Odd places and peoples lie—for the most part unsuspected by the rest of
the world—tucked away solitary and secure in the uncharted wilds beyond
the Himalayas: tiny isolated kingdoms, each knowing naught but itself,
and unknown of all others, strongholds of primitive peoples and of old
primitive ways, elaborately customed, impregnably individual—wonderful,
incalculable domains to which few white travelers journey, from whose
sullen bourne none return.
The Himalayas are cut and gashed by a thousand fissures and natural
passes, and between those loopholes in the great mountain range lie many
a hidden principality, cupped in mountains and rocks as impenetrably as
the lair of some skilful outlaw often is safe from the utmost vigilance
of the police of the American Northwest.
Such was the Kingdom of Rukh: its prince keeping his state, his people
keeping their ways, exactly as they did long before the days of Genghis
Khan, speaking their own guttural language, worshiping their own gods,
obeying their prince in all ways and their priests in some—for their
prince was more to them, more loved, more feared, tenfold more obeyed
than all their small man-made heaven of gods. Who were they? What were
they? Whence had they come? What was their place in the great interknit
mosaic of mankind? None can say. To trace them quite definitely to any
outside kinship were hopeless. Yet most of their faces were somewhat
Mongolian, with here and there one more of Aryan type—always in some
tribesman of power and place.
It was an absolute monarchy, if ever earthly sway and power were
absolute—if the word “absolute” itself has any justification of
veracity.
The Raja of Rukh ruled with an unquestioned despotism no Western monarch
dreams of, and of which but few in the past ever have dreamed, and none
ever has attained.
So often is Asian princeship thus that it would call for no remark in
telling of Rukh, were it not for one odd fact. Of all the natives of
little Rukh, this almost omnipotent ruler was the sole one who had
smirched his birthright, and sinned against the more-than-religion of
the race. For the Raja had traveled, he had broken strange,
unconsecrated breads, eaten strange, polluted meats. He had lived in
Europe, and now in the fortress-home to which he had come back to his
own he in his own person mingled—superficially at least—ways of Europe
with the ways of his fathers. At this his people had wondered a little,
but not one had doubted or questioned, unless indeed Toluk Yap, the high
priest, doubted now and then. And not even Toluk Yap ever had
questioned. For the Raja was god in Rukh, and the gods but satellites of
his power and rank.
Too, all that he occasionally did, ate, or wore that might have hinted
to you or to me of Pall Mall or the Champs Elysées, seemed to his
enslaved, docile people but an eccentricity of his individuality. It
might have stood to them for defilement, his occasional aping of
European ways, and have disgruntled and lashed them to cut-throat fury
and open rebellion, had they sensed it for what it was. But that they
could ill do, since they did not know or suspect that there was a
Europe. He had been away, and he had come back to them; that was all
they knew; and that he had come back was all they cared.
He had brought back with him one grotesque curio at which they gaped for
a time, and then ignored with stolid disgust as far as they could: a
white ape of a man—if it was a man—who, little heed as they paid it,
gave them their first unformed film of idea that somewhere beyond the
mountains that bounded and ended their world there were places on the
earth that were bleached—where trees and reptiles, rocks and sky, if
trees, reptiles and stones and sky there were, all were bleached white
by the torture and misfortune of existing so far from Rukh, as the tawn
of the leopard was sometimes bleached by the lash of the high Himalayan
cold.
Such prolonged absence as this Asian prince had allowed himself well
might have cost him his throne. Scarcely a monarch of Europe—with
cables and cinemas to remind them—would dare to leave his people so
long, and it seems a far rasher thing for a prince to risk whose
kingship and throne lay on the more quickly shifting sands where every
prime minister is a would-be supplanter, almost every half-brother a
usurper at core. But Rukh had known whom to trust and entrust, and had
known when to go, and when to come back.
Unknown to the geographers of the Occident, unsuspected in Whitehall and
Westminster, the Kingdom of Rukh lay snug in the mountains as it has,
perhaps, since Adam was young. And its despot’s rule was absolute. The
King could do no wrong. For the Royal House stood by the people, and the
people stood by the Royal House in the Kingdom of Rukh.
A grim and dun-colored place it was, a region of gaunt and almost
treeless mountains, all of them bleak, barren and gray of tone except
where the clear atmosphere lent them some tint of its hot blue. Clinging
fiercely to the fierce mountain wall, a mile or more away from the
temple precincts, was a vast barbaric palace, its long stretches of glum
unbroken masonry crowned and relieved by endless arcades and turrets;
not two alike, yet all in key and consonance—a fortress-palace telling
of centuries of human labor, of long generations of wealth and lordship.
How many brown hands had lifted it up stone by stone, how many brown
muscle-knotted backs had bent and strained at its making, is beyond
compute. Millions of peasants must have been born to its hewing and
heaving and making, and have died at it. Here in its desert of rocks,
its forest of mountains, it spoke of suzerainty irresistible and
unresisted as nothing in the West, and little in the East, does, a
suzerainty so enormous, impossible ever in Europe, almost unprecedented
in Asia, that it well-nigh told a human power the one thing that human
power never is: omnipotent.
In almost the one level place in the principality was builded the
temple, and housed the gods. This level place was small, a scant
platform of earth wedged between two masses of rock. In the rock on the
East the cave-temple had been roughly hewn. The thick, ungainly pillars,
rudely carved, paint centuries old still showing faintly here and there,
served to divide the cave roughly into three parts. Between the pillars
in the middle section was a seated stone figure, a six-armed goddess,
forbidding, ferocious of aspect, colored face, arms and rough indicated
robes a dark and sinister green. On a low slab of altar before her feet
newly severed heads of six or seven goats still reeked from the priestly
knife, blood still warm clotting about them, and one—the last
knifed—still twitched and shivered in symbol of recent pain. Untidy and
moldering wreaths and handfuls of flowers decorated the temple’s
honeycombed walls, and lay on its spattered floor. Blood dripped on
marigolds, and bats flew cautiously here and there. How flowers had been
come by in this desolate place of gaunt, bare rock, it were hard to
guess. But the floral offerings were there. And there were gardens in
Rukh, almost miracles of one man’s compulsion and his people’s
persistence. The Raja had his gardens in the keeps of his palace, the
priests and a petted woman or two had theirs contrived in some split in
the mountains of rock, places of verdure and bloom as artificial as the
hanging gardens of Babylon, and much more surprising. And the Raja had
his runners. What the Raja of Rukh would, he commanded; what he
commanded was fulfilled.
The open space before the open temple formed between the two rock-masses
a rudely paved forecourt to the temple. It was bordered by a sparse
company of smaller idols, weather-proof, it’s to be hoped, and probably
too comparatively insignificant to be housed with the six-armed
monstrosity in the blood-spattered, bat-infested cave. Three
round-headed stone posts stood near the outer lesser gods, and were
painted green—whether in an economy of paint left over from the great
Green Goddess, or in the wearing of her livery, were idle guesswork for
a Westerner.
Mountain paths wound off behind the rock, and through the low, listless
shrubs that grew impassively beside them, long narrow paths winding in
every direction, that the overlord’s runners might hasten the quicker
and surer wherever he willed.
There were few words in Rukh as a rule. The people worked too hard to
talk overmuch. Their temple rites were nearly their only social
gatherings; and the temple rites watched and done, they were wont to
disperse almost in silence, lumbering stolidly back to labor, food or
sleep.
But to-day the worshipers were lingering excitedly in the courtyard,
watching wide-eyed something up in the air, a great gray and silver bird
of prey, a strange fish-like bird with amazing markings of blue and red
on its silver belly—only the ordinary identification of such birds, but
neither Arabic nor Roman numerals were common sights in Rukh—a horrible
monster bird of prey whose like they never had seen or heard tell of,
never had dreamed of when nightmares tossed their hard-earned sleep; and
it was swooping down on them with a hideous cracking whizz.
“Oo-ae!” a native cried.
“Oo-ae!” another sobbed.
“Oo-ae! Oo-ae!” they all cried then in mingled gutturals of dismay and
despair.
It was a pathetically hideous group of unkempt, squat, frightened
hillsmen, high-cheeked, rather Mongol in type, strong-limbed, stupid of
face (not Mongol in that), adding nothing of color to the dark drab
place, for their rough, almost unmade garments were somber and dark. A
man of higher stature and better garments stood amongst them, his skin
was lighter, his features more of Aryan type, his eye-sockets wider,
more open, an embroidered fur cap on his head, a marigold stuck in its
beads. He had some evident authority over them—Yazok the temple
priest—for when one turned to flee:
“Na-yam!” ordered the priest, and the man did not go. A braver raised
his weapon—they most of them were armed—and again Yazok commanded
“Na-yam!” and the fellow let his lifted arm and the weapon he held fall
to his side.
On and down swooped the monster bird. The priest watched it, silent and
motionless, but with a tense look of acrid dislike on his face, and a
glance of patient contempt now and then to the huddled, shivering group
which drew closer and closer together, pressing farther away to the edge
of the place, closer and closer to him, ejaculating, “Oo-ae! Oo-ae!”
The bird had lit.
It had finished its flight just back of the temple. One terrible
talon—or was it the tip of its great wing?—projected threateningly
over the mass of rocks at the west. The aeroplane that had risen from
Dehra Dun so surely and lightly, while the band had played “Good-by, I’m
going to leave you now,” had made a forced landing on the inhospitable
slope of unknown Rukh, a landing so imperatively forced that almost it
might be termed a crash.