by Talbot Mundy
For a while the wish, inspiring faint hope, that Grim was not dead and might bring Lhaten and some of those other mysterious individuals to the rescue, kept me from jumping over the dark edge of the ravine whose direction we followed. But the more I thought of Grim the more conviction grew that he had been killed. How else could the man in front of me obtain his clothes?
And as for Narayan Singh, what chance had he? The odds were ten to one that those who pursued him had found and killed him. He could not have hidden in the monastery. There was no way to escape except by that zigzag descent, on which pursuers would have the advantage of pursued all the way down. I did not doubt Narayan Singh was dead.
That pessimistic outlook once accepted, the exasperation of being prodded on the heels at every third or fourth stride nearly broke down reason. Death was tempting if for nothing else than that it would deprive my captors of the fun of torturing me further; it was infinitely preferable to the thought of being made mad to the extent that I would yield my will, which seemed to be their object.
There were a dozen places where I might have jumped off before the men who drove me could prevent. I even pretended to worse fatigue than I actually felt, in order to get them used to my sudden stumbling so that they should not jump too quickly to prevent me when I made up my mind — a thing that, when left to myself, I am habitually slow to do.
I am not afraid of death, although I have the ordinary healthy man’s mistrust of suicide as any way out of a difficulty. The thought that Chullunder Ghose would have to face the misery alone if I should take that dark plunge to oblivion was what in the end prevented me. I decided to wait, and endure, and leave the problem up to him. If he should prefer suicide we would break through the veil of death together; if not, I could probably endure what he could.
Then I remembered Mordecai’s brave break for liberty across the passes and it seemed to me that though he died before he reached home he had won a finer fight than any I ever took hand in. I made up my mind I would endure until the end, whatever that might be, if only because Mordecai had done it.
Strangely, after that the thought returned that Grim might be alive and that Narayan Singh might possibly have found him. I could not imagine how Grim’s clothes could have changed ownership without his being taken prisoner or killed, but even the uncertainty was better than the pessimism of despair, and I began to use caution not to go too near the edges of the yawning chasms that we passed.
Long before morning Chullunder Ghose made an attempt to kill himself. He had a rope around his neck which would have hanged him or else dragged two monks to death along with him, if he had reached the edge of the ravine in time. But they were too alert. They threw him to the ground and beat him mercilessly, rubbing snow on his face and neck when he lost consciousness.
After that they tied the two of us together since the babu could hardly drag himself along, and they prodded me persistently and flogged me with the knotted ends of ropes whenever I tried to rest from the strain of supporting a man heavier than myself.
The man in Grim’s clothes never troubled himself once to turn and look at us. He appeared to be sure his men would carry out instructions, and when the coldest dawn I ever knew began to color the surrounding peaks I caught only one glimpse of him, a mile ahead, after which he vanished.
By that time Chullunder Ghose was in delirium, moving forward almost automatically; all I had to do was to support him, but the little strength I had left was hardly equal to it. The prodding no longer hurt. What little landscape I could see was swimming in a mist of blood-red. I could not feel my wrists and supposed they were frozen, but did not care. I decided at last to lie down and be beaten to death, forgetting the man’s threat that I would not be permitted to die; but it took thought an awfully long time to convert itself into action, and we reached a cave while I was still telling myself what to do. I felt as if I were talking to another fellow, whom I pitied.
The man in Grim’s clothes waited for us near the cave mouth. I had lost sense of direction and nothing seemed to stand still long enough for me to see it properly; the only thing that really registered in my exhausted brain was that Grim’s clothes were too small for him and that he looked like a cad without his beard. He had a pointed chin, with a twist that I thought might straighten if I hit it hard enough; and his eyes, instead of being leonine, looked more like a hyena’s.
“How is that for a beginning?” he asked.
He gave me a shove that sent Chullunder Ghose and me both sprawling on the cave floor. Then he stooped to examine my wrists and ordered one of his men to cut the rope and chafe them, but he did nothing to prevent the man whose ribs I had broken from continuing to prod me with the staff. I could not use my arms, and when I tried to kick I found I could not aim straight, which made them all laugh and they prodded me from every direction for the fun of it.
Chullunder Ghose was totally unconscious, lying on his face. The man in Grim’s clothes produced what looked like a silver pocket flask from the bag into which my pockets had been emptied, pulled out a wooden stopper with his teeth and, turning the babu over with his foot, poured a few drops of liquid on his swollen lips. Almost at once he began to recover and tried to sit up but was promptly knocked down again.
Then it was my turn. I was dragged to the rear of the cave and held while the man in Grim’s clothes forced some of the liquid through my set teeth, driving his fingernails into my gums to make me yield.
“That is soma,” he said when he had forced me to swallow a few drops.
The stuff was tasteless and had no noticeable smell, but its effect was almost instantaneous. My whole body became so perfectly at ease that I was hardly conscious of it and my brain became abnormally active. The red left my eyes. The cave, and everything in it, was as clear as if etched with a pen.
“Now think!” he commanded.
Instantly the journey from Darjeeling, including Benjamin’s store in Delhi, the Zogi-la, Mordecai, Sidiki ben Mohammed’s house and every other detail, came to mind in one uninterrupted panorama. As in dreams, when there is neither time nor place and events occur simultaneously without being superimposed or intermixed, I saw everything in a moment.
I felt as if my will were bound with cords, exactly as my hands had been. It was agreeable to have that lucid mental vision, yet it felt like something stolen and a baffled impulse to resist it totally offset the feeling of exhilaration.
“Now you see,” said the man in Grim’s cloths. “Nothing has occurred of your volition. Rait wrote to you to come. You came. It would have made no difference which route you took; we would have caught you. Rait, who has ten times your capability, had to strive for seven years to find our lodge and gain admission. We made him work for it and spared him nothing. After there was nothing left in him that could even wish to play us false he had the right to choose his own assistant. He chose you, so those letters were written to tempt you to try to rescue him. We understand men’s weaknesses. And now, if you have it in you, you are going to be made fit to go to the United States with Rait.”
The stuff he had forced through my teeth had made me speechless. I had will enough remaining to resent his cocksure impudence, but not even the desire to speak.
“Now take this into your mind,” he went on. “You are going to be hurt, tired until the senses lose control of you and what you have always believed is your own will dies forever. When all that nonsense about virtue has been dredged out — you are going to be taught as much as you are capable of learning. You are to be a foil for Rait and that shall be the goal of your ambition. So until you yearn with all your faculties to be obedient to Rait there is going to be only enough peace and relaxation to make agony more keen by contrast.
“Mercy is stupidity, and there will be none. I will give you one hint how to ease the strain, because you may break under it otherwise and that fat Bengali you have brought with you would make a poor substitute. So remember: “The agony won’t last so long if you make up your mind to accept w
hat is being done to you. Resign yourself to the inevitable, and begin to try to see the possibilities.”
He strode away. I saw him talking to Chullunder Ghose. Gradually, minute after minute, pain returned and presently there came the monk whose ribs I broke, to prop himself against the cave wall and instruct three others how to torture me by prodding at my stiffened muscles.
The monks gorged themselves in a group, devouring meat like wild beasts, but the man in Grim’s clothes stood alone with his back toward me, so that I could not see what he was eating. I began shivering with cold and every movement was like a knife stab because of the pain in my muscles, but a monk came and pulled off my overcoat, using a dagger to slit up the sleeves and save trouble.
After that the man in Grim’s clothes fed Chullunder Ghose, and then me, telling half a dozen monks to hold me while he forced a measured quantity of filthy cheese into my mouth; it tasted as if mixed with axle-grease. When I spat the stuff out he scraped it from the floor and then got hold of my tongue, the way a horse is dosed, forcing the mess down my throat with his fingers while one monk held my head between his knees and another kept a rock jammed tight between my teeth.
My overcoat was then slit up with daggers and they gave me part of it to wear around my stomach, tying it in place with strips cut from the coat itself.
“That will keep you alive without making you comfortable,” said the man in Grim’s clothes.
At a sign from him they gloved my hands before they tied my wrists again. Then I was dragged on my back to where Chullunder Ghose lay and made fast to him by the knee and ankle, after which they kicked us to our feet and made us walk like men in a three-legged race.
They had given the babu something to restore vitality and he did not lean his weight on me so much as he had done during the night, but we were fagged out and so nearly hopeless that the thought of suicide again occurred to both of us at once.
“Rammy sahib, let’s jump!” he whispered. “There’s a good place.”
There was ice on the edge of a shelf beside the track, that sloped toward a sheer drop of a hundred feet, with staked rock below. It looked actually friendly and inviting. The suggestion we should make the jump together gave the touch of sympathy that makes men kin.
But we were too dog-weary to jump suddenly, and as we turned toward the edge the monks behind us saw what we intended. We were knocked down and belabored pitilessly with blows ingeniously gauged to cause extreme pain without inflicting too much injury. The man in Grim’s clothes retraced his steps along the track to stand and laugh at us.
“Wait until you begin to want sleep!” he remarked as we were dragged to our feet. “Then you will know what misery is.”
He turned his back and led on, while the monk with broken ribs resumed his prodding with the staff. It was as if his words were a magic spell that opened a new door of torture. The desire to sleep stole over both of us at once, and the incessant pain shot through the stupor like electric stabs, compelling wakefulness.
At times we almost fell asleep and stumbled, but then blows were rained on us and we were brought back to our senses by the pain and the concussion. The worst of it was that our legs were tied together; we trod on the other’s foot unless we kept up a torturing effort to keep time and swing together, and each felt so sorry for the other that it was heartbreaking to inflict an added injury.
The monks who followed close behind us noticed the care we took not to hurt each other and one of them, shoving us out of his way, ran to overtake their leader, obviously telling him about it, showing him in pantomime how each was trying to avoid giving the other pain. He merely nodded.
Later, when they let us rest under the shelter of a rock and we both fell asleep almost instantly, he had me awakened by rubbing snow over my face. He let Chullunder Ghose sleep, but he sat down on a sheepskin with his face thrust close to mine and, leering at me, sneered:
“You will learn that pain and pleasure are two opposites of one emotion. Therefore, you will inflict whichever you choose with equal carelessness. Friendship and enmity being also opposites of one emotion, you will hurt your friends and soothe your enemies. You will do anything except make a fool of yourself by being sentimental.”
Chullunder Ghose’s strength was so much less than mine that we had to rest repeatedly on his account; but that never happened until he actually dropped beside me and, his leg being fast to mine, I was unable to go forward. I have no idea what speed we made, or what distance we covered. It was a waking nightmare, in which I trudged over endless miles of mountain track, supporting Chullunder Ghose by a rope passed around him and over my shoulder.
I can shut my eyes now and see visions of the precipices that we skirted and of the slippery, ice-encrusted rocks up which we climbed, some of the monks tugging at me from above and others prodding from beneath. Chullunder Ghose has no memory of that march; he can hardly recall to mind the cave in which we spent the next night and where I was not allowed to sleep.
It was a cave where boiling hot and icy cold springs flowed out of the rock some fifty feet apart and blended into one stream near a ledge, over which they plunged into a gorge and froze among the rocks. They let Chullunder Ghose lie, but they stripped me naked and dragged me back and forward through the current, so that I was alternately chilled and scalded.
The effect was to rid me of pain for a while and to increase the craving for sleep. But they prevented sleep by tying me, stark naked, to a steam-wet rock above the hot spring; when I yielded to the sleep I slid feet-first toward the boiling water and was brought up with a jerk, just clear of it, by the rope under my arms. In that predicament I stayed until the dawn loomed in the cave-mouth through a veil of falling snow.
By that time I was sullenly obedient, aware that I would lose my reason if I wasted will on anything but clinging to the little reason that I felt I had left. Dumbly, in a sort of mental haze, I watched them beat Chullunder Ghose awake and feed him by forcing uncooked meat into his mouth, twisting his fingers until they nearly broke to make him swallow it. Then they made him drink hot water from the spring.
When my turn came I ate without resisting and the man in Grim’s clothes seemed to misinterpret my obedience into a willingness to yield to him; or possibly he thought that I had no will left. I had not the ability to formulate a plan. I knew that if I should escape, it would mean certain death on a blind trail; cold, starvation or a false step would swiftly make an end of me. But by a sort of half-slumbering instinct, that felt like a maniac’s cunning and frightened me, I discerned his weak point; he believed he had me conquered. Then I knew — or think I knew — how madmen feel who watch for opportunity to play tricks on their guards.
Dissimulation was the keynote of it. I obeyed him when he ordered me to put my clothes on. With the thought, I suppose of testing me he came so close that it seemed a simple thing to kill him; but I knew he would never have done that if he had not felt perfectly sure of himself. I did not let even a glimmer of the hate I felt for him escape me. When he turned I saw a weapon like a black-jack in his right hand.
I pretended to be perfectly indifferent about Chullunder Ghose, standing silently beside him while they tied his leg to mine and seeming not to notice when they beat him until he yelled because he pulled his leg away when the rope touched the skin it had chafed the day before. When the babu spoke to me I did not answer. When the man in Grim’s clothes kicked me as a signal to begin the day’s march, I obeyed the signal without showing the least symptom of the rage I felt.
It was the babu’s turn to bear the brunt of the exertion. He had had a night’s sleep. Though his bruises tortured him and the cold wind stung his broken lips he had recovered something of his strength. He labored manfully to make my share of the exertion less, supporting me where I had previously had to bear the double weight and whispering, as often as he dared, such brief words of encouragement as he could summon from the depths of his own misery.
“This babu loves you, Rammy sahib — Be the
sahib — All’s well that ends well — Devil take hinder-most — There is a gray cloud to every silver lining, so let us be brave — Am personally feeling better — oh, yes, much.”
The thought that he was now the stronger brought out all the man in him and even helped his body to recover from exhaustion. Possibly they had given him something in his food to restore vitality, but it was manhood — the good stout stuff we white men like to think is our monopoly — that made him do his utmost to encourage me, by whispering at the risk of being beaten for it and by kicking my ankle to keep me awake, to save me from being beaten when I fell asleep. And when I did fall asleep on the march he supported me, not letting them discover it — until I stumbled and woke up again.
I never moved my lips to answer him. I was afraid that man in Grim’s clothes might detect the slightest sign of sympathy between us and redouble his attempts to beat the spirit out of me. I merely walked ahead and took advantage of the babu’s efforts, conscious, somewhere underneath the surface of my mind, of cunning in reserve and of a spark of hope that neither would explain itself nor die. Chullunder Ghose weakened again before we finished that day’s march. We climbed over the shoulder of a mountain where the wind blew so that we could hardly force ourselves against it. On the far side there was soft snow into which we sank to the knees, and that finished both of us as far as any further possibility of effort was concerned. We fell and lay still, though they beat us and at last, when the man in Grim’s clothes ordered it, they tied a rope around the two of us and dragged us down the far slope, with another line tied to our feet to steer us by and hold us back. Our hands were tied, so we could not fend ourselves away from lumps of ice that lay across the path. Long before we reached the bottom I was stunned; but I remember, very vaguely, being lowered down a precipice head-first and swinging over chaos gray with whirling snow. I think I was still leg-to-leg with the babu, but neither he nor I are certain about that; we were both so near unconsciousness that our brains received no definite impression.
