The Adventures Of Indiana Jones

by Campbell Black

  He invoked Huan-t’ien, the Supreme Lord of the Dark Heaven, who lived in the northern sky and drove away evil spirits. Only after he’d done so could he finally go to sleep.

  At last, Indiana, too, slept. In a dream, something came to him.

  It came out of darkness, rushing headlong. Terror was at its core; branches tore at its face. Its breathing was heavy under the full moon. The wind moaned it along, it flew through the night out of the night’s black nothing into Indy’s sweating, sleeping brain . . .

  His eyes opened. What was it? He heard something; he was certain of it. Something running; crashing through the underbrush. Slowly, he sat up, listening.

  Short Round and Willie slept near at hand. Something strange was happening, though. Indy sensed it. He stood, went to the door of the hut, walked outside.

  The wind was rising; the moon, an ocherous coin. There: a crunch in the bushes over to the left. Indy turned. The branches rustled. Suddenly, out of the undergrowth, a child appeared, running straight toward him.

  Indy squatted down; the child fell into his arms, unconscious. It was a boy of seven or eight, emaciated to the point of starvation, dressed in a few shredded rags. His back was marked by the lash.

  Indiana called for help, carried the child into his hut, lay him down on the blanket. A few minutes later the elders were all crouched around. Yes, they said, this was a child of their village.

  The shaman dripped a wet rag over the boy’s forehead and into his mouth, then said a few words of healing. The child’s eyes fluttered open. He looked around the room dazedly at all the strange and familiar faces that peered down at him—looked around the room until his gaze fell on Indiana.

  The boy’s arm moved weakly, lifted up, reached out to Indy and to no one else. Indy took the small hand in his own. He could see that the dark, delicate fingers were cut and bruised; they held something tightly. Gradually the child’s fist relaxed; the fingers dropped something into Indy’s hand.

  The boy tried to whisper. Indiana leaned close to hear as the child’s lips moved, almost inaudibly: “Sankara,” he said.

  His mother ran in; word had quickly reached her that it was her child. She kneeled down, took the boy in her arms, hugged him hard, choked back her sobs. Willie and Short Round looked on, wide-eyed and speechless.

  Indy stood, staring at what the little boy had given him. It was a small, tattered piece of cloth, an old fragment of a miniature painting.

  And Indiana recognized it.

  “Sankara,” he murmured.

  FOUR

  Pankot Palace

  DAWN CAME EARLY.

  Indy walked briskly across the village, getting last-minute instructions and pleas from the peasants who trotted alongside him to keep up with his pace. At the outskirts of town, two large elephants stood waiting.

  Sajnu, the guide, was politely trying to drag Willie toward one of them. She was politely refusing.

  “Damn it, Wllie, get on! We’ve got to move out!”

  Okay, okay, he’s right; this is stupid, she thought. We’ve got to go, and this is just a domestic animal. A large, unpredictable, occasionally ferocious, domestic animal. Besides, it’s the only ride in town. Okay. She hadn’t gotten to where she’d gotten in life by being a shrinking violet. Then she wondered just where had she gotten. Mayapore, India. She didn’t want to think about that too long, so she took a deep breath and let Sajnu help her up onto the back of the beast.

  “Whoa! Easy, now. Nice elephant,” she soothed, sitting rock-still on its shoulders, a cross between absolute self-control and impending terror on her face, her golden dress still in her hands.

  Standing by the second elephant, Short Round watched Indy approach. He ran up to the doctor with a scrutable smile all over. “I ride with you, Indy?”

  “Nope, you got a little surprise over there, Shorty.”

  Short Round ran behind the large lead elephant, to see a baby pachyderm being brought in. Just his size! He couldn’t believe his incredible luck! What an adventure! What a nifty trunk! What a great pet!

  “Oh, boy!” he shouted, and jumped up with a hand from the second guide. He knew just how to do it: he’d learned it all watching Tarzan. The elephants in that movie were great friends to Tarzan; so they would be to Short Round.

  Jane was also a great friend to Tarzan. Short Round reflected on the ways in which Willie compared to Jane, with respect to men. He hoped Willie did better with Indy than she did with elephants.

  Sajnu goaded Willie’s animal over toward Short Round. She’d gotten over her initial fears, but was now twisting and shifting all over in a vain effort to find a satisfactory position on the animal’s back. When her mount was even with Shorty’s, the two guides began leading them out of town.

  Willie relaxed enough for a moment to notice the grief-stricken look on many of the villagers’ faces. Some even wept. It caught Willie short.

  “This is the first time anybody ever cried when I left,” she confided to Short Round.

  “They don’t cry about you,” he assured her. “They cry about the elephants leaving.” That must be it: they were such great elephants!

  “Figures,” Willie admitted sullenly.

  “They got no food to feed them. So they taking the elephants away to sell them. Indy said so.”

  Willie heard the third elephant behind her just then, and swiveled completely around on her own creature’s back to see Indy lumbering over on his long-tusked bull.

  “Willie, stop monkeying around on that thing,” he scolded her.

  Short Round giggled. “Lady, your brain is backwards. “That way China; this way Pankot.”

  Pankot? she thought.

  Indiana called down to Willie’s guide: “Sajnu, imanadu.”

  And Sajnu yelled up at Willie, “Aiyo nona, oya pata nemei!” Then he yelled at her elephant.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’m not comfortable yet,” she shouted back. “Indiana, I can’t go all the way to Delhi like this.”

  “We’re not going to Delhi,” Indiana said more quietly.

  “Not going to Delhi!” she shrieked. Panic seized her. “Hey, wait a minute!” She looked down at the villagers in supplication. “Can’t somebody take me to Delhi? I don’t want to go to Pankot.”

  “All right, let’s go,” Indy called down to the guides. “I want to get there before tomorrow night.”

  Sajnu guided Willie’s elephant; the beast lurched forward. The villagers waved at her fondly, and wished her great success, and blessed her for her courage.

  “Indiana!” she hollered at the mastermind of this plot. “Damn it, why’d you change your mind? What did that kid tell you last night?”

  For the time being, he disregarded her. The elephants moved off through the hordes of pitiful townspeople. In their midst, Indy saw the Chieftain and the old shaman, who brought his hands up to his forehead as the entourage rode past.

  The going was slow but steady, bringing the distant hills closer with each passing hour. The countryside remained sparse here, though not nearly so desolate as it had been in the areas immediately surrounding the village. Tall grass became prevalent, along with short, scrubby trees. An occasional small mammal could be seen skittering out of harm’s way.

  Short Round was constantly discovering new things about his elephant. The fine, fuzzy hair that stuck straight up all over the top of its head was bristly as a blowfish; its skin was coarse everywhere but the underside of its trunk, which was smooth as a cow’s udder; and if he scratched the bony knobs above its eyebrow, it would honk the most pleased and funny sound. It told him its name was, coincidentally, Big Short Round.

  Willie had come to terms with her brute, in a manner of speaking, although the manner of speaking was too down and dirty to be called exactly the King’s English. Nonetheless, they’d reached an uneasy truce, in which the elephant moved the way it wanted to and Willie enumerated all the uses she could think of for elephant glue.

  By early afternoon the sun was
enormous. They trekked through areas that were increasingly verdant, replete with banyan trees, climbing fig, leafy ground cover, tepid streams. Increasingly muggy, as well.

  Willie looked down at herself in disgust. She still wore Indy’s baggy formal shirt, now all sticky with heat, filthy with leaves and trail dust; his tuxedo pants, nearly rubbed bare on the seat, it felt like; and his white coat, tied around her waist. How could she have sunk to this level? What had she ever done to hurt anyone? She looked at her sequinned gown, all bunched up in her hands. Just yesterday she’d been a real lady.

  She pulled herself together all of a sudden. Stop it, Willie, stop it, stop it. Being a lady is all a state of mind, and there’s no reason on earth why I can’t be one right here on this Godforsaken lump of animal.

  She removed a small bottle of expensive French perfume from an inner pocket of her once-beautiful dress. And with great aplomb began to dab it behind her ears.

  It soon became evident, however, that she wasn’t the only one suffering from this heat. She looked down at the beast between her legs and muttered, “I think you need this more than me.” So she leaned forward and, with a sense of her own largesse, dabbed some of the cologne behind the elephant’s ears. She had to lean close to reach down there, though; the animal’s smell was so overpowering, Willie grimaced, swung around, and dumped half the contents of her bottle over its back.

  The elephant was outraged. It brought its trunk back over its head, sniffed the foreign fragrance perfunctorily, and trumpeted in disgust.

  Willie looked irked. “What are you complaining about? This is ritzy stuff.”

  The elephant only moaned, and kept on trudging.

  Indy dozed recurrently throughout the day, while Short Round carried on an endless conversation with Big Short Round. By late afternoon, the terrain changed again; they passed into the lower jungles.

  The surroundings here were lush, steamy. The canopy hung a hundred feet overhead, so thick that the sun barely sparkled through, making the air itself seem to take on a deep gold-green hue. Huge rubber trees abounded, draped with hanging moss and dangling lianas. Interspersed everywhere were exotic fruit trees, fern trees, palm, and willow.

  A path did exist, but it was intermittent. Periodically one of the guides would have to clear away a fallen branch or cut back a tendril.

  The place was full of sounds, too. Willie had never heard so many unknown calls: chirps, caws, growls, screams, and clackerings. Some of them gave her goose bumps. Once, something died out there: nothing else could have sounded so. It made her swear under her breath; she held on tighter than she liked to her elephant’s rein. Sometimes, she reckoned, it was just plain hard to be a lady.

  It was easy, however, to be a little boy. Short Round took in the sights and sounds as if they were all part of a grand new game, designed especially for him. He carried himself alternately like a king or a puppy dog—though he regularly looked over to check on Indy’s whereabouts, never forgetting his first responsibility was still as number-one bodyguard.

  There was thunder and lightning for a short time, though no rain came. To Short Round this was a bad portent. It meant Lei-Kung (Lord of Thunders) and Tien-Mu (Mother of Lightnings) were fighting without cause. No good could come of such a quarrel. Lei-Kung was hideous to behold: owl-beaked, with talons on his blue, otherwise human body; he tended to hide in the clouds, beating his drum with a wooden mallet if anyone came near. Tien-Mu made lightning by flashing two mirrors; but when her mood was perverse, she would flash one at Lei-Kung, so he could see his own reflection and be appalled. Then he would beat his drum louder. But there was no rain to issue from the confrontation; only the dry anger of these two Ancient Ones.

  Short Round made an invocation to the Celestial Ministry of Thunder and Wind, requesting a higher authority to intervene in the matter, whatever it was.

  Ultimately the bickering ceased. Short Round remained cautious, however.

  Once, spotting something on an overhanging branch, he stood precariously on the baby elephant’s back to reach up and grab it. It was a globular fruit. He plucked it from its twig, then plopped back down onto his mount. He held it snugly between the knuckles of his first two fingers and the ball of his thumb, and gave his wrist a smart twisting motion several times. Lefty Grove.

  “You come to America with me and we get job in the circus,” he told Big Short. “You like that?” Ever since he’d seen the Charlie Chaplin film about the circus, Short Round had wanted to join.

  The junior elephant’s trunk curled back, took the fruit from Short Round’s hand, and stuck it into its mouth with a joyful little slurp. Short Round understood this to mean that his elephant had appreciated the same movie.

  They came to a shallow river. Sajnu called up to Indy; Indy nodded. Sajnu turned and led the procession up the wide, shin-deep stream: Shorty’s elephant first, then Indy’s, then Willie’s. Thirty yards upstream, Shorty heard a strange noise, followed it aloft into the treetops.

  “Indy, look!” he shouted.

  Indy and Willie both looked up to see hundreds of huge winged creatures flapping across the dusky sky.

  “What big birds,” Willie commented. How interesting.

  Sajnu said something to Indy, and the professor nodded. “Those aren’t big birds,” he told Willie. “Those are giant bats.”

  Short Round cringed. He’d seen Dracula twice, so he knew what bats could mean.

  Willie shuddered too, instinctively crouching lower on her elephant. Unfortunately, this brought her closer (again) than her nose wanted to be. She made a face, mumbling, “Honey, this jungle heat is doing nothing for your allure,” and poured the rest of her perfume on its neck.

  The effect was instantly gratifying. It was the aroma of civilization; it evoked the memory of cabarets and rich benefactors and beautiful clothes and satin pillows. It made Willie positively glad to be alive, giant bats or no giant bats; and without another thought, she burst into loud, exuberant song:

  “ ‘In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking; now, heaven knows, anything goes!’ ”

  It took Indy by surprise to hear her singing like that out here. Made him laugh; made him want to sing himself, suddenly, though he hardly knew any songs, and his voice was profoundly unmelodious. Nevertheless, he began to bellow: “ ‘Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play.’ ”

  Short Round thought this was hysterical. A singing game in which everyone sang their favorite song as loudly as possible. Instantly he chimed in:

  “ ‘The golden sun is rising, shining in the green forest, shining through the city of Shanghai.’ ”

  And Willie crooned louder: “ ‘Good authors, too, who once knew better words, now only use four-letter words writing prose, anything goes.’ ”

  “ ‘Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.’ ”

  “ ‘The city of Shanghai, I love the city, I love the sun.’ ”

  “ ‘The world’s gone mad today, and good’s bad today, and black’s white today, and day’s night today.’ ”

  “ ‘Home, home on the range.’ ”

  Then Shorty joined in with Indy, because he loved that song, too: “ ‘Where the deer and the antelope play.’ ”—except he was singing it in Chinese.

  And they were all singing at the top of their cacophonous voices, to drown each other out, to celebrate the great good fortune of being alive and singing in this very moment of the universe.

  Well, this was the last straw for Willie’s elephant. First that horrible alien odor, now this agonizing squawking: the combination was simply intolerable. The animal stopped suddenly, dipped its trunk in the stream through which they were marching, sucked up about twenty gallons of water, curled its trunk backwards over its head, and gave Wllie a sustained, pressurized hosing.

  She flew off the critter’s back, splashing down into the stream with an ignominious thump.

  Short Round gig
gled uproariously, pointing down at her. “Very funny!” he said with glee. “Very funny all wet!”

  It was the last straw for Willie as well, though. Like an overtired child slapped for playing too hard, she was caught between rage and tears of frustration. She was wet and dirty and hungry and taxed to the end of her rope, and this was the damn limit.

  “I was happy in Shanghai,” she seethed, letting her temper rise to its own level. “I had a little house, a garden; my friends were rich; I went to parties and rode in limousines. I hate being outside! I’m a singer; I’m not a camper! I could lose my voice!”

  Short Round’s eyes grew wide as he watched her. “Lady real mad,” he concluded.

  Indiana looked around where they were paused, judged the height of the declining sun, the depth of the encroaching gloom, and came to his own conclusion. “I think maybe we’ll camp here.”

  He figured they were probably all getting a bit fatigued.

  Sunset.

  The three elephants submerged, chest deep in a wide spot in the river. Indy waded nearby, his shirt off, splashing water on the weary animals. Sajnu did the same from the other side.

  Short Round played laughingly with the baby. The elephant would wrap him in its trunk, swing him in the air, flop him on its back. Then he’d dive in again, and when he resurfaced, the elephant would give him a shower. The two of them were of an age.

  Thirty yards upstream, in a shady, recessed alcove, Willie was taking a leisurely swim. She dove to the cool bottom, turned slowly, went limp, resurfaced, wiped her hair from her eyes, back-floated, hummed contentedly, watched the patterns in the leaves overhead. She needed this.

  Her life had turned upside down over the past two days. Things had been just peachy until this guy walked into the club, and then . . . He wasn’t so bad, really, she supposed—if you liked the type—but she didn’t particularly think she wanted to elevate him to the category of Current Events.