King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure by Talbot Mundy (ink ebook reader .TXT) 📕

a path like a rope ladder descended in zigzags to the valley that is Khinjan's dry moat; it needed courage as well as imagination to believe that the animals could be guided down it.

“Is there no other way?” asked King. He knew well of one other, but one does not tell all one knows in the “Hills,” and there might have been a third way.

“None from this side,” said Ismail.

“And on the other side?”

“There is a rather better path--that by which the sirkar's troops once came--although it has been greatly obstructed since. It is two days' march from here to reach it. Be warned a last time, sahib--little hakim--be warned and go back!”

“Thou bird of ill omen!” laughed King. “Must thou croak from every rock we rest on?”

“If I were a bird I would fly away back with thee!” said Ismail.

“Forward, since we can not fly--forward and downward!” King answered. “She must have crossed this valley. Therefore there are things worth while beyond! Forward!”

The animals, weary to death anyhow, fell rather that walked down the track. The men sat and scrambled. And the heat rose up to meet them from the waterless ravine as if its floor were Tophet's lid and the devil busy under it, stoking.

It was midday when at last they stood on bottom and swayed like men in a dream fingering their bruises and scarcely able for the heat haze to see the tangled mass of stone towers and mud-and-stone walls that faced them, a mile away. Nobody challenged them yet. Khinjan itself seemed dead, crackled in the heat.

“Sahib, let us mount the hill again and wait for night and a cool breeze!” urged Darya Khan.

Ismail clucked into his beard and spat to wet his lips.

“This glare makes my eyes ache!” he grumbled.

“Wait, sahib! Wait a while!” urged the others.

“Forward!” ordered King. “This must be Tophet. Know ye not that none come out of Tophet by the way they entered in? Forward! The exit is beyond!”

They staggered after him, sheltering their eyes and faces from the glare with turban-ends and odds and ends of clothing. The animals swayed behind them with hung heads and drooping ears, and neither man nor beast had sense enough left to have detected an ambush. They were more than half-way across the valley, hunting for shadow where none was to be found, when a shotted salute brought them up all-standing in a cluster. Six or eight nickel-coated bullets spattered on the rocks close by, and one so narrowly missed King that he could feel its wind.

Up went all their hands together, and they held them so until they ached. Nothing whatever happened. Their arms ceased aching and grew numb.

“Forward!” ordered King.

After another quarter of a mile of stumbling among hot boulders, not one of which was big enough to afford cover, or shelter from the sun, another volley whistled over them. Their hands went up again, and this time King could see turbaned heads above a parapet in front. But nothing further happened.

“Forward!” he ordered.

They advanced another two hundred yards and a third volley rattled among the rocks on either hand, frightening one of the mules so that it stumbled and fell and had to be helped up again. When that was done, and the mule stood trembling, they all faced the wall. But they were too weary to hold their hands up any more. Thirst had begun to exercise its sway. One of the men was half delirious.

“Who are ye?” howled a human being, whose voice was so like a wolf's that the words at first had no meaning. He peered over the parapet, a hundred feet above, with his head so swathed in dirty linen that he looked like a bandaged corpse.

“What will ye? Who comes uninvited into Khinjan?”

King bethought him of Yasmini's talisman. He, held it up, and the gold band glinted in the sun. Yet, although a Hillman's eyes are keener than an eagle's, he did not believe the thing could be recognized at that angle, and from that distance. Another thought suggested itself to him. He turned his head and caught Ismail in the act of signaling with both hands.

“Ye may come!” howled the watchman on the parapet, disappearing instantly.

King trembled--perhaps as a racehorse trembles at the starting gate, though he was weary enough to tremble from fatigue. The “Hills,” that numb the hearts of many men, had not cowed him, for he loved them and in love there is no fear. Heat and cold and hunger were all in the day's work; thirst was an incident; and the whistle of lead in the wind had never meant more to him than work ahead to do.

But a greyhound trembles in the leash. A boiler, trembles when word goes down the speaking-tube from the bridge for “all she's got.” And so the mild-looking hakim Kurram Khan, walking gingerly across hot rocks, donning cheap, imitation shell-rimmed spectacles to help him look the part, trembled even more than the leg-weary horse he led.

But that passed. He was all in hand when he led his men up over a rough stone causeway to a door in the bottom of a high battlemented wall and waited for somebody to open it.

The great teak door looked as if it had been stolen from some Hindu temple, and he wondered how and when they could have brought it there across those savage intervening miles. With its six-inch teak planks and bronze bolts its weight must be guessed at in tons--yet a horse can hardly carry a man along any of the trails that lead to Khinjan!

The wood bore the marks of siege and fracture and repair. The walls were new-built, of age-old stone. The last expedition out of India had leveled every bit of those defenses flat with the valley, but Khinjan's devils had reerected them, as ants rebuild a rifled nest.

The door was swung open after a time, pulled by a rope, manipulated from above by unseen hands. Inside was another blind wall, twenty feet behind the first. To the right a low barricade blocked the passage and provided a safe vantage point from which it could be swept by a hail of lead; but to the left a path ran unobstructed for more than a hundred yards between the walls, to where the way was blocked by another teak door, set in unscalable black rock. High above the door was a ledge of rock that crossed like a bridge from wall to wall, with a parapet of stone built upon it, pierced for rifle-fire.

As they approached this second door a Rangar turban, not unlike King's own, appeared above the parapet on the ledge and a voice he recognized hailed him good-humoredly.

“Salaam aleikoum!”

“And upon thee be peace!” King answered in the Pashtu tongue, for the “Hills” are polite, whatever the other principles.

Rewa Gunga's face beamed down on him, wreathed in smiles that seemed to