Caves of Terror by Talbot Mundy (book club recommendations .TXT) 📕

He shook his head.

"My friend, if your eyes had not been fixed on things unworthy of consideration such as an elephant's rump and the theft of sugar-cane, you would have seen us go."

"How did you persuade King to leave me standing there without a word of warning?" I demanded.

"How were you persuaded into this place?" he retorted.

"You mean you gagged and bound him?"

He smiled again.

"Your friend was weak from having so nearly been drowned; nevertheless, you overestimate my powers!"

"When I first met you, you gripped my hand," I answered. "I am reckoned a strong man, yet I could not shift your hand a fraction of an inch. Now you suggest that you are weaker than a half-drowned man. I don't understand you."

"Of course you don't. That is because you don't understand the form of energy that I used on the first occasion. Unfortunately I can only use it when arrangements have been made in advance. It is as mechanical as your watch, only a different kind of mechanics—something, in fact, that some of your Western scientists would say has not yet been invented."

"Well, where's King?" I asked him.

"Upstairs. He asked me to bring you. Now how can I?"

He smiled again with that peculiar whimsical helplessness that contrasted so strangely with his former arrogance. He who had looked like a lion when we first encountered him seemed now to be a meek and rather weak old man—much weaker in fact than could be accounted for by the red ring that my noose had made on his neck.

"Is King at liberty?" I demanded.

"And what do you call liberty?" he asked me blandly, as if he were really curious to know my opinion on that subject.

"Can he come and go without molestation?"

"If he cares to run that risk, and is not caught. Try not to become impatient with me! Anger is impotence! Explanations that do not explain are part and parcel of all religions and most sciences; therefore why lose your temper? Your friend is free to come and go, but must take his chance of being caught. He pursues investigations."

"Where?"

"Where else than in this palace? Listen!"

Among all the phenomena of nature there is none more difficult to explain than sound. Hitherto in that teak-lined room we had seemed shut off from the rest of the world completely, for the door and walls were so thick and the floor so solid that sound-waves seemed unable to penetrate. Yet now a noise rather like sandpaper being chafed together began to assert itself so distinctly as to seem almost to have its origin in the room. In a way it resembled the forest noise when a breeze stirs the tree-tops at night—irregular enough, and yet with a kind of pulse in it, increasing and decreasing.

"You recognize that?" asked the Mahatma.

I shook my head.

"Veiled women, walking!"

"You mean the princesses have come?"

"A few, and their attendants."

"How many princesses?"

"Oh, not more than twenty. But each will bring at the least twenty attendants, and perhaps a score of friends, each of whom in turn will have her own attendants. And only the princesses and their friends will enter the audience hall, which, however, will be surrounded by the attendants, whose business it will be to see that no stranger, and above all no male shall see or overhear."

"And if they were to catch Athelstan King up there?"

"That would be his last and least pleasant experience in this world!"

That was easy enough to believe. I had just had an experience of what those palace women could do.

"She, who learned our secrets, will take care that none shall play that trick on her," the Mahatma went on confidently. "These women will use the audience hall she lent to us. Their plan is to control the new movement in India, and their strength consists in secrecy. They will take all precautions."

"Do you mean to tell me," I demanded, "that as you sit here now you are impotent? Can't you work any of your tricks?"

"Those are not tricks, my friend, they are sciences. Can your Western scientists perform to order without their right environment and preparations?"

"Then you can't break that door down, or turn loose any magnetic force?"

"You speak like a superstitious fool," he retorted calmly. "The answer is no."

"That," said I, "is all that I was driving at. Do you see this?" And I held my right fist sufficiently close to his nose to call urgent attention to it. "Tell me just what transpired between you and King from the time when you disappeared out there in the courtyard until you came in here alone!"

"No beating in the world could make me say a word," he answered calmly. "You would only feel horribly ashamed."

I believed him, and sat still, he looking at me in a sort of way in which a connoisseur studies a picture with his eyelids a little lowered.

"Nevertheless," he went on presently, "I observe that I have misjudged you in some respects. You are a man of violent temper, which is cave-man foolishness; yet you have prevailing judgment, which is the beginning of civilization. There is no reason why I should not tell you what you desire to know, even though it will do you no good."

"I listen," I answered, trying to achieve that air of humility with which chelas listen to their gurus.

That was partly because I really respected the man in a way; and partly because there was small harm in flattering him a little, if that could induce him to tell me the more.

"Know then," he began, "that it was my fault that the Princess Yasmini was able to play that trick on us. It was to me that she first made the proposal that we should use her audience hall for our conference. It was I who conveyed that proposal to those whom it concerned, and I who persuaded them. It was through my lack of diligence that the hiding-place was overlooked in which she and certain of her women lay concealed, so that they overheard some of our secrets.

"For that I should have been condemned to death at once, and it would have been better if that had been done.

"Yet for fifty years I have been a man of honor. And although it is one of our chief requirements that we lay aside such foolishness as sentiment, nevertheless the seeds of sentiment remained, and those men were loath to enforce the penalty on me, who had taught so many of them.

"So they compromised, which is inevitably fatal. For compromise bears within itself the roots of right and wrong, so that whatever good may come of it must nevertheless be ruined by inherent evil. I bade them use me for their studies, and have done with compromise, but being at fault my authority was gone, so they had their way.

"They imposed on me the task of making use of the Princess Yasmini, and of employing her by some means to make a beginning of the liberation of India. And she sought to make use of me to get Athelstan King into her clutches. Moreover, believing that her influence over us was now too great to be resisted, she demanded that Athelstan King and yourself should be shown sciences; and I consented, believing that thereby your friend might be convinced, and would agree to go to the United States to shape public opinion.

"Thereafter you know what happened. You know also that, because the seeds of compromise were inherent in the plan, my purpose failed. Instead of consenting to go to the United States Athelstan King insisted on learning our sciences. You and he escaped, by a dive from the upper window of this palace that would not have disgraced two fish-hawks, and although you never guessed it, by that dive you sentenced me to death.

"For I had to report your escape to those whom it most concerned. And at once it was obvious to them that you were certain to tell what you had seen.

"Nevertheless, there was one chance remaining that you might both be drowned; and one chance that you might be recaptured before you could tell any one what you had seen. And there was a third chance that, if you should be recaptured, you might be persuaded to promise never to reveal what little of our secrets you already know. In that case, your lives might be spared, although not mine.

"So it was laid upon me to discover where you were, and to bring you back if possible. And on the polished table in that cave in which you saw Benares and Bombay and London and New York, I watched you swim down the river until you were rescued by the elephants.

"So then I went to meet you and bring you back."

"What if we had refused?"

"That elephant you rode—hah! One word from me, and the mob would have blamed you for the damage. They would have pulled you from the elephant and beaten you to death. Such processes are very simple to any one who understands mob-passions. Just a word—just a hint—and the rest is inevitable."

"But you say you are under sentence of death. What if you should refuse to obey them?"

"Why refuse? What good would that do?"

"But you were at liberty. Why not run away?"

"Whither? Besides, should I, who have enforced the penalty of death on so many fools, disloyal ones and fanatics, reject it for myself when I myself have failed? There is nothing unpleasant about death, my friend, although the manner of it may be terrible. But even torture is soon over; and the sting is gone from torture when the victim knows that the cause of science is thereby being advanced. They will learn from my agonies."

"Suit yourself!" I urged him. "Each to his own amusement. What happened after I turned to watch the elephant at the gate?"

"Those on whom the keeping of our secret rests considered that none would believe you, even if you were to tell what you have seen. But Athelstan King is different. For many years the Indian Government has accepted his bare word. Moreover, we knew that we can also accept his word. He is a man whose promises are as good as money, as the saying is.

"So after you turned aside to watch an elephant, those who were watching us opened a hidden door and Athelstan King was made prisoner from behind. They carried him bound and gagged into a cavern such as those you visited; and there he was confronted by the Nine Unknown, who asked him whether or not he will promise never to reveal what he had seen."

The Mahatma paused.

"Did he promise?" I asked him.

"He refused. What was more, he dared them to make away with him, saying that the mahout who had accompanied us hither would already have informed the Maharajah Jihanbihar, who would certainly report to the Government. And I, standing beside him, confirmed his statement."

"You seem to have acted as prosecuting attorney against yourself!" I said.

"No, I simply told the truth," he answered. "We who calculate in terms of eternity and infinity have scant use for untruth. I told the Nine Unknown the exact truth—that this man Athelstan King might not be killed, because of the consequences; and that whatever he might say to certain officers of the Government would be believed. So they let him go again, and set midnight to-night as the hour of the beginning of my death."

"Did King know that his refusal to promise entailed your death?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"Why didn't you tell him?"

"Because it would not have been true, my friend. I had already been sentenced to death. His promise could make no possible difference to my fate. They let him go, and ordered me to present myself at midnight; so I went with him, to preserve him from the cobras in a tunnel through which he must pass.

"I brought him into this palace by hidden ways, and after I had shown him the audience hall, where these princesses are to meet, he asked me to go and find you—that being easier for me than for him, because none in this palace would be likely to question me, whereas he would be detected instantly and watched, even if not prevented. And when I had found you—and you nearly killed me—some one, as you know, locked the door and shut us in here together. It is all one to me," he added with a shrug of the shoulders; "I have only until midnight at any event, and it makes small difference where I spend the intervening hours. Perhaps you would like to sleep a little? Why not? Sleep, and I will keep watch."

But, badly though I needed sleep, that sort of death-watch did not quite appeal. Besides, gentle, and honest and plausible though