by Talbot Mundy
A handkerchief was too small, so we fastened a shirt to a stick and took two flashlights to illuminate it. Grim took the flag. He divided us:
“No use all getting shot.”
Twenty paces to his right went Allison — Jeff twenty paces to his left. I followed, twenty paces to the rear. And the Cockney led, like the fellow who carries the drag for a crack pack, that is to say not thoughtful for our comfort. He took an almost straight line, and the going was so evil that we took a full eleven minutes to negotiate that scant half-mile.
We arrived breathless in the bottom of a hollow like the trough of a wave, caused by wind having whipped out the sand; and for a minute we all lay there, breathing deep. Then Grim moved, and the Cockney said:
“Straight up ahead of you, sir. Not an ‘undred yards now.”
So we climbed to the top of the sand-wave, where Allison and Jeff switched on the flashlights and Grim stood bathed in light with the white flag waving slowly as high over his head as he could hold it. I counted ninety seconds before at least a dozen heads showed fifty yards away and a harsh voice shouted:
“Di e di?” (“What is that?”)
“Arba’in Khamseh!” (“Forty-five”) Grim answered.
The entire conversation took place in Egyptian Arabic, and there was not a great deal of it.
“Sixty thousand dogs!” came back the answer.
“That is the true word, but who told it to you? — and who are you?”
“Have you heard of Jimgrim?”
It was a reasonable question. He is so well known by that name from end to end of the Near East that it was hardly likely that at least one of them would not know him by reputation.
“Curses on his religion! What does he want?”
“I am Jimgrim. I have come to advise you to surrender.”
“What is offered?”
“Nothing. Dorje’s cause is lost. Unless you surrender unconditionally — and at once — you will be wiped out.”
There was a long pause, probably for consultation, but we could not hear voices. Grim’s voice broke the silence:
“I make no promise except that — if you surrender — I will do what I can for you. Probably only those who have committed murder will be hanged. I advise those of you who have killed no one to compel the others. I will count one hundred, slowly. Wahid — itnein — talateh—”
The answer was a savage howl of laughter and three rifle-shots. Out went the flashlights and we all ducked below the sand-hill, except young Allison, who rolled over and over. I had to grope for him in total darkness. A hail of bullets swept over our heads and I estimated more like a hundred than fifty rifles. Then there was sudden silence and a voice yelled:
“Curses on your religion, Jimgrim! If you are afraid to see ten thousand dead men, take away your army!”
Then another storm of bullets swept above us. Allison was hard hit. Jeff carried him, and as we crawled away over the rim of the hollow. I saw the army’s searchlights all come blazing into action. There was a roar from the distant motors as the cordon closed in on the cache, at high speed, flooding the sand in front of them with flowing light. Ahead of us we could see McGowan’s searchlight racing forward, tossing its rays as the truck wheels bucked over ridges of sand. We hurried. There was no guessing what would happen, or what surprise those fanatics had in store; our cue was to beat it as fast as we could. Something not remotely unlike panic lent us wings, and if Jeff had not had to carry Allison and we had not waited for Jeff, we would probably have lowered the world’s sand-track record for a quarter of a mile.
Finally Jeff’s wind gave out. We lay down and I tried in the dark to feel where Allison was hit. He died as I laid my hands on him — as decent a young officer as ever stopped a blackguard’s bullet. Then the thing happened that has been so variously described, since it was seen by many thousand men and no two witnesses ever see or remember anything exactly as it happened. My account is very likely no more accurate than scores of others. I can say what I remember, that is all.
The cordon of searchlights closed in, in an almost perfect segment of an arc. McGowan’s truck bumped and thundered past us. And then suddenly I felt something that I can’t describe. It suggested static, although I don’t know how or why it did, and it made one’s skin tingle and one’s teeth and ears ache. All sound ceased instantly — or seemed to — as every searchlight went out at the same moment and every truck came to a standstill. It was almost as if the universe had gone dead. A plane, that I had not even noticed circling in the night, crashed within three hundred feet of where I lay. As nearly as I remember, at about the instant when that happened and when six or seven other planes were falling in all directions, there began a white-hot glow at the place where the cache was supposed to be hidden.
It was next thing to impossible to watch it, it increased so rapidly and its glare grew so prodigious. For a moment, but only a moment, it showed the hues of decomposing metals. And it only lasted about a minute — perhaps less. I believe I saw human figures fleeing from it, caught in its heat and instantly cremated; but they were gone like swift shadows, and that may have been imagination. I can only say that when I think of it, and close my eyes, there is a very vivid mental picture of human figures leaping in the white-hot glare of the hell of the Fundamentalists.
For a minute or two, when the glare died, we were all blind. It was as if we had stared too long at lightning. I was almost deaf, too; I could not make sense of Grim’s remarks to Jeff, although he was close beside me. Jeff picked up Allison, not knowing he was dead, and carried him toward McGowan’s truck. Our flashlight was out of action; Allison, of course, had dropped his, and the one Grim took from Jeff was so hot that it burned him and he had to throw it away. Dorje’s infernal machines had absorbed every atom of electricity anywhere near them in the act of destroying themselves and Dorje’s men.
Dazed, I followed Jeff, who groped his way toward McGowan. Grim was on ahead of us. The first words I distinguished clearly as the vague paralysis left the region of my ear-drums, were McGowan’s:
“Maybe he’ll believe us next time!”
“No,” said Grim, “he’ll say it was a meteor or an earthquake.”
McGowan laughed. “Perhaps he’ll say we planted it to make ourselves a reputation! Anyhow, the old boy broke a record as well as his planes and dynamos. I’ll bet you that’s the first time an army left its ammunition on the desert and advanced behind a screen of unprotected trucks. Say that for him! Who’s that? Who’s gone west? Allison? Oh, damn! I’d rather have lost—”
He did not say whom he would rather have lost, but his next phrase was a bit suggestive:
“Grim, I’d trade you any six brass hats on earth for Allison. That boy had brains and guts too.”
“Allison won’t kick. He died up front,” Grim answered. “It’s only being caught off-stage that actually hurts.”
CHAPTER 21. “What has our babu done to them, I wonder?”
Once, when I was younger, I used to believe the official reports of events. Medical training, of course, taught me that almost no one ever knows the real reasons why people do things or refrain from doing them; but I did believe official blue books, and it always seemed to me that Lincoln’s theory, that you can fool all of the people some of the time, conceded too much. But I think now that people prefer to be fooled until so long after the event that the actual truth takes on the hue of fiction. And I know that numbers of extremely competent men are so peculiarly credulous that in the face of facts they will believe anything whatever except the true explanation.
That general was a case in point. I never met him, never even saw him. Grim did, and privately, afterwards, he and McGowan laughed with Jeff, Chullunder Ghose and me about the conversation they had with him under the stars while the army engineers waited for a destroyed tomb to grow cool enough to be examined.
But it would be very unfair to give the general’s name. He failed in nothing except imagination, and his handling of the troops t
hat night was patient, resolute and ingenious. He did not believe in the existence of Dorje, or his “thunderbolts”; but he played fair and gave us every opportunity, his only mistake having been that he risked quite a number of airplanes and lost them along with their crews. Not one member of the air force employed that night survived to talk about it. Every electric device within a mile and a half of Dorje’s cache not only fused but was made irreparably useless. Even motor vehicles whose engines were not running at the moment were put out of action by the exhaustion of their batteries, which occurred with such sudden violence that the batteries were wrecked. The only reason why the army was not wiped out was that every round of ammunition had been left under guard on the desert five miles away.
But the general maintained his disbelief in Dorje’s thunderbolts, and in Dorje also. There was not a trace of them after custodians had in all probability turned the plugs on dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, in the hope of escaping just before the critical moment and then watching the army blown to smithereens by the explosion of the ammunition in the men’s belts. But they were probably ignorant men incapable of estimating how much electricity so many searchlights would develop or at what range it would become effective. Anyhow, they were caught; and the immeasurable heat — as intense, perhaps, as that developed by a meteor in contact with the atmosphere — that entirely consumed the brass tubes, did more than incinerate those men within its radius. It dissolved them into gas, bones and all. There was not a trace of them discovered.
So there was no one to be questioned after the event, and there was no tell-tale evidence except a hot hole in the ground that looked volcanic and that might have been caused by a meteor or by a terrific bolt of lightning. There had been a tomb there, but now there was none. Stone weighing tons had vanished. Something new in thermo-dynamics had been invented. Someone had discovered how nature converts vibration into heat and dissipates the concentrated heat into another vibration that has other characteristics and effects.
But the general declared it was the Communists and that a cache of some kind of explosive smuggled in by agents of Moscow for the use of Egyptian malcontents had gone off. He accounted for the absence of noise by suggesting that the shape of the tomb might have had the effect of a silencer. The effect on batteries and magnetos he ascribed to shock. And you know what the newspapers said. They had their information from official sources.
“It’s probably some new sort of explosive,” the general admitted. “Or they may have rediscovered Greek fire. No one knows what that was; no one knows what its explosion would have done to electrical instruments because there was no electricity in those days.”
And because no traces of them could be found he denied that all the guardians of the cache could have been killed. He was sure that most of them escaped, so all the troops were promptly put to work to find them, with the result that scores and scores of said-to-be suspicious characters were rounded up and thrown in prison, where, being wholly innocent, they accused one another and gave birth to fabulous stories about Communist activities. Some of those tales are still going the rounds.
But he was a courteous general, and though he considered Grim a visionary and Dorje a mare’s nest, he thanked Grim for his “opportune assistance” and provided us with camels, since there was not a car or even a motorcycle whose ignition was not completely ruined. He sent an Egyptian orderly along with us, too, to take charge of the camels and return them.
It was almost daybreak when we entered the city and were challenged by a sergeant in charge of a guard at a street corner. We had been given no password, and McGowan had stayed with the general; moreover, the sergeant was bored and wanted news, so he accused us of stealing army camels, which our orderly thought was a fine joke, so the orderly said nothing. Bruised, tired, sleepy and craving a bath before anything else, we were not in a mood to solve problems by the exercise of humor, or even to realize that this wasn’t a problem and that the sergeant was only joking with us. However, Grim amused him with a yarn about the searchlights having quit because the army swore too badly about working overtime; and Jeff borrowed a cigarette from him, which is always an excellent way to open negotiations.
“Our Indian friend has mine,” said Jeff, and the sergeant stared at us again by the light of a kerosene lantern.
“Were you gentlemen the friends of Maharajah Gautama Sri Krishna Hanuman Asoka Sahib of Bengal? I think that was the name.”
“We are his worshipful admirers,” Grim answered. “What has happened to him?”
“Sir, he has the Maharani with him, and they’d blind Bertolini the archaeologist in the car. Is one of you gentlemen Major Grim by any chance? Well — he left word that his chauffeur would pick you up at Brown’s Hotel; and he said it would be all right for you all to come to breakfast without shaving.”
“Had he the password?”
“No, sir. But he was riding in a service car and it was Colonel McGowan’s chauffeur, so I let him pass without argument. My orders are not to interfere with anyone who can give a decent account of himself. That one was a prince all right. I wish there were a few more like him. Affable? He told me, any time I go to India he’ll get me transferred to his own corps of lancers — says the pay’s about double what we get and the chances of promotion A1. Took my name, too — had the Maharani write it for him on an envelope.”
We rode on, bidding baths good-bye. The only conceivable meaning of “breakfast without shaving,” was that Chullunder Ghose needed us in a hurry. McGowan’s car was waiting near the hotel; as soon as the camels were out of sight we piled in; and before we had slammed the car door we were off, the chauffeur treating us to an exhibition of fancy driving that was too impetuous to be based on mere desire to get his night’s work done and go to breakfast. We fairly flew toward the region of Nile-bank villas where the better class of houses stand in walled gardens.
There was no name on the gate of the house where we drew up — nothing to distinguish it from a score of others that had gardens sloping to the Nile, except that the shrubbery topping the wall was a bit more dense and the house was invisible through the bars of the iron gate because of a turn in the drive which curved around some sort of outhouse screened by a clump of bamboo. For a blind man’s house the grounds looked too well kept. There was an atmosphere of wealth and good taste. Yet we knew it was Bertolini’s house because his donkey’s hoof-prints were deep in the dust outside the gate, and there are not many people living in that kind of house, even in Egypt, whose donkeys use the front entrance.
The gate opened mysteriously, pulled by someone unseen, and the chauffeur drove in without ceremony, down a drive along which, on either hand, Egyptian statuary alternated with well-kept palms. Dawn was breaking; the place looked clean and peaceful in the early light, and there was a pond in which a group of flamingos preened themselves with an air of never having been neglected or disturbed since Noah left the Ark.
It was a big white stucco house. All the blinds were drawn, and behind two of them, on the ground floor, there was candlelight. The front door opened as we drew up under the portico, and a Chinaman dressed in good black silk stood bowing to us, shaking himself by the hand.
Grim spoke low, hardly moving his lips, so that the chauffeur should not hear him. “Remember now, no shooting! We’re ditched if we do. Bertolini knows there’s something wrong; and he’s crafty, or he wouldn’t be Dorje’s agent. He’ll argue that if we’re enemies we’ll shoot on provocation. Then we can be charged with murder or attempted murder — no bail — and he’ll have time to cover up before we can prove anything. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover he’s been warned by some Egyptian official that we’re on Dorje’s trail; if so, he’ll know we have no warrants — no authority. If he thinks there’s half a chance we’re ‘us’ he’ll play the old game — get us foul of our own net.”
The Chinaman in the doorway seemed a bit disturbed about our lack of haste. He came forward and opened the car door, smiling blandly but looking displeas
ed when Grim ordered the chauffeur back to the hotel to wait for McGowan. However, the chauffeur was gone before the Chinaman could protest.
“We’re filthy,” said Grim. “Can we clean up?” Instead of hurrying, he grew deliberate. He paused in the hall to admire Egyptian antiquities, with which the house was as full as a museum; he lingered to examine scarabs in a glass case: “May I have a candle? Light’s too dim. I can’t see.”
“No, no, not now,” said the Chinaman.
“Why not?”
“Lavatoly this way.”
He led and we followed, but we took a long time in there, washing blood off our faces and tidying up. The Chinaman stood watching us, as obviously irritated as a disturbed owl, and as silent and outwardly still. We had to ask him for towels. Grim took off his turban, examined it and decided to re-bind it with the outside in. He asked the Chinaman to help him.
“That take too much time. You use hair-blush.”
But apparently Grim had no sense of time. He bound the turban on as carefully as a woman getting ready for a fancy dress ball.
“Baltis here?” he asked.
No answer. Grim repeated the question.
“You come soon. You see.”
“You’re garrulous!” said Grim. “If you want me to hurry, come and help me with this.”
So the Chinaman stood behind him to put a hand on the folds at the back and to guide the silk as layer carefully was added above layer. Jeff, done spluttering in the basin, rubbing his stubble-black face with a towel, watched the mirror — noticed Grim’s expression — saw the movement of his eyelids. So did I, but I did not know just what it meant. Jeff, on the way to his jacket that hung on a hook on the door, had to pass behind the Chinaman. He turned suddenly. His left hand clapped the towel over the Chinaman’s mouth; his right arm, descending, crushed the Chinaman’s to his sides and pinned him helpless.
“I’d a hunch to wear this thing,” said Jimgrim, and removing the turban he used it. It was vastly better than a rope. I helped him, and between us we bandaged the towel in place besides trussing the Chinaman’s arms and legs until he was as immobilized as a mummy — almost. He could still breathe. We could still investigate his pockets, of which he had several in the lining of his loose black jacket. Jeff pulled out a pad made of medical cotton and gauze, well folded in a linen handkerchief. I found a sealed glass flask containing about a pint of some colorless liquid. It might be chloroform. There was no cork; it had been sealed by melting the neck of the flask in a Bunsen-burner, and the only way to get the stuff out was to break the bottleneck.
