The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  The vans were small wagons, two spoked wheels on either side, curved covers to shelter them from the Egyptian sun, open at the back and in the front, where the driver sat, whipping his team of four horses. Each van could seat a maximum of eight passengers, and Colonel Mackeson insisted that all the people at his table occupy the same vehicle. He supervised their boarding, then climbed in and seated himself knee to knee alongside Lady Beaumont. The driver clicked his tongue, the horses roused themselves, the wheels ground into the soft earth, and they began the journey across the desert to Cairo.

  Darkness had just begun to fall when they left, and Colonel Mackeson lit the small oil lantern in the van and hung it on the rafters of the roof. It was hot inside, without even the hum of a draft, and the roving light lit all of their faces one by one.

  For four hours, they traveled without a word. The movement of the wagon, the jolts and bumps along the rough road, the poor glow from the lantern, made reading or embroidery impossible. The men smoked in silence, throwing live butts out into the desert, where they were quickly extinguished by the wheels of the van that followed. The women sat, for the most part, with their hands folded in their laps. They had three canteens of water until the first stop, which was nothing more than a shack along the road, with water and bathroom facilities out under the night sky. When one of them drank, the others watched carefully, making sure that not a drop of their share was spilled in this parched land.

  Finally, almost casually, Colonel Mackeson said, his hands on his knees, his gaze fixed upon the floor of the van, “Which one of you stole the Kohinoor?”

  All the silence disintegrated into a babble of voices. He let it go on for a while and then held up his hand, palm outward. His voice was deliberate and cutting. “One of you, maybe more than one of you, is a thief.”

  Mackeson had jumped out of his bed on the night of his faint, before dawn, and gone searching for Captain Ramsay. He had jiggled him awake and told him of the loss of the diamond. Then, the two of them had rushed to Captain Waltham.

  “What do you want me to do, sir?” the captain had asked, struggling into his trousers, tucking his nightshirt into the waistband.

  Mackeson, white in the face, from both the pain and the shock, had said curtly, “Get them all out of bed and into the saloon. Their cabins and belongings are to be searched. Has anyone had a chance to go to the after hold?”

  Waltham had shaken his head. “Between last night and now? I doubt it. This morning is one of the scheduled times, though, when the passengers can access their luggage. We’re to dock at Aden in a few hours.”

  “Find out, will you?”

  So the Booths, Lady Beaumont, Wingate, Arabella Hyde, and Huthwaite had been shaken out of their dreams and ushered into the state dining room, protesting wildly all the while. One of the female crew members, the second-class cabin ayah, had been dispatched to search the women thoroughly. Mackeson had made the men strip down in front of him. They’d all cursed him, but he had been immovable. He’d searched every body cavity himself. He had made them open their mouths, bend over in front of him.

  Then, Ramsay and he had hunted through the cabins, the berths, agitated the bed linens, crawled under the desks and moved the sofas, unfolded every garment. He had asked Multan Raj for a knife and when it was brought looked at it in a brief moment of surprise. It was a dagger, some eight inches long, its hilt decorated in finely wrought stones embedded in solid gold.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It’s my father’s, Sahib,” Multan Raj had said. “A gift from a king; he saved his life with this dagger one night when dacoits came into the raja’s tent.”

  Shaking his head in wonder, Mackeson had slit the silk and cotton linings of all the luggage boxes and ripped them apart. At the end, an hour before breakfast, when the other passengers were already astir aboard the Indus, and the six people waited, shut away in the saloon, there had been no sign of the Kohinoor.

  It had disappeared into the air. Literally. There was no place Mackeson had missed, no earthly place. Unless one of them had swallowed the diamond, and it was cutting up the insides of his or her stomach. When that thought struck, Mackeson had decided that they were each to be followed to the privies, night and day, watched as they went about their business. He’d examined the contents of the bowels himself, unflinching.

  And so they had all come to Suez. Everyone’s nerves were ragged by now—tattered to beyond bearing.

  “Mr. Booth,” Mackeson said. He noticed that Ramsay had his pistol out on his lap, his fingers loosely curled around the trigger.

  “What is it?” In a snarl. Tom Booth was afraid; all the blood had drained from his face, his thick eyebrows and hair stood out stark against the pallor of his skin. His knuckles, tied around each other, were knobs of bone.

  “I found the Ganesha idol, and it is on its way back on the Indus to Calcutta and the rightful owner, the East India Company. The accusations were not false after all, were they, Miss Booth?” This last Mackeson said bitterly.

  She raised her eyebrows at him, still cool, even though they were all jostled about by the movement of the van. The dirt road on which they traveled had been stamped down by many such passings, but the mud was still soft, the horses’ hooves inaudible. “They might not have been, Colonel Mackeson,” she said, “but that’s none of your business. You’re hardly in a position to send the idol back. It doesn’t belong to you.”

  “And neither does it belong to you,” Mackeson said harshly. “There were other things also; I’m sure you tapped everything you could from the auction house that had not yet been cataloged, or you thought was of small value. But tiny as this idol is, given its provenance, it’s worth at least three thousand pounds. So, it goes back, and you get to keep your letter knives and silver shaving kits, snuffboxes and decorative mirrors.”

  Mary Booth’s mouth drew back, and a hiss escaped her teeth. She did not look at her brother, and he unwound his fingers to run them through his hair and wipe a sudden perspiration from his forehead. Neither of them had known the value of the idol, Mackeson realized, or they would have tried to hide it a little better, perhaps packing it in the luggage in the after hold. He hadn’t bothered to search the stowed luggage—Captain Waltham had assured him that it had not been disturbed during the night—they could have had no chance to conceal the Kohinoor. And they were only, after all, petty thieves. The temptation to steal the diamond was huge, but there was no way they could dispose of it, and if they could not realize its value in something useful—pounds sterling—it would be just a piece of stone to them.

  “And what did you discover about me, Colonel Mackeson?” Lady Beaumont drawled from her corner. She had been smoking steadily all through, lighting each cigarette with the end of the last. She had her legs spread out in front of her, crossed at the ankles, uncaring that Mr. Huthwaite, seated opposite, barely had any space to put his own limbs. “Did you enjoy running your dirty fingers through my underwear; put your face to the lace of my petticoats?”

  “Not particularly,” Mackeson said mildly, and she flushed, red to the roots of her white hair. In the past few days, the lines on her face had become more deeply grooved, embedded into her flesh, and dark half-moons pulled her eyes downward at the edges. It was not a pretty sight. “But,” Mackeson continued, “it is not every day, as you say, that an officer has the opportunity of rummaging through a titled lady’s drawers, and I did find some very interesting things. Gifts, did you call them?” He put up his hand and began ticking off on his fingers. “The sarpech ornament from the Raja of Sitarnagar; the ruby that adorned the wife of the Raja of Palampore; the thumb ring from Emperor Jahangir’s rule in the seventeenth century, which belonged to the Gujarati merchant in Bombay—I hear you stayed at his house for a while and that he was indeed very hospitable. All these were reported missing by their owners. There was also a gold brooch with a picture of our Queen; it usually lies inside a glass-topped table in the Marble Hall in Government House in
Calcutta. Four native servants were charged with its theft.”

  Lady Beaumont spat on the floor. “They’re mine; you can do nothing about this. I’m not”—she inclined her head contemptuously at the Booths, seated opposite—“them, nothing, nobodies. You might be able to peremptorily send back what they stole. But I did not steal; these were all given to me.”

  “The SS Indus will leave tomorrow from Suez on her journey back to Bombay, and she will carry all these items with her. You must take care, Lady Beaumont, not to leave such a dismal impression of the Englishwoman in India—and not just to the natives, but to the Company and the men in the Civil Service. Gifts are things that are given by someone, not taken from them without their knowledge or permission.”

  “You fool!” Lady Beaumont launched herself across the van and fell on Mackeson, pummeling him, kicking at his knee. When he felt that first kick, he knew that she had been the one—it was the same boot, that same intensity—who had kicked him in the state dining room and then dived to the floor. The others in the wagon did not move but sat still, watching as Lady Beaumont’s petticoats rose and showed a glimpse of her lace drawers. Captain Ramsay stayed where he was also, still holding the gun, a bleak smile on his face. Mackeson struggled with the woman, and finally managed to run his arms around her flailing body. He dragged her to her seat and pushed her down. He went back to his own seat, slouching—the roof was curved tightly around the frame of the wagon and standing upright was impossible—hit his head against the lantern, and collapsed between Huthwaite and Wingate. A series of aches blossomed up his leg—she had managed to kick him everywhere other than his knee, and this he could manage.

  “Don’t move from there, Lady Beaumont,” he said starkly. “You can count yourself lucky that I didn’t put you in the brig on the Indus.”

  She clicked her tongue at him. “It doesn’t have a brig, and even if it did, you couldn’t imprison me. I’m going to have a word with the Prime Minister when I return, maybe even her Majesty.”

  “You do that,” Mackeson said. “And I will explain my part.”

  He knew that she would not dare to complain. Mackeson had only realized that these unsavory rumors had followed Lady Beaumont all around India when he opened her box. Every piece was frighteningly expensive, and small, and the losses had customarily been blamed on the servants—some of long and honorable tenures with their masters—but doubt had also, always, been cast upon Lady Beaumont. For she had descended upon obscure kings and nobles living outside the periphery of British interest, or sometimes even knowledge, because they had been known to possess this or that magnificent piece of jewelry, priceless and irreplaceable. And invariably, after supping with them, riding their horses, visiting their zenanas, patting their children on the head, Lady Beaumont had left with their treasures.

  “I say,” Martyn Wingate squeaked, “I didn’t take your damn Kohinoor. And there are no skeletons in my almirah.” He laughed, an unpleasant, whining sound.

  Of all of Mackeson’s and Ramsay’s tablemates, this boy was the only one who had been truly terrified by the events of the past few days. He had recognized that this was no joke, that the Kohinoor had to be found, that its loss had enormous consequences, and that if it were never discovered, suspicion would fall upon all of them for the rest of their lives. And his had barely begun.

  Mackeson had found a few half-finished love letters in Wingate’s box, badly written, without sentiment, just barely on this side of illiteracy. The girl was half-Indian; Wingate promised her love, but not money, not marriage. He had no intention of besmirching his own bloodline. Or letting his father know about this affair. Mackeson had read the letters with distaste, only because he’d had to. If there was one person among this sleazy lot who would return the Kohinoor to him, it was this boy, Mackeson thought. He would have taken it unthinkingly, and then not known what to do with it, and would try to slip it back into Mackeson’s luggage at some further date.

  “Your father is the publisher of the Bombay Herald,” Mackeson said softly, “and I know you’re here to follow the Kohinoor to England, but you will never write about this, or talk of it to anyone.”

  Wingate bridled, the spots on his face blooming red. “I say—”

  “Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly,” Wingate said, gulping, “sir.”

  “I hope,” a pious voice said at Mackeson’s elbow, “that you will not cast your eye upon me, Colonel Mackeson. I am a man of God. I could hardly . . . Well, who will look after the poor natives at Cawnpore?”

  Mr. Huthwaite’s luggage had revealed, surprisingly, a sack full of banknotes which had added up to some five thousand pounds. That he too had stolen this somehow, Mackeson didn’t doubt, perhaps skimming church funds or donations. And so, he too was a suspect, although Mackeson could not see how a provincial clergyman in India—or as he had been, a provincial lad in England—could possibly sell the Kohinoor. Somewhere, he too had gone wrong, despite his Cambridge education, his position as Second Wrangler, the honors heaped upon him because of his merits. In the end, the inducement to steal had been too much for him. So why not then take the Kohinoor?

  The only person in the van who had not spoken yet was Arabella Hyde. She had had a box full of love letters also, and the complaints in them from her lover showed her to be selfish, demanding, fickle. She had some pieces of jewelry that weren’t of much value, and underclothing that was tattered and much darned, belying her aura of wealth. Mrs. Arabella Hyde was going back to England, and she would never again return to India—her husband would not have her. If she had indeed bought a passage to England on the Indus in the last few days before departure, it was only because she wanted a glimpse of the Kohinoor. Nothing more. She was the one who had asked him about the diamond at the table.

  The Arabella Hydes of this world would always live in half-finished ambitions—an affair would have been jolly good fun, so she had one and didn’t think of the consequences; a look at the Kohinoor would have been the making of her in the village to which she was returning, so she’d booked a ticket. It wouldn’t strike the empty Arabella that she could actually steal the diamond—her brain was small, her belief in her abilities even smaller.

  The van stopped at the midway point, eight hours into the journey, and Mackeson stepped out beyond the shack into the warm desert night. A pale moon, two days from fullness, hung in the sky, bleaching the flat land, creating dense shadows of the few sparse trees and the boulders strewn around. When they reached Alexandria, the moon would be full.

  Since the day when he had discovered the Kohinoor stolen, Mackeson and Ramsay had sat alone in the saloon at mealtimes, grim and quiet, away from their fellow travelers. The ship and its passengers had been searched, every cabin, berth, desk, and box. But the diamond was not to be found. At Aden, where the Indus docked to take on coal, Mackeson had not allowed the six of them to disembark, even though the coaling had taken seven long hours. At Alexandria, he intended to have them followed into every bazaar and every souk. He did not allow himself the luxury of wondering what would happen if he landed in England without the Kohinoor. Self-pity had never been one of Mackeson’s strong traits.

  Besides, he already had a notion about who it could be.

  • • •

  And so they reached Cairo, and from there, at midday, a few hours after they had climbed out, weary and bone-tired from the van, they boarded the barges that would take them up the Nile. The barges were towed by horses on the banks of the river—the steamer tug being out of commission—and this took them finally to the Mahmoudieh Canal, which cut its way from the Nile to Alexandria.

  Some two days after the Indus had docked in the Suez, the passengers bound for England straggled into Alexandria, and settled into L’Hotel d’Europe, in the Frank quarter of town, to await the boarding of their luggage on the SS Oriental. The mail boxes had been delayed, since the camel convoy had broken down in the desert. So the travelers had an extra day in Alexandria before the ship sailed
to Southampton.

  • • •

  Night fell on the city, and a large moon rose and washed the skies with its hoary glow, blotting out the stars, painting deep and dark oblongs where its radiance did not touch. Golden lights sprang around Alexandria’s semicircular harbor, and at one end, in the old, dilapidated lighthouse, the aged keeper doggedly lit his lamp. There was a newer lighthouse on Eunostus Point, one that approaching ships used to get their bearings and skirt around the border of land, but this older one had a history that went back many centuries, all the way to the occupation of Alexander the Great.

  At Rey’s, more formally the L’Hotel d’Europe, the passengers from the Indus slept in their rooms, knowing they would be awakened before the first glimmer of dawn to find their way through the darkened streets to the harbor and, from there, onto the SS Oriental. The hotel was at the end of a large street. It was built around a central courtyard, with a verandah running along the bottom and the top floors into which all the doors of the rooms opened.

  As the moon climbed into the heavens, its face was blotted by a few stray clouds, like a veil drawn over a woman’s pearl-like face. It sent its silver rays down on the city, over the flat rooftops, and into the room where a man sat in the darkness against a wall, just out of reach of the glimmering light.

  Colonel Mackeson glanced over at the bed, jammed into one corner in the shadows. The rounded curves of the pillow made a very satisfactory image of a man sleeping. He did not smoke, although he yearned desperately for a cigarette. He had been sitting, and waiting, for three hours now, as the noises in the city quieted down, as doors slammed in the hotel, as the lamps in the courtyard were doused and carried away to be cleaned.