The twin motors of the Grumman muttered their way through the cloud, then pulled the plane into the blue sky beyond. Below, the bare, brown backs of the mountains fell away into the canyons like folds of loose hide. The winding thread of the Yellow River which had pointed their way toward the distant hills had fallen behind. Before them lay only the unknown vastness of the Kuen-Lun Mountains and, beyond, Tibet.
Turk Madden eased forward on the stick and slid down a thousand feet toward the black, thumblike peak on which he had laid his course. Then he banked around it and came in over the black lake.
It was there, just as he remembered it. On the far side the age-old ruins, ancient beyond belief, lay bleak and bare in the late rays of the setting sun. Turk put the ship down gently and taxied toward the crumbling structures, keeping a careful eye out for any of the stone piers that might be under the water.
Shan Bao moved up behind him as he neared the stone platform, weathered and black with age. “We’ll tie her up,” he told the Manchu. “I want to go ashore.”
Sparrow Ryan looked over his shoulder. “Looks older than the mountains!” he exclaimed, staring at the buildings. “Who built these?”
Turk shrugged. “That, my friend, is possibly the ultimate mystery. Nobody knows anything about this part of the world. No competent archeologist has ever worked up here. I’ve seen Roman ruins that look juvenile compared to these.”
When the ship was tied to massive iron rings on either side of the slip, they climbed out. Ryan glanced at Turk. “I’ll stay put,” he said, “just in case.”
Madden nodded and helped lovely film actress Raemy Doone to the dock. Travis Bekart climbed out and stood looking around. There was apprehension in his eyes and a certain watchfulness that Turk didn’t like. He was glad the tough little government man was staying behind to keep an eye on things.
The stone platform on which they stood was worn by long ages of wind and water, and it fronted what had once been a magnificent building, over half in ruins now. The architecture was not Chinese but something that predated even the massive monasteries of inner Tibet. The city itself, of which almost a third had been built on stone pilings over the lake, stretched halfway up the sandy hills of the valley.
At the far end of the lake the Thumb Peak pointed a finger at the sky. “I’m glad it’s thumbs up!” Turk said, chuckling. “This place is gloomy!”
Their footsteps echoed hollowly on stones no white man had ever trod, and when they spoke they dropped their voices to whispers as though fearful of awakening spirits long dead.
There was no other sound. A stillness of something beyond death lay over the valley. Even the wind found no place to wail or mourn among the ruins or the hollow arches of empty windows. The platform ended in a paved street that ran along the shore behind the first row of buildings, then turned up a gloomy avenue that mounted the hill. A great stone tower had fallen into the street, which was scarcely more than an alley, making a pile of dusty rubble over which they must climb.
Shan Bao slid a long, yellow-fingered hand into the pocket of his leather jacket and drew out a pipe. Raemy glanced at him, seeing the curious expression in his eyes. “These were your people?”
“Who knows? I am a Manchu, and my people are very ancient, but this”—he waved a yellow hand—“this is more ancient. This is older than the Great Wall, older than time. It is perhaps older than the mountains.”
Turk stepped to a great stone arch that opened into a vast hall, unbelievable in its height and impressive expanse. They walked inside, a tiny knot of humanity lost beneath a dome so huge as to make them stare, unbelieving.
“Who would ever dream there were such places as this!” Raemy exclaimed. “It’s so strange, and so beautiful!”
“Beautiful?” Bekart stared about him distastefully. “It’s gloomy as a cavern.”
They walked out into the darkening street. A bat dipped toward Turk’s head, and, involuntarily, he glanced up.
Beyond the rooftops and on the ridge that enclosed the valley was a small group of horsemen. They were at least a half mile away but clearly visible in the last rays of the sun.
Raemy caught Madden’s arm. “Who are they?”
“Can’t say,” Turk murmured, scowling. “They might be Lolos. We’ll get back to the ship. Bekart, you go on ahead with Miss Doone. I’ll hang back with Shan Bao as they may come up on us.”
“I want to see them!” Raemy protested, lifting her chin defiantly.
Turk grinned. “You’d better go, honey chile. You’d be worth fifty camels up here!”
“I’ll stay,” she said. “I want to see them!”
Turk barely glanced around, his eyes level and hard. “You’ll go,” he said, “now!”
“Let’s not use that tone, Madden!” Bekart said savagely. “I’ll not have it!”
Madden’s eyes shifted to Bekart. “You go with her,” he said coolly, “and get moving!” His eyes went back to the actress. “Take him along,” he said.
Their eyes held. Horses’ hoofs sounded on stone. She turned abruptly then. “We’d better go, Travis,” she said. “He’s right, of course!”
A DOZEN HORSEMEN were riding toward them, loping nearer on their ragged, long-haired Mongolian ponies. When they were almost up to them they reined in, and their leader, a tall, fierce-looking man with greasy black hair, shouted speech strange to Madden’s ears.
Shan replied. After attempting several dialects he made himself understood. “He wants to know what we do here,” Shan said. “I told him we rest awhile.”
“Ask him what he knows of the great mountain, Amne Machin.”
Shan spoke, and the big man’s face became a mask of incredulity. There was excited talk among the horsemen, then the big man spoke excitedly to Shan, shaking his head many times.
Shan looked at Turk. “He says you cannot go there. That is Ngolok country, and they are very bad men with a queen who is a wicked and evil woman. She has many slaves, some of them his own people.”
“Tell him we search for a man who crashed in a plane. Ask him if he knows of any white men up this way.”
After some excited talk, Shan Bao turned back to Turk. “He says once long ago a big bird landed back in the Ngolok country. He has seen it, but it is not broken. He said there was another bird, not so fat in the belly as ours, that flew near here yesterday.”
“Sounds like a fighter,” Madden speculated. “Who would have a fighter up here?”
Shan talked some more, and the leader got down from his pony and came forward. Squatting on his haunches he drew a rough map in the sand, pointing out the mountain peaks, then drew a line for a valley. He put his finger on one spot. “The plane is there,” Shan Bao interpreted. “That line is a deep valley, and very, very rich. Caravans come from and go there from Sinkiang, Urumchi.”
Turk Madden drew a flashlight from his pocket. There were several in the plane. He flashed the light on and off, then handed it to the chief. The man got to his feet to accept the gift, then bowed very low.
“He says any enemy of the Ngoloks is a friend, but he thanks you,” Shan advised.
As the horsemen rode away, Turk led the way back to the ship. “We’ll stay here tonight,” he said. “I think the place he mentioned isn’t more than sixty miles away.”
Ryan was waiting for them on the dock with Bekart and Raemy.
“Miss Doone,” Madden said, turning to the girl, “your trip may not be a wild goose chase. A ship like the one we’re looking for came down safely about sixty miles from here.”
“Turk!” Raemy’s eyes flashed with joy as she caught him by the sleeves of his jacket with both her hands. “Do you mean it? Is it true?”
“Take it easy,” Madden advised. “He might have been killed in the landing, anyway. We only know what this native said, and he was never close to the ship. If he’s alive and enslaved to the Ngoloks, we’ll have a rough time freeing him.”
“Oh, if he’s only alive!”
Turk’s eyes lifted from hers to
Bekart’s and he was shocked. The former Army flyer’s face was dead white, the bones seeming to stand out tight and hard against the tautened skin. His eyes were narrowed and ugly.
Gently, Madden stepped away from the girl. Was Bekart so affected because the girl had grabbed him in her excitement? Or was he afraid that Captain Bob Doone might still be alive?
While the others were busy preparing for night, Ryan walked over to Turk. “What do you think of Bekart?” Madden asked him.
Sparrow Ryan kicked a stone. “Haven’t got him figured,” he said. “Like I told you in Hollywood before we left, the government checked him thoroughly. His war record is good. Before the war he was an advertising man, before that a number of things. He seems to like the company of wealthy women, but who doesn’t?”
“Notice his face when I mentioned the plane was intact?”
“Uh-huh, I did. That hit him right where he lives, Turk, and I’m wondering why. He flew the wingman for Doone, and nobody ever knew what happened but him.”
Could Bekart secretly be in the pay of the people who wanted the Pharo counter? Certainly, this improvement in the Geiger counter which had been the sole cargo of the missing plane was infinitely valuable to a number of countries.
MADDEN RECALLED Ryan’s words of a few days before. “It’s a new gadget. Yank flyer in India dreamed it up. He’d been working in a laboratory where they had to keep testing for radiation. The device for that’s a Geiger counter. This guy dreams up a new angle on it, a much more sensitive tube, just the sort of thing that would be ideal for locating secret atomic plants. This Pharo counter is much more sensitive and has a directional device so they can pin down the location of the disturbance within a matter of miles.
“This guy in India,” Ryan had said, “had access to the materiel and built a model, but then he was murdered. However, they put the gadget in this steel box and started it for the States over the Hump. They were flying it to Chungking, then Japan, then home. But the plane crashed.”
Had that been the reason for the crash? Madden doubted it, and so did the authorities in Washington. The crash had been in the wrong place, almost impossible of access. Three times, under cover of other excuses, the Army had tried to find the plane and failed. Then when they discovered that Raemy Doone, the film star, was financing her own expedition to search for her brother, who had piloted the ship, they had slipped their man, Ryan, into the personnel for the flight. Madden’s eyes searched the shadowy line of the hills, and beyond them the mighty, ice-capped peaks and shoulders of the mysterious Kuen-Luns and the towering majesty of the world’s mightiest mountain, Amne Machin.
Travis Bekart was utterly ruthless. He was the sort of man who got what he wanted, regardless of price. The cold, bleak fury in his eyes a few minutes ago had not been the look of a man in love and engaged to the beauteous Raemy Doone. It had been the expression of a man thwarted who meant to do something about it.
Then Turk Madden stiffened. Sparrow Ryan, who had started toward him, stopped dead still, his mouth open.
For from the distance over the hills came the mutter of a rapidly approaching plane! A drone that mounted and mounted until suddenly, with a gasp of night air, it swept by, low over the hills! It was a single-engine fighter.
“Think he saw us?” Ryan speculated apprehensively.
“No telling. We’d better figure that he did. Get out that B.A.R. If he comes back and asks for it, he can get it.”
The plane did not return, and at daylight Turk Madden rolled from his blankets into a crisp, chill dawn. Gathering a few sticks he built a small fire against a stone wall.
The rest of them crawled from the plane, Sparrow with a gun on his hip, and Shan Bao with his ever-present rifle. Standing it nearby he began to prepare breakfast. Turk’s gun, as always, was in his shoulder holster.
Bekart’s face looked drawn and worried. “Madden!” he burst out suddenly. “I’ve come this far without complaint! But this is madness! Sheer, unadulterated madness! This place is ghastly, and who knows what horrors we may run into up close to that mountain? I’ve heard of the awful chamber of horrors in Samyas monastery in Tibet, and compared to these Ngoloks the people of Tibet are civilized! I insist we turn back!”
“How can you talk that way, Travis?” Raemy protested. “Why, would you want me to waste all I’ve spent? All my hopes and Madden’s time? I wouldn’t think of turning back!”
“I insist!” Bekart replied stiffly. “I love you and I can’t have the woman I love subjected to such risks! This journey was madness in the first place! With what we know now it is worse than madness!”
“You mean,” Ryan interrupted suddenly, “because we now know that Doone landed in one piece?”
Bekart’s face whitened and his eyes glittered, but he did not reply, only continued his tirade. “What kind of plane was that, that flew over us last night? I know every plane that flies, and I never saw such a ship before! What would a fighter be doing here, of all places? We’ve been warned about these people, and every step is nearer to awful death or slavery!”
Turk Madden glanced up. “You knew all that when you came,” he said coldly. “We all did. As it happens, neither you nor Miss Doone has anything to say about the further progress of this trip.
“It is true,” he added, smiling at Raemy’s surprised look, “that she financed this trip to find her brother. That’s still our purpose, but we have another. Ryan is a government man. We’re after a steel box that was Doone’s cargo in the lost plane. That box is of enormous importance, so let’s hear no more about it. The trip continues.
“As for Bob Doone,” Madden added, “if he is alive, we’ll find him. If he is dead, we shall find his grave. Also”—he glanced up, his eyes bland—“I wish to examine Doone’s ship to see what happened to it.”
Travis Bekart’s eyes sparkled dangerously. “What are you implying?” he demanded.
“I?” Turk raised astonished brows. “Why, nothing! Only that’s the usual course when a crashed plane is found. We must find the cause of accidents to prevent future trouble. What else would I imply?”
Raemy Doone stared searchingly at Bekart, and there was a cold and curious light in her eyes. Raemy, Turk decided, was an astute young woman.
DARK WATER ROLLED back from the ship. Turk gunned the amphibian and it lifted, the water of the black lake dropping away below. He came back slowly on the stick, skimming over the ridge and lifting the ship toward the gray clouds. In the distance, its mighty granite shoulders lost in crowding gray cumulus, was the icy mass of Amne Machin, the mountain that was a god.
Turk glanced at the altimeter. “I’m going up,” he said. “We’ll just have a look.” They adjusted their oxygen masks and climbed. Clouds came and fell away. They skimmed an ugly ridge, soared past a glacier-created peak, and climbed on. The towering peak of Amne Machin still hung over them.
“Going on up?” Ryan gestured with his thumb.
Madden shook his head affirmatively. Later, when they had descended to a lower level again, he glanced over at Ryan. “Want my guess? I’d say that peak wasn’t an inch under thirty-one thousand feet, about two thousand higher than Mount Everest! Joe Rock, one of the two white men who ever got within seventy-five miles, estimated it to be over twenty-eight thousand, but he was conservative. Some of the war flyers figured it to be over thirty-three thousand!”
“Gives me chills to look at it!” Ryan said. “Now where’s this plane we’re lookin’ for?”
“On a plateau. We should be there in a few minutes.” The Grumman slid down through scattered clouds and skimmed over a dark forest. Far below them something dark moved on the stone-covered field and vanished under the trees with a queer, bobbing run.
“What was that?” Raemy demanded, over Madden’s shoulder.
He shrugged. “Nothing I ever saw before. There are rumors of queer animals, animals never before seen.”
“Not even in Hollywood?” Raemy was grinning.
“We’re not speakin
g of varieties of wolves,” Turk said. “But only in the last few months they have been finding new animals in the Congo. A new type of rhino, a wild boar. Who knows what they’ll find up here.”
She gestured at the country below. “How much of this is unknown country?”
Madden shrugged. “Probably a chunk as big as Arizona. Tibet itself is just a shade less than the combined areas of Arizona, California, and Nevada. The population is estimated to be about the same as California’s.”
“Look, Turk!” Ryan exclaimed. “There’s the plane!”
“Stop!” The voice was cold and deadly calm. “Fly back to the lake where we stopped last night, and start right now!”
Rigid, Turk Madden looked up. Travis Bekart, a .45 Colt in his hand, was crouching behind them. “Put this ship down,” he said, “and I’ll kill you!”
Madden’s eyes were quiet, calculating swiftly. His quick glance had assured him that Bekart had slipped into a chute harness. If he shot, he would bail out immediately.
“Why, sure!” Turk said. “If you feel that way!” Then, instantly, he snapped into a vertical bank. Hurled from his position, Bekart’s head slammed into the corner of a seat and he collapsed.
Turk glanced at him and watched Shan take the gun from the fellow’s hand, then bind them securely. Raemy watched, her eyes wide and strange.
“What got into him?” Sparrow asked, speaking to nobody in particular.
“I think,” Turk said as he skimmed back over the plane below, “that he would rather we didn’t see this ship! It makes me kind of curious!”
He banked slightly and studied the plateau thoughtfully. “What do you think, Ryan?”
“I think she looks okay. Put her down. After all, Columbus took a chance!”
“Cross your fingers then!” Turk swung around into the wind and came in for a landing. He knew he wasn’t going to like it, but here they were.
As they swooped down, Ryan suddenly touched him on the shoulder. “Pick her up,” he said, “there’s a lake in that hollow!”
Turk shot past the plateau and circled wide over the valley. Sparrow was right. There was another black lake, almost identical with the one seen previously, and here, too, there were ruined buildings, but here they surrounded the lake on three sides. The lake was scarcely more than a mile from the plane on the plateau.
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four Page 70