Holmes seemed especially interested in his left eye, once coming up to within a few inches of it and staring at it. Von Bork became enraged at this close scrutiny.
‘Get away from me, British swine!’ he yelled. ‘Or I will ruin both of your eyes!’
‘Permit Dr. Watson to examine it,’ Holmes said. ‘He might be able to save it.’
‘I want no incompetent English physician poking around it,’ Von Bork said.
I became so indigant that I lectured him on the very high standards of British medicine, but he only turned his back on me. Holmes chuckled at this and winked at me.
At the end of the week, we were allowed to leave the hut during the day, unaccompanied by guards. Holmes and I were not restrained in any way, though the Germans were hobbled with shackles so that the could not walk very fast. Apparently, our captors decided that Holmes and I were too old to give them much of a run for their money.
We took advantage of our comparative freedom to stroll around the village, inspecting everything and also attempting to learn the language.
‘I don’t know what family it belongs to,’ Holmes said. ‘But it is related neither to Cornish nor Chaldean, of that I’m sure.’
Holmes was also interested in the white china of these people, which represented their highest art form. The black figures and designs they painted upon it reminded me somewhat of early Greek vase paintings. The vases and dishes were formed from kaolin deposits which existed to the north near the precipices. I mention this only because the white clay was to play an important part in our salvation in the near future.
At the end of the second week, Holmes, a superb linguist, had attained some fluency in the speech of our captors. ‘It belongs to a completely unknown language family,’ he said. ‘But there are certain words which, degenerated though they are, obviously come from ancient Persian. I would say at one time these people had contact with a wandering party of descendants of Darius. The party settled down here, and these people borrowed some words from their idiom.’
The village consisted of a hundred huts arranged in concentric circles. Each held a family ranging from two to eight members. Their fields lay north of the village on the slopes leading up to the precipices. The stock consisted of goats, pigs, and dwarf antelopes. Their alcoholic drink was a sort of mead made from the honey of wild bees. A few specimens of these ventured near the village, and Holmes secured some for study. They were about an inch long, striped black and white, and were armed with a long venom-ejecting barb. Holmes declared that they were of a new species, and he saw no reason not to classify them as Apis holmesi.
Once a week a party set out to the hills to collect honey. Its members were always clad in leather clothing and gloves and wore veils over their hats. Holmes asked permission to accompany them, explaining that he was wise in the ways of bees. To his disappointment, they refused him. A further inquiry by him resulted in the information that there was a negotiable, though difficult, pass through the precipices. It was used only for emergency purposes because of the vast number of bees that filled the narrow pass. Holmes obtained his data by questioning a child. Apparently, the adults had not thought to tell their young to keep silent about this means of exit.
‘The bee-warding equipment is kept locked up in their temple,’ Holmes said. ‘And that makes it impossible to obtain it for an escape attempt.’
The temple was the great hut in the village’s centre. We were not allowed to enter it or even to approach it within thirty feet. Through some discreet inquiries, and unashamed eavesdropping, Holmes discovered that the high priestess-and-queen lived within the temple. We had never seen her nor were we likely to do so. She had been born in the temple and was to reside there until she died. Just why she was so restricted Holmes could not determine. His theory was that she was a sort of hostage to the gods.
‘Perhaps, Watson, she is confined because of a superstition that arose after the catastrophe which their myths say deluged this land and the great civilisation it haboured. The fishermen tell me they often see on the bottom of this lake the sunken ruins of the stone houses in which their ancestors lived. A curse was laid upon the land, they say, and they hint that only by keeping the high priestess-cum-queen inviolate, unseen by profane eyes, untouched by anyone after pubescence, can the wrath of the gods be averted. They are cagey in what they say, so I have had to surmise certain aspects of their religion.’
‘That’s terrible!’ I said.
‘The deluge?’
‘No, that a woman should be denied freedom and love.’
‘She has a name, but I have never overheard it. They refer to her as The Beautiful One.’
‘Is there nothing we can do for her?’ I said.
‘I do not know that she wants to be helped. You must not allow your well-known gallantry to endanger us. But to satisfy a legitimate scientific interest, if anthropology is a science, we could perhaps attempt a look inside the temple. Its roof has a large circular hole in its centre. If we could get near the top of the high tree about twenty yards from it, we could look down into the building.’
‘With the whole village watching us?’ I said. ‘No, Holmes, it is impossible to get up the tree unobserved during the day. And if we did so during the night, we could see nothing because of the darkness. In any event, it would probably mean instantaneous death even to make the attempt.’
‘There are torches lit in the building at night,’ he said. ‘Come, Watson, if you have no taste for this arboreal adventure, I shall go it alone.’
And that was why, despite my deep misgivings, we climbed that towering tree on a cloudy night. After Von Bork and Reich had fallen asleep and our guards had dozed off and the village was silent except for a chanting in the temple, we crept out of our hut. Holmes had hidden a rope the day before, but even with this it was no easy task. We were not youths of twenty, agile as monkeys and as fearless aloft. Holmes threw the weighted end of the rope over the lowest branch, which was twenty feet up, and tied the two ends together. Then, grasping the rope with both hands, and bracing his feet against the trunk, he halfwalked almost perpendicular to the trunk, up the tree. On reaching the branch, he rested for a long time while he gasped for breath so loudly that I feared he would wake up the nearest villagers. When he was quite recovered, he called down to me to make the ascent. Since I was heavier and several years older, and lacked his feline muscles, having more the physique of a bear, I experienced great difficulty in getting up. I wrapped my legs around the rope—no walking at a ninety-degree angle for me—and painfully and gaspingly hauled myself up. But I persisted—after all, I am British—and Holmes pulled me up at the final stage of what I was beginning to fear was my final journey.
After resting, we made a somewhat easier ascent via the branches to a position about ten feet below the top of the tree. From there we could look almost directly down through the hole in the middle of the roof. The torches within enabled us to see its interior quite clearly.
Both of us gasped when we saw the woman standing in the centre of the building by a stone altar. She was a beautiful woman, surely one of the daintiest things that ever graced this planet. She had long golden hair and eyes that looked dark from where we sat but which, we later found out, were a deep grey. She was wearing nothing except a necklace of some stones that sparkled as she moved. Though I was fascinated, I also felt something of shame, as if I were a peeping tom. I had to remind myself that the women wore nothing above the waist in their everyday attire and that when they swam in the lake they wore nothing at all. So we were doing nothing immoral by this spying. Despite this reasoning, my face (and other things) felt inflamed.
She stood there, doing nothing for a long time, which I expected would make Holmes impatient. He did not stir or make any comment, so I suppose that this time he did not mind a lack of action. The priestesses chanted and the priests walked around in a circle making signs with their hands and their fingers. Then a bound he-goat was brought in and placed on the altar, and, a
fter some more mumbo-jumbo, the woman cut its throat. The blood was caught in a golden bowl and passed around in a sort of communion, the woman drinking first.
‘A most unsanitary arrangement,’ I murmured to Holmes.
‘These people are, nevertheless, somewhat cleaner than your average Londoner,’ Holmes replied. ‘And much more cleanly than your Scots peasant.’
I was about to take umbrage at this, since I am of Scots descent on my mother’s side. Holmes knew this and my sensitivity about it. He had been making too many remarks of this nature recently, and though I attributed them to irritability arising from nicotine withdrawal, I was, to use an American phrase, getting fed up with them. I was about to remonstrate when my heart leaped into my throat and choked me.
A hand had come from above and clamped down upon my shoulder. I knew that it wasn’t Holmes’ because I could see both of his hands.
XI
Holmes almost fell off the branch but was saved by another hand, which grapsed him by the collar of his shirt. A familiar voice said, ‘Silence!’
‘Mowgli!’ I gasped. And then, remembering that, after all, he was a baronet, I said, ‘Your pardon. I mean, Sir Mowgli.’
‘What are you doing up here, you baboon!’ Holmes said.
I was shocked at this, though I knew that Holmes spoke thus only because he must have been thoroughly frightened. To address a baronet in this manner was not his custom.
‘Tut, tut, Holmes,’ I said.
‘Tut, tut, yourself,’ he replied. ‘He’s not paying me a fee! He’s no client of mine. Besides, I doubt that he is entitled to his title!’
A growl that lifted the hairs on the back of my neck came from above. It was followed by the descent of the baronet’s heavy body upon our branch, which bent alarmingly. But he squatted upon it, his hands free, with all the sense of balance of the baboon he had been accused of being.
‘What does that last remark mean?’ the baronet said.
At that moment the moon broke through the clouds. A ray fell upon Holmes’ face, which had become as pale as when he was pretending to be sick in that case which I have titled ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective.’ Holmes said, ‘This is neither the time nor the place for an investigation of your credentials. We are in a desperate plight, and . . .’
‘You don’t realize how desperate,’ the baronet interrupted. ‘I usually abide by human laws when I am in civilisation. But this is the jungle, and here I obey the Law of the Jungle as I learned it from Baloo, the Blind Brown Bear, the Law of the Seeonee Wolf-Pack, of Chil the Kite, Bagheera the Black Panther, and Kaa the Rock Python. And here, even though this is not my native land, India, in the central part of which I am king, not a mere baronet, I revert to my primal and happiest state, that of Mowgli, the Frog, brother to the Wolf and to Hathi, the Silent One, the Elephant . . .’
Good Lord! I thought. How this man does run on! I had supposed that feral men were reticent and laconic types who spoke seldom and then only in short declarative sentences. This man talked as if he were one of James Fenimore Cooper’s noble savages.
‘. . . then I obey my own laws, not those of humanity, for which I have the greatest contempt, barring a few specimens of such . . .’
(There was much more in this single statement, the length of which would have made any German philosopher proud. The gist of it was that if Holmes did not explain his remark now, he would have no chance to do so later. Nor was the baronet backward in stating that I would not be taking any news of Holmes’ fate to the outside world.)
‘He means it, Holmes!’ I said.
‘I am well aware of that, Watson. He is covered only with a thin veneer of civilisation. Very well, Your Highness. It is not my custom to set forth a theory until I have enough evidence to make it a fact. But under the circumstances . . .’
I looked for Sir Mowgli to show some resentment at Holmes’ sarcastic use of a title appropriate only to a monarch. He, however, only smiled. This, I believe, was a reaction of pleasure, of ignorance of Holmes’ intent to cut him. He was sure that he deserved the title, and now that I have had time to reflect on it, I agree with him. He ruled a kingdom many times larger than our tight little isle. And he paid no taxes in it.
‘The very fact that you threaten me,’ Holmes said, ‘tells me that I have some basis of validity in my reasoning.’
I thought that he spoke bravely but indiscreetly and it was discretion that was called for now. But I kept silent.
‘I believe that the real Mowgli, if he exists or ever did exist, would be incapable of such a threat, Kipling’s accounts of the Wolf-Boy’s exploits lead me to believe that Mowgli would be of a high moral character. The genuine Mowgli, if he existed, would only have laughed at my hints of fraud.’
The baronet shifted his weight so that the branch under him creaked. The moon glittered on the sharp blade. He was scowling fiercely.
‘What do you know of the true nature of the Wolfs Brother, Two-Legs?’ he said harshly.
Holmes, seemingly unperturbed, replied, ‘As I said, I know only what I’ve read about him. However, I have arrived at my conclusions through observation of you combined with my trifling powers of deduction. Which some, however, have been kind enough to state are those of a genius. Disregrading this, I still have some gifts worthy of consideration . . .’
Holmes, I thought, you are as wordy as the wild man.
‘One of my dictums is that, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is the truth.’
‘I have read that statement in Doctor Watson’s narratives,’ the baronet said. ‘It’s full of (word blotted out). What if you haven’t included everything that could happen. What if you’ve overlooked something or are incapable of enough deductive powers to see all the patterns of certain clues? You may be a genius, Mr. Detective, but I have read some cases in which you made some serious, even stupid, errors.’
Even in the moonlight, I could see Holmes flush. But he did not reply sharply, perhaps because of the sharp edge so close to his jugular vein.
‘Nevertheless,’ he said determinedly, ‘it is impossible for animals to talk. They may communicate by a rather limited system of signals. But they cannot use language. They are not sentient creatures like Homo sapiens.
‘It is improbable, though barely possible, that a human infant could be raised by wolves. But it is impossible that wolves could have true speech. Therefore, Kipling’s account is obviously fictitious. His Jungle Book is merely an extension of ancient myths, primitive folk-tales, and medieval fairy tales wherein animals do have speech.
‘Thus, there was no Mowgli who talked to animals. It is highly improbable that there was a Mowgli of any kind.
‘But, in 1899, a man claiming to be the genuine Wolf-Boy appeared in Bombay, having travelled all the way from the Seeonee Hills on foot. Or so he said. His claim was widely publicized, and he was the subject of much speculation, pro and con, by various notable personages and authorities. Not to mention some rather lunatic people.
‘Investigation showed, or seemed to show, that the alleged Mowgli was indeed the son of a woodchopper and his wife and that they had been killed by a tiger and that the infant had disappeared.
‘Further investigation revealed that the woodchopper was not a Hindu but a Parsee. Parsees are, as you know, the descendants of Persian fire-worshippers, Zoroastrians, who fled their native land when the Arab Moslems conquered it. They settled in India so that they could have freedom of worship.
‘The woodchopper was a poor relative of Sir Jametsee Jejeebhoy, the Parsee baronet of Bombay. The woodchopper had at one time visited his wealthy second cousin to show him his son. The infant was flawless except for a red birthmark between the big toe and the next toe on the left foot. The man claiming to be Mowgli had such a birthmark.’
‘As you see,’ the baronet said, sticking out a singularly muscular leg and spreading his toes.
‘That could be a fortunate coincidence and, in fact, the basis fo
r action in a fraudulent claim,’ Holmes said.
‘Ngaayah!’ the baronet snarled. ‘You disgust me.’
‘Sir Jametsee, son of the late baronet and himself childless, adopted Mowgli. When Sir Jametsee died, Mowgli inherited his vast fortune and, a few year later, was given a baronetcy by our queen.’
‘I was investigated by Scotland Yard,’ Sir Mowgli said. ‘They found nothing wrong.’
‘But they did not prove your claim,’ Holmes said. ‘They did not apply my deductive and investigative techniques. Their methods were, I regret to say, much like those of the inept and late Inspector Lestrade.’
Sir Mowgli shrugged his heavy shoulders.
‘What do I care what you believe?’
‘What I plan to do,’ Holmes said, ‘is to go to India when the war is over and investigate your claim. I will be a bloodhound, relentless, sniffing out every clue, true or false. I will pursue the trail to its end.’
‘Why should you do that?’ the baronet said.
‘The truth is not only a means but the end. It is its own reward.’
I was trying to puzzle that out when the baronet said, ‘I could kill you now and prevent all that trouble and publicity. I am heartily tired of such, I assure you. However . . .’
After a long pause, Holmes said, ‘Yes?’
‘It would be worth it to avoid such an investigation. Not because I am afraid of the truth, I’m not, but because I am weary of publicity.’
‘Is that why you played yourself in a movie which will be shown everywhere on Earth?’ Holmes said.
‘Don’t try me!’ the baronet said huskily, and his knife flashed.
‘Yes, my dear Holmes,’ I said in, I fear, a trembling voice. ‘There is no need to antagonize our only ally, our only hope for escape.’
‘You are a sensible man, Doctor Watson,’ the baronet said. ‘Would that your colleague were. Very well. I have a proposition to make, Mr. Holmes. What if I hired you to investigate my claim, to ferret out the truth of my story?’
The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes II Page 14
