And this I know: that when the gods have use for us they blindfold us, because if we should see and comprehend the outcome we should grow so vain that not even the gods could preserve us from destruction.Vanity, self-righteousness and sin, these three are one, whose complements are meekness, self-will and indifference.Meekness is not modesty. Meekness is an insult to the Soul. But out of modesty comes wisdom, because in modesty the gods can find expression.The wise gods do not corrupt modesty with wealth or fame, but its reward is in well-doing and in a satisfying inner vision.From the Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup.
And this I know: that when the gods have use for us they blindfold us, because if we should see and comprehend the outcome we should grow so vain that not even the gods could preserve us from destruction.
Vanity, self-righteousness and sin, these three are one, whose complements are meekness, self-will and indifference.
Meekness is not modesty. Meekness is an insult to the Soul. But out of modesty comes wisdom, because in modesty the gods can find expression.
The wise gods do not corrupt modesty with wealth or fame, but its reward is in well-doing and in a satisfying inner vision.
From the Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup.
CHAPTER XXV
Ommonystacked up the fire and resumed his seat in the leather armchair that Marmaduke had always used. Diana, belly to the blaze, barked and galloped in her sleep. Hannah Sanburn went on talking:
“Tsiang Samdup said last night that you have been with him two months. Do you know then what I mean when I say one can’t argue with him? He just sat there on the hearthrug and—it’s difficult to explain—he seemed to be listening for an inside message. It may sound idiotic, but I received the impression of a man waiting for his own soul to talk to him. He was perfectly silent. He hardly breathed. I felt absolutely sure he would find some way out of the difficulty. But the strange thing was, that the solution came from me. I suppose ten minutes passed without a word said, and I felt all the while as if my mind were being freed from weights that I had never known were there. Then suddenly I spoke because I couldn’t help it; I saw what to do so clearly that I simply had to tell him.
“It wasn’t hypnotism. It was just the contrary. It was as if he haddehypnotized me. I saw all the risks and scores of difficulties. And I saw absolutely clearly the necessity of doing just one thing. I told him I would take the child for six months out of every year and treat her as if she were my own. He might have her for the other six months. Every single wrinkle on his dear old face smiled separately when I said that. I had hardly said it when I began to wish I hadn’t; but he held me to my word.
“He brought me the baby the following week, and she was here in this building all the while you were ranging the hills for some word of the Terrys. The hardest work I ever had to do was to keep silent when you returned here worn out and miserable about your sister’s fate. But, if you had been let into the secret, you would have interfered—wouldn’t you? Am I right or wrong, Cottswold?”
“Of course. I would never have dreamed of letting my sister’s child go back to the Ahbor Valley.”
“Yet, if Tsiang Samdup hadn’t taken her every year for half a year, the Ahbors would have killed him. And remember: I had bound myself in advance not to tell any one—and particularly not to tell you. The Lama was only able to loan her to me for six months of every year by consenting to the Ahbors watching her all the time she was with me. Whenever she has been with me Ahbors have watched day and night. The excuse Tsiang Samdup gave to them was that unless she should be with me for long periods she would die and the Ahbors would find their valley invaded by white armies in consequence. They fear invasion of their valley more than anything else they can imagine. On the other hand, they regard the child as a gift from Heaven and the old Lama as her rightful guardian.
“I don’t quite understand the situation up there; the Ahbors don’t accept Tsiang Samdup’s teachings, they have a religion of their own; and he isn’t one of them; he’s a Tibetan. But they recognize him as a Lama, protect his monastery, and submit to his authority in certain ways. Perhaps I’m stupid; he has tried very hard to explain, and so has Elsa. Privately I called her Elsa, after her mother, of course. Tsiang Samdup gave her the Chinese name of San-fun-ho. The word is supposed to signify every possible human virtue.”
“Who called herSamding?” Ommony asked bluntly.
Hannah Sanburn stared. “You know then? This isn’t news? I remember now: Tsiang Samdup said last night: ‘That of which a man is ignorant may well be kept from him, but that which he knows should be explained, lest he confuse it with what he does not know.’ ”
“I’m putting two and two together,” Ommony answered. “I leaned over a monastery gallery in Darjiling. Thechelawas straight underneath me. A beam of sunlight showed a girl’s breasts. Am I right? Are San-fun-ho, Samding thechelaand my sister’s child Elsa one and the same person?”
“Yes. I wonder you never recognized your sister’s voice—that almost baritone boyish resonance. You didn’t?”
“Who are those other girls?”
“Companions for her! Don’t rush me. Wait while I explain. Elsa developed into the most marvelous child I have ever known. It was partly Tsiang Samdup’s influence; he gave up his whole life to training her; and he’s wise—I can never begin to tell you how wise he is. But it was partly due to her heredity. You see, she had your sister’s spiritual qualities, and something of Jack Terry’s gay indifference to all the usual human pros and cons—the courage of both of them—and something else added, entirely her own. I wish she were my child! Oh, how I wish it! And yet, d’you know, Cottswold, down in my heart I’m glad she isn’t, simply because, if she were mine, she would have missed so much!”
Hannah Sanburn stared into the fire again, silent until Ommony grew restless.
“There’s so much to tell!” she said at last. “I knew from the first, and Tsiang Samdup soon discovered that the odds would be all against her unless she could have white children of her own age for companions. When he came and spoke of that I tried to persuade him to let me send her to America; but at the very suggestion he looked so old and grieved and disappointed that I felt it would kill him to lose her. I suggested that he should go with her, but he said no, he had a duty to the Ahbors. I thought then he was afraid the Ahbors would torture him to death and burn his monastery if he should let her go; but he read my thoughts and assured me that consideration had no weight. I believed him. I believe he is perfectly indifferent to pain and death. He sat still for a long time, and then said:
“ ‘It is better not to begin, than to begin and not go through to a conclusion.Thenwe should only have deprived ourselves of opportunity.Nowwe should rob the child.’
“He asked me to obtain white children for companions for her. I refused, of course, at once to have anything to do with it. We quarreled bitterly—or rather, I did. He sat quite still, and when I had finished scolding him he went away in silence. I did not see him again for several months, and he never told me how he obtained white children. I can’t imagine how he did it without raising a scandal all over the world. I have been in agonies over it, for fear this mission would suffer. You know, if word once got around that we were importing white children into the Ahbor Valley, no proof of innocence would ever quiet the suspicion. Just think what a chance the Christian missionaries would have for destroying our good name! Can you imagine them sparing us?”
Ommony grinned and nodded. As trustees of a Buddhist mission to the Buddhists, he had tasted his share of that zealotry.
“He obtained the children through the agency of a Jew named Benjamin,” he said. “They were all orphans. They were saved from God knows what. Go on.”
“I have only seen the other children rarely. Now and then they would come here in twos and threes, and I used to question them, but they all seemed too happy to remember their past, and they only had the vaguest notions as to how they ever reached the Ahbor Valley. The general plan was for me to do my best with Elsa during the six months of the year she was with me, and forherto teachthem. Tsiang Samdup said it would be good for her to have to teach them—that she would learn more in that way than any other; and as usual he was entirely right.
“To help the other girls he madethempass their teaching on to Tibetan children. But he hasn’t had quite the success with the others that he has had with Elsa; they hadn’t her character to begin with. He never punishes. Have you any idea what patience it calls for to educate growing children without ever inflicting punishment of any kind—what patience and skill?”
Ommony glanced at Diana. “It’s the only way. I never punish,” he said quietly. “Go on.”
“My own share in Elsa’s education has been very slight indeed,” Hannah Sanburn went on. “I had to teach her Western conventions as to table manners and so on, and to explain to her what sort of subjects are taboo in what we call civilized society. I have taught her to wear frocks properly, have corrected her English pronunciation and have given her music lessons. I can’t think of anything else. The real education has been all the other way; it isIwho have learned—oh, simply countless things—by observingher. She never argues. You can’t persuade her to tell more than a fraction of what she knows. She is afraid of nothing and of nobody. And she is as full of fun as the veriest young pagan that ever lived.”
“Is she affectionate?” asked Ommony.
“Intensely. But not demonstrative. I should say she loves enormously, but without the slightest jealousy or passion. She has learned Tsiang Samdup’s faculty of divining people’s weakness, and of playing up to their strength instead of taking advantage of the weakness or letting it annoy her. The result, of course, is that she is instantly popular wherever she goes.”
“How in the world have you kept these mission girls from talking about her?” asked Ommony.
“That was quite easy. They adore her. She istheirspecial secret; and they quite understand that if they talk about her outside the mission she will stay away. Besides, the mission girls don’t have much opportunity to talk with outsiders, and those to whom they do talk are superstitious people, who speak with bated breath of San-fun-ho of Ahbor. There have been much harder problems than that.”
Hannah Sanburn stared into the fire again. It appeared there were painful memories.
“You see, there have been European visitors at times. Some of them came unannounced, and sometimes Elsa was here when they came. There were times when I could pass her off as a teacher, but sometimes she was discovered in boy’s clothes, which made that impossible; and whether she was dressed as a boy or girl she aroused such intense curiosity that questions became pointed and very difficult to answer. I have dozens of letters, Cottswold, from friends in Massachusetts asking whether it is true, as they learn from missionary correspondents, that I have a child. Some ask why I kept my marriage secret. Some insinuate that they are too broad-minded to hold a lapse from virtue against me, as long as I don’t come home and make it awkward for them. Others preach me a sermon on hypocrisy. Quite a number of my friends have dropped me altogether. I suppose the strict provisions of the penal code have kept people from libeling me in India, but that has not prevented them from writing scandal to their friends abroad.”
“What was the idea of boy’s clothes?”
“Education. Tsiang Samdup insists she must know everything he possibly can teach her. She has been to Lhassa, far into China, and down into India. He could not have taken her to some of those places unless she were disguised as hischela; a girlchelawould have aroused all sorts of scandal and difficulties. Then again, he says all human life is drama and the only way to teach is by dramatic presentation; but who, he asks, can present a drama unless able to act all parts in it? He says we can only learn by teaching, and can only teach by learning; and he is right, Cottswold, he is absolutely right.”
“Does he propose that she shall preach a crusade or something like that in India?” Ommony asked, frowning.
“He proposes she shall be an absolutely free agent, possessed of all knowledge necessary to freedom. That tour into India was only a part of her education.”
“But I saw her as Samding receiving princes of the blood and being almost worshiped,” Ommony objected.
“Education. Tsiang Samdup says she will be either flattered or hated wherever she goes. He says the hatred will strengthen her. He wants to be sure no flattery shall turn her head.”
“And those other girls?”
“They are to go free also, as and when she goes. Tsiang Samdup is fabulously rich. He pays for everything in gold, although I don’t know where he gets it. He has secret agents all over India—sometimes I think they’re all over the world. He says wherever Elsa goes, she and the other girls will be provided for and will find friends.”
“Where does he propose to send them?” Ommony asked, a wave of rebellion sweeping over him. He was well schooled in self-control, but all the English in him rose against the notion of his sister’s child being subject to an Oriental’s whim. Education was one thing: heritage another.
Hannah Sanburn laughed. The expression of her face was firm, and yet peculiarly helpless.
“I am not to tell you that.”
“Why in thunder not? You have told so much, that—”
“If you were as used as I am, Cottswold, to trusting that grand old Lama, and always discovering afterward that his advice was good, you wouldn’t press the point.”
“My sister’s child—” he began angrily; but she interrupted him.
“Don’t forget: Tsiang Samdup saved the mother from death at the hands of savages. It is thanks to him, and to nobody but him, that the baby was born alive.”
“Yes, but—”
“Tsiang Samdup told me, and I believe him, that your sister put the new-born baby into his arms and begged him to care for it as if it were his own. Shegavehim the baby with her dying breath.”
“What else could she do?” asked Ommony. “Poor girl, she was—”
“Yes. But she did it,” said Hannah Sanburn. “Can you name one instance in which Tsiang Samdup has failed to keep trust to the limit of his power?”
There followed a long silence, broken only by the faint murmur of singing in a hall across the rear courtyard, the falling of burned wood on the hearth, and the muttered barking of Diana chasing something in her dreams. It endured until Diana awoke suddenly, sat up and growled. There came a man’s voice from the front courtyard. Two or three minutes later there was a knock at the door and a toothless old Sikhimese watchman announced a visitor, mumbling so that Ommony did not catch the name. A moment later Sirdar Sirohe Singh strode into the room, greeted by thundering explosions from Diana, who presently recognized him and lay down again.
Thesirdarwithout speaking bowed profoundly, once to Hannah Sanburn, once to Ommony, then crossed the room and sat down cross-legged on the floor, with his back to a corner of the fireplace at Hannah Sanburn’s right hand, where his own face was in shadow but he could see both hers and Ommony’s. Diana went up and sniffed him but he took no notice of her.
“I have word,” he said gruffly, at the end of three or four minutes’ silence.
He seemed to expect comment.
“From whom? About what?”
Thesirdar’samber eyes met Ommony’s. “You remember? When we met the first time I said I was at your disposal to escort you to another place.”
Ommony nodded.
“But I am not your superior.” (Thesirdarused a word that conveys more the relationship of aguruto hischelathan can be expressed by one word in English; but at that, the significance was vague.) “Do youwishto come with me?”
In the West it would have been the part of wisdom to ask when, why, whither? Twenty and odd years of India had given Ommony an insight into arguments not current in the West, however. He did not even glance at Hannah Sanburn.
“Yes.”
“I am ready.”
Thesirdarstood up. There was magic in the air. Diana sensed it; she was trembling. Hannah Sanburn rose and placed herself between thesirdarand the fire, so that he could not pass her easily.
“Do you accept responsibility?” she asked.
Thesirdarnodded.
“Will he return here?”
“As to that I am ignorant. He will arrive there.”
“You will escort him safely to the Lama?”
Again thesirdarnodded.
Hannah Sanburn moved and thesirdarstrode past her toward the door. Ommony started to follow him, but turned, walked deliberately up to Hannah Sanburn and kissed her, hardly knowing why, except that he admired her and possibly might never see her again. She seemed to understand.
“Good-by,” she said quietly. “If you reach the Ahbor Valley you’ll be safe enough—only do what he tells you.” Then, divining his intention: “No, take the dog. I would like her, but you may need her. The Lama said so. Good-by.”
It was cold outside. Ommony tied on Diana’s sheepskin jacket, which was hanging, cleaned and dried, from a peg in the hall. Below in the courtyard thesirdarturned and said abruptly:
“To your own room first.”
It was like being led out to be shot. In the gloom in the corner near Ommony’s door a brown-robed Tibetan waited, carrying something on his arm; Ommony seized Diana’s collar to keep her from flying at him. He and thesirdarfollowed Ommony into the room and waited while he lit the candles; then thesirdarstruck a match and lit the overhead oil lamp.
“Where is Dawa Tsering?” Ommony asked suddenly.
Thesirdarsmiled, showing wonderfully even teeth that suggested not exactly cruelty, but the sort of familiarity with unavoidable unpleasantness that surgeons learn.
“He will come with us part of the way,” he said in a dead-level tone of voice.
Ommony bridled at that. It touched his own sense of responsibility.
“The man is my servant. What do you propose to do to him?”
“I am not his master.”
“You said ‘part of the way.’ What do you mean by that?”
“Wait and see,” said thesirdar.
“No,” Ommony answered. “I will lead no man into a trap. What do you intend?”
Thesirdarspoke in undertones to the Tibetan, who tossed a bundle of garments on the bed and left the room.
“You might save time,” thesirdarsuggested, pointing to the bundle on the bed. His manner was polite, and more mysterious than commanding; he undid the bundle himself and spread out a Tibetan costume.
“How about you?” asked Ommony, beginning to undress.
“I go as I am.”
Ommony put on the warm Tibetan clothes and examined himself in the mirror—laughed—remarked that he looked like a monk whose asceticism consisted in at least three meals a day. But he looked better when he pulled on a cloth cap and threw a dark shawl over it. Thesirdar, walking around him, viewing him carefully from every angle, appeared satisfied.
Then Dawa Tsering came, unaccompanied by the Tibetan, standing burly and enormous in his yak-hair cloak, almost filling up the doorway.
“Thou!” he said, grinning as his eyes met Ommony’s. “Say to Missish-Anbun she should return my knife to me. We go where theremightbe happenings.”
“Where do you suppose we are going?” Ommony asked.
“To that old Lama’s roost, I take it. Between you and me, Ommonee, I am glad to go anywhere, so be I get away from this place. My wife is in Tilgaun and has sent two of her husbands to catch me and bring me to her!”
Thesirdargrinned, watching Ommony’s face. “They practise polyandry in these hills,” he remarked.
That was no news, although there was less of it around Tilgaun since the Marmaduke influence had begun to make itself felt.
“Seven husbands are enough for her,” said Dawa Tsering. “I grew weary of planting her corn-fields and being beaten for my trouble. I am for Spiti, where a man can have as many wives as he can manage andtheyfearhim! Let us be off before that she-wolf’s husbands catch the two of us, thou!”
Ommony nodded. Thesirdarput the lights out and led the way to the outer gate, Dawa Tsering following, complaining bitterly about his knife.
“I am ashamed, Ommonee—I am ashamed to go back to Spiti without my belly-ripper! Where shall I find such another as that? Get it for me! I would pay its weight in gold for it—if I had that much gold,” he addedsotto voce.
Once outside the gate, though, he was much too eager to be going to fret about anything else. The whites of his eyes showed alert in the darkness. There were two ponies; he held Ommony’s, urging him to mount in haste, then ran behind, slapping the pony’s rump, pursuing thesirdar’sbeast, that cantered with a Tibetan clinging to its tail. Diana circled around and around the party, barking.
“Thou! Command thy she-dog!” Dawa Tsering panted. “We go through the village—she will awake my wife’s husbands—command her to be still, or we are lost!”
Oh, I went where the Gods are, and I have seen the DawnWhere Beauty and the Muses and the Seven Reasons dwell,And I saw Hope accoutered with a lantern and a hornWhose clarion and rays reach the inner rings of hell.Oh, I was in the storehouse of the jewels of the dewAnd the laughter of the motion of the wind-blown grass,The mystery of morning and its music, and the hueOf the petals of the roses when the rain-clouds pass.And so I know who Hope is and why she never sleeps,And seven of the secrets that are jewels on her breast;I stood within the silence of the Garden that she keeps,Where flowers fill the footprints that her sandals pressed;And I know the springs of laughter, for I trod the Middle Way,Where sympathies are sign-posts and the merry Gods the Guides;I have been where Hope is Ruler and evolving realms obey;I know the Secret Nearness where the Ancient Wisdom hides.
Oh, I went where the Gods are, and I have seen the DawnWhere Beauty and the Muses and the Seven Reasons dwell,And I saw Hope accoutered with a lantern and a hornWhose clarion and rays reach the inner rings of hell.Oh, I was in the storehouse of the jewels of the dewAnd the laughter of the motion of the wind-blown grass,The mystery of morning and its music, and the hueOf the petals of the roses when the rain-clouds pass.And so I know who Hope is and why she never sleeps,And seven of the secrets that are jewels on her breast;I stood within the silence of the Garden that she keeps,Where flowers fill the footprints that her sandals pressed;And I know the springs of laughter, for I trod the Middle Way,Where sympathies are sign-posts and the merry Gods the Guides;I have been where Hope is Ruler and evolving realms obey;I know the Secret Nearness where the Ancient Wisdom hides.
Oh, I went where the Gods are, and I have seen the DawnWhere Beauty and the Muses and the Seven Reasons dwell,And I saw Hope accoutered with a lantern and a hornWhose clarion and rays reach the inner rings of hell.Oh, I was in the storehouse of the jewels of the dewAnd the laughter of the motion of the wind-blown grass,The mystery of morning and its music, and the hueOf the petals of the roses when the rain-clouds pass.And so I know who Hope is and why she never sleeps,And seven of the secrets that are jewels on her breast;I stood within the silence of the Garden that she keeps,Where flowers fill the footprints that her sandals pressed;And I know the springs of laughter, for I trod the Middle Way,Where sympathies are sign-posts and the merry Gods the Guides;I have been where Hope is Ruler and evolving realms obey;I know the Secret Nearness where the Ancient Wisdom hides.
Oh, I went where the Gods are, and I have seen the Dawn
Where Beauty and the Muses and the Seven Reasons dwell,
And I saw Hope accoutered with a lantern and a horn
Whose clarion and rays reach the inner rings of hell.
Oh, I was in the storehouse of the jewels of the dew
And the laughter of the motion of the wind-blown grass,
The mystery of morning and its music, and the hue
Of the petals of the roses when the rain-clouds pass.
And so I know who Hope is and why she never sleeps,
And seven of the secrets that are jewels on her breast;
I stood within the silence of the Garden that she keeps,
Where flowers fill the footprints that her sandals pressed;
And I know the springs of laughter, for I trod the Middle Way,
Where sympathies are sign-posts and the merry Gods the Guides;
I have been where Hope is Ruler and evolving realms obey;
I know the Secret Nearness where the Ancient Wisdom hides.
CHAPTER XXVI
Theycantered down the village street and over an echoing plank-bridge beneath which starlit water growled over a gravel bed. Only a rare light or two shone through the chinks of shuttered windows. Village dogs yelped at Diana’s heels, but fled when she turned on them. Thesirdarnever glanced backward but rode like a shadow, bolt-upright, vanishing, vanishing, for ever vanishing into the darkness, yet never more than half a dozen ponies’ lengths ahead. The sound of his pony’s feet was all that made a human being of him; otherwise he was a specter.
The track rose sharply after they crossed the bridge and the ponies slowed to a walk, thesirdarmaintaining the lead. Dawa Tsering, utterly winded, sat down on a rock, swaying his body back and forward to ease the stitch in his side. Ommony drew rein to wait for him, peering over a cliff-side into hollow darkness filled with the booming of water among rocks two hundred feet below. Thesirdarshouted from around a bend a little higher up the trail, and stones fell into the track as if his voice had loosed an avalanche.
A dark figure shrouded in black cloth slid down following the stones and, before Ommony could move, had jumped to his rein. A young woman’s face peered up at him, flashing white teeth, but the smile vanished instantly.
“Dawa Tsering,” she muttered, and then began talking so fast that Ommony could hardly understand her. Dawa Tsering was in danger; that seemed clear enough. Also, she, her own self, wanted him, desired him desperately. She had a baby wrapped in a shawl slung over her shoulder and had laid another bundle on the ground.
Ommony pointed down the track, and as he moved his arm two men leaped out of a shadow and rushed up-hill at Dawa Tsering. Diana flew at them and they backed away. They had weapons, but appeared afraid to use them. Dawa Tsering ran up-hill toward Ommony, feeling for the knife that was not there, and Ommony whistled to Diana. The two men followed her cautiously, advancing step by step as she retreated, snarling. From the opposite direction around the bend, thesirdarcame cantering back down-hill, sending stones scattering over the cliff-side. The girl flung herself at Dawa Tsering, seizing him around the neck and pouring out a stream of words, half-intelligible, choked with anger, grief, laughter, command, and emotions unknown to those who have not loved and do not still love an adventurer from Spiti.
“Sooner than expected!” thesirdargrunted, drawing rein.
Thesirdarseemed pleased, and to have changed his mind about being in a hurry. He sat bolt-upright on his pony and waited in silence for something to happen; but the Tibetan behind him drew a long knife and showed it to the two men who were standing in the attitude of wrestlers. Dawa Tsering seemed to want to run, but the woman clung to him. Diana growled thunderously but awaited orders.
“Who are these men?” asked Ommony.
“My wife’s husbands!” Dawa Tsering shook the girl off and stepped between Ommony and thesirdar. It appeared he meant to slip away, but thesirdar’spony made a sudden half-turn, and there was nothing left for him but to stand or jump over the cliff. “Protect me, Ommonee! I have been a friend to you. That dog hasn’t a flea on her. Moreover, Missish-Anbun has my knife.”
“Who is this young woman?” Ommony demanded.
Thesirdaranswered. The two husbands were about to speak, but waited, open-mouthed. The woman was watching thesirdaras if destiny hung on the movement of his lips.
“She is his. It is his child. Choose!” he commanded, shoving Dawa Tsering, making him turn to face him. “Go withherto Spiti, or go withthemto Ladak and the wife of many husbands. Which?”
“But how do I know it is my child?” Dawa Tsering grumbled.
Thesirdar’sface was in darkness from the shadow of the overhanging cliff. He did not laugh, but his smile was almost audible. “Sheknows. You may learn from her. Choose quickly!”
“Is it a man child?” Dawa Tsering asked; and the woman burst into excited speech, beginning to unwrap the bundle that swung at her back.
“Well, that is different,” said Dawa Tsering. “If it is a man child—there is need of men in Spiti. Very well, I will take the woman.”
“To Spiti!” thesirdarcommanded. “Understand: I will write to the Rajah of Spiti. You will stay in Spiti and obey him. If you ever again cross the boundaries of Spiti without a letter from your rajah giving permission and stating the reason for it, you will deal withme!”
“Oh, well!” said Dawa Tsering, shrugging his broad shoulders. “Must I go now?”
“Now!” said thesirdar.
“Good-by, Ommonee. Now you must pick your own fleas off the dog. I will be sorry for you when I think of you without a servant, but I am too well born to be any man’s servant for long, and this woman is a good one. I will sing songs of you in Spiti after you are dead. I think you will die soon. Look out for thatsirdar; he is a tricky fellow.”
He kicked the bundle the woman had dropped, as a signal for her to pick it up and follow him. In another moment he had vanished, clambering by a goat-track up the cliff, humming cheerfully through his nose each time he paused to let the laden woman overtake him.
Thesirdarfaced the discontented husbands, lifting his right hand for silence.
“Go back to that woman in Ladak,[41]and to her say this from me,” he ordered. “That it may be I will come to Ladak. If I come, and when I come, it will be well for her if I have no reason to concern myself about her. Turn neither to the right nor to the left, nor delay on the road to Ladak, but hasten and tell her my message. And when she has beaten you, tell her a second time, and add this: that if again she sends men across the boundaries of Ladak, she shall lose them! Go!”
They went, retreating backward down-hill toward Tilgaun, whence another track led over a seventeen-thousand foot pass toward their polyandrous neighborhood. The Tibetan followed them, presumably to see the order was obeyed. Thesirdarturned and rode up-hill in silence, keeping the middle of the track so that Ommony had no room to draw alongside. On the left a cliff fell sheer into the darkness; on the right it rose until it seemed to disappear among the stars.
Ommony rode with his woolen clothes wrapped closely against the penetrating wind that moaned from over the ravine on his left-hand. Mystified by thesirdar’sconfidently used authority, that could not possibly have been vested in him by the British or by any other government (for it seemed to extend into several states), his sensations began to be mixed and bewildering.
Suggestions of fear are assertive on a dark night, riding into the unknown, without a weapon; and thesirdar’smysterious silence was not reassuring. Hannah Sanburn had said he was “always a friend”; but a woman all alone in charge of a mission, surrounded by potential danger, would be likely to overestimate the friendship of any one who was not openly hostile.
It occurred, and kept on recurring, however hard he tried to dismiss the thought, that, with the exception of Hannah Sanburn, he alone knew the secret about Elsa Terry—he and probably thatsirdarjust ahead of him; and thesirdarmight be one of those dark fanatics whom jealousy makes murderers. What if thesirdarwere leading him now to his death in the unknown?
For what purpose had Elsa been educated? Why had she been taken into India on that weird dramatic venture? Why had she been to Lhassa, the “forbidden city?” Who were the men to whom Hannah Sanburn said the Lama went for advice? Mahatmas? Masters? Or something else? What wastheirpurpose? The Lama might easily be a saint and yet their tool—an unworldly old altruist in the hands of men who had designs on India; as pliable in their hands as the girl appeared to be pliable in his. That journey into India might have been a trial venture to discover how far the girl’s trained personality could be counted on to turn men’s (and women’s) heads. Gandhi in jail, all India was ripe and waiting for a new political mahatma.
Why, if not to spy on Ommony, had the Lama tolerated Dawa Tsering in his company? Dawa Tsering’s suspiciously prompt obedience to thesirdarrather looked as if the whole thing had been prearranged. In fact, it certainlywasprearranged; thesirdarhad admitted he expected something of the sort. And Ommony remembered now that back in Delhi Dawa Tsering had been remarkably complaisant about transferring allegiance from the Lama to himself.
Then—the Ahbor Valley. Was it likely that thesirdarcould be leading him into that forbidden country for any other purpose than to make sure of his death or possibly to keep him prisoner up there? No white man, no government agent, not even one trained Nepalese spy who had penetrated the Ahbor Valley had ever returned alive. The only one who ever did return had floated, dead and mangled, down the Brahmaputra River. Thirty-five miles—not a yard more—from the boundary of Sikhim; perhaps thirty miles from where they were that minute, the Upper Ahbor Valley was as unknown as the mountains of the moon. Why should he suppose thathewas to be specially favored with permission to go in there and return alive?
But there was no turning back now—nothing, of course, to prevent but nothing further from intention. Afraid, yes. Faint-hearted, no. The two emotions are as the poles apart. Fear acted as a spur to obstinacy, the unknown as a lure that beckoned more compellingly than safety; habitually, since his school-days, personal safety had been Ommony’s last, least consideration. He told himself it was the cold wind that made the goose-flesh rise, and all that night, shivering, he forced himself to believe that was the truth, following thesirdar’spony along trails like a winding devil’s stairway that led alternately toward the sky and down again into a roaring underworld.
It was pitch-dark, but the deepest darkness lay ahead, where the enormous range of the Himalayas was a wall of silence ridged with faint silver where the starlight shone on everlasting snow. Darkness may be a substance for all that anybody knows about it; it lay thick and somber, swallowing the sounds—sudden, crashing sounds, that volleyed and were gone. A tree fell into a watercourse. A rock went cannoning from crag to crag and plunged into an abyss. Silence; and then a howl along the wind as a night-prowler scented the ponies.
Bats—unimaginable thousands of them, black, and less black than the night—until the air was all alive with movement and the squeak and smell. Chasms into which the ponies’ hoofs struck stones that seemed to fall for ever, soundless. Dawn at last, touching untrodden peaks with crimson—gleaming gold, and stealing lemon-colored down the pillars of the sky, to awaken ghosts of shadows in the black ravines. Tree-tops, waist-deep in an opal mist, an eagle—seven thousand feet below the track—circling above those like a fleck of blown dirt. A roar ascending full of crashing tumult; and at last a flash of silver on the waves of Brahmaputra, a mile and a half below, plunging toward Bengal through the rock-staked jaws of Ahbor Valley Gate.
Downward then, by a trail that seemed to swing between earth and sky, the ponies sliding half the time with their rumps against the rock or picking their way cautiously with six-inch strides along the edge of chasms, over which the riders peered into fathomless shadow that the sunlight had not reached. Down to the eagle-level, and the tree-line, where the wet scent of morning on moss and golden gravel made the ponies snort and they had to be unsaddled and allowed to roll.
Not a word from thesirdar, although he stroked Diana’s head when she approached him, and laughed at the ponies’ antics. On again downward, and a hut at last, built of tree-trunks, perched on a ledge of rock above a waterfall, on the rim of a tree-hung bowl through which the Brahmaputra plunged.
[41]Spiti and Ladak are Hill States separated by huge ranges, and their customs are as different as their climate and geography, although their actual distance apart is not great.
[41]Spiti and Ladak are Hill States separated by huge ranges, and their customs are as different as their climate and geography, although their actual distance apart is not great.
CHANT PAGANWhen that caressing light forgets the hillsThat change their hue in its evolving grace;When, harmony of swaying reeds and rills,The breeze forgets her music and the faceOf Nature smiles no longer in the pond,Divinity revealed! When morning peepsAbove earth’s rim, and no bird notes respond;When half a world in mellow moonlight sleepsAnd no peace pours along the silver’d air;When dew brings no wet wonder of delightOn jeweled spider-web and scented lairOf drone and hue and honey; when the nightNo longer shadows the retreating day,Nor purple dawn pursues the graying dark;And no child laughs; and no wind bears awayThe bursting glory of the meadow-lark;Then—then it may be—never until thenMay death be dreadful or assurance waneThat we shall die a while, to waken whenNew morning summons us to earth again.
CHANT PAGANWhen that caressing light forgets the hillsThat change their hue in its evolving grace;When, harmony of swaying reeds and rills,The breeze forgets her music and the faceOf Nature smiles no longer in the pond,Divinity revealed! When morning peepsAbove earth’s rim, and no bird notes respond;When half a world in mellow moonlight sleepsAnd no peace pours along the silver’d air;When dew brings no wet wonder of delightOn jeweled spider-web and scented lairOf drone and hue and honey; when the nightNo longer shadows the retreating day,Nor purple dawn pursues the graying dark;And no child laughs; and no wind bears awayThe bursting glory of the meadow-lark;Then—then it may be—never until thenMay death be dreadful or assurance waneThat we shall die a while, to waken whenNew morning summons us to earth again.
CHANT PAGANWhen that caressing light forgets the hillsThat change their hue in its evolving grace;When, harmony of swaying reeds and rills,The breeze forgets her music and the faceOf Nature smiles no longer in the pond,Divinity revealed! When morning peepsAbove earth’s rim, and no bird notes respond;When half a world in mellow moonlight sleepsAnd no peace pours along the silver’d air;When dew brings no wet wonder of delightOn jeweled spider-web and scented lairOf drone and hue and honey; when the nightNo longer shadows the retreating day,Nor purple dawn pursues the graying dark;And no child laughs; and no wind bears awayThe bursting glory of the meadow-lark;Then—then it may be—never until thenMay death be dreadful or assurance waneThat we shall die a while, to waken whenNew morning summons us to earth again.
CHANT PAGANWhen that caressing light forgets the hillsThat change their hue in its evolving grace;When, harmony of swaying reeds and rills,The breeze forgets her music and the faceOf Nature smiles no longer in the pond,Divinity revealed! When morning peepsAbove earth’s rim, and no bird notes respond;When half a world in mellow moonlight sleepsAnd no peace pours along the silver’d air;When dew brings no wet wonder of delightOn jeweled spider-web and scented lairOf drone and hue and honey; when the nightNo longer shadows the retreating day,Nor purple dawn pursues the graying dark;And no child laughs; and no wind bears awayThe bursting glory of the meadow-lark;Then—then it may be—never until thenMay death be dreadful or assurance waneThat we shall die a while, to waken whenNew morning summons us to earth again.
CHANT PAGAN
When that caressing light forgets the hills
That change their hue in its evolving grace;
When, harmony of swaying reeds and rills,
The breeze forgets her music and the face
Of Nature smiles no longer in the pond,
Divinity revealed! When morning peeps
Above earth’s rim, and no bird notes respond;
When half a world in mellow moonlight sleeps
And no peace pours along the silver’d air;
When dew brings no wet wonder of delight
On jeweled spider-web and scented lair
Of drone and hue and honey; when the night
No longer shadows the retreating day,
Nor purple dawn pursues the graying dark;
And no child laughs; and no wind bears away
The bursting glory of the meadow-lark;
Then—then it may be—never until then
May death be dreadful or assurance wane
That we shall die a while, to waken when
New morning summons us to earth again.
CHAPTER XXVII
Smokecame from the hut, through a hole in the roof, giving the sharp air a delicious tang, all mixed with the aroma of fallen leaves and pine trunks. Over beyond the hut spray splashed from the waterfall—rose-colored diamonds against moss-green. The air was full of bird-music, that the ear caught after it was once used to the ponderous roar of water.
A man who was undoubtedly an Ahbor—black hair low down on his forehead, high up on his cheeks—Mongolian cheek-bones—glittering, dark, bold eyes—hairy legs showing beneath a leather-colored smock—waist girdled with a leather belt, from which akukrilike a Gurkha’s hung in a wooden scabbard—peered from the hut door. He stared at thesirdarin silence, curiously, as at some one he must tolerate; it was the half-shy, half-impudent stare of a yokel at a wealthy man from town.
He took the ponies and was very careful of them, unsaddling, leading them to drink, dragging out a sack and spilling grain in the hollow of a rock, feeling their legs and rubbing them down with a piece of bark while they munched contentedly.
Thesirdarled the way into the hut, but laid a finger on his lips for silence. The reason for silence was not evident; there was nobody else in there. The place was clean, but almost bare of furniture; there was a hearth of rough stones in the midst, a rough table, and a bunk in one corner, littered with blue trade-blankets. There was no bench—no chairs or stools—but there were wooden platters on the table, with big silver spoons beside them, and on the hearth imported cereal was cooking in an earthen vessel set in a brass one containing water. There was honey in a white china bowl, and a big glass pitcher full of milk, which looked as if it had stood there overnight; the layer of cream was more than an inch thick. There were two cups, without handles, made of alabaster.
In silence, as if it were a ritual, thesirdarserved the meal and they ate it standing. Then he walked out and sat on a rock that overhung the waterfall. He was not cross-legged in the usual Indian attitude of meditation; his long booted and spurred legs were out in front of him, the way a white man sits, and he leaned an elbow on one knee, his chin on his right fist; motionless in that attitude he stared at the bewildering view until he seemed almost physically to become a part of it.
Ommony watched him from the hut door, now and then losing sight of his form in the spray as he wondered what sort of thinking it might be that could so absorb the man, and as he watched, wondering, his own inclination was to take his shoes off; he felt a pagan reverence possess him, as if that dew-wet, emerald and brown immensity, with the thundering river below and the blue sky for a roof, were a temple of Mother Nature, in which it were impertinence to speak, imposture to assert a personality.
Diana was watching fish in a pool above the waterfall; the aborigine from Ahbor was using hiskukrito fashion a wooden implement with which to comb the ponies’ manes and tails; the birds were hopping on tree and rock about their ordinary business, and an eagle circled overhead as if he had been doing the same thing for centuries. But there began to be a sensation of having stepped into another world.
Things assumed strange and strangely beautiful proportions. The whole of the past became a vaguely remembered dream, in which the Lama, Samding and Hannah Sanburn stood out as the only important realities. The present moment was eternity, and wholly satisfying. Every motion of a glistening leaf, each bird-note, every gesture of the nodding grass, each drop of spray was, of and in itself, in every detail perfect. Something breathed—he did not know what, or want to inquire—he was part of what breathed; and a universe, of which he was also a part, responded with infinite rhythm of color, form, sound, movement, ebb and flow, life and death, cause and effect, all one, yet infinitely individual, enwrapped in peace and wrought of magic, of which Beauty was the living, all-conceiving light.
The enchantment ceased as gradually as it had begun. He felt his mind struggling to hold it—knew that he had seen Truth naked—knew that nothing would ever satisfy him until he should regain that vision—and was aware of thesirdarwalking toward him, normal, matter-of-fact, abrupt, spurs clinking as his heels struck rock.
“Are you ready?” asked thesirdar.
Ommony whistled and Diana followed them along a fern-hung ledge. There was opal air beneath them; crags and tree-tops peered out of slow-moving mist that the sun was beginning to tempt upward. Presently, leaping from rock to rock, until they could hear the river laughing and shouting, sending echoes crashing through a forest that had looked like moss from higher up, they descended breathless, downward, and for ever downward, leaping wild water that gushed between worn bowlders, swinging by tree-roots around outleaning cliffs, Diana crouching as she hugged the wall along a six-inch ledge, crossing a yelling cataract by a fallen tree-trunk, whose ax-marks were the only sign that the trail was ever used before. They came at last to a bank with a cliff behind it, still more than a thousand feet above the Brahmaputra, whose thunder volleyed as if a battle were being fought for right of way through a rock- and tree-staked gorge defended by all the underworld.
Ommony threw himself down, panting, his clothes sodden with sweat and his head in a whirl from the violent exertion and the change in altitude. Every sinew in his legs was trembling separately, and his heart thumped like a steam-injector. Diana lay still at his feet. Thesirdarappeared calm and not particularly out of breath; he sat down on a rock near by with an air of concentrated attention.
Presently Ommony began to feel the chill of damp earth under him. He got to his feet to look for a better place closer to the cliff, and stood for a moment craning upward trying to gauge with his eye the distance they had come from the lip of the ravine that showed at one point sharp as a pencil-line against the sky. He realized he could never find the way back if life depended on it, and guessed there must be another way than that into the Ahbor Valley, or how could men and animals find egress? He turned to speak, leaning one hand against the cliff.
“This way!” said thesirdar’svoice on his left hand; and before he could turn he felt himself shoved violently.
His head still singing from the strain of the descent, a vertigo still swimming through his brain, he was sure, but only dimly, that he had been pushed, then pulled through a narrow fissure in the shadowy corner of a projecting spur. He had scarcely noticed the opening—had not observed that the lower portion of the spur was split away, like the base of a flying buttress, from the wall itself. Within, the opening turned and turned again, a man’s breadth wide each shoulder against the wall, a zigzag passage driven (there were tool marks) into a granite mountain; and when he turned to look, there was nothing to see but the outline of thesirdar’shead against dim light behind him.
Diana forced her way between his legs and ran ahead to explore; he could hear her hollow barking—“All’s well so far—marvelous! mysterious! exciting!”— and then thesirdarshoved him forward, saying not one word. He could not see, but felt the whirring of bats, and knew by the sound that he had stepped into a cavern. Thesirdargroped and found an oil lantern with a bail. Lighting it, and swinging it until the shadows leaped like giant goblins and enormous bats streamed in panic toward the open air, he led the way to a low tunnel at the rear through which it was just possible to walk by bending nearly double.
At the end of fifty yards of that uncomfortable going, there was vastness, black as pitch, and such empty silence that the ear-drums ached. The lantern-light shone into nothing and was swallowed—ceased, except where it struck the natural, dark-granite wall and the end of the hewn tunnel. They were standing on a platform ten feet wide, from which hewn steps descended for ever and ever for all the brain could guess. The roof was utterly invisible; the space beneath it was alive with whirling bats. The air was breathable but stuffy. Sweat began to stream from every pore.
“What next?” asked Ommony.
“What next—ot nex—ot nex—ot nex—ot nex!” the echoes answered, dying away in a grumble at last somewhere in the bowels of the world.
He did not care to speak again. He tried to suppress thought, lest the echoes should learn that and multiply and mock it in the solemn hugeness of the underworld. Diana was afraid now—crouched against his legs and howled when thesirdarstarted down the smooth stone steps, that looked dark-green in the lantern-light.
The howl let loose the hounds of Pandemonium. A phantom pack gave tongue in full cry down the valley of hell—pounced on their quarry leagues away—worried it—and vanished into silence. Thesirdarlaughed, and the laugh went after them, until a thousand devils seemed to mock the ghost the hounds had slam. Diana was seized with panic and had to be dragged by the collar. Ommony did not dare to speak to her for fear of the echoes. He tried whispering once, but only once; it turned into a hiss that made Diana tremble in abject misery.
The echo of their feet was bad enough. Each downward step was repeated until the darkness became full of a din like the clapping of unseen hands; the clink of thesirdar’sspurs was multiplied into the jingle and clank of ghostly squadrons, and the whirring of unseen bat-wings grew into the snort of the war-horses charging line on line. It was easy enough to imagine lance and pennon, and the dead from a thousand battle-fields repeating history.
Ommony began trying to count the steps, but lost the reckoning at the sixth or seventh turn; the stairway zigzagged to and fro across the face of a wall that seemed from its smooth, yet irregular feel to have been hewn by giants from the virgin rock. And when they did at last reach bottom there appeared by the swinging lantern-light to be a causeway running right and left, gray-white and firm with a million years’ accumulation of the bats’ excreta.
Thesirdarhesitated—took the right-hand way, and led with a swinging stride that it took all of Ommony’s strength to follow. There was hardly any echo now, because the bat-dirt underfoot consumed the sound (and filled the air, too, with acrid dust), but there began to be a weird, very far-away rumbling, at first not more than a peculiar, irregular pulsation of the silence, gradually increasing until it sounded as if all the echoes in the world were hiding in the cellar of a mountain, crowding one another to find room.
A roof became vaguely visible at last. They were entering a tunnel, whose floor sloped downward. It appeared to have been originally a natural fissure in the base of a granite mountain; Titans had hewn and enlarged it, leaving buttresses six feet square of natural rock, that curved overhead until they met to support the roof. They were spaced about twenty feet apart, and every gap between was occupied by an enormous image, hewn out of the wall, resembling nothing in the world that Ommony had ever seen. Vaguely, but only vaguely, they suggested temple images of ancient Egypt. No two were alike. Due to the moving shadows, they appeared to change position as the lantern passed them, and the weird sounds that filled the tunnel suggested conversation in the language of another world.
The only remark thesirdarmade of any kind was midway down the tunnel, more than a quarter of a mile from the point where its roof had first become dimly visible. He paused for a moment, seemed to hesitate whether or not to speak, then pointed upward.
“We are under the Brahmaputra.”
His voice sounded muffled. The noise of the tremendous river galloping and plunging overhead absorbed all other sounds.
“How thick is the roof?” Ommony asked. But he did not know how to pitch his voice; the words died on his lips; his own ears could not hear them.
In one place there was water; it appeared to be an artificial drain; there was a trickling, sucking sound where it disappeared through a hole in the wall into obscurity. The floor for twenty yards was built of very heavy timber spiked on to transverse beams laid in slots in the rock wall; the slots were very ancient and the timbers not a generation old, marked here and there with the print of ponies’ hoofs—which seemed to Ommony to prove one point at any rate: there must be another way out from the Ahbor Valley than that goat-path down the side of the ravine. No pony, laden or unladen, could negotiate the trail by which he and thesirdarhad come.
Once they had crossed the wooden bridge the track began to rise, but thesirdarcontinued leading at the same speed, neither heat nor stuffiness impeding him. He swung the lantern in his right hand with an air of indifference, as if he had long ago ceased wondering at the titan labors of the men who hewed the tunnel. There was no air of haste about him; his natural speed appeared to be more than four miles an hour, just as his natural mood was silent, and his natural condition fearless, unsurprised, indifferent to circumstance.
The air began to improve at last, as they emerged into a cavern into which one shaft of sunlight shone through an opening so high overhead that its milky-whiteness, spreading and dispersing, formed a layer, below which the gloom grew solid. The sensation was of being in a grotto under water and looking upward through a cave-mouth toward the surface of the sea. One almost expected to see fish swimming across the zone of light.
Thesirdarallowed Ommony to rest at last. He sat on a rock that resembled an altar, set the lantern on another, and motioned to Ommony to be seated on a third. There were seven stones, exactly similar in shape and size, arranged so as to suggest the constellation of the Pleiades;[42]the seventh, which might be Merope, was surrounded by a circle of masonry, perhaps to suggest that that one is invisible to the naked eye. About and among the big stones there were hundreds of smaller ones, all of the same shape but of different sizes, arranged in no evident pattern, but nevertheless sunk into place in hollows cut deliberately in the rock floor. It looked as if whoever set them there knew a great deal more about the stars than any naked eye reveals.
As Ommony grew gradually used to the dim light the shapes of enormous carvings revealed themselves on walls so high that imagination reeled in the effort to measure them. The shape of the cavern was that of the inside of a hollow tree-trunk, broad at the base, narrowing toward the top until it vanished in impenetrable gloom somewhere above the shaft of light. The walls were all irregular, almost exactly resembling in rough outline the interior of a hollow tree; and wherever there was space a figure had been carved, half-human, ponderous, as contemplative as the Sphinx.
Wherever the eye rested long enough a figure would develop in the gloom, until the darkness appeared full of awful faces that had been there, pondering immensity, since time began.
As well as Ommony could judge, they were in the core of a hollow granite mountain. He turned to question thesirdar, but as he moved a sound like a distant trumpet blast came from above and, glancing upward, he saw a speck that might be a human being, moving on the lip of the opening through which the shaft of light came. Diana howled at the sound, but the howl was lost in the enormous space; there were no echoes.
Thesirdarmade no comment, but got to his feet at once and holding up the lantern examined Ommony’s face for a moment intently. His expression was of exercising judgment, but he said nothing, did not even nod. His amber eyes looked hardly human in the dimness, and glowed with a reddish light behind them—leonine, but curiously passionless. Swinging the lantern again, he turned and led the way toward a projection outflung like a buttress from the nearest wall.
There began then an ascent that almost conquered physical endurance. Steps, whose treads, hewn from the rock, were eighteen inches high, followed the outline of the ragged walls and circled the whole huge cavern three times toward the opening through which the light poured in. There were places, but not many of them, where the way ran almost level along a ledge for fifty feet or so, and thigh muscles had a chance to rest from the agony of climbing. The only other resting places were the crowns of smooth gigantic heads that gazed for ever into vastness. There was no rail, no balustrade; the steps were nowhere more than three feet wide, with nothing on their outer edge but darkness and a terrifying certainty of what would happen if a foot slipped or if vertigo prevailed. Diana, thrusting herself between the wall and Ommony, pressed herself against him for the sake of human company, adding to the terror of the long ascents where no huge head projected to afford a sense of something solid between the wall and the abyss.
Thesirdarseemed tireless. Ommony ached in every sinew of his being. Blood sang in his ears and eyes. Thirst began to torture him. A stitch like a knife-jab gnawed under his ribs. Repeatedly he had to lie face-downward on a level place, pressing both hands tightly on the stone while the whole cavern and all the silent heads seemed to whirl and whirl around him. Then Diana licked the back of his neck, and thesirdarwaited twenty or thirty yards higher up, swinging the lantern as if its constant rhythmic movement were in some way necessary. He never spoke once, made no sound other than his footsteps and the clink of spurs, all the way up; but now and then he stood on the crown of a head overhanging the cavern and swung the lantern in wider sweeps, as if he were signaling to some one.
The shaft of light faded and almost disappeared before they reached the opening. Ommony was in no condition then to reckon up the hours or to guess at the height he had climbed. Not more than barely conscious, he collapsed on a smooth platform that sloped dangerously outward, his fingers trying to grip the rock and his feet continuing to climb. He felt thesirdar(or somebody) seize him by the arm-pits, heard Diana growl, and the next he knew he was lying face-upward with cool water on his lips, a cool breeze on his face, and a starlit sky overhead. He felt Diana nosing at his hair, and knew nothing after that for several hours.