by Talbot Mundy
It is mystery, of course, that wrecks conspiracies. Successful ones are those whose leaders avoid the mystery that calls attention to them too soon. Nevertheless, they must have mystery, since without its dramatic cloak their followers would soon lose faith and interest. So each initiate of the inner circle, elected from below, was sworn to secrecy in the presence of his own subordinates, who were required at the same time to take oath not to question him or to discuss his secret comings and goings. From this inner circle selection was made from above with vows of secrecy again renewed, until there were actually only ten men justified in believing themselves in the Ranee’s confidence; of the ten, one was a Russian, one was Jonesey and another was Rahman.
Rahman and Jonesey showed Gup through the caverns, introducing to him the individuals who had charge of the various stores. Rahman had been captain of the smuggling of supplies across the border; his horse business was the excuse for passing to and fro. And his pride as he viewed the stuff in store was something that he had to let escape in words, lest it choke him.
“By Allah, we used our wits! It was a simple matter for her agents to buy guns and ammunition, hospital supplies and all sorts of engines for making things. By my beard the money-hunger and the craving for meat and women are one; they cause men to sell what they have, for what they have not; they will sell in the face of the Prophet and in spite of all the laws that were ever made by governments. It was easy to buy. It was easy to bring the stuff to India. But how do you suppose we got delivery?”
Gup betrayed suitable wonder.
“Well — and this, by God, was my thought — we ordered the greater part of it consigned to the Amir of Afghanistan, in Kabul, to be routed by way of the Khyber Pass. And by God, on its way up the Khyber we stole it! He knew nothing. He knew less than nothing. I have a friend in Kabul who is in the Amir’s ministry, so when the Indian Government sent telegrams and documents the answer came swiftly; the goods were ordered cleared and sent on up the Khyber. They were supposed to be the Amir’s troops that came to act as escort to the camel trains. Wallah! It was I who led them, and I led them hither! There was not a man in the escort who had ever seen Kabul, and by my beard, nine-tenths of them are in these caverns now.”
“What has become of the other tenth?” Gup asked.
“Mashallah! It is marvelous how easily a talkative man dies,” he answered. “And that is an important matter, concerning which it is well that we should speak now.”
They were standing in the jagged mouth of a tunnel, with the huge grim gorge below them and behind, in a cavern at the tunnel’s end, millions of rounds of British army ammunition in the original boxes. Rahman stroked his beard and drew attention to the fact that he intended to speak with great discretion and in confidence. He laid a finger on his nose and rubbed it for a moment. He touched his dagger-hilt and glanced at Jonesey. He stared down into the gorge, then up again and met Gup’s eyes.
“When a man falls from the summit yonder — to the bottom of this place — he is dead, by God.”
Gup nodded.
“We have had such accidents.”
Gup tried to measure with his eye the sheer face of the cliff that Rahman indicated with a gesture. He guessed it at several thousand feet without a visible foothold.
“Hitherto,” said Rahman, “since we lacked a man with enough spirit and force of character to rule our Ranee, she has ruled us. And by the beard of him whom Allah loves, we have had to rule ourselves in spite of her, much of the time! For she has issued strange orders, such as no man in these mountains ever heard of. She, who expects to send her lashkars screaming into battle, commanded that none shall be slain for disobedience!”
Jonesey, leaning on his staff and framed in the opening against a blue sky, so that he looked like a saint in a stained-glass window, spoke, with raised eyebrows and scandalized lips:
“Do you realize the full significance of that? The full enormity? The only really popular sport in these mountains is murder. True, there is a secondary sport — that of cutting off the nose of one’s rival in love; but that is on the whole more dangerous and is a game that is only played by the strictly Corinthian set. The universal outdoor sport during nine months of every year is murder, without any rules, and no quarter asked or given. It is such sportsmen as those who are to be chidden, not slain for disobedience! And by the Prophet’s beard, the strange thing is that we don’t dare to disobey her!”
“No,” said Rahman, “since to disobey her would end in no man’s obeying any one. And after all, it is she who holds the purse-strings. And it was she who thought of all this, and who had the courage to seduce us into it.”
“We Moslems,” Jonesey remarked, “also believe that Eve persuaded Adam.”
“Therefore,” said Rahman, “seeing that her law was inconvenient, we appealed to the law of Allah, who made universes and decreed that such as have no wings shall not fly. Who is she, and who are we that we should change the law of Allah?”
“Unthinkable!” said Jonesey.
“And so,” said Rahman, “they who disobey in little matters, such as killing one another in anger or stealing one another’s goods, are chidden, but they who talk are blindfolded, lest they should behold the fruits of sin and repent too swiftly. It is not good for a bad man’s soul to repent in too much haste. And their hands are tied, lest they should do themselves an injury, owing to great grief caused by naughtiness. But since Allah decreed that men shall walk, not fly, their legs are left free. And they are led to that summit yonder, where they are turned around several times and then allowed to walk in whichever direction Allah chooses.”
“What if they walk the wrong way?” Gup suggested.
“Bahadur,” said Rahman, “there is nothing wrong and no wrong way in all God’s universe. There is a precipice on both sides. Ten steps, one way or another, and they test the law of Allah which says weights fall downward. And at the bottom they are dead.”
“Well?” said Gup. “What is your point?”
“It pleases us that a man has been found who shall command this army. Let there be no more nonsense about not killing. An army is not the blossom in a cherry orchard breathing perfume for birds to sing about. An army stinks! An army marches! An army fights! And by my beard, and by my father’s beard, an army slays or it is slain! It is neither wise nor merciful to wean on pap such children as must fatten on the raw wind! Neither is it wise or merciful to wean young fighting men on punishments that would make an Afghan woman smile!”
Gup avoided argument. “What they probably need,” he said, “is to have their noses rubbed into a fight.” Fighting was probably unavoidable, there had been so much preparation for it. He could certainly not prevent it by preaching peace to people who think peace is merely a time of making ready for the next invasion of some one else’s country. The tide was rising; at the best he could only guide it, narrow its course and make it expend its violence in the direction where it could do least harm. He began to feel sorry for statesmen, instead of rather despising them.
“And the news from Kabul?” he asked. “When will the Amir move?” He was wondering why Rahman, an Afghan who owned property in Kabul, should be at such small pains to disguise contempt for his own Amir. No law can make a man admire his king, but kings who hear rumors of disloyal speech can confiscate, and rumors fly like birds where there is neither road nor telegraph.
“God knows,” said Rahman. “He is only an echo in the skin of Abdurrahman, who was a ruler whom Allah loved. It was Allah’s will that the great Abdurrahman should eat what he could earn in poverty and exile until the time came when he had learned how to rule. And by my beard, when that time came he did rule. Neither did he poison any one, to reach the throne. But when he died, came Habibullah Khan, who was a weakling. He died by poison. And then this man, who is like a valley-bred stallion fed on poor hay, full of big notions but without stamina and swiftly wearying of hardship. He will snort at a challenge afar off and ignore the danger close at hand. When
he does move he will be swift, but he will spend his effort swiftly. He will burst into India and win a victory or two perhaps, and then, because none has faith in him, his generals will get out of hand. From informing him they will turn to advising him, and from advising him to letting him consult with them. And from that it is one short step to ruin — and our opportunity! For I tell you, Gup Bahadur, as Allah is my witness, men whose leader has failed them by being as feeble as themselves desire another leader as dry men thirst for drink!”
“True,” said Jonesey. “And a leader must conquer his friends before he may safely tackle enemies.”
Gup was thinking furiously, as both men knew; they were watching his every gesture. He was beginning to feel now the reins of this team he must drive. He suspected Jonesey of being the originator of the whole plan, but no matter; Jonesey and Harriet Dover possibly concocted it between them. Rahman was an incident, like himself. They had chosen the ex-Ranee of Jullunder for their purpose because she had youth, charm, wealth and the necessary resentment against the Indian Government to make her welcome the suggestion and accept it as her own idea. Perhaps they had never even thought of it themselves until they saw her. And she had run away with them; she had had too much character and independence to suit Harriet Dover, not enough cynicism to suit Jonesey, and she was of the wrong sex to suit Rahman’s notions of what might be accomplished with an army in the field. They had chosen himself to provide the missing element. Well and good; he, too, would run away with them! Rahman and Jonesey exchanged glances, noticing the new expression on his face. They lingered, expecting him to explain himself, but all he said was: “What are we waiting for?”
Presently they introduced to him a Russian — a dun-whiskered man in smoked glasses, whose finger-nails were nearly destroyed by chemicals and whose whole body had been twisted by privation. He spoke very little English but was anxious to talk in fluent German about his soul and about psychic forces that, he said, were changing human beings into something else. He was not mad, but he had run from Czarist and succeeding reigns of terror, southward through Siberia and into Tibet, where they had flogged him and then shown him mysteries that stirred imagination. Enormous altitude and bad food had contributed. Escape from Tibet had been an ordeal that destroyed all interest in anything but psychic life, and he saw that in terms of chemistry, because chemistry had been his first love. Gup was a chemical compound. So was he — and the hills — and men’s souls. Everything was chemical. But Gup, who had been paid sixpence a day extra in the army for knowing German, wanted to know what the product of all that theorizing was.
“How much gas have you made?”
“Come and see.”
He led through tunnels that made Rahman shudder and howl whole verses from the Koran, so that the tunnels boomed and reechoed with Arabic, and voices seemed to come forth suddenly from caverns that they had gone exploring, driving in front of them gibbering djinns. The Russian’s electric torch showed hideous, fantastic crag and somber shadow. There was a warm wind that felt like the breath of some stabled monster; it was sour with the same faint venom that Gup had noticed on the Russian’s clothing — a suggestion of bitter almonds. At the mouth of one cavern he paused and sent the torchlight streaming in, not offering to enter but motioning to Gup to step forward and look.
There lay eleven human corpses in a row, but they hardly looked human. They were naked and resembled mummies, only that they were yellow and most of the skin, parts of the dried flesh and even some bone had been eaten away.
“Who are they?” Gup demanded.
“Some of my men. Nichevo,” said the Russian. “They were disobedient, but it doesn’t matter. They touched what was forbidden, and now what are they? The same, doubtless, only chemically changed. And where are their souls? Nichevo. They are somewhere. Possibly they have gone into the cyanide. But I will show you others — older ones.”
He led along a wider tunnel, downward now by steep hewn steps that had been worn by the tread of human feet. They reached a shaft and descended it by a wooden ladder into a cavern that had no other entrance than a hole in the roof. It was a huge place, its floor covered with sand that bore no close resemblance to the rock which formed the roof and walls. There were the rusted remains of what appeared to be a very ancient iron ladder. And around the cavern, their backs to the wall, like ghosts in conference, sat more than a hundred dead men. They were all naked. Some of their heads had fallen to the floor, but some were grinning, their dry drawn lips exposing yellow teeth in shrunken gums.
“Some more of your men? Why are they all naked?” Gup demanded.
“Look,” said the Russian. “Some of their hair, their nails and their skin has also vanished. No, these were never my men. I am not so ancient. They have jewelry. Some of them have weapons. Go closer and look, but don’t touch! That short man in the center, whose head has fallen into his lap, appears to be the chief.”
What with the sand underfoot and the cavernous silence, the weird attitudes of the dead and the light-pools formed by the electric torch, there was a sensation of being under water. Footsteps made no sound. The echo of the Russian’s voice and of Rahman’s endlessly repeated verses from the Koran suggested the sound of water flopping into far-off crevices. But in sharp contrast to that the dry air made the lips crack and the eyes feel prickly. Gup strode nearer and knelt on one knee on the sand to examine the man who, the Russian had said, was the chief.
He appeared to be holding his head in his hands. It had fallen and lay looking upward at the place where it had been, suggesting an unseen phantom head still in position and gazing down at it. The features were not recognizable, but there were Persian rings on the fingers of both hands, a Persian bracelet on the right wrist, and there was an ivory-hilted double-bladed Persian dagger on the sand near the withered feet. Wherever metal touched, the flesh was eaten to the bone, and the bone seemed rotten with a greenish-yellow fungus.
“Come away,” said the Russian. “And don’t stir the sand as you walk.”
Gup returned to the foot of the ladder. “Who are they? How did they die?”
“Who knows? Nichevo. They are dead,” said the Russian. “They are possibly some of Iskander of Macedon’s men, and I think they committed suicide. There was an earthquake. You know, this is a great neighborhood for earthquakes; there have been dozens in this place in two thousand years. There is one cave where I have found the feet and hands of men who were crushed under a wall that simply folded down on them. But as I say, I think these committed suicide.”
“Why?”
“Who knows, and what does it matter? The hole overhead was open when I found it but the iron ladder had been unhooked and laid on the sand. It may be they were starving, or surrounded by enemies. They were here for the gold, I suppose, but there is no sign of their having found any; most of the gold had been dug out long before their time.”
“But what do you think killed them?”
“This sand underfoot. Don’t disturb it. There is an inch or two on the surface that is more or less harmless, nowadays. In their day, even the surface was probably poisonous. I think they sat there, said their prayers to whatever gods were fashionable at the moment, kicked their heels into the sand — and died.”
“In Allah’s name, let us get out of here!” Rahman exploded. “Devils are in this place!”
He began to climb the ladder. Jonesey followed, protesting he was not afraid of devils but of foul air.
“Which is the same thing!” said the Russian. “Watch lest that fool drop his staff into the sand! He might stir something. Some of the ancients had more knowledge than our scientists credit them with. Long before these men’s day this cavern was a cyanide tank, although I haven’t had time to examine it and study out the process that they used. This sand is a sediment left by evaporation; the lower layers are probably extremely rich in gold; I intend to find out when I have time, but one has to be careful with such stuff. Cyanide is deadly. Let us climb.”
Gup fo
llowed him up the ladder, demanding his torch for a last look at the hundred-and-one dead men seated where they had sat, perhaps two thousand years ago, for their last conference. The Russian had grown garrulous; he hung like an ape from the ladder and chattered his views in German:
“These are the most amusing caverns in the world. There was everything here formerly, even radium, but there is almost nothing left except death and deadly poison. It is the most incredible geological mixture; it is as if all the left-overs were thrown here when the world was finished and hell was not yet thought of — I mean, of course, before man came and made hell necessary chemically and in every other way. It may have been hell’s architect who did the original mining here! There were all the ingredients! Most of the cyanide comes from potassium ferrocyanide in contact with sulphur at high temperature caused by burning oil, but I can’t tell you how the distillation takes place; Satan himself could not enter those caverns! — Take a last look. Can’t you imagine those poor fools, more than a thousand miles away from home — they may have been deserters from Iskander’s army — heartbroken at finding no treasure in here — perhaps hungry and hunted by the sweet philosophers who-live in these mountains — sitting down perhaps to share their last crumbs — probably thinking that the fumes and burning oil and boiling water were the work of Pluto and his devils — perhaps ignorant that the sand was full of deadly poison, or possibly knowing that and — oh, what a pity we can’t look back and see! But they’ll invent a machine one day for doing that — and then we’ll know what idiots our ancestors really were, which will explain why we are idiots and it will all seem so hopeless that we will destroy ourselves and let the insects try to run things. Have you a cigarette?”
