THE CAVE OF BONES
The Gray Mahatma stood watching the crowd until the last sweating
nondescript had obediently disappeared, and then returned into the
temple to dismiss King and me.
"Come with us," King urged him; but he shook his head, looking more
lionlike than ever, for in his yellow eyes now there was a blaze as of
conquest.
He carried his head like a man who has looked fear in the face and
laughed at it.
"I have my assignation to keep," he said quietly.
"You mean with death?" King asked him, and he nodded.
"Don't be too sure!"
King's retort was confident, and his smile was like the surgeon's who
proposes to reassure his patient in advance of the operation. But the
Mahatma's mind was set on the end appointed for him, and there was
neither grief nor discontent in his voice as he answered.
"There is no such thing as being too sure."
"I shall use the telegraph, of course," King assured him. "If necessary
to save your life I shall have you arrested."
The Mahatma smiled.
"Have you money?" he asked pleasantly.
"I shan't need money. I can send an official telegram."
"I meant for your own needs," said the Mahatma.
"I think I know where to borrow a few rupees," King answered. "They'll
trust me for the railway tickets."
"Pardon me, my friend. It was my fault that your bag and clothes got
separated from you. You had money in the bag. That shall be adjusted.
Never mind how much money. Let us see how much is here."
That seemed a strange way of adjusting accounts, but there was logic in
it nevertheless. There would be no use in offering us more than was
available, and as for himself, he was naked except for the saffron
smock. He had no purse, nor any way of hiding money on his person.
He opened his mouth wide and made a noise exactly like a bronze bell.
Some sort of priest came running in answer to the summons and showed no
surprise when given peremptory orders in a language of which I did not
understand one word.
Within two minutes the priest was back again bearing a tray that was
simply heaped with money, as if he had used the thing for a scoop to get
the stuff out of a treasure chest. There was all kinds--gold, silver,
paper, copper, nickel--as if those strange people simply threw into a
chest all that they received exactly as they received it.
King took a hundred-rupee note from the tray, and the Gray Mahatma waved
the rest aside. The priest departed, and a moment later I heard the
clash and chink of money falling on money; by the sound it fell quite a
distance, as if the treasure chest were an open cellar.
"Now," said the Gray Mahatma, placing a hand on the shoulders of each of
us. "Go, and forget. It is not yet time to teach the world our sciences.
India is not yet ripe for freedom. I urged them to move too soon. Go, ye
two, and tell none what ye have seen, for men will only call you fools
and liars. Above all, never seek to learn the secrets, for that means
death--and there are such vastly easier deaths! Good-bye."
He turned and was gone in a moment, stepping sidewise into the shadows.
We could not find him again, although we hunted until the temple priests
came and made it obvious that they would prefer our room to our company.
They did not exactly threaten us, but refused to answer questions, and
pointed at the open door, as if they thought that was what we were
looking for.
So we sought the sunlight, which was as refreshing after the temple
gloom as a cold bath after heat, and turned first of all in the
direction of Mulji Singh's apothecary, hoping to find that Yasmini had
lied, or had been mistaken about that bag.
But Mulji Singh, although fabulously glad to see us, had no bag nor
anything to say about its disappearance. He would not admit that we had
left it there.
"You have been where men go mad, _sahibs_," was all the comment he would
make.
"Don't you understand that we'll protect you against these people?" King
insisted.
For answer to that Mulji Singh hunted about among the shelves for a
minute, and presently set down a little white paper package on a corner
of the table.
"Do you recognize that, _sahib_?" he asked.
"Deadly aconite," said King, reading the label.
"Can you protect me against it?"
"You're safe if you let it alone," King answered unguardedly.
"That is a very wise answer, _sahib_," said Mulji Singh, and set the
aconite back on the highest shelf in the darkest corner out of reach.
So, as we could get nothing more out of Mulji Singh except a tonic that
he said would preserve us both from fever, we sought the telegraph
office, making as straight for it as the winding streets allowed. The
door was shut. With my ear to a hole in the shutters I could hear loud
snores within. King picked up a stone and started to thunder on the door
with it.
The ensuing din brought heads to every upper window, and rows of other
heads, like trophies of a ghastly hunt, began to decorate the edges of
the roofs. Several people shouted to us, but King went on hammering, and
at last a sleepy telegraph babu, half-in and half-out of his black
alpaca jacket, opened to us.
"The wire is broken," he said, and slammed the door in our faces.
King picked up the stone and beat another tattoo.
"How long has the wire been broken?" he demanded.
"Since morning."
"Who sent the last message?"
"Maharajah Jihanbihar sahib."
"In full or in code?"
"In code."
He slammed the door again and bolted it, and whether or not he really
fell asleep, within the minute he was giving us a perfect imitation of a
hog snoring. What was more, the crowd began to take its cue from the
babu, and a roof-tile broke at our feet as a gentle reminder that we had
the town's permission to depart. Without caste-marks, and in those
shabby, muddy, torn clothes, we were obviously undesirables.
So we made for the railroad station, where, since we had money, none
could refuse to sell us third-class tickets. But, though we tried, we
could not send a telegram from there either, although King took the
station babu to one side and proved to him beyond argument that he knew
the secret service signs. The babu was extremely sorry, but the wire was
down. The trains were being run for the present on the old block system,
one train waiting in a station until the next arrived, and so on.
So, although King sent a long telegram in code from a junction before we
reached Lahore, nothing had been done about it by the time we had
changed into Christian clothes at our hotel and called on the head of
the Intelligence Department. And by then it was a day and a half since
we had seen the Gray Mahatma.
The best part of another day was wasted in consulting and convincing men
on whose knees the peace of India rested. They were naturally nervous
about invading the sacred privacy of Hindu temples, and still more so of
investigating Yasmini's doings in that nest of hers. There were men
among them who took no stock in such tales as ours anyhow--hard and fast
Scotch pragmatists, who doubted the sanity of any man who spoke
seriously of anything that they themselves had not heard, seen, smelt,
felt and tasted. Also there was one man who had been jealous of
Athelstan King all his years in the service, and he jumped at the chance
of obstructing him at last.
After we had told our story at least twenty times, more and more men
being brought in to listen to it, who only served to increase
incredulity and water down belief, King saw fit to fling his even temper
to the winds and try what anger could accomplish. By that time there
were eighteen of us, sitting around a mahogany table at midnight, and
King brought his fist down with a crash that split the table and
offended the dignity of than one man.
"Confound the lot of you!" he thundered. "I've been in the service
twenty-one years and I've repeatedly brought back scores of wilder tales
than this. But this is the first time that I've been disbelieved. I'm
not in the service now. So here's my ultimatum! You take this matter
up--at once--or I take it up on my own account! For one thing, I'll
write a full account in all the papers of your refusal to investigate.
Suit yourselves!"
They did not like it; but they liked his alternative less; and there
were two or three men in the room, besides, who were secretly on King's
side, but hardly cared to betray their opinions in the face of so much
opposition. They did not care to seem too credulous. It was they who
suggested with a half-humorous air of concession that no harm could be
done by sending a committee of investigation to discover whether it were
true that living men were held for experimental purposes beneath that
Tirthanker temple; and one by one the rest yielded, somebody, however,
imposing the ridiculous proviso that the Brahmin priests must be
consulted first.
So, what with one thing and another, and one delay and another, and
considering that the wire had been repaired and no less than thirty
Brahmin priests were in the secret, the outcome was scarcely surprising.
Ten of us, including four policemen, called on the Maharajah Jihanbihar
five full days after King and I had last seen the Mahatma; and after we
had wasted half a morning in pleasantries and jokes about stealing a
ride on his elephant, we rode in the Maharajah's two-horse landaus to
the Tirthanker temple, where a priest, who looked blankly amazed,
consented at once to be our guide through the sacred caverns.
But he said they were no longer sacred. He assured us they had not been
used at all for centuries. And with a final word of caution against
cobras he led the way, swinging a lantern with no more suggestion of
anything unusual than if he had been our servant seeing us home on a
dark night.
He even offered to take us through the cobra tunnel, but an acting
deputy high commissioner turned on a flashlight and showed those
goose-neck heads all bobbing in the dark, and that put an end to all
talk of that venture, although the priest was cross-examined as to his
willingness to go down there, and said he was certainly willing, and
everybody voted that "deuced remarkable," but "didn't believe the
beggar" nevertheless.
He showed us the "Pool of Terrors," filled with sacred alligators that
he assured us were fed on goats provided by the superstitious townsfolk.
He said that they were so tame that they would not attack a man, and
offered to prove it by walking in. Since that entailed no risk to the
committee they permitted him to do it, and he walked alone across the
causeway that had given King and me such trouble a few nights before.
Far from attacking him, the alligators turned their backs and swam away.
The committee waxed scornful and made numbers of jokes about King and me
of a sort that a man doesn't listen to meekly is a rule. So I urged the
committee to try the same trick, and they all refused. Then a rather
bright notion occurred to me, and I stepped in myself, treading gingerly
along the underwater causeway. And I was hardly in the water before the
brutes all turned and came hurrying back--which took a little of the
steam out of that committee of investigation. They became less free with
their opinions.
So we all walked around the alligator pool by a passage that the priest
showed us, and one by one we entered all the caves in which King and I
had seen the fakirs and the victims undergoing torture.
The caves were the same, except that they were cleaner, and the ashes
had all been washed away. There was nobody in them; not one soul, nor
even a sign to betray that any one had been there for a thousand years.
There were the same cells surrounding the cavern in which the old fellow
had sat reading from a roll of manuscript; but the cells were absolutely
empty. I suggested taking flashlight photographs and fingerprint
impressions of the doors and walls. But nobody had any magnesium, and
the policemen said the doors might have been scrubbed in any case, so
what was the use. And the priest with the lantern sneered, and the
others laughed with him, so that King and I were made to look foolish
once more.
Then we all went up to the temple courtyard, and descended the stairs
through the hole in the floor of the cupola-covered stone platform. And
there stood the lingam on its altar at the foot of the stairs, and there
were the doors just as we had left them, looking as if they had been
pressed into the molten stone by an enormous thumb. I thought we were
going to be able to prove something of our story at last.
But not so. The priest opened the first door by kicking on it with his
toe, and one by one we filed along the narrow passage in pitch darkness
that was broken only by the swinging lantern carried by the man in front
and the occasional flashes of an electric torch. King, one pace ahead of
me, swore to himself savagely all the way, and although I did not feel
as keenly as he did about it, because it meant a lot less to me what the
committee might think, I surely did sympathize with him.
If we had come sooner it was beyond belief that we should not have
caught those experts at their business, or at any rate in process of
removing the tools of their strange trade. There must have been some
mechanism connected with their golden light, for instance, but we could
discover neither light nor any trace of the means of making it.
Naturally the committee refused to believe that there had ever been any.
The caverns were there, just as we had seen them, only without their
contents. The granite table, on which we had seen Benares, London and
New York, was gone. The boxes and rolls of manuscript had vanished from
the cavern in which the little ex-fat man had changed lead into gold
before our eyes. The pit in the center of the cavern in which the
fire-walkers had performed, still held ashes, but the ashes were cold
and had either been slaked with water, or else water had been admitted
into the pit from below. At any rate, the pit was flooded, and nobody
wanted the job of wading into it to look for apparatus. So there may
have been paraphernalia hidden under those ashes for aught that I know.
It was a perfectly ridiculous investigation; its findings were not worth
a moment's attention of any genuine scientist. Subsequently, newspaper
editors wrote glibly of the gullibility of the human mind, with King's
name and mine in full-sized letters in the middle of the article.
About the only circumstance that the investigating committee could not
make jokes about was the cleanliness of all the passages and chambers.
There was no dust, no dirt anywhere. You could have eaten off the floor,
and there was no way of explaining how the dust of ages had not
accumulated, unless those caverns had been occupied and thoroughly
cleaned within a short space of time.
The air down there was getting foul already. There was no trace of the
ventilation that had been so obvious when King and I were there before.
Nevertheless, no trace could be found of any ventilating shaft; and that
was another puzzle--how to account for the cleanliness and lack of air
combined, added to the fact that such air as there was was still too
fresh to be centuries old.
One fat fool on the committee wiped the sweat from the back of his neck
in the lantern light and proposed at last that the committee should find
that King and I had been the victims of delusion--perhaps of hypnotism.
I asked him point blank what he knew about hypnotism. He tried to
side-step the question, but I pinned him down to it, and he had to
confess that he knew nothing about it whatever; whereat I asked each
member of the committee whether or not he could diagnose hypnotism, and
they all had to plead ignorance. So nobody seconded that motion.
King had lapsed into a sort of speechless rage. He had long been used to
having his bare word accepted on any point whatever, having labored all
his military years to just that end, craving that integrity of vision
and perception that is so vastly more than honesty alone, that the
blatant unbelief of these opinionative asses overwhelmed him for the
moment.
There was not one man on the committee who had ever done anything more
dangerous than shooting snipe, nor one who had seen anything more
inexplicable than spots before his eyes after too much dinner. Yet they
mocked King and me, in a sort of way that monkeys in the tree-tops mock
a tiger.
Their remarks were on a par with those the cave-man must have used when
some one came from over the sky-line and told them that fire could be
made by rubbing bits of wood together. They recalled to us what the Gray
Mahatma had said about Galileo trying to make the Pope believe that the
earth moved around the sun. The Pope threatened to burn Galileo for
heresy; they only offered to pillory us with public ridicule; so the
world has gone forward a little bit.
"Let's go," said somebody at last. "I've had enough of this. We're
trespassing, as well as heaping indignity on estimable Hindus."
"Go!" retorted King. "I wish you would! Leave Ramsden and me alone in
here. There's a cavern we haven't seen yet. You've formed your opinions.
Go and publish them; they'll interest your friends."
He produced a flashlight of his own and led the way along the passage, I
following. The committee hesitated, and then one by one came after us,
more anxious, I think, to complete the fiasco than to unearth facts.
But the door that King tried to open would not yield. It was the only
door in all those caverns that had refused to swing open at the first
touch, and this one was fastened so rigidly that it might have been one
with the frame for all the movement our blows on it produced. Our guide
swore he did not know the secret of it, and our letter of authority
included no permission to break down doors or destroy property in any
way at all.
It looked as though we were blocked, and the committee were all for the
air and leaving that door unopened. King urged them to go and leave
it--told them flatly that neither they nor the world would be any wiser
for anything whatever that they might do--was as beastly rude, in fact,
as he knew how to be; with the result that they set their minds on
seeing it through, for fear lest we should find something after all that
would serve for an argument against their criticism.
Neither King nor I were worried by the letter of the committee's orders,
and I went to look for a rock to break the door down with. They
objected, of course, and so did the priest, but I told them they might
blame the violence on me, and furthermore suggested that if they
supposed they were able to prevent me they might try. Whereat the priest
did discover a way of opening the door, and that was the only action in
the least resembling the occult that any of us saw that day.
There were so many shadows, and they so deep, that a knob or trigger of
some kind might easily have been hidden in the darkness beyond our view;
but the strange part was that there was no bolt to the door, nor any
slot into which a bolt could slide. I believe the door was held shut by
the pressure of the surrounding rock, and that the priest knew some way
of releasing it.
We entered a bare cavern which was apparently an exact cube of about
forty feet. It was the only cavern in all that system of caverns whose
walls, corners, roof and floor were all exactly smooth. It contained no
furniture of any kind.
But exactly in the middle of the floor, with hands and feet pointing to
the four corners of the cavern, was a grown man's skeleton, complete to
the last tooth. King had brought a compass with him, and if that was
reasonably accurate then the arms and legs of the skeleton were exactly
oriented, north, south, east and west; there was an apparent inaccuracy
of a little less than five degrees, which was no doubt attributable to
the pocket instrument.
One of the committee members tried to pick a bone up, and it fell to
pieces in his fingers. Another man touched a rib, and that broke
brittlely. I picked up the broken piece of rib and held it in the rays
of King's flashlight.
"You remember?" said King in an undertone to me. "You recall the Gray
Mahatma's words? 'There will be nothing left for the alligators!'
There's neither fat nor moisture in that bone, it's like chalk. See?"
He squeezed it in his fingers and it crumbled.
"Huh! This fellow has been dead for centuries," said somebody. "He can't
have been a Hindu, or they'd have burned him. No use wondering who _he_
was; there's nothing to identify him with--no hair, no clothing--nothing
but dead bone."
"Nothing! Nothing whatever!" said the priest with a dry laugh, and began
kicking the bones here and there all over the cavern. They crumbled as
his foot struck them, and turned to dust as he trod on them--all except
the teeth. As he kicked the skull across the floor the teeth scattered,
but King and I picked up a few of them, and I have mine yet--two molars
and two incisors belonging to a man, who to my mind was as much an
honest martyr as any in Fox's book.
"Well, Mr. King," asked one of the committee in his choicest note of
sarcasm, "have you any more marvels to exhibit, or shall we adjourn?"
"Adjourn by all means," King advised him.
"We know it all, eh?"
"Truly, you know it all," King answered without a smile.
Then speaking sidewise in an undertone to me:
"And you and I know nothing. That's a better place to start from,
Ramsden. I don't know how you feel, but I'm going to track their science
down until I'm dead or master of it. The very highest knowledge we've
attained is ignorance compared to what these fellows showed us. I'm
going to discover their secret or break my neck!"