The Old Man of the Mountain Part 13

What did that mean? What service was exacted of the hapless wretches enthralled to such a master?

He remembered too that the Old Man had wholly ignored Forrester's reference to the Englishman who, it was suggested, had fallen into his hands. Had the dust of Beresford's destroyed body been already scattered on the floor of this horrible temple, or had he too been preserved for a lifelong servitude? Was he perhaps at this moment lying in a cell, alone, crushed in spirit, asking himself the same unanswerable questions?

Agitated beyond endurance, Mackenzie got up and paced the floor. As he walked, he found himself glancing more and more frequently, and each time for a longer period, at the monster's green eye. It exercised a basilisk attraction: by and by he was unable to withdraw his gaze from it. He tried to look elsewhere, to think of other things; but always his eyes wandered back to the one spot. It glowed upon him with a sort of hypnotic fascination, leering, as it seemed, mocking him, a mute unwinking witness of his despair. Unable to endure the torment, he turned his back upon it, threw himself on the floor, and buried his face in his folded arms. And there at last, worn out in body and mind, he fell into a sleep broken by frightful dreams.

When he awoke his hand moved by force of habit to his pocket for his watch. It was gone. He felt in all his pockets: they had been emptied.

Nothing but his clothes was left to him. Looking up at the window slit, he saw sunlight streaming in; the greenish hue had almost disappeared.

He rose, and with a strong effort of will forced himself to turn towards the wall on which the monster was painted. He almost shouted with relief when he discovered that the third eye, though still aglow, was much dimmer than it had been in the night. The sun had conquered; the eye's baleful attraction was gone.

Presently the negrito guards brought him his breakfast of water and the same glutinous porridge as on the previous day. He spoke to them, first in English, then in Hindustani, but they answered nothing; if they understood him, they gave no sign of it. An hour or two later they returned, accompanied by one of the shaven priests, who indicated that he was to follow them. To refuse, he knew, would be vain; but he shivered with dread lest he were summoned to witness another scene like that of the night. He found, however, that his fears were not justified. His guards took him through miles, as it seemed, of narrow corridors hewn in the rock, always ascending, and brought him presently to an arch through which the sunlight poured. Pa.s.sing out into the open air, he saw with surprise that he was at the foot of a steep stairway cut in the face of the rift. The steps, about a foot wide, led to the summit, perhaps a hundred feet above. A rope, carried down a kind of handrail, intervened between the pa.s.senger and the abyss yawning more than a thousand feet below.

The guards signified that he was at liberty to ascend the stairs, and left him. At first he shrank from attempting the climb; his experiences, and his restless night, ill fitted him for any task that demanded steady nerves. But Mackenzie was a man of grit; freedom, the fresh air, the pure sunshine braced him; his curiosity was keen; and at length, steadfastly averting his eyes from the dizzy depth below, and clinging firmly to the rope, he began to mount the stairway.

He gained the top, and an unexpected sight met his wondering eyes.

Before him, and on either side, stretched a broad plateau, rising in the far distance to the mountains of the snowy range, whose peaks, miles high, glistened dazzlingly in the sunlight. That which surprised him most of all was that the plateau was cultivated. It was divided into many rectangular fields, on which crops of all kinds were growing, and herds of cattle grazing. The fresh green of the vegetation was refreshing to his eyes after the greyness of the barren rock on which they had rested of late. He saw now why the community required supplies of wood from the outside. There were no timber trees. At his right hand lay an extensive orchard, but nowhere were to be seen trees that could be felled for fuel or building.

In three directions there were groups of huts, and people were moving about in the fields. They were evidently of many races. There were dwarfish negritos like the Temple guards, Chinese, Tibetans, Nagas and other hillmen. There were women and children, but these seemed to be all negritos or hill-folk: no Chinese women were among them.

Mackenzie remained for several minutes at the top of the rock stairway, scanning the whole prospect. He was quite alone, apparently free to move in any direction he pleased. No one took notice of him. When he moved a few paces towards the nearest group of huts, he looked around, expecting to find that someone had been told off to watch him. The fact that such was not the case induced a sense of utter hopelessness. If he was not guarded, the reason must be that escape was impossible. But he promised himself that, granted his liberty thus, he would not rest until he had thoroughly explored the plateau, and a.s.sured himself that there was not in one direction or another an outlet into the larger world.

The sight of Sher Jang approaching him, spade in hand, recalled him to the present, and he hurried to meet the shikari, whose usually expressionless countenance lit up at sight of him.

"It is good to see that you are alive," he said. "What did they do with you?"

"They locked me up, sahib, in a warm room, and this morning brought me here. A shorn-pate put this spade into my hand, and bade me dig. I have lost caste; it were better to die: but he told me I am a slave, and shall remain a slave while life lasts."

"And Hamid Gul?"

"I know nothing of him, sahib. I have not seen him since we left the pit below. There are many of my countrymen here; they are all in bondage; and they quake and shiver when they speak of the Eye."

"I don't wonder," Mackenzie murmured. "What do they say of the Eye?"

"They speak of it as of some unknown horror, sahib. No one has seen it: they say that no man sees it and lives. They declare that the one-armed stranger had both his arms, like you and me; one day he had two, the next, when he came up, he had but one. They tell also that men have gone from this place down into the depths yonder, and have never been seen again. It is Fate: who can stand against it?"

At this moment a Chinaman dressed like those who had formed the second rank in the Temple came up to Mackenzie, held out a spade, and signed that he was to join a group of men who were digging in a neighbouring field. Mackenzie thrust his hands into his pockets and turned his back upon the man. To his surprise there was no insistence, no attempt at compulsion: the priest, as he supposed him to be, went away without a word. And then he saw Forrester hurrying towards him from the head of the stairway.

"Where's Bob?" were Forrester's first words.

"I was going to ask you that," Mackenzie replied. "I haven't seen him."

"They locked me up alone," Forrester went on, "and I never pa.s.sed a more awful night. That eye!"

"The monster's on the wall?"

"Yes. Had you one too? I couldn't look away from it: try as I might, the frightful thing seemed to draw my eyes to it against my will. What unnameable devilry are they playing on us?"

"Making good!" Mackenzie replied with a grim tightening of his mouth.

"The Old Man of the Mountain said we were to stay here for the rest of our lives: he means to terrify us into knuckling under. But I vow----"

"For any sake say nothing," Forrester implored earnestly. "I feel as if the very air were spying on us; and who knows, if we say anything against him, he won't burn us to powder as he did that poor trembling wretch!"

"An easy death: better than lifelong slavery. All these folk you see about are slaves."

"But why have they let us come up here?"

"To prove we can't escape, no doubt. But I'll not----"

"Hush! Look at that fellow slinking by!" Forrester cried in an urgent whisper.

It was one of the shaven priests walking towards the orchard.

"Let's follow him," said Mackenzie. "There's no check upon us; we are free men still."

Sher Jang had returned to his digging. The two friends set off pace for pace after the priest. He did not enter the orchard, which was in no way railed off, but skirting its upper end, he drew near to a long low building of stone, with open doorways a few feet apart. It reminded Mackenzie of the rank of connected cottages often seen near engineering works in his own country, except that it was characteristically Chinese in form and decoration. The priest entered one of the doorways and disappeared. As they pa.s.sed, they heard a dull incessant hammering from within the building.

"Sounds like a smithy," said Forrester. "I wonder what goes on there?"

A little beyond the building, rose a sort of paG.o.da, three stories high, but not so truly pyramidal in shape as the memorials frequently seen in China. It was surrounded by a walled enclosure, the wall being too high for them to see over.

"It's not big enough to be the Temple," Mackenzie remarked. "I guess it's the residence of the August and Venerable. We'll go on; maybe we'll see the Temple later."

"I don't want to see it," Forrester said with a shudder. "I never want to see it again."

"Eh, but I do," Mackenzie returned. "I wish to know all I can about this place. The look of the outside can't do us any harm."

But no such building came in sight. The only thing that attracted their attention was a stream flowing from north to south across the plateau.

It pa.s.sed through the walled enclosure of the paG.o.da, and flowed away between embankments in what they supposed to be the direction of the falls. They were thinking of following its course, when a horn sounded stridently in the distance. At the signal the priests emerged from their dwellings, and marched in file towards the stairway. Mackenzie and Forrester followed them, out of curiosity. They descended the stairway one by one. Soon afterwards another file, the moustachioed priests, came up from the opposite direction. None of them so much as glanced at the two young men standing aside to watch them. When all had gone down, Sher Jang came up to his masters, and told them that the horn blast was the signal for the midday meal. If they wished to eat, they must descend, for no food was given on the plateau to the men from below.

"I'll not go down till I must," said Mackenzie firmly. "To exchange this fresh air and sunshine for the close atmosphere below--no, I'll fast for the day rather."

The two remained foodless for the rest of the day. No one interfered with them. They rambled where they pleased. Every now and then they spoke to one or other of the Indians in the community, asking them how they had come to the place and what their experiences had been. A few had stumbled upon the rift by accident; most had been entrapped, kidnapped, or inveigled by the priests. All were utterly broken in spirit, and lived in hourly terror of the Eye, the mysterious and dreadful something of which rumour spoke, but which none had seen.

Among those whom the Englishmen addressed was an old Indian, who told them that he had been captured with his little daughter several years before on the outskirts of his village. He was a zamindar, a man of substance and of some education. He invited the two men into his hut.

"Lilavanti!" he called as they entered.

From behind a curtain that divided the apartment a tall beautiful girl of sixteen or seventeen years came forth. She wore no veil. A white dhoti was wound about her body. Her raven-black hair was bound with a fillet of pearls, and a string of pearls depended from her neck. She bowed deeply as her father introduced the visitors as English sahibs, placed cushions for them, and then seated herself modestly in a corner.

"I have no hope for myself, but I still dream that my daughter may even yet be released from bondage," said the zamindar, looking with pride at the girl. "We are not ill-treated, you perceive; we make no complaints on that score. So long as the slaves fulfil their appointed tasks they suffer nothing at the hands of the priests. But our life is overshadowed by a cloud of uncertainty as to what the future may bring forth."

"What is the meaning of it all?" Forrester asked.

"No man knows, but I will tell you, sahibs, some conclusions I have come to. The negritos, the original inhabitants of this plateau, are a dwindling race. Fresh blood is required in order to maintain a sufficient population for the cultivation of the soil. Prisoners are brought here for that purpose, and for another which I know not. At irregular intervals men are taken down the steps yonder: we never see them again. The strange thing is that no Indians are thus removed, but only Chinese and negritos. And there is another strange thing: the Chinese prisoners of humble rank are set to work on the fields and are never taken underground; but at intervals, sometimes long, sometimes short, young men of n.o.ble birth and high education are brought here. At first they spend their days here above, as you are doing to-day, and descend at sunset; but a time comes, sooner or later, when they descend for the last time and are no more seen. And from the first they are listless, dazed, scarcely sane. If they speak, it is as though they were the mouthpiece of others. Some of them have conversed with me in my own tongue; but I have never been able to learn from them any particulars of their past life, or of the nature of the place underground where they pa.s.s the nights. Always they speak with the utmost reverence of the priests, whom they profess to be their kind friends."

"Like our young Chinaman," Forrester remarked to Mackenzie.

"Ay; he is the latest victim, it seems. Have you ever seen one of our countrymen here?" Mackenzie asked.

"One only. I shrank from telling you. He came up daily for eight or ten days: I had many conversations with him. It is four days since I saw him: I shall never see him again."