Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “How do the priests cross the river?” Hawkes asked.

  “They sit on a mat, and the mat gets up and flies. But some say that the owls pick up the mat and carry it.”

  “That sounds more probable!” said Hawkes.

  “Yes, much more probable. How could the priests make a mat fly?”

  The mahout was adamant. His elephant could not possibly swim the river, and he himself would rather die than ride into that jungle to look for a bridge.

  “For should there be a bridge, it might not bear the elephant. And whoever heard of a bridge in a jungle? But every one has heard of evil spirits. They are bad for elephants. An elephant goes crazy and kills, and smashes things, when evil spirits enter him.”

  Threats, bribes, arguments, were useless, until at last Hawkes gave the elephant a lump of corncake soaked in whisky, to establish confidence, and ordered the elephant to hoist him up to the mahout’s seat. With his legs behind the great beast’s ears he urged him forward. The mahout’s mind changed then. He declared his honor was at stake. He shrieked disconsolately, as a man should who, for honor’s sake, must plunge into the midst of devil’s magic. Hawkes crawled into the howdah and took his rifle from its case; but rifles are no good against devils. The mahout climbed by the elephant’s knee to the elephant’s neck; white-eyed with terror he demanded whisky, which is good against everything. Hawkes gave him some.

  Then tank-work, such as only elephants, of all living things, can do — crushing, sliding, grinding, breaking, crashing into undergrowth — plunging through the tributaries of the river, following its course and smashing down the thickets — turning aside for nothing but the big trees and the biggest boulders. Time and again the howdah and its load were almost ripped off; half a dozen times Hawkes swung by the arms from a branch of a tree to save himself from being brained. But the elephant waited for him, and they went on, mile upon gloomier mile, drenched, bitten by a million mosquitoes, leaving a track behind them that a blind man could have followed if he only were amphibian. And at last, about four in the afternoon, the going became firmer. Limestone cropped up through the tree roots and the trees were less huge, although as dense as ever. The weary elephant appeared encouraged, as if he recognized the neighborhood of humans, where a decent beast was likely to get dinner. Suddenly the river curved; it thundered down a waterfall between sheer flanks of limestone, with a fern-filled, rocky island in the midst.

  It was easy to see there had been a bridge there once upon a time, although its fallen masonry had long ago been swept down-stream by rain-fed torrents such as this one. There had been a road of some importance; some of its paving-blocks, up-ended by resistless trees, stood up like tombstones in the jungle. For a bridge now, there was nothing but a hand-rope, taut across the river, and two tree-trunks — near bank to the island, island to the far bank. They were slippery with rain and only half-trimmed; branches blocked the way along them. It was something that a goat or a man could tackle; for an elephant, it might as well not be there. The mahout grinned, chattering with terror, but relieved because this seemed to be the limit.

  Hawkes pulled out a flashlight from the bedding-roll, shouldered his rifle by the sling and put some spare shells in his pocket, filled the other pocket with some chocolate and biscuits, looked to his flask and gave his orders.

  “Set me down,” he said, “and wait here. Feed your elephant and hunt some dry wood. It’s getting late; if we have to make a night of it we’ll need fire.”

  He poured all that was left of the whisky on the elephant’s big, flat corn-loaves. Then he started across the bridge. It was a slow job, although the rope helped; the rifle and flask slings kept on catching in the half-trimmed branches, and by the time he reached the island he was dizzy with exertion and with the roar of the torrent beneath him. He rested on a pile of masonry that had once formed a part of the bridge. Then he glanced back at the elephant — one of those sudden, intuitive movements that the dogmatists explain away by calling them coincidence.

  He could see the mahout in his place on the elephant’s neck; and before that sight set thought in motion he became aware of danger. The mahout did not look round; he merely urged the elephant. Before Hawkes could think or shout, the elephant was going full pelt through the jungle, back along the way he came. There was only a glimpse of him, gray as the tree-trunk shadows. He was gone in a second.

  Hawkes shrugged his shoulders. It was no use swearing. He would kick the liver out of that mahout in good time. Meanwhile, what next? Forward was hardly likely to be worse than backward, and he could not possibly struggle back to the ford before sunset. Neither was it the slightest use to sit still. Besides, he was dripping wet; the elephant had shaken down continual showers of water from the trees, and Hawkes had a wholesome dread of a night in wet clothes in the fever-ridden jungle. He decided to go forward and to look first for a place where he could spend the night. Next, he would look for dry wood. Then, if there was any time left before sunset, he would try to discover a path towards the village on the far side of the river. He was angry, but not in the least discouraged.

  The tiger, for the moment, gave him no concern whatever. With his double- barreled .577 express and sufficient daylight he felt well able to care for himself; by nightfall he proposed to have a hot fire going that would keep any tiger away and be smoky enough to defeat the much more dangerous mosquitoes. Chullunder Ghose’s curious injunction not to shoot the tiger troubled him least of all; if he had seen the tiger there and then he would have shot the brute without a moment’s hesitation. But as he worked his way along the slippery tree- trunk, with the hungry dark-brown flood beneath him, he did wonder why the babu should have been so emphatic about it.

  “Damn him, he knows me. He should have chosen a native for this job if he didn’t want the tiger sent west.”

  Something hit him on the helmet. It was a fine, big, padded helmet with a waterproof cover. It absorbed shock, so that the stone, or whatever it was, did no harm except almost to make him lose his footing. Sacred monkeys sometimes swarm amid ancient ruins; thinking of the ruins that he hoped to find, he supposed for a moment that one of the monkeys had pelted him, as they frequently do. He hurried to the far bank, scrambled to the ground and looked up at the tree-tops. Not a sign of monkeys. But another stone hit him a crack on the jaw.

  He unslung his rifle, cocked it, stared about him and aimed at a sound. There was something moving in a thicket, or behind the thicket. He was certain it was not a tiger. Someone who had flung that stone was lurking — looking at him. He could feel eyes. He began to walk toward the thicket. Something or somebody scurried away, not making more noise than a furtive animal, but it was an unrecognizable noise. Elimination left no probability except that a human being was trying to scare him back the way he came, but was afraid to be seen.

  “Hell! Whoever it is, is as scared as I am,” he reflected. Knowing he was rather scared, he set his jaw and squared his shoulders.

  Half-light filtered through the trees of a jungle under heavy clouds, induces nervousness. It makes a sound seem half-mysterious and wholly dreadful. Hawkes was neither superstitious nor a weakling, but the goose-flesh rose all over him. He was as dangerous then as dynamite. He would have shot at anything he saw. But he could see nothing. The trees were not nearly so dense on this side of the river, due to sheet-rock that afforded only random root-hold; undergrowth was dense where it had found a lodging, but there was not much of it to give a fair view in all directions, except where boulders blocked the way. Much of the undergrowth was fern, a little less than waist-high, drenching wet, but passable. And, winding through the fern, if not a track, at least something that faintly suggested one, appeared to take an almost definite direction. Much too nervous now to care to stand still, Hawkes decided to follow that track.

  It led away from the gloom of the jungle. It presently curved into a space of ten or fifteen acres where a fire had raged not long ago and second- growth was barely knee-high. Stumps and charred downwood
barred the way, but the footpath, more distinct now, wound amid them. On the right hand, sunset bathed the sky in furious crimson. On the left hand was a pond an acre in extent, half-filled with lotus-pads and still surrounded by limestone masonry, broken, but not so badly that one could not see some of the steps that once had lined the pond on all four sides. And beyond the pond, the ruined temple.

  It was a heap of grim blocks, tumbled by an earthquake. Trees had rooted in the cracks, and done more havoc than the tremors that had wrecked the roof and some of the enormous columns. Giant creepers, flaming in the sunset, seemed to tie the mass together as if jungle-gods had drawn a net around it to preserve its shapelessness. Nothing remained of a temple, seen from outside, except one huge image, partly fallen, tilted forward and to one side, staring downward. Unimaginably held by roots and broken masonry, it grinned at its reflection in the still pool — loathsome on a blood-red mirror — cruel, calm, impassionate. A million frogs made music to it. On its head, amid the carving of the hair, a seed had rooted and produced a drooping spray of green that made the head look drunken. And the coarse lips and the lazy, heavy- lidded eyes smiled confidently at the glutted drunkenness of death that swallows life, and even swallows death itself, and ends in nothing.

  Hawkes remembered he was hungry then and ate some chocolate. There was plenty of charred wood that would make a camp-fire; there was time enough, too, to gather up a good load. Nothing for it but the ruins; he must take his chance of snakes and hunt for a nook or cranny large enough to spend the night in. He could build a fire in the entrance and dry his wet clothes. Forward!

  Fifteen minutes’ scramble over fallen masonry and tangled creepers brought him to a window, or what had been one. It was nothing but a shapeless, dark hole, but it opened into what the flashlight revealed as a cell, about twenty feet by ten, with walls of heavily carved limestone, and so deep in bat- dirt that there was no guessing what the floor was made of. At the far end there were shadows and a broken masonry partition, but Hawkes did not stay to examine those; he went for wood. After half a dozen trips he had enough to keep a good fire going all night; so he frayed up tinder with his clasp-knife, economically built his watch-fire in the middle of the hole, and set to work to clear a piece of floor to sit on, scraping away the bat-filth with a piece of charred wood. The stench turned his stomach, so he let it alone after a few minutes and decided to sit on a loose, square block of stone that had a clean side when he turned it over. Then he pulled his clothes off and began to dry them at the fire.

  So he was naked, except for his socks and boots, when something stirred away behind him in the dark beyond the broken masonry partition. He grabbed his rifle. Then he pulled his trousers on. He listened. Suddenly he used the flashlight, but it made the darkness even darker where the shadows lay beyond the broken masonry. He felt his trousers slipping, so he had to tighten his belt with one hand while he clutched his rifle with the other. He held the flashlight between his knees; the light went upward, terrifying scores of bats that were disturbed enough already by the watch-fire in the entrance. By the time he had his belt tight and the flashlight aimed again there was a woman staring at him.

  She had stepped from behind the broken half-wall at the far end. One could tell she was a woman by her long hair, flowing to her waist but gummed into ropes with blue mud. From her breasts, as flat as pancakes, to her knees, as gnarled as tree-knots, she was covered with a goatskin apron. She had no eyebrows. Her eyes glowed sullenly from dark holes in a wrinkled face that looked as hard as bronze. Her lips seemed hardly skin-thick, tight against splendid teeth that were as yellow as amber. Beauty that had left her as the tide leaves the barren beaches, made her terrible by hinting it had been hers.

  And another thing was terrible. Emaciated, scarred by thorn and weather, she stood straight as a spear and as strong as an Amazon. Life had not left her; it lingered and burned in a scarred mask. And she looked as if she hated life, that rioted in sinewy, strong loneliness, and gave her nothing.

  “Cheerio,” said Hawkes. “I’ve chocolate and biscuit. Come and have some.”

  No answer. He repeated the invitation in Hindustani. “Come on, mother. Come and share supper with me. I’ll forgive you for hitting my jaw with a rock. It was you. No use lying. Who else could have done that?”

  Again no answer. But she beckoned, holding a long stick like a spear in her left hand, motioning with her right arm stretched out in front of her at full length, four upturned fingers summoning, unmistakable.

  “All right, mother. I can lick you,” he remarked. “I’ll follow.”

  She turned on her heel, and from behind she was as splendid as a statue of youth, with the goatskin loosely drawn round her loins and nothing but the long blue ropes of hair to hint at old age. The muscles of her back, as she moved, were ripples in the flashlight.

  “Hell! I wonder — could I lick you?” Hawkes thought. But with his thumb he set the safety catch of his rifle. “Hell! I’d hate to shoot a woman. Why not stay here?”

  But he followed. Curiosity was stronger than good sense.

  CHAPTER 11. “How about a permit?”

  Stanley Copeland suddenly — as such things happen — saw that he had bitten off a mouthful that a dozen of him could hardly have chewed. He was getting no rest, and the Sikh was as tired as himself.

  “Say, you and I are like the old lady who tried to sweep back the Atlantic with a house-broom,” he said; and the Sikh stared wide-eyed at him, equally enthusiastic, equally conscious of human limits, but guiltily aware of a waiting list of crippled, maimed, and sick who had responded to the call of naive propaganda.

  “We’re like Germany, we need a moratorium,” said Copeland. “I’m game to buy my standing with hard work, but you and I are just snowballs in hell, that’s what we are. Next thing, both of us will go sick. Nurse each other, I suppose, eh?”

  “But I have some very interesting cases for you,” said the Sikh apologetically. “I am even hoping to bring you a leper.”

  “The devil you are. You may not believe it, Kater Singh, but what I crave now is strong drink and a tiger. I’m sick of patching cripples. I want to kill something. Philanthropy palls. If you brought me a really rare eye, I could walk out on you. That’s the plain truth.”

  “God relieves the over-burdened,” the Sikh quoted piously. And that was also true, apparently, because the door opened without a knock that instant. The Sikh scowled, not so positively sure of God’s benevolence as speech might indicate. Copeland turned about and faced Chullunder Ghose, the omni-impudent, the all-observing, genial and fat to look at in his English shooting-jacket and his homespun loin-cloth.

  “Don’t you like it?” he asked, lifting the loin-cloth like a ballet- girl’s skirt. He did a caricature of Pavlova. “It is my concession to Mahatma Gandhi. All things in their turn to all men — not too much, though, or they love you, and their love is dreadful.”

  “Drink?” suggested Copeland.

  “You will go far. Never have I seen a swifter diagnosis. Eighty percent of diagnoses — so says Osler — are inaccurate, but yours is verb. sap. to the ultimate dimension! Let me warn you, whisky is forbidden by the Sikh religion. Order, therefore, three drinks. We will drink ours swiftly to preserve him from the sin of voting too dry and becoming too wet.”

  Copeland produced the whisky bottle, and his servant brought the glasses and siphon. They drank in silence until Copeland set the glass down. “I’d forgotten what it tastes like!”

  “Same here,” said the babu. “And the sun is shining! Your eyes assure me you have forgotten what that looks like! Come and see it! Twenty million miles of mud — and only one macadam road in all Kutchdullub! But it leads you to the city, and it starts here. I’ve a Ford car.”

  “How about a permit?” Copeland asked. “I’ve had a formally polite but firm communication from the Foreign Office calling my attention to section so- and-so of Order in Council number umpty-um restricting the movement of aliens into Native States.�
�

  “Did it mention boils?” Chullunder Ghose asked. “Boils on the back of a bachelor’s neck — of a hypochondriacal bachelor’s neck — of a white babu’s neck — an officially dignified and economically useless, ethically hypocritical anachronism’s neck? I think not. Circumstances alter cases. I could do the job as well as you can, with a safety-razor blade. But dignity would call that impudence. Besides, I need a mouse to help me nibble at the nets of Humpty-Dumpty on a rocking-horse. He rocks like hell, I tell you. One shove — and we shall have his alternative, probably worse, undoubtedly not much better, but different. That is nature. Work with nature, same as Osler ordered. Are you coming?”

  “You bet. But coming where? Why? Do I get the tiger?”

  “Yes, unless he gets you. And unless you are afraid of moss-back majors with a mid-Victorian morality that makes them fit this epoch as a pig fits an automobile.”

  “Frighten me later on,” said Copeland. “You have pulled my cork. I’m coming.” He grinned at the Sikh. “You’ll have enough to keep you busy till I come back. Keep all those eyes in the dark, if you can, and remember what I showed you about draining deep wounds. Go slow with iodoform, and don’t let ’em change their own dressings. I’ll be back — when?”

  “Then!” the babu answered. “When it’s over. When the Major has been recommended for a decoration, and when you and I have received our reprimand! Observe my belly; it is obese with reprimands. The walls of my wife’s bathroom in her home in Delhi are beautified with fifty of them, framed in pale pink. Let us go now.”

  CHAPTER 12. “The devil quotes scripture, sahib”

  Major Eustace Smith, in a sweater and blazer with a scarf round his neck that gave him almost the appearance of a rowing man, paced the tiled veranda, pausing at frequent intervals to glare into the Residency garden. He had to turn his whole body in order to do it, because the boils on the back of his neck were in the sharply painful stage. The garden offered no encouragement; it was a drab, wet, dreary wilderness of half-neglected flowers ruined by the rain. The sun had burst forth through the brown-gray clouds, but nothing welcomed it except the weeds and a lonely bull-frog, who reiterated big drum belches of enthusiasm from an unseen puddle.