King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure

by Talbot Mundy

  Oh, Abdul trod with a martial tread, Swinging his scimiter's weight. "I am overlord here," he said, "And he who wishes may chance his head, "For my blade is long, and my arm is strong, "And the goods of the world to the bold belong!" So Abdul guarded the gate.

  Many a head did Abdul cleave, Turban and crown and chin, For all the 'venturers sought to know What it could be he guarded so. And since none give but eke receive, A thrust in his ribs made Abdul grieve For good blood outpourin'.

  His men wept, watching Abdul bleed And life's light waning dim, Till he cursed them. "Open the fort gate wide! To saddle, and scour the countryside For a leech!" he swore. "God rot ye, ride!" 'Twas thus, in the guise of a friend in need, His enemy came to him.

  The second gap closed up behind them and the tunnel began to echoweirdly. The mule was the next to be panic-stricken. The noise ofhis plunging increased the echoes a thousand times and multiplied hisfright, until the poor brute collapsed into meek obedience at last.But the guide strode on unconcerned with his easy Hillman gait, neitherdeigning to glance back nor making any verbal comment.

  Over their heads, at irregular intervals, there were holes that if theyled as King presumed into caves above, left not an inch of all thelong passage that could not have been swept by rifle-fire. It wasimpregnable; for no artillery heavy enough to pound the mountain intopieces could ever be dragged within range. Whatever hiding place thisentrance guarded could be held forever, given food and cartridges!

  The tunnel wound to right and left like a snake, growing lighter andlighter after each bend; and soon their own din began to be swallowed ina greater one that entered from the farther end. After two sharp turnsthey came out unexpectedly into the blaze of blue day, nearly stunned bylight and sound. A road came up from below like that of an ocean in thegrip of a typhoon.

  When his wits recovered from the shock, King struggled with a wilddesire to yell, for before him, was what no servant of British India hadever seen and lived to tell about, and that is an experience more potentthan unbroken rum.

  They had emerged from a round-mouthed tunnel--it looked already like arabbit-hole, so huge was the cliff behind--on to a ledge of rock thatformed a sort of road along one side of a mile-wide chasm. Above him, itseemed a mile up, was blue sky, to which limestone walls ran sheer, withscarcely a foothold that could be seen. Beneath, so deep that eyescould not guess how deep, yawned the stained gorge of the underworld,many-colored, smooth and wet.

  And out of a great, jagged slit in the side of the cliff, perhaps athousand feet below them, there poured down into thunderous dimness awaterfall whose breadth seemed not less than half a mile. It spoutedseventy or eighty yards before it began to curve, and its din was likethe voice of all creation.

  Ismail came and stood by King in silence, taking his hand, as a littlechild might. Presently he stooped and picked up a stone and tossed itover.

  "Gone!" he said simply. "That down there is Earth's Drink!"

  "And this is the 'Heart of the Hills' men boast about?"

  "Nay! It is not!" snapped Ismail.

  "Then, where--"

  But the one-eyed guide beckoned impatiently, and King led the way afterhim, staring as hakim or prisoner or any man had right to do on firstadmission to such wonders. Not to have stared would have been toproclaim himself an idiot.

  The least of all the wonders was that the secret of the place shouldhave been kept all down the centuries; for it was the hollow middle ofa limestone mountain, that could neither be looked down into fromabove, because the heights were not scalable, nor guessed at from theconformation of the country. The river, that flowed out of rock and wentplunging down into the chasm, must be snow from the Himalayan peaks, onits way to swell the sea. There was no other way to account for that;but that explanation did explain why at least one Indian river is nogreater than it is.

  The road they followed was a fold in the natural rock, rising andfalling and curving like a ribbon, but tending on the average downward.It looked to be about two miles to the point where it curved at thechasm's end and swept round and downward, to be lost in a fissure in thecliff.

  They soon began to pass the mouths of caves. Some were above the road,now and then at crazy heights above it, reached by artificial steps hewnout of the stone. Others were below, reached from the road by means ofladders, that trembled and swayed over the dizzying waterfall. Most ofthe caves were inhabited, for armed men and sullen women came to theirentrances to stare.

  Ears grow accustomed to the sound of water sooner than to almostanything. It was not long before King's ears could catch the patter ofhis men's feet following, and the shod clink of the mule. He could hearwhen Ismail whispered:

  "Be brave, little hakim! She loves fearless men."

  As the track descended caves became more numerous. In one there werehorses, for as they passed there came a whiff of unclean stables, andthe litter of fodder and dung was all about the entrance. The mouthsof other caves were sealed, with great wax disks, strangely stamped,affixed to stout wooden doors. One cave smelt as if oil were stored init, and King wondered whence the oil was brought--for the sirkar knowsto a pint and an ounce what products travel up and down the Khyber.

  At last the guide halted, in the middle of a short steep slope where thepath was less than six feet wide and a narrow cave mouth gave directlyon to it.

  "Be content to rest here!" he said, pointing.

  "Thy cave?" asked King.

  "Nay. God's! I am the caretaker!"

  (The "Hills" are very pious and polite, between the acts of robbing andshedding blood.)

  "Allah, then, reward thee, brother!" answered King. "Allah give sight tothy blind eye! Allah give thee children! Allah give thee peace, and toall thy house!"

  The guide salaamed, half-mockingly, half-wondering at such eloquence,pausing in the passage to point into the side-caves that debouched toeither hand. There was a niche of a place, where a man might lie onguard near the entrance; another cave in which horses could be stabled,with plenty of fodder piled up ready; another beyond that for servantsand baggage, with a fireplace and cooking pots; and at the last at therear of all a great cavern full of eerie gloom, that opened out from theend of the passage like a bottle at the end of a long neck.

  Peering about him into vastness, King became aware of frame beds, placedat intervals in a row, each with a mat beside it. And there were severalbrass basins and ewers for water. Also there were some little bronzelamps; the guide lit three of them, and King took up one to examine it.As he did so, involuntarily his hand almost went to his bosom, where thestrange knife still reposed that he had taken from the would-be murdererin the train to Delhi.

  There was no gold on the lamp; but the handle by which he lifted it hadbeen cast, the devils of the Himalayas only knew how many centuries ago,in the form of a woman dancing; her size, and her shape, and the artwith which she had been fashioned, were the same as the handle of theknife.

  Watching him as a wolf eyes another one, the strange guide found histongue.

  "How many such hast thou ever seen?" he asked.

  "None!" answered King, and the guide cackled at him, like a hen that haslaid an egg.

  "There be many strange things in Khinjan, but few strangers!" heremarked; and then, as if that were enough for any man to say on anyoccasion, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the cavern. It wasthe last King ever saw of him. He followed him down the passage to theentrance and watched him until his back disappeared round the firstbend, but the man never turned his head once. He did not even look overthe edge of the road, down into the amazing waterfall, nor up to theround disk of sky.

  King turned back and looked into the other caves--saw the weary horseand mule fed, watered and bedded down--took note of the running waterthat rushed out of a rock fissure and gurgled out of sight down anotherone--examined the servants' cave and saw that they had been amplyprovided with blankets. There was nothing lacking tha
t the most exactingtraveler could have demanded at such a distance from civilization. Therewas more than the most exacting would have dared expect.

  "Why isn't it damp in here?" he wondered, returning to his own cave. Andthen he noticed long fissures in the cavern walls, and that the smokefrom the lamps drifted toward them. He could not guess what made itdo that, unless it were the suction of the enormous river hurryingunderground; and then he remembered that at the entrance air had rusheddownward into the hole down which the horse had disappeared, whichpartly confirmed his guess.

  "Ismail!" he shouted, and jumped at the revolver-crack--like echo of hisvoice.

  Ismail came running.

  "Make the men carry the mule's packs into this cave. You and Darya Khanstay here and help me open them. Remember, ye are both assistants ofKurram Khan, the hakim!"

  "They will laugh at us! They will laugh at us!" clucked Ismail, but hehurried to obey, while King wondered who would laugh.

  Within an hour a delegation came from no less a person than Yasminiherself, bearing her compliments, and hot food savory enough to makea brass idol's mouth water. By that time King had his sets of surgicalinstruments and drugs and bandages all laid out on one of the beds andcovered from view by a blanket.

  It was only one more proof of the British army's everlasting luck thatone of the men, who set the great brass dish of food on the floornear King, had a swollen cheek, and that he should touch the swellingclumsily, as he lifted his hand to shake back a lock of greasy hair.

  There followed an oath like flint struck on steel ten times in rapidsuccession.

  "Does it pain thee, brother?" asked Kurram Khan the hakim.

  "Are there devils in Tophet! Fire and my veins are one!"

  The man did not notice the eagerness beaming out of King's horn-rimmedspectacles, but Ismail did; it seemed to him time to prove his virtuesas assistant.

  "This is the famous hakim Kurram Khan," he boasted. "He can cureanything, and for a very little fee!"

  "Nay, for no fee at all in this case!" said King.

  The man looked incredulous, but King drew the covering from his row ofinstruments and bottles.

  "Take a chance!" he advised. "None but the brave wins anything!"

  The man sat down, as if he would argue the point at length, but Ismailand Darya Khan were new to the business and enthusiastic. They had himdown, held tight on the floor to the huge amusement of the rest, beforethe man could even protest; and his howls of rage did him no good, forIsmail drove the hilt of a knife between his open jaws to keep themopen.

  A very large proportion of King's stores consisted of morphia andcocaine. He injected enough cocaine to deaden the man's nerves, andallowed it time to work. Then he drew out three back teeth in quicksuccession, to make sure he had the right one.

  Ismail let the victim up, and Darya Khan gave him water in a brasscup. Utterly without pain for the first time for days, the man was asgrateful as a wolf freed from a trap.

  "Allah reward thee, since the service was free!" he smirked.

  "Are there any others in pain in Khinjan?" King asked him.

  "Listen to him! What is Khinjan? Is there one man without a wound or asore or a scar or a sickness?"

  "Then, tell them," said King.

  The man laughed.

  "When I show my jaw, there will be a fight to be first! Make ready,hakim! I go!"

  He was true to his word and left the cave like a gust of wind, followedby the three who had come with him. King sat down to eat, but he had notfinished his meal--he had made the last little heap of rice into aball with his fingers, native style, and was mopping up the last of thecurried gravy with it--when the advance guard of the lame and the haltand the sick made its appearance. The cave's entrance became jammed withthem, and no riot ever made more noise.

  "Hakim! Ho, hakim! Where is the hakim who draws teeth? Where is the manwho knows yunani?"

  Ten men burst down the passage all together, all clamoring, and one manwasted no time at all but began to tear away bloody bandages to show hiswound. The hardest thing now was to get and keep some kind of order,and for ten minutes Ismail and Darya Khan labored, using threats whereargument failed, and brute force when they dared. It was like beatingmad hounds from off their worry. What established order at last was thatKing rolled up his sleeves and began, so that eagerness gave place towonder.

  The "Hills" are not squeamish in any one particular; so that the factthat the cave became a shambles upset nobody. The surgeon's thrill thatmakes even half-amateurs oblivious of all but the work in hand,coupled with the desperate need of winning this first trick, made Kinghorror-proof; and nobody waiting for the next turn was troubled becausethe man under the knife screamed a little or bled more than usual.

  When they died--and more than one did die--men carried them out andflung them over the precipice into the waterfall below.

  Ismail and Darya Khan became choosers of the victims. They seized a man,laid him on the bed, tore off his disgusting bandages and held theirbreath until the awful resulting stench had more or less dispersed. ThenKing would probe or lance or bandage as he saw fit, using anaestheticswhen he must, but managing mostly without them.

  They almost flung money at him. Few of them asked what his fee wouldbe. Those who had no money brought him shawls, and swords, and evenclothing. Two or three brought old-fashioned fire-arms; but they weremen who did not expect to live. And King accepted every gift withoutcomment, because that was in keeping with the part he played. He tossedmoney and clothes and every other thing they gave him into a corner atthe back of the cave, and nobody tried to steal them back, although aman suspected of honesty in that company would have been tortured todeath as an heretic and would have had no sympathy.

  For hour after gruesome hour he toiled over wounds and sores such asonly battles and evil living can produce, until men began to come atlast with fresh wounds, all caused by bullets, wrapped in bandages onwhich the blood had caked but had not grown foul.

  "There has been fighting in the Khyber," somebody, informed him, andhe stopped with lancet in mid-air to listen, scanning a hundred facesswiftly in the smoky lamplight. There were ten men who held lamps forhim, one of them a newcomer, and it was he who spoke.

  "Fighting in the Khyber! Aye! We were a little lashkar, but we drovethem back into their fort! Aye! we slew many!"

  "Not a jihad yet?" King asked, as if the world might be coming to anend. The words were startled out of him. Under other circumstanceshe would never have asked that question so directly; but he hadlost reckoning of everything but these poor devils' dreadful need ofdoctoring, and he was like a man roused out of a dream. If a holy warhad been proclaimed already, then he was engaged on a forlorn hope. Butthe man laughed at him.

  "Nay, not yet. Bull-with-a-beard holds back yet. This was a littlefight. The jihad shall come later!"

  "And who is 'Bull-with-a-beard'?" King wondered; but he did not ask thatquestion because his wits were awake again. It pays not to be in toomuch of a hurry to know things in the "Hills."

  As it happened, he asked no more questions, for there came a shoutat the cave entrance whose purport he did not catch, and within fiveminutes after that, without a word of explanation, the cave was leftempty of all except his own five men. They carried away the men too sickto walk and vanished, snatching the last man away almost before King'sfingers had finished tying the bandage on his wound.

  "Why is that?" he asked Ismail. "Why did they go? Who shouted?"

  "It is night," Ismail answered. "It was time."

  King stared about him. He had not realized until then that without aidof the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front of him;his eyes had grown used to the gloom, like those of the surgeons in thesick-bays below the water line in Nelson's fleet.

  "But who shouted?"

  "Who knows? There is only one here who gives orders. We be many whoobey," said Ismail.

  "Whose men were the last ones?" King asked him, trying a new line.

  "
Bull-with-a-beard's."

  "And whose man art thou, Ismail?"

  The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite thesame assurance in his voice as once there had been.

  "I am hers! Be thou hers, too! But it is night. Sleep against the toiltomorrow. There be many sick in Khinjan."

  King made a little effort to clean the cave, but the task was hopeless.For one thing he was so weary that his very bones were water; foranother, Ismail pretended to be equally tired, and when the suggestionthat they should help was put to the others they claimed their izzatindignantly. Izzat and sharm (honor and shame) are the two scarcelydistinguishable enemies of honest work, into whose teeth it takes bothnerve and resolution to drive a Hillman at the best of times. Nerve Kinghad, but his resolution was asleep. He was too tired to care.

  He appointed them to two-hour watches, to relieve one another untildawn, and flung himself on a clean bed. He was asleep before his headhad met the pillow; and for all he knew to the contrary he dreamed ofYasmini all night long.

  It seemed to him that she came into the cave--she the woman of the fadedphotograph the general had given him in Peshawur--and that the cavebecame filled with the strange intoxicating scent that had first wooedhis senses in her reception room in Delhi.

  He dreamed that she called him by name. First, "King sahib!" Then,"Kurram Khan!" And her voice was surprisingly familiar. But dreams arestrange things.

  "He sleeps!" said the same voice presently. "It is good that he sleeps!"And in his sleep he thought that a shadowy Ismail grunted an answer.

  After that he was very sure in his dream that it was good to sleep,although a voice he did not recognize and that he was quite sure was adream-voice, kept whispering to him to wake up and protect himself.

  But the scent grew stronger, and he began to dream of cobras, thatdanced with a woman and struck at her so swiftly that she had to becometwo women in order to avoid them; and Rewa Gunga came and laughed atboth and called them amateurs, so that the woman became enraged and drewa bronze-bladed dagger with a golden hilt.

  Then intelligible dreams ceased altogether, and he, slept like a deadman, but with a vague suggestion ever with him that Yasmini was notvery far away, and that she was interested in him to a point that wasactually embarrassing. It was like the ether-dream he once dreamt in ahospital.

  When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down thepassage into his cave.

  "Ismail!" he shouted, for he was thirsty. But there was no answer.

  "Darya Khan!"

  Again there was no answer. He called each of the other men by name withthe same result.

  He got up and realized then for the first time that he had not undressedhimself the night before. His head felt heavy, and although he did notbelieve he had been drugged, there was a scent he half-recognized thatpermeated the cave, and even overcame the dreadful atmosphere that thesick of yesterday had left behind. He decided to go to the cave mouth,summon his men, who were no doubt sleeping as he had done, sniff thefresh air outside and come back to try the scent again; he would knowthen whether his nose were deceiving him.

  But there was no Ismail near the entrance--no Darya Khan--nor any of theother men. The horse was gone. So was the mule. So was the harness, andeverything he had, except the drugs and instruments and the presentsthe sick had given him; he had noticed all those still lying about inconfusion when he woke.

  "Ismail!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, thinking they might all beoutside.

  He heard a man hawk and spit, close to the entrance, and went out tosee. A man whom he had never seen before leaned on a magazine rifle andeyed him as a tiger eyes its prey.

  "No farther!" he growled, bringing his rifle to the port.

  "Why not?" King asked him.

  "Allah! When a camel dies in the Khyber do the kites ask why? Go in!"

  He thought then of Yasmini's bracelet, that always gained him at leastcivility from every man who saw it. He held up his left wrist and knewthat instant why it felt uncomfortable. The bracelet has disappeared!

  He turned back into the cave to hunt for it, and the strange scentgreeted him again. In spite of the surrounding stench of drugs andfilthy wounds, there was no mistaking it. If it had been her specialscent in Delhi, as Saunders swore it was, and her special scent on thenote Darya Khan had carried down the Khyber, then it was hers now, andshe had been in the cave.

  He hunted high and low and found no bracelet.

  His pistol was gone, too, and his cartridges, but not the dagger,wrapped in a handkerchief, under his shirt. The money, that his patientshad brought him, lay on the floor untouched. It was an unusual robberwho had robbed him.

  At least once in his life (or he were not human, but an angel) it dawnson a man that he has done the unforgivable. It dawns on most men oftenerthan once a week. So men learn sympathy.

  "I should have been awake to change the guard every two hours!" headmitted, sitting on the bed. "I wouldn't hesitate to shoot another manfor that--or for less!"

  He let the thought sink in, until the very lees of shame tasted likeashes in his mouth. Then, being what he was,--and there are not verymany men good enough to shoulder what lay ahead of him--he set the wholeaffair behind him as part of the past and looked forward.

  "Who's 'Bull-with-a-beard'?" he wondered. "Nobody interfered with meuntil I doctored his men. He's in opposition. That's a fair guess. Now,who in thunder--by the fat lord Harry--can 'Bull-with-a-beard' be?And why fighting in the Khyber so early as all this? And why does'Bull-with-a-beard,' whoever he is, hang back?"

  Chapter X