by Talbot Mundy
“Give it to me,” said the babu. Quorn was too slow for him. The babu appeared to lack that mistrust of darkness as a thing in itself which handicaps most people. He merely flashed on the light at intervals for half-a-second, talking all the while and striding confidently.
“Were you raised on bogies?” he asked. “Everybody is. India’s darkness is said to be full of millions of them and it probably is; but I have never met one that could pull a trigger, and you can’t scare me with mere malevolence. Benevolence is often much worse. This world is a place for pragmatists, and if the next world isn’t, what do I care? Lend a hand, please.”
It taxed their united strength to raise one of the stones in the floor. There was nothing under it but a big bronze rod, curved slightly, with a handle at one end and a small hook at the other. But a small stone in the wall came out rather easily after having been thumped a few times with the rod; and that revealed a hole just large enough to admit the hook. The babu inserted almost the full length of the rod and gave it half a turn until the hook took hold of something.
“Now pull,” he commanded.
Grunting, straining, with their feet against the wall, they pulled until something yielded and the rod came slowly toward them. It came almost half-way the width of the tunnel. Quorn could not see what was happening because the babu had switched off the flashlight and set it down in order to use both hands. He merely realized that they were pulling something out through the hole. He did not know that the enormous slab of limestone, that looked like a support for the roof of the tunnel, had opened outward, until the babu had flashed on the light again. They had been pulling at a chain which was fast to a lever on the far side of the wall. The babu turned the flashlight on a rather complicated looking system of levers, and then led the way in, up a flight of five steps and into a narrower tunnel whose floor was foul with bats’ excreta. There was very dim light that came through small gaps set at wide intervals; it foreshortened the view along the tunnel, so that it looked like a dungeon. The masonry of the arched roof, clumsy and irregular, afforded foothold for countless bats that let go and fled in front of them. The air was foul with their stench, although there seemed to be plenty of ventilation of a kind and the tunnel was dry.
“Two miles!” said the babu, and his voice rumbled along the tunnel. “It is not too safe in places where the roof needs propping. It will fall in one of these days. Then another bit of history will lose reality. The scholars will debunk it. They will say there never was a tunnel. Howsoever, it is how the miracles were managed, in the days before the mission was even a palace as yet, and that is centuries ago. There used to be a dance of gods and goddesses on astrologically stipulated dates. There was a circle of flame around a stone stage and the gods and goddesses appeared within it, vanishing again before the flame died. That was very comforting to pious people, and it might be happening today, but certain of the priests and ladies of the nautch of Kali’s temple somehow or other got badly burned. And it may be that the price of naphtha went up. Or perhaps the contemporary Maharajah was jealous and promised the people to restore prosperity by putting a prohibitive import duty on inflammables. At any rate, the gods and goddesses discontinued the entertainment. And there were always spoil-sports in the world sticking noses into things. The only difference is that nowadays they don’t get burned at the stake, or flayed alive, or similarly cured of blasphemy, but go to parliament and get a peerage. Some one told about this tunnel leading out from Kali’s temple to the place where spiritual fox-trots used to fascinate the credulous. They nailed him to a tree by the tongue, of course, for blasphemy. But that wasn’t enough to stop talk. So the priests invented or revived the tale of Sankyamuni and the tiger. Ever since then they have kept the most ferocious tiger they could get, in a cage in the mouth of the passage. Priests are simple people, just like politicians and financiers. They hate to let go of a vested interest, even when the dividends have to be passed. Unrespectable criminals would have closed this passage, which would be easy to do. But priests are moralists, and morals mean looking a long way ahead. There might come a time in course of generations or of centuries when this passage could be put to profitable use again. So they discouraged all investigation from the end we entered, by arranging that their tiger can be loosed into the tunnel. Would you like to meet the front end of an angry tiger in a tunnel? And at that, a tiger propaganded by the priests as being fed by night on ogres’ entrails that are brought forth from the underworld by incantations?”
Quorn was breathless from the bat-stench and the speed with which the babu led. The floor was regular enough, but he couldn’t be sure of that, because the babu only used the light in the very dark intervals midway between the slots of daylight from the holes in the roof. The slots resembled chimneys as much as anything. Some of the holes were almost closed up, and those sections of the tunnel were in almost total darkness. Sweat streamed into his eyes. The babu’s conversation rumbled so along the tunnel that it was an almost intolerable effort to separate the words from their echo. It made him irritable, and the irritation was increased by thirst.
However, there was light ahead at last — a lot of blinding white light. The babu waited for him at the foot of what appeared to be a high, roofless tower, twenty feet wide at the summit and a great deal wider at the bottom. It was almost kiln-shaped.
“We are now beneath Siva’s temple, on the opposite side of the street from Kali’s temple,” said the babu. “This is why I dared talk. Sounds pass upward at this point. Do you remember the roof of Siva’s temple? This is one of those cone-shaped towers. All that fallen masonry in front of us was once a stairway that led to a door about two-thirds of the way up; but when the stair fell they bricked up that door. I am probably the only living man who knows for certain that the stair, when it fell, didn’t block the last bit of tunnel. Bamjee knew it. He knew a lot more than was good for a man of his limitations. This babu brought medicines for Bamjee all the way from Cawnpore, where there is a poisoner who knows enough about antidotes to make the fortune of a specialist in bootleg liquor patients. But Bamjee died nevertheless. His fault was that his greed was stronger than his curiosity, and he was too crude. He attempted to blackmail Bughouse Bill by threatening to sell the secret of this tunnel to the Maharajah. It was a silly threat, as Bamjee realized when it was too late. Some men seem to have to die to get sense knocked into them. The Maharajah would have paid him nothing for the secret. And to threaten Bughouse Bill is to incur an animosity that oozes essences of herbs which do not aid longevity. However, dying men grow talkative if they are humorously entertained, so this babu learned Bamjee’s secrets. Let a man be solemn on his death-bed and he will talk about eternity and many other matters that he does not know yet. I told Bamjee jokes, and he told me, by Jiminy, this secret that he did know. I know how to use it, but he didn’t.”
He began to lead the way again, but paused. “From here on,” he admonished, “silence! Not a whisper!”
It was easy going, although there seemed to be no passage at all until they took the fallen masonry in flank and found an opening between it and the wall. They were now in a winding tunnel, pitch dark, that apparently made a circuit because its walls were a part of the foundations of the temple, The babu turned the flashlight upon carvings which suggested that even the foundations were built of ruins older than the ancient pile above them. Some of the carvings were upside down. At last they turned a corner and the babu switched the light off. Thirty feet ahead of them, seen cross-wise of the tunnel opening, at an angle, silhouetted sharply, stood the temple tiger, black against the bright sky. There was a rather sharp slope up toward him, and at the top of that, before one reached the cage, were stone steps. Both men breathed hard. The tiger heard them — turned — stared down at them, and snarled.
The babu touched Quorn’s black turban, then his own, and pointed to the shadow beneath the cage. The meaning of that was plain enough; their heads would be invisible from the temple courtyard, even should they ra
ise them above the level of the floor of the cage. But the nearer they approached the tiger the more restless he became — then angry — then furious. He began to rush to and fro and to hurl himself against the bars. It was entirely probable that priests were watching him to prevent a trick being played. But the babu crept so close that the tiger almost clawed his turban through the bars. He drew Quorn closer — pointed — made him study details, while the tiger raved and ravened up above them.
The back of the cage was unlike the front. One section of it had been made to open, and that part resembled a door. It would swing outward on hinges. But the door, instead of being locked, was fastened, similarly to the front one, by iron bolts that shot into the framework of the cage, one at the top and one at the bottom. To reach either bolt would mean getting within reach of the tiger’s claws. Above the cage, behind where the arch had been filled in with masonry, there was a dark hole where several men might hide, unseen and safe, if they could reach it; but the only possible way to reach it would be to open the door of the cage and climb by that. The tiger probably could take the same route, since the door was cross-barred and would give him foothold for a leap.
Because they were below the floor-level, there was nothing to be seen through the cage but the far bars and the sky beyond it. But the babu pointed at the sky, so Quorn studied that, too. The sun, he observed, would set behind the cage. Long before sunset the huge pile of the temple would throw all that corner of the courtyard into deep shadow; and he remembered how dark the tiger’s cage was after sunset. But the more he considered that tiger in its cage, the more he wished himself in Philadelphia.
The babu beckoned him away at last, and they had a last glimpse of the tiger tearing at the bars in an attempt to follow them as they found their way back to the circular space beneath the open dome.
“This, here, is our bull ring,” said the babu. “Here we kill him. We shall need a ladder. Then I climb to the top of the cage, and stay there. I release the top bolt. You release the bottom one with long tongs. As the door swings open it protects you from him. If he turns to attack you — if he does turn, which he may not — I switch on the flashlight in his face. He is hungry; the priests have kept him famished to sweeten his disposition. And a tiger loves dogmeat. We will have a dog tied here in this place and when we leave him alone the dog will howl. I have a good dog ready; he can howl like hell; he usually howls all night long. So the tiger goes after the dog, and you take a gun and go after the tiger.”
“You’re a genius,” said Quorn. “I know a hotter one than that, though. See here: the tiger jumps past me — I grab his tail and tie a knot in it — that makes him holler and fetches the dog, who grabs his ear and hauls him to the tank in the mission courtyard. There we drown him decent. Me and you get leather medals, and the band plays ‘Hallelujah.’”
“You are all right,” said the babu. “Certainties only fail when men can’t joke about uncertainties. Now you tell me. How do you think we ought to do this?”
Quorn scratched his forehead. “You’re going to bring her along this tunnel with the other tiger?” he asked. “She’s to get through that cage, and then lead our tame tiger up over the bridge? Is that it? You’ve your choice o’ two ways. Either you get a hunk o’ meat with good, quick poison in it, and you shove that through the bars from this side. If he’s famished, he’ll swallow it quick; and if it’s cyanide, or even strychnine, you won’t need no referee to count him out like Tunney. Then the way’s clear. Otherwise you shoot him.”
“No good,” said the babu. “We have got to get their tiger out of the way. Their tiger absolutely never was. Ours is the tiger, and there is no other — not even his ghost. Ratty must lead our tiger through the tunnel. We couldn’t trust her to do it. As a Princess, she is unpredictable. But as a tiger-leader, I should say she is a dead cert — dead before the job is half done.”
“Do you mean you have a double for her?” Quorn asked.
“No, not for the last act. But we needn’t kill her in the first act, need we? Dead princesses are as useless as a League of Nations passport with a visa from the king of Manchukuo.”
“Well then, what the hell?” Quorn answered irritably. “Talk horse. What’s your idea?”
But the babu only grinned. He answered: “Think it over, Gunga sahib! Now is time for thinking. Get that over with. Tonight there won’t be any time for thinking.” He began to lead the way toward the tunnel. Over his shoulder he added: “Think of the impossibilities. You will reject those. Then tonight you won’t try them.”
“Aw, hell, come on, tell me your plan,” Quorn insisted. But the babu answered over-shoulder:
“Not I! You would argue it to death. This babu’s plans are best unargued even when they’re no good. And the worst plan is the best one, if the best is argued to a frazzle but the worst one isn’t.”
Just as he reached the tunnel-mouth he stooped and carefully examined something that was cached behind some crumbled masonry. It was a bundle. It consisted of one long rod with a two-pronged hook at the end, a pair of long-armed blacksmith’s tongs, and a gun that looked almost twice as long as any other gun that Quorn had ever seen.
“Am not a good sport,” said the babu. “When I aim at a tiger, I like a barrel long enough to keep him that far off at any rate.”
“Oh yeah?” Quorn asked. “So it’s you who’ll shoot him?”
“Did you think I’d let a God-dam Yankee do what I daren’t?” the babu answered. “I daren’t. But I will. You watch me. Let’s go. There is lots to do yet — plenty to go wrong yet! Come on — hurry, hurry, hurry!”
XXIV
“It Is Impossible To Keep A Secret.”
It was well they returned when they did. Asoka disliked his new quarters, and the smell of tiger had sent him into a passion of indignation. Ratty hardly dared to go near him. The ring in the wall was coming loose, too; half a dozen more tugs and either the iron bolt or the wall itself might give way. The younger, smaller elephant was copying Asoka — not exactly out of hand yet, but in a mood to make trouble at the first chance.
It was a problem that taxed resources. Quorn fastened a rope on to the end of the iron bolt inside the empty building and made that secure by bringing it out through a window, so that at any rate there was the weight of a whole wall to tax Asoka’s strength. The babu crawled beneath the tiger’s van and out through the archway. He returned with ten men, who looked like cabinet ministers, they were all so nicely dressed, but he set them to work at once to draw the van around the tank and toward the great stone trap-door leading to the tunnel. There he parked it, probably out of Asoka’s sight, because all elephants are short-sighted, and upwind from him anyhow. That done, he made the ten men raise and bolt in place the massive boarding that fitted the end of the archway; thus he shut off the inner courtyard and secured theoretical privacy. Then he dismissed the ten men — sent them up the ladder and to the inner courtyard by way of the roof. Moses, he decided, was a liability at that particular moment, so he sent him indoors out of danger. Ratty was commanded to resume the cast-off royal robes. They produced a curiously swift effect on him. He was a showman instantly — a circus showman, intelligent, alert, dependable, no matter what he might be out of sight and smell and sound of the arena. One imagined sawdust.
“Destiny is a hussy,” said the babu, “but I think we bilk the lady. If she misses this one, it’s her last chance — almost. Up with the trap-door. Tie it open.”
The van door faced the opened trap; the descending steps were six or seven feet in front of it. The door would open toward the courtyard wall. The babu ordered Quorn to stand between the van and the trap, so that he would be facing the door when it opened.
“Stand a little nearer to the trap-door. If he likes you, he will pass you. If he doesn’t I will swat him. He mustn’t like me whatever happens. You coax, I drive — love and hatred, fifty-fifty. In you go — out with him, Ratty — take him down the steps into the tunnel!”
Ratty jumped in
swiftly and gave the tiger no chance to do any thinking. He unsnapped the chain in a second and drove the tiger out in front of him. But he followed so fast that he almost lost his foothold on the van step. The tiger hesitated, blinked at the sun-lit courtyard and seemed to mistrust the yawning hole in front of him. Quorn stood terrified. He could have touched the tiger. He could have kicked it. It stared at him, as undecided as Quorn was what to do next. But Ratty, with the chain in both hands, started down the steps. The babu stepped out from behind Quorn with a slat of wood in his hand. He spanked the tiger on the rump and it went down the steps, but in no great haste. It repeatedly snarled back- ward over-shoulder at the babu, who remained on the top step flourishing his weapon.
“Love and hatred, fifty-fifty,” he repeated. “A tiger is a sentimentalist. A sentimentalist is a behaviorist. And a behaviorist would be a person if he had intelligence, but he hasn’t. If the tiger murders Ratty, you will have to double for him. Let us hope not. Should he murder you, it would be all up! Go down now and help to seduce him into the other tunnel.”
But seduction was not so easy. The tiger drank a little where the water seeped through from the tank. Then he stared back at the sunlight, eyed Quorn suspiciously and pulled back on the chain when Ratty went in through the opening into the long tunnel. He was much too powerful to have been dragged by one man, and he snarled at Quorn, who called back to the babu:
“What now? He’s getting ugly!”
But Quorn’s voice either scared the tiger or reassured him. He started forward. Ratty took up the slack of the chain. Quorn, with his heart in his mouth, slipped by between the tiger and the wall, so that he could at least pretend to cut off that end of the tunnel. Then he spoke again, pitching his voice low, and the babu ran down-steps and slapped them, as he came, with his piece of wood. He made a noise like crackers going off. The tiger gave one glance at him and then slunk stealthily through the opening. The hair was still rising on Quorn’s neck when Ratty called back quietly that all was well.