Nothing new! Nothing new!
Nowhere to hide when a reckoning's due,
But right earns right, and wrong gets rue,
With nothing deducted or given in lieu;
And neither the War God, I, nor you
Ever could make one lie come true!
Vale, Ceasar!
As Yasmini herself had admitted, she headed from point to point after a
manner of her own.
“You know where is Dar es Salaam?” she asked.
“East Africa,” said King.
“How far is that from here?”
“Two or three thousand miles.”
“And English war-ships watch the Persian Gulf and all the seas from
India to Aden?”
King nodded.
“Have the English any ships that dive under water?”
He nodded again.
“In these waters?”
“I think not. I'm not sure, but I think not.”
“The grenades you have seen, and the rifles and cartridges were sent by
the Germans to Dar es Salaam, to suppress a rising of African natives.
Does it begin to grow clear to you, my friend?”
He smiled as well as nodded this time.
“Muhammad Anim used to wait with a hundred women at a certain place on
the seashore. What he found on the beach there he made the women carry
on their heads to Khinjan. And by the time he had hidden what he found
and returned from Khinjan to the beach, there were more things to
find and bring. So they worked, he and the Germans, for I know not how
long--with the English watching the seas as on land lean wolves comb the
valleys.
“Did you ever hear of the big whale in the Gulf?”
“No,” said King. That was natural. There are as a rule about as many
whales as salmon in the Persian Gulf.
“A German who came to me in Delhi--he who first showed me pictures of
an underwater ship--said that at that time the officers and crew of one
such ship were getting great practise. Do you suppose their practise
made whales take refuge in the Gulf?”
“How should I know, Princess?”
“Because I heard a story later, of an English cruiser on its way up
the Gulf, that collided with a whale. The shock of hitting it bent many
steel plates, and the cruiser had to put back for repair. It must have
been a very big whale, for there was much oil on the sea for a long time
afterward. So I heard.
“And no more dynamite came--nor rifles--nor cartridges, although the
Germans had promised more. And orders for Muhammad Anim that had been
said to come by sea came now by way of Bagdad, carried by pilgrims
returning from the holy places. I know that because I intercepted a
letter and threw its bearer into Earth's Drink to save Muhammad Anim the
trouble of asking questions.”
“What were the terms of the German bargain?” King asked her. “What
stipulations did they make?”
“With the tribes? None! They were too wise. A jihad was decided on in
Germany's good time; and when that time should come ten rifles in the
'Hills' and a thousand cartridges would mean not only a hundred dead
Englishmen, but ten times that number busily engaged. Why bargain when
there was no need? A rifle is what it is. The 'Hills' are the 'Hills'!
“Tell me about your lamp oil, then,” he said. “You burn enough oil in
Khinjan Caves to light Bombay! That does not come by submarine. The
sirkar knows how much of everything goes up the Khyber. I have seen
the printed lists myself--a few hundred cans of kerosene--a few score
gallons of vegetable oil, and all bound for farther north. There isn't
enough oil pressed among the 'Hills' to keep these caves going for a
day. Where does it all come from?”
She laughed, as a mother laughs at a child's questions, finding
delicious enjoyment in instructing him.
“There are three villages, not two days' march from Khabul, where men
have lived for centuries by pressing oil for Khinjan Caves,” she said.
“The Sleeper fetched his oil thence. There are the bones of a camel in a
cave I did not show you, and beside the camel are the leather bags still
in which the oil was carried. Nowadays it comes in second-hand cans
and drums. The Sleeper left gold in here. Those who kept the Sleeper's
secret paid for the oil in gold. No Afghan troubled why oil was needed,
so long as gold paid for it, until Abdurrahman heard the story. He made
a ten-year-long effort to learn the secret, but he failed. When he cut
off the supply of oil for a time, there was a rebellion so close to
Khabul gates that he thought better of it. Of gold and Abdurrahman, gold
was the stronger. And I know where the Sleeper dug his gold!”
They sat in silence for a long while after that, she looking at the
table, with its ink and pens and paper, and he thinking, with hands
clasped round one knee; for it is wiser to think than to talk, even when
a woman is near who can read thoughts that are not guarded.
“Most disillusionments come simply,” King said at last. “D'you know,
Princess, what has kept the sirkar from really believing in Khinjan
Caves?”
She shook her head. “The gods!” she said. “The gods can blindfold
governments and whole peoples as easily as they can make us see!”
“It was the fact that they knew what provisions and what oil and what
necessities of life went up the Khyber and came down it. They knew a
place such as this was said to be could not be. They knew it! They could
prove it!”
Yasmini nodded.
“Let it be a lesson to you, Princess!”
She stared, and her fiery-opal eyes began to change and glow. She began
to twist her golden hair round the dagger hilt again. But always
her feet were still on the footstool of the throne, as if she
knew--knew--knew that she stood on firm foundations. No sirkar ever
doubted less than she, and the suggestions in King's little homily did
not please her. She looked toward the table again--then again into his
eyes.
“Athelstan!” she said. “It sounds like a king's name! What was the
Sleeper's name? I have often wondered! I found no name in all the books
about Rome that seemed to fit him. None of the names I mouthed could
make me dream as the sight of him could. But, Athelstan! That is a
name like a king's! It seems to fit him, too! Was there such a name, in
Rome?”
“No,” he said.
“What does it mean?” she asked him.
“Slow of resolution!”
She clapped her hands.
“Another sign!” she laughed. “The gods love me! There always is a
sign when I need one! Slow of resolution, art thou? I will speed thy
resolution, Well-beloved! You were quick to change from King, of the
Khyber Rifle Regiment, to Kurram Khan. Change now into my warrior--my
dear lord--my King again!”
She rose, with arms outstretched to him. All her dancer's art, her
untamed poetry, her witchery, were expressed in a movement. Her eyes
melted as they met his. And since he stood up, too, for manner's sake,
they were eye to eye again--almost lip to lip. Her sweet breath was in
his nostrils.
In another moment she was in his arms, clinging to him, kissing him. And
if any man has felt on his lips the kiss of all the scented glamour of
the East, let him tell what King's sensations were. Let Ceasar, who was
kissed by Cleopatra, come to life and talk of it!
King's arm is strong, and he did not stand like an idol. His head might
swim, but she, too, tasted the delirium of human passion loosed and
given for a mad swift minute. If his heart swelled to bursting, so must
hers have done.
“I have needed you!” she whispered. “I have been all alone! I have
needed you!”
Then her lips sought his again, and neither spoke.
Neither knew how long it was before she began to understand that he, not
she, was winning. The human answer to her appeal was full. He gave her
all she asked of admiration, kiss for kiss. And then--her arms did not
cling so tightly, although his strong right arm was like a stanchion.
Because he knew that he, not she, was winning, he picked her up in his
arms and kissed her as if she were a child. And then, because he knew he
had won, he set her on her feet on the footstool of the throne, and even
pitied her.
She felt the pity. As she tossed the hair back over her shoulder her
eyes glowed with another meaning--dangerous--like a tiger's glare.
“You pity me? You think because I love you, you can feed my love on a
plate to the Indian government? You think my love is a weapon to use
against me? Your love for me may wait for a better time? You are not so
wise as I thought you, Athelstan!”
But he knew he had won. His heart was singing down inside him as it had
not sung since he left India behind. But he stood quite humbly before
her, for had he not kissed her?
“You think a kiss is the bond between us? You mistake! You forget! The
kiss, my Athelstan, was the fruit, not the seed! The seed came first! If
I loosed you--if I set you free--you would never dare go back to India!”
He scarcely heard her. He knew he had won. His heart was like a bird,
fluttering wildly. He knew that the next step would be shown him, and
for the present he had time and grace to pity her, knowing how he would
have felt if she had won. Besides, he had kissed her, and he had not
lied. Each kiss had been a tribute of admiration, for was she not
splendid--amazing--more to be desired than wine? He stood with bowed
head, lest the triumph in his eyes offend her. Yet if any one had asked
him how he knew that he had won, he never could have told.
“If you were to go back to India except as its conqueror, they would
strip the buttons from your uniform and tear your medals off and shoot
you in the back against a wall! My signature is known in India and I am
known. What I write will be believed. Rewa Gunga shall take a letter.
He shall take two--four--witnesses. He shall see them on their way and
shall give them the letter when they reach the Khyber and shall send
them into India with it. Have no fear. Bull-with-a-beard shall not
intercept them, as I have intercepted his men. When Rewa Gunga shall
return and tell me he saw my letter on its way down the Khyber, then we
shall talk again about pity--you and I! Come!”
She took his arm, as if her threats had been caresses. Triumph shone
from her eyes. She tossed her brave chin and laughed at him, only
encouraged to greater daring by his attitude.
“Why don't you kill me?” she asked, and though his answer surprised her,
it did not make her angry.
“It would do no good,” he said simply.
“Would you kill me if you thought it would do good?”
“Certainly!” he said.
She laughed at that as if it were the greatest joke she had ever heard.
It set her in the best humor possible, and by the time they reached the
ebony table and she had taken the pen and dipped it in the ink, she was
chuckling to herself as if the one good joke had grown into a hundred.
She wrote in Urdu. It is likely that for all her knowledge of the spoken
English tongue she was not so swift or ready with the trick of writing
it. She had said herself that a babu read English books to her aloud.
But she wrote in Urdu with an easy flowing hand, and in two minutes she
had thrown sand on the letter and had given it to King to read. It was
not like a woman's letter. It did not waste a word.
“Your Captain King has been too much trouble. He has
taken money from the Germans. He adopted native dress.
He called himself Kurram Khan. He slew his own brother
at night in the Khyber Pass. These men will say that
he carried the head to Khinjan, and their word is true,
for I, Yasmini, saw. He used the head for a passport,
to obtain admittance. He proclaims a jihad! He urges
invasion of India! He held up his brother's head
before five thousand men and boasted of the murder.
The next you shall hear of your Captain King of the
Khyber Rifles, he will be leading a jihad into India.
You would have better trusted me. Yasmini.”
He read it and passed it back to her.
“They will not disbelieve me,” she said, triumphant as the very devil
over a branded soul all hot. “They will be sure you are mad, and they
will believe the witnesses!”
He bowed. She sealed the letter and addressed it with only a scrawled
mark on its outer cover. That, by the way, was utter insolence, for the
mark would be understood at any frontier post by the officer commanding.
“Rewa Gunga shall start with this to-day!” she said, with more amusement
than malice. After that she was still for a moment, watching his eyes,
at a loss to understand his carelessness. He seemed strangely unabased.
His folded arms were not defiant, but neither were they yielding.
“I love you, Athelstan!” she said. “Do you love me?”
“I think you are very beautiful, Princess!”
“Beautiful? I know I am beautiful. But is that all?”
“Clever!” he added.
She began to drum with the golden dagger hilt on the table, and to
look dangerous, which is not to infer by any means that she looked less
lovely.
“Do you love me?” she asked.
“Forgive me, Princess, but you forget. I was born east of Mecca, but my
folk were from the West. We are slower to love than some other nations.
With us love is more often growth, less often surrender at first sight.
I think you are wonderful.”
She nodded and tucked the sealed letter in her bosom.
“It shall go,” she said darkly, “and another letter with it. They looted
your brother's body. In his pocket they found the note you wrote him,
and that you asked him to destroy! That will be evidence. That will
convince! Come!”
He followed her through leather curtains again and down the dark
passage into the outer chamber; and the illusion was of walking behind a
golden-haired Madonna to some shrine of Innocence. Her perfume was like
incense; her manner perfect reverence. She passed into the cave where
the two dead bodies lay like a high priestess performing a rite.
Walking to the bed, she stood for minutes, gazing at the Sleeper and
his queen. And from the new angle from which King saw him the Sleeper's
likeness to himself was actually startling. Startling--weird--like an
incantation were Yasmini's words when at last she spoke.
“Muhammad lied! He lied in his teeth! His sons have multiplied his lie!
Siddhattha, whom men have called Gotama, the Buddha, was before Muhammad
and he knew more! He told of the wheel of things, and there is a wheel!
Yet, what knew the Buddha of the wheel? He who spoke of Dharma (the
customs of the law) not knowing Dharma! This is true---Of old there was
a wish of the gods--of the old gods. And so these two were. There is a
wish again now of the old gods. So, are we two not as they two were? It
is the same wish, and lo! We are ready, this man and I. We will obey, ye
gods--ye old gods!”
She raised her arms and, going closer to the bed, stood there in an
attitude of mystic reverence, giving and receiving blessings.
“Dear gods!” she prayed. “Dear old gods--older than these 'Hills'--show
me in a vision what their fault was--why these two were ended before the
end!
“I know all the other things ye have shown me. I know the world's silly
creeds have made it mad, and it must rend itself, and this man and I
shall reap where the nations sowed--if only we obey! Wherein, ye old
dear gods, who love me, did these two disobey? I pray you, tell me in a
vision!”
She shook her head and sighed. Sadness seemed to have crept over her,
like a cold mist from the night. It was as if she could dimly see her
plans foredoomed, and yet hoped on in spite of it. The fatalism that she
scorned as Muhammad's lie held her in its grip, and her natural courage
fought with it. Womanlike, she turned to King in that minute and
confided to him her very inmost thoughts. And he, without an inkling as
to how she must fail, yet knew that she must, and pitied her.
“Have you seen that breast under the armor?” she asked suddenly. “Come
nearer! Come and look! Why did his breast decay and his body stay whole
like hers? Did she kill him? Was that a dagger-stab in his breast? I
found perfume in these caves--great jars of it, and I use it always.
It is better than temple incense and all the breath of gardens in
the spring! I have put it on slaughtered animals. Where the knife has
touched them, they decay--as that man's breast did--but the rest of
them remains undecaying year after year. It was a knife, I think, that
pierced his breast. I think that scent is the preservative. Did she kill
him? Was she jealous of him? How did she die? There is no mark on her!
Athelstan--listen! I think he would have failed her! I think she stabbed
him rather than see him fail, and then swallowed poison! Afterward their
servants laid them there. She smiles in death because she knew the wheel
will turn and that death dies too! He looks grim because he knew less
than she. It is always woman who understands and man who fails! I think
she stabbed him. She should have loved him better, and then there would
have been no need. I will love you better than she loved him!”
She turned and devoured him with her eyes, so that it needed all his
manhood to hold him back from being her slave that minute. For in that
minute she left no charm unexercised--sex--mesmerisrn--beauty--flattery
(her eyes could flatter as a dumb dog's flatter a huntsman!)--grace
unutterable-mystery--she used every art on him she knew. Yet he stood
the test.
“Even if you fail me, Well-beloved, I will love you! The gods who gave
you to me will know how to make you love; and lessons are to learn. If
you fail me I will forgive, knowing that in the end the gods will never
let you fail me! You are mine, and Earth is ours, for the old gods
intend it so!”
She seemed to expect him to take her in his arms again; but he stood
respectfully and made no answer, nor any move. Grim and strong his jowl
was, like the Sleeper's, and the dark hair three days old on it softened
nothing of its lines. His Roman nose and steady, dark, full eyes
suggested no compromise. Yet he was good to look at. She had not lied
when she said she loved him, and he understood her and was sorry. But he
did not look sorry, nor did he offer any argument to quench her love. He
was a servant of the raj; his life and his love had been India's
since the day he first buckled on his spurs, and Yasmini wouldn't have
understood that.
Nor did she understand that, even supposing he had loved her with
all his heart, not on any conditions would he have admitted it until
absolutely free, any more than that if she crucified him he would love
her the same, supposing that he loved her at all. Nor did she trust the
“old gods” too well, or let them work unaided.
“Come with me, Athelstan!” she said. She took his arm--found little
jeweled slippers in a closet hewn in the wall--put them on and led him
to the curtains he had entered by. She led him through them, and, red as
cardinals in lamplight on the other side, they stood hand-in-hand, back
to the leather, facing the unfathomable dark. Her fingers were so strong
that he could not have wrenched his own away without using the other
hand to help.
“Where are your shoes?” she asked him.
“At the foot of these steps, Princess.”
“Can you see them yonder in the dark?”
“No.”
“Can you guess where the darkness leads to?”
“No.”
He shuddered and she chuckled.
“Could you return alone by the way Ismail brought you?”
“I think not.”
“Will you try?”
“If I must. I am not afraid.”
“You have heard the echo? Yes, I know you heard the echo. Hear it
again!”
She raised her head and howled like a wolf--like a lone wolf that has
found no quarry--melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger. There
was a pause of nearly a minute. Then in the hideous darkness a phantom
wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long minutes there
was din beside which the voice of living wolves at war would be a
slumber song. Ten times ghastlier than if it had been real, the chorus
wailed and ululated back and forth along immeasurable distances--became
one yell again--and went howling down into earth's bowels as if the last
of a phantom pack were left behind and yelling to be waited for.
When it ceased at last King was sweating.
“Nor am I afraid,” she laughed, squeezing his hand yet tighter.
She led him down the steps, and at the foot told him to put on his
slippers, as if he were a child. Then, hurrying as if those opal eyes
of hers were indifferent to dark or daylight, she picked her way among
boulders that he could feel but not see, along a floor that was only
smooth in places, for a distance that was long enough by two or three
times to lose him altogether.
When he looked back there was no sign of red lights behind him. And when
he looked forward, there was a dim outer light in front and a whiff of
the cool fresh air that presages the dawn!
She led him through a gap on to a ledge of rock that hung thousands of
feet above the home of thunder, a ledge less than six feet wide, less
than twenty long, tilted back toward the cliff. There they sat, watching
the stars. And there they saw the dawn come.
Morning looks down into Khinjan hours after the sun has risen, because
the precipices shut it out. But the peaks on every side are very beacons
of the range at the earliest peep of dawn. In silence they watched day's
herald touch the peaks with rosy jeweled fingers--she waiting as if she
expected the marvel of it all to make King speak.
It was cold. She came and snuggled close to him, and it was so they
watched the sparkle of dawn's jewels die and the peaks grow gray again,
she with an arm on his shoulder and strands of her golden hair blown
past his face.
“Of what are you thinking?” she asked him at last.
“Of India, Princess.”
“What of India?”
“She lies helpless.”
“Ah! You love India?”
“Yes.”
“You shall love me better! You shall love me better than your life!
Then, for love of me, you shall own the India you think you love! This
letter shall go!” She tapped her bosom. “It is best to cut you off from
India first. You shall lose that you may win!”
She got up and stood in the gap, smiling mockingly, framed in the
darkness of the cave behind.
“I understand!” she said. “You think you are my enemy. Love and hate
never lived side by side. You shall see!”
Then in an instant she was gone, backward into the dark. He sat and
waited for her, cross-legged on the ledge. As daylight began to filter
downward he could dimly make out the waterfall, thundering like the
whelming of a world; he sat staring at it, trying to formulate a plan,
until it dawned on him that he was nearly chilled to the bone. Then he
got up and stepped through the gap, too.
“Princess!” he called. Then louder, “Princess!”
When the echo of his own voice died, it was as if the ghoul who made the
echoes had taken shape. A beard--red eye-rims--and a hook nose came out
of the dark, and Ismail bared yellow teeth.
“Come!” he said. “Come, little hakim!”