by Talbot Mundy
“And now sing,” said Gup, “before you murder some one.”
For a second he expected her to do one thing or the other. Her lips moved and the Lottie Carstairs radiance almost trembled into being. She almost yielded to him, or so he thought. But the sound of a gong came through the curtains and she shook that mood off.
“To hear them — and you — talk, one would think I was incapable of thinking! One would think it was not I but a committee that had this vision and made it come true.”
“You promised to sing. You are dressed for it.”
“Did I? Am I? The mood has passed. I will sing when you give me your promise. Why sooner? Shall I sing about their fears and your Scots religion? I feel more like killing some one! When I have won you—”
“You won me years ago,” said Gup. “You can’t unwin me! I address myself to Lottie Carstairs.”
“I prefer my victories to look less like a rout,” she retorted. “However, I will win! Do you mind picking up that sari? I dislike asking you but I’m supposed to be a queen; I mayn’t wait on myself. But those idiots were right, I must wear it; this dress won’t do — not yet, but I will change all that. Now I suppose I must send for them again, and I suppose I must apologize. Do you ever feel like crying? No, of course you don’t, you enormous mass of Calvinistic egoism! Oh, I hate you! Daylight — and a dozen chiefs have come — the brutes expect to be received at this hour! Does it penetrate through your obstinacy, what a difference it might make if I could introduce them to my new general?”
“You may say I am your new counselor,” Gup suggested, smiling down at her. He knew she was as lonely as himself. He felt an impulse to take her in his arms, but in spite of his recent boldness he was almost childishly shy with women. She might have misinterpreted his motive. He did not in the least mind smashing her house of cards, but her self-respect was as important to him as his own. Besides, he did not suppose that kind of woman was to be won or weakened by any assault on her personal dignity.
“I will tell them that, if you will consent to command my army,” she retorted. “Oh, I hate you and I admire and pity you! What a man you are, and what a pawky little penny-wise Scots conscience! Those twelve chieftains out there, who are eating bread and honey in my back hallway and glad to get it, have more real resolution in their little fingers than you have in your whole strong body! They have more to lose than you have — they are chieftains, each with a little army of his own. They have the courage to come and discuss war. They would follow a man like you to the ends of the earth after one swift look at you — and you? You stand there afraid to lead them! Yes, you are afraid! You are afraid of the old nurse’s schooling that you call conscience! You forget that John Knox was a fighter — and Robert Bruce — and Wallace. So was every one of your national heroes.”
“You look splendid,” he said, “when your eyes blaze, but I like you better when you smile.”
“I will never smile at you again unless you yield! I loved you when you threw three men out of the room. I hate you — I despise you when you are afraid and when you preach! Go — leave me to do a man’s work! Jonesey shall show you the way. You may go where you like — yes, to the devil, or below the border, where Glint will—”
It was possibly Gup’s face that made her pause. He had moods when he was like an enormous boy, expressing every passing emotion where whoever cared might read it.
“I will not go below the border,” he said calmly. “I will stay here and do what I can to save you from the consequences of your own mistake.”
“Why not say sin? The word was on your lips, you preacher! I tell you, you shall not stay here except on one condition. You know the condition. I promised you twenty-four hours. If you yield, you shall never have to yield to me again. If you yield, I will put such a sword in your hand as no man ever had before. If you refuse — well — you will be another of my cherished illusions gone up in smoke, that’s all. I will turn my back on you for ever and try to forget you, and when I can’t help remembering you, I will think of you as the coward. There, I have said it. Do you like the word?”
“Not much,” said Gup. It brought the blood to his temples, but he made no retort.
“Then go, and leave me to talk to men of courage! You will find Jonesey outside that door. He is to guide you anywhere you please and he is to answer all your questions.”
Gup bowed to her. He felt he was missing an opportunity, yet he was so old-fashioned in his prejudices that he saw no way to improve the situation. She was his hostess, never mind how she had inveigled him to be her guest. And he loved her. There was no logic in that. It made him feel tragic, not happy. He had no right to love her, he who had foresworn all women. Certainly it conferred no right on him to say more than he had done; in fact, he had even stretched a point. If love was what the poets say it is, then was he not, by loving her, condoning everything she stood for? But can a man prevent himself from loving? Or was it untrue? Was he only feeling an emotion due to too much mental torture and then sudden relief from it? He would find that out. So he strode to the door with a smile on his lips that gave the lie to bewilderment. He was too well mannered to appear indifferent, too proud to turn again and plead. He did not glance over his shoulder. He pushed the door open and almost stumbled over Jonesey, squatting like a Hillman on the mat outside. The Orakzai Pathans, whose heads he had recently cracked together, stood with their backs to the far wall. They grinned at him! His method suited their notions perfectly; so would they, too, have treated eavesdroppers, only that they might have used steel in place of bare hands. They admired his prowess.
Nor was Jonesey resentful. He got up and began leading the way through another door and along rock-hewn corridors that echoed to the tread of the Pathans who followed at a decent distance, tramping like boot-shod infantry.
“Ex-Indian army soldiers,” said Jonesey. “All such savages are proud of being drilled, although it bores them to learn. Thank you for not kicking me. Any man may get punched or chucked out, if Allah wishes. But there is nothing either in the Bible or the Koran about being meek when you’re kicked. What a colossally strong man you are.”
“You seem to me to be a ridiculous person,” Gup answered, prejudice no longer urging him to be polite.
“I am indeed. It is my business,” said Jonesey. “I am the hardest-worked court jester that the world has ever seen. I even keep the charts with all the pins in them that show where our food for powder frets in unmapped villages. Care to see them? I will show you charts that the Indian Government would pay for by the inch. They would cover each inch with sovereigns as high as you could pile ’em without spilling — and cheap at the price! Come and look.”
He led into a low rock room where tables stood, and on the tables there were British-Indian survey maps, corrected in various-colored inks and with colored pins stuck all over them.
“Even aeroplanes, you know, can’t get that information,” said Jonesey. “See — there are all the footpaths, mule-tracks, caverns, villages — water, stores of provender, numbers of rifles and ammunition — names of headmen — names of mullahs — time required for messages to go by runner — numbers of camels and mules available — census of men, women and children — and — most important of all — temperament, affiliations and politics of every headman, village, district, tribe and group of tribes. Me — I — mullah Ghulam Jan — opprobriously known as Jonesey, did it.”
It was hard to believe him. He looked like a monk, with his stiff black beard and his shaven head, the long brown smock and sandals, and the staff on which he leaned, a monk who might have been a poet or a maker of stained-glass windows. If he had stepped down out of a picture of the Middle Ages he would have been more credible.
“Why did you do it?” Gup asked him. “If you’d wanted money, the Indian Government would have paid you. You’re not the sort of man who seeks power—”
“Passion!” Jonesey interrupted. “The selfsame reason why I played the organ in chapel at home when I
was ten years old, with whooping-cough and chilblains. Passion! They used to have to stop the service while I whooped with my head in a bag behind the organ. Even so our Ranee of Song and Dance has had to hold up her campaign for a less spiritual empire while I plodded over mountain ranges and made notes with pin-pricks under the Arabic letters of the Koran I carried. It was the only safe way; they would have skinned me if they had seen me writing anything. I detest being skinned. I have skinned myself on nearly every crag of the Himalayas. Necessity knows no law. Hillmen have no sense of a stranger’s privacy. So I invented a kind of pin-prick shorthand — spoiled a Koran — bad luck, so they tell me; but I never did have luck, so what’s the difference?”
He invited Gup to see the radio. “We can send and receive, but we don’t dare send. The Indian Government might listen in. However, we pick up a lot of their messages, and we have a Russian who is good at decoding. Let me show you our plant; the antenna is as artfully hidden as my virtue.”
Gup did not crave an exhibition of the Welshman’s showmanship. He was not a customer for a throne. He would have liked a horse — the big black stallion again for choice — on which to ride away to some place where he could think uninterrupted.
“To the devil with your radio,” he objected. “Introduce me to some solitude.”
Jonesey looked swiftly sidewise at him. “Come and see our gas-plant. We’ve a Russian who makes poison-gas from stuff we dig from the old mine workings. He is an artist — loves it — he is well worth studying. And it’s wonderful poison. One sniff, and you have all the solitude you wish, in the realm from which no traveler returns. You wouldn’t wish to return. — not into the same body; bodies that have sniffed it don’t look pleasant. A sort of cyanide, I think he said, but I don’t know chemistry. We couldn’t use it unless the wind were just right; the second-hand gas-masks that some munitions dealer sold to our Ranee’s agent let it through like water through a sieve. It cost us nearly ninety men to make that discovery, but it did good in the long run; there is now a wholesome superstition that it might not pay to trespass into these caverns. Sometimes it’s not easy to get even the right people to call on us. However—”
He became aware by no particularly subtle process that Gup was becoming angry. The staff was snatched out of his hand; one end of it poked him rather shrewdly near the liver.
“I said solitude!”
“This way, sir. Pray accept my apology. I had catalogued you in my mind as a suitable king. I retract. You will make a perfect emperor — a Cæsar. After you are dead, if it is not lese-majesty to speak of death with reference to you, they will deify you. It was a violent temper, you know, that made Charlemagne, Nero and Henry the Eighth so successful. This way, please. I could kill you very easily, but I don’t want to become a fugitive from injustice.”
He led in and out of ancient passages that were sometimes squared and finished, with padlocked doors to right and left, and sometimes rough with the original pick-marks. They were shored in places, but not with timber; whoever the previous owner had been, he was a man who commanded plenty of skilful masons; wherever the roof of a tunnel was weak it had been supported by a beautifully built stone arch. Some one else had fitted doors into the arches, but all those doors were open at the moment, to let the fresh air flow.
“We could barrack a hundred thousand men unseen,” said Jonesey, “but we couldn’t feed ’em. Some one invent riflemen who don’t eat, and I’ll conquer the world — and then the moon and Mars. Bellies are worse than bad feet. You can fix bad feet with worse whisky, but you have to feed bellies. However, there are five thousand men eating their heads off, now, within a quarter of a mile of you. You couldn’t find ’em in a week. It’s a great place, this. My own belief is, some of Alexander’s men got lost up here and took to mining, but the mine was already ancient when they got here. And there has been some one else since their day, but who he was, only Allah knows. Sometimes I think not even Allah knows all of it. Here’s the entrance. How do you like the view?”
Gup stood under a huge stone arch and stared at the blistering whiteness of the boulder-strewn valley floor. The half that was in shadow was more tolerable to the eyes, but gloomier than hell’s gate — shudder-some — comfortless. The half that lay in sunlight was a wilderness of agony. It suggested one of the dead craters of the moon. There was even a sort of island near the center that might have been left there by a final spasm of the fires within a dying earth. On the side on which Gup found himself, half in shadow and half in sunlight, a bulge of the enormous wall projected overhead to a distance, in places, of about two hundred feet, so that it would be impossible from above to see the entrance to the caverns or the almost countless openings that had been cut into the wall. The waste rock dug from the mine had been used for a fill, and had been leveled, so that there was a terrace, about two hundred feet wide and more than a mile long, curving around that end of the ravine.
“It isn’t only ants that work!” said Jonesey. “How would you like that job, without machinery?”
The windows of the Ranee’s fan-shaped chamber were in plain view, half a mile away. From the mouth of a near-by tunnel came the mutter of a muffled Diesel-engine and the faint purr of a dynamo.
“How did you get your machinery down here?” Gup demanded.
“Ah!” said Jonesey. “If you knew that, you would know the way out!”
Gup’s jaw jerked forward. “Does that mean I’m a prisoner? You were to answer all my questions.”
“I answered that one. No, you’re not a prisoner, but you don’t know the way out. A king in prison would be a dangerous nuisance, whereas an ignorant king is nothing out of the ordinary. But let me ask you a question. What do you suppose caused this pock-mark in the earth’s hide? Does it occur to you that an enormous meteorite may have struck the earth here and exploded? Something spectacular happened. Too bad that it happened before there were men in the world to witness it. I wouldn’t mind dying if I could be snuffed out by such a thunder-bolt as that — it would make me feel important, and it’s our feelings that matter; nature insults us when it wipes us out with microbes or a one-inch bullet — not that we don’t deserve the insult, but who wants what he deserves? Look up — up there against the sky. It’s seven thousand feet from the floor to the top of that crag. Do you notice how the explosion, or whatever it was, threw up a lip like the splash of a bursting bubble? It leans outward. It makes this place almost impregnable — almost undiscoverable. Aeroplanes can’t see much. Except at noon there’s always enough shadow to make photography impossible. They daren’t fly low because of the danger of forced landings; and if they fly high they can’t see detail. How do you like our parade-ground?”
He indicated the wide terrace but Gup took no notice of the question. He was almost spell-bound by the huge raw horror of the place, although he noticed that it had no such effect on the men within sight. He could count about a hundred individuals, each attending to some task or other; there were several cleaning mules at a cavern-mouth at the far end of the terrace; others, in the distance, appeared to be women carrying bags of grain toward the great central mass of boulders, from which he could now see thin blue smoke ascending. Twenty or thirty men were cleaning rifles near another tunnel-mouth. Somewhere close at hand a man was singing.
Gup strode out on the terrace. Jonesey followed him and the two Orakzai Pathans came striding along behind. It was Gup’s first taste of the lack of privacy that makes crowned heads resemble gold-fish in a glass jar. He resented it. He ordered Jonesey to keep out of reach unless he wanted to be pitched off the terrace, so Jonesey fell behind. Having no hat, Gup did not care to expose himself in the glare; he turned to the right, in shadow, and walked rapidly to where the terrace ended in a flight of rough steps leading to the boulder-strewn floor of the gorge.
“It’s like an open sore in earth’s side,” he reflected. “If there’s anything in the theory that like produces like, it’s a suitable throat to spew forth death and ruin. Is destin
y intelligent? And if so, why am I here? Why is she here? Are good and evil synonymous terms? Can good come out of evil? What’s to be done? What if I do nothing? What then? Why is it that a man can’t see the proper thing to do? It would be so simple to do the right thing if we only knew what it was. Death doesn’t matter; nobody minds dying if there’s a decent reason for it. There’s probably a decent reason for living, if we only understood it. There’s a decent thing to do now — but what? Why should I love that woman? God knows. I don’t. I only know I do love her. Are love and destiny the same thing? If so, why the perfectly unnecessary hell when two tides meet? Perhaps this world is hell, with heaven to be won by enduring the torment, as the Moslems seem to think. If so, let’s clean up hell — that’s obvious. But how?”
He hardly looked where he was going. The way before him was between huge, tumbled boulders that cast shadow within shadow. They were all unclimbable; there was nothing to do but follow the winding track between them; it was a maze where a hundred thousand men, if they had food and water, could hide indefinitely. They could not even be shelled effectively by long-range cannon; the surrounding crags were too high and there was too much cover between boulders. They could easily hide from aeroplanes; a hundred bombs might kill a few, not many. Nothing less than poison-gas could drive them out.
He shuddered at the thought of poison-gas. If it was true that they were concocting some devil’s brew with cyanide within those caverns, duty was plain; he must prevent that, at whatever risk. However, Jonesey was an imaginative liar and it seemed hardly likely they would have the necessary knowledge or appliances. If they made the stuff, how could they store it? Anyhow, he hoped that was a lie. And if it was true, he hoped that she had had nothing to do with it.
“God, what a weird world! Ruin — outlaw — this place — offer of an army — offer of a kingdom! And in love with the woman who trapped me into it! Can you beat that?”