither their skill went, none knows. They had woven the story of sunlight opening the pagan riot of the flowers in a wilderness in spring — a harmony of hope that knows no limits, and of faith that knows no fear, yet law-obeying, within natural dimensions. That rug increased Gup’s irritation; it suggested se
ntimental values experience had stung him to consider worthless.
“Every flower in every field is fed with blood and bones,” he muttered. “God, what a farce this life is! Beauty is an insult spat at tortured faces!”
Then a clash of brass rings on a rod as crimson curtains were withdrawn revealing women in the filmy silken stuff that imitates the colors of the mountain ranges in the waking daylight — more than a dozen women, all young, unembarrassed and without that challenge in their eyes that so many women in rebellion, and always eastern women use to disguise their own doubt of themselves. These were not so self-assured as wholly sure of something else, though of what, was not hinted. Gup, angry again since he was sure of nothing except, perhaps, that women and he had no pursuit in common, bowed and stood still. One of them stepped forward and addressed him — in English; it was too good English to have been learned in an Indian harem. She was dark-complexioned, with heavy, wavy dark hair, but slim and agile-looking; he had seen English girls as dark as her, in Devonshire; he had seen scores of them in Scotland.
“You are welcome, and we’re sorry if the stairway was a little uncivilized. Won’t you come in?”
He followed her, straight through the midst of a bevy of women who made him feel ridiculously huge, into a room that seemed to have been hewn out from the curving buttress of a mountain’s flank. It was fan shaped. The perimeter was pierced with mullioned windows set with small panes of tinted glass, each window forming the end of a deep recess, so suggesting the ends of the ribs of the fan. Deep, cushioned seats were around the walls of each recess and beneath the windows; all the walls were hung with draperies of embroidered cloth-of-gold, and on the enormous floor the rugs were piled in such profusion that feet sank into them and movement was without sound. The music seemed to come from a balcony hewn in the wall at the short, squared base of the fan, above the curtained door. It was dark outside; all light came from electric bulbs in unseen niches in the walls.
There was only one chair — Chinese — nearly large enough to be called a throne, set on a low platform facing the door, between two window recesses, but there were cushions on the floor in heaps irregularly placed in a wide semicircle, more or less facing the throne. On the chair, in a peacock-colored turban fastened with a spray of brilliants, wearing a long embroidered, crimson coat over a golden smock and oriental trousers, with pointed golden slippers on her bare feet, sat the Ranee of Jullunder. Age had not yet touched her with its cynical contempt for enthusiasm; she had years ahead of her of youth and ascending energy before the curve would bring her to the valley of vain longings and the harvest of youth’s ambition. And again Gup noticed the old Egyptian, almost goddess-like expression of her eyes and mouth. If she had worn the serpent on her forehead, with the head-dress slightly changed, she might have posed for the portrait of Hatshepsut, daughter of Amon-Ra who sat upon the throne of Horus. Her smile was royal; it betrayed no trace of triumph — only welcome, dignity and wisdom.
“So we meet again,” she said. “I consider myself fortunate. And you?”
To save his life Gup could not have answered less than courteously. She was too fine — too full of grace and dignity to be treated as his anger told him she deserved. It was intolerable that she should have spread her net and drawn him into her presence like an animal intended to be tamed and put to work, but her presence was wonderful, nevertheless. She had shed the vague vulgarity of Lottie Carstairs but retained her charm; she had left behind the Ranee of Jullunder’s aim at middle distances, enlarging vision without losing the touch of detail; she had burgeoned, ripened into something new — dynamic and not masculine, self-restrained and almost irresistible. The stuff that had made the London public mad for her was there without its veil of aped immodesty. Gup had to find his voice. It came gruffly, less calm than he wished:
“I am unfortunate. I have to repeat what I said at the first interview. I won’t do what you wish.”
She smiled. If he could read, her smile suggested nothing but approval, though there was perhaps a trace of recognition of a thing foreseen. “I keep you standing,” she said. “That is not gracious. And I haven’t introduced you. Ladies, this is Angus McLeod — better known as Gup McLeod and henceforth to be known as Gup Bahadur, commander-in-chief of my army!” The women murmured and Gup bowed to them, she watching him with eyes as full of laughter as blue pools are when the wind and sun unite at daybreak.
“You accept?” she asked him, misinterpreting his bow with a provoking, sub-malicious air of unexpected pleasure.
“No,” Gup answered. “I have told you.”
“Well, never mind. You can’t deny what you don’t know. You haven’t seen yet — haven’t heard. The way to win you is to show you your plain duty. And the way to make you pleased with me is to offer you breakfast. I suppose we must call it breakfast. Do you know what time it is?”
“No, I don’t. The liar who led me down the thing you call a stairway said it was after midnight.”
“Jonesey did? Then he told the truth for once. It is two hours after midnight.”
“Jonesey? I don’t know him. The man I mean called himself Alam Khan — and Ghulam Jan — and Syad Mahmud, among other names.”
“Yes — Jonesey — David Jones is his real name. He’s a Welshman, born in Cardiff. Didn’t he tell you he was at Jesus College, Oxford, where the Welsh all go? Some day he will damn himself by writing a true book about the Tribes of the Himalayas, but he is invaluable as long as he lets the truth alone.”
“He has my money and revolver,” Gup said pointedly.
“Oh, no. You will find them on the breakfast table. Shall we go into the other room? I have only two rooms fit for a commander-in-chief to see.”
The art of rising to accept a man’s arm is a half-forgotten dignity, too hasteless for these eager democratic days wherein women run lest men see something first. But a new throne needs old manners, and the aim at doing one thing well implies unconscious ease in all subordinate things. Gup felt himself honored. He did not wish to be and it annoyed him, but he confessed it to himself in secret. He even wondered, as he walked beside her with his feet an inch deep in Persian rugs, what the fellows at home would say if they could see him arm-in-arm with Lottie Carstairs in a troglodytic palace hewn out of the heart of unwritten history.
The other women stayed in the great room. She and he alone passed through splendid curtains into a room where silver peacocks adorned the walls, depicted strutting in every imaginable attitude that could display the mystery of their metallic feathers. There were peacocks perched on painted trees and peacocks on the wing across the low curved ceiling.
“Who did this?” Gup asked her.
“No one knows. But Jonesey found it. Jonesey knows every foot of the ranges. It was he who blasted through the Serpent’s Tail. He was looking for pitchblende. He discovered this.”
“Is he the rogue that he pretends he is?”
“Of course not. Jonesey is a Druid, who hides druidism under a mask of imbecility. A reputation for madness has saved his life a hundred times. You know they won’t harm madmen in a Moslem land. That is why so many mullahs behave like idiots.”
There was a table, beautifully laid and laden with fruit from the low-lying Afghan valleys. The same deaf and dumb girl waited on them. They sat facing each other in the soft glow streaming from a hidden source, and for a while they said nothing at all, he waiting for her to speak and she observing him, as if wondering which corner of his obstinacy to attack. “Do you drink wine?” she asked after a while. “Not at breakfast.”
“I never touch it. It robs inspiration of spontaneity, if that means anything. I mean, I hate artificial illusion. I like to think things for myself. I like to do things myself, all new, on my own foundation, without advice or assistance. But that can’t always be done, particularly in a land where women are the lawful prey of anybody bold enough to seize them. Paradox is useful. The very fact that women are made to wear veils and are kept in harems makes it possibl
e for me to leap into power. I amaze the Hillmen. I upset all their calculations. But that is a power that will swing again against me when it has reached its limit — which is not yet, but the day will come.”
She paused, but Gup said nothing. He perceived the thin end of a wedge that she proposed to drive into his self-control. He preferred eating fruit to answering. She went on:
“It annoys me to have to build on old foundations — tradition and so on; so many of them are rotten — like the treatment of women here, for instance, and the Brahmin rule in India. But I learned my lesson when Jonesey showed me this place. I had had dreams of a fortress built according to my own plans; one that should grow — become a town, a city, and then send forth branches, the way Rome did, only much more swiftly. Don’t smile at that; things do move swiftly nowadays. I mean to make a kingdom in these hills.”
“I was smiling,” said Gup, “at the thought that things also tumble swiftly. And dreams vanish like smoke.”
“Yes, part of my dream went. I let it. I accepted this system of caverns left by some one else, who also seems to have built with a kingdom in view. It is too near to the border, but even that had its advantage; I was able to bring up supplies, luxuries, and make the place more habitable. It is very ancient — nobody can guess how old, but in good repair and dry. There is shale here, and oil, and the oil has been burning underground for ages. The dry heat of that, and the inrush of air has kept all moisture from the caverns. We use a Diesel system for electric lights, and I wish you had seen the fun we had getting that heavy engine over the border without arousing the suspicion of British officers. We draw our fuel from a shallow well and filter it through clean sand.”