THE RIVER OF DEATH
Dressed now in the Punjabi costume with gorgeous silk turbans, we walked
side by side up the marble steps and knocked on the brass-bound, teak
front door at the top. Exactly as when we arrived on the previous day,
the door was immediately opened by two women.
The Mahatma was in there ahead of us, and had evidently told Yasmini
sufficient of our adventures to make her laugh. She squealed with
delight at sight of us.
"Come! Sit beside me in the window, both of you! My women will bring
food. Afterward you shall sleep--poor things, you look as if you need
it! O, what is that, Ganesha-ji? Blood on your linen? Were you hurt?"
Her swift, restless fingers drew the cloth aside and showed a few inches
of where my bare skin should have been.
"It is nothing. My women shall dress it. They have oils that will cause
the skin to grow again within a week. A week is nothing; you and
Athelstan will be here longer than a week! And you crossed the Pool of
Terrors? I have crossed that too! we three are initiates now!"
"Ye are three who will die unless discretion is the very law ye live
by!" said the Gray Mahatma. He seemed annoyed about something.
"Old Dust-and-ashes!" laughed Yasmini, snapping her fingers at him.
"Hah!" She laughed delightedly. "They have seen enough to make them
believe what I shall tell them!"
"Woman, you woo your own destruction. None has ever set out to betray
that secret and survived the first offense!" he answered.
"It was _you_ who betrayed it to _me_," she said, with another golden
laugh. Then, turning to King again:
"I have sought for that secret day and night! India has always known of
its existence; and in every generation some have fought their way in
through the outer mysteries to the knowledge within. But those who enter
always become initiates, and keep the secret. I was puzzled how to
begin, until I heard how, in England, a woman once overheard the secrets
of Freemasonry, and was made a Freemason in consequence.
"Now behold this man they call the Gray Mahatma! He does as I tell him!
You must know that these Knowers of Royal Knowledge, as they call
themselves, are not the little birds in one nest that they would like to
be; they quarrel among themselves, and there is a rival faction that
knows only street-corner magic, but is more deadly bent on knowing Royal
Knowledge than a wolf is determined to get lamb."
The Gray Mahatma saw fit to challenge some of that statement.
"It is true, that there are wolves who seek to break in," he said
quietly, "but it is false that there are quarrels among ourselves."
"Hah!" That little laugh of hers was like the exclamation of a fellow
who has got home with his rapier point.
"Quarrels or not," she answered, "there is a faction that was more than
willing to use the ancient passage under my palace grounds, and to hold
secret meetings in a room that I made ready for them."
"Faction!" The Gray Mahatma sneered. "Faithful seniors determined to
expel unfaithful upstarts are not a faction!"
"At any rate," she chuckled, "they wished to hold a meeting unbeknown to
the others, and they wished to make wonderful preparations for not being
overheard. And I helped them--is that not so, Mahatma-ji? You see, they
were scornful of women--then."
"Peace, woman!" the Mahatma growled. "Does a bee sting while it gathers
honey? You spied on our secrets, but did we harm you for it?"
"You did not dare!" she retorted. "If I had been alone, you would have
destroyed me along with those unfortunates on whose account you held the
meeting. It would have been easy to throw me to the _mugger_. But you
did not know how many women had overheard your secrets! You only knew,
that more than one had, and that at least ten women witnessed the fate
of your victims. Is that not so?"
"Victims is the wrong word. Call them culprits!" said the Gray Mahatma.
"What would the Government call them?" she retorted.
The Gray Mahatma curled his lip, but made no answer to that. Yasmini
turned to King.
"So I knew enough of their secrets to oblige them either to kill me or
else teach me all. And they did not dare kill me, because they could not
kill all my women too, for fear of Government. So first they took me
through that ordeal that you went through last night. And ever since
then I have been trying to learn; but this science of theirs is
difficult, and I suspect them of increasing the difficulty for my
benefit. Nevertheless, I have mastered some of it."
"You have mastered none of it!" the Gray Mahatma retorted
discourteously. "The golden light is the first step. Show me some."
"They thought they were being too clever for me," she went on. "They
listened to my suggestion that it might be wise to show Athelstan King
the mysteries, and send him to America to prepare the way for what is
coming. So we set a trap for Athelstan. And Athelstan brought Ganesha
with him. So now I have two men who know the secret, in addition to
myself and all my women. And I have one man who has skill enough to
_learn_ the secret, now that he knows _of_ it. Perhaps both men can
learn it, and I know full well that one can."
"And then?" King suggested.
"You shall conquer the world!" she answered.
King smiled and said nothing.
"I am uncertain yet whether or not I shall choose to be queen of the
earth!" she said. "Sometimes I think it would be fun for you and me to
be absolute king and queen of everywhere. Sometimes I think it will be
better to make some stupid person--say Ganesha here, for instance--king,
and for ourselves to be the power behind the throne. What do _you_
think, Athelstan?"
"I think," he answered.
"And you observe that the Gray Mahatma likewise thinks!" said she. "He
thinks what he can do to thwart us! But I am not afraid! Oh dear no,
Mahatma-ji, I am not at all fearful! Your secret is not worth ten
seconds' purchase unless it is of use to me!"
"Woman, is your word worth nothing?" asked the Gray Mahatma. "You can
not use what you know and keep the secret too. Let those two men escape,
and the secret will be blown to the winds within the hour."
She laughed outright at him.
"They shall not escape, old raven-in-a-robe!"
Just then some of her women brought a table in, and spread it with
fruit-laden dishes at the far end of the room. Yasmini rose to see
whether all was as she wished it, and I got a chance, not only to look
through the curtains, but also to whisper to King. He shook his head in
reply to my question.
"Could you manage for two, do you think?" he asked; and by that I knew
him for a vastly more than usually brave man. Consenting to what you
know is sure to destroy you, if the other fellow fails, calls for
courage.
"Makes a two to one chance of it," I answered.
"Very well, it's a bet. Give your orders!" said King.
The Mahatma sat rigid in mid-room with closed eyes, as if praying. His
hands were crossed on his breast, and his legs twisted into a nearly
unimaginable knot. He looked almost comatose.
The shutters and the glass windows were open wide to admit the morning
breeze. Nothing was between us and freedom but the fluttering silk
curtains and a drop of about seventy feet into an unknown river.
"Hold my hand," I said, "and jump your limit outward!"
The Gray Mahatma opened one eye and divined our intention.
"Mad!" he exclaimed. "So then that is the end of them!"
He believed what he said, for he sat still. But Yasmini came running,
screaming to her women to prevent us.
King and I took off together, hand-in-hand, and I take my Bible oath
that I looked up, and saw Yasmini and the Gray Mahatma leaning out of
the window to watch us drown!
Of course, seventy feet is nothing much--provided you are used to the
take-off, and know the water, and have a boat waiting handy to pick you
up. But we had none of these advantages, and in addition to that we had
the grievous handicap that King could not swim a stroke.
We took the water feet-first, close together, and that very instant I
knew what we were up against. As we plunged under, we were whirled
against a sunken pole that whipped and swayed in the current. King was
wrenched away from me. When I fought my way to the surface I was already
a hundred yards beyond the palace wall, and there was no sign of King,
although I could see his turban pursuing mine down-stream. We were
caught in the strongest current I had ever striven with.
I don't know what persuaded me to turn and try to swim against it for a
moment. Instinct, I suppose. It was utterly impossible; I was swept
along backward almost as fast as I had been traveling before. But what
the effort did do was to bring me face-up-stream, and so I caught sight
of King clinging to a pole and being bobbed under every time the weight
of water caused the pole to duck. I managed to cling to a pole myself,
although like King it ducked me repeatedly, and it was perfectly evident
that neither of us would be alive in the next ten minutes unless a boat
should come or I should produce enough brawn and brain for two of us.
And there was no boat in sight.
So between ducks I yelled to King to let go and drift down toward me. He
did it; and that, I believe, is the utmost test of cold courage to which
I have ever seen any man subjected; for even a strong swimmer becomes
panic-stricken when he learns he is no longer master of his element.
King had the self-control and pluck to lie still and drift down on me
like a corpse, and I let go the pole in the nick of time to seize him as
his head went under.
Followed a battle royal. Fight how I might, I could not keep both of our
heads out of the water more than half the time, and King very soon lost
the little breath that was left in him. Thereafter, he struggled a bit,
but that did not last long, and presently he became unconscious. I
believed he was dead.
The choice then seemed to lie between drowning too or letting go of him.
I did not dare try the shallows, for ninety per cent. of them are
quicksands in that river, and more than one army has perished in the
effort to force its way across. The only possible safety lay in keeping
to mid-stream and sweeping along with the current until something should
turn up--a boat--a log--possibly a backwater, or even the breakwater of
a bridge.
So I decided to drown, and to annoy the angels of the underworld by
taking as long as possible in the process. And I set to work to fight as
I had never in my whole life fought before. It was like swimming in a
millrace. The current swirled us this and that way, but everlastingly
forward.
Sometimes the current rolled us over and over on each other, but for
fifty per cent. of the time I managed to keep King on top of me, I
swimming on my back and holding him by both arms, head nearly out of the
water. I can't explain exactly why I went to all that trouble, for I was
convinced he was dead.
I remember wondering what the next world was going to be like, and
whether King and I would meet there, or whether we would each be sent to
a sphere suited to our individual requirements--and if so, what my
sphere would be like, and whether either of us would ever meet Yasmini,
and what she would be doing there. But it never occurred to me once that
Athelstan King might be alive yet, or that he and I would be presently
treading mother earth again.
I remember several terrific minutes when a big tree came whirling toward
us in an eddy, and my legs got tangled up in some part of it that was
under water. Then, when I managed to struggle free, King's cotton
loin-cloth became wrapped in a tangle of twigs and I could neither
wrench nor break him free; whenever I tried it I merely sent myself
under and pulled his head after me.
However, that tree suggested the possibility of prolonging the agony a
while.
I seized a branch and tried to take advantage of it, using all my
strength and skill to keep the tree from rolling over on King and
submerging him completely. I can remember when we whirled under the
steel bridge and the tree struck the breakwater of the middle pier; that
checked us for a moment, and instead of sending us under, dragged King
half out of the water, so that he lay after that on top of a branch.
Then the stream got us going again, and swung the butt end of the tree
around so that I was forced by it backward through the arch of the
bridge; and after that for more than a mile we were waltzed round and
round past sand-banks where the alligators lay on the look-out for
half-burned corpses from the burning ghats higher up.
At last we swung round a curve in the river and came on a quiet bay
where they were washing elephants. The current swung the tree inshore to
a point where it struck a submerged sand-bank and stuck there; and there
we lay with the current racing by, and King bobbing up and down with his
head out of water, and I too weak by that time to break off the twig
around which his loin-cloth was wrapped.
Well, there we were; but after a few minutes I raised enough steam for
the whistle at all events. I yelled until my own ear-drums seemed to be
bursting and my lungs ached from the pressure on the water in them, and
after what seemed an eternity one of the mahouts on shore heard me.
Hope surged triumphant! I could see him wave his arm, and already I saw
visions of dry land again, and a disappointed Yama! But I was
overlooking one important point: we were in India, where rescues are not
undertaken in a hurry.
He called a conference. I saw all the mahouts gather together in one
place and stare at us and talk. They swung their arms as they argued. I
don't know what argument it was that finally appealed to the mahouts,
but after an interminable session one of them fetched a long rope and
nine or ten of them climbed on the backs of three big elephants. They
worked their way a little bit upstream, and then came as close as the
elephants dared. One of the big brutes felt his way cautiously to within
twenty yards, and then threw up his trunk and refused to budge another
inch.
At that a lean, naked, black man stood up on his rump and paid out the
rope down-stream. He had to make nine or ten attempts before it finally
floated within reach of my hand. Then I made it fast to the tree and,
taking King in my right arm, started to work my way along it. It was
just as well I did that, and got clear of the branch; for the mahouts
passed the rope around the elephant's neck and set him to hauling; he
rolled the tree over and over, and that would surely have been the end
of King and me if we had been within reach of the overturning branches.
As it was I clung to the rope and the elephant hauled the lot of us high
and dry.