The Venus of Konpara

by John Masters

  An hour passed. They began to move forward. The first quarter of a mile was the worst - a vivid agony. After that, it was a slow, plodding numbness of horror. At last the dam took shape in the drifting smoke, and Kendrick stopped.

  ‘Foster, up the steps. Shoot any armed man you see. Smith with him. Mohan, you cover them. Go, go!’

  ‘No, I’m going first,’ Mohan muttered He stumbled forward. Each one of the hundred and eighty steps up the centre of the face was pain. For the last fifty be could feel Smith bodily pushing him. When he reached the top he fell down. Dimly he heard Smith say, ‘No one here. The spread of the fire has upset their plans.’

  Mohan crawled to his knees and looked round. The coolie camp was a tangle of burned and burning huts, some black, some red, some orange. The whole of the Dobehari Ridge was burning. To the south and east the jungles towards Deori had not caught. He looked again. They had. Eight or nine miles away, on the outskirts of the city, a line of black smoke lined the horizon. Not a human being was in sight.

  Kendrick, Barbara, and Foster joined them. One of the jackals had survived, and now crawled past and down the outer face.

  ‘Rukmini, Rukmini,’ Mohan groaned, and knelt, hunched, his eyes closed He forced himself to his feet ‘Now - .’ he said.

  Chapter 29

  An arrow sighed past his head and fell, clattering, on the stone. Too exhausted to duck, Mohan scanned the cliffs at the southern end of the dam, whence the arrow had been fired, but saw nothing. Smith urged them all down the outer steps and off the dam. As they went another arrow hit the stone behind them. In the ruins of the coolie camp they stopped. ‘That arrow went over a hundred and fifty yards,’ Jim Foster said resentfully.

  ‘He was above us, and the wind was with him,’ Smith said. ‘We’re safe here. We’re safe anywhere as long as no one can hide within a hundred yards of us. Until nightfall.’

  ‘Until nightfall?’ Kendrick croaked. ‘Here? No. Go to Deori.’

  Mohan said, ‘There’s a fire that way, too. Well never get there through the jungles, with the Gonds waiting for us.’

  ‘This fire must have been seen from Deori,’ Kendrick said.

  ‘They have their own fires to worry about,’ Smith said.

  ‘The cavalry....’

  ‘Are at Purankhola.’

  Mohan tried to recall what they had taught him at Sandhurst. They must have water, if possible. - And an open place to defend themselves. No help from Deori would reach them until tomorrow morning. It was about eleven o’clock now. Nearly twenty-four hours.

  Smith said, ‘We won’t have to worry about water, soon.’ He nodded towards the east. Over there the sky had turned a deep purple-blue. Under the purple a bar of primrose yellow ran across a forty-degree arc of the horizon, leaving a thinner band of angry green between it and the blurred blue of the distant hills.

  ‘A mango shower,’ Kendrick muttered.

  Foster laughed, without mirth. Mohan smiled with him. Sometimes those ‘mango showers’ were like tornadoes - a dust storm, cyclonic wind, rain in buckets.

  ‘Where can we go?’ Mohan asked. Several places were suggested and discarded. At length Smith said, ‘I think Indra’s Rock is our best chance. No one can be above us, it’s bare, and we’ll be protected on one side, at least, by the cliff.’

  They moved off in a small diamond-shaped formation -Mohan at the point with the rifle, Foster at the right with the pistol, Smith at the rear, Kendrick and his wife at the left, where they would be moving along the edge of the pit.

  On the slope leading up from the coolie camp, as in the pit, the scrub had burned out, but the bigger trees were still on fire.

  They moved very slowly over the charred land and among the burning trees, and, seeing no one, came after twenty minutes to the beginning of the Dobehari Ridge. As they reached the spine of it the desolation spread out plainly around them. Cheltondale was a smoking pile of twisted beams in their path. Across the valley the village of Konpara still burned furiously. Southdown and the Rest House had gone. The Konpara Ridge stood devastated from end to end, the fire still raging along the western flank. Smoke and flames boiling up from beyond it showed that the woods round Tiger Pool were burning, but to the north, above the Konpara Cliffs, the jungles had not caught.

  The wind had died. There must be a local wind round those farther fires, but here there was nothing, and Mohan found the silence more terrifying than the noise to which he had become accustomed. Smith called, ‘That’s the storm coming. The wind always dies first.’

  Mohan’s tongue felt thick and painful in his mouth. There would be no water at Cheltondale. The bhistis had always brought it by hand from Tiger Pool.

  It was lucky Smith had brought the rifle. But obviously Smith had suspected a trap. Another thought struck him. He stopped. ‘The other rifles,’ he cried. They must have got them. We’re sitting ducks for anyone with a gun!’

  Smith said, ‘I think not. Mr Kendrick’s bolts are in his safe. That only leaves yours, and Huttoo Lall would not risk arousing the servants’ suspicions by trying to get it. This was going to look like an accident.’

  Mohan led on. They passed Cheltondale. A little later he became aware of a low, continuous noise which he could not identify. It grew louder as he advanced, and sounded like a distant train, then like a waterfall. Everyone had heard it, and Kendrick was looking round with renewed bewilderment.

  Foster recognised it first. From his position at the right of the diamond he hobbled across to the edge of the pit and looked over, Mohan following. Directly below them a thick column of pure green water leaped out of the mouth of the conduit and arched down to burst in a low thunder of white spray among the blackened devastation of the pit floor. It was an impressive sight, though it made Mohan’s tongue swell painfully.

  ‘I suppose they’ve jammed open the inlet gate in Tiger Pool,’ he said. ‘But why? To drown us, if we’d still been down there?’

  ‘That would take days,’ Smith said. ‘I think it’s to prevent us using the conduit as a shelter. We might have been able to lower ourselves into it. That means this has been done since we left the coolie camp. We’re being watched.’

  Five minutes later they reached Indra’s Rock. A short search showed that no one was hiding within two hundred yards of the flat summit. They all looked at Mohan. He realised that they were waiting for his leadership. But why do you look at me, he thought angrily. You are all older than I, and more experienced. Any one of you should be able to say what must be done - except perhaps poor Kendrick, whose attention wanders so that I am not sure that he always realises where he is, or what has happened... and I am thinking of Rukmini, and looking across the blackened hills, and crying out, Where are you, let me come to you.

  He was the Suvala, and they were acknowledging it. If he was the Suvala these people who were trying to kill them were his own people. He should be able to think as they thought, and so guard this little party of strangers until help came.

  He said, ‘They have been watching us, and they are watching now. But the spread of the fire was not planned, and they are disorganised. No attempt will be made on us until dark. Or during the storm. It will be dark and confused for two or three hours then.’

  ‘What’s happened to all our servants?’ Foster asked. ‘The coolies. My new foreman. Are they all in it? Or have they all been killed?’

  Mohan said, ‘They’ve been sent away. The headman could give orders as from us, as soon as the fires began - to collect valuables, go to some appointed place. There must have been great confusion. One man speaking with authority would be believed... We must get to work.’ He eyed Kendrick doubtfully, but he’d have to be trusted now. Mohan handed him the rifle, and said, ‘Will you sit on top here, sir, and keep watch?’

  Kendrick took the rifle and turned it over to his hands. His expression brightened. ‘Yes. I’ll keep watch. And if I see any of them... ‘ He laughed loudly.

  Mohan led the others down the north face of the rock.
The ground was covered with isolated tangles of thorn scrub that had burned to black charcoal without crumbling to the ground.

  Each made a patch of cover which would certainly hide a man in dusk or storm. Mohan said, ‘We’d better start pulling these down.’

  Barbara Kendrick said suddenly, ‘Wait! Will the wind reach us before the rain, before the clouds?’

  Mohan answered impatiently, ‘Probably. It usually does.’

  She said, ‘It’s coming! What’s the time?’

  ‘About noon, a little earlier.’

  ‘That’s near enough.’

  Foster said, ‘We’d better get to work.’

  ‘Wait,’ Barbara insisted. ‘Watch!’

  The light turned a sickly yellow and the wind came, At first in short, sharp gusts from the south, then more steadily. To the, east the Deori Plain vanished under a brown-yellow pall, and overhead the sky sank slowly upon them. The wind caught the waterfall, the familiar mist formed, a rainbow began to take shape, then vanished as that gust died.

  The wind set in steady and hard from the south, increasing every moment in force. Barbara Kendrick called, ‘Now look!’ She was on her feet, her grimed face ugly in its concentration. ‘The rainbow!’ The rainbow took full and perfect shape under the strong wind, spanning the Konpara Cliffs in an arc of violet, red, orange, yellow, and blue.

  Foster said, ‘We ought to...’

  Barbara Kendrick cried, ‘Where are we standing?’

  Smith said, ‘Indra’s Rock.’

  ‘And this ridge is called Dobehari, meaning...’

  ‘Noon.’

  ‘It is noon now. And who was the ancestor of the Suvalas?

  ‘The Lord India.’

  ‘His weapon?’

  ‘The bow. Indradhanus,’ Smith said. ‘Indra’s Bow. The rainbow.’

  ‘It is four days after the Rite of the Labourers,’ Barbara said, ‘but that’s close enough. Look!’

  The smoke from the fires .flowed flat and fast towards the north now, making the atmosphere extraordinarily dark but shot through with a yellow glow from the sun, like a London station on a foggy day with bright lamps trying to burn through from a high roof. The rainbow, its colours slowly becoming more lurid, stretched across the sky, the left end seeming to rise from the valley of the Deori River near the Buddha Tumulus, the right end falling to earth on the Konpara Ridge, a little to the right of the ruins of Southdown.

  Barbara said, ‘Standing on the Noon Ridge, at noon, in Indra’s country, Indra’s bow seems to rest there,’ She pointed. ‘At the right hand - the left is the unclean side. The cave was made by artists and priests, not by engineers. There is the mouth of the cave - there, there! Where the caretaker’s hut of Southdown stood.’

  Kendrick had joined them. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked anxiously. ‘What are you all pointing at?’

  His wife turned on him. ‘When we first built Southdown, what stood there, where the caretaker’s hut was?’

  Kendrick said, ‘What? What’s that got...?’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘There was a big pile of wood,’ Kendrick said, ‘ready to be burned for charcoal. When I planned the bungalow, the headman said we’d need a caretaker’s hut. I agreed. They took the wood away and had the hut built before work began on Southdown.’

  ‘The mouth of the cave is there,’ Barbara Kendrick cried. The wind howled across the rock, and the air was full of black and grey ash. The sun had vanished. She said, ‘Rukmini’s there. She understood, yesterday, because she is - Rukmini. Oh, why didn’t I see it sooner!’

  Kendrick shouted, ‘There’s nothing there! Right in our own compound, all these years! You’ve got art on the brain, rainbows, waterfalls...’

  Barbara said, ‘The people who built the cave didn’t know what caused the rainbow. It wasn’t something pretty and harmless to them. It was the Bow of God!’

  Mohan stared hungrily across at the Konpara Ridge. Southdown had stood near the point where the level top of the ridge began to slope gently down towards the village. A few yards beyond the edge of the back lawn, where the servants’ quarters had been, a rock spine worked its way out of the soil, rose to ten or twelve feet in height, and sloped on down with the ridge. Near the beginning of that outcrop, not more than thirty yards from the servants’ quarters, the caretaker’s hut had stood against the rock. He had never been in it, but he remembered asking the headman once, perfunctorily, whether the quarters and the hut had any cave or hole opening out of them, and the headman assuring him with a sad smile that there was nothing of the kind.

  The caretaker was the headman’s brother,’ Smith said.

  Kendrick said, ‘He was, but...’

  Mohan said, ‘That settles it. I’m going.’

  Barbara said, ‘And I, with you.’

  Charles Kendrick tried to seize her, but she wriggled out of his grip and ran away down the slope, Mohan close behind. He remembered that Kendrick had the rifle and, feeling cold in the small of the back, turned quickly.

  Kendrick held the rifle half raised, but Smith stood beside him, very close. Smith called, ‘I’ll stay here with Mr Kendrick. We’ll hold Indra’s Rock in case you’re wrong and have to come back. Jim, you go with them, and keep that pistol up where it can be seen.’

  Jim Foster ran down the slope to join them. Smith and Kendrick stood silhouetted against a dark oncoming mass of dust, earth, ash, and smoke.

  Then with Barbara on his left and Foster beyond her Mohan began to run. The wind smoked among the standing army of dead trees. Here and there it found a bough split like a reed, and made a droning roar. The sun had gone from the sky and the rainbow from the fall. They crossed the shallow valley and began to climb the Konpara Ridge. Foster shouted, ‘If it is the place, and if Rukmini’s inside - alive - someone will be on guard.’

  Mohan said, ‘Only to prevent her getting away. One, two men... Split here --I’ll go right, you and Barbara left.’

  They approached the rock spine from different angles. Mohan reached the top first, and cautiously looked over. A dark, naked man sat half asleep against the other side of the rock almost directly below him, a long-handled hatchet in his hand. Jim’s head appeared thirty feet to the left. The pistol glinted a moment as he aimed. He fired. The sitting man jumped where he sat and did not move again, blood and brains leaking out of his smashed face. Mohan scrambled down the rock face and met Jim and Barbara.

  Ten paces to their left the burned-out planks and timbers of the caretaker’s hut lay in an orderly pile against the foot of the rock spine, crosswise and endwise as they had burned and fallen.

  Mohan said, ‘Keep watch. I’m going to have a look.’

  Jim muttered, ‘Be quick. Visibility’s getting very bad.’

  Mohan stepped cautiously into the wreckage. Near what had been the right corner of the back wall of the hut the rock turned sharply in a sort of buttress before continuing its northward course down the ridge. The face of the buttress had been cut into to form a doorway, three and a half feet wide and five feet high. Mohan drew a deep breath and, crouching, entered the doorway.

  The entrance ran straight in, at the same dimensions as the doorway, for five feet, then turned sharply to the left. The sound of the wind was louder there, roaring and bellowing in the confined space. The floating ash particles made his eyes smart. He turned the corner, and found total silence, almost total darkness.

  He waited, his heart pounding steadily and loudly. He’d got to know what was here. He’d had some matches in his trouser pocket. When he put his hand down he remembered that they had exploded during the fire, and burned his thigh.

  He reached up. The roof was over six feet here, and he could stand. He began to walk forward. The floor sloped sharply downward, but was cut and smooth-paved under his feet. The walls had fallen back. His reaching fingers told him that the passage was five feet wide here.

  At forty paces the gradient lessened and he came to another right-angled turn. He stopped. Forty paces betw
een right-angles, and no one in that length, unless they were crouching low against the wall. A rifle and a pistol could defend that as long as the ammunition lasted. More enemies might be hiding farther down the passage... but he was sure there were none; the place smelled of the emptiness of centuries. ‘Rukmini!’ he whispered, but there was no answer.

  He hurried back, and crawled out ‘We must get the others here,’ he said briefly, and explained what he had found. Jim said, ‘I’ll go,’ and clambered up the rock spine. At the top he sank to his knees, but slowly, his eyes turned to the north. He said, Three men are coming up the side of the ridge towards us, from the direction of Tiger Pool.’

  ‘After us?’ Mohan asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. They’re moving carelessly. No one saw us come over the ridge.’

  ‘They must have! Or heard the shot!’

  ‘Smoke, wind,’ Jim said. ‘Lie down!’

  Mohan and Barbara lay down among the burned, timbers and waited. After a long anxious wait the pistol roared above them. Mohan jumped to his feet. Two villagers stood transfixed beside a blackened bush ten paces off, staring over his head at Jim. A third man lay twisted at their feet Jim fired again, but missed. The two men turned and fled like madmen down the slope.

  Mohan went out to the fallen man. It was Huttoo Lall. Barbara knelt and put her hand on his heart. ‘Unconscious but not dead,’ she muttered. The bullet had gouged a trough along the side of his face, and he bled heavily. Mohan said, ‘We’ll take him in with us. Perhaps we can make him tell us why they’re trying to kill us.’

  They bent to the wounded man, struggled with him to the mouth of the cave, and left him there. Then they scrambled up the rock to Jim’s side. ‘We must get Smith and Kendrick,’ Mohan said. ‘Can they see a signal?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ Jim said. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘Wait.’

  Indra’s Rock, a quarter of a mile away, showed but dimly through the murk, and then only for seconds at a time. The wind had sucked the debris of the fire out of the pit and a huge black column, hundreds of feet thick, rose and writhed into the sky before the upper wind caught it and brought it rushing across the valley towards the Konpara Cliffs. Mohan waved his coat frantically, but the wind hung it out like a board in his hands, and it was so dirty that it blended in with the background of sooty sky and cliff.