UNDER THE BRAHMAPUTRA.
Smoke came 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 a _kukri_ like a Gurkha’s hung in a
wooden scabbard—peered from the hut door. He stared at the _sirdar_ in
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.
The _sirdar_ led 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, the _sirdar_ served 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 his _kukri_ to 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 the _sirdar_ walking toward him, normal, matter-of-fact,
abrupt, spurs clinking as his heels struck rock.
“Are you ready?” asked the _sirdar_.
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. The
_sirdar_ appeared 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 the _sirdar’s_ voice 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 the _sirdar’s_ head 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 the _sirdar_ shoved 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. The _sirdar_ groped 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 the _sirdar_ started 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. The _sirdar_ laughed, 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 the _sirdar’s_ spurs 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.
The _sirdar_ hesitated—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 the _sirdar_ made 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 the
_sirdar_ had come.
Once they had crossed the wooden bridge the track began to rise, but the
_sirdar_ continued 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.
The _sirdar_ allowed 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 the _sirdar_, 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.
The _sirdar_ made 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.
The _sirdar_ seemed 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 the
_sirdar_ waited 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 the _sirdar_ (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.
-----
[42] The ancient Greek legend of the Pleiades is that they were the
daughters of Atlas and Pleione, and that the seventh, Merope, concealed
herself out of shame for having loved a mortal. But the legend is
doubtless vastly older than the Greeks and has an esoteric, or hidden
meaning. A telescope reveals hundreds of stars in the constellation.
In this sense we are our brothers’ keepers: that if we injure
them we are responsible. Therefore, our duty is, so vigilantly
to control ourselves that we may injure none; and for this there
is no substitute; all other duties take a lower place and are
dependent on it.
From the Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup.