“Anything wrong, Mr. Gwynn?”
“No. No. Nothing wrong. There’s water. Or I think I see it.”
He pulled himself up and firmly turned his back on the deceptive paradise. He anchored one hand with sudden strength, and stretched down the other to haul up Fomin and Mahene.
Below them was a shallow crater, craggy, riven, terraced, and resembling an immensely magnified rock garden. On the eastern slope was a rough pool of water, obviously artificial. Little dug channels, choked and disused, led the water across the floor of the crater. Along the ditches and in flat damp patches grew a tangle of cultivated plants that had gone wild. Wheat, corn and some kind of cabbage competed for the soil; their supply of light and water was unbounded.
Mahene rushed for the pool in great dancing strides, and plunged in. Fomin knew as well as Gwynn what to expect. With a show of unconcern, he asked:
“How – how does it taste?”
“Commissar,” shouted Mahene, “it’s a change from your old saddlebags. I wouldn’t say better than that.”
They joined Mahene in the water. Its touch was heaven to their dried skins. Its flavor was no worse than that of a spa water, and its effect was unlikely to be more than inconvenient. With the crater for a base to which, in emergency, they could return, they were free at last of time, and could find the vital homeward well at leisure.
Mahene cut a load of green stuff, and took down the three full water bottles for the pony. While he was away, Gwynn and Fomin searched for the unknown builder of the pool and channels. That he was dead or had long since departed was certain. They found his dwelling, a cool hollow in the crater wall. There was nothing in it but his bed of cornstalks, crude pots of cut lava and some packets of seeds, printed in Russian. Scratched on the wall were Russian characters, like the scrawling of child or cave man.
“Here – lived – Pyotr – the – monk – to – the – glory – of – God,” Fomin translated. “And a list of years beginning at 1920. And the word Glory written up everywhere again and again.”
“He hadn’t even any fire,” Gwynn said. “He must have lived on raw grain and vegetables.”
“Why not?” Fomin asked, with a touch of indignant sympathy for the unknown. “He was a hermit.”
A hermit. He certainly was. To Gwynn a hermit was a historical curiosity. Fomin, however, seemed to find such fanaticism wholly natural and contemporary.
“His choice was wrong,” he said. “But it was truly Russian.”
He looked proudly over the crater, as if it were his duty to annex it for some spiritual union that was not altogether the Union of Soviets.
Mahene returned at sunset with food and the primus stove. He reported that the pony was eating, and that it would certainly recover if they could find an easy route for it up to the water.
They started for that glowing western face which they and the shepherds had seen across the desert. A path, with steps roughly cut in the rock, led upwards out of the crater, then curved to the west and down. It ended abruptly in a much trampled space at the top of a cliff. They knew that they must be directly above the shining light.
Below them the side of the hill fell away in what was rather a rough glacis than a cliff. It was far too steep to climb, but a man could rest against it if he had some slight means of support. Both the man and the support – what was left of them – were visible. At the bottom, lying on a narrow platform of gravel, was a body. At the top, tied round a boulder, was the broken end of a grass rope.
Another path, very narrow and worn smooth by the ascents and descents of a single pair of feet, skirted the edge and then plunged downwards, zigzagging across the normal slope of the hill until it led them back to the cliff’s foot. The monk Pyotr lay with his hands crossed on his breast; he must have been some time a-dying after his fall. He wore the remains of his black frock tied round his waist. It had not rotted. The knots showed that this rag was all he had in life. Where his flesh had been exposed to the sun it had dried; where it was covered by his long, gray hair, it had disappeared. In the wash of the light wind the hair moved back and forth over white bone.
He held a heavy hammer in his hand. The debris upon which he lay was not gravel, but chippings from the rock face, fallen week after week and year after year during his strange, singlehanded quarrying. The bank of debris was two hundred feet long, proving that he had worked on the end of his rope right across the face of the glacis.
Gwynn picked up a handful of the chippings. They were composed of a hard deposit left by water which had seeped over the glacis and dried, or even boiled, before it reached the bottom. This mineral skin the monk had cleaned away from the underlying rock.
Fomin knocked out a specimen of the rock itself.
“Zinc again,” he said. “But what use did he think it was without any possible transport? Why did he want it? Did he think his God would make the railway?”
“He wanted it to make the shining light,” said Gwynn.
“They did not teach chemistry in monasteries.”
“No. They taught patience, Fomin. Patience till death. Patience for the glory of God. Glory he wrote, didn’t he? Oh, it’s quite plain! He saw after dark the luminous patches of rock where sulphide of zinc had been exposed to the sun, and wanted more of it.”
“A natural sulphide of zinc in that purity is impossible,” Fomin answered shortly.
“But there it is, my good colleague. There it is! It is also impossible that one man should clear 30,000 square feet of it with nothing but a grass rope and a hammer. One square foot an hour. Four hours a day. Ten thousand days. That would do it, Fomin, if he came in 1920. You should be proud of your compatriot. A Stakhanovite, eh?”
“But for what? For what, I ask you?”
“To light the desert.”
“For aircraft?”
“For us, commissar,” replied Mahene impatiently. “My Lord, all that work! And how he must have hoped that someone would see it!”
Quarter of a mile to the south was a steep ridge from which they could look, at an angle, onto the face of the rock. Twilight was on them when they reached it. Faint luminous patches were visible where Pyotr had been at work and on raised surfaces where water had never run. Then the night came down and the glacis began to glow with the merciless light it had received during the day.
The pattern of the monk’s quarrying appeared. It was very rough, and only to be distinguished after long watching, for gullies, angles and pinnacles broke the outline. The design was intended to be a solid eight-pointed star. The eighth point was incomplete, barely started. It stood exactly above the dead body of the monk.
In the middle of the star – or so nearly the middle that Pyotr plainly had the eye of a craftsman – was a black spot which seemed to be a hollow, too deep to catch the sun during the day. A black line which was a ledge ran across the star to its center.
They found the bottom of the ledge. That, too, had been worn into a path. It was a vile place, nowhere more than two feet wide, but the going was firm and the way could clearly be seen. The light, when they were in the midst of it, was not so powerful as it had appeared from a distance; the rock was luminous as the bow wave of a summer boat, revealing the shapes of objects without detail.
The black spot was a natural cleft, of which the outer edge had been knocked into a rough circle by Pyotr’s hammer. It was quite shallow. At the back they could see a dim gleam of metal which drew a gasp of anticipation from John Mahene.
An icon of the Virgin and Child stood upon an altar crudely chipped from the surrounding rock. The two Byzantine heads stared at the intruders from a massive frame of gold. The devotion which had inspired that indefatigable monk to rescue it from destruction or theft could be understood, but how he had carried an object of such breadth and weight and value across frontier and mountains, whether hidden in sacks or under his cassock, was beyond conjecture; nor could they guess how he had come to the hill, over the face of which, for his remaining years, he had labored
to extend the deep and golden frame of his treasure. As likely as not, Gwynn thought, he had gone up to die, and found, like themselves, a reprieve.
“Worth the journey, Fomin?” he asked.
“I will not let you take it. It stays here,” Fomin answered with quiet and absolute determination.
“I was not thinking of its worth in Bond Street,” said Gwynn gently.
Fomin’s lack of comprehension wasn’t surprising. He served his own kingdom of the spirit. So did they all, he thought, all different kingdoms, the European, the Asiatic and the Negro. They had risked their lives for such utterly distinct reasons, and God alone knew whether one was more valid than another.
Mahene’s upright body was tense with reverence. He was not a man to kneel. When he felt Gwynn’s eyes upon him, he found it necessary to speak.
“We shan’t get rich this time, Mr. Gwynn,” he said.
He did not sound disappointed, merely regretful that it was too much for any human being to expect profit as well as success.
“Not this time, John,” Gwynn answered. “This time we have come with our gifts.”
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1952 by the Estate of Geoffrey Household
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
978-1-5040-1048-1
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EARLY BIRD BOOKS
FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY
BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT
FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS
NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY
EBOOKS BY GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
Tales of Adventurers Page 19