Newspapers / The Roanoke Beacon and … / Feb. 15, 1918, edition 1 / Page 2
Part of The Roanoke Beacon and Washington County News (Plymouth, N.C.) / About this page
This page has errors
The date, title, or page description is wrong
This page has harmful content
This page contains sensitive or offensive material
Tr. At By TALBOT MUNDY The Most Picturesque Romance of the KING IS LED TO VISIT A VAST CAVE THROUGH WHICH AN MilNdERGROpND ; RIVER FLOWS, AND IN A GREAT ; CAVERN MEETS THOUSANDS OF FANATICS ! t Synopsis. At the beginning of the world war Capt. Atholstan r Kingof the British Indian array and of Its secret service, is ordered to Delhi to meet Yasmini, a dancer, and go with her to Kinjan to meet the outlaws there who are said by spies to be preparing for a jihad or holy war. On his way to Delhi King quietly foils a plan to assassinate him and gets evidence that Yasmini is after him. He meets . llowa Gunga, ; Yasmini's man, , who says she has already gone north, 1 and at her town house witnesses queer dances. Ismail, an Afridi, be comes his body servant and protector, lie rescues some of Yasmini's hillmen and takes them north with him, tricking the Hangar into going ahead. The Rangar deserts him at a dangerous time. He meets his brother at Ali Masjid fort. The disguise he assumes there fools even the sharp-eyed cutthroats composing his guard. He enters Khinjan caves, thanks to his lying guides. CHAPTER XI Continued. "Are there devils in Tophet? Fire and my veins are one !" The man did not notice the eager ness beaming out of King's horn rimmed spectacles, but Ismail did; it seeme'd to him time to prove his vir tues as assistant. . iirTUJ S V. tAMf. Antrim T ' . .1 J. Ill c? ia luiuuua iia&iiu nullum Khan," he boasted. "He can cure any thing, and for a very little fee !" The- man looked incredulous, but King drew-the covering from his row of instruments and bottles. "Take a chance !" he advised. "None but the brave wins anything!" Ismail and Darya Khan were new to the business and enthusiastic. They had the man down, held tight on the floor to the huge amusement of the rest,' before be could even protest; and Ma howls nf mire did him no p-nnd for Ismail drove the hilt of a knife be tween his. open jaws to keep them open. A very, large proportion of . King's stores consisted of morphia and co caine. He injected enough cocaine to deaden the man's nerves, and allowed 'it '""line to work. Then he drew out three back teeth in quick succession. to maKe sure ne naa uie ngiu one. 'Ismail let the victim up, and Darya Khan; gave him water in a brass cup. TTfoi-l-w TritKftnf Tflln frt tVta firct tlm a wolf freed from a trap. ''Ar-i there any others in pain in . ; ."Listen to hira! What is Khinjan? Is there one man without a wound or a sore or a scar or a sickness?" 'men, ten tnem, saia lung. ne man iaugnea. "When I show my jaw, there will be a fight to be first ! Make ready, hakim ! Igo!" King sat down to eat, but he had not finished his meal he had made the last little heap of rice into a ball with his fingers, native style, and was mop ping up the last of the curried gravy with It when the advance guard of .the .lame and the halt and the sick ..made. its appearance. The cave's en trance became jammed with them, and no riot ever made more noise. "Hakim! Ho, hakim! Where is the hakim who draws teeth? Where is the man who knows yunani?" Ten men burst down the passage all togeiner, an clamoring, ana one man wasted no time at all but began to tear away bloody bandages to show' his weuna. i-ung roiled up Ins sleeves ana began, so that eagerness gave place to wonder. Tile desperate need of winning his first trick, made him horror-proof; and nobody waiting for the nest turn ' was troubled because the man under the knife screamed a little or bled . more than usual. ' . ' When they died and more than one !did die men carried them out and - flung them-over the precipice into the ' 'waterfall below. : Ismail and Darya Khan became choosers of the victims. They seized a man, laid him on the bed, tore off his disgusting bandages and held their breath, until the awful resulting stench ,had more or less dispersed. Then King .would probe or lance or bandage as he saw fit, using anesthetics when he must, but, managing mostly without ' them.' They almost flung money at him. He .' tossed .money, and clothes and every ' other' thing they gave hira into a corner "at "the back of the cave, and nobody lied to steal them back, although, a ''man suspected of honesty in that ' company would have been tortured to " death 'as an' heretic and would have ' fisto" no svilinnthv. For hour after grue'sonj'e, "hour he toiledover wounds and. sores such as onTy battles and evil living can pro duce, until men began to come at last with fresh wounds, all caused by bul- lets,' wrapped In bandages on which tSf oiood h't caked but had not grown "There has been fighting in the Khy ber," somebody Informer! him, and he stopped with lancet in midair to listen, Scanning a hundred faces swiftly in 'the smoky lamplight. There were ten men Who held lamps for him, one of ' them-a newcomer, and itAas he. who spoke. ,i tf "Fighting In the Khyb Aye! We of Wwe Copyright by The Bobbt-Merrill Company them back into their fort !" Aye ! we slew many!" "Not a jihad yet?" King asked, as if the world might be coming to an end. The words were startled out of him'. Under other circumstances he would never have asked that question so di rectly; but he had lost reckoning of everything but these poor devils' dread ful need of doctoring, and he was like a man roused but of a dream. If a holy war had been proclaimed already, then he was engaged on a forlorn hope. But the man laugheti ot hira. "Nay, not yet. Bull-with-a-beard holds back yet. This was a little fight. The jihad shall come later!" 1 "And who is 'Bull-with-a-beard'?" King wondered ; but he did not ask that question because his wits were awake again. It pays not to be in too much of a hurry to know things in the "Hills." As it happened, he asked no more questions, for there came a shout at the cave entrance whose purport he did not catch, and within five minutes after that, without "a word of explana tion, the cave was left empty of all ex cept his own five men. They carried away the men too sick to walk and vanished, snatching the last man away almost before King's fingers had fin ished tying the bandage on his wound. "Why is that?" he asked Ismail. "Why, did they go? Who shouted?", "It is night", Ismail answered. "It was time." King stared about him. ne had not realized until then that without aid o the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front of him ; his eyes had grown used to the gloom, like those of the surgeons in the sick-bays below the waterline in Nelson's fleet "But who shouted?" "Who knows? There is only one here who gives orders. We be many who obey," said Ismail. "Whose men were the last ones?" King asked him, trying a new line. "Bull-with-a-beard's." "And whose man art thou, Ismail?" The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite the A Man Whom He Had Never Seen Be. fore Leaned on a Magazine Rifle and Eyed Him aa a Tiger Eyes Its Prey. same assurance In his voice as once there had been. "I am hers ! Be thou hers, too ! But It. is night. Sleep against the toil to morrow. There be many sick in Khin- - - King made a little effort to clean the cave,,b,ut the task was hopeless. For one thing he was so weary that his very bones were water, ne appointed two-hour watches, to relieve one an other until dawn, and flung himself on a clean bed. He was asleep before bis head had met the pillow; and for all he knew to the contrary he dreamed of Yasmini all nightlong. W iff 11. in ywet the cave she, the woman of the faded photograph the sreneral had given him in Peshawur and that the cave be came filled -.'ith the strange intoxicat ing scent that had first '; wooed his senses in her reception room In Delhi. He dreamed that' she called vim by name. First, "King sahib!" Then "Kurraur Khan!" And her "oice was surprisingly familiar. But dreams are strangevthings." . . . '. . "He sleeps 1" said the same Voice presently. "It is good that'he sleeps!" And in his sleep he thought that n shadowy Ismail grunted an answer. When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down the pas sage into the cave. "Ismail !" he shouted, for he: was thirsty. But there was no answer. "Darya Khan!" Again there was no answer. He called each of the other men by name with the same result. He decided to go to the cava mouth, summon his men, who were no doubt sleeping. But, there was no Ismail near the entrance no Darya Khan nor any of the other men. The horse was gone. So was the mule. So was the harness, and every thing he had, except the drugs and in struments and the presents the sick had given him ; he had noticed all those lying about in confueion when he woke. "Ismail !" he shouted at the top of his lungs, thinking they might all be outside. He heard a man hawk and spit, close to the entrance,- and went out to see. A man whom he had never seen before leaned on a magazine rifle and eyed him as a tiger eyes his prey. , "No farther!" he growled, bringing his rifle to the port. "Why not?" King asked him. "Allah ! When a camel dies in the Khyber do the kites ask why? Go in !" He thought then of Yasmini's brace let, that had always gained him. at least civility from every man who saw it. He held up his left wrist and knew that instant why it felt uncomfortable. The bracelet had disappeared! He turned back into the cave to hunt for it, and the strange scent greeted him again. In spite of the surround ing stench of drugs and filthy wounds, there was no mistaking it. If it had been her special scent in Delhi, as Saunders -swore it was. and her special scent on the note Darya Khan had- car: rled down the Khyber, then it' was hers now, and she had been in the cave. He hunted high and low and found no bracelet. His pistol was gone, too, and his cartridges, but not the dagger, wrapped in a handkerchief, under his shirt. The money, that his patients had brought him, lay on the floor un touched. It was an unusual robber who had robbed him. "Who's Bull-with-a-beard'?" he won dered. "Nobody interfered with me un til I doctored his men. He's in oppo sition. That's a fair guess. Now, who in thunder by the fat lord Harry can 'Bull-with-a-beard' be? And why fighting in the Khyber . so early as all this? And why does 'Bull-with-a-beard,' whoever he is, hang back?" CHAPTER XII. They came and changed , the guard two hours after dawn, to the accom paniment of orders growled through the mist, and the crash of rifle-butts grounding on the rock path. King wei.t to the cave entrance, to look the new man over; he was ' a Mahsudi no sweeter to look at and no less treacher ous for the fact. Also, that he had boils all over the back of his neck. He was not likely to be better tempered because of that fact, either. But it is an ill wind that blows no good to the secret service. "There Is an end to everything," he remarked presently, addressing the world at large, or as much as he could see of it through the cave mouth. "A hill is so high, a pool so deep, a river so wide. There is an end to pain !" he went on, adjusting his horn-rimmed spectacles.. "I lanced a man's, boils last night, and it hurt him, but he roust be well today." "Go in!" growled the guard. "She says It is sorcery ! She says none are to let thee touch them!" "I can heal bolls !" said King, retir ing into the cave. Then, from a safe distance down the passage, he added'a word or two to sink in as the hours went by. At intervals throughout the day Yasmini sent him food by silent messengers. It is not easy to worry and eat heartily at one and the same time. Having eaten, he rolled up his sleeves' and native-made cotton .trou sers and proceeded to clean the cave. After that he overhauled his stock of drugs and instruments, repacking them and making ready against opportunity. "As I told that he&thcn with a gun out there, there's an end to every thing!" he reflected. "May this come soon 1" The second guard that afternoon proved even less communicative than the first, up to the point when, to les sen his ennui, King begat to whistle. Each time he came near the entrance the new guard could catch a few bars of the tune. After a little while the hook-nosed ruffian began to sing the Mines Decade dog's. So King stopped at the entrance and saw then a blood-soaked bandage on tV "ght of his neck, not very far from tut igular. . "Hah !" kl King. "Was that wound got in the r'oyber the other day?" "Nay. Hvi-j In Khinjan." "A man to5d me last night," said King, drawing on imagination without any compunction at all, "that the fight in the Khyber was because a Jihad is launched already." "That man lied!" said the guard, shifting position uneasily, as if afraid to talk too much. "So I told him !" answered King. "I told him there never will be another jihad." "Then thou art a greater liar than he!" the guard answered hotly. "There will be a jihad when she Is ready, such an one as never yet was! India shall bleed for all the fat years she has lain ynplundered ! Not a throat of an un believer in the world shall be left un slit! No jihad? Thou liar! Get in out of my sight!" . So King retired into the cave, with something new to think about. Was she planning the jihad ! Or pretending to plan one? Every once in a while the guard leaned far into the cave mouth and hurled adjectives at him, the mildest of which was a well of in formation. If his temper was the tn per of the "Hills," it was easy to r?d disappointment for a jihfvd that should have been already but had beuo post poned. King let him alone, .and., paced the cave for hours. , , He 'was squatting- on ... his bed-end in the dark, like, a spectacled image of Buddha, when the first' jOf. 'the. three men came on guard again and at last Ismail came for him holding a pitchy torch that filled the. dim passage full of acrid smoke and made both of ,hem cough. Ismail was red-eyed with-it.' "Come!" he growled. "Come, little hakim!" Then he turned on his heel at once, as if afraid of being twitted1 with desertion. He seemed to. want to get outside, where he could keep out of range of words,, yet not to wish to seem unfriendly. . But King made no effort to speak to him, following in silence out on to the dark ledge above the waterfall and no ticing that the guard with the boils- was back again on duty. He grinned evilly out of a shadow as King passed.. "Make an end !" he advised. "Jump, hakim, before a worse thing happens !" To illustrate the suggestion he kicked a loose stone over the cliff, and the movement caused hira to bend his neck and so inadvertently to hurt his boils. He cursed, and there was pity in King's voice when he spoke next. "Do they hurt thee?" "Aye, like the devil ! Khinjan is a place of plagues !" "I could heal them," King said, pass ing on, and the man starqd hard. "Come !" boomed Ismail through the darkness, shaking the torch to make it burn better and beckoning impatient ly, and King hurried after him, leaving behind a savage at the cave mouth who fingered his sores and wondered, mut tering, leaning on a rifle, muttering and muttering again as if he had seen a new light. Instead of waiting for King to catch up, Ismail began to lead the way at great speed along a path that descend ed gradually until it curved round the end of the chasm and plunged into a tunnel where the darkness grew opaque. For thirty minutes he led swiftly down a crazy devil's stairway of uneven bowlders, stopping to lend a hand at the worst places, but ever lastingly urging him to hurry. Then the hell-mouth gloom began to grow faintly luminous, and the water fall's thunder burst on their ears from close at hand. They emerged into iresn wet air ana a sea or sound, on a rock ledge like the one above. Ismail raised the torch and waved it. The fire and smoke wandered up, until they flattened on a moving opal dome, that prisoned all the noises in the world. "Earth's Drink !" he announced, wav ing the torch and then shutting his mouth tight, as if afraid to voice sacri lege. . . . . ' . " It was the river, million-colored in the torchlight, pouring from a' half-mile-long slash in the cliff above them and plunging past them through the gloom toward the very middle of the world. Somewhere it met rock bottom, and boiled there, for a roar like the sea's came up from deeps unimagin able. '- ' " . " ; ' He watched the overturning dome until his senses reeled. Then he crawled on hands and knees to the ledge's brink and tried to peer over. But Ismail dragged' hfra back. '-"' 1 "Come!" he howled; but in all that din his shout was like a whisper.' "How deep 'is "it?" King bellowed back. "Allah!. Ask hi.m who made.it 1" The fear of the falls was on the Afridi, and he tugged at King's arm in a frenzy of imp tierce. Suddenly he let go and broke Jcto a run. King trotted after him. After ten minutes' hurrying uphill he guessed they must be level with the river, in a tunnel run ning nearly parallel. Ismail kept look ing back to bid King hurry and never paused once to rest. ppmr;" y.p nrrod fiercely. "This reads to the 'Heart of the nills' P AnS. after that King had to do hi& best to keep the Afridl's beck in sight They began after a time . tt, hear voices and to see the.smoky glare made by other torches. Then Ismail set the pace yet faster, and they became the last two of a procession of turbaned men, who tramped along a winding tunnel into a great mountain's womb. The sound of slippers clicking and rutching on the rock floor swelled and died and Fwelled again as the tunnel led from cavern Into cavern. In one great ... cave they came to every man beat out his torch and tossed it on a. heap. After that there was a ledge above the height of a man's head on either side of the tun nel jei along the.fedge little oil-burning lau were.Tspnced, at measured Intervals. A quarter of simile farther along there were; two (sharp turns in the tunnel, and ,Jhej jsj: last a sea of noise and a veritaMe'hlaiof JIght. Tart of the noise' me.cICJ?Vg; feel homesick, for out of thef; itiouHtaln's very womb brayed" u music-box, such as the old-time carousals made use of before the days of electricity, and steam. It was being worked by inex pert hands, for the time was some thing jerky; but It was robbed. of its tinny meanness and even lent majesty by the hugeness of a cavern's roof, as well as by the crashing, swinging music it played wild wonderful invented for lawless hours and a kingless peo ple. - ' "Marchons ! Citoyens ! " The procession began to tramp In time to it, and the rock shook. They deployed to left and right into a space "Come!" He Urged Fiercely. "This Leads to the Heart of the Hills!'" so vast that the eye at first refused to try tofnieasure it. It-was the hollow core' of a ; mountain, filled by the sea sound of a human crowd and hung with huge stalactites that danced and shift ed and flung back a -thousand colors at the flickering light below. Across the cavern's farther end for a space of two hundred yards the great .river rushed, plunging out of a great fanged gap and hurrying out f view down another one, licking smooth banki on its. way with a hungry sucking sound. - - , There were little lamps everywhere, perched on ledges amid the stalactites,; and they suffused the whole cavern In' golden glow. In the midst of the cav--ern a great arena had been left; bare, and thousands of turbaned men squat ted round it in rings... At the end where the . river formed a tangent, to them the rings were flattened, and at that point they were cut into by the ramp of a. bridge, and by a lane left to connect the bridge with the arena. The bridge end formed a nearly square platform, about fourteen feet above the floor, and the broad track thence to the arena, as well as all the arena's boundary, had been marked offi by great earthenware lamps, whose greasy smoke streaked upvand was lost by the wind among the stalactites. "Greek lamps, every one of 'em !" King whispered to ' himself, but he wasted no time just then on trying to explain how Greek lamps had ever got there. There was too much else to watch and wonder at. No steps led down from the bridge end to the floor; toward the arena it was blind. But from the bridge's far ther end across the hurrying water stairs had been hewn out of the rock wall and led up to "a hole" of twice a man's height, more than fifty feet above water level. On either side of the bridge end a passage had been left clear to the river edge, and nobody seemed to care to Invade it, although it was not marked off in any way. Each passage was' about fifty feet wide and quite straight. But the space between the bridge end and the arena, and the or ;na Itself, had to be kept free from trespassers by fifty swaggering ruf fians, armed to the teeth'. Every man of the thousands there had a knife in evidence, but the arena guards had magazine rifles as well as Khyber tulwars. Nobody else wore firearms openly. Some of the arena guards bore huge round shields of pre historic pattern of a size and sort he had never seen before, even in ' mu seums. But there was very little that he was seeing that night of kind that he had seen before anywhere! - The guards lolled Insolently, con scious of brute strength and special favor. When any mar. trespassed with so much as a toe beyond the ring of lamps, a guard would slap his rifle-butt until the swivel rattled, and the of fender w?wld wmrrj lwtu bounds ainld the jeers of a ay who had seen. Shoving, kicking and elbowing with set purpose, Ismail forced a way through the already seated crowd and drew King down Into the cramped space beside him, close enough to the arena to be able to catch the guards low laughter. But he was restless. Ho wished to get nearer yet, only there seemed ho room anywhere in front. Then a guard threw his shield down with a clang and deliberately fired his rifle at the roof. The rlcoehettlng bul let brought down a shower of splint ered stone and stalactite, and he grinned as he watched the crowd dodge to avoid it. instantly a hundred men rose from different directions and raced for the arena,' each with a curved sword In either hand. " The yelling changed back Into the chant, only louder than before, and by that much more terrible. Cym bals crashed. The muRi; box resumed Its measured grinding of the "Marseil laise." And the hundred began an Afridi sword dance, than which there is nothing wilder in all the world. Its like can only be seen under the shadow of the "Hills." Ismail seemed obsessed by the spirit of hades let loose drawn by it, as by a magnet, although subsequent events proved him not to have been altogether without a plan. He got up, with his eyes fixed on the -dance, and thrust himself and King next to some Orak zai Pathans, elbowing savagely to right and left to make room. And patience proved scarce. The nearest man reached for the ever-ready Pathan knife, but paused in the instant that his knife licked clear. From a swift side glance at King's face he changed to a full stare, his scowl slowly giv ing place to a grin as he recognized him. "Allah!" lie drove the long blade back again. . "Well met, hakim ! See the wound heals finely !" ' Baring his shoulder under the smelly sheepskin coat, he lifted a bandage gingerly to show the clean opening out of which King had coaxed a bullet the day before. It looked wholesome and ready to heal. "Name thy reward, haklra ! We Orakzai Pathans forget"' no favors !" (Now that boast was a true one.) King nodded more to himself than to the other man. He needed, for In stance, very much to kndw who was planning a jihad, and who "Bull-wlth-a-beard" might be; but it was not safe to confide just yet in a chance-made ac quaintance. "A very fair acquaintance with some phases of the East had taught hira that names such as Bull-with-a-beard are often almost ioto graphlcally descriptive, ne rose to feet to look. A blind man can talk.-iiut it takes trained eyes to gather informa tion. The din had increased, and it was safe to stand up'and starebecause all eyes were on the madness in the mid dle. There were plenty besides him self who stood, to get a better view, and he had to dodge from side to side to see between them. "I'm not to doctor his men. There fore It's a fair guess that he and I are to be kept apart. Therefore he'll be as far away from me .now as possible, supposing he's here." - Reasoning along that line, he tried to see the faces on the far side, but the problem was to see over the dancers' heads. He succeeded presently, for the Orakzai Pathan saw what he want ed, and in his anxiety to be agreeable, reached forward to pull back a . box from between the ranks in front. Its owners offered instant fight, but made no further objection when they saw who wanted it. and why. King won dered at their sudden change of mind. He found a man soon who was not interested in the dancing, but who had 'eyes ' and' eafs apparently for every thing" and 'everybody else. He watche3 Jhim for ten minutes, until at last their eyes met. Then he sat down anJ kicked the box back to its owners. Ha touched the rathan'S' broad shoulder. The man smiled and beh't his turbaned h'cad to listen.' '' ''"Opposite," sa'id King, "nearly ex actly oppositethree rows' from the front, counting the front row. as one there isits a man .with a black beard, whose shoulders are' like a bull's. Aa lie "sits he hangs his head between them. Look! See! Tell me truly what his naine is J" . t . T The Pathan 'got., up "and strode for ward to stand on the b6x kicking aside the elbows that leaned on It and. laugh: ing 7hen the owners cursed hirp. H stood on it and stared for five minuted, counting deliberately three times over, striking a finger oh the palm of hU hand to check himself. "Bull-with-a-beard !" he announced at last, dropping back into place beside King. - "Muhammad Anim. The mullah Muhammad Airim." "An Afghan?" King asked. - "He says he Is an Afghan. But nn less he lies he Is from Ishtamboul (Constantinople). " : Itching to ask more questions. King the -hakkr. Kurram Khan blinked mildly behind his spectacles and looked like One to whom a savage might safe ly ease his mind. - "He bade me go to Sikaram where my village is and bring him a hundred men for his lashkar. He says he haa her special favor. Wait and watch, 1 say!" - - "Has he money?" asked King, appar ently drawing a- bow at a venture fo conversation's sake. Btit there is an art in asking artless queations. King witnesses wilj doings In the cavern and sees harrowing sights. Yasmini appears, a love ly vision, and the arnry of fight ers go wild with enthusiasm. (TO BE CONTi UlJUl
The Roanoke Beacon and Washington County News (Plymouth, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
Feb. 15, 1918, edition 1
2
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75