by Talbot Mundy
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the new man was a Mahsudi — no sweeter to look at and no less treacherous for the fact. Also, that he had boils all over the back of his neck. He was not likely to be better tempered because of that fact, either. But it is an ill wind that blows no good to the Secret Service.
“There is an end to everything,” he remarked presently, addressing the world at large, or as much as he could see of it through the cave mouth. “A hill is so high, a pool so deep, a river so wide. How long, for instance, must thy watch be?”
“What is that to thee?” the fellow growled.
“There is an end to pain!” said King, adjusting his horn-rimmed spectacles. “I lanced a man’s boils last night, and it hurt him, but he must be well to-day.”
“Get in!” growled the guard. “She says it is sorcery! She says none are to let thee touch them!”
Plainly, he was in no receptive mood; orders had been spat into his hairy ear too recently.
“Get in!” he growled, lifting his rifle-butt as if to enforce the order.
“I can heal boils!” said King, retiring into the cave. Then, from a safe distance down the passage, he added a word or two to sink in as the hours went by.
“It is good to be able to bend the neck without pain and to rest easily at night! It is good not to flinch at another’s touch. Boils are bad! Healing is easy and good!”
Then, since a quarrel was the very last thing he was looking for, he retired into his own gloomy quarters at the rear, taking care to sit so that he could see and overhear what passed at the entrance. Among other things in the course of the day he noticed that the watch was changed every four hours and that there were only three men in the guard, for the same man was back again that evening.
At intervals throughout the day Yasmini sent him food by silent messengers; so he ate, for “the thing to do,” says Cocker, “is the first that comes to hand, and the thing not to do is worry.” It is not easy to worry and eat heartily at one and the same time. Having eaten, he rolled up his sleeves and native-made cotton trousers and proceeded to clean the cave. After that he overhauled his stock of drugs and instruments, repacking them and making ready against opportunity.
“As I told that heathen with a gun out there, there’s an end to everything!” he reflected. “May this come soon!”
When they changed the guard that afternoon he had grown weary of his own company and of fruitless speculation and was pacing up and down. The second guard proved even less communicative than the first, up to the point when, to lessen his ennui, King began to whistle. Because a Secret Service man must be consistent, the tune was not English, but a weird minor one to which the “Hills” have set their favorite love song (that is, all about hate in the concrete!).
The echo of the waterfall within the cave was like the roaring in a shell held to the ear, but each time he came near the entrance the new guard could catch a few bars of the tune. After a little while the hook-nosed ruffian began to sing the words to it, in a voice like a forgotten dog’s.
So he stopped at the entrance and changed the tune. And the guard sang the words of the new tune, too. After that he came out into the light of day (direct sunlight was cut off by the huge height of the cliffs all around) and leaned in the entrance, smiling.
“Allah preserve thee, brother!” he remarked. “Thine is a voice like a warrior’s — bold and big! Thou art a true son of the Prophet!”
“Aye!” said the fellow, “that I am! Allah preserve thee, for thou hast more need of it than I, although I guard thee just at present. Whistle me another one!”
So King whistled the refrain of a song that boasts of an Afghan invasion of India, and of the loot that came of it, and the prisoners, and the women — particularly the women, mentioning more than a few of them by name, and their charms in detail. It was a song to warm the very cockles of a Hillman’s heart. Nothing could have been better chosen for that setting, of a cave mouth half-way down the side of a gash in earth’s wildest mountains, with the blue sky resting on a jagged rim a mile above.
“Good!” said the bearded jailer. “Now begin again and I will sing!”
He threw his head back and howled until the mountain walls rang with the song, and other men in far-off caves took it up and howled it back at him. When he left off singing at last, to drink from a water-bottle, that surely had been looted from a British soldier, King decided to be done with overtures and make the next move in the game.
“Didst thou ever sing for her?” he asked, and the man turned round to stare at him as if he were mad, King saw then a blood-soaked bandage on the right of his neck, not very far from the jugular.
“When she sings we are silent! When she is silent it is good to wait a while and see!” he answered.
“Hah!” said King. “Was that wound got in the Khyber the other day?”
“Nay. Here in Khinjan. I had my thumb in a man’s eye, and the bastard bit me! May devils do worse to him where he has gone! I threw him into Earth’s Drink!”
“A good place for one’s enemies!” laughed King.
“Aye!”
“A man told me last night,” said King, drawing on imagination without any compunction at all, “that the fight in the Khyber was because a jihad is launched aleady.”
“That man lied!” said the guard, shifting position uneasily, as if afraid to talk too much.
“So I told him!” answered King. “I told him there never will be another jihad.”’
“Then art thou a greater liar than he!” the guard answered hotly. “There will be a jihad when she is ready, such an one as never yet was! India shall bleed for all the fat years she has lain unplundered! Not a throat of an unbeliever in the world shall be left un-slit! No jihad? Thou liar! Get in out of my sight!”
So King retired into the cave, with something new to think about. Was she planning the jihad! Or pretending to plan one? Every once in a while the guard leaned far into the cave mouth and buried adjectives at him, the mildest of which was a well of information. If his temper was the temper of the “Hills,” it was easy to read disappointment for a jihad that should have been already but had been postponed.
When they changed the guard again the new man proved surly. There was no getting a word out of him. He showed dirty yellow teeth in a wolfish snarl, and his only answer was a lifted rifle and a crooked forefinger. King let him alone and paced the cave for hours.
He was squatting on his bed-end in the dark, like a spectacled image of Buddha, when the first of the three men came on guard again and at last Ismail came for him holding a pitchy torch that filled the dim passage full of acrid smoke and made both of them, cough. Ismail was red-eyed with it.
“Come!” he growled. “Come, little hakim!” Then he turned on his heel at once, as if afraid of being twitted with desertion. He seemed to want to get outside, where he could keep out of range of words, yet not to wish to seem unfriendly.
But King made no effort to speak to him, following in silence out on to the dark ledge above the waterfall and noticing that the guard with the boils was back again on duty. He grinned evilly out of a shadow as King passed.
“Make an end!” he advised, spitting over the Cliff into thunderous darkness to illustrate the suggestion. “Jump, hakim, before a worse thing happens!”
To add further point be kicked a loose stone over the edge, and the movement caused him to bend his neck and so inadvertently to hurt his boils. He cursed, and there was pity in King’s voice when he spoke next.
“Do they hurt thee?”
“Aye, like the devil! Khinjan is a place of plagues!”
“I could heal them,” King said, passing on, and the man stared hard.
“Come!” boomed Ismail through the darkness, shaking the torch to make it burn better and beckoning impatiently, and King hurried after him, leaving behind a savage at the cave mouth who fingered his sores and wondered, muttering, leaning on a rifle, muttering and muttering again as if he had seen a new
light.
Instead of waiting for King to catch up, Ismail began to lead the way at great speed along a path that descended gradually until it curved round the end of the chasm and plunged into a tunnel where the darkness grew opaque. In the tunnel the torch’s smoke cast weird shadows on walls and roof, and the fitful light only confused, so that Ismail slowed down and let him come up close.
Then for thirty minutes he led swiftly down a crazy devil’s stairway of uneven boulders, stopping to lend a hand at the worst places, but everlastingly urging him to hurry. They were both breathless, and King was bruised in a dozen places when they reached level going at least six or seven hundred feet below the cave from which they started.
Then the hell-mouth gloom began to grow faintly luminous, and the waterfall’s thunder burst on their ears from close at hand. They emerged into fresh wet air and a sea of sound, on a rock ledge like the one above. Ismail raised the torch and waved it. The fire and smoke wandered up, until they flattened on a moving opal dome, that prisoned all the noises in the world.
“Earth’s Drink!” he announced, waving the torch and then shutting his mouth tight, as if afraid to voice sacrilege.
It was the river, million-colored in the torch-light, pouring from a half-mile-long slash in the cliff above them and plunging past them through the gloom toward the very middle of the world. Its width was a matter of memory, and its depth unguessable, for although dim moonlight filtered through it, he did not know where the moon was, nor how far such light could penetrate through moving water. Somewhere it met rock-bottom and boiled there, for a roar like the sea’s came up from deeps unimaginable.
He watched the overturning dome until his senses reeled. Then he crawled on hands and knees to the ledge’s brink and tried to peer over. But Ismail dragged him back.
“Come!” he howled; but in all that din his shout was like a whisper.
“How deep is it?” King bellowed back.
“Allah! Ask Him who made it!”
The fear of the falls was on the Afridi, and he tugged at King’s arm in a frenzy of impatience. Suddenly he let go and broke into a run. King trotted after him, afraid too, to look to right or left, lest the fear should make him throw himself over the brink. The thunder and the hugeness had their grip on him and had begun to numb his power to think and his will to be a man. Suddenly when they had run a hundred yards, Ismail turned sharp to the right into a tunnel that led straight back into the cliff and sloped uphill. As the din of the falls grew less behind him and his power to think returned, King calculated that they must be following the main direction of the river bed, but edging away gradually to the right of it. After ten minutes’ hurrying uphill he guessed they must be level with the river, in a tunnel running nearly parallel.
He proved to be right, for they came to a gap in the wall, and Ismail thrust the torch through it. The light shone on swift black water, and a wind rushed through the gap that nearly blew the torch out. It accounted altogether for the dryness of the rock and the fresh air in the tunnel. The river’s weight seemed to suck a hurricane along with it — air enough for a million men to breathe.
After that there was no more need to stop at intervals and beat the torch against the wall to make it burn brightly, for the wind fanned it until the flame was nearly white. Ismail kept looking back to bid King hurry and never paused once to rest.
“Come!” he urged fiercely. “This leads to the ‘Heart of the Hills’!” And after that King had to do his best to keep the Afridi’s back in sight.
They began after a time to hear voices and to see the smoky glare made by other torches. Then Ismail set the pace yet faster, and they became the last two of a procession of turbaned men, who tramped along a winding tunnel into a great mountain’s womb. The sound of slippers clicking and rutching on the rock floor swelled and died and swelled again as the tunnel led from cavern into cavern.
In one great cave they came to every man beat out his torch and tossed it on a heap. The heap was more than shoulder high, and three parts covered the floor of the cave. After that there was a ledge above the height of a man’s head on either side of the tunnel, and along the ledge little oil-burning lamps were spaced at measured intervals. They looked ancient enough to have been there when the mountain itself was born, and although all the brass ones suggested Indian and Hindu origin, there were others among them of earthenware that looked like plunder from ancient Greece.
It was like a transposition of epochs. King felt already as if the twentieth century had never existed, just as he seemed to have left life behind for good and all when the mosque door had closed on him.
A quarter of a mile farther along the tunnel opened into another, yet greater cave, and there every man kicked off his slippers, without seeming to trouble how they lay; they littered the floor unarranged and uncared for, looking like the cast-off wing-cases of gigantic beetles.
After that cave there were two sharp turns in the tunnel, and then at last a sea of noise and a veritable blaze of light.
Part of the noise made King feel homesick, for out of the mountain’s very womb brayed a music-box, such as the old-time carousels made use of before the days of electricity and steam. It was being worked by inexpert hands, for the time was something jerky; but it was robbed of its tinny meanness and even majesty by the hugeness of a cavern’s roof, as well as by the crashing, swinging march it played — wild — wonderful — invented for lawless hours and a kingless people.
“Marchons! — Citoyens!—”
The procession began to tramp in time to it, and the rock shook. They deployed to left and right into a space so vast that the eye at first refused to try to measure it. It was the hollow core of a mountain, filled by the sea-sound of a human crowd and hung with huge stalactites that danced and shifted and flung back a thousand colors at the flickering light below.
There was an undertone to the clangor of the music-box and the human hum, for across the cavern’s farther end for a space of two hundred yards the great river rushed, penned here into a deep trough of less than a tenth its normal width — plunging out of a great fanged gap and hurrying out of view down another one, licking smooth banks on its way with a hungry sucking sound. Its depth where it crossed the cavern’s end could only be guessed by remembering the half-mile breadth of the waterfall.
There were little lamps everywhere, perched on ledges amid the stalactites, and they suffused the whole cavern in golden glow, made the crowd’s faces look golden and cast golden shimmers on the cold, black river bed. There was scarcely any smoke, for the wind that went like a storm down the tunnel seemed to have its birth here; the air was fresh and cool and never still. No doubt fresh air was pouring in continually through some shaft in the rock, but the shaft was invisible.
In the midst of the cavern a great arena had been left bare, and thousands of turbaned men squatted round it in rings. At the end where the river formed a tangent to them the rings were flattened, and at that point they were cut into by the ramp of a bridge, and by a lane left to connect the bridge with the arena. The bridge was almost the most wonderful of all.
So delicately formed that fairies might have made it with a guttered candle, it spanned the river in one splendid sweep, twenty feet above water, like a suspension bridge. Then, so light and graceful that it scarcely seemed to touch anything at all, it swept on in irregular arches downward to the arena and ceased abruptly as if shorn off by a giant ax, at a point less than half-way to it.
Its end formed a nearly square platform, about fourteen feet above the floor, and the broad track thence to the arena, as well as all the arena’s boundary, had been marked off by great earthenware lamps, whose greasy smoke streaked up and was lost by the wind among the stalactites.
“Greek lamps, every one of ’em!” King whispered to himself, but he wasted no time just then on trying to explain how Greek lamps had ever got there. There was too much else to watch and wonder at.
No steps led down from the bridge end to the floor; towar
d the arena it was blind. But from the bridge’s farther end across the hurrying water stairs had been hewn out of the rock wall and led up to a hole of twice a man’s height, more than fifty feet above water level.
On either side of the bridge end a passage had been left clear to the river edge, and nobody seemed to care to invade it, although it was not marked off in any way. Each passage was about fifty feet wide and quite straight. But the space between the bridge end and the arena, and the arena itself, had to be kept free from trespassers by fifty swaggering ruffians armed to the teeth.
Every man of the thousands there had a knife in evidence, but the arena guards had magazine rifles well as Khyber tulwars. Nobody else wore firearms openly. Some of the arena guards bore huge round shields of prehistoric pattern of a size and sort he had never seen before, even in museums. But there was very little that he was seeing that night of a kind that he had seen before anywhere!
The guards lolled insolently, conscious of brute strength and special favor. When any man trespassed with so much as a toe beyond the ring of lamps, a guard would slap his rifle-butt until the swivels rattled and the offender would scurry into bounds amid the jeers of any who had seen.
Shoving, kicking and elbowing with set purpose, Ismail forced a way through the already seated crowd, and drew King down into the cramped space beside him, close enough to the arena to be able to catch the guards’ low laughter. But he was restless. He wished to get nearer yet, only there seemed no room anywhere in front.
The music-box was hidden. King could see it nowhere. Five minutes after he and Ismail were seated it stopped playing. The hum of the crowd died too.
Then a guard threw his shield down with a clang and deliberately fired his rifle at the roof. The ricocheting bullet brought down a shower of splintered stone and stalactite, and he grinned as he watched the crowd dodge to avoid it. Before they had done dodging and while he yet grinned, a chant began — ghastly — tuneless — so out of time that the words were not intelligible — yet so obvious in general meaning that nobody could hear it and not understand.
