The Old Man of the Mountain Part 9

Beyond the plain rose the mountains, towering up peak behind peak to the summits of the snowy range in the remote distance. The three men halted involuntarily, struck both by the majesty of the scene and by the deafening roar which almost drowned their voices.

"Man, it's grand!" Mackenzie shouted.

"But where is it?" Forrester bawled in his ear.

They looked all around, but saw nothing to account for the thunderous noise. The sky was overcast, and a layer of mist obscured the lower foothills, though the heights beyond heaved their grey ma.s.ses in clear undulations miles above. As they stood, a sunbeam stole through the clouds, and a rainbow flung its gay arch across the plain directly ahead of them.

"There's rain over there," said Jackson, at the top of his voice.

"Only mist!" Forrester cried in reply.

For a few moments they gazed mutely upon a sight that never loses its interest and wonder. Then Mackenzie smote his thigh, and cried like one in ecstasy:--

"Man--it's the Fall!"

The mist was rolling away as the sun gathered strength, yet the rainbow did not fade, but shone more brightly than ever over a s.p.a.ce of perhaps one-eighth of a mile. And then the onlookers saw that what had hitherto seemed to them a part of the bank of mist was in reality a gigantic torrent of water, mingled with spray thrown up hundreds of feet from the unseen bottom. They watched it in silent awe. The villagers had described it as falling from the clouds into the depths of the earth.

Their words appeared to be literally true. An eighth of a mile in width, the torrent poured over the edge of a tableland--a single huge step in the ascent to the plateaux of Tibet. Mist still hung above it, the enormous screen of spray concealed its lower part, and at the distance they still were from it the spectators could only just distinguish the movement of the mighty volume of water.

It had been arranged with their guides that they should remain on the spot where they first caught sight of the fall until the men had delivered their timber and returned. The delay gave them an opportunity of taking a meal. As they ate they amused themselves by guessing at the height of the fall. Forrester suggested that it was as high as St.

Paul's; Jackson thought this estimate too low; and Mackenzie astonished the others by declaring that he wouldna wonder but it was fully as high as Ben Lomond.

It was three hours before the natives returned, and the white men, setting forth impatiently at length to skirt the lake and reach the foot of the hills on the western side of the fall, found to their amazement that they had nearly two miles to go before they came level with it.

Then they were struck dumb by the full magnificence of the scene. The spray itself, rising like steam from a gigantic cauldron, attained to the height of St. Paul's. The two Englishmen were prepared to admit that the top of the fall was even higher than the summit of Ben-Lomond; but Mackenzie's calculating eye gauged more nearly to the truth.

"I would say it's two thousand feet, or a wee bit more," he said, and his friends laughed at the incongruous use of the word "wee" in such a connection.

They found that the scarp over which the torrent poured extended for miles on each side. It appeared to be almost perpendicular, though away to the left it became more broken. On the right, except for one or two steep and rugged spurs, it was one continuous wall of rock.

The path they had followed round the western sh.o.r.e of the lake brought them to a small wooden bridge spanning an inflowing stream. It somewhat resembled the bridge delineated in the well-known willow pattern. To this the raft of timber was moored. Evidently it was part of the plan for maintaining the secrecy of the hill community that purchasers and vendors should come into contact as seldom as possible; or perhaps the woodcutters' own fear of the Eye kept them from approaching nearer to the dwelling of the "little men." No doubt the timber would presently be fetched, and drawn along the stream into the lake, and thence to its destination.

The three men looked around for some signs of human habitation, but discovered none. A rough roadway, however, led from the bridge along the base of the precipice towards the fall, which appeared to be about half a mile distant. After a brief consultation they decided to make their way along this road. To be prepared for possible danger they first laid down their impedimenta and unslung their rifles. Then they set off, Forrester leading with the shikari.

After a while the path rose somewhat steeply on the face of the cliff, and they soon saw that it pa.s.sed underneath the fall itself, the torrent of water forming a gigantic arch. When they arrived beneath this they found themselves in a dim twilight, the gla.s.sy sea-green surface of the watery arch reflecting a pallid hue upon their faces. They were perfectly dry, except for some flecks of spray dashed upon them from the base of the fall. At this spot they were three or four hundred feet above the surface of the lake, which boiled and foamed like an angry sea immensely magnified. The din was terrific; even the loudest shout would scarcely have been audible.

At their first entrance into this segmental tunnel Hamid Gul shrank back, appalled by the noise, the falling water, and the immense, tattered sheet of spray that rose from the seething cauldron hundreds of feet below. But seeing that his employers were pressing forward he pulled himself together, and hurried on close at Mackenzie's heels. The width of the path had diminished to a bare three feet, and as the party crept along it they instinctively clung to the wall of rock on their left hand. A strange attraction was exercised by the smooth arch of falling water; on their right, inducing the same kind of vertigo which most people experience when looking down from giddy heights.

So they pa.s.sed through the furlong of tunnel. A hundred yards or so beyond the eastern end the path began to slope downwards as steeply as it had ascended on the other side, and within a short s.p.a.ce the party found themselves once more almost on a level with the lake. Then the path came to an abrupt end, disappearing into the water that washed the base of the perpendicular cliff. Here they halted; it seemed that they could go no farther, that they must retrace their steps and explore in the other direction.

They could not make themselves heard one by another, but Mackenzie signed to the rest to stand fast; he remembered that beyond the bridge behind them there was no road except that which skirted the lake, and drew the reasonable inference that the path by which they had come must, after all, lead somewhere. It occurred to him to test the depth of the water. Finding that it was no more than two feet, he took off his boots, rolled up his putties, and started to wade. In a few seconds he turned and beckoned to his companions. They followed his example, and on joining him found that he had come to a sharp corner of the precipice, which was cut at this point by an extraordinary rift. At the entrance it was perhaps forty feet wide. The sides were straighter and even nearer to the perpendicular than the face of the cliff bordering the lake. They gazed upwards in astonishment at the immense height.

The top was so far above them that the sides seemed almost to touch, leaving only a narrow slit. Peering into the cleft, they saw nothing beyond the first hundred yards or so. Little light filtered through the opening at the top, and the floor of the rift was illuminated more and more faintly as the sides converged.

Our party stood there in mute amazement. Mackenzie was the only one of them who knew anything of geology: a Scot always knows something of everything; and he surmised that the rift was the result of some t.i.tanic disruption of the earth in an age long past. It was as though the ma.s.s of solid rock had been rent asunder by a gigantic wedge, impelled by a Cyclopean hammer--such a hammer as Thor wields in the Norse myths.

It seemed of little use to enter the rift. No mortal men could make that their abode. But on pa.s.sing beyond the entrance they soon found that further pa.s.sage along the edge of the lake was impossible. The water still came right up to the face of the cliff, and the pathway--if it was a pathway--which they were treading sank ever deeper beneath the surface. There was nothing for it but to hark back, unless they were prepared to swim. Jackson suggested that possibly some side path branched from the rift, leading by a steep zigzag ascent to the summit of this strange precipice.

Retracing their steps accordingly, they turned into the rift, donned their boots, and marched forward. The floor sloped gently upwards, the walls converged until the s.p.a.ce between them was barely half what it had been at the entrance. Pressing on, they became aware that the rift was not straight, as they had believed. A sharp bend brought them upon a sight that caused them to halt, peer nervously upward and in front, and tighten their grasp upon their rifles. Three canoes lay tandem against the right-hand side of the rift--harmless objects in themselves, but rather perturbing as indications that men were somewhere in the neighbourhood. They were obviously intended for transporting persons across the lake without the necessity of making the pa.s.sage under the fall. In the dim light they would scarcely have been visible from the entrance, even had the rift been straight; the bend effectually concealed them.

Once more the party halted. Shut in as they were by the high, close walls, the sound of the waterfall came to them now only as a dull rumble; but when they spoke it was in whispers. Apart from the risk of being heard by an unseen enemy, there was an atmosphere of mystery and awesomeness that weighed oppressively on their minds.

"What are we to do?" asked Jackson.

"Go on!" Forrester replied, firmly. "We can hardly be seen. The sides are so smooth and straight that no one could perch anywhere to molest us, except at the corners. We must be on our guard there."

"But surely no one can live here! Nothing could grow; there doesn't even appear to be moss on the rock, and the air's as stuffy as in a cave."

"Man, don't argufy!" said Mackenzie. "Straight ahead!"

They continued their course. Every now and again the rift turned sharply to one side or the other, and the smooth floor, unimpeded by loose rocks or boulders, always ascended, more and more steeply as they advanced. Strangely enough, the higher they went the stuffier the air became, and the deeper their sense of oppression, or rather, perhaps, of nervous strain. Mackenzie, who had once been down a coal-mine in Lanarkshire, suspected the presence of poisonous gases.

"There can't be fire-damp," he murmured, "but it may be carbonic acid.

Bide a wee while I strike a match."

But this fear was dispelled when the flame burned brightly for a second or two. He extinguished it abruptly.

"Hoots! I'm an a.s.s!" he said. "Someone may have seen the light; and if there are men about, I'd rather see them first than they us."

"My skin is tingling just as if I'd got a grip of the terminals of a battery," Jackson remarked.

"It's uncanny, and that's a fact," said Mackenzie. "But look, man!

What's that?" he added, in a startled whisper, clutching Forrester by the arm with one hand, and pointing ahead with the other.

His comrades closed upon him, and peered into the semi-obscurity, their heads almost touching. A little to one side of them stood Sher Jang, impa.s.sive as ever, though he held his rifle with both hands, and his muscles were as taut as a bent spring. Behind, Hamid Gul's one eye bulged from its socket as he tiptoed to look over his master's shoulder.

A few yards to their front the rift made one of the sudden bends that formed such strange features of its course. It struck to the right at a sharp angle, so that the wall which had been on their left hand became almost perpendicular to their line of march. On its smooth rocky face, some eighteen or twenty feet above the ground, an extraordinary procession was moving across their line of vision from right to left, like shadows cast faintly upon a screen. The leading figure was that of a skeleton, clothed about with a misty body shaped like a man in tourist costume: a tall frame, the bones standing out in black relief from the midst of a faint penumbra. Behind this trotted the skeleton forms of a number of almost naked dwarfs, no more than four feet in height, each bearing a spear upon his shoulder. At the rear came a second full-sized figure, taking long strides, like a schoolmaster at the tail of a line of boys. The shadowy surround of his skeleton widened towards the bottom like an academic gown. The watchers held their breath, amazed at the weirdness of the dim shapes, and still more at the manner of their progress. There were no steps to be seen in the face of the cliff, yet the gait of the procession was unmistakably that of men descending a steep stairway. Foot by foot they moved downwards on their diagonal path; one by one they reached the floor of the rift; then, instead of walking along it towards the spectators, they seemed to descend into the earth, and in a few moments disappeared from view. Not a sound had accompanied them; no tramp of footsteps, no clash of weapons.

Drawing a long breath, the white men, tense and watchful, waited a little for some sign of their reappearance, but nothing more was seen.

If the strange people had observed the group of onlookers, they had paid no heed to them. At last, Mackenzie hurried forward to search for the steps and the subterranean pa.s.sage to which they gave access. The rest of the party followed him, save Hamid Gul, who remained as one transfixed, shivering with awe.

When they came to the wall they were thrown into a state of utter consternation. The surface of the rock was wholly unbroken; there was neither stairway nor pa.s.sage into the ground--the cliff was as smooth as polished granite. They looked upwards, to the right along the rift; they pa.s.sed their hands over the face of the rock, struck it here and there, probed with their rifles the floor--all was apparently solid. An uncomfortable feeling of creepiness stole over them. What mysterious secret lurked in this gloomy cleft in the mountain?

None of them had yet uttered a word. When Forrester spoke, it was in a whisper.

"Were they shadows?" he asked.

They turned about and looked back along the rift. There was no light between the walls. Far above, the sunlight illumined their summits, a bright streak in the gloom. But no shadow could have been cast so low.

"Och!" exclaimed Mackenzie, shaking himself. "We cannot get to the bottom of yon. Come away!"

Every man of them, without confessing it to the others, was thinking of the singular things they had heard in the forest village. Their minds were oppressed by the villagers' superst.i.tious dread; it required an effort to proceed with the march, leaving this uncanny incident unexplained. But they braced themselves at Mackenzie's words. Whatever the explanation of the procession might be, it argued the presence of beings other than themselves in the cleft or its neighbourhood; and the remembrance of their errand nerved them to go on. If Captain Redfern's unfortunate companion were indeed held captive in this mysterious region, it appeared that they must look forward to something more than a straight fight; but they could not allow themselves to be daunted by apparitions, which, after all, might have a simple explanation.

When they resumed their march it was with more caution than before.

Despite themselves, they had a sense of being watched, of something impending, almost of helplessness, strange though this sensation was to their robust Western minds. Almost unconsciously they kept closer together, holding their rifles ready in one hand, and unb.u.t.toning their revolvers with the other. Only Hamid Gul walked alone. He followed with trembling knees some yards in the rear, wishing that he had courage enough to run back to the entrance, where there were at least s.p.a.ce and air.

They turned to the right with the rift. Soon the walls began to converge, and the twilight grew dimmer and dimmer. At one spot the pa.s.sage was scarcely eight feet wide. Beyond this it broadened again, and the light improved. Then, with startling suddenness, the silence behind them was broken by a harsh sound that caused them to jump round in a tingle of apprehension. It was like the rattling of heavy chains, followed by a loud grating squeak, and a second or two later by a metallic clang that echoed ominously in the narrow rift. The echoes died away; all was again silent.

Mackenzie had already started back, a vague inkling of what had happened freezing him to the marrow. In the semi-darkness he collided with Hamid Gul, who let out a yell and dropped his rifle, which fell with resounding crash on the ground. The others hurried close on Mackenzie's heels. He reached the narrow pa.s.sage recently left, and here, in the greater obscurity, he came full tilt against an obstacle that barred the way. His rifle clashed against it, and when his friends joined him they found that their escape was cut off by a huge iron shutter that filled the whole width of the pa.s.sage.

Mackenzie struck a match, and held it aloft. To their dismay they saw that the shutter was at least twenty feet high. It fitted into grooves on either side and in the floor beneath, which the darkness had not allowed them to see when they pa.s.sed a few minutes before. Its surface was decorated with an elaborate and fantastic design, the prevailing note of which was a monstrous eye, which glared with a singularly sinister effect in several parts of the pattern. The upper part of the shutter was attached to two heavy chain cables, one on each side of the rift. These cables seemed to disappear into the walls another twenty feet or so above; but from the position of the trapped party, with the poor aid of match-light, it was impossible to see beyond the points at which the chains appeared to enter the rock. Lighting several matches together, however, Mackenzie held them high above his head, and the flame glinted for a moment upon a dark face peering down upon them over the top of the shutter. It was visible only for an instant, then it was gone; but in that instant the three men felt the culminating shock of amazement. In those features--the high cheekbones, the slanting eyes, the long, thin, grey moustache--they thought they recognised the countenance of the elder of the two Chinamen who had been the companions of their march--the man whom the bemused lad had called Wen Shih.