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Roy Glashan's Library
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Blue Book, February 1937, with first part of
"The Treasure of Vanished Men"
James Francis Dwyer
JAMES FRANCIS DWYER (1874-1952) was an Australian writer. Born in Camden Park, New South Wales, Dwyer worked as a postal assistant until he was convicted in a scheme to make fraudulent postal orders and sentenced to seven years imprisonment in 1899. In prison, Dwyer began writing, and with the help of another inmate and a prison guard, had his work published in The Bulletin. After completing his sentence, he relocated to London and then New York, where he established a successful career as a writer of short stories and novels. Dwyer later moved to France, where he wrote his autobiography, Leg-Irons on Wings, in 1949. Dwyer wrote over 1,000 short stories during his career, and was the first Australian-born person to become a millionaire from writing. —Wikipedia
A fascinating novel by the author of "Caravan Treasure," in which those
wild hawks of trouble, Thurland and Flane, seek the riches of Angkor.
THERE are days in spring that are so splendid," said my Uncle Thurland Spillane, "that the dear Lord rubs His fine hands together and He says to the listening angels: 'Let's be doing something.' Days like the one that is wrapped around us this blessed minute."
Flane Spillane looked slyly at his brother and laughed softly. After a pause Thurland went on, talking as if speaking to himself.
"It was on a day like this," he said, "that Marco Polo, that fine Venetian, started out for Cathay. For Cathay!The words are so sweet that they near choke me. And I'll wager there was the same thrill in the air when the great Sir Francis Drake swung the Golden Hind out of Plymouth harbor to circumnavigate the world. And although it was autumn when Columbus went aboard the little Santa Maria to discover the big wide country of America, I'll bet the Almighty had put the spirit of adventure into the scented winds of Palos. For there are days made by Him that whisper to brave hearts, and on those days things happen. Yes, things happen."
The words of my uncle Thurland Spillane, himself a Marco Polo out of Kerry, were thrilling to my ears. For Thurland was a god to me. Flane, who had rescued Thurland from the terrible abyss into which he had fallen when seeking the treasure guarded by the Woman with Feet of Gold (I told about that last year, as you may remember, in "Caravan Treasure"), was some one whom I loved and admired—but Thurland I worshiped. Thurland had been chosen to walk with the Angel of Great Happenings. The lean prideful head, the venturesome nose, the bold eyes that looked out like two spearmen on a castle wall, marked him as a wild hawk of trouble who brought the yeast of adventure into a world grown dull with fat and careless living....
We were, to my great delight, for T was but a boy of seventeen, sitting at a little table before the Café de la Paix; and all Paris streamed by us as we rested in the soft yellow sunshine. Paris, the blonde of the great cities—Paris, that, as Thurland said, "wears high heels that are a little turned because she has done a lot of walking."
All the trees along the Boulevard des Capucines were dressed up with tiny leaves as green as any that you'd find in sweet Kerry from which we had come. And the air was filled with the kisses of spring. Flane gave a sigh of contentment and sipped his drink. "It is certainly a fine day," he said; "and it is a pity we have nothing better to do than sit here in the sun and watch the world slip by us. What are you thinking about, Jimmy?"
"I was thinking about my Aunt Anastasia," I answered. "I bet she would like Paris."
"She's better off at the Green Tree Farm in Kerry," said Thurland. "There's peace and quiet there and that is better for her at this time. Paris is too heady. Some cities are worse than whisky. They make you drunk with the queer magic that is in the air. Places like Stamboul, and Cairo, and Fez, and Paris. You believe everything that you see and hear, just the way old Paddy O'Brien believed the leprechaun, when the leprechaun told him to put his gold under a stone in the potato-patch, and he would find twice as much in the morning."
"And did he?" I asked.
My uncle didn't answer; his eyes were fixed on three persons who had come to one of the little marble tables immediately in front of us: two men and a girl.
One of the men was a gray, foxlike person with shifty eyes and a mean, hard mouth. There was a moneylender in Kenmare with just such a mouth, the lips of him, ashamed of the hard words they had uttered, having turned inward so there was only a mark like two inches of dirty string to show where his mouth was.
And with this man was a youth and a girl that had the chrism of holy love upon their foreheads: a girl as beautiful as Deirdre of the Sorrows, with a soul as white as bleached linen, the big eyes of her filled with admiration for the flushed youth who was answering the cunning questions put to him by the man with the mean mouth.
IT seemed from the answers he gave, that the foxy man was a stranger to them. The queries were made in a whisper, but we could hear quite plainly the responses that the young fellow made to them. He and the girl, said the boy, proudly, were on their honeymoon. They came from a town called Dover, in the State of New Hampshire, and it was their first trip abroad. "We have," he said, and there was a fine note in his voice as he made the statement, "been married fourteen days! Just fourteen days!"
Now the man with the mean mouth put his elbows on the table and leaned toward the boy in the manner of a person who has something wonderful to tell. And as the boy listened, he got flustered as if he didn't like the talk of the other. And now and then he would turn his face toward the girl as if he thought a glance from her would help him out of the web that the other was spinning round him. The cunning web that the spiders of the Grands Boulevards spin around the innocents who come to Paris—the innocents who wander up and down like lost lambs in the jungle; for as Thurland remarked, that lady called Paris, with her dyed hair and her turned heels, shelters a lot of wolves who prey on the untraveled ones who come to see her.
Clever are the wolves. They will show the innocents this and that, and in the end they will blackmail them and rob them; and if they go to the police, they will get no satisfaction at all.
Now my Uncle Thurland was listening without appearing to listen. For he had a way like that; his eyes made a fine pretence of watching a comedy between an Arab rug-seller and a woman on the sidewalk; but they saw as well the flushed features of the boy and the growing distress on the face of the girl. And although I couldn't hear what the mean-mouthed man was saying, I think Thurland heard. Or he may have guessed, he being wise in the way of scoundrels, knowing cities in every part of the world.
The youth made an effort to break the web of the spider. He tried to rise from his chair, but the man put out a claw and drew him down again. And his whispering went on and on, words that were the devil's glue.
Now the boy caught the eye of my uncle, and something that he saw there made him stare so hard that the spider who was putting the web around him turned to see what he was looking at—turned and looked at Thurland, who eyed him the way a terrier would eye a rat.
FOR a few moments the man stared at Thurland, with his lean throat quivering as he gathered up his courage; then he spoke. "Are you listening in on other folks' business?" he asked sneeringly. "Have you nothing of your own to worry about?"
Now, before my uncle on the marble table was a half-tumbler of whisky and soda, with a big spiky lump of ice in it. With one hand Thurland grabbed the coat-collar of the fellow, pulling it away from his neck so that he made a funnel; then with the other hand he picked up the glass and poured the whisky down the spout he had made between coat and skin. And the piece of ice went with it!
It was done with a simplicity that was surprising. The speed and a sort of carelessness held for a moment those who had seen it. It held even the man with the hard mouth, the cool manner of the attack keeping him in his chair while you could count five.
He sprang to his feet then, his cane uplifted as if he would strike Thurland, but those eyes of my uncle held him. Spitefully they held him as he stood with his arm uplifted. Then, turning his head, he screamed "Police!" at the top of his voice; and the agent on the corner of the Place de l'Opéra came at a run.
"Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?" cried the agent.
In hot French the man told him what had happened. He had been sitting with friends, he said, and a man he didn't know from Adam poured a glass of liquid and a lump of ice down his back. From somewhere near his stomach he found what was left of the spiky piece of ice, and held it out to the agent as proof of what had happened.
The surprised policeman turned upon my uncle, his notebook in his hand. "Et pourquoi avez-vous agi ainsi?" he cried.
Thurland looked bored. "It was a mistake," said he carelessly, speaking in French; "I thought he was some one else." He smiled when he said this, and he looked hard at the fellow with the mean mouth. "I thought," he went on, "that he was a man that I met once on the Unter den Linden in Berlin—a cunning devil of a man who called himself a colonel, but who was no more a colonel than I am myself. A fine confidence man, he was. Many and many a tourist he flayed with the Rosary trick and other methods. The police were hot on his trail, but he dodged them. He called himself Colonel Considine; but his real name was— Hold on, my friend; I'm telling why I poured the whisky down your neck!"
But the fellow didn't wish to hear any more of my uncle's explanation. He broke through the ring of waiters and clients, and went at a run across the Place in the direction of the Boulevard des Îtaliens, dodging the cars whose drivers cursed him.
The surprised agent watched him till he was out of sight, then he turned and looked at Thurland who was laughing softly.
"Monsieur," said the agent, "I would like your name and address in the event of the complainant visiting the Bureau de Police."
Thurland laughed louder when the small policeman said that, and he patted him affectionately on the shoulder. "It's a bright boy you are to think of that," he said. "My name is Thurland Spillane, but as I travel a lot, the only address that will find me is the Green Tree Farm, on the road from Glengarriff to Kenmare, County Kerry, Ireland."
When the agent heard the strange names, he snapped his notebook shut, gave a snort of disgust and went back to his post. For the French believe that they have the finest language in the world, and it's only when a foreigner is ordering drinks or food, that they'll make an effort to understand him.
The young man and the sweet girl had stood close to Thurland during the talk, and now the youth spoke. "I know that you did that for our sake," he said simply. "You see—you see he spoke to us, and— and we couldn't get away from him."
"Sure, I know," said Thurland, shaking the hand that the young man put out. "Paris is full of them. If I were you, I'd speak only to the pretty colleen at your side."
The two blushed and walked away. Thurland sat down and spoke to the waiter. "Bring me another whisky," he said, "and don't put the ice in it till I see how much whisky is in the glass. It was the very weakness of the last drink that tempted me to pour it down the neck of that crook."
"Well," said Flane, after the waiter had brought the drink, "there's no harm in starting things. Do you remember Tommy Boylan, who thought to start a friendly conversation with a girl in Kenmare by saying: 'That's a hell of a hat you're wearing.'"
Thurland laughed, took a sip of his drink, then looked up at a man who had risen from a table at the very edge of the terrace and approached my uncle.
"PARDON," said the man, bowing like Mr. Delaney the dancing-master at Glengarriff. "I was listening when you gave your name to the agent. Did I hear it correctly? Are you Mr. Thurland Spillane?"
Thurland looked at the man before he answered. He was small and thin, with the face of a very intelligent sparrow. And in his eyes was a light that you might think was queer, but which was but the glow from the very active brain behind them, as we found out in the days that followed.
"You heard correctly," said Thurland.
The man took a card from his pocket-book and handed it to my uncle. "You might not recognize the name," he said, "but you might remember meeting me one night at Belgrade, when you were in the company of the Baron St. Ladau?"
Thurland glanced at the card and got to his feet. The cold manner in which he had received the inquiry about his name had fled, and he pushed forward a chair for the stranger.
"My brother," he said, indicating Flane; "and this is my nephew."
The small man bowed to each of us, and murmured something about being enchanted, which we knew wasn't true; for it was Thurland that he wanted to speak to, and no one else. No one else in all Paris, if one could judge by the satisfaction that was on his face and the wild excitement that showed in his words and actions. And as I looked at him, I thought that the Angel of Great Happenings with whom my uncle was permitted to walk, had heard his words about the beauty of the day and had created the little incident with the confidence-man as a curtain-raiser for something big and wonderful. That is what I thought, and what Flane thought as we watched the small man. For he had the pleased look of a terrier who has found his master after losing him in a crowd—a queer delight that bubbled out of him.
He wished to buy champagne, but Thurland would have none of it. And he got so excited that he couldn't speak at all, sitting and looking at Thurland. And all Paris swam by in the sunshine, the English and Americans, the Swedes, Germans, and Italians; and the four of us sat at the little table while the Fates were mixing the batter in which we were to stew and sweat in the months to come. Mixing it in the big mortar in which all adventure is mixed with the pestle of discontent.
A CHAUFFEUR in uniform broke in on our quiet. He addressed the small man, who turned to Thurland. "I want to talk to you," he said, "but I cannot speak here. At my house, yes? I live at Neuilly, and my car is here. Would you—you and your brother and your young nephew—would you come and have lunch with me? Yes?... Good."
Still laboring under the excitement caused by his meeting with Thurland, he led the way to a big American car that stood at the curb. The chauffeur opened the door, and we climbed in.
OH, a fine town is Paris, with its big broad boulevards. And never, I am sure, did it look finer than on the day we rode in the big car along the Avenue de la Grande Armée—and was ever a better name given to a street? And it was only when the car pulled up before a mansion, sitting like a fine lady in its own park, that Flane and I knew the name of the man with whom we were riding, Thurland spoke it. "No, Count Zavrel," he said, in answer to a question as to whether he was engaged in anything at the moment, "I am free for the time being at least, as Mike Hennessy said when he broke out of the jail at Tralee."
In the wide hall of the mansion a girl sprang upon the Count and hugged him wildly—a girl who was like the spring day, she being bright and smiling and full of life. A girl of twenty or so, slim and straight, who looked up at my two big uncles with an astonished grin on her pretty face.
"My niece Joyeuse," said the Count; and Joyeuse shook hands with us in turn, laughing as if she found something amusing in the fact that her uncle had collected us on the streets of Paris and brought us home for lunch.
"Joyeuse is a tomboy," said the Count, smiling at her. "She is an American, and has been given too much freedom. Now, I am afraid, she has come into my charge too late."
While the girl rushed away to give orders for the luncheon, the Count explained to Thurland that his sister had married an American, and that Joyeuse was the only child of the marriage. Both parents had been killed in a motor accident in California, and he had taken the girl under his care.
"But I cannot control her," he said dolefully. "If she had been brought up in my country, it would be different; but in America young girls do what they like. Je suis desolé."
He made a face as if he was dissatisfied, but we thought that he was delighted with the smiling Joyeuse, who now came back to inform him that lunch was ready to serve.
Now, of that lunch and the matters that followed, it is hard to tell. For the pouring of a glass of whisky and water down the neck of a scoundrel had brought us into an atmosphere of wonder and magic. And we heard things that savored of witchcraft, and black magic— things that might have been unbelievable if you heard them in any other city but Paris.... For in the quiet cities of the world, cities like London and New York, people are thinking of business and commerce, and go about their work soberly with no expectation of strange things coming into their lives at all. But in Paris, men and women dream of marvelous things happening to themselves, and many a fool sees dream-chariots on spring days in the Tuileries, and themselves riding battle-chargers in the wisps of sunshine above the Seine.
The Count Zavrel, so Flane and I discovered during the luncheon, was a Russian. He spoke English in a way that was better than an Englishman, because, and this was curious, he used the little mistakes he made in such a manner that he doubled the value of his words by his confusion. And he was an artist with words—a great artist, knowing their value and their appeal: bringing them forward in their proper order, the strong fierce words that have power and strength, and the fine-colored ones that bamboozle the listener with the beauty in them when they are uttered softly.
IT was when the lunch was finished that he started—cunningly, very cunningly. He laid in a background like one of the old painters, and although Thurland and Flane might have known what part of the earth he was speaking about, I didn't. That it was a place far away on the fringe of the world I guessed; but the name of it was a mystery to me. And at times I wondered if it was a real place, or if he was romancing like a story-teller in the Arabian Nights.
A fine tale he told. It was the history of a people that I had never heard of—a history that ran back over the centuries, so that most of it was but the gabble of ancients and had fine fat lies twisted into the bits of truth. It told of the start of this people who founded a kingdom. How their chief, out walking one day, came to the entrance to a hidden place where the people worshiped a snake-god they called Naga, a god with seven heads, and from that day they grew great.
"That was the beginning of the Khmer dynasty," said the Count. "The beginning of their greatness. They had, or thought they had, architects that were sent to them by the snake-god, and they built cities and palaces of great splendor. They built Angkor in the Ninth Century of the Christian era, and the modern world didn't know of its existence till forty years ago: It was buried in the great forests, dead and deserted for hundreds of years, till the French stumbled on it. Great towers that ran up two hundred feet in height; courts in which an army could rest; carvings and sculpture that the critics of the world think wonderful. And it was there in the forest with no life in it but the great bats that slept in it, by the millions and millions."
THEN it was that my Uncle Thurland spoke. "But there's nothing in Angkor now," he said coldly, as if he wished to steady the high talk of the Count. "I haven't been there myself, but I have spoken to men who have visited it. There's nothing there but ruins and bat's-dung and muck that the French are clearing out, hoping to get American tourists to come and see it."
The Count smiled, and looked at Thurland as a wise man would look at a smart boy. "You are quite right," he said. "There is nothing in Angkor. I speak of it only to whet the appetite. It is a little cocktail in words. It is just because there is nothing in Angkor that I mentioned it at all.... Why is there nothing in Angkor?"
Thurland grinned. "Some one took it, I guess," he said.
"Some one took it," repeated the Count slowly. "Some one took it; What fine words those are to explain the great happenings in the world! They explain everything without explaining. Listen. In the Fourteenth Century something happened to Angkor. We know that from the annals. What was it? You do not know?"
"I don't," said Thurland stubbornly.
The Count was upon his feet now. He was excited; his eyes shone; his features twitched; and the words were flung from his lips angrily.
"I will tell you!" he cried. "On a day in summer something came up from the marshlands of the coast I. Up by Phnom-penh! Creeping up the Mekong! Through the Tonlé-sap to the Grand-Lac! Something that squatted on the great terraces of Angkor-Vat and grinned at the yellow-robed monks that chanted their prayers!"
The hair on my neck prickled as I listened to the Count. And the heads of Thurland and Flane were thrust forward. In my mind I pictured some enormous animal, a cross between a hippo and a rhinoceros, swimming up to a far-off city and playing the devil with the little shops, the way Finnegan's red-and-white bull did when the flies got him mad at Glengarriff fair.
The Count had lifted his right arm, and now he lowered it gently as if pulling down a switch that gave the answer.
"It was the Plague!" he whispered. "The Plague!"
A terrible word is that word plague; It's a word that sounds black. "The Black Death," it was called in Scotland and Ireland hundreds of years ago, when it mowed down the people; and there was the "Great Plague" that swept London, when they marked the houses with a red cross and the words "God have mercy on us," and the dead-carts rumbled by in the night collecting the bodies the way they collect refuse in big towns today.
But of all the tales of plagues that I have ever read of or listened to, that story of the Count's concerning its coming to Angkor was the most thrilling. Perhaps it was the way he told it; but I know that it filled me with a sort of terror: I felt in a way that I was there with the stricken people, running and screaming and praying to the snake-god Naga who had deserted them.
In their thousands they dropped before the invisible hand that came across the great lake. Men and women and little children. Soldiers and servants, the rich and the poor. And they lay where they dropped, for no one would give them burial. Yes, they lay as they fell, the living stumbling over them.
"THEN," cried the Count, "the king ordered the evacuation of Angkor. They must leave, because the snake-god Naga had cursed it. A thousand pirogues made out of the trunks of the great trees that are called koki, pirogues with forty rowers in each, were gathered on Grand-Lac; and the king and his hundred wives, and the nobles and their wives went aboard them, leaving the poor of the city to shift for themselves.
"And into the pirogues they put the treasures of Angkor: The great pearls that came from Jiddah and Koseir, rose-colored like those that Marco Polo had seen placed in the mouths of the dead in the city of Ta-pin-zu; pearls that had been soaked for seventy days in the milk of white mares to increase their luster! Great emeralds that preserved the chastity of the women who wore them, so it was said; diamonds that made men invisible; and enormous rubies that were thought to be the eyes of dead snakes. And gold! Bars of gold that weighed down the pirogues till the rowers screamed in fear. And in the dark night, with the soldiers beating off the poor who tried to rush the boats, the great line of pirogues streamed across Grand-Lac, heading for the Mekong. And the plague got fiercer at Angkor, till the few that were left alive fled into the forests, and the bats moved into the great halls and towers—where they lived in the millions till the French came five hundred years later to evict them."
INTO the eyes of my Uncle Thurland came that strange look of treasure-lust that I had seen there on our journey to the Black Mouth. And Flane wet his lips and swallowed, as if he believed he had one of the rose-colored pearls in his own mouth. And myself I was pop-eyed with the wonder of the tale, and my chest felt as if an iron band had been put around it. I looked from Thurland to Flane, and then to the face of the girl Joyeuse. She alone was calm. Perhaps she had heard the tale before.
Thurland woke out of the trance put upon him by the story. He shook himself, shifted his great long legs, let a half-smile run over his face and then put a question: "And where did they go?-" he asked. "The pirogues, I mean."
The Count didn't answer. He moved toward a bell-button and pressed it. While he waited, he looked at his two clasped hands, and into the silence of the great room came the far-off whisper of Paris—the never-ending whisper. Day and night it goes up; for Paris is the City of Tongues that are never still, and tongues that have little wisdom in them.
A servant came into the room, and the Count spoke: "Faites venir le bonze. Vite!"
Now, I didn't know what a bonze was at the moment, but I learned in the hours that followed that it was the name given in Indo-China to one of the begging monks who spend their lives in the pagodas, praying and thinking about paradise to come. In a few minutes the bonze appeared, led by a French servant who was his guard and attendant; and when he came into the room the Past came with him. That Past about which the Count had been speaking. For the man was older than any other man we had ever seen! Older by years and years.
His age was like a whip that struck us across the eyes, making us blink with a queer pain; and I know that I caught a strange odor when he came through the door—the musky odor that they say comes out from crocodiles of great age. And when he stopped walking, and stood in a patch of sunshine, he looked like something that you'd find wrapped in rags in the British Museum, with a label telling you it was dug up at Karnak or Memphis, and that it was the body of the treasurer of one of the Pharaohs.
The Count waved the guard out of the room, and the Count himself locked the door through which he had left, and two other doors that led out onto a terrace. And lest there might be peeping servants, he placed table napkins over the keyholes so their cunning eyes couldn't see what was happening in the room.
The Count then stood before the bonze and spoke to him—spoke in a language which we didn't know, but which we found out later was an ancient tongue called Pali. And the old man listened with the lids of his eyes drawn down over the bits of glittering black agate that they covered. For his. eyes had no whites to them at all. They'were black as bog-oak, but with, a shine to them like the flash of a diamond when they moved.
Swiftly the Count talked; then he stepped back, leaving the old man standing on a stretch of carpet some five feet from the end of the big table around which we were sitting. And in the fat silence of the closed room, we stared at him. Aye, we stared at him.
HE did nothing—at least nothing that we could see; yet there was in the room a feeling of great mystery, a feeling that something of which we knew nothing was going on, something that was akin to what John Trench, the blind man, who lived near my father's farm, called "the Ancient Wisdom." Always when John Trench uttered those words, I had a cold feeling in my spine, the words bringing thoughts of happenings that were beyond the knowledge of scholars like Father Houlahan and the Reverend Mr. Alkin, both of whom could talk your head off in Greek and Latin.
For five minutes we stared, our eyeballs getting dry because we didn't dare to wink; then Flane grunted as if he had seen something that surprised him greatly. Flane's glance had turned to the feet of the monk, and the rest of us swung our eyes in the same direction. And a gurgle of wonder came from Thurland and myself. And our heads went forward, and our throats became dry, for the feet of the monk had left the carpet! Left the carpet on which they had been resting! A foot above the pile they were, hanging limply downward, the way you see the feet of flying angels in holy pictures.
There is, I believe, great doubt as to whether this thing that is called levitation can be done. Scientists say that it is impossible; but the scientists, as my Uncle Thurland often remarked, are little stay-at-home fellows who sit in their laboratories with funny-shaped bottles and never see much of the world. And the things they don't see they won't believe, they being like Morry O'Brien, who never believed in telegrams, because he had watched the wires for days, and had never seen any go by.
ABRUPTLY Thurland got to his feet and came close to the monk. He stooped and looked at the space between the feet of the old man and the carpet; then he passed his hand through that space to see if there was any invisible support holding him up. But there was nothing at all. The old one was hanging there in the air like a dragon-fly; and although he didn't weigh much,—the poor devil being only skin and bone,—it looked to us like a fine miracle indeed.
Thurland came back to his seat; and the Count spoke again in the queer tongue. It was a question that he put, as we understood later. He was asking the old man to tell to us the story of the escape from the city of plague on the night when the king and his hundred wives, and the nobles and their wives, with all the treasure, fled across Grand-Lac.
In a whisper it came—a thin whisper that came to the ears like the notes of a flute played far off. And when he paused, as he did often, as if he were refreshing his memory, the Count hurriedly translated to us what he had said....
There were story-tellers who came to the Green Tree Farm who had the gift of words—words that sparkled like opals, and with which they made the weft and the woof of their gay tales, so that their play brought a light to the minds of the listeners and a joy to their hearts. But the story of the monk, as we heard it, was not like those. It was a story as dark as the lake over which went the pirogues full of women and nobles and jewels and gold. Dark and frightening. And in it were bits that the girl Joyeuse had no right to hear, but which she listened to without a blush on her face.
ON and on it went, an inky stream of words, out of which the imagination twisted things just as you'd make baskets out of osiers—twisted things that were frightening: Witchcraft and bedevilment, and tricks of paganism that we didn't understand or wish to understand. Of unholy love and strange vices, till we pictured the hundreds of nobles and the thousand women as a vicious mob sailing in the long black pirogues in the direction of hell.
For to those that escaped, there came the belief that the snake-god had turned against them, and that they were lost, whatever they did; and the despair made them reckless and sinful and vicious, as the pirogues with their forty rowers to each carried them farther and farther from the doomed City of Angkor-Thom.
They swung into a great river that the Count told us was the Mekong, which Thurland already knew of, he being out in China when he fled from the town of Irkutsk. And we saw the river as the story of the monk went on. Coming down from the lost country of Tibet, through wild passes in the mountains, its banks filled with great high trees in which are thousands and thousands of monkeys, sitting so close to each other that their tails hang down like a fringe from the branches on which they squat.
And they screamed and gibbered at the nobles and their women. And the women pelted them with food and fruit which the apes caught. And some of the women, made mad with fear of the death that chased them, threw their heavy bangles at the monkeys, laughing and screaming as they did so. And big birds followed the pirogues to get the food that was tossed from them, Great birds like you see in the big Zoological Gardens: flamingoes, and cormorants, and great crested cranes the height of a man. And the noise and the shouting woke the enormous bats that slept in the thick foliage of the trees, the big bats of Asia that have wings made of reddish-looking leather, no feathers on them at all, and who sleep all day with their heads hanging down, their claws clinging to a branch of a tree.
Now, I wish that I had possessed the power to take down every word that the Count translated to us on that spring day—take it down the way the smart reporters take down the questions and answers in the law-courts. But I hadn't the trick, so the words ran into each other and formed just a splendid purple patch in my memory, and out of that patch I pick the bits that didn't dissolve, so to speak, they being too colorful....
Behind the line of pirogues on the dark silent river crept the Plague—mad with the king and the nobles and the lovely women who were trying to escape from it: Whipping along the oily water faster than the long canoes, snatching now and then like the quick paw of a beggar at a fruit-stall. Snatching one of the dainty little ladies in her finery and flashing jewels. "Hah," said the Plague, "you thought you would escape me, did you!" And saying that, it would strike. And the men at the pirogues would thrust the body overboard to the big fishes who were swimming after the pirogues.
After such a happening the king would shout at the rowers, and the nobles would whip them with long bamboos; but no matter how fast they rowed, the Plague kept up with them. At first those that were in the last pirogue thought they were in the worst position, and their rowers flailed the river till they got up near the front; but soon they found that their place in the line had nothing to do with the wicked snatching hand that followed. For men and women in the first pirogues were picked oft while the occupants of the last were not touched,
FOR days they drove northward up the great dark river. They came to the falls and the rapids, and they carried the great pirogues over them and put them again in the water. And hundreds of miles from Angkor, so it seemed to them, the Plague halted. For only one man took sick in the space of three days, and this was a holy man, a venerable bonze, who had been permitted to come because of his sanctity and great age.
When this man took sick, a noble ordered the rowers to toss him overboard; but they refused on account of his great age and holiness. They thrust water and food to him, and he recovered, the only man who had been stricken by the Plague and escaped death.
Then, according to the monk's story, the holy man uttered a warning to the king and the nobles and women in the pirogues. He told them that they had left the Plague behind them, and if they changed their ways and manners, they would all live. If they didn't :here was, in their midst, an unknown who was a sort of carrier of the malady, who would watch them closely, and if they sinned, the unknown would again unloose the terror from which they fled.
His words terrified them. The drunkenness and sinfulness ceased. The pirogues came to a country where the people were simple and industrious, and there they landed. They carried the treasure ashore; then they sank the boats, so that none of the Khmer folk would know that they were there. They climbed up into the uninhabited passes; and there in a valley, the king ordered a halt. The rowers became bullies of the native tribes, forcing them to construct houses and temples, and they were flogged when they didn't go at their work with a will.
For a space of time that the Count thought between twenty and thirty years they lived there, and frightened by the words of the holy man, they were quiet, thanking the gods for their escape. Then the life seemed dull to them, and the old devils of the flesh got to work. The city that they had built became a cesspool. Vice flourished; they drank, and dethroned the stone gods that they had set up after their escape. Then, on a day in summer, the Plague pounced on them again—the Plague that had chased them up the Mekong! The Black Death!
The Count paused in his translation of the monk's tale. We were all staring at the ancient. Thurland was on his feet. The monk was taken with a sort of convulsion. He whined softly, then with a queer jerk of his features he fell upon the carpet, as if some unseen force had struck him and laid him flat.
As he lay there, he repeated again and again one word. Screamed it. It sounded like karsh, but it had no meaning to anyone but the Count and his niece.
"What is he saying?" asked Thurland.
The Count took a glass of water and sprinkled the face of the monk, then he turned and answered the question put by my uncle. "He is accusing himself of being the carrier," he said quietly. "That it was in his body the germs waited, and that he destroyed the City of Klang-Nan."
"But this," cried Thurland fiercely, "this was hundreds of years ago!"
"I know," said the Count. "That's the great puzzle. Wait till we get rid of him, and I'll tell you something."
HE touched the bell; the man who had brought the monk into the room appeared: and the Count instructed him to take the ancient away. The servant lifted the sobbing old thing in his arms and carried him away, but his presence seemed to remain. In a queer way he was there—the feel of him, so to speak; and we stared at the spot where he had hung like a scarecrow in the sunshine, the thin stream of words coming from his shriveled lips.
I shivered as I thought of the accusation he had made against himself. He was the Plague! The carrier! And although as Thurland said, hundreds of years had passed since the destruction of Angkor, I was cold with the fear that came over me.
The Count began to talk, and we listened. "This man was brought to Paris by the French Government, with many others, at the time of the Colonial Exposition. He was one of the exhibits from the Laos State in the north of Indo-China. There was a belief then that he was the oldest man in the world. The medical faculty thought he was a hundred and forty years of age, perhaps more.
"Few took much notice of him at the Exposition. He was just an old, old man. He lived in the huts with his countrymen, and sat in the sunshine like an old lizard when Paris passed by in her thousands, and laughed at him. I saw him then. Youngsters tossed bits of paper at him to wake him up, and he cursed them. Funny, yes? Children annoying him when—when he thinks that he is some one who possessed the power to wipe out a city? Startles you, eh? Man in the Bible, remember? Elijah the Tishbite. Kids taunted him, and the old she-bears came down and mauled them."
FLANE said: "Do you really think that he has the power? I mean, do you think that he is still a carrier?"
"He might be," answered the Count. "I don't know. Wait! I'll tell you everything that I know about him. For some reason or other, he didn't go back with the other human exhibits who were brought from the far-off colonies to show the stay-at-home French what a great empire they possessed. It's always the way with those affairs. Governments are in a hurry to bring the exhibits, but in no hurry to take them back. This old freak broke loose from his mob and wandered about Paris. Didn't want much. He eats a handful of rice a day. Slept in doorways. Now and then, I believe, the agents picked him up, but they let him loose when they could get nothing out of him.
"Five weeks ago I was walking along the Boulevard Malesherbes. I saw a crowd and went over. A truck had hit this poor devil. He was lying in the roadway, the people waiting for a policeman to arrive. I don't blame them for not wanting to touch him. He didn't look nice. And—and there was that feeling of frightful age about him. Gave them the jumps.
"I got him to a pharmacy. Had his head bound up and brought him here. Why? Well, I am interested in things that this silly world, in its hurry to play with bubbles, has forgotten.
"I am interested in folklore. In witchcraft, demonology, magic. Have you read The Golden Bough?... No?" It doesn't matter. But this business—this that we have in hand—it appeals to me. Greatest thing in my life. I've been listening, watching, questioning this old man day after day. He knows about more than half the scientists in Europe. He has secrets that would astound them."
Thurland stretched his long legs and stared at the small man on the other side of the table. "And now," said Thurland, "what do you propose to do?"
There was a long interval of silence, the bright eyes of the Count fixed upon the face of my uncle. The strange fighting face of Thurland Spillane, the face that resembled so much the picture I had once seen of that splendid doge of Venice whose name was Andrea Dandolo.
And we waited as if something great hung upon the answer to that question, something that was a little terrifying. Flane and I, and the girl Joyeuse, waited.
The Count spoke softly. "Some one," he said, "has written these words; and though they are sweeter in the French, still, they are thrilling in the English: 'In the depths of the forests of Siam, I have seen the evening star rise above the ruins of mysterious Angkor.'
"I know the East. I have lived at Hanoi, at Hue, at Haiphong; but I have never visited Angkor. Now, I have a reason. I am, curiously, a person who dislikes death. I hate the tomb. There are no more damnable words than those that are written about the life of man being but three score and ten years. Those words have killed thousands! Millions! When a man lives to be ninety, the foolish papers say that he has attained a great age. Reporters come on his birthdays, and ask him silly questions. Ninety! What is ninety? It is nothing! Do you know— Wait! Look at the spot where that monk stood! Look at it! You can easily think that he is still there! Still there in the sunshine! Why? Because of some strange personality that the years have bestowed on him—that the centuries have bestowed on him! Do you know that I firmly believe that he—that he in his own body and flesh—was the carrier that brought the Plague to the city in the lost valleys of the Lacs country, the City of Klang-Nan!"
MY two uncles sat silent. The girl rose and opened the windows leading to the terrace. The whisper of Paris came to our ears.
"And you want to go out there?" said Thurland, after a long silence.
The Count nodded. His hands were hugging each other, so that the knuckles were as white as his face. And his eyes were brighter than ever.
"To hunt for what?" asked my uncle. "You're rich. It isn't treasure you're after?"
"No," answered the Count. "I wish proof. I wish to take this man, this monk, over the route that the fugitives from Angkor-Thom took in the long ago, I wish to make a check on what he has told me. I want to see if it is possible—" He paused, and my uncle Thurland finished the sentence.
"If it is possible to beat death," said my uncle.
Again the Count nodded. Thurland smiled the strange cynical smile that months later we saw on many a stone face carved in long-dead centuries—the cynical smile that tells of shattered beliefs, of the futility of knowledge, of the brave facing of facts that have rolled in upon the mind to prove the smallness of man and the little effect his passing has in this big throbbing world. The terrible grinding world that reduces all things to gray dust....
The atmosphere was cleared by the statement the Count started and which Thurland finished. It put the Count's cards on the table. He was willing to take a gamble. He wanted neither gold nor treasure; but he wished to find out if it was possible to beat death. Bright boys have tried it through the centuries, men who got mad when they heard that a tree like the big sequoia in California could live for three thousand years or more, that the carp at Versailles were a hundred and fifty, and that tortoises in the Galapagos showed by their shells that they were veterans when Bonaparte was prancing around Europe.
"And the treasure?" asked Thurland; and his voice had a soft purr in it.
"If there is treasure there," said the Count, "it can be taken by anyone who accompanies me. As to the expense, I might say that I am willing to pay everything. I am rich. I have nothing else to occupy my mind—and I too would see the evening star above Angkor."
Thurland smiled, and looked at Flane. They didn't speak, because speech was unnecessary. The story, as translated by the Count, had put its hands upon them.
"You have maps?" said Thurland, turning to the Count.
"Scores of them," he answered. "Let's go into the salon. The maps are there."
In a body we moved into the adjoining room; and upon a huge table were spread maps of Indo-China, of the Great Mekong, of the unexplored regions running up toward Tibet where live the Cambodians, the Tais, the Khams.and the Kraus, about which the busy Occidental world knows nothing at all.
It wasn't that day, or the day before, that the Count had thought about voyaging to the East. The look of the room showed that. And with the maps were pictures of Angkor-Vat—photographs of the enormous terrace, the stairways, the galleries and the towers, hemmed in by the jungle that now surrounds the city, leaving only the great monuments to show the luxury and pomp that was there in the long-dead centuries.
THURLAND and Flane fell upon the maps: the girl Joyeuse led me aside and questioned me about my two uncles.
I told her of the quest in the Sahara, of the Black Mouth, and how we escaped—the story told the world in the novel "Caravan Treasure." And she was much interested. Suddenly she leaned forward, and spoke determinedly.
"My uncle wishes to leave me with friends at Passy while he is away," she said; "but I won't go to his friends. If he goes to the East, I'm going too!"
She explained her name to me. Charlemagne called his great sword Joyeuse; and, blending in the steel, so she said, was the lance-point that pierced the side of Our Lord. Her words thrilled me.
"It's strange to be named after a sword," I said.
"In French the word sword is feminine," she answered. She had a queer way with her.
The afternoon closed in. The lights of Paris showed up like a great field of daisies. My two uncles and the Count crouched over the maps and the photographs. They talked in whispers.
It was quite dark outside when the man who had charge of the old monk knocked at the door and stumbled into the room before the Count had time to tell him to enter.
"II s'est échappé!" he screamed. "Le bonze, monsieur! Le bonze!"
Words choked him as he tried to explain. He had left the old one for a few minutes to get some food for himself, and when he returned, he found the window of the room open and the monk nowhere to be seen.
THE Count led the rush that followed —through the dining-room, along a corridor leading to the rear of the house, across an open court to a sort of annex in which the servants slept. The stuttering guard pointed to the open window through which the old one had escaped.
"He'll be in the garden!" cried the Count. "He couldn't climb the wall. Call the other servants, and search the garden!"
That garden of the Villa Mille Fleurs had been left to itself. It had run wild, the shrubs and trees not knowing the shears or the saw for a long time. Now it seemed dark and mysterious as we plunged into it to search for the ancient.
Flane, who was beating the bushes to the right of Thurland, stopped suddenly.
"What's that?" he demanded hoarsely.
There came from the far end of the dark garden a thin wailing noise that was like the sound of a flute played softly—thrilling and rather frightening music. It came up over the dark shrubbery and sobbed around us, bringing chills to our spines as we listened. And it seemed to be colored, colored a queer scarlet, so that we looked up as if we could see the notes swirling around our heads.
"What kind of devil's music is that?" asked Flane. "Who's playing it?"
The Count, who had stopped like the rest of us, cried out something in French and rushed forward. Thurland and Flane followed him, and I ran in their tracks, afraid to be left alone. Crashing through the bushes, they charged toward the end of the garden, and the scarlet notes whipped them forward.
There was a high wall of stone at the rear of the garden, an old wall upon which green ivy crawled. The Count swung to the right and followed it, my two uncles at his heels. The music was louder now—faster, more troubling to the nerves. It carried a barbaric note. From somewhere in my mind came a line of verse that I had read years before:
"The mad musician whose hot breath
From reed pipes brings the Dance of Death!"
The Dance of Death! That was it! The swirling notes that filled the garden was the music of death! I wanted to cry out the information to Thurland, but the ash of great fear filled my throat.
The Count halted; Thurland pushed past him. Against the ivy-covered wall I saw something—something black that, either by its own force, or by the pull of some one on the other side, was moving up the wall. Not climbing! Moving —rising without movement of its own!
It was the monk! Thurland, with a Gaelic curse on his lips, sprang forward and grabbed him. The music stopped with a shrill piercing note. Flane, running to the side of his brother, beat at something that seemed to come from the other side of the wall; then the servants came up with two lanterns.
Thurland held the old man by the sleeve of his yellow robe. The ancient was weeping. That is, the tears on his withered cheeks showed as the lamp was turned on him, but he made no sound.
"Back to the house," said the Count, and back we went—silently, Thurland still clinging to the sleeve of the monk.
INTO the salon Thurland took the ancient. The Count ordered the servants back to their quarters, and the five of us stood around the strange figure. The girl Joyeuse had not joined in the rush across the garden, but she had been waiting near the annex when we returned. She didn't seem frightened.
"Now," said Thurland, looking hard at the Count, "you haven't told us everything. There were others out there tonight.... The music—the hand that Flane struck at.... Does anyone want him?"
"Yes," answered the Count. "I can't tell you who they are, but I have known for some days that others are trying to coax him away. It was for that reason that I have put a guard over him."
"And you think they know what you know?"
"I suppose they do. It would be the only reason for getting him into their hands."
"This is a strange business," Thurland muttered. "A strange business entirely."
The Count opened his mouth to speak, but a knock at the door halted him. When he said "Entrez," the man who had been guarding the ancient came in.
Head bowed, the fellow commenced to speak in an apologetic tone. His nerves had been upset by the events of the evening; his heart was not as good as it might be. Now, this very night, he would like to make his démission.
"But we cannot get anyone to take your place at this hour," said the Count.
The fellow was stubborn. He had to leave, to leave at once.
SLOWLY the ancient turned and looked at the guard. The glittering eyes were concentrated on the fellow. The right hand, thin, clawlike, was suddenly lifted up, palm turned toward the man; then the fingers closed with a quick snapping motion as if they had seized upon something that was invisible to us. The guard winced, and took a step backward. He seemed terrified.
Thurland spoke. "I'd let him go," he said, addressing the Count. "I've got a thought about him. I think he's double-crossed Methuselah here, and now he's afraid of the old man. Did you notice that movement of the fingers?"
"But who'll guard the monk?" asked the Count.
Thurland looked at Flane. "My brother and I might take turn and turn about," he said quietly.
"There's a room next to the dining-room, a sort of pantry with barred windows," said the Count. "We might shift him into that. It would be easier."
He stepped to a desk, took a wad of hundred-franc bills from it, counted off the sum owing to the guard, and waved him to the door. The fellow stumbled out of the room.
The girl broke the silence following the departure of the guard. "Who made the wonderful music?" she asked. "I have never heard anything so beautiful." Flane looked at her in surprise. The swirling notes had not seemed wonderful to Flane. Not at all.
"It was so—so exotic," continued the girl. "A tune that you might hear on a hillside near Ispahan. Something that—that a shepherd might have played. It thrilled me."
No one spoke. "Who made it?" she asked again, looking from one to another.
"We don't know," said the Count. "We think it was played by some one who was outside the wall. Some one who wished to direct the bonze to the point where he would be helped over the wall. Or—or where he would lift himself over the wall." He turned to Flane. "What did you hit at?" he asked.
"I couldn't say exactly," said Flane. "I thought it a hand, but it wasn't. I'm puzzled."
The Count opened the door leading into the dining-room. We filed through, Thurland still keeping a clutch on the sleeve of the ancient. Joyeuse ran ahead and opened the door to the pantry. It was a long, narrow room with shelves running up to the ceiling. It had two windows opening onto the garden, both closely barred. The thinnest man in the world couldn't escape from it.
Thurland examined the room closely. "It's fine," he said. "If he wants to get away, he'll have to come through the dining-room, and it's easy to sit in a room where there's food and drink. Is there a bed handy for the poor devil?"
The Count rang for a servant who brought a mattress and bed-clothing. The bed was arranged, on the floor, the old man pushed into the room. Thurland locked the door and put the key in his pocket. And Flane got a length of rope from the kitchen, ran it through the brass handle of the door, and tied it to the leg of the big table at which they sat.
"That's that," he said, rubbing his forehead. "If there is any whisky about, I know where it would be useful."
BUT the monk's story, translated by the Count, followed by the strange business in the garden, had left me jumpy. I turned from time to time and stared at the door leading into the pantry. The Count believed that the old man in the narrow room with its barred windows had wiped out the City of Klang-Nan in the secret valleys of the Laos hills. He had definitely said so, and I believed it—believed with all my heart and soul.
The very look of the old man stirred the imagination so that an enormous faith was bred in the mind, and all things were believable....
I fell asleep at last, and I didn't wake till the sun was shining through the lace curtains of the dining-room. Thurland was awake, but Flane and the Count were asleep, their heads pillowed on their folded arms. I glanced quickly at the rope that was tied to the leg of the table; Thurland saw my interest and grinned.
"He's still inside, Jimmy," he said.
"Are you—are you sure?" I asked.
My words brought a doubt to Thurland's mind. He got up and peeped through the keyhole, and a sigh of relief came from him as he made his observations.
"He's at his prayers," he said, as he came back to the table.
"Who is?" asked Flane, roused by his brother's words.
"Monsieur Methuselah," answered Thurland. "You had a fine sleep. I should have called you two hours ago to take your turn in watching the old one, but I let you sleep."
"I wish you had called me," said Flane. "All the damn' talk of the evening gave me mad dreams."
NOW as I looked at Thurland, I knew that he had cut his walking-stick, as they say in Kerry. The smile on his face told me that he had accepted the offer of the Count. A strange joy had descended upon him, for the. Angel of Great Happenings had opened a path for him out of the morass of dull days. He was like a hunting leopard that had found the door of his cage open, and though stricken with amazement, was scampering madly toward the jungle.
The Count awoke, looked at Thurland and Flane, turned his head and glanced at the rope, then grinned good-naturedly.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"Nearly seven," answered Thurland.
"We'll get some coffee," said the Count, and he walked across the room and pushed the bell-button.
As he did so there came, as if his finger had magically produced it, a clanging of the bell at the front entrance of the garden—the insolent clanging that goes on and on, and which, if one is imaginative, one always associates with the Law. For decent people never jangle a bell. They pull the cord softly and wait. But the Law, wishing to send fear in front of its arrival, treats the bell-rope or knocker with fine violence.
The Count looked out through the window; a servant was hurrying down the garden path. Through the quiet air we heard the bar of the big iron gates pulled back, then the sharp voice of a man addressing the servant. Quite clear it came to us, and it rode on the wings of fear.
"Count Zavrel?" said the voice. Then came a word that the Irish hate, the word "Police." And good reason they have for their dislike to that same word.
THURLAND got to his feet and walked to the window. Flane followed. The four of us, looking down on the driveway, saw the little procession. The servant walking ahead, followed by two men, one in the uniform of an inspector and the other the ordinary small agent that you see in scores on the streets of Paris.
"Now what the devil?" said Thurland softly. "On a nice spring morning like this, it's strange that the first callers are two ferret-faced wretches that have nothing to do but stick their noses into other people's business."
In silence we waited, hearing from far off the voice of the servant, which was quite respectful and a trifle servile. For servants, as Thurland once said, love to see their masters in trouble; and to them, a visit from the police always spells trouble, as it often does to people higher up. The fellow was asking them to seat themselves in the hall while he went to see if the Count was up.
Not thinking we were in the dining-room, he opened the door, and there was a grin of pleasure on his weak face because he was still thinking what a joke it would be to tell his master the police were after him. He wiped the grin away with an effort, and bowed to the Count, informing him that an inspector of police wished to speak to him.
Another thing my uncle said once was this: "Police and undertakers enter a room in the same fashion. They have queasy looks on their faces, as much as to say: 'Where's the body?'"
The inspector picked out the Count, bowed, and took a notebook from his pocket.
"Last night, just before eleven o'clock," he said, speaking in a high-pitched voice, "a man was sitting on the terrace of the Café du Printemps in the Rue des Acacias. Suddenly he fell from his chair to the ground. An ambulance was called, and he was taken to the Hospital Beaujon. The doctors examined him, and reported that he was dead." He paused and looked at the Count, then continued: "In his pocket was a letter evidently addressed to himself in the care of 'Count Zavrel, Villa Mille Fleurs, Boulevard d'Argenson, Neuilly.' His name was Pierre Lartigue."
"I have employed a man of that name," said the Count coldly. "He left my service last evening. Why does his death concern me?"
"It is the cause of his death that troubles the hospital," said the inspector slowly.
"Why?"
"Because the medical authorities have an idea that he died from a strange Asiatic disease. They suspect the plague."
The face of the Count gave no hint of the shock that he must have felt. He was quite calm, and in the silence that followed the statement, the inspector looked at my two uncles, who had now taken seats at the table. They appeared as unconcerned as the Count, though they too must have been startled. As for myself, I thought my pounding heart would fracture my ribs.
"Plague?" murmured the Count. "The plague in Paris! What kind of plague?"
"Bubonic," snapped the inspector.
AGAIN the little silence; again the inspector looked from one to the other. The mouths of my two uncles were closed firmly. It was not their business; it was a matter for the master of the house.
"I know nothing about it," said the Cbunt. "I cannot understand how he got it. Where, may I ask, do I come into this matter?"
"There is," said the inspector slowly, "the possibility of quarantine. That is, if the disease can be traced here."
"But he may have visited scores of places," protested the count. "There is no evidence that he contracted it here."
"Not yet," said the inspector. "What were his duties?"
"General," said the Count casuallv. "He did this and that."
The inspector was silent. He seemed puzzled. He consulted his notebook, found no help there, looked at the agent at his side, and then let his gaze wander around the dining-room.
His eyes fell upon the rope that ran from the handle of the pantry door to the leg of the table. It made him curious. He stared at it for a few moments; then with raised eyebrows turned to the Count.
Thurland spoke before the Count could answer the yet-unspoken question. "If you're troubled as to what we have in there," said my uncle, "I'll tell you. We have there two of the wildest and most savage wolf-hounds that were ever bred in Ireland. They hate police like the devil; so when we saw you and your friend coming up the garden path, we slung them in there for safety."
Flane grinned openly as the faces of the inspector and the agent showed the effects of the information. They moved back toward the door through which they had entered, and the look of confidence fled from their faces. For a moment they forgot the plague, and the man Pierre Lartigue whose sudden death had brought them to the villa.
"Have you a license?" stuttered the inspector.
"It's with them," answered Thurland gayly. "Tied around their blessed necks, so to speak. Would you like to see it?" He half rose from his chair and turned toward the pantry door, but the inspector stopped him.
"No, no," he cried. "It is not in discussion at the moment. The matter—the matter on which I came has nothing to do with—with dogs."
He seemed a little rattled, and the Count stepped in to finish the interview. "Is there anything else?" he asked. "If you have quite finished we would like to proceed with our breakfast."
The inspector tried to recover his composure, but failed, then stuttered out a half-threat. "I haven't orders to quarantine the villa," he said. "I must see the hospital authorities, and when—"
"When you do see them, come and speak to me," said the Count irritably. "Good morning."
The two stumbled through the door, the agent pulling it to behind him. We heard them clumping along the passage, listened to the servile domestic who escorted them down the driveway, then when the iron gates clanged behind them, the Count sprang into action.
"Get him out!" he cried. "Quick!"
HASTILY Thurland untied the rope, and opened the door of the pantry. The monk was lying on the mattress, but Thurland stooped, picked him up bodily and carried him into the dining-room.
In that same strange tongue that they had used on the previous evening, the Count fired rapid questions at the ancient and with the same quickness the monk replied. We guessed the reason for most of the queries and answers. The Count wished information. He had accused the old one of inoculating the unfortunate guard, and now he wished to find out if the malady would spread.
The Count turned to Thurland and Flane. "He says that there is no danger," he cried. "No danger of it spreading. He doesn't deny that he—that he gave it to Lartigue."
"Mother o' God!" muttered Flane. "This is a fine mess we're in now!"
"It's no mess if there's no danger of it spreading," snapped Thurland. "If the malady stops with the death of the fool guard, who brought it on himself by double-crossing the old man, how the devil are we concerned?"
I KNEW then that the amazing story of Angkor had entrapped Thurland. There was a fierce fighting light in his eyes as he hurled the question at Flane. Upon him was the same wild desire to seek and find that had gripped him during the mad trek across the desert in the quest of the Caravan Treasure.
The madness flamed up in him, smashing down obstacles, making little of all the barriers that fate might put in the way. For when Thurland sought anything that he wanted greatly, there was only one obstacle that could stop him. That obstacle was death. "But the quarantine?" cried Flane. "To hell with the quarantine!" snarled Thurland. "Why wait here till the fools put a guard on the place?" He turned to the Count who had stood by during the interchange between the two brothers.
"You said that you had everything prepared for this voyage?" he demanded.
"Everything," answered the Count.
"The matter of the money?" asked Thurland.
"Already transferred under another name to the Banque de l'lndo-Chine, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. There's enough in hand to get us to Saigon."
"Passports?"
"Mine and my niece's are in order."
Thurland turned to his brother. "Go to our hotel as quick as you can. Get the passports! Hurry, now. There isn't a moment to lose. That little inspector would have camped here if I hadn't frightened him off with the talk of wolfhounds. But he'll be back. Get to it!"
Joyeuse came into the room as Flane dashed away. She looked from the Count to Thurland, then spoke softly. "What's happening?" she asked.
"We're going away," said Thurland.
"When?" she asked.
Thurland looked at his watch. "It's now ten minutes past eight," he said. "I think we'll be hitting the high road in the direction of Marseilles a few minutes after nine."
My uncle was in charge now. The mantle of authority was upon his shoulders. He pulled a chair to the table and motioned the count to sit down beside him. A valley in the far-off hills of the Laos states called to Thurland Spillane.
The servants were called in, one after another, handed a month's wages and dismissed. The chauffeur was ordered to get the two cars—one American and the other French—ready for a journey. When he reported that they were in order, he received an extra pourboire and was told to pack.
"Everyone must be out of the place within thirty minutes!" cried Thurland. "It's to your own benefit to snap into it. Listen! The police have a nice thought of quarantining the outfit, because the man Lartigue died last evening from drinking French beer, so I'd advise you to hustle."
NO need to repeat the order.... The villa was like an ant's nest on which some one had poured a pot of boiling water. The poor devils of servants, horrified at being locked up for weeks in a place that the authorities viewed with suspicion, rushed to their quarters, tossed their belongings into battered trunks and old valises, and dragged them out through the porte de service; There, in the back street, they piled them on barrows and taxicabs and fled, thankful to escape with a month's wages that they hadn't earned.
The telephone rang, but no one went near it. "It's the little folk at the hospital," said Thurland. "They want to tell us that they've found a bug with a Latin name, and for us to come in and get vaccinated. Pull the yellow nightshirt off that old man, Jimmy. He'll have to get into regular clothes."
The Count brought an old suit and an overcoat, and with much trouble we got the bonze into them.
Joyeuse brought a packed bag into the dining-room. She seemed delighted at the sudden departure. The Count opened a strong-box in the wall of his study and took from it a fine wad of thousand-franc bills. He stripped off a number and passed them to Thurland. A butler, the last servant in the villa, reported that windows and doors were locked, with the exception of the big iron gates of the driveway.
Flane arrived in a taxi; then Thurland gave the orders for departure. It was exactly forty minutes since the inspector had left the villa.
"The Count is driving the French car," said Thurland; "and you, Flane, and the old monk will ride with him. I'm taking Jimmy and the young lady with me in the American machine. We're heading for Marseilles by way of Nevers, Lyon and Avignon. There might be trouble, and there mightn't. If we get separated, we've got a meeting-place arranged. Now let's go!"
Thurland led the way. We swung through the big gates onto the Boulevard d'Argenson, crossed the Pont de Neuilly and turned southward.... The morning was a sister to that of the day before. The green woods of the Bois de Boulogne waved to us. Little winds from the Midi came up and met us as we found Route Nationale Number 7, running in the direction of Moulins.
Joyeuse was delighted. The visit of the inspector had made it unnecessary for her to plead with the Count. She kissed her fingertips to Paris—Paris of the turned heels, who had found reason to send my Uncle Thurland wandering.
THERE are no other roads like the roads of France. For they, above all others, whisper of the days of splendid romance. In the yellow sunshine of the spring you can look at them with half-closed eyes and see in fancy the dashing ladies and handsome men who once rode over them. For a road gets character from the people who pass over it, gathering grace or deviltry from the shoes of their feet or the hoofs of their horses. And this is well known to wise men, for the roads that have been frequented by footpads and robbers inspire fear, although you might not know their history; while the paths leading to shrines and sacred places have acquired a soothing quality that is like balm to the soul of those that walk over them.
By Fontainebleau, that seems a green heart of romance itself—for to Fontainebleau come folk from all over the world, their own lives being so dull that they try to satisfy their longings by staring at the bedroom in which poor Marie Antoinette slept. "And that," said Thurland, "is a poor way of getting a kick. It's like sniffing the empty glass of a man who has been drinking whisky."
By Nevers and Moulins, clinging to Number 7 and taking no notice of the small roads that ran out from it into romantic country. Somewhere behind us were the Count, Flane and the bonze; and wondering a little as to how they were getting along, we thundered into Lyons, which is a big pounding town, and there we found lodgings in the Rue Quatre-Chapeaux, which is a funny name for a street. But the name of the hotel was funnier, it being the Hôtel Milan, Monopole et de la Paix; and Joyeuse and I puzzled a lot as to the relation of the names to each other. The ride had made us friends—the ride and the fact that we were on our way to see the evening star shine upon Angkor.
THE Midi was before us on the morning we left Lyons—the Midi, where thin sunshine makes cabins into castles. The Midi, where the little hills become the Alps that Tartarin climbed, where Saint Marthe slew the monster Tarasque that ravaged the countryside, and where Queen Jeanne of the perfumed hands, the last of the Chatelaines, presented the prizes to the tilting knights at the Courts of Love.
"This country," said Thurland, nodding at the stretches of staked vines, "was once a fine place, where it was as easy to get into a fight as it is in Ireland; but now they do nothing but squeeze grapes whose juice they send to America. The world has gone to the devil. There are big wars; of course, but it's the little fights that you get day by day that keep men healthy and sane."
We kept a bright lookout for the other car, but we saw nothing of it. Thurland was worried lest they had struck trouble, for if we lost the monk, it would be no use going on....
Then, in the late evening, as we swung towards Aix-en-Provence, we saw ahead of us the big car that the Count was driving. Halted by the roadside, a mounted gendarme was studying the carnets of the driver in a manner that showed he didn't like them.
"Agh!" growled Thurland. "The Curse of Cromwell on all police, say I!" And saying that he stepped on the gas and sent a warning for the gendarme to pull his horse out of the way.
The gendarme was annoyed. He made a motion with his hand for Thurland to stop, but my uncle pretended that he didn't see him. He drove straight on without a glance at the Count or Flane, and he took no notice of the blast of the whistle that the gendarme sent after us.
"Did you see the old monk in the car?" asked Thurland, when we were a kilometer away.
"No," I answered. "I only saw the Count and Flane."
"They've stuffed him under the seat," said Thurland. "Flane is better than a jackdaw for hiding things."
My uncle remained silent for a few minutes, then he expressed the fear that had come to him. "If they took that old Methuselah away from us, I'd go back and burn the town they carried him to," he said grimly. "Interfering devils are the police! Always sticking their cocked noses into other people's business. There was once a great scientist in Ireland who invented a disease that would only take on policemen. He died before he could get it in proper working order. I have always regretted his death.
Lest the gendarme would get to a telephone and block us, we circled Aix, then ran southward to Aubagne, coming into Marseilles from the east, as if we were returning from the Riviera. We stopped at a little hotel just off the Cannebičre.
HIGH above Marseilles is the church of Nôtre-Dame-de-la-Garde, and it was on the hill where the church stands that Thurland had arranged a meeting with the Count. A strange place for a rendezvous, but a wise one, for it is only tourists who go up to the church, and the police think that all tourists are harmless folk who poke around old churches and do no harm at all.
The three of us took our coffee and brioche on the Cannebiere, the next morning, and Thurland talked.
"Down this street," he said, "went a lot of fine scoundrels on their way to the Holy Land to beat up the Turk. A fine business, the Crusades. If they got killed, they went straight to heaven; and if they lived they had all the plunder that they could grab and a lot of honor.
Off to Jerusalem to tread ankle-deep in blood at the 'winepress of the Lord.'"
A lean, rat-faced boy came running from the Cours Belsunce. He took a quick look at my uncle, then came forward and spoke in a whisper.
"Comment?" cried Thurland.
"II y a des agents au garage qui vous cherchent, monsieur!" cried the boy.
My uncle reached for his pocketbook, took out a hundred-franc bill and put it into the hands of the boy. "You'll go far," he said. "There are boys like you in Ireland with the hatred of peelers in their blood." He turned to us with a grin. "The police are at the garage waiting to chat with us," he said. "We can't go back. We'll look up the rest of them. I'm afraid the place is not healthy."
Thurland bought a copy of Le Petit Marseillais as we climbed into the cab that was to take us to the ascenseur that runs up the face of the hill to the church. Hurriedly he searched the pages of the paper, and a grunt told Joyeuse and myself that he had found what he hunted for. He placed a big forefinger on the paragraph, and we read it as the cab jolted over the rough paving-stones of the Boulevard Nôtre Dame. It was a Paris telegram from the Havas Agency, an agency that collects news for the out-of-town papers, and it ran:
Un invidu, Pierre Lartigue, admis ŕ L'Hôpital Beaujon, est mort aussitôt arrivé. Les médecins, ayant trouvé sur lui les symptômes de la peste, ont immédiatement averti les autorités. La police est alertée.
"Well," said Thurland, "the day is starting badly, as old Paddy Meehan said when they woke him up to tell him they were going to hang him. P'raps Flane and the Count and the old blackamoor are in a prison in the Midi, and our trip :o the East is a pipe-dream."
The ascenseur took us up the face of the cliff, and there on the top we found Flane waiting for us. He grinned as we arrived for Flane, like Thurland, took troubles with a light heart.
"You passed us in a hurry yesterday!"
"I knew you'd get out of trouble withuut my help," laughed Thurland. "But we've had our share this morning. The police are after us. Where's the Count?"
"He's out at the Jardin Zoologique," answered Flane. "He's got the monk with him." *
"And why?" cried Thurland.
"It seems," explained Flane, "that there's a leopard in the garden that came from the monk's country. He saw it when he passed through on his way to Paris, and he spoke to it. That's what he says this morning. He'd do nothing at all till he was taken to visit the beast."
My Uncle Thurland swore softly. "This is a fool business at a moment when the police are on our heels," he cried. "Here in the paper is a bit about the death of the fellow in Paris; the police are at our hotel waiting for us to come back; and now you tell me that the count and the old monk are making a morning call on a leopard in the zoo!"
"Don't snarl at me," said Flane. "We could do nothing with the old devil till the Count agreed to take him. If you can't go back to your hotel, we had better go and find them."
To lessen the danger threatened by the police, Flane and Joyeuse rode in one cab, and Thurland and I in the other, and my uncle growled and grumbled as we drove across the town to the Palais de Longchamp, where the zoo is situated.
"Did anyone ever hear the likes of it!" he cried. "On a morning when trouble is all about us, the old fool wants to see a beast from his own country! This is a queer business. There are moments when I'm a little afraid of it, because— because there are things about it that don't "seem natural. The way that old devil lifted himself off the floor, the strange music in the garden, and the quick death he gave the guard by snapping his fingers at him. Yet that was a fine story he told of the great jewels and the gold."
"A fine story," I agreed.
ONLY a few persons were in the Jardin Zoologique, the gates having been just opened; but the few who were there were gathered in one spot, and to that spot we moved. And we knew, as we tried to control our hurry, that the attraction was the old bonze.
The ancient had climbed under the guard-rail that was five feet away from the cages of the big cats, and he was on his knees, stroking the head of a leopard, who seemed delighted to see him! Ay, the leopard was whining with pleasure as the old one chattered to him in a lingo that he seemed to understand. The eyes of the beast were glowing with green fire, and he slobbered and whined, trying in his dumb way to tell the monk how delighted he was with the visit. And the little knot of Frenchies that were standing round were "Ah'ing" and "Ooh'ing" in the manner of persons who are looking at a miracle.
The keeper of the big cats had run to the house of the head keeper, and now the two of them came running across the green stretch, the one telling of what he had seen, the other showing by signs that he doubted it.
They thrust themselves through the little crowd, and when the boss keeper saw the monk tickling the ears of the leopard, he let out a yell of warning and shouted his opinion of the monk's fooi-hardiness.
"Mon Dieu!" he screamed. "Cet homme est fou!"
He stooped and tugged at the coat of the monk; but the leopard showed that he didn't like any interference with the conversation he was having. He snarled at the keeper, and tried to reach him wi:h a snaky paw; and the keeper stumbled back into the crowd, swearing and shouting about the stupidity of the old man
THURLAND thought the publicir; might be dangerous to our safety. He pushed his way to the side of the Count and whispered to him. "Get him away," urged Thurland. "The bright boys from the papers might come at any moment to snap the old boy's picture and that'll make trouble for us."
The Count dragged at the old man's coat and spoke to him in his own tongue The monk protested, but the Count was alarmed. His adjuration became sharper, and the old one showed signs of irritation. He had his ugly mug against the bars now, his wrinkled lips touching the nose of the leopard. Keepers were coming at a gallop from other parts of the garden, shouting the news to each other. Thurland lost his temper. He climbed over the guard-rail, grabbed the man around the waist and lifted him off the ground. With the old fellow protesting and the leopard whining, Thurland marched toward the gates. The taxi that had brought Flane and Joyeuse to the garden was still waiting, and Thurland made for it, the ancient kicking madly.
Thurland was about to push the old one into the cab when a tall man sprrang at him, dealing him a blow on the back of the head that brought him to his knees. The stranger attempted to release the monk, but Thurland clung to him. The tall man turned as Flane entered the fight. I saw his face plainly as he wheeled. It was a dark, evil face: the eyes were the eyes of a madman, and the lobes of his ears were larger than any lobes I had ever seen.
Strong he was, without a doubt, and no fool with his hands, parrying Flane's blows in a manner that showed he knew something about the art of defence.
For a minute they battled, Flane and the unknown; then a soft whistle came from a clump of trees to the right. The man turned, and running swiftly, disappeared in the bushes of the park.
Thurland put the monk into the cab and stared at the clump of trees. He had an idea of pursuing the fellow, but the Count stopped him.
"We must get away!" said the Count sharply. Hurriedly he whispered an address to the chauffeur; and the cab carrying himself, Thurland and the monk rolled off in the direction of the city.
An agent came running from the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the keeper at the gate having telephoned that there was a disturbance. He asked Flane what was the trouble, but Flane was angry, and his replies were short and not polite. The agent was puzzled as to whether he should arrest us; and while he was thinking about it, Flane found another cab, put Joyeuse and me into it, climbed in himself and told the driver to hit it up for the Cannebičre.
My two uncles always thought that politeness was wasted upon policemen. "If you're polite, they think you're afraid of them," said Flane as the car swept down the Allées de Meilhan; "and fear is a prison cell or worse. Without his jacket that little fellow wouldn't dare to speak to a full-grown man!"
The attack at the Jardin Zoologique and the knowledge that the police were waiting at our hotel startled the Count. At the top of the Cannebiere the other cab was waiting for us; and Thurland, his head thrust out of the window, signaled us to follow.
SOME seven miles from Marseilles is a place called Allauch; and there we hid ourselves for the rest of the day, acting the part of foolish tourists in looking at the old church and the Roman walls. As the monk was the most noticeable, my Uncle Thurland sat with him all the afternoon on a wooded hillside, while Flane and Joyeuse and myself kept out of the way of folk. The Count went on to the next town and telephoned the shipping companies, trying to find a boat that would take us out of Marseilles as quickly as possible.
Toward nightfall we got together again. The Count arrived and told us that he had secured accommodation on a Dutch steamer, the Van Tromp, that was sailing at daybreak the following morning. She was making for Batavia, but she would call at Rangoon, and there we could leave her. She carried, so the agent informed the Count, no other passengers.
Our nerves on a tension, we found accommodation for the night in two little hotels. I couldn't sleep. My thoughts were of the man with the large lobes to his ears. There was something sinister about his attack, something unexplainable. He had rushed at Thurland as if filled with a sudden madness at seeing the old monk separated from the leopard, and he had fought back at Flane with the same fanatical fury. The Count and my uncles connected him with the attempt at escape made by the bonze at the Villa Mille Fleurs in Neuilly, and now, more than ever, they wished to keep their movements secret.
>WE were on our way to the city before dawn, and a strange cold place is the town of Marseilles before the light of day comes to it. The string of cafés running the whole length of the Cannebičre, filled with customers and ablaze with lights in the evening, are empty and dark and unromantic in the early morning. A dirty fog had drifted in from the Gulf of Lions, and on the paved circle around the Vieux-Port one had to step carefully, or one would walk right into the harbor.
The Van Tromp was lying out beyond Fort St. Jean, and the five of us got into a motorboat and set out to find her. The fog-blanket hid everything; and we ran around in it, the boat-owner and Thurland yelling out, "Van Tromp, ahoy!" every few minutes, and getting answers in every tongue in the world except Dutch.
When we thought we'd never find her, there came a cheerful "Ja! Ja!" out of the fog, and we edged in to her ladder and climbed aboard. She was wet and cold like Marseilles, but there was a fine odor of hot coffee. The fat captain led us into the saloon and ordered great bowls of it to be brought to us.
"We go 'way joost one hour, ja!;" he cried; then, to our surprise, he added:
"We wait one odder passenger an' two sailors." We had thought there were to be no other passengers.
The skipper was interested in Methuselah. He watched the monk drinking his coffee, and his blue eyes twinkled. "Him foonny fellow," he gurgled. "Many years old, ja? P'raps one hoondred?"
"Perhaps," said the Count.
THE captain filled his meerschaum and considered the monk. The monk considered the captain. For some reason that we could not see, the two had taken an interest in each other.
"Two hoondred, mebbe?" said the captain. "He no talk? Neen?"
"Yes, he talks," said the Count, not showing any great pleasure in the captain's interest. "He talks a lot when he wants to."
And curiously, the monk chose that moment to show he could talk. He turned to the Count and started to chatter at great speed, using his skinny hands to emphasize what he was saying, looking occasionally at the Dutch captain as he jabbered away.
Count Zavrel seemed surprised and puzzled. When the monk stopped speaking, the Count turned to the captain. "He says he knows you very well—was a friend of yours for many years in Saigon."
"I was never in Saigon," said the Dutchman. "I have been in nearly all der ports of the Indies, but never in Saigon."
The Count spoke again to the monk, who seemed to resent the denial of the captain. "He seems certain," said the Count, smiling. "He knows a lot of details about your life. He speaks of a blue uniform with a star, and he says—pardon me for mentioning this, but if it wasn't you, it doesn't matter—he says you occupied a bungalow with a very pretty brown young lady who, I think, was some sort of relative of his. He knows her name. It was, so he says, Neang-Khlot."
A queer look came upon the face of the Dutchman. He laid his pipe down and stared at the monk. "Wait!" he cried. "I have one leetle test to make." .
He rushed from the saloon, to return in a few minutes with a large book which he placed upon the table. We saw the name in gilt on the cover. It was the bound copies of De Indische Gids, a monthly journal printed in Amsterdam. With fingers so fat that they resembled sausages, the captain thumbed the pages till he came at last to a double section made up of photographs of dead Dutchmen who had founded the East Indian empire for the Netherlands.
He swung the page of photographs before the monk. The old man peered at it without showing any great interest. Then, suddenly, he came to life. He pointed to a photograph in the second row. A smile of pleasure showed upon his wrinkled face. He chattered excitedly, and the Count translated: "He says that is the picture of you as he saw you in Saigon."
The Dutchman choked. He moistened his lips and stared at the old man. "That is the picture of my great-grandfather, General Jan Oudegeest!" he cried. "Ja! He died at Saigon one hoondred an' feefty years ago! He fought der tamned British in the Moluccas, ven der beeg tief Stamford Raffles was alive!" His excitement affected his English; he spluttered and waved his fat hands.
"Dot feller is five hoondred years oldt!" he cried. "It ees bad luck to haf heem on my ship. Ja! Now it ees too late to pitch heem off. I must go on deck! I am sick! Sick to der stomach!"
HE stormed out of the saloon, leaving us staring at the bonze. The old fellow had now lost interest in the matter. He curled up in a chair and went to sleep. Possibly the effort to recall the name of the brown girl who had lived with General Jan Oudegeest in Saigon in the long ago had tired him. But if any further demonstration was needed to convince my uncles that they were traveling with a freak, they had received it right there in the dark saloon of the Van Tromp; We were in the company of a person who created an atmosphere of mystery. Mystery that brought thrills! That little matter of the captain's great-grandfather made us feel more certain than ever that the ancient really knew of the lost city of Klang-Nan, the treasure-city in the dark valleys of the Laos country.
The passenger and the two sailors came aboard. A tug straightened the bull-nose of the Van Tromp, and we moved cautiously down the bay. Thurland spoke to me.
"Come on deck and get a glimpse of the Château d'If," he said. "We might see the ghost of Monte Cristo in this fog."
We couldn't see the islet or the chateau on account of the fog, but we saw the other passenger. He was standing near the rail, a tall man wrapped in a long overcoat, and he looked sharply at my uncle as we passed him. He had a thin, drawn face, the skin of which was as yellow as an Orangeman's sash on the Twelfth of July; and his eyes were deep-set his head and close together as if they wished to see danger in company.
"He looks a merry devil," said Thurland, when we were out of his hearing. Jimmy Hannigan looked like that when he drank some stuff for poisoning cockroaches, thinking it was whisky."
We went back to the saloon to find that the others had been shown to their cabins. The accommodation on the Van Tromp was not grand, but we were so pleased to be away from Marseilles that no one complained. Joyeuse had a small cabin to herself; so did the monk. The Count and Thurland shared a large cabin, and Flane and I had another. The yellow-faced passenger was quartered alongside the cabin occupied by Thurland and the Count.
The Van Tromp was a vessel that you'd know was Dutch if you knew anything at all about boats. For ships, as Thurland said, carry the look of the people that build them. In the old days were the big heavy English vessels made out of teak and oak, the slimmer French that looked French; and wasn't it the Americans who built the clippers with their long raking masts and their topsails that wiped the sky?
The fog lifted in the gulf. A big Peninsula and Oriental steamer was swinging in toward Marseilles, full of English officers from India, and cattle- and sheep-kings from Australia. And a Messageries Maritime liner driving home from Singapore was at her heels. And two oil tankers from the United States, and a wicked-looking destroyer, and fishing boats with colored sails. It was fine to look at them. Joyeuse and I thought it great fun. We were bound for the East.
"If you're going to the East," said Thurland, as we were eating lunch, "you'll never see your shadow before noon. And that's good luck. Everyone knows that it's a bad business to see your own shadow before twelve o'clock."
"Why?" asked the Count.
"It just is, that's all," said Thurland. "Look at what happened to old John Noonan, who lived over against Valencia, where the big cable to America hops into the sea!"
"What happened to him?" demanded the Count.
"John Noonan," said Thurland, "started out one bright morning to go to the fair of Portmagee, and as. he was going eastward, his shadow crept along behind him, a long black streak of it, he being a lanky fellow of six feet and a bit. And as he walked, he thought of a fine trick he would play on a man named Paddy Lynch. Paddy Lynch was so blind that he couldn't find his whisky-glass if he put it down on the table; and for that reason he drank his drink the moment he got it. It occurred to John Noonan that he would sell Lynch a black mare that he owned, and which, like poor Paddy, was nearly sightless, she being totally blind in one eye, with a cataract forming in the other.
"The thought of the trick pleased him as he walked along, hitting with his blackthorn at the little daisies and cowslips that had never done him any harm at all. He had got to the bridge about a mile from Portmagee, when he let a cry out of him and stopped dead on the road. Do you know why? The long lean shadow that was trailing him like a hound, rushed between his legs and ran out in front of him! In front of him, and the blessed sun in his face! Three yards and more of it! And when he lifted his stick in astonishment, there was the shadow of the stick out in front of him when it should have been at his heels!
"'I'm bewitched!' he screamed. 'I'm bewitched!'
"He turned about, thinking that the shadow would swing around with him, but it didn't. He was facing the west now, and all the shadows of the treees and the fences were in their proper places, but his wasn't. He looked over his shoulder at it, and he damned it in Gaelic, he being a fine hand at cursing.
"'Come around here where you belong, you dirty black fraud!' he shouted. 'What the devil do you mean by going contrary to nature's laws?'
"But the shadow took no notice of his curses; and after a while, he turned again to the east and started walking, the shadow in front of him, leaping off the toes of his shoes, so to speak, as he went forward. And the rats of fear gnawed at John Noonan's wishbone as he walked, the happening being strange enough to frighten the bravest man in the world.
"He came to Billy Doyle's farm at the entrance of the village, and there was Billy Doyle in the roadway, his shadow reaching out toward old John's. Billy Doyle's shadow was short and wide like himself, while Noonan's was long—as I've said.
"When Doyle and Noonan were four yards apart, the shadows met, and Billy Doyle, who was a bright observant man, saw the wonder of it. He made the sign of the cross and stared at Noonan.
"'It happened a little way back there by the bridge,' said John Noonan, seeing the question in the eyes of the other. 'I was thinking of something, and all of a sudden it darted through my legs like a startled fox, and ran out before me like a strip of crape.'
"'I'll wager,' said Billy Doyle, 'that it wasn't your prayers you were thinking of when it happened!'
'"Well, it wasn't, to tell you the truth,' said Noonan. 'It was a litfele bit of private business that I was mulling in my head. Do you believe it will go back to its right place before I reach the village? I'm thinking I would look funny walking down the street with the black shadow of me running in front.'
"'I don't know,' said Billy Doyle, edging into his own gate, he not liking to mix his own shadow with one that was acting queer. 'If I were you, I'd keep going,' he said.
"John Noonan walked on—he came to the village street and started down it; but he hadn't gone far, when a boy of ten, named Tommy Casey, saw there was something wrong with him. For the dog belonging to the boy, going forward to welcome Noonan, threw a shadow in one direction, while Noonan threw a shadow in the other. Noonan tried to shoo the dog away, and it was then that the boy called the attention of his father to the phenomenon.
"Old Casey was amused. 'John,' he called out, 'by the look of your shadow, you're going in the wrong direction.'
"'You go to blazes!' snapped Noonan, kicking at the dog.
"Old Casey's comment brought the thing to the attention of a lot of horse-copers that were waiting round for the sales to start, and they all got interested. And the more questions they asked, the madder Noonan got, especially when the children started to jump on the shadow with the idea of driving it behind him where it should have been.
"'Leave be!' he shouted, flailing at a kid with his blackthorn. 'It's my business, and no one else's.'
"Some one went and told Father Dunne, the parish priest of Portmagee, and he came to have a look. And when he saw the shadow running toward the east, he said something under his breath and looked hard at John Noonan. And Noonan got red in the face and glared at the priest.
"'When did it happen?' asked the priest.
"'When I was near the stone bridge,' snapped Noonan. 'It ran between my legs and out in front of me.'
"'What were you thinking of?' asked the priest.
"'Of business,' snapped Noonan, glaring at the crowd of men and women, who had their heads stuck forward lest they'd miss a single word. 'I was thinking of a deal I was going to make,' he continued, making a slap at a boy who was dancing a jig on the shadow.
"'A devil's deal, I'll wager!' cried the priest. 'A black deal, if I'm any judge. Tell us now what it was?' 'I won't tell!' shouted Noonan.
"'You're afraid!' cried the priest.
"'I'm not!' shouted old John. 'If you're so damned curious to know, it's this: I was thinking of selling the black mare to Paddy Lynch!'
"One of the horse-copers, who knew the mare was blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other, cried out at him. 'You old thief!' shouted the coper. 'You'd sell a blind horse to a blind man! May your soul rot in hell!'
"All the other dealers started to abuse him, and John Noonan broke down and commenced to sob. The priest looked at the shadow and spoke to him. 'You'll be the sight of Ireland with your shadow running the wrong way,' he said. 'The English and Americans will be sending over great scientists to look at you, and your mug will be in all the papers in the world. An Irishman who is so crooked that his shadow won't stay straight!'
"'What'LL I do?' sobbed Noonan, overcome by thought of his plight.
"'I'll tell you,' said the priest. 'What is the best horse on your farm?'
"'The red stallion that I call Sarsfield,' answered John.
"'Well,' said the priest, 'if you repeat these words after me, your shadow will go back to its proper place. Now say this, word for word. Say: "I, John Noonan, will give this blessed and holy day to poor Paddy Lynch, the blind man, the fine red stallion that I call Sarsfield, and will not take a brass farthing in return."'
"For a few minutes John Noonan remained silent, not liking to give up his horse; but when a new crowd of men and women came running to see his shadow, he cried out the words. And before he had got to the name of the stallion, the shadow made a rush between his legs and spread itself out behind him, and there it stayed. And that evening he led the red stallion over to Paddy Lynch's farm, although it hurt him a lot to do so."
MY uncle Flane, who had not listened to the story, came to the door of the saloon and beckoned us. He led us to the end of the deck where the monk was sitting on the scrubbed boards in the sunshine, his eyes on the well-deck below him.
"I may be mistaken," said Flane, "but I'd like some of you to look over those sailors and see if you recognize a friend."
Five of the sailors were sitting out on the tarpaulins covering the hatches, four of them playing with a greasy pack of cards, the fifth watching. They took no notice of us as we looked down at them.
It was Joyeuse who first noticed what Flane had already discovered. She whispered to us. "The one in the blue jumper!" she gasped. "He—he is the man who struck Mr. Thurland at the Zoological Garden! Look at his ears!"
Thurland uttered a warning as one of the men looked up at us. "Don't let them see we're looking!" he said, and we turned away quickly. But we knew that it was the man. The queer deformity of the ears marked him. No two men in the city of Marseilles possessed such enormous ear-lobes. His clothing, of course, was different from that which he had worn when he tried to take the ancient from Thurland's arms, but there could be no mistake.
We walked back toward the saloon. We were silent. A terror had come from the well-deck with the discovery.
"Possibly he's one of the two men shipped just before we sailed," said Flane. "The Dutchman said he was waiting for a passenger and two sailors."
"Have you seen the passenger?" asked Thurland.
"No," said Flane.
"He's pretty," said Thurland, dryly. "One of those handsome men that women dream of. If you get a chance, engage him in talk. He might be another that has taken a fancy to us."
THE Van Tromp was no great sea boat. She was small, and the Mediterranean seemed to know it, picking on her whenever a wind came up. For the seas bully the little ships, the waves having a great longing to rock them backward and forward, trying with all their might to tip them right over. And off Malta a big howling wind came rushing out of Africa, and fell like a mastiff on the Van Tromp.
The monk went to his bunk and stayed there. So did the Count. And, on the second day of the storm Joyeuse thought she could stand it better if she retired. Captain Oudegeest, and the passenger, whose name appeared to be Schiemann, and who was, so he told Thurland, a Latvian by birth, ate with us at the big table in the saloon. The Dutch steward served the Count, Joyeuse, and the monk in their cabins. The Count and Joyeuse ate little, but the monk ate nothing at all. He lay with shut eyes, mumbling what seemed curses at the tumbling waters.
On the third night of the storm Flane went to the monk's cabin before retiring, to see that the old fellow was all right.
The deck was unlighted, the cabin dark. Flane pushed open the door, and was in the act of stepping within, when some one leaving the cabin crashed against him, knocking him flat on his back.
Flane, reaching up, made a grab at the leg of the unknown as the fellow was leaping over him, and the unknown came with a crash to the boards. The noise brought Thurland, the Count and myself. Some one pushed the button of a flashlight. Flane had a clutch on the ankle of Schiemann, the yellow-faced Latvian!
Captain Oudegeest lifted Schiemann to his feet. At first we thought he had been dazed by the fall; then we discovered that he was under the influence of a drug. The Captain led him into the saloon, seated him in a chair, and sent for a shadowy officer called "the doctor," but who seldom left his cabin.
The "doctor" made a quick examination of the yellow-faced man. He made a queer gesture by running his forefinger beneath his nose; then he winked at the Captain. In silence the Captain and the "doctor" took hold of the fellow and escorted him to his cabin.
Thurland looked at Flane. "Was he walking out of the monk's cabin when you struck him?" he asked.
"Walking?" snapped Flane. "He was flying! Knocked me flat with his speed!"
"What the devil was he doing there?" growled Thurland.
"Let's go and see," said the Count.
In a body we went to the cabin of the ancient. He was sound asleep.
WE returned to the saloon. Captain Oudegeest was there drinking coffee. The Count told him that he considered the presence of Schiemann in the cabin of the monk rather extraordinary, and he suggested that the Captain question the man in the morning.
"I vill do no such t'ing!" said the Captain. "Dot oldt man is no goodt. If Schiemann went in dere to kill heem, I vould be bleased! He is badt. He bring troubles on my boat." Noisily he sucked down the remainder of his bowl of coffee and stalked out.
"What does he mean by troubles on his boat?" asked the count.
Thurland shook his head. "I don't think the Dutchman likes Methuselah," he said. "He seemed a little angry about the old fellow's story of his great grandfather and the little brown lady. He might think that there's a brown leaf in his genealogical tree. Let's go to bed. We'll talk matters over when we see the Latvian in the morning."
We didn't see the Latvian in the morning. He kept to his cabin. We rolled by Crete, the Van Tromp groaning like an old lady with rheumatism.
The monk was up, but he knew nothing about his visitor of the previous evening. He shook his head vigorously when the Count questioned him. He hadn't spoken to Schiemann, and he had nothing in his cabin that the other would desire. Captain Oudegeest was sulky. He barely acknowledged our salutes.
IT was immediately after lunch that trouble started. A Finnish sailor was the owner of a monkey of the wah-wah species; and today the Finn brought him out on the sunshiny well-deck.
The old monk was squatting outside his cabin, a blanket wrapped around him, his eyes half closed. The rolling of the Van Tromp was hard on him.
The wah-wah barked, just one short single note; and to his great surprise there came an answering bark. And from the way he swung around on his hind-legs and stared about the steamer, it seemed that the bark pleased him. He was a male wah-wah, and he thought the invisible barker was a female. That's what his actions told us.
He barked again, his head on one side listening, and immediately the answering bark came to him.
The wah-wah let out a whole stream of barks and started out to look for the lady. The Finn screamed at him, but he took no notice.
A mad ape was that fellow. His speed was amazing. He dashed here and there and everywhere. He went through the sailors' quarters; then, not finding the unseen barker, he sprang for the upper deck, barking as he searched for the invisible sweetheart.
He rushed from one cabin to another, clawing at the bunks, pulling blankets and coverlets to the floor, upsetting everything that wasn't nailed down.
It was unlucky that the yellow-faced Schiemann should be asleep when the wah-wah came searching. The half-crazed ape tore the blankets from the berth, and the barks of the wah-wah were mixed with the curses and the yells of rage of the passenger.
A revolver cracked; the monkey appeared with Schiemann in pajamas at his heels. A second bullet missed the ape, who swung from the iron rail to the deck below, and disappeared in the quarters of the sailors, fear for the moment smothering the desire to find the unseen barker.
The first officer of the Van Tromp seized the arm of the Latvian and tried to explain the conduct of the wah-wah—how the monkey had been upset by the barking of another monkey hidden somewhere on the steamer.
Schiemann's gaze fell on the ancient, wrapped in the blanket folds. Screaming threats, he broke away from the officer and made a rush toward the ancient.
It was Thurland who halted him. My uncle stepped in his path when Schiemann was within ten feet of the monk, wrenched the revolver from his hand, tossed it overboard, then swung the fellow round and gave him a push in the direction of his cabin.
Thurland's action seemed to bring him to his senses. He mumbled an apology for his conduct, then at a trot hurried back to his cabin. The old monk dozed.
The Count looked at Thurland and Flane. The three were puzzled. "Was it Methuselah who barked?" asked Flane.
"Of course," said Thurland. "I saw his lips move when the monkey climbed up the ladder from the deck below."
"But Yellow-face hadn't seen him do it, and yet he knew," said Flane.
Thurland was silent for a long minute; then he spoke. "That fellow is no more a Latvian than I am," he growled. "He's a cross-breed from Macao, where they've got so many different kinds of blood in their bodies that their hands and their feet fight with each other, and the hair on their heads grows seven different ways out of spite. And it isn't the first time that he's seen Methuselah either."
The Count nodded. He seemed upset.
AS the Van Tromp rolled into more peaceful waters, Joyeuse reappeared on deck. She was excited because we were approaching Port Said, for Port Said is the gate to the Orient and all the wonders of the East. Somewhere in the blue haze in front of us was the great Canal that De Lesseps dug through the leagues of sand, and our nearness to it played the mischief with my nerves.
For the East came out to meet us. With every thump of the screw, the feel of it became more apparent. There was a soft velvety wind that came up from the desert below Cairo, the great Sudan; part of the sea through which we moved came from the Nile itself, the great river shoving into the Mediterranean the millions of tons of water it brings from the hills of Abyssinia.
And the stars, bigger and brighter than I had ever seen them, seemed to know that we were on our way to find the lost city of Klang-Nan of which the monk spoke, and where he had lived hundreds of years before. The fine stars that had looked down on many wanderers....
Before daylight I awoke to find that the steamer had stopped. I looked out the port, and saw the town of Port Said. And there on the end of the breakwater leading to the Canal entrance was the statue of a man with his arm extended—the great De Lesseps pointing toward the East—the glorious East!
"THIS town," said my Uncle Thurland, 1 "is the sink of the world. Every man going to the East gets his first mouthful of the devil's juice in Port Said, and every man going westward takes his last swig before he reaches countries that the Lord still rules over. The hungry Westerner on his first voyage gets pop-eyed over it, and the old rakes from the East leave it with regret. There's a pub in Queenstown called 'The First and Last,' and I always think of it when I see Port Said."
Thurland and I were going ashore to buy clothes and shoes and topees, for we had left Marseilles with little, not having time or inclination to buy with the police at our heels. Flane had taken Joyeuse for a look at the town, and the Count was left aboard with the monk. The Van Tromp had to fill her old stomach with coal before she went into the Canal; and when we came down the gangplank, the colliers were around her, also the bumboat men with all sorts of trash that they wished to sell to the crew.
About the wickedness of the town I can say little, but the strangeness of it slammed me hard when we stepped ashore at the landing-stage. For although it is hot and filthy and smelly, it has, to a boy, the same strong attraction as the door to his first circus. For Port Said is a great door to which come the hurrying ships, eager to get through to the wonders beyond. There they were in the harbor, rocking backward and forward with impatience as they waited their turn to get into the Canal. A big P. & O. steamer for Australia, a Messageries boat for China and Japan, an American liner on a trip around the world—filled with folk whose pockets were lined with dollars that they threw away at every port for things of no value, for as Thurland said, ports make people so crazy that they buy things they would never think of purchasing at home. And there were big tramp ships and tankers rocking at their buoys, their captains waiting their turn. And the fierce expectancy and nervousness and bustle and heat put a glamour on the town, fine glamour that got into the blood, and put magic into the cries of the men who pushed rugs and beads and feathers into your face on the Shâri es-Sultân Husein, making the street like a fair-ground with their whining cries. And you weren't surprised to see the English and the Americans buying things in a hurry, the yells of the sellers making them believe that if they didn't buy quickly, they would lose treasures that they could never see again.
Thurland glared at the pack of peddlers, and they fell away from us, knowing that my uncle was a person who had seen ports before. Shrewd are these little lice who live on the foolishness of travelers, cunning in their way of summing up voyagers. Now and then a man would rush at Thurland; then suddenly turn away as the fierce eyes of my uncle fell on him, turn away like a yapping terrier before the look of a bulldog....
We bought white suits and topees and shoes and underclothing from sleek servile Egyptians, cunning Greeks, and more cunning Syrians; and with half-naked boys carrying our purchases, we made our way back to the landing-stage. We thought we had finished with Port Said with its humbug and trickery, not knowing what was awaiting our ears on the Van Tromp; Not knowing at all.
THE Count screamed the news to us as our boat swung to the gangplank. We caught his words above the noise of the winches and the rumble of coal. The monk! The monk had escaped!
Flushed and excited, the Count stumbled down the ladder and shouted details. The old one was not on the steamer. It had been searched from stem to stern. The bumboat men had been questioned. No one had seen the ancient. For just a minute the Count had napped outside the cabin of Methuselah, and when on awaking he had looked into the cubicle, the berth was empty!
My uncle said nothing, although he was mad with temper. He ordered a steward to take the bundles; then he told our boatman to pull him around the steamer so that he could question the squatting bumboat men. And fierce was that same questioning. Their faces grew sallow with fear as he put his queries. Had they seen an old man come over the side? It would be better for them to speak the truth, for if they lied, they would never sell another brass trinket to sailormen. Softly he made his threat, so softly that the words carried the fear that comes with the hiss of a snake.
AN old man had seen—a wrinkled patriarch, who might have known De Lesseps. He had seen something that might have been a bundle or it might have been a man, lowered over the side. He had turned his head, thinking it might be contraband, but now he was sure it wasn't that, for it had moved; and opium, by the beard of the Prophet, didn't kick in its cloth, although it could bring dreams.
Thurland waved his hand to the landing-stage, and we went swiftly back to the Shâri es-Sultân Husein. And now the town was an enemy of ours, a place where tricksters who plotted against us had their hiding-places....
Oh that first trip to the town my uncle had exchanged greetings with a big man who stood near the landing-stage. They had known each other in Shanghai, so Thurland told me, and now when we returned to search for the monk, the man was still there, smoking a cigar and looking leisurely at the milling crowds.
Thurland stepped across to him and spoke. "Are you busy, John?" he asked.
"I'm not," answered the man. "I have all the time in the world and a bit left over."
I knew from his frank cordial manner that the man was an American, and I knew by the way he listened to Thurland that the two were brothers under their skins, for his eyes brightened as Thurland told him of the disappearance of the ancient.
"They've got him in some hole in this town of the devil," snapped Thurland, "and I'm going to find him if I comb it from here to the first sand dune. Will you come along?"
"Let her go!" cried the man called John; and he was so eager, that he hopped on the bare toes of a Lascar and made the fellow bawl with pain.
Now, the white visitors to Port Said stay around the sea-front on the verandas of the Eastern Exchange Hotel and the Casino Palace, and their farthest trip inland is to the shipping offices or the banks. And good reason they have for keeping close to the landing-stage. At the back of the town, where the waters of Lake Manzala slop against the sunbaked shanties, is the dirty native quarter that you reach by the Shâri el-Gâmi et-Taufiqi, and it was to this section that my uncle and the American and myself galloped in a horse carriage with a mad driver who screamed for the roadway.
"It would be better for you to go back to the ship," said Thurland to me as we climbed into the carriage.
"Please let me come," I said; and when the American named John laughed, Thurland pushed me into the carriage.
An inquisitive white in that native quarter out by the shallow lake has a fine chance of getting a knife between his ribs, there being a number of colored residents who hate curiosity. But my uncle didn't care about their feelings. He was thinking only of the loss he would suffer if the monk was taken away from him. As the galloping horse took us into the filthy quarter where the odors of dried fish, of rancid oil, of saffron, and things unnamable came against us like an army, Thurland was thinking of the dark Mekong. His strong hands were clenched as if they held the rose-colored pearls that Marco Polo spoke of, the great emeralds that kept a girl pure, and the blazing rubies that were thought to be the eyes of dead snakes. For my uncle had the power of picturing the things that he sought, throwing them up before his eyes so that they became terribly and maddeningly real. When he read a story, he saw everything as if it had happened, a gift which some people have, and which is called visualizing.
"STAY here!" said Thurland to the coachman, as we reached the Shâri Kisra. "Don't move from this spot. If I don't come back for hours, you'll be well paid."
The search was on—the search for the old monk. The search through that quarter that might have been a suburb of hell itself, so full of sin and viciousness it seemed on that morning. For the servants of Satan ran the little dens into which we went one after the other. The little dens in which strange sins were born and bred in the gloom.
Thurland and the American, marching like two big grenadiers, dived into the dens without any fear. Places where queer drinks were sold to dazed men and drabs; places from which came the reek of opium so that you knew what was going on there when you were yards away from the door; places where lost women, that were hardly women at all, cursed and shrieked when my uncle pulled aside the blinds of split bamboo and looked within.
A man threw a bottle at the head of the American. The American dodged; then with a swift punch he knocked the fellow down. I thought that John was enjoying it. There was a broad grin on his face as the hunt went on. But there was no grin on the face of Thurland. The two eyes of him—those eyes that always looked like two spearmen on a castle wall—were blazing with temper as he asked questions, stamping into the dark rooms behind the opium shops, and bringing squeals from the unclean things that sat in the half darkness.
We came to a lane that had only one entrance—a lane full of sand and deviltry, so that it had the look of an unsprung trap. When you looked at it, if you had only the brains of poor Willy Hennessy, who had no brains at all, you would say to yourself: "There's something wrong here. The toe of my shoe is going to touch a rope or a spring that the devil has stretched in the sand, and I'll lose my immortal soul." That was the feeling that came out from it, a feeling that made you think there was an invisible angel at the open end of it, sending out warnings.
But Thurland walked boldly into it, John at his heels. And with terror choking me, I ran behind them, my ears alive to the whispers that came from the shuttered windows—the whispers that rose like a swarm of bees when we swung into the lane. And from a latticed balcony, a light-o'-love screamed a warning that brought a slamming of doors.
Thurland pushed against the first door. It gave way before him, and three men ran into a room beyond. He caught the last of the three by the back of the neck and pulled him into the sunshine; then as he started to question the filthy wretch, he choked back his words and flung back his head to listen. From above us came the soft strain of music: a thin wavering eerie note that rose and fell. A note that took both Thurland and myself back to the Villa Mille Fleurs in Neuilly on the evening when the bonze tried to escape!
Thurland flung the man from him and dashed into the house. The American followed. A fear paralyzed my limbs, a terrible fear that held me there in the fierce sunshine.
Squeals and curses came from within. The splintery noises made by the crashing of flimsy chairs and tables, the thud of fists; then as I stared at the dark door, Thurland staggered out with the old monk in his arms! Behind him, guarding the retreat, was the American, waving the iron leg of a bedstead that put fear into the skinny devils who ran like starved wolves after him.
"Back to the carriage!" cried Thurland; and at a trot we fled from the lane, through a narrow alley filled with refuse, then into the Shâri Kisra. Far off, we saw the waiting coachman, and with a shouting mob at our heels, we ran toward him.
The coachman, when he saw the mob, thought the. business was one that he would do well to dodge. He sprang to his driving seat when we were close to him, and started to flog his horse; but the American was too quick for him. He rushed to the head of the sleepy animal and threw it back on its haunches. Thurland tossed the monk into the carriage, tumbled in after him, dragging me with him. John hopped up beside the frightened driver, grabbed the whip and used it in turn on the horse and the crowd that had caught up with us. The carriage lurched forward; we swung at a gallop into the Shâri el-Gâmi; beyond was the Shâri de Lesseps and the landing-stage.
As Thurland carried the old bonze to a boat, he spoke to the big American. "Would you like a trip?" he asked.
"Where to?" countered the other.
"Saigon and beyond," said Thurland.
"Sure," said the man called John.
"Step aboard," said Thurland; and that is how John the American, whose full name was John Jefferson Martin, was enlisted in the great search....
We received a visit from the police during the afternoon. They had heard stories which they wished to verify. The Count and Thurland spoke to them. Persons whose names we did not know had kidnaped the old monk; my uncle had rescued him; the affair, as far as we were concerned, was finished.
But the police wished to see the bonze. They visited his cabin and questioned him, the Count acting as interpreter. The ancient nodded his head vigorously to show that he wished to stay with the Count, and the police had to be content.
"How old is he?" asked the sergeant.
"I don't know exactly," said the Count.
"There's a mummy in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo that is a dead ringer for him," said the sergeant. "They dug it, and a praying baboon in red granite, out of the place where they found old Tut-Ankh-Amen." He stared for a long while at the monk; then he walked out on deck and spat fiercely into the sunshine. "He makes me feel as cold as a lizard," he growled.
FLANE and Joyeuse returned to the steamer. They had lunched at the Casino Palace Hotel, and were surprised to hear of all the happenings that had taken place during their absence. They were introduced to John Jefferson Martin and informed of his enlistment. They seemed pleased. Martin had a friendly manner. Captain Oudegeest protested that there was no cabin for him. But the Dutch agent wished to gather in every piaster he could, and he made the Captain shift his third officer and give the cabin to Martin.
"And our dear friend Schiemann?" asked Flane. "Did he have any hand in the affair of the morning?"
"He went ashore early and has not returned," said Thurland.
"I hope he gets lost," said Flane. "It will save one or the other of us from twisting his neck."
WE edged into the Canal late that afternoon, and Europe was lost to us. For the Canal is the door to the Orient, and when a vessel creeps slowly into the hundred-mile gut, those who are upon her enter another world: The world of the Thousand and One Nights, the world of magic, of witchery, of dreams. And one's thoughts change; the common-sense logical part of the mind giving way to the flighty imaginative part, so that facts are distasteful, and the lamp of Aladdin is in one's hand. And the slowness with which the steamer moves makes a spell, its speed being held down to ten kilometers an hour, lest the waves trouble the embankments; and that too adds to the thrill, making the passage a sort of strange ceremony of initiation.
Now it was curious the effect of the Canal upon the bonze. He was on deck when we entered the waterway, and almost immediately we noticed the change. He had been depressed and silent since the moment Thurland had brought him back to the steamer; but now he roused himself as we moved slowly down the great trench. He straightened his back; his eyes, that were bits of polished jet, glowed with a strange light; and he began to talk in the manner in which he had told the story of the plague at Angkor—talk with a fierceness and swiftness that puzzled the Count.
Although no one but the Count understood what he was saying, we strained our ears to listen to him, the very passion that was in his words holding us—that and the look of amazement on the face of the Count. No time had he to translate what the old fellow was saying, for the words rolled from the thin lips in a manner that made us think he was reciting something that he had learned years and years before.
It was a sudden move by Flane that interrupted the flow of words. We were standing in a clump above the well-dock; and Flane, taking his eyes from the face of the monk, saw something that interested him. A sailor had climbed noiselessly from below, and was clinging by his finger-tips to the iron railing so that he could hear what the bonze was saying!
A fine lesson Flane taught the fellow. He lifted his shoe and brought it down on the man's fingers, and the yell of pain and rage that came from him halted the monk. The sailor dropped down on the covered hatch and ran for the galley, but we had recognized him. He was the sailor with the large lobes to his ears.
Flane sprang over the railing and gave chase, but the fellow hid himself, and my uncle had an angry argument with Captain Oudegeest over the incident. The Captain would not believe that the man was eavesdropping. He asked why should anyone listen to what the ancient was saying.
"He ees a mad oldt liar!" he cried. "Dot stuff he speak about my great grandfather ees all lies! You must not intervere mit my sailors! You beoples an' dot oldt man make troubles on my ship."
"We'll make more if some folk don't watch themselves," snapped Flane.
Flane came back to where we were standing and put a question. "Did anyone see Schiemann?" he asked. "Has he come aboard?"
No one had seen the supposed Latvian. His cabin door was closed; and the Dutch steward shook his head when Thurland made careless inquiry. Schiemann had been left behind at Port Said.
The flurry caused by the sailor's attempt to listen to the bonze took our attention for the moment from the old man; but now our curiosity to learn what he had been saying made us turn to the Count. The old man was silent, but that change in his manner noticeable when we entered the waterway was more evident than ever. There had come to him a strange majesty, a look of power, of importance. There came out from, him something that crushed the doubt one held regarding his great age, the doubt that one made into a barricade for sanity.
NOW, as the Van Tromp slipped slowly between the sandbanks, the suspicion that he was lying about his age fled from us, and we believed. It was upon the face of every one of us quite visible in the dusk. We believed implicitly. The dusk creeping over the Arabian sands helped to establish that belief; a thin green-white moon over Egypt assisted; the black outline of a camel and its rider on the bank lent aid; and the warm odors of the night bedded down the acceptance in our minds.
A half-mile spear of light came out of the gloom ahead. The eye of the hurrying Malle des Indes—the Indian Mail. The eye of England! The Van Tromp shouldered in to the hitching-posts to allow the Royal Mail free passage. What was a small Dutch steamer, to the monster that carried princes and maharajahs, diplomats and cattle-kings? The line of faces looked contemptuously upon us as she thrust by; yet we at the moment would not have changed places with any group upon the mailboat. For a kind of ecstasy had come to us with the belief in the monk's great age, a sort of beatitude that thrilled us.
THE voice of the Count showed how the ancient's words had affected him. He spoke in a hushed voice as if great secrets had been given to him, secrets that he was a little afraid to put into words.
"He says," whispered the Count, "that he was through here years and years before the Canal was constructed. He passed over the old caravan road between Es-Sâlihîyeh and El-Kantara. That was the old route from Syria to Egypt."
After a long silence Thurland put a question. "And what was taking him to Egypt?" he asked, his voice hoarse and low.
For a moment or two the Count did not answer. Possibly he thought the answer would appear strange to us, and well it might. "He was with a party that was carrying gifts to the Sultan Ali Bey who had conquered Syria, but was assassinated when he was returning to Egypt. His party heard of the killing and returned."
"And when was the Sultan Ali Bey killed?" asked Thurland.
"Around 1770," answered the Count quietly.
Then, as we were figuring in silence, the music came to our ears—that thin flutelike music that we had heard in the Villa Mille Fleurs at Neuilly, and which Thurland, Martin and myself had heard in the native quarter of Port Said!
It came from the dark bank of the Canal, a thin sweet lariat of sound, circling over us so that at times we thought we could see it. See it in the velvety darkness, a scarlet thread, weaving in circles, rising and falling at the will of the player!
It twisted itself around the monk. He clutched the rail of the steamer and stared shoreward, his lean neck thrust out, his wrinkled face alive with interest. He made little moaning noises, queer animal-like noises that might be made by a chained dog striving to get to something just beyond its reach. There was about him a longing that made us think he might leap from the steamer in an effort to reach the sandy shore. Thurland stepped close to the old man, one hand ready to grasp his clothes if he made a move to jump overboard.
The music ran with us. The bank was in darkness, and we could not see who or what produced the sounds, but as we were moving at the slow speed of four miles an hour it was quite easy for the musician to keep up with us.... In the afternoon small Arab children begging pennies had run with us for a mile or so.
For miles the music ran with us, coming plain to us till we reached the Balah Lakes. And how it clung to the steamer we never knew. But at the lakes the channel widened, and we heard it far off, then lost it completely.
The monk had no intention of going to bed, and not one of us seemed sleepy. We sat there on the deck and watched the banks slip slowly by, the wash of the steamer running on either side of us, making two white serpents of foam against the sand. And there was something in the night that had the quality of hypnotism. For of strange places there are plenty along that waterway; and now and then the Count spoke of them in a low voice: the spot where Miriam, the sister of Moses, was smitten with leprosy; and the Bitter Lakes, which are the Marah of the Bible....
In the morning we came to Suez; and at Suez we got a surprise. For a small launch brought out Schiemann, whom we had left behind at Port Said, he having reached Ismailia by a fast motor-boat, and from there having taken the train which covers in two and a half hours the distance that takes a steamer eight hours or more. And with Schiemann—came a friend—a big black-browed man who looked a killer, if ever a man did. And by the way he glared at my two uncles as he passed to Schiemann's cabin, it would look to a fair-minded observer that he had picked them out as likely victims.
"I'm afraid," said Thurland, after he had passed, "that the black chap has heard nothing to your credit."
Flane grinned. "It was you he looked hard at," he said. "Well, there's nothing like a sea voyage for making friendships, so I've heard."
"You've heard wrong," said Thurland.
THE Van Tromp waddled down the Red Sea; and on the steamer was the false quiet that comes before a thunderstorm, when clouds are busy packing themselves together, so that they can make as big a muss as possible. Not one of our party spoke to Schiemann or to the black-browed man, whose name we learned was Bruden; and they gave no indication that they wished to speak to us. The two ate at a separate table, and spent the day whispering to each other.... It was a strange ship's company. Captain Oudegeest was surly. He glared at the bonze whenever he passed him on deck, but the monk took no notice.
The Count told Joyeuse and me about a curious health system that the bonze practiced, and which the Count and the monk discussed every day. The name of it was Hatha Yoga, and it told of the proper way to breathe, the right exercises to take, and the proper food one should eat if one wished to reach a hundred years or more.
"It's too much work," said Joyeuse, laughing. "And what's the good of living, if you look like the monk?"
"You needn't look like him," said the Count.
"Well, I'd sooner look pretty for a little while and then die," said Joyeuse. "I'd hate to be old and ugly."
"But think of the wisdom that would be yours," argued the Count.
"I don't like wisdom," said Joyeuse; then in a lower voice she whispered: "I like—I like love."
She glanced along the deck, to where Flane was leaning over the rail....
THE Count knew a lot about the world, and he had gathered much thrilling information about places. And when he told of what he had seen, he did it with little words that had the color of crushed opals.
In our passing through the Red Sea, h» spoke much to me of the Past, the fat Past that was filled with big happenings in that same quarter. For the Red Sea and the lands about it were the center of the world in the days of old, and the feel of those things come to folk who travel there. You think of Solomon with his black beard, so curly and shiny, sitting on his high throne made of ivory and yellow gold, asking, if the Queen of Sheba has arrived to eat some sherbet with him, and ordering up a chariot to take her for a gallop over the hot sands, his big hairy arm around her so that she can't fall out. "For Solomon," as my Uncle Thurland said, "was always a man in a hurry as far as ladies were concerned." And the two of them asking questions of each other, questions that were so puzzling that no one else could answer them.... Oh, what a fine brave world it was in those days!
And I knew why the Count was interested in the monk and the manner in which the monk had reached such a great age. For the Count thought the present was nothing at all, and that like wine, everything else had to be old to be good. We were going to Angkor, so that he might find the secret of life; then, after hundreds of years, he could look back in reality on days like those we were then living, which would have become golden to him.
"It was a great world in the days of Solomon," he said.
"But isn't it a fine world now?" I asked, looking at Flane and Joyeuse, who were sitting together in the sunshine.
"It is hard and commonplace," said the Count. "There is no poetry in it. What do we have in this sea now? Hurrying mail-boats filled with silly officials and soldiers, round-the-world cruise-ships with tired folk who can't amuse themselves at home, ugly tankers carrying oil for airplanes to splatter death on towns. But in the past there was romance." He was silent for a moment; then he spoke: "For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks."
I didn't agree with the Count, but I didn't tell him that I thought different. Of course the words of the Book of Kings were nice words, but I was sure that we were on a journey that was nearly as good as the journeys made by the ships of Tharshish. And I bet that my uncles, Thurland and Flane, thought the same. Also John Jefferson Martin, who had been told about the pirogues that carried the pearls and emeralds and rubies up the dark Mekong. Martin's eyes bulged when Thurland told him about those pirogues.
YELLOW-FACED Schiemann and his friend Bruden had nothing to say to us; Captain Oudegeest was very sulky, and showed his dislike of the monk; the sailor with the big ear-lobes watched us whenever we were on the deck. And in this air of suppressed hate we rolled through the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and came to Aden.
The Count quoted a few lines about Aden as we came close to it. I think they were written by a poet named Kipling, but I'm not sure.
Old Aden, like a barrack stove
That no one's lit, for years an' years.
I had never seen a barrack stove, but I knew what was meant. For Aden is a place where the little devils of loneliness and despair might make their home. Hard and heartless is that town on the bare rocky coast, a place where the germs of war and hate are bred. The Lord made it a hatching-ground for both, denying it grass and trees and water, and toasting it daily with a sun that dries the brains of the poor devils that have to live there. For the British troops that are in Aden are there for punishment, it being a station where the tough boys are sent to make them tougher, and a better place could not be found.
The Van Tromp had to unload some machinery, so my Uncle Flane offered to take Martin and myself out to see the great cement-lined tanks that the Queen of Sheba is supposed to have had built while waiting for a note from King Solomon. Flane had asked Joyeuse to accompany us, but she thought the heat was too great.
We reached the landing-stage where a crowd of English soldiers stood around with nothing to do but stare at the ships in the harbor; and we were standing together, looking at the camel pulling the town water-cart, when something happened. A small devil-fish, of the sort the natives eat, was thrown from some spot to the left of us, and it struck my uncle on the chest, splattering him with water, and also putting a few scales and bits of slime on the jacket of a big Highlander who was close to us.
The Highlander gave a yell of rage and looked around to see who had thrown the thing, his face as red as a boiled lobster. He made a move forward, but my uncle put out a hand and restrained him.
"It was intended for me," said Flane.
"But, mon, will ye be looking at me jacket!" cried the Scotchman. "I'll be pullin' the muckin' head off the black-faced devil!"
But Flane held him, pushing him to the rear as he walked toward the man who had thrown the devil-fish. And the man was no stranger to us. He was the black-browed brute who had come aboard the Van Tromp at Suez in the company of Schiemann.
NOW the soldiers, who had nothing to do, and were loafing in the sad way of soldiers, became as bright as hornets when they heard the yell of the Highlander and saw the possibility of a fight. They looked from the black-browed Bruden to Flane, weighing them up in their minds, and they gurgled like children. For Flane and Bruden were two big men who looked like fighters; and something told the soldiers there was a hate of which they knew nothing behind the throwing of the slimy devil-fish.
"To the yard!" they cried in chorus. "The yard, where the police can't see it!"
Quick and smart were those boys, and it looked to me as if they had handled many a fight around that landing-stage. There was an enclosed yard with a big gate and a wall some fifteen feet in height; and into this yard they hustled Bruden and Flane. The soldier hurriedly closing the gate wished to put me outside, but Martin objected, and I was pulled within and the gate clanged.
The big Highlander and Martin were Flane's seconds, and two soldiers seconded Bruden. And from what he said to them as they pulled his shirt over his head, they must have thought they had a winner. For they grinned when he whispered to them, telling them, I suppose, that he would give my uncle a fine thrashing.
And it didn't look such an easy matter for Flane. For Bruden was big, with great arms on which the muscles stood up, so that one glancing at him quick, would think he was deformed. And by the way he acted, it looked as if he knew the business of fighting; for when the soldier lads appointed a referee, he didn't listen to the words of caution at all, being so eager to get at it.
"Now," said the referee, "let's have a fair fight, gentlemen. No cat-scratching or bear-hugging. Let 'er go!" Another soldier beat on a piece of tin that took the place of a bell, and the fight was on.
Bruden thought to make short work of my uncle. He hurled himself across the patch of sun-baked earth, and he started an overarm punch as he came—a punch that would have cracked the jaw of Flane if it had landed, which it didn't. For Flane made a leap forward and got inside it, his own right fist landing with a soft thud on the nose of the other. He ducked under a left counter; dancing clear, he took a long straight stab at the nose and landed again.
The big Highlander shouted approval, the spots on his jacket making his sympathy for my uncle greater than it would have been for an ordinary stranger. "Do it again, me bonnie laddie!" he cried, and Flane took him at his word.
Bruden was mad then. The grin was wiped off his ugly face, and a look of murder was planted there instead. He was puzzled by the quickness of Flane, for my uncle was a hornet that jumped in when he had a chance, and then sprang clear, leaving the effects of his sting behind him. And the soldiers gurgled with delight; and the hot mad sun of Aden blazed down on the yard; and from without came the shouts of Arabs, and above the shouts was a hammering on the big door, the military police having got word that something was going on in the yard.
BRUDEN rushed and grabbed Flane around the waist. He lifted him from the ground and tried to throw him over his head in spite of the referee, who struggled to pull the big arms from my uncle's waist. But Flane wasn't troubled. If the fellow wanted wrestling, he could have it; and as I stared at the two, my mind went back to the night in Marrakech when Flane wrestled Ahmed Mansour the golden-skinned Arab on a roof-top. The feet of Flane left the ground, and Bruden gathered himself for a mighty hoist; but as he did so, something happened to him. It might have been a trick of ju-jitsu, but I am not sure. Anyhow, the big arms of him loosened for an instant, and in that instant Flane wriggled clear, and attacked.
One, two, three! Bruden stumbled backward with Flane after him. "Would you throw a fish at me?" screamed Flane, landing blow after blow, not letting the other get set for a moment. "I'll wager you'll have trouble in smelling the next one!" he shouted, as a tremendous wallop landed on Bruden's nose—his guard being useless to protect his face from the storm of blows.
THE big Highlander was crazy with joy. The soldiers were on their toes yelling, and the military police were climbing over the gate and over the walls, swearing as they dropped down into the yard. Bruden was running-running round and round the ring, till at last Flane caught up with him and dropped him with a clip under the ear.
It looked as if there'd be a dozen fights to follow. For the military police were mad at having to climb the wall, and madder still that they had been kept away from a good fight; and to cap the uproar, some joker threw another bit of stale fish at the jacket of the big Highlander, and he was nearly insane because he couldn't find out which of his mates did it. And there was murder in the air, the hot, throbbing, suffocating air that might have come out of the ventilators of hell.
"We'll cut out the visit to the tanks," said Flane as he pulled on his coat. "This is a bad town."
We pushed our way through the milling soldiers, who were arguing and shouting at each other; and we got a boat at the landing and were rowed back to the Van Tromp.
"You're back quick," said Thurland, when we climbed the ladder.
"They didn't like us," growled Flane; and that was all, as far as I know, that he said about the fight.
The Van Tromp had unloaded her machinery and was ready to move on, but the Captain waited for Bruden. The siren screamed, but we could see no hurrying passenger at the landing.
Schiemann, field-glasses to eyes, studied the town and tried to cool the temper of Captain Oudegeest.
The Captain, cursing all passengers, signaled the engine-room, but at the very moment the Van Tromp swung for the outer sea, a boat left the landing-stage, the four Arab oarsmen flailing the water madly. It was Bruden—Bruden with a bandaged head! He had to be assisted up the ladder, and he wabbled a little as he went to his cabin.
My Uncle Thurland looked at Flane. But Flane was studying the shore-line running down to Steamer Point. Flane could be very silent at times.
ON the chart in the saloon of the Van Tromp were lines which showed the course of the winds in the different seas; and looking at them, I often thought that a chart showing the winds of hate that blew around the Van Tromp would be interesting. For winds of hate were surely there as we moved across the Indian Ocean and rolled up the Bay of Bengal. They came from the cabin of Schiemann and Bruden, puffs of fine fury that you could feel as they passed. And Captain Oudegeest, for some reason or other, took a great dislike to one and all of us, but especially the bonze. Yes, especially the bonze. When the Captain saw the old monk on the deck, he would turn his head and spit into the scuppers, and the black eyes of the ancient would glitter with hate as he observed him.
And the sailor with the big lobes watched us with no love on his face; and the shadowy officer who was called the doctor, and who was always half-drunk, didn't like us at all, he having got a quick push from Flane when he annoyed Joyeuse by trying to flirt with her.
The bonze was the root of all the trouble. Aye, of every little bit of it. That change in him that we noticed when the Van Tromp entered the Canal became more evident with each league we covered. There went out from him a feeling of mystery and power—went out over the ship. The Dutch steward, who had grinned at him when he first came aboard, was now afraid of him. The first officer of the steamer would never pass the monk if there was another way round; and the sailors would stand in little knots and stare at him when he was on the deck.
But the old man seemed to be blind to the fact that the whole ship was interested in him. He went through his exercises of breathing in a corner of the deck, and he made no attempt to speak to anyone but the Count. Of his food be was particular. The water that he drank he put in the sunshine for thirty minutes before he drank it, so that it could be made "alive" by the rays of the sun; and the wheat he ate he placed for some days in a little water till it germinated, eating it then because it too became "alive" and was filled with a new strength. This the Count explained to Joyeuse and to me.
"The Hatha Yoga has been practiced in the East for thousands of years," said the Count. "There are men who can do things that seem supernormal because they have concentrated for years on getting control of their bodies. They can regulate the beating of their hearts, and raise or lower their pulse at will."
"Can he do that?" asked Joyeuse.
"I think he can," answered the Count.
IT was on a morning when we were within two days' steam of Rangoon that Captain Oudegeest stirred the temper of the bonze. The Captain was walking around the deck while the old man was examining a dish of wheat that showed the faintest trace of sprouting. The Captain was in a bad humor. He thrust out a big boot and kicked the dish overboard.
The monk sprang to his feet, and the Captain moved back from him as if afraid of something that he saw in the glittering eyes. Then the Captain cried out something in Dutch that sounded like a yelp of fear; and it was that yelp that roused the Count, who was sleeping in a deck-chair.
The Count took one look at the monk and the Captain; then he ran swiftly toward them. The right hand of the old man, thin and clawlike, was moving upward as it had moved on the night in the Villa Mille Fleurs when he had snapped his fingers in the face of the guard that had played him false—moving up slowly in the same frightening manner, the palm turned outward.
The Count reached the side of the old man. He caught the thin wrist of the monk and jerked the hand downward, speaking swiftly and earnestly.
THE monk listened; the anger left his face; he turned and walked away. Captain Oudegeest had staggered back against the rail. White-faced and silent he stood, when the Count turned to him.
"You fool!" cried the Count. "What did you do to him?"
"I—I," stammered the Captain, "why, I joost kicked a dish of his tamned wheat off my ship."
"You nearly kicked yourself into hell," snapped the Count.
The Captain did not speak. He turned and went slowly to his cabin. He appeared stunned. A sailor bending an awning over the deck had seen the incident and spread the story around the ship. The crew whispered to each other, and stared at the monk.
The Captain ate his meals in his cabin during the two days that followed the incident. We hardly caught a glimpse of him till the Van Tromp shouldered into the forest of masts at the mouth of the Rangoon River, and the great shining pile of the Shwe Dagôn pagoda dazzled our eyes.
Here was the real East—the East we had dreamed of. It came to us, drugging our senses, stirring mad dreams, giving to us a belief in the story of the monk so that my uncles, Thurland and Flane, and also John Jefferson Martin, drooled like hounds within reach of their prey. For just around the corner of the tongue of land that is the Malay Peninsula was Saigon; and beyond Saigon was the mysterious Angkor, and the great Mekong up which had gone the long pirogues laden with treasures so wonderful that the very description of them took one's breath,
"As Johnny Riley said when they put the rope round his neck, 'It won't be long now,'" muttered Thurland.
Flane nodded, and squared his shoulders. He was standing with Joyeuse, their eyes turned upon the Shwe Dagôn. I think the strangeness of Rangoon with all the clamor of the "Pool" frightened Joyeuse. She put out her little hand and touched the sleeve of Flane's coat; then the big hand of my uncle stole up and swallowed it as if it were something that his strong fingers were hungry for. I knew then that Joyeuse loved Flane, and that he worshiped her.
WE said no good-by's to Captain Oudegeest. And we didn't trouble about the yellow-faced Schiemann and the black-browed Bruden. The magic of the East had us, bringing a confidence that was surprising, for it seemed that the very fact that you longed for something would bring it to you, for that same longing is the religion of the Orient. A fine lazy religion! You just sit and yearn and yearn and yearn, whispering your desires to the old stone gods, giving them a wilted flower or a few grains of rice, hoping to stir their generosity to give you something that a little hustle on your own part would get you in a tenth of the time you spent in asking the gods.
NOW the bonze had to visit the Shwe Dagôn pagoda, for the Shwe Dagôn is a living, throbbing thing that cannot be treated with contempt. There it is, with its great pelt of gold, squatting in the sunshine, the stream of prayers from millions going up into the hot mad sunshine of Burma, And with the prayers go up the incense from thousands of smoking sticks, and the odor of the flowers that are piled around the stone gods—the stone gods that have a sort of cynical grin on their faces as if they knew that the business was foolish, and that nothing would come of the praying and the offerings. Nothing at all.
The Count wished to hunt around for a steamer to take us to Saigon, but the bonze would do nothing till he went to the pagoda. And dressed now in the yellow robe of his order, he led us forward in a manner that showed he had been there before. Hundreds of times before! And his knowledge of the place, together with the throb and the passion that we felt around us, made a backing for his great story of the flight from Angkor, so that the smallest grain of doubt fled from our minds, and like lambs we followed him—followed him barefooted into the great pagoda, and into as fine a mess of trouble as one could think of 1
The bonze left us to go into an inner shrine, where a few hairs from the head of the Buddha are kept, and into which we couldn't go, being unbelievers. So we stood and sniffed the incense, and the perfume of jasmine and lotus and crushed marigolds, wondering how long the old man would take with his prayers, because if we could judge by the looks of those who passed to and fro with naked feet, the sooner we left there, the better.
Ten minutes went by—fifteen, twenty. Martin picked up a flower that had dropped on the floor, but a monk snatched it from his hand and placed it before a stone figure,
"They don't like us here," said Thurland. "We had—"
My uncle didn't finish his remark, for at that moment the bonze appeared, and with him were fifty or sixty yellow-robed monks that ran around him, touching him whenever they could with their long brown fingers, and gurgling with holy joy as they did so. Gurgling and jabbering, and calling him by a name we had never heard before. A queer name, that later we found to be the same as one of the four gods that rule the Cambodian paradise. It was Tohsâroth; to us he had been "Methuselah," the "Ancient," the "Old One," or any other foolish name that came to our mind; but to them he was Tohsâroth, the holy one, and we were impressed.
The swarm rolled down on us, pushing us this way and that as the monk tried to get close to the astonished Count to tell him who they were and why they were running round him like starving cats around a fishmonger. And the eyes of the Count showed surprise as he listened. And the hubbub grew louder, and ever more monks came running, until—what with the hot thrusting bodies —we were in danger of being smothered.
"What the devil does it mean?" cried Thurland.
"They're a pilgrim party from his own district," shouted the Count. "They're from Pnom-Penh! From Pnom-Penh on the Mekong!"
The words choked us. The bunch of lean, starved-looking fellows that ran around the bonze were from the capital of Cambodia, from the town that was within a few hours of Angkor itself! They had seen the evening star rise and rest upon the mysterious ruins! They had squatted on the great terrace from which the king and his nobles had taken their departure in the long ago!
We were impressed, astounded, bewildered by the happening. We were in the company of over half a hundred men who were actual residents of the place toward which we had been moving since the bright morning we had fled Neuilly in fear of the police!
TO us, it seemed we were already there. The pushing, chattering army that surrounded the bonze gave a new quality to his tale, a new glamour and force that brought also a fear to us—lest we be tricked or outmatched by others who had heard fragments of the tale.
"Get him out of here," said Thurland to the Count. "There'll be a riot if we stay here."
The Count took the arm of the monk and led him down the great stone stairway, but the army streamed after him. Fighting to get next to him. Crying his name: "Tohsâroth! Tohsâroth!" Clawing and scratching at Thurland and Martin, who tried to discourage them. Pushing flowers into the old man's face and down his neck, running in front of him and dropping petals that he could tread on, and which they then picked,up and held to their lips.
"I'll be damned if I ever saw a homecoming like this!" growled Thurland. "You'd think the old fellow had won the heavyweight championship of the world."
WE had left Flane and Joyeuse at the foot of the stairway, because Joyeuse didn't like the idea of going farther into the great pagoda; and now, to the astonishment of the two of them, we streamed down like a rabble that is trying to rescue a friend from the police.
And that description is not far from the truth. For the new-found friends of the bonze wanted the old man to leave the Count and stay with them, and that didn't suit us at all. We had traveled a long way with the ancient, and we were determined to stick to him. Tohsâroth, holy or unholy, was our property.
Thurland shouted the news to Flane as the mob swept them along, Flane doing his utmost to protect Joyeuse from the crazy devils who wished to walk close to the bonze. Into the narrow streets went the human flood, the shaved heads of the monks shining in the fierce sunlight, pushing a way through Chinese, Sikhs, Burmese, Karens, Hindoos and Malays. And now it came close to a riot; for here and there the mob knocked over the stall of a man selling rice-cakes or sweets, and the devil's own argument started as to who would pay for it.
The Count shouted to Thurland what Tohsâroth said about mob and the wishes of the mob. The pilgrims from Pnompenh were starting home that very afternoon as deck-passengers on a specially chartered coastal packet that had brought them down from Saigon, and they wished our Methuselah to travel with them. They not only wished it—they demanded it; and they were prepared to give battle to us or any other body that tried to take him away from them. He was a super-bonze, it seemed, and it was a compulsory service that they were called Upon to perform.
"And what does he think?" cried Thurland, when the Count explained.
"He wants to go with them," shouted the Count.
"Then we'll go with him and the mob," said Thurland promptly.
DOWN the narrow streets to the waterfront, upsetting stools and sweetmeat stalls, carrying with us all the poor patient folk that came up against us. Shrieks and prayers and curses. The proud pilgrims from Pnom-Penh shouting out the virtues of the ancient, our ancient that we had brought back to the East—the East that knew his value, that respected him, that worshiped him as a person upon whom the stone gods had conferred immortality.
Police fought the procession with fists and truncheons. They were thrust aside or carried with us. Vainly half a dozen of them made a rush to get to Tohsâroth, thinking that he was a sort of queen bee of the Swarm, and that if he could be grabbed and put somewhere, then the mob would break up and go home. But the pilgrims bit and scratched to protect him; and with chants and the banging of little tambours and the ringing of bells, we reached the gangway of the oldest and dirtiest steamer I had ever seen.
It was the Kelantan, and it had brought the pilgrims around from Saigon. It was a trollop of the China Sea, a thing that wise sharks would follow, their ears listening to the groaning of her old timbers.
The skipper was a huge Dane, and every man on her was of the same nationality. Stripped to his waist, the Captain shouted and struck at the pilgrims when they stood to chatter on the gangplank. A mate as big as himself pushed them around on the dirty deck, cursing and kicking the poor devils when they didn't obey his orders. To him the pilgrims were cattle; his hand and his boot were heavy on their ill-fed bodies.
THE Count attempted to speak to the Captain, but the Captain had a contempt for small men and pushed him aside. Thurland took the matter up then, and there was something on Thurland's face that brought politeness from the Dane. He said he had no cabin accommodations for anyone, no matter what sum they offered; and, for carrying a female, he had sworn by all the Norse gods that he would never ship one on a boat he bossed. "Not half a vummin!" he roared. "They is to me the bad lucks!"
Thurland spoke to the Count. "Let Flane and Joyeuse and Jimmy go on another boat," he said. "You and I and Martin will stay with this swarm."
"Please let me stay!" I cried.
"It'll be rough," said Thurland.
"I don't mind," I cried. "Let Martin stay with Joyeuse and Flane."
The mate was chasing the last stragglers onto the wharf, grabbing carelessly at a man here and there, and thrusting him toward the gangplank. He caught several poor devils who belonged to Rangoon, thinking to make up the number that he wanted; and the captured ones screamed with terror at the thought of going to sea in the Kelantan; And well they might! One required the fine spirit of religious sacrifice to sail on that boat, and perhaps the local monks that saw the Shwe Dagôn pagoda every day of their lives didn't have the same fervor that brought the Pnom-Penh crowd! Anyhow, they kicked and squealed when the mate tried to pull them aboard. The steamer had brought seventy-five pilgrims, and the mate wanted seventy-five to take back.
Thurland and the Count spoke to Flane, Joyeuse and Martin. They were to take the fastest boat for Saigon, and if they got there before Us, which was a certainty, they were to wait till we arrived.
"And you might have to wait a hell of a long while," growled Thurland, turning to take a look at the old trull that was to carry us.
We shook their hands and went aboard to see the Danish captain. He was in a hot dispute with his engineer, the latter swearing that the engines were in such a condition that the Kelantan couldn't cross the Gulf of Martaban, much less reach Saigon.
"We're going with you," said Thurland quietly.
"You's vat?" screamed the Captain.
"You heard me," said Thurland. "We're buying deck passage with the pilgrim folk."
The Dane put a huge hand on my uncle's chest and started to push him toward the gangplank, but he didn't push him far. Thurland caught the forefinger of the Captain, a forefinger as big and as stout as the leg of a small chair, and he bent it back with such quickness and force that the Captain howled with the pain it brought.
"I don't like people putting their hands on me," said Thurland, letting go of the fleshy chair-leg. "Now be sensible and say quick how much the three of us will pay for a ride on this undertaker's barge?"
The Captain rubbed his forefinger and glared at my uncle. "Seven hundred Straits dollars!" he cried; and although that was about ten times the price he charged per head to the pilgrims, the Count paid.
The Kelantan was ready to move on, the mate having made a tally and found that he had seventy-five passengers; and if they weren't the same seventy-five that he had brought to Rangoon, he didn't care. He ordered the gangplank pulled in and the ropes cast off; the engines coughed and we edged into the "Pool." Above the screaming of the jostling hundreds that were interested in our Methuselah, we heard the voice of Flane, who was standing with Joyeuse and Martin.
"Pleasant voyage!" he cried. "It's fine to think of you traveling in such luxury."
IT was strange about the start of that voyage. To me, and I think to Thurland and the Count, there came belief that we were on the last lap of the journey. That we were really on the dark Mekong, up which the pirogues had taken the treasures and the fleeing nobles. Perhaps it was the presence of the pilgrims that created the atmosphere, that brought to us the feeling that we should see at any minute the banks of that great river stumbling down to the sea through the wild passes of the unknown country. The banks with their high trees in which are thousands and thousands of monkeys sitting so close together that their tails hang down like a fringe from the branches on which they squat. For that is how the ancient described them when telling of the flight from Angkor-Thom. And I thought if I shut my eyes, I could hear the screaming of the flamingoes and cormorants that followed the pirogues.
Yes, Thurland thought the same. For when we rolled out of the mouth of the Rangoon River, he looked at me and smiled. "We'll soon be there now," he said quietly. "I mean at Klang-Nan."
"HOLY men," said my Uncle Thurland, looking at the pilgrims on the Kelantan, "can stand sufferings that would kill strong men like myself, who have no saintliness to boast of."
Thurland was right. The mob of the Kelantan went through enough physical torture to earn each one a seat in his particular paradise, and they made no complaints at all. They were filled with a fine fervor that made it impossible for them to register pains and aches, and they had their stomachs under such control that a handful of rice was a feast.
And they had Tohsâroth to look at—Tohsâroth whose presence brought the thrills of the other world, to which they were fighting their way with prayer and fasting. They clustered around him on the dirty deck of the steamer, and when he spoke, their heads were thrust toward him as if the missing of a single word was a sin. Our Methuselah was a god to them.
The Kelantan stumbled down the Gulf of Martaban, felt her way nervously by the little islands of the Mergui Archipelago and headed for the Malacca Strait. And the mob prayed and chanted hymns and slept. And the Captain and the engineer quarreled nine times a day about the engines; and whenever the big mate was in a temper, he kicked a pilgrim; and the pilgrim would howl and look at the ancient, whose black eyes, glittering with anger, followed the mate.
"I hope," said Thurland, "that the mate doesn't try to make a football out of our old friend. I had better caution him."
The Count nodded, and Thurland buttonholed the mate as he went by and spoke quietly to him. "Listen, laddie," said Thurland. "I see you are a bit handy with your feet, so I'll give you a warning. If you kick the old man, you'll be kicking dynamite."
"I kicks who I pleases!" roared the mate.
"Good," said Thurland; "but don't say I didn't warn you."
The mate, to show his contempt for the advice, booted a sick pilgrim into the scuppers, and spat at a small gilded Buddha. A tough man was the mate.
"There was a fellow like him in Kerry once," said Thurland. "A chap so handy with his feet that he wore the toes out of his boots kicking dogs and cats and children that came in his path. One night going home from a fair, he saw what he thought was a small boy sleeping in the hedge, and he gave him a boot with the toe of his brogue. The little fellow hopped up, and the kicker saw then that it was a leprechaun.
"'Why did you do that?' asked the leprechaun.
"'I don't know,' said the kicking gentleman. 'It's in me blood, I think.'
"The leprechaun waved a little hand at the fellow's feet; then, with a grin, he said: 'Lift your boots, me bouchal.'
"The man tried to lift his boots, but he could only get them three inches off the ground. Not an inch higher, try as he would.
"'Now,' said the leprechaun, 'you're cured of your bad habits, and if you have the desire to kick a sleeping body in a hedge, you can't. On your way now, because I'm a little tired.'
"The man shuffled off home, pushing one foot after the other; and from that day to the day he died, he went round in the same fashion. I saw him when I was a little boy, and my own father told me the story."
WE bought food from the Captain. At least, we bought what provisions he had, and we cooked them on a charcoal stove on deck. Rice and canned beans and biscuits and Danish cheese and coffee, and once we had a chicken from the mate's private crate. The pilgrims saved a little rice to feed the chickens, forgetting that the owner of the birds was a brute who ill-treated them at every opportunity.
There were cockroaches on the Kelantan that were as big as sparrows; and there were yellow scorpions, also bedbugs that had been with the steamer for years and years. And there were humorous ticks that burrowed under your skin and laid eggs there. The pilgrims wouldn't kill them, it being against their religious teaching; and the cockroaches, scorpions, bugs and ticks knew that they were safe and took liberties.
But we, like the pilgrims, had something to cheer us up and make us forget the troubles of the moment. Something that brought colorful dreams in the steaming days, and in the hot nights when the poor devils moaned prayers in their sleep, and the crazy engines pounded, and the Captain drank gin-slings and cursed the sea. We were on the last lap of our voyage. Thurland danced a jig as the cross-winds from the China Sea rolled the Kelantan backward and forward till the pilgrims thought she would roll so far that she couldn't straighten herself. And they weren't far wrong in thinking that. For wicked winds came across from Borneo and slammed the old thing in the ribs so that she staggered under the attack.
"Straight ahead of us," said Thurland, "is Cochin China, with the Mekong pouring itself into the sea. If nothing happens in the next sixty hours, we'll be going up the river like the pirogues that fled the plague. Mother o' me! Like the pirogues that fled the plague!"
THE happening Thurland feared took place when we had passed the island of Paulo Condove, where they get swallows' nests that are worth their weight in gold, to make soup of. We were swinging a little to the east to make Saigon, when the Danish mate got annoyed with a pilgrim, and booted him so hard that the wretch screamed with the pain.
Our Methuselah raised a protest, but the mate was so mad that he wouldn't listen. He continued to kick the pilgrim, and Tohsâroth got to his feet. The mate thought this a sort of challenge, and he made a rush and clipped the old one under the ear.
Thurland let out a roar and made for the mate, swinging his fists as he came. But the mate had never been trained in the use of his hands and had never heard of the Marquis of Queensberry. He was a kicker, knowing tricks with his feet like the French know, and which they call savate; He made a quick leap into the air, bringing his right foot up in a roundabout fashion and walloping Thurland on the ear with the heavy boot.
It was a fine hefty kick, and it would have brought an elephant to his knees. Thurland dropped as if he had been shot, and the mate leaped forward and handed him a couple of kicks in the ribs before anyone could get close enough to stop him. He was in the act of putting in a third when he stopped and looked at Tohsâroth—looked at him with startled eyes.
The ancient had drawn himself up so that he seemed inches taller, and those eyes of his that had no whites and were like bits of black opal, glowed like the eyes of a cat in the dark. The Count cried out to him and made a rush to stop him from lifting his right hand; but the pilgrims got in the way of the Count and hindered him. And the old one took no notice of the Count's cries, his temper making, him deaf to everything. For days he had watched the mate kicking the half-starved pilgrims and spitting on their poor gilded Buddhas, and now the mate was going to get his! Aye!
The lean claw went up slowly, palm toward the sailor; then the long fingers snapped in a curious fashion, and the mate staggered backward against the rail. His face was yellow; his big mouth was open; and his eyes were pushed out like the eyes of a crab. Clinging to the rail, he stared for a few moments at the old bonze; then he slipped into the scuppers.
The Count screamed a warning as a seaman moved forward. "Don't touch him!" cried the Count. "Wait!"
The man stood back. My Uncle Thurland was on his feet now. He moved toward the mate in the scuppers, leaned over him; turned, and spoke to the Count. "He's dead," said Thurland.
The Captain of the Kelantan stumbled down from the bridge, swearing frightfully as he came. He thrust the pilgrims out of his way, pushed the body of the mate with a big sea-boot, looked into his face, then turned and stared at the old bonze.
"By God!" he cried. "I know! I know once't that swine bane come on my sheep! I know! Heem one bloody killer! Tohsâroth the Devil! I chuck him in de sea! Heem Tohsâroth the Death-giver!"
He made a rush at the ancient; but Thurland was in the way now—repaying the action of the monk in saving him from the boots of the mate. "Steady!" said Thurland. "Steady, me bold gossoon! What do you think our nice mate died of?"
"Plague!" screamed the skipper. "Plague! I haf heard of this swine. He kills. He snaps his fingers, so—an' men die! I chuck the swine overboard! He killed my mate!"
But Thurland held the big arms of the skipper, speaking softly to him as he struggled. "If you think that, me bouchal,"he whispered, "I wouldn't lay a finger on him. It would be you that we'd be tossing overboard after he had finished with you. Be quiet now, and let us think what we should do."
The Captain saw the danger of pulling any rough stuff on the old man, who had now returned to his seat. There he was, mumbling prayers to himself, his wrinkled face upturned, looking so quiet that no one would suspect him of sending a man into the other world a few minutes before. But the lads from Pnom-Penh, who clustered round him as if they would claw the eyes out of the Captain, knew. They knew that he had, by some magic or other, wiped out the mate who had booted them whenever they got in his way.
The Captain was quiet now. He stood with Thurland and the Count looking at the dead man, and two thirds of the crew stood with them. The news had gone down into the engine-room, and a few of the boys that were feeding the crazy engine climbed up to have a look. One of them, wearing only dungaree pants and a sweat-cloth around his neck, pushed me out of the way. I looked up at him, a little angry because he had handled me roughly, and I had difficulty in choking the cry that came to my lips. Under the swipes of coal-dust and sweat, I recognized his ugly mug. It was the man Bruden that Flane had thrashed in the dock-yard at Aden!
They straightened out the mate and placed him on a hatch-cover. The Captain, Thurland, and the Count were whispering together. The crew, heads thrust forward, tried to catch the words of the three. The Captain seemed frightened; the crew didn't seem too pleased. The angry chief engineer had come up from below, and he pushed himself into the argument.
Thurland and the Count suggested that the Captain should at once bury the body of the mate, lest the infection should spread; but the Captain, who had a filthy copy of a little book of rules issued by the Board of Trade, said that he couldn't. He was the skipper of a coastal boat, and he had to bring the body into port.
"Then it's quarantine?"
"It's damn' well so!" screamed the Captain. "Three weeks, one bloody month!" Suddenly he broke down and commenced to cry. Tears as big as hailstones rolled down his cheeks.
The chief engineer broke the silence with a burst of loud laughter. The Captain recovered himself, swore fiercely at the engineer and stumbled up the ladder to the bridge. The Kelantan, heading in for the entrance to the Saigon River, was then abreast of the mouths of the Mekong, the river of our dreams. Off to port the great stream, seventh largest river in the world, was pouring itself into the China Sea through half a dozen openings.
I PUSHED my way to Thurland's side. Bruden had been ordered below by the chief engineer. I whispered the news. "Are you sure?" asked Thurland. "I'm certain," I answered. My uncle was quiet for a minute, staring at a brown haze far off to the west of us, a haze that became solid and firm till we knew it as the coast of Cochin China. "The trouble is getting no thinner," said Thurland. "And that's what Jamesy Gallagher said about his wife when the reducing medicine didn't work on her. Yes, indeed, Jimmy!
WE entered the Saigon River with the yellow flag flying at the masthead. The Kelantan had been squirted with disinfectant till the smell of her brought insulting yells from the passengers and crew of a boat of the Grande Ligne de l'Ouest that passed us as we came into the stream.
We anchored in the middle of the river as the night was coming down, far ahead of us the lights of the city twinkling in the velvety dusk, and from here and there a faint note of music came to us to tell of the gayety that was ashore. For Saigon is the Paris of the East, and the French exiles sit out on the terrasses of the cafés and make themselves believe that they are back on the boulevards.
River police in snorting motorboats came alongside and shouted questions through megaphones at the Captain. The health authorities could not come aboard till the next morning, but we were to stay put. If the medical men found that the mate had died of plague, we would be taken to the quarantine station and held there till all danger had passed.
"There is no danger," said the Count, "but it is impossible to convince a medical man that there isn't."
My Uncle Thurland muttered curses and looked at the twinkling lights on the Quai Francis-Gamier, and the line of lamps on the bridges over the Arroyo Chinois that runs into the Saigon River. Thurland was angry, and there was no one on whom he could spill his temper.
"You're certain that was Bruden?" he asked me.
"Quite certain," I said. "He's all smeared with grease and coal-dust, but it's him."
"Well," said Thurland, "if we're quarantined, there's a chance that I'll give him a better hiding than Flane gave him at Aden."
The mention of his brother's name made him turn and look at the lights of the city. "If Flane is here, he'll know we're in trouble," he said softly; "and trouble is a magnet that brings him at a run. Now I wouldn't be surprised—" He paused and thrust his head forward and stared at the dark river-water.
"Wouldn't be surprised at what?" I said.
There was a laugh in Thurland's voice as he whispered his answer. "I wouldn't be surprised to find him nosing about this old tub. He has a brain, Flane has. When he was a boy, they thought of making him into a priest or a professor or something like that; but the moment he heard them planning, he left home and stayed away till they had forgotten about it."
The Count came across the deck, and Thurland whispered his hopes. The Count was thrilled. The possibility of a rescue lifted the sadness from our hearts. Thoughts of a quarantine of three weeks or more was something that weighed hard upon our minds.
The hot heavy night rolled around us—the night with a thousand odors that stirred queer thoughts. We were close to our destination, but the death of the mate had put chains around our hurrying feet. Ahead, some few hours' journey, was Pnom-Penh; and beyond was the mysterious Angkor on which the star of evening looked questioningly down.
I thought that I could see it in the velvety night—see the great towers, the immense stairways, the thousand and ohe sculptures of the seven-headed serpents, their stone heads spread fanwise, guarding this great shrine of the past. Our nearness to it made me curiously faint.
The tired pilgrims had stretched themselves in long lines on the deck. The Captain had slipped into a drunken stupor. The body of the mate, covered with a blanket soaked in disinfectant, showed in the shadows. The Kelantan seemed a boat of death.
AFTER midnight, it was then, that Thurland was roused by the pit-pit of a motor-boat that came out of the Arroyo Chinois into the Saigon River. It hung to the shore till it was opposite the Kelantan; then the motor was cut suddenly, and in the tremendous silence we thought we heard the creak of oars.
The sound came nearer. That spluttering engine was evidently too noisy for the final approach. The boat was being pushed furtively toward the Kelantan,
"That'll be Flane," whispered Thurland. "What a brother for a man to have!" His voice quavered as he spoke. I prayed that it might be Flane, so that Thurland would not be deceived.
Closer, closer came the boat. We saw it dimly on the oily water. It rounded the stern of the Kelantan, and the two rowers were plain to us in the dull light thrown by the riding-light—John Martin and Flane.
THURLAND whistled softly. The boat slipped to the side of the steamer. A whisper came up from it.
"Got to be quick," said Flane. "River police."
Thurland had knotted a rope to a stanchion and tossed the other end overboard. Martin grabbed it.
"The bonze?" whispered the Count.
"Leave him to me," said Thurland. "Down you go."
The Count went over the side, slid down the rope and fell into the boat.
"You're next, Jimmy," ordered Thurland, and I followed the Count, more awkwardly if possible, falling into the arms of Martin, who saved me from going overboard.
We stared upward, waiting for Thurland. The Count's excited breathing could be heard above the gurgling of the water against the ship's side. The Count was worried.
"He'll never get him," he whispered.
"He will," said Flane quietly. "Leave it to him. He can do anything."
The silence was broken by the querulous chatter of disturbed sleepers. It grew. Some one screamed. There was a shuffling of feet, a cry of alarm; then Thurland appeared on the rail, with a great bundle in his arms.
Holding this bundle with his left arm, he grabbed the rope with his right, twisted his legs around it, and came with the speed of a bullet into the boat.
He gasped out an order to the Count. "Speak to the old devil before he tries any tricks with me!" he cried. "I had to put a cloth over his head. Set that engine going! There'll be hell to play in a minute!"
Martin set the engine going, swung the nose of the boat in the direction of the Arroyo Chinois, and we fled into the night. The drunken skipper fired a bullet at us; the screech of a police whistle came from the wharf of the Messageries Maritimes, and from the pilgrims rose a prolonged howl that sounded like the yelping of a fox-pack that has lost the scent. Tohsâroth had left them.
We swung into the narrow channel with Martin at the wheel, and the Count busy explaining to the bonze why it had been necessary for Thurland to wrap the old fellow's head in a blanket and drop overboard with him. Tohsâroth seemed a little sulky. It was plain that the kidnaping didn't please him.
The arroyo narrowed. We turned toward the bank, a lantern swinging slowly, marking the landing. We bumped against a slippery stringpiece and stared upward at the holder of the lantern. It was Joyeuse—looking quite mannish in pantaloons and sports-shirt.
Martin tied up the motorboat, and Flane hurriedly explained matters to the Count. There was an early morning train to My-tho, where we could take the regular steamer that connected Saigon with Angkor, or we could start immediately for My-tho in an automobile to be hired in the Rue Lagrandičre.
"Automobile," the Count decided. "At My-tho we'll hire a private launch to take us up to Pnom-Penh and beyond."
We roused a sleepy garage-man, who in turn roused a sleepier Chinese chauffeur. After much discussion a big American car was pushed out, and we climbed into it.
All Saigon seemed asleep, breathing heavily like some big animal. Indeed, the moist air, hot and languorous, made one think that all around one were huge sleepy beasts of the kind that roamed about when the world was young.
As the car started with a jerk, I stammered: "Wouldn't you think that—that the night is alive? That the whole place is sort of—sort of watching us?"
Thurland laughed softly. "It is," he said. "The funny little people in the West think that the East is dead. It reminds me a lot of Billy Granger of Glengariff. Billy died, and all his friends came to the wake, bringing bottles of whisky and quarts of stout. When they got settled down for a fine drinking-bout, Billy sat up in his coffin and squealed like a horse at them. They ran like the devil, and he got quickly out of the box and locked the door so that they couldn't come back. He had lashings of drink, and he threatened to shoot anyone who came near the place. They say he was drunk for three weeks."
The car rushed through the hot dark, with strange odors coming to our nostrils. The bonze, pacified by the Count, slept soundly; Joyeuse and Flane talked in whispers; Thurland explained to Martin why it was necessary for us to go to Angkor instead of proceeding straight up the Mekong to search for the lost city of Klang-Nan.
"The old man is like a hound," said Thurland. "He's got to pick up the scent from the place where the whole lot of them piled into the pirogues on the night they fled. It'll bring everything back to him. When he gets his nose to the ground, or to the water, it's 'Yoicksl' and away."
"It's strange," said Martin.
"It's more than that," laughed Thurland. "It's unreasonable, as Tommy Henikey said when they sentenced him to death for killing an Englishman."
IT is the Me Nam Kong and not the Mekong to the people who live alongside it; and if a river deserved three names instead of one, it is that same Me Nam Kong. For a fine lusty river it looked to us when the morning light struck it as we reached My-tho. The rains had fattened it, and it rolled by proudly, its dark waters flashing in the sunshine as if they wished to tell you that they had come over two thousand miles from the highlands of Tibet.
We stood together and stared at it. And I think we were a little awed with the force that came out from it, and the vastness of it. We watched the native boats going down on it, boats that were houses in a way, for whole families lived on them, catching the big fish from the river and drying them in the hot sunshine, so that the reek of drying fish that came to our nostrils on that morning at My-thq was seldom far from us in the days that followed.
The bonze made his obeisance to the river, and we wanted to do the same, but the foolish pride of the whites stopped us. The river was the thing we had sought, with the fierce fury that a lover seeks a mistress. Night after night it had rolled through our dreams, black and frightening. Night after night we had seen the long line of pirogues going up it, the forty rowers flailing the water, the frightened sweating nobles urging them forward, the screaming beauties throwing their bangles at the monkeys that chattered on the branches of the big trees. It was the great gut of the world, to us—the gut up which we would go to find the treasures that were taken from Angkor hundreds of years before.
"Agh!" grunted Thurland, as he stood, feet apart, and surveyed the waters. "It's a bully stream you are, for certain. You could put the Shannon and the Blackwater in a corner of your stomach, and you wouldn't know you had eaten them!"
We found a boat—a motor-launch that was clean and comfortable. Its owner, an undersized Annamese, knew the river from My-tho to Luang-Prabang, the capital of the Lao state of the same name, to which he said he went often to get loads of cutch, cardamom, indigo, cinnamon, deer-horns, ivory and fish-roe. The launch was called the Ang-Duong, after the predecessor of that King Norodom who gave his country to France.
Joyeuse laughed as he named his cargoes. "Ask him if he ever carried wim-wams for geese's bridles, or silver coronets for toads," she whispered.
At noon on that morning at My-tho we went aboard. We were curiously excited. The river acted as a drug; the air, the sunlight and the nearness to Angkor-Vat, the place of great mystery, put a spell upon us. And Tohsâroth was a greater Tohsâroth here in his own kingdom. For the men on the waterfront bowed before him; the little Annamite women, their bare breasts the color of saffron, curtsied to him; the naked children wilted under his glance. What they knew about his great age I know not, but they were impressed—greatly impressed. The power was there, a power that came out to them when they looked at him.
THE Ang-Duong headed bravely upstream, into Sroc Khmer, as the country is known to its people. The little Annamese, whose name was Thlôk, was at the wheel; his assistant, Kčt, looked after the engine. The dress of each consisted of a loin-cloth.
We forgot Schiemann and Bruden and the sailor with the large lobes in his ears. We forgot the Kelantan, held in quarantine in Saigon River. We were afloat on the river of dreams—a little fey with the wonder of the place, and the fact that we had reached the river.
Huge trees along the banks, tamarind, palms, teak and ironwood. Bamboos of enormous height and thickness. Stretches of green brush like a painted wall; paddy-fields with workers knee-deep in water; old pagodas on hilltops, houses perched on poles to escape the flood waters, and junks innumerable. And the hot air filled with uncountable odors: rotting vegetation, exotic flowers, fish in the process of fermentation for that luxury of the Cambodians the sauce called nuoc-mam; and above all, that frightening odor that comes from oldness itself—from a country in decay.
"This is no white man's country," said Martin. "The French have buried thousands of brave lads here; but I don't know what they'll get back for them."
"If we get what we're looking for, we'll make a contribution," said Thurland softly. "If the French hadn't dug Angkor-Vat out' of the forests, we would never have heard the story."
The Count was whispering to the old bonze. The treasure did not concern the Count—the reason that he had given for the voyage on that evening at Neuilly was the one and only reason: he wished, to use the words of my uncle, "to beat
Death." And the belief that he could do so, seemed to have taken possession of him now.
It was curious to us—a little startling. From the atmosphere that seemed in itself to hold the strange perfume of death, he absorbed strength. The sea trip had tired him, but now he seemed like a man who had been ill and was convalescing. And it looked as if the old bonze was whispering secrets to him, secrets of great value, if we could judge by the look on the Count's face.
"I was told once," whispered Thurland to Flane, "that for every man in the world there is a climate that suits his soul and his body, and that he should search till he finds it. A wise man in Fez told me."
"It may be," said Flane; "but for myself I've never found one that suits exactly. They're either too hot or too cold; and if the climate is halfway bearable, the police are not."
"The Count has found his," whispered Thurland.
Joyeuse agreed with Thurland. Whether the Count had managed by the strangeness of his surroundings to hypnotize himself, or whether the ancient had whispered some strange secret connected with the system of Hatha Yoga, I know not; but the change was there— although vague and fleeting, it was quite plain to us....
We were to stop at Pnom-Penh for the night, and continue the next day to Angkor. So all that day we pit-pitted up the Mekong, past little villages whose names were called out to us by the smiling Thlôk. Strange names, which Thurland found with difficulty on the map—Vinh-long, Tan-chau, Vinh-xuong and Banam. And the queer spell of the river deepened. It seemed (but this of course was impossible) that the enormous pagoda of Angkor itself had created an influence that went out for leagues and leagues, so that one who didn't know of its existence would feel there was something strange and curious in the neighborhood.
And this, so Thurland told me, has been noted by explorers who have discovered ruins of great value. Cities of the strange folk that once lived in Central America, and who worshiped the sun and made sacrifices to it; and the monster stone pillars on an island in the Pacific called Easter Island, pillars that no man knows the use of, or how they were brought there. For the quality of life that is in ruins of that kind goes out from them, so that sensitive folk feel it, and fight their way through seas and jungles to reach the relics of the past. So we felt Angkor—felt it with our skin, as we saw Pnom-Penh show up in the blue haze that hung like a bridal veil above the river.
MY Uncle Thurland wondered why American gunmen didn't investigate some of the great treasures of the East—treasures that are loosely guarded by men who would be mightily astonished to have an automatic thrust under their noses. Now in that town of Pnom-Penh is a golden image—made for old King Norodom—that is inlaid with diamonds, and the gold itself has a value of a million dollars. And there, are others nearly as valuable. "Possibly the gunmen haven't heard of them yet," said Martin, when on that afternoon of our arrival Flane, Thurland, Martin and I went to see the Vat-Prah-Keo, or Emerald Temple. "Besides, that statue would be an awkward thing to get down to the coast."
"It's a nice piece," said Thurland quietly. "A handy lad with a screwdriver or the blade of an old penknife could pick a handful of those stones out while you were winking."
A yellow-robed monk, burning incense in front of the statue, stared hard at Thurland, as if he saw the cupidity on my uncle's face. Flane moved us away.
"That fellow might be a tough gentleman if you tried gouging the stones," said Flane. "There's a chance he has a gun under that overall of his."
We went back to the hotel near the wharf of the Messageries Fluviales Company, and we found that the big boat from Saigon which comes up from the moqth of the Mekong hod just arrived, bringing passengers for Angkor who would sleep that night at Pnom-Penh. They were just coming ashore.
Not wishing to make ourselves noticeable, we stood behind some bags of rice to watch them, little thinking that they would have any interest for us. The deck passengers were Cambodians, Annamese, Hindoos and Chinese. There stepped down a score of dancing-girls that had been down to Saigon to give an exhibition, ballerinas belonging to the palace—serious little things who moved like animated dolls and were convinced their business of dancing was one of the most important in the world, as indeed it is throughout the whole of Cambodia. Behind them came some French officers and Government officials, half a dozen tourists, then a man walking by himself.
Thurland gave a grunt of astonishment and stepped quickly behind the bags, pulling Flane and Martin with him. Without speaking we watched the man as he walked toward the Grand Hotel. It seemed years since we had seen him, and yet it was only a few days. But those few days had been so full of happenings that the sight of his ugly mug startled us. The man was Schiemann, the supposed Latvian, who had sailed with us from Marseilles on the Van Tromp! Schiemann, who had brought Bruden aboard at Suez! Schiemann, whom we had left at Rangoon!
"Well, as the fox said when sixty dogs were chasing him, 'there must be something about me that's attractive,'" growled Thurland. "It's too late to warn the Count. Schiemann will spot them on the terrace."
WE returned to the hotel, to find that the Count and Joyeuse had seen Schiemann. They had been sitting in the lobby when he entered, and they had recognized him immediately.
"Where's the old one?" asked Thurland.
"In his room," answered the Count.
"We must keep a tight watch on him," said Thurland. "I wouldn't be surprised to know that Bruden and the fellow with the big ears are on that boat. Martin, you go up on the balcony and sit outside the old chap's room. Flane will take a turn after dinner, and then I'll relieve Flane. One of us should be close fo him throughout the night"
Schiemann didn't come to the dining-room. He stayed in his room. Flane made a visit to the wharf, but could see nothing of the two we thought might have accompanied Schiemann. If the Kelantan was still quarantined (which was a certainty), Bruden, to follow us, would have had to leave the ship in the manner in which we had left it.
LATER in the evening Martin went to the spot where the motorboat was tied up. He came back at a run. A white man had tried to board the Ang-Duong; and when refused permission by Thlôk, the visitor had lashed out viciously with his fists and knocked the little Annamese unconscious. Kčt, the mechanician, had rushed forward with a boat-hook, and the unknown had fled into the darkness.
"Go back and stay with the boat," said Thurland. "That bird wants to cripple the engine. Go quick! Flane and I will watch Methuselah. Jimmy, you go with Martin."
Martin and I went at a trot to the Ang-Duong; Thlôk had recovered from the punch, but his saffron-tinted face carried a fine bruise where the blow had landed. He was busy sharpening a knife—hoping that the visitor would return.
The two Annamese lay down and slept after a little while, but Martin and I stayed awake. A big red moon shot up out of the dark forest, and the night taiked in the way it does in lonely places. For although Pnom-Penh was a town with sixty or seventy thousand people in it, there was about it the fearful loneliness that sits in countries that have passed their springtime and have settled into decay—countries that are far away from the throbbing heart of the Western world. As my uncle once said, you might give a shot to these Eastern countries that might wake them up for a little while, just as you'd wake up an old horse; but the betting is that they'll slip back into the slime....
Big fish sprang out of the water, leaping at the millions of insects that flew around—beetles with horns and sawlike claws, and mosquitoes that moved in swarms, so that a fish that was clever got a whole mouthful of them when he hopped. And we saw the big bats flying across the face of the moon, the horrible leather-winged things whose ancestors had lived in the great halls of Angkor-Vat till the French drove them out and disinfected the place to kill the odor that they left behind them: fox-bats with a wing-spread of five feet, bats that eat fruit and, so it is said, suck, the blood of anyone who is too sleepy to feel their razor teeth on his skin.
We were glad when the morning came, and the Count and Joyeuse, Thurland, Flane and Tohsâroth came down to the boat; nothing had happened at the hotel.
Just as we were starting away from the wharf, a little Annamese girl came at a run from the hotel. A small doll of a thing, the size of the ballerinas that had come off the boat. She was about eighteen years of age, her body from the waist to her bare feet wrapped in a piece of flowered brocade called panung; but the upper part of her body was uncovered, and her little pointed breasts shone in the fierce morning sunshine.
She called to the bonze as the engine turned over, and the old man, who looked like a sleepy lizard, sat up and shouted an answer.
"I'll wager this is a great-great-great-granddaughter of the old bonze," said Martin.
The girl gave a Cambodian whoop of joy, gathered her panung around her legs, took a flying leap across the yard of water that separated the Ang-Duong from the shore, and landed in Tohsâroth's lap. They embraced without a thought that anyone was observing them, and they chattered like two mad parrots in the springtime.
"The devil!" said Thurland, looking at the Count. "Will you please ask the old rooster how long we are to wait around?"
The Count had difficulty in putting the question, the ancient having no ears for anyone but the little lady in the flowered skirt. But at last he explained: The young woman was, as Martin guessed, a relative, she being the direct descendant of a sister of the bonze who had died, so he asserted, some two hundred years before! Her name was Om. Just Om!
"It has a dangerous sound," whispered Flane.
In silence we sat and gazed at the old man and the girl. Om seemed amused. She giggled, showing her teeth lacquered in black, her little tongue red from chewing betel. She picked Thurland as the leader of the party, and made a sort of obeisance to him.
"Well, if he has asked all the questions concerning the family, we'll unship her and get along," said Thurland.
The Count spoke again to Tohsâroth. The old man replied with energy. His protests were translated.
The girl Om was friendless. She had no relatives in Pnom-Penh. By chance she had heard of the arrival of her much-removed uncle, and she had rushed to him for protection. By the family laws of Cambodia he could not refuse it. She had to come along with the expedition.
"Great jumping catfish!" cried Thurland, and he stared at the little saffron-colored lady, who wriggled and squirmed under his gaze.
Suddenly she sprang from the side of the ancient, grabbed the big hand of Thurland and kissed it with enthusiasm. Joyeuse was amused; Flane and Martin guffawed; but Thurland was annoyed. A bunch of nearly naked loafers on the bank commented on the happening.
Thurland turned to the boat-owner and shouted an order.
The Ang-Duong swung away from the wharf. We were a curious party of eight on our way to Angkor the Mysterious.
ONCE my Uncle Thurland told me of a spot in the ocean supposed to exist on the rim of space. Sailors call it "The Sink of the World," and they believe that ships are drawn toward it by some magic power, slipping into a vast whirlpool, never to be heard of again. I thought of that "Sink of the World" as the motor-launch headed up through the Tonlé-sap toward Grand-Lac. For the power of that strange nightmare of sailors was upon us. We were being pulled toward Angkor!
We were in a net of dreadful witchery that held us body and soul, a net that was made out of the mysteries of the dead centuries, out of rites and ceremonies, out of charms and spells and incantations, out of enchantment and vampirism, and all the hocus-pocus through which the world has passed since Time began.
We were silent, because the fingers of Angkor were upon our lips. The breath of Angkor was on our faces. We sat quiet, staring at the reed beds along the shores, from which rose at times enormous flocks of white herons with crests of red and yellow. And here and there an old temple peered at us through the trees, and yellow-robed monks stood and stared at us. Once, when we were quite close to the bank, a group of monks saw Tohsâroth and became dreadfully excited. They raced madly along, crashing through the reeds in an effort to keep up with us, screaming questions at the ancient, to which he croaked answers. One by one they dropped with fatigue, except one lean wretch who discarded his robe and running completely naked, kept up with us for a mile or more. He was foaming at the mouth when he fell exhausted as we swung into the entrance of Grand-Lac. The two Annamese boatmen looked with frightened eyes at Tohsâroth. They whispered to each other.
Night came down when we were crossing Grand-Lac, which is over a hundred miles in length. The Annamese boatman consulted with the Count and Thurland. He could put into shore for the night, or he could go on and make Siem-reap in the dawn.
"Continuez!" said the Count.
"Continuez!" echoed Thurland.
Flane smiled. Flane knew; Martin knew; and I knew. The Count and Thurland could not have ordered a halt. They hadn't the power to combat the unseen force that was dragging us forward. In the darkness before us was the magnet, the enormous temple of the snake-god, the mortar of which had been mixed with a fanaticism and religious fervor that the centuries could not kill.
The monk chanted prayers, and the thick night became alive. Now and then the old man seemed to go into a sort of trance that brought chills to us. The Count listened to him with astonishment, his hands cupped to his ears, so that he would not miss a word that came from the ancient's mouth.
"What is he chattering about?" asked Thurland.
"Of the past," whispered the Count, and there was a note of fear in his voice, a sort of quaver that startled us. For fear gains by being transferred from one person to another, so that the half-terror that was upon the Count became a sort of super-virus when it entered us.
Joyeuse was upset by it. All that long day she had sat quiet and watchful, but the mad pursuit of the monks along the bank had affected her, and now at the chattering of Tohsâroth, she began to sob softly. Flane tried to comfort her.
"It's all right," he whispered. "There's no danger."
"I—I am sorry I came," sobbed Joyeuse. "I'm horribly frightened!"
Flane was angry with Tohsâroth, and asked the Count to stop the chanting of the old man; but the Count's orders had no effect on Tohsâroth. For now, across the dark waters of Grand-Lac, came the thin wailing notes of a flute that took our thoughts back to the garden of the villa at Neuilly. And the strange sobbing music stirred the bonze.
Lariats of sound came out of the velvety darkness, swirling around us, eerie, ghostlike, bringing a tenseness to our nerves.
"Where the devil is the music coming from?" asked Thurland.
Martin thought it came from the left; Flane thought it came from the right; and I thought it came from behind us. The Count questioned Thlôk, the launch-owner. The man was so frightened that he could hardly speak.
"C'est un ma-couď!"
"Ma-couď?" questioned the Count, puzzled by the native word.
"Un diablel" explained Thlôk.
He hunched his shoulders and looked into the night. His remarks seemed to suggest that he had heard the sounds before, but his manner showed that he did not wish to inquire into where they came from or who produced them.
"It's from junks," said Martin. "I thought I heard the noise of their paddles."
"If it is, they must be going round and round us," grunted Thurland. "It's here, there and everywhere!"
We couldn't lose it. On and on across the lake went the swift-moving launch, but the ghostlike melody hung to us. The two boatmen crouched low, as if they thought the strains were invisible lassos thrown by the evil spirits of the waters. We sat silent and puzzled. The monk had fine spurts of talkativeness, and now and then the girl Om beat his thin hands with hers as if to bring him out of a trancelike state into which, so it seemed to us, he slipped at times. We longed for daylight....
At six o'clock the launch owner pointed ahead. "Siem-reap," he whispered, and we looked with joy at the little village on the lake. For Siem-reap is the doorstep of Angkor. Here one steps into the circle of vast ruins that speak of the glory of the Khmers.
We had arrived!
Possibly it was what we had heard that made the first view of the ruins so terrifying to us. For the place had a cloak of mystery around it that bred fear— a fine biting fear that clutched us by the throat and brought a shiver into the words that we whispered to each other. A fear that made us turn our heads to see if the legions of the past were walking with us.
THERE it was as the French found it, with its great moat two hundred yards wide and over three miles in length. And a wall of two miles with four gates through it. And the great terrace along which run the carvings of the sacred snakes of Naga leading to the doors of the temple itself. Gray with age, the centuries pockmarking the conglomerate and sandstone out of which it is built.
Tohsâroth led us—Tohsâroth, still in the trance-like state that had come upon him on the launch. Chanting softly to himself, but loud enough to attract the attention of the few people that were around. They found something curious in the manner of the old bonze. They stared at us, and some of them followed.
Tohsâroth climbed the main stairway, and we were within the building. Within the great gallery of the first story, surrounded by the bewildering carvings that were made a thousand years ago, carvings that made us stare pop-eyed at them, we never having seen their like. For in stone they told the history of the Khmer race, and all the traditions connected with it. They showed battle-scenes with the dead and the wounded, men hacking and cutting with spite and fury, generals on horseback and on elephants cheering them on. There was heaven and hell, with stone figures enjoying themselves in the one place, and having a devil of a time in the pther. And there were processions that made us drunk with the wonder of them: gods riding on the backs of peacocks, and a goddess sitting on the seven-headed snake that was called Naga. And the never-ending stories in stone increased the fear that the place brought to us. They were nightmares, that had lived there in the darkness for centuries, and had now come to light in a world that could not understand them.
But Tohsâroth understood them, he being of the past in which they were made. At times he paused in his chanting and spoke to the Count, explaining this or that; and the Count whispered {he information to us—as if afraid the stone gods would hear and spring at him.
Tohsâroth walked up and down before a carving that ran along a wall for fifty yards, and we followed him backward and forward, wondering a little what it was all about. That it was fine work we knew; but a puzzle-picture to the brains of all of us till the Count explained.
"This," said the Count, "explains the churning of the sea. This is Mount Mandara, with the great serpent twisted around the root of it. One god pulls his tail and the other pulls his head, and the mount turns round and churns up the sea. Do you understand?"
"I don't," said Thurland, "but it doesn't matter anyhow. The place gives me the jim-jams. What's he searching for now?"
"We must wait for the night," said the Count. "I've questioned him, but he won't be hurried."
Flane and Joyeuse got tired of the promenade and found a stone seat on the terrace, but the rest of us followed the old bonze, who walked hand in hand with Om, and the stone gods looked at us with that cynical smile that one saw sometimes on the face of Thurland, the smile that tells of the futility of knowledge, and the smallness of man whose little butterfly flight is soon over, while a stone god rolls down the centuries.
WE rested in the hot noon. Tohsâroth was silent now. He sat with the little girl, apart from us, his eyes upon the temple.
Thurland questioned the Count. Thurland's mind was filled with thoughts of the treasures that had left Angkor one night in the long ago: the great rose-colored pearls from Jiddah and Koseir, the diamonds that made men invisible, the enormous rubies thought to be the eyes of dead pythons. The delay irritated him.
"It is necessary," said the Count. "I cannot explain. I have asked him for reasons, but he will not give any."
THE hot afternoon wore on, with us waiting and watching, the place and the ruins producing a sort of mental torpor that made conversation difficult. Yet although my uncles and Martin were annoyed at the delay, they were in their hearts satisfied that there was a reason —a reason that was known to Tohsâroth. In some way that we could not understand, he was seeking a means of stirring his memory so that he could see again the night of the great flight.
We felt the effort as we watched—felt it so that we were hurt by the strain that was upon him. He was trying to remember, to remember a night that had rolled over Angkor hundreds of years back—a night of terror. Behind the dark eyes he was flicking over the pages of memory, getting the "scent" of the flight, seeking it like a hound, because it had become faint with the years—with the terrible destroying years. In the middle of the afternoon the old monk stated that he wished to visit the ruins of Angkor-Thom, which is situated a little more than a mile from Angkor-Vat, and the Count hired a wagon to take us. Joyeuse was tired and had no wish to go; so Flane stayed with her—also the little girl Om, whose bare feet had grown weary from tramping up and down the galleries of the great pagoda. Tohsâroth, the Count, Thurland, Martin and I climbed into the wagon and took the road to Angkor-Thom—Angkor-la-Grande—the great city of luxury, where a million persons once lived, but which is now a place of desolation.
Here lived the great Khmer kings: Jayavaman, who built Prah-Khan eleven hundred years ago: and Cri Yaçovarman, the king of kings, who enlarged Angkor-Thom till it was the most glorious city of the East. The gate through which we passed had been the main entrance, and through it in the long-dead years there had passed colorful processions of knights and ladies, of chanting bonzes, magicians, and dancers out to honor the snake-god Naga. Now there was nothing but overthrown walls, broken pillars, and the chipped faces of gods that had once rested on flower-decked pedestals to receive offerings of rice and incense.
"It's a merry place indeed," said Thurland. "One would think that big guns had pounded it to pieces."
"The big guns of Time have done the job," said the Count.
A wailing monk came up to us and spoke to Tohsâroth. The monk led us to a place that is called the Belvedčre du Roi Lépreux, which is the Turret of the Leper King; and there our Methuselah seated himself, chanting softly, and not taking any notice of us. And the shadows deepened, and the loneliness of the place grew greater. And the silence was 'a great hand upon our mouths, so that 'speech seemed impossible. And we were a little afraid, for it seemed that at any moment something might happen, something unexplainable and terrible, the set-'ting being there with the ruins and the silence and the feeling of despair.
IT was Martin who saw the thing. He grunted in a curious fashion and drove his elbow into the ribs of Thurland. And Thurland stared, and the Count stared, and I stared. With eyes that couldn't flicker for the life of us, we stared. And the silence wrapped itself around us till we choked under the clutch of its invisible fingers.
Before Tohsâroth was a broken slab on which appeared the carved snake, the seven-headed sacred cobra; and to us it seemed that the snake had come alive, with the sole difference that he now had one head instead of seven. One head instead of seven, and that head was weaving backward and forward as if he intended to strike the old monk, who sat and stared at him.
That is what we thought when our eyes first fell on the serpent; but as we stared at the crawling thing, we saw that the carving was still there, and that the cobra was a chap who lived in a hole beneath the slab, and had got a little mad because the old monk had come and squatted too close to his home.
Thurland reached for a rock to brain the thing, but the monk saw the movement and stopped him with a gesture of his thin hands. And there in the frightful stillness we sat and stared at the weaving head with its expanded hood, the black and white spectacle-mark showing plainly on the back of that same hood, with the two spots on the under surface. So close it was that we could have counted the scales of the thing.
Tohsâroth spoke to the snake—spoke in a low soft voice with words that we didn't understand. Later the Count told us what he said. The old man was telling the cobra to go back to his hole, because we didn't wish to hurt him; but the cobra, unimpressed, blew out his hood to its full size and commenced to hiss.
Tohsâroth spoke again—more firmly now, and with a little bit of temper in his voice. He lifted his right hand in a gesture of command and uttered two words. Plainly he was warning the crawling thing to go back or he would run his ugly hooded head into trouble.
The cobra didn't like advice. He got himself ready to strike. Thurland cried out a warning as the head of the snake lashed forward at the bonze; but in the very act of striking, it was arrested. Aye, arrested with a sudden jerk in midair; then—then as we watched—it was drawn back slowly, and it and the body disappeared in thin air! Like smoke it vanished: and there, behind where it should have been, was the broken slab with the carving of the seven-headed cobra!
Thurland and Martin were on their feet. "Where did it go?" cried my uncle. "What the devil happened to it?"
Now there are explanations given for many happenings that occur in the East, happenings that are thought supernatural by those who have seen them. The wise lads say that most of them are explained by mass hypnotism, all the watchers being fooled by the fellow who performs the supposed miracle. But the little sequel to the disappearance of that cobra seems inexplicable.
The stone slab that carried the carving had been lying in the sun all that sultry afternoon, and like every other fragment around, it was hot to the hand when touched. Tohsâroth had risen when Thurland asked the question; and now as we stood staring at the place where the serpent had disappeared, the old man pointed to the carving and spoke.
The Count translated. "He says it is there," he cried excitedly. "The third head! He says to touch it with your fingers and you will find the proof!"
Looking a little bewildered, Thurland stooped and timidly touched the third stone head of the fanlike seven. He gave a yelp of wonder; then, in turn, he touched the other six.
He straightened himself and looked at the Count. "It's like ice, but the others are hot as hell!" he said.
The Count walked over and touched them in the manner of Thurland. Martin did the same; then I laid my fingers on them. The third head seemed to have that cold frozen feel that one would expect when touching a serpent. A chill came out from the stone, a frightening deathlike chill, while the six other heads had absorbed the heat of the afternoon sun so that they were like coals under the touch of my hand!
Tohsâroth was on his feet. He appeared excited. He spoke rapidly to the Count. The matter of the cobra had produced a change in his manner. Some long-buried memory had been brought to the surface by the happening. In some mysterious manner it formed a connecting link with the great flight from Angkor.
"We are on our way!" cried the Count. "He remembers! Lord in heaven! I can't explain, but—but—come on!"
At a half run we left the Turret of the Leprous King and hurried toward the main gopura, the gate where a three-headed elephant supports the carved pillars. We climbed into the waiting wagon and turned toward Angkor-Vat. The dusk was on the ruins when we came to the spot where Flane, Joyeuse and Om were awaiting our return.
BUT if the ruins were awesome in the daytime, they were a thousand times more so when the night came down upon them. They breathed terror. There in the darkness were hundreds and hundreds of carven Buddhas. Smiling with that half-cynical smile as if they, as Thurland remarked, knew under which thimble was the pea that might be the very secret of life and death. The place was dead, and yet curiously alive. Throbbing with some strange force that it had absorbed in the long centuries when no man had laid eyes on it. Crouching in the thick forests with the millions of bats fluttering within its dead heart, it had gathered to itself a vicious power. Something like the power that men say comes from the Sphinx, only a thousand times greater; for the Sphinx is a poor thing compared to the great ruins of Angkor.
But we were on our way now. The old bonze had the scent. As the red moon came up out of the forest, he raced with skinny legs along the terrace, explaining to the Count—telling of the happenings of that night of long ago. The terrace is raised three feet from the ground, and that elevation permitted the nobles to climb on the backs of the elephants that were brought up against the outer side. And on that night of the great flight, the elephants were drawn up there to take the king and the nobles and the pretty ladies of the court down to the shores of Grand-Lac. The old monk, by signs and talk, made us see them—the great beasts with their decorated howdahs shouldering the raised terrace to take their loads....
On went the bonze, with us after him. Mad as a March hare he was now. He was living the night of the great stampede. He was fleeing the Plague—the Plague, that had come up the Mekong from the marshlands of the coast, and had squatted on the terrace of Angkor-Vat!
His hands were over his ears as he ran, and we understood why. He was shutting out the screams of the thousands who were mowed down by the Black Death; for the Past was on him and he heard those screams again—heard them in the stillness of the night.
Heading toward the lake, the wagon clung to our heels, the man not having been paid, but the bonze wouldn't wait for the wagon: The "scent" was on the ground, he having run behind the elephants on that night of long ago.
Flane dropped behind, to help Joyeuse. He halted the wagon and lifted her and the tiny Om into it; then he ran on after the rest of us. Thurland and the Count were running close to the monk; then came Martin, with me a little behind him. Somewhere in front was Siem-reap, and the launch, and Thlôk and Kčt.
The red moon pulled a cloud over its face. I stumbled and fell, picked myself up and ran on. From in front came the patter of running feet; then came a high yelp of pain, a curse, then Thurland's voice cried out a warning.
THE road was tree-lined; the moonlight came through in long white toothpicks, and these hit the bodies that were struggling on the ground. Hit them here and there as they writhed around, so that one had the belief that they were serpents and not men battling there— serpents who grunted and cursed and threshed about in the dust.
A hand caught my ankle and jerked me to the ground: then as I climbed to my feet, I saw Thurland plain in a patch of moonlight. He was clutching the old monk with his left hand, and swinging mighty blows with his right. And now and then he unloosed a war-cry that tore through the night.
The wagon clattered down upon us, its single lamp dim with the dirt and dust. The driver pulled up as he heard the yells of Thurland. I got a smack on the side of the head that might not have been intended for me; and as I lay on the ground, heavy shod feet trampled over me. I heard Flane calling to Martin; then, with a queer suddenness, the fighting ceased. A hand grabbed me and pulled me to my feet. It was Thurland.
"Hurt?" he asked.
"No," I answered. "What—what happened?"
"A few laddies jumped on us," he said. He struck a match and stooped down.
Lying in the middle of the road, face upward, was the sailor with the big lobes to his ears, who had been aboard the Van Tromp.
"Is he dead?" I gasped.
"Not a bit of it," snapped Thurland. "He'll be his own dirty self in a few minutes. Are you there, Flane?"
Flane answered from the side of the wagon. He came to Thurland's side. "Did you use a knife?" he asked.
"I did not," snapped Thurland.
"Well," said Flane, "the gentleman named Bruden got a prick from a blade It's not much, but I was wondering who gave it to him. He came back after they stampeded, and was making a rush at you when some one pricked him."
Thurland pulled the unconscious sailor to the side of the road and walked over to the spot where the Count, Martin and the old monk were standing. Half-sitting, his back against a tree was Bruden. His shirt was open, and in the light of the wagon lamp a trickle of blood ran from a wound in his right breast.
He stared up at us with angry eyes; then he fixed his gaze on the monk, and a great fear seemed to spring upon him. The old bonze had stiffened suddenly, drawing himself up in the manner he had done when he struck down the mate of the Kelantan on the way to Saigon; and that gesture seemed to frighten Bruden. He clawed himself to his feet with a cry of fear and dived into the brush. In the silence we heard him crashing madly through the vines.
Thurland looked us over. "We're all here," he said quietly. "It was a nice fight while it lasted. I thought some one would be hurt badly. Now—who stuck the skewer into that fellow?"
Joyeuse looked over at Om; and Om wriggled from one foot to the other, her little bare breasts shining as the shafts of moonlight touched them. She hadn't understood Thurland's question, but she felt that she was under observation.
Thurland whistled softly. Om smiled up at him; then, with a certain bashfulness, she thrust a hand beneath her embroidered skirt and brought out a lean and vicious-looking dagger. To save Thurland Om had given Bruden a jab!
"Well, I'm damned!" said Thurland. Then he wheeled and cried: "Look out! He's off!"
The forced halt had annoyed Tohsâroth. He was afraid that he might lose the "scent" if he wasted time on such silly interruptions as a fight, and now he was off, running swiftly in the direction of Siem-reap and the water.
Human shadows at the wayside screamed and yelled at us. A guard of the countryside, thinking we were pursuing a thief, joined in and refused to be shaken off till Thurland spoke sternly to him. Strung out along the road, with the wagon in the rear, we came to the landing-place where we had left the launch.
Thlôk and Kčt were asleep; but the arrival of Tohsâroth, who beat Thurland by some yards, roused them. Hurriedly they tore the covering from the engine and set about tuning it up. A group of chattering persons had gathered on the bank. A small official advanced and informed the Count that it was necessary for us to await the arrival of the French Resident and the Receveur des Postes. There had been, he asserted, rumors of combats,
The Count pooh-poohed the suggestion. "Ce n'est rien du tout, monsieur!" he said.
"Mais, monsieur" cried the other, "il faut attendre!"
The Count watched Joyeuse and Om climb into the launch, heard the engine sputter and throb as the lean skillful hands of Thlôk brought it into life, then he glanced at Thurland.
"Let's go!" cried Thurland. "Once you start arguing with these little officials, you're lost."
The Count hopped aboard; the official made a rush at the bow of the launch as if tempted to jump aboard; but Thlôk swung the Ang-Duong away from the stringpiece, and the widening distance frightened the fellow.
We saw him dance up and down in the moonlight, shrieking orders to the cluster of local people who had been puzzled by our doings; then Tohsâroth took our attention from them and we forgot them. For Tohsâroth was under the spell that had seized him. He was fey with the rush of memories that had come to his mind. A sort of fierce dignity had fallen upon him. His skinny claws gave the startled Thlôk the course, and Thurland and the Count accepted his directions without questions. The bonze had become the captain of the Ang-Duong,
AGAIN the music swirled around the . launch—the thin ghostly music that brought chills to us. The old bonze cocked his head and listened to it as if it conveyed a meaning to him. We thought it did, for he screamed unintelligible words at Thlôk, and motioned him to stand in closer to the eastern shore of the lake, a suggestion that Thlôk combated because he thought it dangerous.
The Count questioned Tohsâroth, and the bonze poured out a flood of reasons.
"What does he say?" asked Thurland.
"We must follow the route of the pirogues," answered the Count. "He says unless we do that, he cannot guide us."
"But the channel might have changed," said Thurland. "This boatman seems afraid to take his directions."
"We must chance it," cried the Count. "He says—he says he can see them!"
"See what?" asked Flane.
"The pirogues I" whispered the Count. "He's—he's staring at mental photographs he made some hundreds of years ago. I don't know what to think, but— but if we're going to let him lead us, let us pluck up our courage and follow him."
THLÔK had stopped the engine, and we were all looking at the bonze. He had dropped on his knees; his skinny hands clutched the gunwale of the boat, and he was staring out across the moonlit waters of the lake: staring as if he saw monsters swimming upon the quiet water, staring as we had never seen anyone else stare in our lives. His lower jaw had been dragged down by the wonder that he alone saw out there on the lake; his outstretched neck was something to put the fear of God in the heart of anyone watching him.
"Wow!" gasped Martin. "What— what the devil does he see?"
Joyeuse screamed softly, while Om slid from her seat and put her little hands on the shoulders of the old man. But Tohsâroth took no notice of her.
Now his head moved slowly, ever so slowly, as if following the course of something moving toward the mouth of the lake, something moving slowly. The muscles of his neck were strained to their utmost as the lean head was thrust out to catch the last glimpse of the thing; then suddenly he relaxed and slipped to the bottom of the launch.
The Count pointed ahead at the spot that had held the eyes of the bonze when he slumped. He shouted an order to Thlôk, and the launch leaped forward. Thlôk had seen the old man watching, and was too astonished to dispute regarding the channel.
Now and then the Annamese turned and looked at the old monk, looked at him with fear and respect. Tohsâroth, recovered now, urged him on with motions of his hand. We sat silent and watched. And the music clung to us like a skein of colored silk, caught by the small pennant at the bow.
The moon dropped into the lake. Dimly we could see each other, and now and then some one whispered—whispered fearfully, as if the sound of a voice would break the spell that was upon us. But our minds were busy—busy with pictures of what this ride would bring us. For each of us felt that the great finishing drive toward the lost City of Klang-Nan had commenced. The course had been long, but we had now arrived at the straight, with the winning post in the distance.
All depended on the old monk, who sat and stared at the darkness ahead of us—the darkness where, to the eyes of Thurland and Flane, Martin and myself, danced the rose-colored pearls that had been soaked for seventy days in the milk of white mares to give them greater luster; the diamonds that made men invisible, and the great emeralds that preserved the chastity of the women who wore them. What the Count thought about I know not. Perhaps he had the thrill that came from the belief he would beat death, beat it as Tohsâroth had beaten it, so that he could watch the centuries roll by and defy the skeleton hands of the Grim Reaper.
We passed out of Grand-Lac in the early morning. The monk waved a hand to the right bank, where lay the small town of Kompong-chnang. We wanted food, but we knew that Tohsâroth had thoughts beyond provisions. He was following step by step a flight of long ago. We thought from his manner that the pirogues had stopped at Kompong-chnang. We were certain they had.
Tohsâroth pushed through a mob of staring natives and marched toward an old pagoda that overlooked the water. A shaven monk came at a run, and our Methuselah questioned him. From the gestures of the local monk we understood that the pagoda was now not used, it being undermined by the floodwaters so that it was considered unsafe.
Tohsâroth ignored the information. He marched toward it; and we followed, wondering a little as to the reason. The crowd increased.
WE followed him into the pagoda, the crowd making cries of warning as they clustered around the door. Part of the roof of the place had fallen in; and here, hanging from the beams, were the great fruit-eating bats of Asia. Hundreds of them. Awakened by our entrance, they flew around, making curious noises, and swooping down over our heads in a threatening manner. The stench was frightful.
Tohsâroth paused for a minute as if trying to get his directions; then he steered for the east wall of the temple, stumbling over the broken masonry, his black eyes gleaming with excitement. Joyeuse, Martin and the small Om had stopped inside the door; but Thurland, the Count, Flane and I clung to the heels of the old man.
The wall was a picture in stone. There was a whole line of elephants; and on the back of each rode a god or a goddess, each sitting under an umbrella made of sculptured palm fronds. The elephants had carved wreaths of flowers around their trunks, lotus and jasmine and tuberose, and they were all marching toward a door that looked to be the opening on the Cambodian paradise.
The old monk counted the elephants. He counted them again. He stood and stared at them. He seemed puzzled. The forefinger of his right hand went up and down as he counted for the third time, his withered lips moving with the finger. A sort of helplessness showed upon his lined face. He looked around and beckoned to the local monk, whose lean shaven head was thrust within the door, he being afraid to venture inside.
HE came now when Tohsâroth called him. The two talked, Tohsâroth gesticulating and pointing to the row of elephants marching bravely, the near foreleg of each lifted high.
The local monk raced out of the pagoda with the evident intention of seeking information, and after a while, he returned with the super-bonze, a very old man who walked with difficulty, and who had to be supported across the floor by his skinny-legged associate.
Tohsâroth questioned the old man, and by bits that the Count overheard and translated to us, we began to understand what was wrong. An elephant was missing! On the night when the king and the nobles fled Angkor, there were eleven elephants marching along the wall of the pagoda—now there were only ten! We felt a bit qualmy as the Count informed us of the reason for the discussion.
The old super-bonze became excited. He waved his hands and talked. He motioned toward the inner wall of the chamber in which we were then standing. Something had been changed. Dimly, from his gestures and the words the Count heard, we knew that a division wall had been erected, and that the missing stone elephant was in a room at the rear! The wall had broken the procession, and that last elephant had been cut off. He had been cut off, so the Count thought, for two hundred years. But Tohsâroth knew that he had been in the line at one time.... At one time! On the night of the great flight he had been with his stone brothers!
The lot of us stumbled through an arched door into a corridor at the rear. Darker and more smelly. Some one brought a torch; the flickering light showed the missing elephant that the wall had cut off from his fellows.
Tohsâroth, with, a gesture, waved the others back. He took the torch and walked alone to the wall on which the great stone beast stood out plainly. In silence we watched him. The angry bats flew circling about over our heads. Now and then one, made angry by the torch, dived and touched the leaping flame with its leathery wings, making frightening shadow-patches on the walls.
Tohsâroth was on his knees. His clawlike hands were fingering the stone flowers around the neck of the elephant. One by one he went over them, and we craned forward, a fierce and terrible expectancy upon us. For there came to us a feeling that something was going to happen within that ruined pagoda, something that would clinch the belief that we held— the belief in the age and the knowledge of the old man with whom we had traveled the long leagues from the Villa Mille Fleurs at Neuilly.
The long fingers of Tohsâroth's lean hand clung to a carved lotus. The fingers went over it, caressing it, touching each leaf; then suddenly, he thrust against the center of the flower with force, chanting softly as he did so.
The stone stomach of the elephant swung outward! Slowly, ever so slowly —the creaking sound of hidden hinges could be heard above the meowing of the fox-bats, above the heavy breathing of the packed crowd behind us. Tohsâroth had dropped upon his knees and was making obeisance to something within the stone stomach of the beast.
THE fists of my big uncles, Thurland and Flane, saved us from death at that moment. For the crowd that had followed us into the pagoda were seized with a sort of madness when they saw the stone slab that formed the stomach of the elephant swing outward. They made a mad rush forward, and it was then that Thurland and Flane used their fists to such good advantage.
The two of them, standing shoulder to shoulder, knocked down the leaders of the rush; and they, falling, tripped up the others that followed them, so that in the space of a few minutes there was a heap of the nearly-naked devils squirming on the dirty floor, clawing and biting at each other. And as they fought with each other, bits of the ceiling of the place, disturbed by the shouting and the pounding of bodies, tumbled down upon us, and there was a great danger of the whole building collapsing and burying the lot of us in the ruins.
The Count wasn't idle at that moment. He dashed forward to the side of Tohsâroth. I saw him stoop above the shoulders of the old man; then, as he saw what was within the secret place, he spoke rapidly to the bonze. The Count grabbed the torch; the hands of Tohsâroth were thrust within the opening; they seized something, drew it out and lifted it high.
The light of the torch struck the object, struck it so that it blazed like a small sun, throwing out a thousand splinters of colored fire. Thurland and Flane, at a cry from the Count, formed a bodyguard for the bonze; and pushing aside the screaming mob, they led the old man with the glittering treasure out from the ruined pagoda into the light of day.
There the crowd saw clearly what it was that Tohsâroth carried. A shout of terror went up from them; they crouched in fear, dropping to their knees in the wet clay. Silence crept over the place, a fearful silence....
There has been published since then a little book, called a brochure, entitled "The Jeweled Buddha of Kompong-chnang." It can be bought in Paris for five francs; but those that read it might well think it is a fairy story, and that no such object ever existed, although the man who wrote the book tells truthfully of the finding of it, and even mentions the name of my uncle, misspelling the name, which is the habit of the French, calling him "Sir Durland Splane"—he that had no claim to the title, although there was no finer knight in the world's history.
Here is a bit translated from that same book, which I have beside me:
It was a golden statue of the Lord Buddha, standing some fifteen centimeters in height, encrusted with diamonds of the first water, the largest embedded in the chest of the figure. But the most astonishing part of this magnificent example of Khmer workmanship was the rose-colored pearl that formed the stomach, a pearl which, from all the descriptions given by persons who examined the find, was unique in size and luster....
Now, it was the great pearl that made the stomach of the squatting Buddha which held the eyes of my uncles, and Martin and the Count. For, curiously, those words about the rose-colored pearls that Marco Polo had seen placed in the mouths of the dead in the city of Ta-pin-zu had about them a magic that made them more desired than the other treasures the Count had spoken of. Possibly it was the story about their being soaked for seventy days in the milk of white mares that thrilled us, for that suggested high sorcery; but this I know: the great gleaming pearl held us, it sitting like a lustrous moon amongst the diamonds, smooth and calm and quiet, while the other stones danced in the sunlight.
Hungry for it were Thurland and Flane. Aye, and the Count and Martin. Desire made their hands open and shut, their fingers itching with the longing to get hold of it; and for that, no man who ever saw the thing would blame them.
The super-bonze who ran the pagoda was standing close to Tohsâroth, his old eyes on the statue, his hands raised in adoration. Tohsâroth looked at him, spoke to him for a few minutes in a low whisper; then—the hearts of us were shot with the pain it brought—he placed the treasure in the yellow hands that were thrust out greedily to receive it....
The Count spoke fiercely to Tohsâroth, and the old man replied. He said, so the Count translated, that the statue of Buddha had been placed there on the night of the great flight, so that it would guard and protect Angkor. It had, according to Tohsâroth, done the work it had been asked to do, and now it should remain in the old pagoda of Kompong-chnang forever.
IT was no use arguing, although there was a look on the faces of Thurland and Flane that made the half-naked mob back away from them. Martin swore. But the Count, who was not treasure-mad like my uncles and Martin, spoke softly to them, explaining we had no claim at all on the find, which was the truth, it being solely the business of Tohsâroth and the super-bonze who bossed the pagoda in which the thing was hidden. But it was hard for my uncles to see this.
"It's a hell of a business to leave a thing like that with a lot of bare-polled monks," growled Thurland. "Some big-fisted thief will come along, squeeze the throat of a few of the lice and stick it in his pocket."
"And that's the blessed truth," said Flane. "There's no strongbox here to put it in, and a big man could mop up a score of them. It's putting temptation in the way of a thief."
"It's not our business," said the Count. "It has nothing to do with us."
Thurland and Flane looked at each other and then at the old super-bonze and the crowd. I think the big pearl that made the stomach of Buddha had them under a spell at the moment, and that very little would have made them rush the old boss of the pagoda and take the thing from him. Then Flane grinned.
"It's nothing to what we'll get at Klang-Nan," he said. "Let's go away from this place before we grow green with longing for the pearl."
The Count collected Tohsâroth, and we went down to the water, the crowd following us, pushing and scrambling to get close to Tohsâroth, whom they thought was a miracle-worker. And they weren't far short of the mark in thinking that. We climbed back into the launch and headed down the Tonlé-sap toward its junction with the Mekong, up which we would go on the long journey to the hills....
From what I find in the little book about "The Jeweled Buddha of Kompong-chnang," that which Thurland thus prophesied came to pass. This lad who wrote the brochure says this about the theft:
The find was not reported to the French Resident by the monks, they fearing that the Resident would seize the treasure. One of their own number watched the statue day and night; but on a morning six months after the wonderful relic had been unearthed, this guard was found with his throat cut, and the statue had disappeared from the box in which it had been locked. The theft is attributed to a Japanese rice-dealer who visited the district to buy the paddy crop. This Japanese has not been heard of since.
So Thurland was right; but whether it would have been proper for my uncles to grab the thing, fearing that a thief would get it if they left it unprotected, is another matter. My uncle said that the English argued that way when they grabbed every little island they found in the oceans of the world; but there's a difference between an island and a statue of Buddha, as the English might explain to you. For clever are the English at explaining why they gather up islands that are lying loose and unprotected....
The business at Kompong-chnang increased the fever that was upon all of us—the queer fever that made us forget everything but the story of the great flight. A fever that was a torment and a pain to us, but sweet withal.
We sat without speaking as the Ang-Duong rushed down the Tonlé-sap, each one of us fingering our dreams the way the yellow-robed monks finger the great strings of beads that they carry. And we weren't in a world that we knew, for those same dreams put a glamour on everything, bringing to the reed-beds a glow that thrilled us, and twisting the squawking of the cormorants and herons into music that hurt us with the sweet beauty of it.
The eyes of the Count glowed with pleasure, the age of Tohsâroth being once more proved to him by the finding of the golden Buddha. Thurland and Flane and Martin were drunk with expectation, the hunger bred by the sight of the rose-colored pearl showing on their faces. Joyeuse was quiet; and when she looked at Flane, she smiled softly, for it was plain that she loved him. The little Om had become a slave of Thurland, she thinking him a god; and she was quite ready to stick her dagger into anyone that touched him, as she had stuck it into Bruden. A small piece of deviltry was Om.
WE swung into the Mekong, and the river had "its head up." The rains in the hills had fattened it, and the junks came down at a speed of twenty miles to the hour. Thlôk hugged the bank to dodge the strong central current, and the Ang-Duong had to struggle for every mile she made. Pirogues going in the same direction fought bravely against the stream, the naked piroguiers yelling like demons, their steersmen cursing the river devils that held them back.
We at silent and stared at the banks. The river was a yellow stallion. It raced across the paddy-fields; it foamed under the little houses built on poles; it grabbed trees whose roots were too weak to stand the pressure, tore them from the bank and carried them downstream, to the great danger of the flying junks that went with them.
We passed villages to which the flood had brought a fierce activity. Naked men were wading in the water, armed with huge nets on poles. They scooped out fish, which the women and children gutted hurriedly, split deftly, and hung on bamboos to dry. The Cambodians were harvesting their food supply for the year.
The stench brought an army of big birds that dived upon the bamboo racks if an opportunity offered. Pot-bellied youngsters fought them off. Here and there a yellow-robed monk, finding fishing easier than begging, had tucked up his garments and was busy hooking seven-pounders from the water. For the Mekong, with the Grand-Lac, produces enough fish to supply all Cochin-China.
HIS face turned to the stern of the Ang-Duong, sat the bonze; his black glittering eyes were fixed unswervingly on the river. He watched it as if he expected at any moment to see a faster boat in pursuit of us.
"What is it?" asked Thurland. "Does he think the police are chasing us?"
The Count questioned the old man, but he didn't answer. He sat in a crouching position and stared and stared at the river. Then, as the evening closed in, we understood: Tohsâroth was living in the Past. It had taken possession of him. He was once more in one of the long pirogues that had fled Angkor. Somewhere behind us, so Tohsâroth thought, pursuing us, was the Plague!
As the dusk came down, he screamed for speed. He cursed Thlôk; and Thlôk, fearful of the trunks of trees that came charging down the current, was upset by the curses. He begged permission to tie up for the night at the first village we came to; and in spite of Tohsâroth's protests, the Count ordered a halt. There was a fine chance of a racing log sinking us in the darkness if we went on.
There was a monastery close to the village at which we tied up for the night. Half a dozen monks were on the bank when we climbed out of the launch; and the moment they saw Tohsâroth, they gave little yelps of surprise and gathered round him. He spoke to them, and they listened with startled eyes, staring at the river up which we had come. We felt sure he was telling them of the Plague.
"He'll frighten the devil out of them, and they'll run us out," said Flane. "Look at the fear he's plastering on their faces!"
The men, women and children gathered around to listen: Something evil was coming up the river, up from the coast. What it was they couldn't tell. Open-mouthed, they ran around the cluster of monks. Women wept, and children squealed with fear.
An old bonze waddled from the monastery. He was so fat from eating and lack of exercise that he could hardly walk. He listened to Tohsâroth, and he seemed to understand. He spoke to the villagers and soothed them. The Thing that they feared, he asserted, had passed years and years before. It was only a memory of it that terrified the old man.
The Count put a question to him. When did he, the fat monk, think the Thing had passed?
The fat bonze replied that he had heard of something that had passed the village hundreds of years before—something like that which Tohsâroth feared.
He ordered the villagers to prepare a feast for us. In no time we sat down to a great feed. We had a marmite of rice with a stewed peacock, dried fish, and bananas; five-score persons watched us eat. But Tohsâroth ate nothing. He watched the river, and the monks and frightened children watched with him.
Two huts were made ready for us. We were given mats. Joyeuse and Om slept in one hut, the four of us in the other. Tohsâroth did not sleep. The terror was on him. In the half light before sunup we heard him chanting, stopping now and then to curse Thlôk.
THE river was waiting for us—angry waters from Tibet. Nervously Thlôk looked at the stream. He would have liked to turn the nose of the Ang-Duong and go racing back to My-tho, but the Count was stern. And the size of Thurland, Flane and Martin terrified Thlôk.
Tohsâroth increased the troubles of Thlôk. The old monk ordered the boatman to cross to the other side of the stream. Thlôk objected. There was a fine chance of a log swatting us in midstream, and sinking the outfit.
The Count questioned Tohsâroth. The old man poured out a stream of reasons for the change to the eastern shore. At the point at which we were at the moment, these pirogues of long ago had crossed to the other bank! He recognized the bend in the river, the great sweep of forest on the other side.
"Does he know what is beyond the bend?" asked Thurland.
The Count put the question, and Tohsâroth answered. At ten kilometers beyond the bend there was a large village with a pagoda on a hilltop, with an immense Buddha carved in the rock.
The Count questioned Thlôk. The boatman agreed: The village was there; so was the pagoda and the enormous Buddha.
"Has Methuselah been here since that night?" asked Thurland.
"He says that he hasn't."
"Well," said Thurland, his eyes upon the old man, "I think we should take a chance and cross the stream."
The face of Thlôk showed the fear that gripped him as he swung the launch away from the bank. Great logs rode the current like monster sea-serpents. Flying junks came round the bend with cargoes of naked men who screamed and yelled warnings at us. The Mekong was on the rampage.
A huge log rose like a crocodile and plunged at us. Thlôk lost his head in trying to dodge it, and the launch got a slanting blow that shook us. The boatman and his assistant looked back at the sheltering bank we had left. They decided against the crossing.
Thurland stood up, lifted Thlôk from his perch and took the wheel. If Tohsâroth said the pirogues crossed over—well, we were going to cross over. We had followed the route from Neuilly, and we were going to keep to it.
A mango tree torn up by the roots charged us. The branches whipped our faces as Thurland swung the launch out of the way. We were in the center of the stream. A huge junk charged like a black bull. A raft, with a family crouched under a shelter of mats scraped the side of the Ang-Duong; the wife of the raftsman on her knees before a small statue of a god imploring protection.
Flane and Martin were busy thrusting off the hurrying logs, the rest of us feeling none too pleased with the crossing. Tohsâroth was the only calm person. He sat upright, his eyes upon the forest, a slight smile showing on his face, as if he was happy to see the place once again.
We reached the quieter water. Thurland handed over the wheel to Thlôk. We breathed again.... A bad river is the Mekong in flood-time.
IN the huge trees along the bank were the monkeys of which the old monk had spoken in the Villa Mille Fleurs at Neuilly. Thousands of them. They sat on the branches, their tails, as he had described them, hanging down like a fringe beneath the limbs. And they screamed and gibbered at us as they had done at the fleeing nobles and the women in the pirogues.
"The place hasn't changed a bit," said Thurland. "The only difference is that we have no gold bracelets to throw at the monkeys."
Flane looked at Joyeuse and smiled. "We'll get some later if they didn't throw them all away," he said.
We came to the village. It was exactly as the old bonze described it. We tied up while Thlôk and Kčt overhauled the engine; and once again Tohsâroth spilled fear on the people who clustered around. To us, it seemed that the fear was already there like tinder, and all the old man had to do was to put a match to it.
The Count, who was wise, explained to us. "This is a primitive country," he said. "Few things happen—that is, things that have any importance. I have talked a lot with Tohsâroth; and I think the flight from Angkor, although hundreds of years ago, is still remembered."
"By whom?" asked Thurland.
The Count looked around him in the queer way that he had. He stared at a battered statue of Buddha squatting on a stone lotus. The thing had been there a thousand years, perhaps. Perhaps longer. The roots of a great tree had plowed under the statue and tilted it a little, so that the figure had a half-tipsy look about it.
"By him," said the Count softly. "He recalls the old pagoda and those carved monkeys on the wall opposite. And the old trees. This place, as you said, hasn't changed, and the flight is still remembered. It was photographed by—by everything along the river. The memory of its passing has never been wiped out."
Now that was a strange remark, a puzzling remark: but there seemed to be some sense to it. For the river was the same as it had been on that night of long ago. It hadn't changed. The same pagodas squatted along its banks, the same little villages, the same kind of people with the same ways and the same thoughts. There had been no big sweeping movements like those that had taken place in the Western World. None at all. No new religions, no new customs, no skyscrapers, nothing. The women were beating the paddy as they had beaten it in the days when the plague came up the Mekong; the men wore the sampot around their loins in the same fashion as they did then; the bamboo huts on poles were the same.
The Count looked at Tohsâroth and the eager-faced crowd that surrounded him. "The photograph of the flight is here around us," he said; "and now the presence of the old man makes them see it clearly."
A MAN spoke excitedly, and the crowd broke apart. Two boys started up the hill at a wild gallop; the rest milled around Tohsâroth. We watched the runners, wondering what they had been sent for.
The boys disappeared in the pagoda; the crowd became silent; the roaring of the wild stallion of a river was the only noise that came to our ears. The odor of flowers and rotting vegetation was like a drug, stifling and overpowering.
The boys darted out the door of the pagoda. Behind them came four monks, and behind the four walked a girl. But in saying that she walked, I am wrong. She didn't walk—she floated, or so it appeared to us as we stood and watched her come slowly down the hillside.
She was slim and beautiful. The upper part of her body was bare, and the color of golden honey. Around her loins was a twisted shawl with a pattern of peacocks embroidered in gold that fell to her knees. Her feet, like her hands, were small and beautiful; and around her ankles were a dozen great bands of shining gold that made nice clinking sounds as she walked.
AS she came down the hillside, she kept her eyes on the ground, picking her steps, for the path was rough; so she did not see our little party till she was within a few yards of us. It was then that she lifted her eyes and looked at us—looked at us one after the other; but it was upon Tohsâroth that her eyes came to rest. And the smile that had been in them when she looked at Joyeuse died. Hurriedly it died, and in its place came a fear that hurt one to look at—a fear that pecked at your own heart, knowing the dread that was on hers.
She stepped back a pace, and her two little hands were pressed to her bare breasts. Her lips moved, but no sound came from them; then with a great effort she cried out a word that we had heard weeks before. It was the word that Tohsâroth had screamed out when he had finished his story of how the Plague had come to the city of Klang-Nan. The word he had called himself, believing that he was the "carrier," and that it was in his body the germs waited. It was the word "Karsh!"
In a startled silence we stood and stared at her. No one moved. The monks, the watching villagers, we who had invaded the place, stood as if we had been turned to stone by the word that she had uttered.
The girl began to cry with the great fear that was on her; and it was then that Joyeuse broke from the side of the Count and rushed toward her—rushed toward her and flung her arms around the honey-colored body, soothing the little thing with words that she didn't understand, but which were so soft that they stroked the frightened soul of her.
A lean, shaven monk ran at Tohsâroth as if he would strike him. Flane pushed the fellow away, the monk cackling like a hen that has laid an egg. And a leper howled like a mad-dog. A queer devil of a man, that leper—for he had no eyes and no hands, and he was tied to a gray-bearded monkey. The monkey picked up scraps of fruit and a few grains of rice and placed them in the man's mouth, although the beast looked half-starved himself.
The Count spoke to the stuttering monk, and by degrees he got the reason for her fear. And by the motions of the monk and the bits that the Count translated, we understood. The anklets that were around the feet of the girl had been found on the bank of the river years and years before. They were thought to have been tossed there by the god of the waters, who would in his own good time send a celestial dancer to wear them.
The dancer—the honey-colored girl whom Joyeuse was then comforting—came some months before our arrival. She came in the manner that the god Cakiamouni came to Angkor, whose strange arrival is described in Pali on his monument. A mist appeared, although it was not the season; there was a storm of wind and rain; and there in the pagoda they found the girl, sheltered as Cakiamouni had been sheltered by the great stone hood of the snake god, expanded miraculously to keep the cold rain from her naked body. Knowing at once that she had been sent to wear the golden anklets, the monks had taken them down and placed them on her feet.
"Before they placed anything else on her, I'll wager." said my Uncle Thurland. "Well, it's a great story. Will you ask our Methuselah what he has to say to it?"
The Count spoke to Tohsâroth. He asked him if he could explain how the girl came to recognize him. The old man shook his head. He had never seen her before.
Tohsâroth wished to examine the gold anklets, but the girl screamed when he approached, holding Joyeuse as a shield between herself and the ancient. A monk was at last persuaded to take one of the anklets from the leg of the girl and carry it to Tohsâroth, on condition that it would not be touched.
WE stared as the monk held it up for our inspection. To me it was a fine coil of gold worked with little figures; but to the Count it was something the equal of which the world had never seen.
The Count spoke of it to Thurland and Flane. He was thrilled with the fine work that was on it. He looked at Tohsâroth, and the old man roused himself from a sort of trance and nodded. Tohsâroth thought the anklets belonged to the little ladies who had fled Angkor in the long ago. They were the anklets they had thrown, in their hysteria, at the monkeys who sat on the branches and mocked them!
"Let's get on I" cried Thurland. "We're wasting time!"
We climbed into the launch. In silence the crowd watched us. The Count tossed a small coin to the howling leper. The gray-bearded monkey picked it up and placed it in the leper's mouth. The honey-colored girl watched Tohsâroth. The monk was kneeling before her, placing the golden ring on her ankle.
"Those fellows are not as silly as they look," said Martin in an undertone, as the launch pushed away from the bank.
THE Count, in the days that immediately followed, was upset by the presence of Joyeuse. Again and again he asserted that he should have used common sense and parked his niece at Saigon or My-tho or Pnom-Penh. But each time he rebuked himself aloud, the girl combated him. She was not afraid; the dangers didn't trouble her; she would have died of loneliness if she had been left behind. And each time she endeavored to excuse or justify her presence, she glanced at Flane. And the small Om would giggle and show her black lacquered teeth and the inside of her mouth, scarlet with betel. She would pat the hands of Joyeuse and whisper to her of devils and spirits that lived in the forests along the banks. And although Joyeuse understood few of the words, the voice of Om, charged with wonder, brought thrills to her.
The country spawned mystery—a fine cold mystery that crept into your bones. A mystery that followed you like a padding wolf, so that at times you felt the breath of the thing. For Cambodia is still in the hands of the gods of old, although the French control it, and send their thousands of pottus out there to fight diseases that are not known in the sunny France from which they came. Aye, the gods, immense and smiling, whose stone faces you meet at every turn, own the East; and as my Uncle Thurland said, they'll get back anything they give, like Jerry Cafferty of Ken-mare, who always put a shilling on the plate in church and picked up two sixpences !
Strange things we saw in the days before we got to Luang-Prabang. We saw a hundred men surround an imaginary devil and stamp him under their bare feet, stamp him in a way that made us believe he was really there. And we saw the cobras of the temples that were fed with frogs by the poor devils who believed the reptiles to be the sons of gods. And there were trees with great fleshlike flowers that folded up on birds or bees that came to sniff them, folded up and ate them. Vampire flowers whose petals were so much like soft white flesh that one was afraid to lay a finger on them. The natives believed that the trees could move themselves about from place to place if the birds and the insects didn't come to them in sufficient numbers when they were hungry. And there was a look about them that made us believe they could do that same.
The country bred nightmares. You saw faces on rocks that were not there, but which you thought should be there, the rock giving an invitation, so to speak, for some one to carve the head of Buddha on it. The rubber-trees that were being bled for their gum had cuts in them that looked exactly like red mouths. And we heard in the nights the flutelike noise which we had heard first in the garden at Neuilly, and later on the Suez Canal and the Grand-Lac. Here the natives said it was made by a great snake whom no one had ever seen.
MYSTERY and magic everywhere. Men knew of our coming before we arrived; the gods of the river had told them.... One described the farmhouse where Thurland was born. This native could do many things. Each morning he took a flock of ducks into a rice-patch, stuck a bamboo in the ground and told the ducks not to wander more than two hundred meters from it. The ducks never did.
And time wasn't measured as we measure it. It was the Hour of the Dog, the Hour of the Snake, the Hour of the Owl, the Hour of the Rat, and so on. The small Om taught them to Joyeuse, and Joyeuse pretended to like them; but to me it was another thread of the sorcery that the place was wrapping around us. The unclean sorcery! For there was life in the things,that in other places would be dead. A life and an intelligence that questioned our presence. The trees wondered why we were there; the rocks wondered; and the old pagodas hated us.
WE came to a village where, in a green slimy pool, lived half a dozen crocodiles that had been there for years and years. And the natives consulted the crocodiles as the men of the Aran Isles in the days of old consulted the blind fish in St. Bride's Well. They put questions to the devils, and the manner in which they hopped gave the answers. It looked silly to us; but as Thurland remarked, there's a lot of white folk who go to palmists and fortune-tellers, and swallow every word told to them.
Thlôk wanted to know if he would have a safe passage back to My-tho after he had parted with us; and the old fellow who fed the crocodiles agreed to put the questions. If the crocodile turned to the right after listening to the question, it was supposed to mean "Yes," and if he went to the left it was "No."
The old man gabbled the question about My-tho; and a listening croc lashed out with his tail and swam off to the left. Thlôk, whose face was the color of saffron, turned a pasty white when he saw the swimmer doing a crawl-stroke around the pool. Flane, thinking the boat-owner would tumble into the place, reached out and held him up. The crocodile's "No" had swatted Thlôk like a fist in the stomach.
The Count, scenting trouble, tried to pull Thlôk away from the tank; but Thlôk had given three bronze cash and he wished to know the worst. His curiosity glued his feet to the slimy stones, and he wouldn't move. Where was the trouble going to strike him, and when?
The questioner asked the crocs if the bad luck was coming soon, and one of the brutes did a swift ten yards to the right which showed that in his opinion Thlôk was sitting on the edge of a volcano. Thlôk and Kit dropped to their knees and started praying, and the old man was quick to use their emotion by getting a few more cash out of them.
Thlôk babbled out another question. How many days would pass before disaster dropped on him?
The old boy who owned the beasts in the slimy pond considered how he could put the query. Four of them had their snouts above the water, they smelling the lump of rotten buffalo meat that he had in his hand, and which made them very attentive. To Thlôk he explained that he would ask the question in two parts. He would ask first if it was more than four days, and if the question was answered with a "No," he would then ask the days to be reckoned by the number of crocodiles that would swim to the right.
He got a "No" on the first question, so it was only a question of how many days under four. Solemnly he put the query, and three crocodiles lashed out to the right, swimming swiftly; the other one sniffed at the stench that came from the buffalo meat. In three days
Thlôk was going to step into a patch of bad luck!
Now, how that was done I don't know. Perhaps it was the manner in which the old fellow spoke that stirred the brutes to do this or that. But whatever the trick, it made a fine limp boatman out of Thlôk, and it made Thurland so mad that he wanted to throw the old questioner into the pool. For terror took hold of Thlôk and loosened the muscles of his legs so that he couldn't walk back to the launch; and when we got him there, he bawled like a baby....
THE first day passed with the ordinary troubles of the river: logs walloping into us, boatmen on downstream junks and pirogues screaming to us to get out of the way, and the monkeys jeering at us from the great trees of teak and tamarind and ebony.
The second day was the same, except that Thlôk wept more than ever, feeling his doom approaching. On the morning of the third the poor devil couldn't move, fear having paralyzed his muscles. And the fear that was his came out from him and bit into the minds of the rest of us.
"Did you speak?" asked Flane, looking at Thurland.
"I didn't," snapped Thurland. "I thought you said something to me."
And that was how it was with the rest of us. We thought we heard thin whispers, whispers that warned us of trouble. The monkeys spoke to each other and pointed at us, and Thlôk whined with a high note that put our teeth on edge.
ABOUT four in the afternoon, the thing hit us. A snag ripped the bottom of the Ang-Duong, and the Mekong spurted in our faces as Thurland turned the nose of the boat to the bank. The crocodile man had made a good prophecy!
We grounded on the mud with the water to our waists, and a fine sight we were as we scrambled ashore, Thurland with the small Om under his arm, and Flane carrying Joyeuse, and Thlôk and Kčt howling like banshees over the loss of the boat.
Tohsâroth was comforting. He informed the Count that as we were then approaching the first rapids, we would have had to leave the Ang-Duong and take to the pirogues, so the loss of the boat was a small matter. Tohsâroth had no sympathy for Thlôk.
The jungle steamed from the heat and the moisture. Great creepers hanging from the trees blocked any attempt we might make to find a track; so we waited till an upstream junk should rescue us. Tohsâroth said that there was a village about five kilometers away, so we sat around a smudge and fought the big mosquitoes while Thlôk and Kčt howled in chorus.
Two pirogues came downstream as the night was closing in. Cunningly the piroguiers swung them into the bank, and with large grins of delight hailed us. They acted like a rescue-party, and we were puzzled.
"How the devil did they know we were here?" asked Martin.
The Count questioned them. Delightedly they grinned. Word had been sent to them by the owner of the crocodiles in the village where Thlôk had heard the prophecy! How was it sent? They laughed loudly, but they didn't explain.
"They possibly think it a foolish question," said Thurland, and it looked as if they did. In some mysterious manner they had heard that the crocodile man had prophesied disaster for the launch, and they had hurried downstream in the hope of salvage!
We climbed into the bamboo shelters of the pirogues. Two men stood on the front platform of each craft, and two stood on the rear. They pushed their iron-shod poles into the mud of the river, walking sternward as they did so, and the craft drove forward under the thrusts. They chanted softly, and the speed increased.
In the darkness we came to the village. Once again Tohsâroth was the center of attraction. The folk milled around him, shouting greetings; and in spite of the protests of the Count, they led him to a large hut, where some sort of game was in progress.
Thinking that the old bonze would get into trouble, we went along. A Chinese buyer of "paddy" was running a fan-tan party, hoping to win back from the simple villagers all the money he had paid them for their grain.
Fan-tan is a simple game. You place your money on one of the four corners of the mat; the Chinese dealer puts a bowl over a pile of cash, then draws the coins out in fours. The number left under the bowl at the last draw—that is one, two, or three—denotes the winner. If they come out even fours, then four wins.
Now, one of the welcomers of Tohsâroth had lost all his paddy money to the Chink. He placed the hands of the old bonze on his head and begged his help. Tohsâroth agreed; he told the fellow to borrow a little money and put it on three.
Three won. Tohsâroth ordered a shift to two. Two won. Another shift to one. Again the winner. Then the whole amount was pushed onto three. Three turned up obligingly.
The Chinaman glared at Tohsâroth; the local grain-growers were following the tip of the old bonze, and were scooping back their losses. The atmosphere of the place became hectic.
Tohsâroth was calm. He lifted two fingers as a signal to his friend to gamble on two; and as he did so, the temper of the Chinaman blew up. With the small hooked stick with which he drew the coins from beneath the bowl,, he struck at the old man. Tohsâroth put up his hand to protect his face, but the tiny hook caught his wrinkled cheek and scratched it slightly.
The old man touched his cheek, regarded for an instant the smear of blood on the tip of his forefinger; then he looked at the Chinaman. A clammy silence was upon the place. The close-packed gamblers were looking from Tohsâroth to the Chink; the stakes on the fan-tan board were forgotten. Something had crept into the smoke-filled room—something that brought the chill of death with it.
Suddenly the Chinaman screamed. It was a horrible dry scream. He dropped the long bag in which he carried his cash, sprang from his seat and fled out into the darkness....
The man who had won money on the tips given by Tohsâroth found us sleeping accommodation. He brought food and arranged with the piroguiers for an early start. He blessed Tohsâroth.
But long before dawn my Uncle Thurland roused us. "Get up," he whispered. "We're going to move before trouble breaks in this camp. The Chinaman died in the night."
We made our way to the bank of the river. The pirogues were there. In the darkness to the northward were the hills of Laos, and in a valley between those hills was the lost City of Klang-Nan.
THERE are no guidebooks or road maps of the Laos country. Beyond Luang-Prahang the region is a mystery even to the French who are supposed to control it. A fine fat mystery! There live the Tais, the Chams, the Meos, the Lolos, and others without any names at all; and they live in the same manner as their forefathers did when Angkor-Thom was in all its glory.
Fine and free is their life, fishing and hunting; and the collector who comes around to collect head-taxes often loses his way on a jungle path or falls into a pit that has been dug to catch a tiger. For the folk in the hills of Laos are a bit like the Irish in their hatred of little men who come round to collect money for something that is called a government, and of which they know nothing at all.
And into this country we bored day after day. And with each league we traveled, a queer fever that had come upon Tohsâroth after leaving the village where the Chinaman died suddenly, seemed to grow greater.
Thurland, after watching the old man, told of a great fighter in Ireland who had the same complaint. "It would come on him when he was close to a fair," said Thurland. "He would get all hot and feverish with the thought of the battles he would have with the swaggering lads who didn't know that a champion was coming down the road."
"And who is Methuselah going to fight?" asked Martin.
The Count, who had been whispering to Tohsâroth, answered the question. "Devils," said the Count softly. "The devils of the hills."
Joyeuse looked at the Count as if puzzled by his answer. The Count, like Tohsâroth, seemed a little affected by the loneliness of the country through which we were then passing. That belief of his, the belief that he could beat death, was stronger with each kilometer we covered. No thought of treasure was in his mind; he thought only of prolonging his years in the fashion Tohsâroth had prolonged his; and all his whisperings to the old man were concerned with this subject. The Count was learning rapidly.
My Uncle Thurland told us of a man in Kerry who thought, like the Count, to beat death. He offered his soul to the devil if Old Nick could prolong his days to two hundred years, and the devil agreed. On his two-hundredth birthday Satan arrived to collect, but the old man had grown cunning. "Have a drink before we leave," he said. "This is a drop of whisky that never paid a penny to a gauger."
The devil was in a good humor and sat down at the table to please the old man. "That's a great patch of potatoes I have there," said the old fellow; and when the devil turned his head to look at the spuds, the ancient poured holy water into the whisky in the devil's glass.
"May you never run short of coal!" said he to the devil, lifting his glass.
"That's a kind toast," said Old Nick; "and I thank you from the bottom of my heart." And when he said that, he took a big mouthful of the whisky and holy water.
He let a roar out of him that people heard five miles away. Flames flew out of his mouth and set the cabin afire, and he left with a rush that took the door off its hinges.
The old man, said my uncle, went on living quietly till he was fool enough to fire a charge of buckshot into an English landlord. They hanged him in Glengariff; and people who went to the hanging said they they saw the devil waiting near the gibbet.
"I don't know whether that's true," said Thurland; "but if you ask a man in that country to look at a potato-patch while he has a drink in front of him, he's liable to give you a poke in the ear."
Now we had turned into the Nam-Hou, a tributary of the Mekong, and the loneliness was an iron hand that pressed down upon us. Somewhere far above us was the Chinese state of Yunnan; away to the west lay Siam and Burma; and to the east, jungle and mountains ran to the Gulf of Tongking.
Thurland, looking toward the west, spoke to Martin. "If you had good ears, you might hear the temple bells of Man-dalay," he said, laughing. "I've heard you bawling the song."
"How far is it?" asked Martin.
"To a crow, it is five hundred miles," answered my uncle, "but to you, it would take a lifetime of walking."
Martin stared at the massed trees that stood knee-deep, so to speak, in the stream; and the trees stared back at us, angry perhaps, because they couldn't block our passage, for the jungle has a hatred toward man. A crocodile, disturbed by the chanting of the piroguiers, slipped back into the water from the mudbank where it was sunning itself; a python unwound itself from a tree and crawled away; a flat-nosed dwarf fishing from a log let out a yelp of fear and dived into the bushes. And the forest smoked with the heat and the moisture. But we were near the end of our journey! We were near Klang-Nan!.
ON a hot noon there came to our ears that thin, wailing music we had heard on two previous occasions. It came like needles through the silence. Tohsâroth rose from the shelter of split bamboos in the center of the pirogue and waved a hand to the frightened polers. We drove toward the right bank of the river; and as we neared it, we saw that a little crowd of men, women and children were waiting there, as if our arrival was expected.
"They've heard of us," said Flane, as doglike yelps of greeting came from the group. "Or is it a deputation to welcome Methuselah on his return from foreign parts?"
The two pirogues reached the bank. Tohsâroth stepped ashore, and we followed him. Tohsâroth was the star attraction. For him the fruit, the flowers, the boiled rice, the cigarettes, the betel. The people were Meos folk, undersized and ugly.
"How did they know he was coming?" asked Thurland.
The Count questioned the old man, and Tohsâroth led us over to a part of the bank where fish were drying. With his skinny hands he pointed to the entrails of fish spread on the ground. His arrival, so he asserted, had been made plain to the local sorcerer by the condition of the entrails! The diviner had known how many would be in the two pirogues, and had also told that two of the visitors would be females!
THURLAND and Flane and Martin expressed doubts, but the Count believed. He said that it was a recognized science that had been practiced for many centuries. He called it by its name. It is some word like "Ichthyomancy," but I'm not sure.
"I wouldn't believe it if my own mother told me," said Thurland. "Will you ask if the fish-prophet knows what we are here for?"
The Count asked; and the old man who had guessed our coming hobbled forward and gave his answers. Smart and bright they were, when we heard them. We had come, he said, to visit the place of the ghosts that was guarded by the gods with four faces and six arms. We had come with the belief that we could take treasure away from the many-faced and many-armed watchers. We were wrong. The guards were all-powerful. We would be crippled or killed in the attempt. The signs foretold our hurried departure when the many-faced guardians gave us a taste of their power.
"A cheerful lad," said Thurland when the seer had finished speaking. "If he can get all of that out of the stomach of a freshwater pike, what could he get out of the belly of a shark?"
Flane laughed. "How far away are we from the spot?" he asked. "I mean, the spot where was the city of Klang-Nan?"
"Two days' journey," said the Count.
"And how are we to get to it?"
Again the questioning with the whispered replies.
We had stumbled onto a spot where terror ruled. A small wind brushed the fronds of the trees, and the little crowd gazed with wide eyes at each other. A ghost had passed! There was a ripple on the stream; one of the river gods had lifted himself to see what was doing on shore. A limb crashed in the jungle; they stared fearfully in the direction of the noise!
"If we stay with them for a day or two, we'll be doing the same," said Martin. "I've got the jumps already."
The Count, curiously, seemed impressed by the prophecy. The Count desired only to beat death; and although that was a dream into which he had put effort and money, it didn't bring to him the recklessness and the contempt for danger that the visions of treasure brought to my uncles and Martin. Before the eyes of Thurland and Flane and Martin danced continuously the rose-colored pearls, the emeralds, the big rubies that were thought to be the eyes of snakes. Their reward would be tangible, something that they could feel with their big hands; that made them indifferent to the croakings of the soothsayer.
"To the devil with him and his chattering!" said Thurland.
"But he prophesies death," said the Count, "death for some of us!"
"The priest of Glengariff prophesied that I would be hanged before I was eighteen," snapped Thurland. "And he got it off the stars, and not from the belly of a fish!"
"But Joyeuse," muttered the Count, "—this trail up the mountain will be too hard for her."
"I'm going," said Joyeuse. She stood by Flane as she spoke; and Flane smiled as she voiced her decision.
While this talk was in progress, a large fish had been caught by a boy, and the soothsayer was called to make an examination of the entrails. The crowd ran with him, and in silence we watched them, their stunted bodies bent down to hear what the squatting fish-prophet would say.
A yelp of wonder came from the soothsayer. The crowd split apart. Their flat faces turned in our direction; their slitted eyes and misshapen mouths told us that the finding concerned us.
Tohsâroth and the prophet led the rush back to us. Tohsâroth explained: and what he told the Count didn't please us at all.
"The Meo," said the Count, "finds that we are not the only visitors. Somewhere down the river are two other white men in a swift pirogue."
"The hell!" cried Thurland.
Tohsâroth spoke again. "He thinks they are not friends of ours," translated the Count. "He thinks we should move away before they arrive."
"Does he know how far off they are?" asked Thurland.
"A day's journey," said the Count.
NOW, such a story might have seemed ridiculous to us if told in another part of the world; but on the banks of the Nam-Hou, with the listening jungle around us, the words were like drops of acid that destroyed the suspicion that one tried to turn on them. The thought that Tohsâroth had told the seer of Schiemann and Bruden came to all of us; but the ancient assured the Count he had said nothing. The Meo had picked the information out of the fish, and the fellow stood up before us with his purple sampot and his big hat of rice-straw and defied contradiction. We, he proclaimed to the crowd, were followed by two enemies, and the crowd whined with sympathy.
"Now," said Thurland, "we've got to move. Whether the fish-prophet's story is true or not, we've come too far to worry about it. Let's go!"
HIDDEN in the jungle was a small village, a place of thirty miserable bamboo huts with straw roofs sitting on rickety poles, ladders leading up to the little wooden landings. And the spirit of despair was upon those thirty huts. It seemed to us, as we entered the place, that the terror in the minds of the Meos folk had entered into the little dwellings built beneath the big trees from which hung great creepers like green serpents, the flowers on them resembling scarlet eyes in the gloom of the place. It was the home of fear—a fear that had a million hands, wet, cold hands that came out and throttled one.
The head-man was old—and suspicious. When we told him we wished rice and dried fish, and guides to hack a way up the mountain to the place of the ghosts that was guarded by the gods with four faces and six arms, he was appalled.
He shrieked a refusal. No men of the village would be allowed to go near the place of ghosts. It was death to venture close to the four-faced guards. He, in his young days, had climbed the mountains and looked down on the valley where the ruins of Klang-Nan were to be seen. He had seen strange shapes; he had seen were-wolves; he had seen gigantic cobras crawling in battalions amongst the stones. The city had died and should not be disturbed.
The Count, through Tohsâroth, offered money. The old man shook his head. The lives of his people could not be bought with paper piasters.
"We've run up against a snag," said Thurland.
Now, Joyeuse had a fish made out of blue enamel that Flane had bought for her at Port Said—a little thing of Chinese workmanship, every tiny scale of it movable, so that the slightest touch made it seem alive. When we had stepped from the pirogues, the Meos people had noticed it and pointed it out to each other, she wearing it pinned to her breast; and their interest in it never faltered in the march to the village. Even the old head-man was attracted to it, his bleary eyes being fixed on it when he was listening to our demands.
In the silence Joyeuse took the fish from her breast and whispered a word to Flane. Flane smiled, took the little ornament, stepped toward the landing on which the head-man sat, poked the old fellow with his forefinger; and then, when he opened his eyes, my uncle wiggled the fish before him.
The head-man was intrigued by the moving scales. He stretched out his dirty paw and clutched it. He held it on the palm of his right hand and shook it gently. He laughed, and the villagers laughed with him. Cautiously he inquired if it was a gift. Tohsâroth answered that it was. The old fellow continued to wriggle his paw; guffaws came from the crowd. Fear wras forgotten for the moment, brushed away by the childish joy of the head-man.
Suddenly the old fellow sat up and shouted orders. He named the men who were to go with us to hack the underbrush from our path and guide us to the ruins. He ordered out his own miserable and filthy palanquin for Joyeuse; but after a glance at the strip of dirty canvas slung to a pole, she refused his offer; and with a little shudder of fear she declined his suggestion to stay in the village till we returned.
"Let us get off before he gets tired of playing with that toy," cried Thurland. "Hurry now! Hurry!"
T>HE nearness to Klang-Nan and the treasure it contained brought a sort of madness to my uncles and Martin. The long trek was over, and they were within reach of the wonderful things that had filled their dreams for weeks. The taste of plunder was in their mouths, producing a queer insanity.
They snatched parangs from the natives as we attacked the slope of the mountain. The track, if there had ever been a track, was overgrown with devilish creepers that made obstructions more troublesome than barbed wire. At these the three big men at the head of the squad of Meos slashed with fury, yelling and screaming to the frightened natives when the latter paused for a moment in the attack.
My uncles and Martin forgot Joyeuse, the Count, Tohsâroth, Om and me; they were in the lead, stripped to the waist, hacking like madmen; and the mountain echoed their shouts of encouragement. For the first hundred yards after we left the village we were accompanied by a few curious old men and children, but the yells of my uncles terrified them, and they rushed back to their little huts.
The darkness came down on us, and the work was halted. A piece of ground was cleared, and fires were built to scare off beasts. Thurland, fearful that the Meos would desert in the night and rush back to the village, gathered the men into the center of the cleared space and set a watch. He would take the first four hours, Flane the second, and Martin the third....
From the jungle came sounds that were frightening: howls, grunts, snarls, a mad caterwauling, hoots, screeches, and above all that terrifying flutelike noise that we had heard before, and which the Laos folk asserted was made by a crystal snake that no one had ever seen.
I couldn't sleep; neither could Joyeuse nor the Count. I heard them whispering at times, the Count trying to assure her all was well. Once, long after midnight, there came the cry of a leopard from the brush quite close to us, and an answering cry came from some one in the circle of sleepers. Short and sharp it went up in answer to the call of the beast.
Flane, who was on guard, asked a question, and Thurland roused himself. I saw the two of them in the light of the fires. They stood up huge and shadowy.
"Some one answered the yelp of that big cat," said Flane in a whisper.
"I heard," said Thurland. "Was it one of the natives?"
"It didn't come from them."
The call of the leopard came again, quite close this time; then, from somewhere to the right of me, rose the answer. Clear and distinct, a perfect imitation of the cry that came from the jungle.
"Tohsâroth!" growled Thurland.
My two uncles walked to the spot where the old man was lying. The Count and Joyeuse were sitting up; and a half dozen of the Meos had been roused. My thoughts went racing back to that morning in the Jardin Zoologique at Marseilles, when Tohsâroth had fondled the leopard whose keeper thought him the most dangerous cat in the garden.
Flane spoke to the Count; and the Count questioned the ancient. His replies, when translated, made my flesh creep. Tohsâroth asserted that he knew the leopard in the same manner as he knew the beast in Marseilles. They were friendly. The big cat spoke to him, and he had answered. There was no reason for us to get frightened.
He rose from the ground and unloosed another cry. The leopard answered; then Tohsâroth stepped gingerly over the figures of the natives and went toward the spot whence the sound had come.
"Stop the old fool!" cried Thurland.
Flane tried to hold the old man, but he shook off my uncle's hands and stepped into the thick brush beyond the light of the fires. Gurgles of horror came from the Meos folk. They huddled together, piling wood upon the fires, arming themselves with flaming sticks to stop the expected rush of the beast.
OPEN-MOUTHED, we listened to the sounds that came from the darkness into which Tohsâroth had stepped.
Our ears gathered in the crackling of underbrush, the soft swish of disturbed leaves; then with dry throats and hair a-prickle, we heard the deep purrs of a beast expressing its pleasure, and the voice of Tohsâroth, soft and soothing.
The voice came to us as if he were relating a story to the purring cat. It wa not the tongue in which he conversed with the Count; it was more fluid, more musical. Wonder choked us.
AFTER some fifteen minutes the old man returned, entirely composed, walked to the place he had left, and lay himself down. He spoke a few words to the Count, and the Count translated. Tohsâroth wished us to know that could sleep quietly. The leopard was quite close to us, and would see that were not disturbed!
The Meos folk showed little faith the statement. They sat in a circle their fire-sticks like flaming spears turned to the wall of darkness that surounded us. And although I had s Tohsâroth perform miracles, I held the same opinion as the little brown men.
Before dawn Thurland ordered the advance. The strokes of the parangs blended with the chattering of monkeys the twitterings of a million birds that welcomed the day. Somewhere above us in the blue mists was Klang-Nan—Klang-Nan, and the pearls that had been soaked in the milk of white mares, Klang-Nan, and the great emeralds that kept women faithful! Klang-Nan, and the rubies that were thought to be eyes of dead snakes!
Steeper the path now, steeper and more slippery. Up and up! Away below us when the sun rose we saw the white ribbon that was the Nam-Hou, up which we had come; and for an instant we thought of the prophecy of the man in the purple sampot who studied the entrails of fishes. Two men were coming up the river in pursuit! Two white men.
"We'll be on our way back when they get here," growled Flane, sensing the thought that was in the minds of rest of us. "They've been a jump behind us since we started."
The big trees watched the squad pf hacking men. An elderly Meo dropped, exhausted. Thurland handed his parang to me. Every stroke helped.
In the early part of the morning the Meos showed symptoms of fear. They whispered to themselves, and watched the jungle. At times they "pulled" their stroke, and held their parangs ready.
, "What's the trouble?" asked Martin. For a moment the attack on the jungle halted. We became one great listening ear that strained the fear-producing sounds from the packed trees.
We looked at each other to check what we had heard—what we had heard for many minutes before, but which we were afraid to admit. Padding close to us, unseen but within earshot, were beasts!
Thurland glanced at Tohsâroth. The old man was the only calm person amongst us. There was a look of quiet dignity upon his thin face.
"What the devil is he pulling on us?" cried Flane; and as he spoke, he drew a revolver from his pocket and stepped towards the spot from which came snuffles and soft purring noises.
Tohsâroth became suddenly alert. He sprang forward and seized the arm of my uncle. Rapidly he spoke to the Count. We, so the Count explained, were not to be afraid. Close to us were a score of big cats who were friends of the old bonze! They would not attack us if we left them alone! On the contrary, they would protect us from other beasts!
Doubt was on the faces of our little party; dismay on the faces of the Meos. The natives, understanding in a way what the old man had said, showed an inclination to stampede. Thurland and Martin saw the signs of flight, and got behind them.
Tohsâroth, in the same musical voice of the night, addressed the unseen animals. There came from the undergrowth the contented purrings we had heard before. The old man turned to Thurland, and smiled like a conjuror who has pulled off a difficult trick.
There was nothing to do but go forward. My uncles and Martin waved the gang to the attack. Parangs were swung in rhythm; but now and then the sound of padding feet slipped into the thuck of steel on wood—slipped in to tell us that the unseen escort was with us!
UPWARD we went. We came to a small clearing where stood a statue of the Buddha, the face pitted by the centuries. At the foot of the stone throne were a bunch of withered flowers, a handful of rice and some cardamom seeds!
Thurland picked up the flowers and looked at the Count. "Who put these here?" he demanded.
The Count questioned Tohsâroth. The old man shook his head and turned to the Meos. They answered in chorus, and their response was relayed to us. Ghosts had placed the flowers and the rice and cardamom seeds before the holy one! Ghosts from the ruins of the city toward which we were fighting our way.
THE rim of the mountain was above us when the night came down. Bare and rocky, it was. In the dusk the line of it seemed to move with a wavelike motion which startled us till we found that a troop of monkeys had gathered to peer at us.
Again Thurland arranged the watch. The Meos were in a state of great fear. Squatting on their haunches in the circle of fires, they seemed fabulous persons that the mind of a small boy would build from the pages of a story-book written in the days when the world was a world of wonder. Alas, there are no books of that kind written today, the earth being a shopworn place with few spots like that mountain up which we climbed to the city of Klang-Nan.
There was no sleep for any of us. Sitting upright, we dozed, waking with a start when there came an extra-loud yelp from some beast that had crept close to the fires. Waking up and rubbing our eyes, to stare at the squatting Meos and convince ourselves that they were real. And the fat, thick night rolled around us, an animal in its own way, the rough tongue of it licking the backs of our necks and putting the devil's own fear into our souls.
AT the first whisper of day Tohsâroth arose, turned his face to the mountain-top, and chanted softly. And the blessed angels in heaven were the only ones who knew what he said. For the Count didn't understand, and the terrified Meos folk didn't understand; but whatever it was, it had a quality that none of us had ever listened to before.... There are, so Thurland told me, strange words in the ancient tongue of Ireland—the tongue that was spoken by the Tuatha Dé Danann, the tribes of the god Danu, who came to Ireland from Greece—words that when uttered, go out into the world and become forces that produce accidents and suicides and murders, they being full of queer wickedness. Now the words of Tohsâroth made me think of what my uncle had told me.
On and on went the flow of words, the essence of terror dripping from them. A sturdy Meo got to his feet and made a rush for home. Flane dropped him with a punch under the ear. Another bolted, and he went down from a clip handed out by Martin. Thurland caught a pair of them by the throats and tossed them back into the circle, where they struggled with each other, clawing themselves to their feet, to be knocked down again by my uncles.
But the devil himself couldn't have stopped the stampede; the poor wretches couldn't stand the terror that the words made in their minds. In a flood they rushed my uncles and Martin. A chop with the flat of a parang sent Thurland to the ground; Martin got a butt in the stomach that put him out of action; and Flane was lifted up and carried twenty yards down the hillside on the backs of the mob that he tried to halt. Inside of five minutes we were alone, our ears gathering up the noises of the Meos crashing through the bushes, screaming to each other as they fled down the mountain to their wretched village.
Thurland, rubbing the side of his head, glared at Tohsâroth: but the bonze didn't see Thurland for the fine ecstasy that possessed him.
The small Om shrieked and turned to follow the Meos; but Martin grabbed her. Joyeuse placed the palms of her hands over her ears and stepped close to Flane.
Then, suddenly, as if a cap had been put onto the hose from which the ancient was squirting the words, his chant ended. The silence ran in on us like a flood. The birds and the monkeys hadn't a whimper out of them. The mist lifted; the rim of the mountain was plain to us, so plain that we saw on the rocks immediately above us slight movements that startled us—wrigglings and twistings that were as a quicklime of horror to our throats.
FOR long minutes no one spoke. Tohsâroth, head thrown back, was regarding the rocks, as if waiting for a sign.
The writhing and wriggling grew less. The unclean things slipped away; the rocks lay bare and naked as the sun struck them. Slowly Tohsâroth came out of the trance-like state which had come upon him when he started to chant. He spoke to the Count.
"He says we can go forward," translated the Count. "We have, according to his words, been accepted."
"By whom?" asked Flane; and although my uncle made an effort to be flippant when he put the question, he failed. For our eyes still held the picture of the wriggling mass on the rocks.
The Count moistened his lips and looked around fearfully. "The gods of the place," he whispered,
"There's a mob of them," said Flane; and as he spoke, he weighed the parang that he held in his hand.
Tohsâroth turned and regarded my two uncles and Martin. He seemed displeased. He spoke rapidly to the Count.
"You are to be told this," said the Count impressively. "There must be no violence. Nothing will attack you. The things that you have seen live in the ruins; and to Tohsâroth they are sacred. The place was the place of Naga; these are the servants of Naga."
"I don't like them," said Thurland stubbornlv.
"Neither do I," said the Count. "But we have come for certain things, and we must do as the old man wishes. I have come for wisdom, you for treasure. As for the Meos, the ancient thinks it is better for us that they bolted."
"And better for themselves," muttered Flane.
"Do we go on?" asked the Count.
"Of course," answered Thurland. He swung his parang; and we moved slowly upward toward the lip of the mountain —toward it and the servants of Naga. I felt sick at the stomach with the dread that was on me.
It was Tohsâroth who stepped first upon the flat rocky plateau—Tohsâroth, shoulders lowered, hands clasped in an attitude of adoration. He had pushed himself quickly forward when the last yard of brush had been cut away.
Thurland stepped up beside the old man, and the rest of us followed.
No one spoke. No one wished to speak. In my own case, and I think in the case of the others, words would have been difficult to utter at that moment; for our eyes brought to us horror pictures which produced a sort of mental paralysis.
Broken pedestals and upturned statues ran in a long line that whipped across the mountain-top and swooped into the valley. Carvings of gods and demons, of animals and monsters; and every one of the chunks of stone was alive! A slithering, slippery, hissing life that came from hundreds and hundreds of cobras!
JOYEUSE screamed; her cry whipped the movements of the cobras and increased the noise that rose from them. Theirs was a little orchestra from hell with the hissing and the dry rustling sound made by their bodies moving over the stones, and they didn't like interruptions.
My Uncle Thurland said something in Gaelic; whether it was a curse or a prayer I know not. The hand of Flane tightened its grip on the big parang he carried. The Count and Martin seemed hypnotized. Om crept into the shadow of Tohsâroth, peeping fearfully from behind the robe of her old relative.
Tohsâroth spoke again. He seemed to be pleading with the devils, his voice soft and low; and as he spoke, the hissing died down, and their movements grew more sluggish. Softly, ever so softly his words flowed over them, something like the droning of a great bee; and after a little while they were quiet. And the biggest of them slipped into holes and niches in the rocks.
The paralysis left us gradually, and we found that we could turn our eyes from the crawling things and look at each other. The faces of the three big men, Thurland, Flane, and Martin, were tense like the faces of men who had seen death but were not afraid, there being no looseness of the jaws that shows the coward. The Count looked startled, his eyes, that were always bright, having the spark of fear in them. Om had screwed up her features so that her snub nose, black eyes and mouth were in a curious heap in the center; and upon the face of Joyeuse was the soft pallor and the sweet fear that you see on the baby moon when it is sent out to wander across the sky.
Tohsâroth was calm. He turned and spoke in an undertone to the Count, and the Count moistened his dry lips and translated to us. "This," said the Count, "is the entrance to the city of Klang-Nan. The old one says that it, being the city of Naga, is in charge of those that you have seen. It belongs to them, and we can only advance with their permission. If one is killed by any of us, we will never get back alive. That's flat and final. He wishes me to make you understand before we move on."
Thurland shrugged his big shoulders. "I never heard that the word of a snake had any value," he said.
"It's the law," asserted the Count. "We must believe in it or go back."
Flane looked at Joyeuse as if trying to plumb the courage behind the face on which still clung the wash of fear. In silence we stood there, knowing well that if Joyeuse wished to turn back, Flane would kill the passion for treasure that was in his heart and go with her. For a great love had sprung up between the two, a love that could throttle the hope of gain if the girl wished to lift her little finger.
Joyeuse nodded, and Thurland and Martin gave a joint sigh of relief. Before their eyes were the ruins of Klang-Nan; and although death was in every nook of the crumbling ruins, there also were the treasures that had troubled their dreams,
Tohsâroth, droning softly, led the way: in Chinaman file we followed. The avenue had been flagged with great broad stones like those on the principal façade at Angkor-Vat, but here and there strong trees had shot up between the crevices of the paving stones, and had thrust the great slabs upright or overturned them completely. The same trees had overturned the statues of gods and monsters, using their thick roots as levers to upset them; and at places the lianas had twisted themselves around the neck of a god like the rope of a hangman and pulled him off his pedestal, making us think that the Almighty had got mad with the paganism of the place, and had used His trees to smash and destroy the idols that foolish men worshiped.
Gingerly, and with the cold paw of fear on our hearts we walked, for danger was close to us, every stone that had been displaced being a home for the hooded death.
The sun basted us; our brains throbbed with the heat; and the wicked enchantment of the place was upon us, so that we thought we heard sounds that we had never heard before—sounds that seemed to come from the gods of old, whispers in tongues that were older than the tongue of the Goidels, the wild devils who were the first conquerors of Ireland, and whose male babies ate their food off the point of the father's sword.
FLANE asked in a low voice of Thurland: "Are my ears playing tricks on me? I'm hearing words."
"And I too," said Thurland; "but the words are Latin and Greek to me."
Tohsâroth halted; and we looked to see what had pulled him up. The avenue by which we had come had been sliced neatly as if the dear Lord had taken a league-long sword and with one mighty slash had left a gash some fifteen feet in width, and running, as far as we could see across the mountain. An earthquake had at some time split the rocky hillside, and the chasm it had made blocked our approach now to the larger ruins in the valley below us.
Gloom hid the bottom of the trench, so there was no question of climbing into it and scrambling up the other side. It ran away down to. the other side of the world; and to us, as we stood and stared into its depths, it looked as if the Almighty had placed it there as a holy moat to keep persons from invading Klang-Nan on the other side.
Thurland examined the trench. "A few trees could be pushed across it to make a bridge," he said. "Let's get to it."
There were trees aplenty. Thurland, Flane and Martin set to work to drag them to the edge of the trench, the Count and I giving what help we could in the matter. Tohsâroth, Joyeuse and Om sat in the shade and waited. There was a frightening stillness upon the place.
We pulled half a dozen logs to the edge of the trench, but the question of getting their ends to the opposite bank troubled us. We tried upending them and letting them fall forward, but this was a failure; and we tried pushing them forward, but the weight of the logs and the lack of man-power made this difficult. For the farther bank was higher than the one we were on, and the end of the log that we thrust forward always hit it at a point below the edge.
It was while the five of us were trying to lift the end of the first log that we had pushed across the trench, that the miracle happened. Sweating and stumbling we were, trying to raise the far end of it, when two skinny hands reached down, seized it, jerked it upward and placed it securely upon the rim! Two skinny hands that belonged to Tohsâroth!
We lowered our end of the log and stared. Stared at the figure of the old bonze on the other side of the trench. A minute before, he had been sitting with Joyeuse and the small Om. We had seen him placidly watching our struggles with the log. Now he was on the other side, having crossed fifteen feet of space with nothing to walk on!
Flane looked at Joyeuse, whose hands were clasped and whose eyes showed the bewilderment that was upon her. All agog she was, unable for the moment to answer the question on the face of Flane. She looked at the chasm and then at Tohsâroth standing in the white sunshine on the far side, and in a thin whisper she spoke. "He walked across on air!" she gasped. "On air! I saw him!"
"BELIEF," said my Uncle Thurland, "is like a taste for caviar—one must be trained to it. And a miracle," said he, "is just something that you haven't seen before."
We hadn't seen Tohsâroth cross the trench, but Joyeuse and Om had seen him passing over. And there he was in front of us, motioning us to push over another log, so that he could help us place it beside the first. And feeling stunned and a little sick, we did so, pushing over half a dozen till we had a bridge on which one could safely walk; and when that was made, the old bonze returned to our side, nothing about his manner suggesting that he had done anything remarkable.
In silence we stared at Tohsâroth— Tohsâroth who knew the city of Klang-Nan when it throbbed with life. Tohsâroth, to whom the centuries had brought a knowledge that frightened us. And we felt small and weak like little children.
And all the fears of the millions that had gone before us crept into our brains out of the little cells in which, God help us, they are hidden! The fears of a million fathers and a million mothers. For there was no science to explain to our ancestors that this and that—storm and thunder and lightning and swift death— were nothing extraordinary and were just to be taken in the stride of life. And there was none to prove that vampires and goblins and warlocks didn't exist, for the clever boys that laugh at those things today were not around in far-off times, so the fears were born and stored—born and stored to come out into the everyday brain when something unexplainable happened.
Martin turned and looked back along the crazy avenue by which we had come to the trench. "That fellow that read the future from the guts of fishes might be right," he said. "I've got a crawly feeling in my spine."
"We all have," said Thurland; "but as the herring said when he found himself in the shark's stomach, 'It's a tough place, but he might get seasick.'"
The Count was silent as he watched Tohsâroth. The Count was impressed. We spoke of the explanation of the rope trick, the supposed mass hypnotism of the watchers; but Tohsâroth, while he was on the other side of the chasm, had used muscular force in helping us place the ends of the logs.on the far side!
"If we had only seen him there, we might have thought he fooled our eyes," said Flane; "but he helped to make the bridge while he was there."
"Let's forget it," said Thurland. "We're not here to inquire into this and that like nosy policemen with their notebooks and pencils. We're here to get stuff that will make us richer than Cairbre of the Cat's Head, who had seven castles and a wife in each. Come on!"
Flane carried Joyeuse across the bridge, holding her face against his shoulder so that she wouldn't look at the depths. And Thurland took the small Om in his arms and carried her over, returning then to lead me by the hand lest a giddiness should come upon me while crossing.
Tohsâroth lifted up his arms and cried a greeting to the ruins that were scattered across the valley. We were in Klang-Nan, the city of the snake-god.
THE ruins of Angkor-Thom, although much more extensive than those of Klang-Nan, lacked the fine quality of evil that came from those about us when we crossed the trench—the quality of malicious hatred that seemed to flow out from the great stones and direct itself against us, brought terror. The place loathed us; every stone, whether still in place or overturned, showed, so we thought, a hatred of our presence.
Joyeuse, taken with a sudden weakness, wished to sit down. Flane led her to a large flat stone, but he sprang back from it with a short curse. The stone was a battleground. Upon it, engaged in a fight to the death, were a scorpion of tremendous size, and a hairy spider with great green eyes, who stood upon legs that lifted him a full inch from the stone.
IT was strange that the fighting pair held us at that moment, but they did. When Flane muttered the sharp curse-word, we gathered round and watched the battle. The scorpion, his long flexible tail hoisted up over his back, tried to maneuver the spider into position for a death-thrust, racing round and round, while the spider wheeled swiftly to confront him.
The spider was fooled by a feint of the scorpion. He swung to the right thinking the jet-black horror was attacking from that point. The mistake was fatal. The scorpion rushed in, grabbed the thorax of the spider with his pincers and brought his tail over in a quick death-stroke. The spider quivered; his long legs gave way and he collapsed.
We moved slowly forward, Tohsâroth in the lead, searching, searching, his black glittering eyes examining every toppling ruin that we passed.
"What's the idea?" asked Thurland. "Joyeuse is all in."
The Count spoke to Tohsâroth, and the old man explained excitedly. He was, so the Count translated, seeking a place where we could pass the night without fear.
"Is there such a place?" grinned Flane.
Again there were questions and answers between the old bonze and the Count. We understood dimly that there was, somewhere in the ruins, a place of sanctuary, a place that Naga had graciously given from his territory, and where the wretch who offended the laws of the snake-god could find protection till he had been judged or had made penance for what he had done.
The news, unbelievable as it seemed, thrilled us. That there was a corner of that terrible stretch of ruins that would be safe during the hours of darkness brought a blessed peace to our minds
We tagged after the old man with strength born of his statement. The fear of the coming night had been growing as the shadows lengthened. The hooded death went hunting in the night.
"But we've done no harm to living thing," said Thurland.
"He says that we have in our hearts the desire to do harm," translated the Count.
"And he's mighty near the mark in saying that," snapped Flane.
Tohsâroth broke into a jog-trot. We ran at his heels. In the dusk ahead there loomed up a building that was a little larger than the ruins around it. The front had fallen outward, the big stones blocking our path as we got nearer; but the two sides and the rear wall were standing. Of roof there was none; no peasant hut in County Kerry was as bare and forlorn as the inside of that place. And in the whole of Ireland there wasn't a tenth of the cold loneliness that was between those walls. No, nor a hundredth part of it.
"Can we make a fire?" asked Flane.
Tohsâroth had no objections, so we built a fire on the big stones with which the place was paved. The flames bit into the darkness that had come swiftly upon the ruins; and there we stood, puzzled and silent, looking out through the opening where the front wall had collapsed; and as we stood there, the night chorus came to our ears—the snarls and yelps and screams of the hunters and the hunted.
Tohsâroth seemed worried, and the Count talked with him. The collapse of the front made the old bonze doubtful about the safety of the place, he fearing that it had lost its right of sanctuary by the fall of the wall. He squatted there, watchful of the world beyond the firelight, and the Count sat with him.
Joyeuse slept, her head against the shoulder of Flane. Little Om curled herself up in a bundle near the fire and forgot her troubles. The rest of us dozed, waking with starts of terror when the sights of the day crept into our feverish dreams.
Each time when I awoke, I heard the whispering of Tohsâroth and the Count —their tense, excited whispering. For the Count, on that night in the sanctuary of Klang-Nan, was learning a lot of the old man's secrets. The promises Tohsâroth had made were being fulfilled.
Thurland whispered to Flane. "The old fellow is showing his tricks," he said. "Do you hear?"
"I've been listening," answered Flane, "The devil is telling his secrets about beating death. It sounds uncanny. I'm praying for daylight."
Martin was awake then. The four of us listened to the two who squatted near the door. The Count was then repeating words that Tohsâroth uttered—repeating them the way a little child would whisper the words of a prayer. But it wasn't a prayer. Mother o' me! No! It was the litany of the devil himself that the old man was mumbling!
"Our Father who art in heaven!"> cried Thurland; and although there was fear in his voice, it sounded clean and wholesome against the green trickle that came from the lips of Tohsâroth—the green trickle of paganism that had super-strength in that long-deserted city of the snake-god.
Martin joined his voice to Thurland's, stumbling over the words that I'll wager he hadn't said for many a day; and the sweet whisper of Joyeuse threaded itself in with them. For myself I couldn't utter a syllable, my throat feeling as if it had a band of iron around it, and my tongue withered by the devil's rune that came from the bonze.
Flane spoke to the Count, damning him for taking part in something that we knew was unclean; but the Russian took no notice of the curses and insults that Flane flung at him. He was beside himself with the hunger to learn all that Tohsâroth knew, the hunger that had been with him for months, and which was being relieved at last. For this he had come, and now at Satan's trough he was gorging himself.
Toward the dawn the whispering died down. It stopped altogether, and the only sound was the sobbing of Joyeuse and the words that Flane whispered to her in an effort to comfort her. From beyond came the yelps and screams, the rustling of bodies dragged through the long grass, the hiss of the hooded hunters.
IN the gray light we looked at the Count and Tohsâroth. The Muscovite had changed. Whatever he had heard during the long night had produced a curious excitement, a queer nervousness, so that his features as well as his manner had altered. And his voice had a tremor in it when he spoke.
He surprised my uncles and Martin by his first remark. "We should get away as quickly as possible," he said. "At once! There is no time to lose! All around us are dangers of which we know nothing! Terrible dangers!"
"We're ready to go when we've got what we came for," said Thurland.
"I—I don't think it's possible," stammered the Count. "I think we had—we had better go away."
"Is it that you have got what you came for and would like to clear out?" asked Thurland.
"I have been told things," answered the Russian.
"The devil's tricks," snarled Thurland. "But what you have learned is no use to us. We made a bargain with you, and to that bargain we'll keep."
THE Count whispered to Tohsâroth. Now, so it seemed to us, those two had come closer together during the night. They had agreed upon a course of action. Both wished to retreat as quickly as possible from the ruins of Klang-Nan!
Thurland got to his feet. He crossed to where the Muscovite and Tohsâroth were sitting, and he spoke. "We'll start back the moment we have the treasure," he said. "Let's get busy."
"He is afraid to tell," stammered the Count.
"Why?" asked Thurland.
"He fears the vengeance of Naga."
"He should have thought of that before. It's too late to back out now. Tell him!"
The Count did so, although the old bonze, watching my uncle, guessed at what Thurland had said. Over the withered face of the ancient swept fear—a gray fear that brought a sort of palsy upon his features, and left him for a minute speechless.
He spoke at last, and the Russian translated. Tohsâroth, so we were told, was certain that death would come to both himself and us if he revealed the hiding-place of the treasure. The whispers of the night had convinced him that we were lost if we raided the hiding-place of Naga. On the day now opening before us, we should make our escape. If we stayed another night, the place of sanctuary would be invaded by the servants of the god—the hooded servants that we feared.
"We needn't stay another night," said Thurland. "We'll get the stuff and bolt."
"But he won't tell where it is!" cried the Count.
"He had better tell," said Thurland.
The Russian spoke softly to my uncle. He spoke of the powers of the old bonze, the powers that we had seen exercised on three different occasions. He urged Thurland to be careful, lest he annoy the ancient.
Flane came and stood beside Thurland; then Martin rose and stood beside Flane. Big, bold men, the three of them, frantic for the treasure that had brought them there.
"If the old man does any finger-snapping at one of us, he'll be in eternity in five seconds, in spite of all the devil tricks he knows," said Thurland. "You can tell him that. This hasn't been a pleasure-trip; and Naga or no Naga, we're not going without the plunder."
"That is so," said Flane.
"Same here," added Martin.
Nervously the Count put the decision of the three before the old man. And the eyes of my uncles and Martin were watchful. They had seen three men who had offended the bonze die hurriedly, and they were taking no chances. How he did his killing they didn't know, but they were ready....
The skinny hands of Tohsâroth writhed around each other as he listened to the translated words of Thurland. His eyes, that were like bits of black opal with curious glinting lights in their depths, glowed as we had seen them glow when he had struck down the brutal mate of the Kelantan on the voyage to Saigon. I saw the hand of Thurland tighten on something within his pocket. If the bonze lifted his arm to make the death-gesture, it would be the last movement he would ever make.
IN silence we awaited the old man's decision. There came a soft rustling from the dry grass without. A hooded hunter was returning from his night prowl. A bearded monkey swung from the branch of a stunted tree, peered within the sanctuary, showed his surprise at seeing us, and called loudly to his mates to come and take a look at us. Far off, a leopard screamed.
Tohsâroth lifted himself from his cross-legged position. He stood before Thurland, the East before the West; and for long minutes they stared at each other, the brave blue eyes of Thurland looking into the black vicious eyes of the other. The eyes of a Christian fighting the eyes of a pagan, so it seemed to us who watched.
Thurland won. The bonze pulled his yellow robe around him, turned and pattered out of the sanctuary. In single file we followed him, Thurland treading on his heels, the right hand of my uncle still thrust in the pocket of his jacket. Thurland had lost faith in the ancient.
WE stepped out into silence and sunshine—sunshine that was like a glaze on the ruins. And the quiet was a quiet that followed us, eating up the rustling noises made by our feet in the dry grass. Bleary-eyed gods, looking like punch-drunk fighters under the wallops of the centuries, stared at us as we passed—stared and grinned; at least, we thought they grinned, as our passing shadows twisted their chipped features. Klang-Nan was watching us; Klang-Nan was laughing at us. For the City of Cobras knew what was in the heart of Tohsâroth, the black heart of him; and the old ruins were thinking that we were going to our execution....
Over the fallen stones, slipping and stumbling, not a word uttered—in a silence broken only by an occasional hiss as a sleeping serpent uncoiled and slid angrily out of the path of the bonze. We followed a sort of tunnel that ran between walls less than four feet apart. We came to the blind end of it and halted. We were facing a carving of Buddha. He was seated on the coiled folds of the seven-headed cobra, the heads reaching up behind him and forming a sort of protective covering. A bad old gentleman he looked to us.
Tohsâroth flung himself down before the statue. He whispered excitedly to the Count.
"He says we should all kneel!" cried the Russian.
"Well, we won't!" snapped Thurland.
Tohsâroth spoke again. There was temper in his voice. The Count dropped to his knees and spoke to Thurland.
"It won't hurt you," said the Count. "He says it's a necessary part of the performance he must go through to get this door to open."
"He'll do it without my help," said Thurland. "The old stone chap will understand that we're not of his religion."
Tohsâroth, Om and the Count prostrated themselves while the rest of us stood and stared at the figure of the Buddha. And the figure stared back at us, the sly smile of it widening in that sneering grin that you connect with the East, the grin of conceited folk who think they know everything. You see it on the faces of the little Japs and the Chinese, and the Hindoos and the Siamese: and why it is there the good Lord only knows. But there it is.
Now, how Tohsâroth did what he did was a puzzle to us then, and is a puzzle tq some of us still. For while he had his forehead on the ground, mumbling some, mumbo-jumbo stuff, the figure started to move back from us. The snake and the old gentleman! Noiselessly they moved back, as if some one had withdrawn the coiled snake the way a butler in the great houses would take the chair of his mistress when she was rising from the table. For a distance of a full yard the stone statue slid away from us; and to the right of the figure was an opening. Dank and frightening, lit up by a faint spectral light that came from a slit in the roof of the chamber it led into.
Tohsâroth rose slowly. He turned, looked at Thurland and made a motion with his skinny hand.
Thurland made the same motion back, to the bonze. "After you," said my uncle. "The only thing left to the Irish is their politeness"."
The bonze didn't understand the words, but he understood the gesture. He stepped forward and turned into the opening. Thurland followed him, and behind Thurland came the Count and Flane and the rest of us.
THE chamber into which we stepped was lighted by a thin slit some three feet in length high in the arched roof. The light from this opening struck down on a curious figure in the center of the bare room—the lifelike figure of a nude dancing-girl. Her two hands were thrust forward, with palms held in the proper praying gesture of the Buddhists, but each finger and thumb were of unusual length, and were separated in such a manner that the tips were a matter of four inches apart.
The figure was of limestone, and the moisture that had come in through the opening in the roof had produced curious stains here and there that at first, in the poor light, looked like splotches of blood. They were on her neck and breast, so that I thought in that first moment that she had been stabbed to death and then turned into stone by some strange power possessed by the priests of Naga. The place bred mad thoughts of that order.
Thurland whispered to Martin; and Martin dropped back to the door of the chamber. Little faith had my uncle in the old man that led us; and the manner in which the stone door had slid away made him cautious about our safety. So Martin stood near the opening while the rest of us moved fearfully toward the dancing figure with the strange deformed hands.
Tohsâroth bowed to it, bending low, his hands touching the stone floor of the place. Again and again he lowered himself: and each bow he made seemed to increase the silence of the chamber.
SUDDENLY he straightened and stepped close to the figure. He put his skinny right hand out toward the upturned stone fingers of the dancer. Softly with, his first finger he touched, in turn, the outspread fingers of the right hand; then in the same halting fashion he touched the fingers of the left.
He paused, his head cocked sideways, as if listening. And we listened with him—listened with our ears and with every inch of our skin. We didn't know for what, we not having the slightest idea of what the old devil was waiting for. But the silence told us that sound of some sort was coming—coming from somewhere beyond our ken.
Again, slowly, ever so.slowly, his skinny paw went out. And our eyes followed it. It touched two fingers of the right hand of the figure, two of the left, then swiftly, so swiftly that we could not follow, it moved between the two like the hand of a pianist striking the keys that held the thread of melody. Backward and forward, from one stone hand to the other, faster, faster, the beams of light striking it at times and making it impossible for us to register the touches, dazzling us with the swiftness of it....
It came to an end. Tohsâroth stepped back from the figure. He brought an arm across his eyes as if to shield them from some terrifying sight, and in that position he listened again. And we listened. And Klang-Nan listened. And the whole of the Laos country from the borders of Yunnan to the sea listened. That is what we thought. Listened with a monstrous cupped ear. For what?
It came. A slight splintery sound. A faint tinkle as if a piece of glass had been rolled along a stone floor; yet it had the effect of an explosion upon our taut nerves. Our faces were turned to the soft gloom beyond the figure from which the sound had come, our necks craned forward. We were breathless.
THURLAND spoke to Flane in a whisper. "Go and look," said Thurland; and Flane stepped around the figure and stooped to peer at the shadows. Tohsâroth held his position, the right arm crooked before his eyes.
My Uncle Flane made a soft choking noise as if the sight of something extraordinary had pinched his throat. His shoes crunched on the floor as he wheeled swiftly and came back to us. His big right hand was outstretched, and in the broad palm of it sat the brother to the great rose-colored pearl we had seen in the golden statue at Kompong-chnang!
Wonderful indeed it was as the light fell upon it: a thing that glowed like the dawn, the soft tints appearing to move like colored clouds beneath the lustrous "skin." And the reflection of it showed upon the palm of my uncle, bringing to his hand a sort of miraculous illumination that startled us.
"Mother o' God!" cried Thurland, and with eyes that saw nothing but the great pearl, he stepped toward his brother. And the rest of us drew in, the glory of the thing dragging us forward.
Tohsâroth moved. He slipped from the side of Thurland, turned, and made for the door of the chamber.
"Look out!" cried Flane. "Stop him, Martin! Stop him!"
The old bonze sprang at the opening, but Martin was alert. He flung out his right hand, seized the robe of the old man, and with a quick jerk brought him to his knees.
Tohsâroth cried out in anger; then as Martin stood over him, that skinny claw that carried the dreadful power forged in hell was uplifted. Palm outward, it flashed before the face of Martin; the fingers made a quick snapping motion as if they had seized upon something invisible. Martin staggered backward and dropped to the floor.
The Count, who was the nearest to Tohsâroth, sprang forward with the idea of helping the old man to his feet. That was what my uncles thought later, and I have no doubt they were right; but the bonze was now as poisonous and as vicious as one of the hooded things that guarded Klang-Nan. He thought that the Russian, like Martin, had the intention of blocking his escape. Again the damnable claw was uplifted; the Count reeled and fell.
Tohsâroth was on his feet. A horrid squeal of rage came from his lips. The black eyes were blazing now. He was Tohsâroth the Killer! Tohsâroth the Death-giver!
Between him and the door was Joyeuse! And between Joyeuse and death was the swift hand of my Uncle Thurland ! The claw was moving upward under the flying cloak of the bonze as Thurland fired. Tohsâroth screamed; for an instant he seemed to lift himself clear from the stone floor; then he flung out his arms and fell face downward....
Flane grasped the fainting Joyeuse and cried out questions to her. Was she hurt? Did she feel any pain? Was she certain? A man beside himself was Flane. He took the girl up in his arms and carried her out into the air.
Joyeuse was unharmed; but the Russian Count and Martin were no more. The lean body of Tohsâroth writhed like a wounded snake trying to gather strength to turn and kill again. But at last all movement ceased.
EIGHT of us had gone into that chamber, and five had come out alive. In a little group we stood in the sunlight, stunned and speechless. Joyeuse had a protecting arm around the shoulders of the small Om, who seemed unable to understand what had happened. And the Buddha on the entrance door grinned at us.
"If you hadn't got him," said Flane, looking at the Buddha, "he'd have closed the door on us, and we'd be sealed up there till Judgment Day."
"That's what I thought," said Thurland. "We're lucky to be alive. But I grieve indeed for Martin and the Count."
For a long while no one spoke. I think my two uncles were waiting for Joyeuse to feel like herself again after the shock. Of their own immediate plans they were agreed without speaking at all. For the death-chamber dragged their heads toward it, and now and then they licked their lips in expectation.
When Joyeuse said nothing, Flane took the great pearl from his pocket and held it again on the palm of his hand. A little shamefaced he appeared to be as he drew it forth, but when he saw the fierce wild beauty of it, he forgot the dead, forgetting also that one of the men within the chamber was the uncle of the girl—forgetting it entirely. For the great rose-colored pearl had a power like that of a drug, so that when we stared at it, the terrible happenings that had taken place but a few minutes before were wiped out.
Now my Uncle Thurland knew much about pearls. He had spent a lot of time at Lingah in the Bahrein Islands, and he had wandered in the Sulu Sea and down around Torres Strait where the Malays and Japs scrape up the gold-lip and black-lip shell, the shadows of the big "gray-nurse" sharks above them as they toil with bursting lungs in ten fathoms of water.
He had seen the great pearls of the world, and had handled many of them. "La Pelligrina," the "Southern Cross," "La Coralita," and that strange double pearl joined by a ligature of nacre which was called "The Dancing Houris," and which disappeared when the Czar of all the Russias was pushed off his throne. But Thurland had seen no pearl like the one that Flane held on the palm of his big hand.
"Have you ever seen one like it?" asked Flane, and his voice was deep and husky with the emotion that gripped him.
"Never!" answered Thurland. "Nor no other white man in the world has seen such a thing before this day!"
Like a mother putting out trembling fingers to touch her new-born babe he reached for the pearl; and Flane let him have it with a soft sigh as if he were giving away his own soul. And Thurland stroked it, and whispered to it, calling it "avourneen" in soft Gaelic, his eyes bright with the love he had for it.
Flane roused himself from the fine stupor that came with the possession of the pearl. He looked at Joyeuse, and the terror on her face made him put a question. "What is it?" he asked.
"Let us—let us go away!" gasped Joyeuse. "Now! Now at once!"
Flane seemed surprised. He looked at Thurland, and Thurland seemed as astonished as his brother. Just as much and more if anything.
"Go away?" muttered Thurland. "Go away?" He swallowed fiercely and glanced toward the door of the chamber. "In there," he cried, "there may be a hundred like this beauty that I've got in my hand! A thousand, maybe! Who can tell? And there are emeralds as big as hen's eggs! And rubies and diamonds! Go away, is it? Now that the blessed Lord in heaven has heard our prayers!"
Flane tried to soothe Joyeuse, whose terror had increased as she listened to the throaty words of Thurland. He took her little hands in his and spoke softly to her. We would go in a little while—in an hour perhaps. He and his brother would make a quick survey of the chamber: then we would start with all speed for the Meos village on the banks of the Nam-Hou.
A LITTLE scream from Om interrupted the soft words of my uncle. The finger of the girl pointed to some shattered pillars to the right of us. Across the smooth surface of one ran a glistening length of death.
Now my Uncle Thurland was beside himself at that moment. In his left hand was the great pearl; and as the thing on the stone stared at him, his right hand went to the pocket into which he had thrust the automatic.
Thurland fired at the wicked weaving head. The bullet nicked the neck of the thing, breaking the spinal cord. But the crack of Thurland's revolver had been followed by another explosion that came from the direction of the avenue by which we had entered Klang-Nan!
"Was that an echo?" asked Plane.
We listened. There came to us the sound of a second shot, a third, then a little volley that brought echoes from all the shattered ruins around us. Our thoughts sprang back to the prophet in the purple sampot who read the future from the entrails of fishes. Had the two men who were pursuing us up the river arrived at Klang-Nan?
NO single shots followed the volley. The fat silence rolled in again. Flane and Thurland looked at each other: then, with deliberate steps they started toward the door of the death-chamber. If the firing announced the arrival of Schiemann and Bruden, there was no time to lose.
Joyeuse, Om and I followed the two men to the door. T peered within, but Joyeuse and the little girl could not force themselves to look. Flane and Thurland had disappeared in the gloom. I saw their stooped figures as they searched the floor at the point where Flane had picked up the pearl. The minutes crawled by on feet of lead. There were no sounds but the crunching of the shoes of my two uncles.
Thurland came and stood in front of the figure of the dancing-girl. Scratching his head, he studied the outstretched hands. There lay the secret: Tohsâroth. by playing swiftly upon the deformed fingers, had unloosed the door of some secret pocket in the wall, and from that pocket had dropped the extraordinary pearl.
Flane came and stood beside his brother. They whispered together; then Thurland's fingers touched the stone fingers of the statue. Like a clumsy boy endeavoring to produce a tune that he has seen played by a teacher, his strong fingers struck here and there, first on one stone hand and then on the other.
Flane tried, then Thurland again. With the treasure madness upon them, they struck with fury, struck till the hands of Thurland left blood upon the fingers of the dancing-girl.
At last, cursing softly, they gave up the effort. The finger-combination had been lost to us by the death of the old bonze. It was too intricate to remember.
"The only thing is to sound every stone in the place," growled Thurland. "If one is hollow, it's the hiding-place."
Flane nodded. I went back to the door where Joyeuse and Om were waiting.
"Are we going away?" asked Joyeuse; and the evil of the place had leached into her so that she was nearly hysterical.
"Not yet," I answered. "My uncles are searching."
Om made a grimace to show that she was hungry. I gave her a handful of rice from my own small share, and went back to my uncles.
Thurland and Flane had drawn a line on the wall up from the point where Flane had found the great pearl, and they were tapping the stones on each side of this line, tapping them one after the other, their ears laid to the wall in an effort to find out if one was hollow. They had forgotten the crawling devils that guarded the place. They had forgotten the misery and terror that clutched Joyeuse.
"We have very little food," I said, when Flane, straightening his back, gave me an opportunity to speak.
"To hell with food!" he snapped. "What time is it?"
"About noon," I answered.
"Go out and get all the dry wood you can gather up and bring it in here," he ordered. "We'll want it for the night if we stay on."
"Stay on?" I repeated.
"Yes!" shouted Flane. "Get the wood! And don't pick up any sticks that have heads on them!"
I WENT back to the door of the chamber. I was terrified. My uncles, unless they discovered the cache, intended to stay the night in the chamber of death!
Gargling with dread of the night, I acquainted Joyeuse of their intention. I thought she would collapse. With eyes wide with fear, she turned and surveyed the ruins. And the chipped gods leered at her. Klang-Nan had trapped us by putting the poison of desire into the minds of Thurland and Flane.
I gathered up piles of dry wood for the night, gathered them fearfully. "Don't pick up any sticks that have heads on them," Flane had said; it was sound advice.
ALL through the silent afternoon my uncles tapped without stopping, dragging in rocks from the outside to make scaffolds to reach the higher course, and tirelessly striking at the stones, hoping one would prove to be hollow. Ceaselessly they tapped and listened, but the walls kept their secret.
There had been no further sounds of firing from the direction of the avenue.
The night fell. Thurland ordered me to light a fire in the chamber, and to bring Joyeuse and Om inside.
Joyeuse balked at the door of the place. The bodies lay as they had fallen, and the girl couldn't face them. She wept softly over the death of the Count.
I went and told Flane. He climbed down from a pile of stones and walked to the door. Softly he spoke to Joyeuse, pleading with her, begging her to come within the chamber. A clever tongue had Flane, and well he used it at that minute. Cunningly he argued with her. It was too late to leave Klang-Nan, the night being on us and a thousand dangers around us, but he promised her that at sunup we would start. He put his arm around her waist, then shielding her from the sight of the dead, he led her to a corner of the chamber where the statue blocked her view of the bodies.
"And you shall guard this pearl while we search," he whispered, and saying that, he placed the great pearl in her hands.
"We have the night before us," he muttered, as he went back to his tapping. "Keep the fire going, Jimmy! Have you plenty of wood?"
"Plenty," I answered, and I was glad then that I had dragged in the piles of branches during the afternoon. For the night came to the door of the place and made faces at us. And the devils in Klang-Nan awoke with the darkness and made noises that chilled my blood. Cries and screams, and mad caterwauling, and with these came the rustling of dry grass that told of the passing of hooded hunters. But my two uncles were not disturbed by the sounds that came from without. Stripped to the waist, their bodies covered with the lime and dust that their blows dislodged, they kept up the search.
It was after midnight when Om shrieked. I had just thrown a bundle of wood upon the fire, and the cloud of smoke curling up to the slit in the roof of the chamber blinded me so that for an instant I could not see what had frightened her.
I saw Flane turn from the wall and look toward the door; then he sprang from the makeshift scaffold and made a quick rush forward. I caught a glimpse of a nightmare-breeding coil on which the light from the fire flickered, of a threatening head with red points of fire as eyes; then the parang in the hand of Flane swung in an arc of light, and the head left the coil.... It was a mighty blow.
Without a tremor in his voice, my Uncle Flane spoke to me as he turned back to the wall. "You should keep an eye on the door," he said. "Better still if you would put some live coals there. Don't step on that thing."
My Uncle Thurland hadn't stopped tapping. I doubt if he saw anything of the affair. My two uncles were insane with the desire for plunder. Fear of devils, beasts, or serpents was thrust out of their minds by the longing for the things of which they had dreamed during the weeks of the voyage.
NEAR daylight my two uncles decided to overthrow the statue in the hope that they would find some clue of the cache. Fearlessly in the dim light they went outside and found two great limbs that they could use as levers. They built up a fulcrum with flat stones, chipped out two holes at the base of the statue and thrust the poles into them.
Two strange beings were my uncles as they gripped the ends of the poles and swung their weight upon them. Bleary-eyed, with little sweat runnels on their dust-covered bodies, their hair white with lime, their great muscles showing, they brought a thrill to me as I watched them. There's a mad bravery in the Irish, a courage that makes one weep.
The statue refused to budge. I made a movement to touch the pole but Flane ordered me away. "Stand clear" he cried. It was their battle, and they would have no interference.
Their muscles cracked in the heavy silence. They uttered Gaelic war-cries. They heaved and pulled. Then, as the first beam of light came down through the roof on the head of the dancing-girl, the levers won out. The figure rocked on its base, moved sideways, steadied itself; then, as Thurland shouted wildly, it went crashing to the floor, the dust filling the chamber, blinding us as we crouched against the wall.
Flane and Thurland stepped over the shattered pieces. They stooped over the stone that had formed the base. The fingers of Flane picked up what looked to be a folded sheet of paper. He straightened himself and unrolled it. I was close enough to have a fleeting glimpse of the page. Upon it I distinctly saw a mass of Cambodian characters, the strange twisted script that we had seen carved on the statues of gods; but as I looked, the letters disappeared! Disappeared before our eyes! Like ghost symbols they fled, the faint light from the roof fading them till the sheet was white and blank with never a trace of what had been written upon it!
Flane, looking puzzled and helpless, turned the paper over. He found nothing. He looked around the chamber as if he thought the characters that had skipped from the page might be in hiding in the corners.
Thurland examined the shattered pieces of the upended statue. There was nothing to explain how Tohsâroth had worked the miracle. Nothing to tell us how he, by striking the deformed fingers of the dancing-girl, had caused some secret cache in the wall to open and drop the great pearl on the floor. There were no wires, no rods, no machinery. The figure was solid....
The light increased. Flane stared at the piteous face of Joyeuse. Her eyes were upon him, and in the soft silence they seemed to dispel the madness that had been evident during the night. He crossed the chamber and took her two hands in his.
"I swore by the bones of my father that we would leave at sunup this morning," he said, "and I'll keep my word." He turned and spoke to his brother: "We're on our way, Thurl. The curse of Almighty God is on this place, and I wish to get out of it."
THE sun was up when we stepped from the chamber. My two uncles examined the stone door on which was carved the leering Buddha, but they could not find the hidden spring that operated it.
"We might block the opening with stones," said Flane. "It won't take us long. It wouldn't be right to leave the place open."
Hurriedly we collected stones from the ruins near by and piled them up in front of the grinning Buddha. We were filling in the last course when Thurland gave a yell of warning and sprang clear. The Buddha was moving! Moving forward against the stones that we had piled up before him!
Open-mouthed, we watched. With the same slow movement by which he had retired he now came forward, pressing with such force against the wall we had built that the heavy stones were thrust outward, toppling over and leaving the figure of the god in full view! There was a sharp click of hidden machinery, and the chamber was closed—forever.
"It's easy to explain," said Thurland. "The weight of the rocks we piled up operated the hidden lever that the old bonze pushed down when he knelt before the door. But all the same it's enough to scare the soul out of a man."
For long minutes we stared at the figure, then we turned and moved forward in the direction of the sanctuary where we had passed the first night. From that point we could pick up the route to the chasm that we had crossed on the bridge of logs. Thurland, parang in hand, walked first, followed by Joyeuse, Om, and me. Flane brought up the rear.
IT was a still, watchful morning. Klang-Nan seemed to know that we were leaving. Now and then there was a rustling in the grass, and here and there on the shattered walls we saw the disappearing length of a serpent. Monkeys, whose tails made fringes to the boughs on which they sat, discussed us as we passed.
We found the place of sanctuary, and Thurland called a halt. He spoke to Flane. "On the other side of the bridge we'll have trouble," he said. "We had better map out some way of dealing with it. The old bonze is not here to soft-soap the foul crawling devils that are waiting there to say good-by to us. Let's think."
"I've been thinking," said Flane. He pointed to a tree that we had noticed on our arrival in the ruined city. A strange tree. It grew to the height of some fifteen feet, the top being a bushy mass of spines. Devilish spines. They stood up like the quills of a porcupine, their duty being, as far as we could see, to protect a mass of green fruit from the raiding monkeys. And right well they did it. Now and then we saw an adventurous monkey hanging from the limb of a tree that grew close to the prickly ones, trying hard to reach the fruit hidden in the spines, yowling frightfully as the barbs pricked him.
Flane explained his plan. "Revolvers are no good," he said; "and the parangs are no better if we are attacked by ahy great number of them; but a couple of these trees used as street-sweepers use brooms would make a fine path for us. You and Jimmy can push in front, Joyeuse and Om will follow, and I'll act as a rearguard. If the spikes on them keep the monkeys off, they'll trouble the squirming things on the avenue."
"It's a good idea," said Thurland.
We chose a couple of young trees and hacked them down with the parangs. We trimmed off the lower branches till nothing was left but the great bunched head with its thousand and one spines. They were formidable weapons. Flane put Thurland and me in line, the tops of the trees upon the ground, and ordered us to Walk forward in a trial march to see how they would work. There were no serpents about, but courage came to us as we pushed, the terrible spines tearing up the ground. We blessed the thought that had come to Flane. My Uncle Thurland gurgled with joy as he thrust the spiteful yard-wide broom in front of him.
"It's the devil's own brush," cried Thurland. "I'll wager the blessed Saint Patrick had something like this when he swept the snakes out of Ireland! You could beat a lion with a tool like this."
Like pikes we carried the prickly trees on our shoulders as we made for the bridge. An occasional cobra lifted his head and hissed as we went by, but there was no attempt made to attack us. Twice we lost our bearings and had to retrace our steps. The silence was broken only by the chattering of half a dozen old monkeys who ran after us, skipping from wall to wall and shouting to friends who were too lazy to follow. Yet the watchfulness of the place was plain to us.
The courage that came with the possession of the spiked saplings received a shock as we came near to the bridge across the chasm. Thurland, in the lead, put out a hand and halted us. A clear slope led down to the great trench, and on this slope a battle had taken place.
FOR a minute or more we stared at the obstruction, then stepping softly we approached. Seated back to back, and holding a pose that made us think at first that they were still alive, were Bruden and Schiemann! Both hands of each' man grasped automatics; they had died fighting. Around them Were the ant-covered bodies of the crawling things they had fought and killed—seven of them! Joyeuse and Om were speechless with terror, and I was in a condition little better.
My two uncles, if they were Upset by the sight, kept their feelings under control. In lowered voices they talked, their glances turning often to the piles of fallen masonry that were all around us. The prickly saplings were on the ground now. We were on guard.
"Lord have mercy on their souls!" said Thurland. "Let's hope that we—" He paused and watched a black streak slip with sickening speed over the statue of a dethroned god.
"Let's move," said Flane. "You and Jimmy to the front with the sweepers the moment we cross the bridge! Joyeuse and Om close as they can follow you. I'll keep my face to the rear. Now, in the name of God, let us go!"
We crossed the bridge, Flane holding the hand of Joyeuse, Thurland leading the small Om. The terror that we were to face on the far side made the bridge less frightening. I crossed without help.
BEYOND there was quiet. Nothing stirred; sullen heat was upon the place. Silently we placed the prickly heads of the saplings on the big flat stones that paved the avenue. My teeth chattered; I recalled a special prayer that Father Hannigan had taught us and which was to be used when great danger threatened. I mumbled it softly.
Flane spoke to Joyeuse. He asked her to be brave. "Just keep your head and follow Thurland," he said.
"But—but there mightn't be any danger," whispered Joyeuse. "They mightn't touch us."
Flane smiled. "Unless they know what we are taking away," he said. "If they know about the pearl they might get mad."
Joyeuse placed her hand on her bosom where the great pearl rested. She tried to speak but no sound came from her lips.
"Ready?" asked Thurland.
"All ready," answered Flane.
"Keep together," cautioned Thurland. "We're off."
The prickly trees made a harsh rustling noise as we pushed them over the flat stones. In that first twenty yards I wondered if we had done wisely in making the racket that would announce our going. I thought our chances would have been greater if we had tiptoed along the avenue, but that belief left me as Thurland called a warning.
A black, whip-like thing shot out from a heap of masonry. Head erect, hood expanded, it coiled in the path of the spiny broom that Thurland was pushing. Coiled and hissed a warning at the bristling brush that came straight at it.
The serpent struck blindly at the broom, and the damnable spines impaled it as it struck. With eyes glazed with terror I saw it. Pierced in a dozen places it rode the terrible sweep, striking again and again in its death agony at the frightful bayonets which nature had given the tree to protect its fruit from marauding monkeys.
My Uncle Thurland made a gurgling noise to show his pleasure at the success of the sweeps. Flane from the rear shouted a warning, and then it was my turn. A brownish-black length slid with frightening swiftness before my broom. I saw the terrifying head rise above the spikes as I thrust forward with all my strength, and then I too had a passenger. A furious fighting passenger that was skewered on the terrible bristles.
I heard the slash of Flane's parang, heard him speak a word of encouragement to Joyeuse. Joyeuse was sobbing. Our march was a nightmare!
Another victim for Thurland.... Another for me.... Two more for Thurland.... One dodged the spines and started to move swiftly up the ten-foot handle between me and the brushy end. I tried to drop the tree, but I couldn't. I tried to cry out, but my tongue was of ash; then Thurland fired. The head was blown off the thing, but it rode coiled on the sapling.
JOYEUSE shrieked. Thurland turned his head, clutched my shoulder and halted. Flane, holding off a rear attack, had slipped and lost his footing. I saw him, on his knees, his great arms wielding two parangs as he struck here and there. The hissing devils seemed to understand that they had him at a disadvantage.
My Uncle Thurland, with tremendous strength, swung his brush in a half-circle to the rear, and as he did that, I looked at Joyeuse—Joyeuse, insane with fear lest Flane should be struck by one of the darting heads. I saw her thrust her hand into her bosom. Saw her as she clutched something, lifted it high and hurled it back along the avenue. My eyes saw the sun strike it as it fell and rolled along the flat stones.
Flane was on his feet now. The brush of Thurland had swept away the danger. "Keep going!" yelled Flane. "Keep going. We're nearly there!"
As I thrust madly forward, I wondered what Joyeuse had thrown when she had seen the terrible danger that threatened Flane. Her action puzzled me.
Then suddenly I knew—I knew, and the knowledge killed the horror of those last few yards that We traveled. Killed it by trying to picture the astonishment and anger of my two uncles when they were told. Joyeuse, crazed with terror, and thinking of the words of Flane when he spoke of the serpents attacking because we were stealing something from Klang-Nan, had in her madness thrown back to them the great pearl she carried in her bosom!...
We reached the lip of the mountain from which point we had first viewed the guardians of the snake-god. We were clear. Flane picked the fainting Joyeuse up in his arms and rushed down the path that we had cut previously. Om ran at his heels, I followed, Thurland brought up the rear. Far away we saw the silver strip of the Nam-Hou....
The descent of the mountain was easier than the climb up. And our feet were light. We wished to make the Meos village before nightfall, so at a trot we went forward.
It was in the noonday halt that Joyeuse whispered to Flane of what she had done at the moment he lost his footing on the avenue of death. I was watching them as they sat apart. Joyeuse had her lips close to the ear of my uncle, and as she made what I knew to be her confession, I saw Flane's face change in a manner that was startling.
He tried to believe, but he couldn't. The words that she whispered stuck in his mental gullet and choked him. Amazement twisted his features out of line, gave a queer turn to his mouth and put a look of indescribable bewilderment in his eyes. With a great effort he moved his lips. I knew that he had uttered two Words. "The pearl!"
Joyeuse nodded her head. Minutes went by, Flane fighting to recover from the blow. Then, suddenly, his face cleared. He put his big arms around the girl, drew her to him and kissed her. Flane understood. The pearl had been thrown back because of a love that in the mad moment of extreme danger, had thought only of him.
IT was nightfall when we stumbled into the little Meos village in the great trees. My Uncle Flane, singing loudly, led us into the place.
It was difficult to get the little folk out of their huts, but at last they understood that we Were not devils from the jungle and they brought us food and arranged sleeping quarters for us. The soothsayer in the purple sampot counted us and asked by signs about the missing three. Thurland, by gestures, explained that they would never return, and the prophet blew out his chest and addressed the villagers. We surmised that he was screaming out the Meos equivalent for: "I told you so! Give me the entrails of a fish and I'll make the future as plain as the nose on your face!" He was still talking as we fell asleep.
WE were a month and three days descending the Mekong to My-tho. We rode from there to Saigon, and as we dismounted from a battered car in front of the Hôtel des Nations on the Boulevard Bonnard, a small policeman stepped up and asked our names and our business.
My Uncle Thurland grinned. "I," said he, "am the Lord of Damnation and Sorrow. My brother here is the Prince of Disappointment. Here is the Lady of Romance, the little thing is the Button of Pure Affection, and the boy is Sancho Panza. And are you satisfied now, my little man or will I tell you more?"
The policeman stared for a few moments at Thurland; then he walked swiftly away.
A boat of the Chargeurs-Réunis was leaving that very evening for Marseilles, and Thurland booked passages on her. He also arranged with the agent to look after the small Om.
"Where did you get the money?" asked Flane.
"I took the wallet from the pocket of the old Count as we were leaving that stone chamber," answered Thurland. "It was a pity to leave good money in there."
We went aboard ih the late afternoon. Flane had told Thurland of the loss of the great pearl, but Thurland did not seem cast down. He led us to the bar and called for drinks.
"And if you put ice in my drink before I see how much whisky is in the glass, I'll toss you overboard," he said to the barman. "If a waiter in Paris hadn't spoiled a good drink, I wouldn't have poured it down the back of a crook ahd by that same trick got myself into this wild-goose chase from which I'm returning."
He looked around to see what Flane thought of his statement, but Flane hadn't heard. He was standing with his arm around the waist of Joyeuse, watching the lights of the Quai Francis Gamier slip into the soft dusk as we moved down the Saigon River.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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