by Sax Rohmer
One swift look I ventured—noting that he was a comparatively young man with a high intellectual forehead, that he wore black-rimmed spectacles and carried a notebook. Then I closed my eyes and lay still.
He took the chair beside me, raised my wrist, and felt the pulse. As he dropped my hand I ventured on a quick glance. He was recording the pulse in his notebook.
Next, unbuttoning the jacket of my silk pajamas, he inserted a clinical thermometer under my left armpit and, leaving it there, dipped the point of a syringe into a glass of water and carefully wiped it on a piece of lint. This, also, I witnessed, without being detected.
Engrossed in his tasks, he was not watching me. I saw him load a shot of some nameless drug into the syringe and place his loaded syringe on the table.
I reclosed my eyes.
The Chinese surgeon removed the thermometer and recorded my temperature.
There was a long, silent interval. I kept my eyes closed. Something told me that he was intrigued, that he was studying me.
Presently, I felt his head close to my bare chest. He pressed his ear against my heart. I lay still, until:
“Ah, Mr. Greville,” he said, with scarcely a trace of accent, “you are feeling better, eh?”
I opened my eyes.
The Chinaman was still watching me. His face was quite expressionless as his tones had been.
“Yes,” I said… and my voice refused to function higher than a whisper!
“Good.” He nodded. “I was becoming anxious about you. It is all right now. The artificial nourishment, I think, we may dispense with. Yes, I think so. Do you feel that some very savory soup and perhaps a small glass of red wine would be acceptable?”
“Definitely!”
My whispering voice positively appalled me!
“I will see to it, Mr. Greville.”
“Tell me,” I breathed, “where is Nayland Smith?”
The Chinese surgeon looked puzzled.
“Nayland Smith?” he echoed. “I know no one of that name.”
“He’s here… in el-Khârga!”
“El-Khârga?” He stopped and patted me on the shoulder. “I understand. Do not think about this. I will see that you are looked after.”
A little, wrinkled Asiatic, who either was deaf and dumb or who had had orders to remain silent, brought me a bowl of steaming soup and a glass of some kind of light Burgundy. It was a vegetable soup, but excellent, as was the wine.
And presently I found myself alone again.
I listened intently, trying to detect some sound which should enable me to place the location of this extraordinary green and gold room in which I found myself. Any attempt to escape was out of the question. I was too weak to stir from the divan.
Apart from a vague humming in my aching head, no sound whatever could I hear.
Was I in the house of the Sheikh Ismail? Or had I been smuggled away to some other place in the oasis? An irresistible drowsiness began to creep over me. Once, I aroused with a start which set my heart beating madly.
I thought I had heard a steamer’s siren!
Of course (I mused) I had been dreaming again. A sudden, acute anger and resentment stirred me. I was thinking of my companions. I groaned because of my great weakness… I dozed.
Good heavens! What was that?
My heart beating wildly, I tried to sit up. Surely a motor horn! I lay there sweating from the shock of the effort.
I closed my weary eyes…
Divining, rather than knowing, that the door behind me had opened, I kept my lids lowered—but watched.
A faint perfume—which I later determined was rather an aura than a physical fact—reached me. I knew it. This was the herald of another of those troubled visions—visions of the goddess Kâli incarnated.
She stood beside me.
The mythical robes—perhaps never more than figments of delirium—were not there. She wore a golden Chinese dress not unlike a pajama suit and little gold slippers. The suit was silk of so fine a texture that as she stood between me and the light I could detect the lines of her ivory body as though she floated in a mist of sunrise.
A soft hand touched my forehead.
I raised weary lids and looked up into jade-green eyes.
She smiled and dropped into the chair.
So it was Madame Ingomar that I had to thank for my escape!
“Yes,” she answered softly in her strange bell-like voice. “I saved your life at great peril to my own.”
But I had not spoken!
Her hand caressed my brow.
“I can tell what you are thinking,” she said. “I have been listening to your thoughts for so long. When you are strong again, it will not be so—but now it is.”
Her voice and her touch were soothing—magnetic. I found my brain utterly incapable of resentment. This woman, kin of the superdevil, Fu-Manchu, my enemy, enemy of all I counted worth while— petted me as a mother pets her child!
And a coldness grew in my heart—yet I remained powerless to resist the spell—because I realized that if she willed me not to hate, but to love her, I should obey… I could not refuse!
I dragged my gaze away from hers. Irresistible urges were reaching me from those wonderful eyes, which had the brightness of polished gems.
She stooped and slipped her arm under my head.
“You have been very ill,” she whispered. Her lips were almost touching me. “But I have nursed you because I am sorry. You are so young and life is good. I want you to live and love and be happy…”
I struggled like a bird hypnotized by a snake. I told myself that her silver voice rang false as the note of a cracked bell; that her eyes were hideous in their unfathomable evil; that her red lips would give poisoned kisses; that her slenderness was not that of a willow but of a poised serpent. And then, as a worshipper calls on his gods, I called on Rima, conjuring up a vision of the sweet, grave eyes.
“The little Irish girl is charming,” said that bell voice. “No one shall harm her. If it will make you happy, you shall have her… And you must not be angry, or get excited. You may talk to me for a few minutes and then you must sleep…”
My next awakening was a troubled one. The strange room looked the same. But she had gone. How long?… I had lost all track of time.
What had I imagined and what was real?
Had I asked her, or only dreamed that I had asked her, of the fate of my friends? I thought I had done so and that she had told me they were alive, but had refused to tell me more.
Alive—and, I could only suppose, prisoners!
She had assured me, unemotionally, one arm pillowing my head and those magnetic fingers soothing my hot brow, that it was blind folly to oppose her. She wielded a power greater than that of any potentate living. Her strange soul was wrapped up in world politics. Russia, that great land “stolen by fools,” was ripe for her purpose…
The present rulers? Pooh! Her specialists (calmly she spoke of them and I supposed her to mean professional assassins) would clear away such petty obstacles. Russia awaited a ruler. The ruler had arisen. And, backed by a New Russia, which then would be part and parcel of Asia—“my Asia”…
China, after many generations, was to be united again. Japan, in the Far East, Turkey, in the Near East, must be forced into submission. Already the train was laid. Kemal stood in her way. Swâzi Pasha, his secret adviser, must be removed…
“But I am so lonely, Shan. Your name is sweet to me, because it is like my own Chinese. Sometimes I know I am only a woman, and that all I see before me ends in nothing if it brings me only power and no love.”
Now I was alone.
This was a superwoman into whose hands I had fallen! And what blindness had been upon me during our earlier if brief association to close my eyes to the fact that she had conceived a sudden, characteristically Oriental infatuation?
Perhaps a natural modesty. I had never been a woman’s man and counted myself negligible when female favors were being distribute
d. Or, possibly, my preoccupation with Rima. Certainly, from the first moment I had met her, I had not so much as noticed any other woman’s existence or bothered myself to wonder if any other woman had noticed mine.
Yet, as I recalled again and again, Madame Ingomar had chosen me to show her over the excavation and had sought me out many times. Yes, I had been blind…
Now, too late, I saw.
Beyond any dispute, she sprang from generations of autocrats; power was in her blood. She had selected me, for no reason that I could imagine; and I had read in those strange green eyes, as clearly as though she had spoken, that if I rejected her I must die!
I knew, also, intuitively, that she had experienced love. Judged by Western standards, she was young. But judged by any standards she was old in knowledge. However I chose, my triumph would be a short one.
So musing, and as weak as a half-drowned cat, I lay staring around my gold and green prison.
The door behind me opened and the Chinese doctor came in.
“Good morning, Mr. Greville.”
I glanced at the heavy curtains. No trace of light showed through them.
“Good morning,” I said.
My voice was stronger. The Chinaman went through the ritual of taking pulse and temperature; then:
“A great improvement,” he announced. “You have an admirable constitution.”
“But what has been the matter with me?”
He moved his hands in a slight, deprecatory gesture.
“Nothing, in itself, serious: a small injection. But it was necessary to renew it… However, I am going to get you on your feet, Mr. Greville.”
He clapped his hands sharply, and the silent man entered.
Together, and skillfully, they raised me from the divan and carried me into a beautifully equipped bathroom which adjoined the green and gold apartment.
“You must not object to our assistance in your toilet,” said the doctor. “Because, although unknown to you, we have so assisted before!”
I submitted to the ordeal of being groomed. I had never been seriously ill, and the business was new to me and utterly detestable. Then I was carried back to bed.
“A lightly boiled egg, and toast,” the Chinaman declared, “will not be too severe. Tea—one cup—very weak…”
Presently this was brought and set upon the table beside me. Propped by cushions, I now found it possible to sit up.
With some trace of returning appetite I disposed of this light breakfast. The tray was removed by the dumb man and I lay waiting. Watching the doors alternately, I waited… for her. And I waited in a steadily mounting horror. In some way which I had never hitherto experienced, this woman, for all her exotic beauty, terrified me.
The door opened… the dumb man came in with a number of books, a box of cigarettes, and other small comforts.
There was no clock in the room and my wrist watch had been removed…
I saw no one but this silent Asiatic all day, of the progress of which I could judge only by the appearance of regular meals.
Several times, but more faintly than on the first occasion, I could have sworn I heard river noises, and once what strangely resembled a motor horn.
The Chinese surgeon attended me after I had dealt with a dinner excellently prepared, and “groomed” me for the night. When he had gone, I lay smoking a final cigarette and wondering if…
“Turn out the light when you are tired,” had been his final injunction.
Lying there in silence and darkness, I almost touched rock bottom. Despair drew desperately near. I was utterly at the mercy of this woman. Whatever had happened to me had left me weaker than a child. And that damnable mystery, the true nature of my illness, was not the least of my troubles.
I suffered no physical pain, except for a throbbing head; I could recall no blow… what had been done to me?
Sleep was out of the question; but I had tried to find relief from the inexorable amber fight. Why, I wondered wearily, had I imagined riverside and street sounds and now imagined them no longer?
And, whilst I turned this problem over in my mind, came a sound which was not imaginary.
It was muffled. But I had learned that all sounds reached the green and gold room in that way. Nevertheless, dim though it was, I knew it… an eerie minor cry—the cry I had heard in Petrie’s courtyard in Cairo…
The call of a Dacoit!
Good God! Had this she-fiend been mocking me! Was I to be strangled as I lay there helpless?
My hand reached out for the switch. I was trembling wildly. Weakness had destroyed my nerve. I grasped it—a pendant— pressed the button…
No fight came!
At which I nearly lost myself. I suppose, for the first time in my life, I was delirious, or hysterical.
“Smith!” I cried. “Weymouth! Help!…”
My voice was a husky whisper. Weakness and terror had imposed on me that crowning torture of nightmare—inability to summon aid in an emergency.
But this was the peak of my sudden, childish frenzy. The fit passed. Nothing further happened. And I grew cool enough to realize that perhaps my enforced silence had been a blessing in disguise. Smith! Weymouth!… Heaven only knew where my poor friends were at that hour.
The door behind my couch opened.
I lay still—resigned, now, to the inevitable. I did not even attempt to look around, but stayed with half-closed eyes prepared for death.
A dim light appeared.
Watching, I lost faith in myself. I was altogether too exhausted, in my low state, to experience further fear; but I determined that my brain was not so completely to be relied upon as I had supposed. Actually, I was not awake; I hovered between two states in a borderland of hideous fancy.
An outré figure carrying a lantern came into the room.
The light of the lantern cast a huge, misshapen image of its bearer on the golden wall.
This was a hunchbacked dwarf—epicene, revolting. His head was of more than normal size; his gray-black bloated features were a parody of humanity; his eyes bulged, demoniac, from a vast skull. He wore indoor Arab dress, a huge tarboosh crowning his repulsive ugliness.
Never so much as glancing in my direction, he crossed to the door on the other side of the room and went out.
Both doors remained open. Sounds reached me.
First among these I detected voices—subdued but keyed to excitement.
They were voices of delirium, I decided. They spoke a language which conveyed nothing to me.
A man wearing an ill-fitting serge suit and a dark blue turban raced through the room in the wake of the dwarf. He carried an electric torch. Its reflection, diffused from the golden walls, exhibited a yellow, tigerish face, lips curled back and fanglike teeth bared in a sadistic grin…
The Dacoit who had followed me to Cairo!
It was a procession of images created by a disordered brain. Yet I was unconscious of any other symptoms of fever.
Two kinds of sounds came to me now: the excited voices, growing louder, and a more distant, continuous disturbance difficult to identify. Then came a third.
A pausing shriek quivered through the house… and died into wordless gurgling.
The Dacoit reappeared. He carried a short, curved knife, its blade red to the hilt… His squinting, bloodshot eyes fixed themselves upon me. He drew nearer and nearer to the divan upon which I lay helpless.
Out of the babel of voices, one voice detached itself; a harsh, metallic voice. It cried three words.
The Dacoit passed me—and returned by the way he had originally entered.
A sustained, harsh note… a flat, surely unmistakable note—that of a police whistle!
I smiled in the darkness.
Clearly, high fever had claimed me. But this ghastly delirium must soon end in unconsciousness. I touched my forehead. It was wet, but cold.
The indistinguishable voices grew faint—and died away.
But that queer, remote booming continued.
A dim crash sent ghostly echo messengers through the building.
Shouts followed. But now I could pick out certain words…
“Easy at the landing, sir! Wait for me…”
A sound of clattering footsteps, apparently on a staircase…
“You take that door—I’ll take this!”
Surely I knew that great, deep voice.
More ghostly crashing.
“Nothing here!”
“Next floor!”
A background of excited conversation; then:
“Nayland Smith!” came the great voice—“are you there, sir? Shan Greville! Are you there?”
I did know that voice!
“Silence!” it commanded. “Listen!”
In the interval of stillness which followed, I tried to reply. My heart was beating like a racing engine. My brain had become a circus. And the answering cry died in my throat.
“Carry on!”
Clattering of footsteps was renewed. They were somewhere outside the green-gold room, when:
“God’s mercy!”
They had found the hunchback. Sudden silence fell.
Subdued voices broke it, until, above them:
“There’s another room!” came a cry.
Holding an electric lamp, the speaker burst through the doorway…
Delirium was ended: this was reality!
“Greville!”
“Weymouth!” I said faintly and stretched out a shaking hand.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SWZI PASHA ARRIVES
Perhaps the presence of blue-uniformed and helmeted constables in a measure prepared me. But, looking back, I realize that this anomalous intrusion upon the oasis did not register a hundred per cent of its true force at the time.
I was weak in a degree which I simply couldn’t believe or accept. The idea of mirage remained. When they carried me through a queer room adjoining that in which I had suffered—a room where something lay covered by a piece of ornate tapestry torn from the wall—I was still no more than half alive to facts.
