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THE  GLORY  OF  EGYPT

For a minute we were silent. Soames and I were sitting on the low wall over the steep drop to Lebong where the four roads meet in Darjiling; shining in snow before us were the mightiest of the Himalayas—excepting only Everest—Kinchenjunga and her giant sister Janoo. The stalwart departing figure in a rough belted coat was Ras-pa, the wily Mongol with whom we had made our bandobast (arrangement) for a trip up the mountains beyond Sikkim—very much beyond, as a matter of fact, though we did not think it necessary to harp too much on that. All having been fixed up, next day would see the first stage of our trek.

“It’s going to be the time of our lives. I told you so in Calcutta, and I say so again,” Soames said, knocking the ash off his cigar.

“And I say yes to that—if we pull it off. But you know, old man, when you’ve counted up the risks I’m not that sure. It’s a wild, wild country up on the roof of the world, and if the Lord ever made it He clean forgot it long ago.”

“That’s so. And yet—well, there’s something in a job of this kind, Ross, apart from the dollars. I’m all for the open road and the camp-fires and the good sleeps and the whole blessed business.”

“Same here! I used to dream of it down in Calcutta when one got sick of Chowringhi and the blessed old plaster casts on the Maidan. And—Lord! the steamy heat and the plotting little babus up the back streets! No, no! This is going to be the right thing whether we come back flush or beggars.”

Soames and I had known each other a couple of years. We were both Indian Civil Service men with the gift of tongues that oils the wheels in a land that has over two hundred languages, not to mention dialects, in its own vastness. We worked in the same office and growled at the very same heads of departments. But the difference between us was that Soames was six years older than I, and I had an uncle and he had only his wits. Let me introduce myself as Christopher, known as “Kit” Ross, and explain my uncle. He was a man who had gone up the Indian ladder about as quickly as it could be done, and was now Lord Lidderdale governing the principality of Pampur; and as he was a confirmed old bachelor his heir got more of a look-in than other fellows—and that was me.

It therefore followed that when I felt I could serve my country by an expedition up into those wild mountains that lie beyond the Debatable Land of India strings were pulled mysteriously, and the Indian Government began to consider that information about the upper Passes, in view of possible Bolshevist troubles with Tibet, was just the very thing they wanted. And when the Sirkar had reached that stage more strings were pulled, stretching far beyond the bounds of so-called civilization, and weird officials in the blue distance held themselves politely ready to speed the emissaries of the Sirkar on their way.

It was then I made it plain to the heads of departments that I could not undertake the task alone. Suppose I crocked up or went west, who was to run the show and bring back the information? No—Soames was the man. He knew Tibetan and Lepcha inside out, and had a very fair knowledge of spoken Chinese, which may be uncommonly useful in those parts. Soames was the heaven-born head of an expedition like this, and I was ready to serve under him. So I respectfully represented, etc., etc. And Soames was appointed.

And now for the inside of this humility on my part. That is the true beginning of the story.

There had been an evening in Calcutta when there was some sort of freshness in the air and the stars were lamping out low and splendid in the black velvet sky; and on this evening my noble self, tired with the heat and a bit sick of life, was strolling by the water beyond the Eden Gardens. Things were a bit out of joint. Joan Boston and I had quarrelled pretty badly; and though that is quite another story it had its bearing on what followed. I don’t know that I should have been quite so keen about the mountains if all had been smooth sailing there. How much I cared for her I scarcely knew myself, but she needn’t have done it quite like that. It made a man look small—feel small. It hurt. Not a wound, but a constant irritation like nettles. I wanted to get away for a bit and think it out. And there had been a worrying business about a babu razzle-dazzle with bombs. Altogether I was beginning to envy old Soames his absorption in race problems, in the natives, in a hundred things that seemed to take the place to him of everything that other men bothered about.

And as I lounged along and watched the stars making each a trail of light on the water like a little moon there came to me a man. Afterward I was inclined to think that man was the messenger of fate. At the time I felt him a distinct addition to the annoyances of life, for he begged and begged and he declined to leave me in spite of the awe of the sahib. He stuck to me, he held out a lean brown hand, and he asked alms in a voice alien to the Calcutta jabber. And his presence breathed of the mountains. In addition he looked most appallingly and consumedly ill.

His face was Mongolian, flat and good-humoured, but wasted until the high cheek bones stood out like crags and the small eyes looked like little lost pools of ink behind them. In one ear he wore a massive silver ear-ring set with large flat turquoises. A greasy, fur-edged cap, a tattered blouse belted in with leather and heavy lead clasps, and shoes of strips of leather sewn together—that was his kit. An arresting kit, in a way; for though there are plenty of these men to be seen up Darjiling way they trouble Calcutta very little. There was something appealing about the fellow, too—the innocence of the mountain man trapped in a big city. One saw him rent by the human sharks about him; one knew the black, evil-smelling dens in Calcutta where the kindly flat face would win no mercy, where the very ear-ring he wore might mean a slit throat and a splash in the Hugli, and so an end. And he was deadly ill—he was shaking from head to foot, his lips cracked with fever, his eyes burning pin points.

I marched on. After all it was no affair of mine; and Heaven only knows what these natives are up to! But the man followed me, pleading in his strange tongue, and I shook him off again and pushed on, understanding nothing of what he said, except that it must be the usual hold-up for money.

Yet at the corner I looked back. The man had given up. His strength had failed, and he was leaning up against the wall, shaking horribly. I saw the lean hand go up to his head, and saw also a fat, cunning Bengali of the lowest type who had edged up to him, while an unveiled woman was closing in like a vulture on the other side.

After all—— I thought and hesitated—and was lost. I walked back to where the man hugged the wall, shuddering.

“Clear out, you two!” A sahib speaking in that tone is obeyed.—“I say, what’s the matter?” I said to the sick man. “What were you trying to tell me just now?”

The answer came faintly from between rattling teeth—a poor attempt at English.

“Heaven-born, your servant—sick. No money. Pity! Taking this”—he touched his ear-ring—“buying food.”

I reflected. Soames. Soames was the man. He knew half the languages of the hills. He had strange stores of herbal medicines gathered in the Terai where the black-water fever kills all but those of the native born who know the secrets of leaf and juice. Who but Soames had spent his vacations among the wild Lepchas in the deep Himalayan hill valleys, among the wild Bhotiyas beyond Sikkim?—and knowing them all, felt them to be human, and had all sorts of queer sympathies and understandings with these queer creatures. Yes—Soames.

So I stepped aside and hailed a passing Sikh policeman, ordering him to telephone Soames Sahib at once at his rooms and ask him to come right away to Ross Sahib on the river side of the gardens. All in the lingo we politely call Hindustani. I knew it would get him. Soames was never out—he would be sitting smoking furiously and studying the customs of, say, the Baltis. But he would come.

He did. In twenty minutes we were gravely surveying the shivering human wreck who leaned against the wall, half slipping down it from weakness. And with the first word he uttered Soames struck oil. He understood.

“I say, you know, Ross,” he said, turning to where I listened respectfully, “this is a queer let-out. The man’s a Lepcha—a Buddhist from above Darjiling. Of course I had two leaves up there before you joined up; and I know the patter.”

“By George, I believe you helped to build the tower of Babel!” I said with awe. “What does the poor chap say?”

“Not much. He’s too sick. But look here—what are we going to do? As sure as we leave him he’ll go under. He won’t have a blessed look-in. And they’re decent fellows, the Lepchas, and—well, I’ve always wanted to hunt one down to find out some of their little ways.”

“H’m! that settles it. The hospital?”

“No. I don’t take much stock in the hospital, and there isn’t a soul there that speaks his lingo. I see he’s got Terai fever, and I know exactly what to do. I’ll put the poor beast in the attic room in my flat.”

I own I viewed the patient with some distaste.

“He isn’t too clean, but, after all—as you had two sick monkeys and then the cat bear—and that fakir from Benares—I suppose the people will stand anything. I’ll stick the damage.”

“Rot! It’ll cost me nothing. Hail a gharry.”

I hailed a native vehicle, and we bundled him in under the bewildered stare of the driver, who could scarcely credit this new madness of the sahibs. Human life doesn’t count for much in Calcutta among the people. A little sooner, a little later, what does it matter, when death waits for all?

Well, that was the beginning. Soames cleaned him. He explained that he might have been very much dirtier, if you come to that. He put him in a camp bed which, though hard enough for Western tastes, was wild and pampering luxury to the man of the hills. He gave him cunning medicines compounded of a root that grows in the hills beyond Tendong, and all this worked a miracle, and the man lived, unexpectedly and against all reason. And it is a fact that we rejoiced in that victory as if he had been flesh and blood of our own. After all, if you pit yourself against any old thing, you like to do the trick, and we both got as keen as mustard about it.

The man was so little trouble—at first almost unconscious all the time and needing nothing; then so jolly patient, obedient, and grateful, that it was only needful to leave some food by him and go off on our business and find him steadily better when the evening came. Even the janitor of the flats made no objection. The two monkeys had been much more trouble, and the cat bear was remembered with terror. So peace prevailed.

Being dismissed from the imperious service of Joan Boston I used to come in and find Soames staring concernedly at the invalid when he got back from a stifling day at the office, driven half dotty by the whirring of the electric punkahs. So it went on.

Then came the stage when he got up in our absence and did his clumsy best to tidy the room where he lay; and in trying to dust the sitting-room he broke the treasure of Soames’s soul, an earthenware image, compounded of the ashes of a departed lama and a little clay. So pathetic was his grief that Soames hid his anguish and bid the old chap cheer up; there were plenty more in Tibet if one happened to be taking a week-end there.

It was not long after that that the invalid, an invalid no longer, laid his silver ear-ring at the feet of Soames and passionately besought him to accept it for the charges we had been at. It was all he had, and, though it was little, he offered it as a token that his life was ours—and more Soames’s. Might all the Buddhas, all the Incarnations, reward us for the mercy shown to a friendless man! There was no mistaking his gratitude, and it touched Soames. The whole affair was one after his own heart, and he liked the fellow. It was like having a big kindly dog about the place. In the evenings he managed to extract a lot of useful knowledge of the high lands and the little ways of the hill folk. And so one night came the revelation.

It was extended to me when I came in, swept and garnished for a dance at Government House, and I own it knocked me end-wise. I just seized the telephone and dispatched my regrets to her Excellency that a touch of fever would deprive Mr. Ross of the pleasure, etc.—and that though I knew well Joan Boston would be there! And I sat down, white tie and all, beside Soames, and the Lepcha squatted on the ground before us.

We had something to look at, for it was Soames’s opinion that no one had ever seen a clean Lepcha before, or ever would again. The tattered blouse, the greasy cap, had disappeared, and new garments in the highest Lepcha fashion had been contrived by a Hindu tailor who could copy anything earthly from a bishop’s apron to the fluffy skirt of a ballet dancer.

He was a strong-built, Chinese-looking man of thirty, with a cheerful grin and a straight way of looking into your eyes that took us both. His name, of many syllables and appalling difficulty, Soames had boiled down to Yar, and this he accepted gratefully.

“I think, Ross, I’d better condense what I’ve gleaned from him. It may make no difference to you, but it has made a big one to me anyhow. Light up, and let’s have a palaver.”

Yar, who had already developed a passion for the Feringistan pipe, was given his share, and we all settled down to it.

“I don’t know if you remember, Ross, that the last Government expedition went up into Chinese Turkestan in 1912. They went up to do surveying and excavate for ancient manuscripts and treasure, along the old Chinese route that linked up China with Central Asia; and very interesting things they found. Murray was at the head of it.”

“What did they find?”

“Lost cities, temples, pictures, manuscripts, all the refuse of a wonderful dead civilization that the sand is swallowing up as hard as it can. They came back through a corner of Tibet, avoiding Lhasa, and crossed into Sikkim.” Well, I have Murray’s book, and I was looking up something the other night and Yar was hopping round, devastating the place as usual—and the book was open at the pictures of Tsanpo. Down came his finger on it, and I all but jumped out of my skin when he said, grinning placidly, “Me there, sahib. Me knowing Murray Sahib. Me seeing all!”

“Extraordinary!”

“Yes—you may say that. Of course I ordered him back into Lepcha at once, for I couldn’t delay for his English. And this is his yarn. Murray lost a lot of his coolies when he entered Tibet, and he picked up Yar among ten others—right there. Now, mark you! Murray had got pretty nearly all he wanted in the way of finds—but one thing he missed.”

“What was that?” I was sitting upright now. I could see Soames was bursting with something big, and Yar’s eyes were following every word, like a dog trying to understand his masters. This was the beginning of the return he would make the Powers for their undreamt-of mercy.

“Well, after Murray had entered Tibet, reports reached him of a very ancient city or fortress lost in the mountains to the southwest. He first heard of it a long way off, at Ming-oe, and was inclined to set it all down to native romancing. There was a king. There were arms, treasures—I don’t know what all! Still, being a cautious fellow, he asked as he went along; and the scent got hotter. He spoke of it at Tsanpo, and you may judge his surprise when Chang-Ta-Jen, the old Amban there, declared that he believed the story. There was a man who had seen it, but none had got in.”

“Mirage,” I said, “or crags like buildings. I knew a man who was up at Lopnor, and he declared you saw Windsor Castle or Portsmouth Dockyard if you looked long enough.”

“Yes, I thought of that too, but it doesn’t quite fill the bill. To condense, Chang-Ta-Jen brought in a man who had seen the place from a distance; and Murray pushed a reconnaissance a little way off his route to investigate. He found nothing, and, being short of time and men and beasts, he chucked it. You can see the whole thing in his book, and it always fascinated me. That’s all about Murray.”

“And where does Yar come in?”

“As thus. Yar told me the story exactly as it is in the book, but with this addition. Murray had found a temple at Tsanpo with a secret chamber full of the most delightful old junk in the way of ancient documents, pictures, implements, everything you can imagine; and by bribing the priest he was allowed to take away what he wanted. The men had, of course, to carry it. Well, when the expedition broke up, Yar and another of the men chummed up and engaged in a little deal of their own; and at Tsondo this friend got a kick from a pony and died. The law of wills is a bit loose up there, and Yar annexed the deceased’s sheepskin coat and other effects; and later on, sewn into the breast of the coat, he found this. He says the man believed it was a charm.”

From a little leather purse, such as the mountain men carry for tinder and steel, Soames extracted a document written on yellowish paper, evidently having been rolled round a smooth stick, but folded flat now. The characters on it were Chinese, but of the oldest type. Soames handled it with the deepest respect.

“When Yar gave me this he said it was a charm that would bring the lost city within reach. It would send the demons to sleep and make a broad way to the gate. Some lama had told him so. Of course I know a little Chinese. I made out two or three words, such as ‘wisdom,’ ‘splendour,’ ‘king,’ but I soon stuck. Too difficult. So I walked off to the museum and said I had a bit of old Central Asian romance, like Murray’s stuff, and could they decipher it? Crosby went at it at once, and here it is.”

“Go on—do buck up!” I was getting wild at the invariable search in his pockets and all their rich fruitage.

“Here it is. No, it isn’t. Yes, here.”

And out it came. He read slowly aloud—

Here is a hiatus in the script.

We were silent. I was digesting the thing, and Yar turned his eyes from one to another like a bird, so quick and bright were they.

“I tell you what, Soames—I believe what you bluffed Crosby with is the explanation. This is a bit of some Old World Arabian Nights. Don’t take it seriously. There’s nothing to it.”

“Well, I don’t look at it that way. Murray took it seriously. Now if an expedition went up for that only——”

“An expedition! My good fellow, have you any little notion of what an expedition costs? Why, if we put all we have in the world to it, we couldn’t begin to look at it. What’s the good of flying kites?”

“Don’t talk a minute. I want to think,” said Soames.

So we both sat in silence, I revolving many things in my brain.

There was Joan, you see, and though we had quarrelled it was not the kind of quarrel that puts a full stop to things. I was rung up that evening before the Government House affair, and a voice began, “Is Mr. Ross——” and when I answered it myself, bang up went the receiver, and communication was cut off dead. But I knew the voice. I could not go off into the wilds and sit on the ridgepole of the world without a word to Joan. We were not engaged, of course, but I was not sure that I wanted to escape the possibility that we might be one of these days. The mischief was that she had a lot of money and I had not, and whatever my expectations might be, Lidderdale was as good a life as any man of his age, and I liked the old boy a sight more than I liked my possible inheritance from him. The thought of the fat park in Buckinghamshire, and the drowsy old manor house and a mild gallop now and again after a more or less ready-bred fox, didn’t allure me from those wild days in India after “Stripes” in the jungle or the ghoral in the mountains. I liked the queer people, too, along the Simla-Tibet road, where I had once made the wonderful trek past the Shipki to Kashmir, a deal better than the county people round Hardover Grange, with the dull round of entertainments and the gradual fading away of a real zestful life into the common round of a stout country gentleman who has once been in the Civil Service in India. England is small since the War and the world is wide, and I was for the open road and the camp-fire and the far horizon all the time. I wanted to make my own way, not to hang on to Lidder’s coat-tails. Still—Joan, with her turquoise eyes and that appealing innocent pale golden hair so like a child’s, and her expression anything but childlike! She was a part of all the Indian joys. I must see her again.

Yar still squatted before Soames, looking with that quick bird-like look from one to the other. Soames was staring at me now—heavily, almost suspiciously.

“I say, Ross, a man has no right to probe into another fellow’s affairs, and I’m the last to do it, but—may I speak frankly?”

“By all means, old man.”

My voice didn’t come to heel quite as I should have liked. Soames was as sharp as a gimlet, and as persistent when he was really interested. I knew he was at the back of my brain as much as I was myself. Leave given, he went on remorselessly—

“If a man’s hankering after a woman, he’s no good for a trip of this kind. He wants to have his eyes skinned and his wits drilled, and not to be mooning about——”

I couldn’t stand it.

“Shut up, Soames. If I undertake this job I put my back into it. You may bet on that. But it’s no question of women. It’s money and the Sirkar and Murray’s chucking it that we’re up against. And I think the ditch is too big for our jump.”

Soames was exactly like an elephant in the way he took things—slow to all appearance, but you couldn’t stop him.

“It isn’t worth bothering about the Government or money or Murray if you can’t give yourself up to it soul and body. I remember when I had a trip up Everest way before people began to talk of doing anything serious up there. I wanted a preliminary canter and just to come in with some useful information when it would be wanted, and I had it all fixed up with Moffat. He speaks Nepalese. Well, what happened? At the last minute he went and got engaged to the last importation of the fishing fleet from England. A girl with a mouth like a rabbit. And he chucked. I could have brained him but that I knew I might safely leave her to pay off my score; and she paid it off properly when she jilted him for that fat M’Vicker in the Council—the man that went home with liver last year.”

Of course Soames got one’s back up now and again. His way of putting things was not always exactly delicate or tactful, but if one wanted a job put through I must say there was no one like him. So I smoothed my ruffled feathers.

“If I sign on I won’t chuck, never you fear. And I’ll let you know in twenty-four hours whether I’m on or off. But that’s a trifle. The real thing is Murray first. Then the Sirkar and the money.”

He pushed the evening paper silently across the table with his finger on a paragraph.

“Mr. Murray, the celebrated explorer and archæologist, will visit Calcutta very shortly on his way to Burma, it being his intention to go up to Bhamo and beyond on an expedition, the details of which are not yet before the public.”

Fate again! I had thought Murray was in England—tied up there indefinitely, arranging his find with the Museum people.

“If Murray sees this paper and hears what I have to say, and then thinks it’s worth following up, what will you say then?” Soames demanded.

“I shall say done along with you, and you can count on me to the last fence. All the same, there’s still the Sirkar and the cash.”

“Your uncle might have a say in that.” Soames was refilling his pipe with a hand that almost shook from suppressed eagerness. “They think no end of him up at Delhi and Simla. And the cash will follow if we get the credit.”

That was true enough, and that was why Soames wanted me. We were good friends enough. Indeed, being the queer fellow he was, I think I was his closest friend, though that might not be anything to write home about. But it was my uncle that fixed it, and I knew, though I did not as yet lavish the information on Soames, that he was for Simla in a few days, to stay at the Viceregal Lodge, and, of course, that might mean greasing the wheels very considerably. Joan, too, was off to Simla, to stay with her married brother there. But I withheld these items until I had seen her and knew exactly where I was. I got up to go.

“One minute,” Soames went on imperturbably, “there’s another paragraph of interest just below Murray’s.”

I looked again. Of course. Old Lidderdale’s jaunt to Simla. Catch Soames not knowing anything useful.

“You see? Seems as if it was all shaping, doesn’t it?”

“In a way, yes. But Lidder’s got his own views, you know.”

“If by any chance you were going up Simla way——”

I could stand his uncanny insight no longer. I gathered myself up to go.

“Well, so long. See you to-morrow, and then we’ll know more.”

I left him sitting with Yar at his feet and a map of Sikkim and the wild Beyond on the table. I doubt if he looked up as I went.

I rang Joan up next day, and her voice on the telephone was glacial. I had added to my enormities by chucking the dance the night before.

“At tea-time? I shall be in, of course. Captain Durell and a few more are coming. Mother likes him too. He’s the sort of person that rather grows on one. My brother has asked him up to Simla. Mother would be rather glad if he were going at the same time as we. It’s a long journey.”

I translated this speech rapidly. It meant: “You are to be as jealous and unhappy as you deserve. You are to think I like this man’s company much better than yours. But I don’t. If I did, I shouldn’t take the trouble to frighten you.”

Boldness. Cheek. Brass. That is the only hand to play when a woman is bluffing. I played it.

“Then I shall certainly not come. Because I must and will see you alone. And if I can’t I won’t come at all. I have something very important to say and to consult you about, and shall probably be leaving Calcutta before long; but if you can’t see me alone——”

Silence. Then a small voice as if from a great distance—

“Is that true?”

“Absolutely. That was what kept me away from the dance last night.”

“It was not that you were sulking?”

“Not a bit. I was got up to go—but something happened so thrilling that I just told her Ex. I had fever.”

“I know. I heard that.”

Another pause. I held a discreet silence.

The very small voice resumed—

“Between six and seven perhaps——”

She rang off.

Between six and seven I was in the lift soaring heavenward to the Bostons’ flat. Mrs. Boston was a widow only less charming than her daughter, and the number of butterflies that hovered about that flower garden was astonishing even for India. A bunch of them was waiting for the lift above, and I saw Durell’s eyes wake up as I stepped out coolly. He passed me the time of day, and then said, laughing with a little constraint—

“That you, Ross? A day late for the fair, I’m afraid. They’re going out presently.”

“I know. So am I!” and I nodded superior, and saw him whisked down in the lift, worried more than a little. It bucked me up somehow for the encounter. If his reception had been comfortable that was not the way he would have looked. I knew Joan so far.

The drawing-room was empty—a beautiful room, all cool fragrance and subdued light, for it was dark outside and the lights glittering about the city. There was the music of a distant band on the Maidan, muted and sweet, the chairs stood inviting to repose, a long white glove lay forgotten on one of the sofas. That was what riches meant—luxury, beautiful things brought and laid before your feet, languid ease. Could I sit here for ever, or in rooms more splendid, with Joan always before me, always sweet as a rose or with the little stimulating thorns about the rose to make it more desirable? What would it be like? Would it pall? And suddenly, as I looked out into the velvet-black mystery of the night, a longing inexpressible in any words swept over me—a longing for the hard, clean life of adventure, the dangers, the terrors, the high rewards that make up a man’s life who cuts himself adrift from all the enervating luxuries of civilization and goes straight out into the wilds. Soames was right—a thousand times right!

Then I felt something in me thrill like a bird’s wings before it flies. And the door opened very softly and Joan came in.

Can I describe her? She was dressed in something long and clinging and shimmery and silvery. I think they call it a tea-gown, but I know that with the pale gold of her little head she looked like the spirit of a white lotus blossom—golden stamens and all. It fell so closely about her that she seemed a mere wisp of a thing, if it had not been for those great blue eyes that had all the soul of a woman in them, shy, frightened, bold, tyrannical, alarming, dangerous.

“C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.”

She came gliding forward, and pulled up short a few feet away, her hands dropped beside her.

“You said you especially wanted to see me—I would never have agreed to it after the way you behaved, but that——”

“What?” I asked, holding my own as best I could.

“But that—one has to be polite, and we were friends once.”

“We didn’t think about politeness then.”

“You certainly didn’t. Anything more rude—more exasperating——”

“Well, you had your revenge. You said you never wanted to see me again. And even now I don’t know what I did.”

She flashed an angry look at me.

“You took me at my word and stayed away as if you were glad enough of the excuse.”

“If I had been, should I have rung you up? Sit down and let me talk to you, Joan. I told you I’m probably leaving Calcutta before long. Won’t you make friends before I go?”

She dropped into a chair instantly, but said nothing, and the lamp was behind her. I could not see her face.

“Joan, can I trust you with a secret?”

“You know best.” Her voice had a queer, muffled sound.

“I want your promise. I know I can trust that. And it’s a matter of consequence to more than me.”

“I promise. What is it?”

I told her. Not all the details—nor the vital ones. I felt it would not be fair to Soames to give away any of his show, though I would have trusted her myself with anything. Not because the light fell so divinely on the pale gold of her hair that it shone like a faint aureole about the hidden face. No, not that, but for the something boyish and frank that went with the slim hips and the knit muscles and the queer public-school code of honour of the best type of modern English girl.

She listened with fixed attention, at last leaning forward, chin propped on her hand flashing with the great eyes of her rings.

When I stopped she spoke.

“What does it mean exactly? How long would you be gone? Is it dangerous?”

“How can I tell? Months—years. How does one know? Things like that open out like a telescope. I should be more or less under orders, for the man who’s planned it would naturally take charge. As to dangerous, who knows!”

“Why do you want to do it? For money?”

Ah, we were up against it now! A woman doesn’t know how the salt sweet taste of adventure on the lips is the headiest wine in all the world—more than money, than success, than—love?

And if one even could explain it to her would she ever forgive the last?

“Not money,” I said lamely. “It’s the chance—the bigness of the thing, the wonderful——”

I broke off. She was scarcely listening.

“What I want to know,” she said measuredly, “is why you come to tell me? You said—to ask my opinion.”

“Haven’t we been friends? Isn’t that reason enough? And I wanted you to know why I didn’t come last night.”

“If that’s your only reason you’ll have to explain it to at least twenty girls more. Tell me exactly what’s in your mind. Be straight—I want to know.”

“I don’t know myself,” I said morosely.

There was a long pause. Her voice cut across it like a whip-lash.

“I know. I’m not afraid. I’ll tell you. You are not perfectly certain whether you love me or no. You thought if you came to-day you could make up your mind. You like me a good deal. Don’t I know that? Don’t I remember things——”

She stopped a second, but went on with no relenting—

“Well, I’m not here to be taken or left at any man’s pleasure. Not even yours——”

“Even.” I made a move forward. She sent her chair spinning back out of reach with a motion of her foot.

“I said ‘even,’ and I meant it. But the thing is too big for me to gamble on a chance. Either you love me or you don’t. And if I knew you did, then it would be only beginning, for I have a point of view too, and I’m not clear about that.”

She held me speechless. It was all so intensely modern—repellant, fascinating, cold-hearted, alluring. Her face invited me passionately—her words fenced her away. I said exactly the wrong thing.

“Do you want me to stay, Joan?”

She laughed a little, but said nothing. I floundered in a little deeper.

“If I thought that——”

“Yes?”

And then I was silent. I really did not myself know the end of the sentence. An electric bell tingled through the quiet of the flat.

“That means mother’s nearly dressed. I’ve only a few minutes more. I think I had better be quite frank with you, Mr. Ross. It may save us both some trouble in the end. If you want me, I suppose I’m worth giving up a wild-cat expedition like this for. I say no more. We’ll leave it at that.”

“Then I’m not worth waiting for? And you can’t see anything in the point of view of a poor man who wouldn’t for all the world, and the next world thrown in, be dependent upon his wife’s fortune?—who knows he may get that inequality straight up yonder.” I threw my hand in the direction of the north.

She laughed like a peal of Christmas bells.

“I thought you said money had nothing to do with it. But every word you say clears up the situation. If you loved me it wouldn’t be my money or your money. It would be ours. And as to waiting for you, you’re worth waiting for a lifetime if you love me and I love you, and not one hour if we don’t care for each other. No, no. You’ve hesitated, and he who hesitates in a thing of this kind is certainly lost as far as I’m concerned. I wish you good luck, and I daresay I shall see your adventures in the paper; and if you come back you’ll get a twopenny-halfpenny knighthood, and if you don’t——”

“If I don’t?” I caught at that, but there was no relenting in her hard little voice.

“If you don’t, I hope you’ll be more comfortable wherever you are. No, Mr. Ross, no nearer, please. I haven’t been serious in saying all this. I knew you didn’t care for me really, and I care as little for you. The test was whether you stayed or went. And you’re going.”

I captured her hand somehow, and at last said the right thing—the thing I should have said in the beginning.

“Joan, we do care for each other, and that clinches my going. What you’re saying is a whim—a girl’s whim worthy of neither of us. And I’m going. No woman worth her weight in mud would keep a man back from such a glorious adventure, and no man worth his weight in mud would stay. If I did, in a month you’d chuck me for a fool and a coward, and serve me right too. I know you better than you know yourself——”

She was furious. She pulled her hand away. She repeated doggedly—

“If you go, it’s the end of everything. That’s the last word I shall say.”

A minute or two went by, and she faced me panting, holding on to the back of her chair—a white little fury. Then slowly, with a marvellous feminine transition, her eyes softened, her lips unbent, she stretched out a trembling hand, looking downward.

“I’m behaving like a naughty child. Oh, forgive me. If I hadn’t cared, should I have—— I don’t know what I’m saying. Stay with me, Kit; you can’t—can’t go. I want you to stay. Stay with me.”

So she held to her point, and it was still to be a trial of strength between us; but she would use the silken net of the old Roman shows, and I must stick to the clumsy club which is all a man has got to fight with in his encounters with a woman.

She slipped from behind the ambush of the chair, and drew nearer.

“My first request, Kit. Do you think of yourself up in the wild mountains, and me trembling, mad with anxiety all the time? No letters—nothing. You blotted out perhaps for years—perhaps”—her voice fell—“for always. If it was a duty—if the country sent you——”

She came a little nearer. I breathed the faint fragrance of her hair—I had never seen her so lovely. I caught her in my arms and held her close.

“Little girl, little girl, if that’s the kind of wife you’d be, you’d be my ruin. You’ve no right to make this a test—no right to stand in my way. Be good to me—be good to yourself. Don’t force me into opposition.”

The fury flashed back, and she wrenched herself free.

“Don’t force me into opposition. So I should be your ruin, should I? Then you may be sure I never will. When you leave this room I’ve done with you. I go up to Simla next week, and what I do there is my own business. Love you? I hate you—the more because you’ve made me say things I sicken to think of. Go!”

She darted at the door, slipped through it, and was gone. We had scarcely been together for twenty minutes! I stood a little longer, wondering whether the incalculable creature would come back, but there was no sound, no sign. I let myself out at the hall door and went out into the starry dark of the Maidan, and there I walked up and down considering, but with never a thought of surrender. I might not understand women—I knew very little of Joan Boston; but an irrefutable instinct told me that if I gave in I was a lost man, and that any future relations between us would be hopeless.

Was I sorry? Did I love her? I can answer neither question. She alternately fascinated and repelled me, and I thought she had behaved odiously in this business. Can a man think that of a woman he loves? Again, I don’t know. I own I watched the post for a day or two, but I told Soames I was his man, and was the easier in my mind, and in the hurry and anxiety of our plans whatever emotions I had were snowed under. That is the unromantic truth—I can’t say otherwise; and yet at the back of behind I knew very well that if I had seen her coquetting with Durell it would have been a pain I could ill face. Better the mountains, and freedom from the labyrinth. Time—“the father of truth,” as Mary Stuart used to call him—would test us both, and better apart while he was at his work. I knew that—I know doubly now that I was right.

She went off to Simla without a word, and the next event was Murray. I shall never forget the day when Soames and I boarded him at the Great Eastern Hotel.

He was a strongly built thick-set man, much younger looking than I had expected, with a keen blue eye and a manner of quiet decision which accounted for his world fame as an explorer who brought back not only the demarcations of dead civilizations but also their lost jewels of scroll and picture to a wondering world. I liked him on the spot—even got so far as wishing my trip was to be with him instead of Soames. Soames was a strong man too—never a doubt of it. But his strength was a sullen, heavy push against all obstacles, which might or might not be endurable to those who were up against it. Murray wore his as lightly as a feather, with a smiling quiet that I could jolly well see would flash and thunder in one crash at the right moment.

He received us sitting on the edge of a table like a boy, and swinging his legs meditatively when the story was fairly launched. Soames’s face was red—almost congested with eagerness. It half frightened me to see how much it meant to him and how he staked himself on the result. It made me afraid of what Murray might say. I felt a kind of thrill run through me when the fateful document was in his hand—with the translation. I don’t know whether he needed the latter, but he never looked at it, and Soames’s eyes smouldered on him like red coals while he considered.

“Have you got your man on hand—the Lepcha?” he asked at length, still staring at the queer characters.

“Yes—outside. I thought you might want him.”

Soames went to the door and whistled as you might to a dog, and Yar came trotting up the stair. That was the crucial minute, and if Soames felt it more than I, I can only say he must have been all a-tingle from head to foot when Yar stood before the great man saluting humbly.

I saw the piercing blue eyes go through him like darts, and then Murray relaxed into a good-natured smile.

“Why, I know you,” he said in the hill dialect. “Tsanpo? I picked you up there.”—He turned to Soames. “His story’s true, so far.”—Again to Yar: “You were the man that was nearly drowned in the big river?”

Yar nodded wildly and grinned delighted. He hadn’t expected this.

“I never forget a face,” Murray said, lighting his pipe. “This was one of the best of my men at Tsanpo. A very decent, hard-working fellow. Now, hold hard, Mr. Soames, and let him tell me his story in his own way of how he got this document. Don’t you say another word for a bit.”

A long talk ensued. It was beyond me, but I saw Soames bursting with interest as Murray put question after question. Of course I heard it all later. It opened up all sorts of new points of view, because Murray knew exactly what to ask him and we didn’t. He got all kinds of camp stories and gossip from the man—nothing in themselves, perhaps, but uncommonly useful in piecing together the blanks in the document. There was no doubt there was a legend in that part of the world of some great people who had long, long since come from some unknown land into an outlying spur of the Tibetan mountains and there lost themselves. Perhaps they were gods—who could tell? But they could do strange things indeed. They could make pictures in the fire that would reveal distant happenings. They could search out the very secrets of men’s hearts. They possessed the Splendour of Egypt.

“The Splendour of Egypt! What’s that?” Soames broke in, unable to hold back any longer.

Murray turned calm eyes upon him. “God knows. I heard of it up there just as this fellow says. But whether it’s a thing or a person or a place, I never could get at. Anyway I can tell you this. Your man’s honest as far as he goes. Up there the air is thick with stories of these mysterious people. You say the Museum people tell you this document is very ancient. From my own knowledge I can corroborate that. This is the ancient Chinese character which gradually changed after the eighth century and has not been used for many centuries since.”

“And your summing up, sir?” I ventured.

“My summing up is that the matter is of great interest.”

“Enough to move the Government?”

He laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

“The Sirkar is hard to move, and it very seldom has any money to spare. Besides, I want a little bit myself for the trail I’ve laid now. But if you’ve any influence——”

“Will you tell us this,” Soames burst in again—he could hardly hold himself together; the veins stood out on his forehead—“if it were your own case and you could scrape any sort of an expedition together, would you follow this up or let it lie?”

“The eldest of you two is a good fifteen years younger than I. If I were your age I certainly would have a shot at it. Why not? It’s better for both of you than striving in this reeking hot place; and if you don’t find exactly what you want, at least you’ll find some uncommonly interesting and useful information. No question of that.”

Soames relaxed his tension a little. He remembered even to be polite.

“Thank you a thousand times, sir. Might we quote you as not thinking it a wild-cat scheme?”

“Why, certainly. The Sirkar knows me well enough to know I’m no hot-head; and quite apart from this business of yours, there are things going on up yonder not entirely unconnected with the Russians that our Government might as well know the rights of. But you know, Mr. Soames, you’ll do much better with the Sirkar if you have a cut-and-dried cost-calculated plan to lay before them. They’re not attached to glittering generalities.”

Soames knew—even I knew that. We spread ourselves out in gleaning information at this wonderful fountain-head, and the upshot was that he promised to advise us with the preparation of a plan during his fortnight in Calcutta. No such bit of luck ever befell two adventurers, for what Murray didn’t know wasn’t knowledge, and I can only hope we were grateful enough to show our gratitude as we felt it. Murray did it for love’s sake; not for us, but for the unknown that he had followed all his life like a relenting goddess: and he did it as no other man in the world could have done it—and we knew it.

Six days later Soames dispatched me to Simla with the outline, while he stayed in Calcutta to extract the last drop of Murray’s vintage. I left them together—Murray himself so interested now that I had moments of terror lest he should insist on taking command and snatch the laurels from us to add to his jungle of them. But he didn’t. He played fair. He gave us of his best and went on to his own business, leaving us exalted beyond measure.

Of course I did not want to go to Simla. I tried at first to put Soames on the job; but the truth was he was wanted at Calcutta, and no one could lasso Lidderdale but myself. So I went off, stopping a couple of days at Ambala with a man in the Guides who happened to be there on leave and who knew Sikkim like a book. Time was precious, but that was not wasting it, and when I got to Kalka I knew a few useful things I hadn’t known before. I had a lot to think of as the little train crept up the face of the great hills to Simla—so much that if even I had not known every turn of the line, I doubt I should have seen the sights of wonder and glory that open from each higher height as you climb to Jutogh. Lidderdale met me at Simla station—the dear old man as glad to see me as ever, little guessing the quest I was to put him on, and anticipating nothing but the jolly rides up to Mashobra and Mahasu, and the endless gup (gossip) of Calcutta and Bombay that delighted a man who had spent all his best years in India. We dined at the Club that night, though he was staying with the Viceroy, and settled down to it after dinner. But first I must hear about Simla, and what particular stars were shining in that high firmament.

“You haven’t met the new Viceroy, Kit. Well, Lady Armadale has told me to ask you to dinner to-morrow. Quite informal—themselves and the Staff, more or less, and her pretty niece, Lady Meryon—the charming widow. Just the sort you used to be crazy about. Do you remember the nursery governess at Beech Hill that you threatened to marry when you were seventeen, and drove your mother frantic? Dark eyes and a long throat that sets off her diamonds. You might do worse, young man, if you could persuade her to think so.”

“Yes; but I might do a jolly sight better, Lidder.” (I had always called him that. It came easier than uncle somehow.) “I’ve something up my sleeve that leaves all the Merry Widows standing. When you’ve finished your port and we’ve got through the gup, I’ll tell you something that’ll make you sit up and take notice with a vengeance.”

Even that didn’t draw him from the rapids of our pent-up talk. We went through all the items down to—“The new beauty came the other day—Joan Boston, pretty girl with eyes exactly the colour of Persian turquoises. Lots of tin, they say. Perhaps you knew her down south, did you? A man called Durell is always after her, but I notice that Lord Alistair Keith is running neck and neck with him. Betting’s even——”

I own I listened to that paragraph, and admitting carelessly that I had come across her, fixed Lidder to the subject for as long as it would last. An arrant flirt! he summed her up. Well, so be it. What did it matter to me? I saw a little fury flaring at me: “If you care for me, you’ll stay. If you go, it’s the end of everything.”

I was going—there was no more to be said.

It was an hour after, and very cautiously, that I broke my great news to him. Cautiously, because Lidder was of the age when a man’s apt to shy at anything new, and I felt that King Mu and the hideous Monsters that Run might be too strong a vintage for his palate. His eyes were like billiard balls before I had done.

“But, God bless my soul! it’s a fairy tale, Kit. Have you and Soames been reading the Arabian Nights? You’d better throw in a genii or two to complete the picture.”

It was then I weighed in with my strong suit—Murray. Of course Lidder knew all about Murray, and his ears went up like a terrier’s when you murmur “Rats!” We got down to a solid plane of business after that, with our heads together over the routes and figures Soames had made out with Murray. I will do Lidder the justice to say he had the heart of a boy, and my next anxiety was—not that he would put a spoke in our wheel, but that he would want to head the trek himself. He had been a great shikari in the old days—one of the best shots in the Peninsula, and “still in his ashes lurked their wonted fires.” But I snuffed them out gently but firmly, and concentrated his vision and mine on the Viceroy. I had a big pull there, I knew. Lidder and he had been at Eton together, and he had fagged for Lidder—blacked his boots and boiled his eggs, and so forth—a service not to be forgotten on either side. They had both been wet-bobs, and knew every inch of the Thames in company. Yes—if the Viceroy could be moved, Lidder was the lever. We talked till 2 a.m., and his brain was as full of Tibetan romances as my own when we said good-night at the door.

Of course I saw her next day. One sees everybody at Simla—can’t help it when every one takes pretty much the same ways. She and her mother were riding down the lower slopes of the Chota Simla spur with two men in attendance—Durell, of course, and a good-looking high-boned Scot, whom I took to be Lord Alistair. I was walking—Joan saw me perfectly, but she made her mare dance a bit—I knew that trick of hers—and it naturally took up all her attention until they were well past. I don’t know whether Durell saw me or no. Mrs. Boston bowed very prettily. She looked almost as well in a habit as her daughter.

It rattled me a bit, I own. I dressed for the dinner at the Viceregal Lodge with a queer, unsteady feeling—a sort of wish to see her again, to know the worst, that I could have dispensed with. It was as much as I could do to pull myself together when I made my bow to the Viceroy, and if Joan had been there I should have made a very poor show indeed.

As it was, Lidder got hold of his Excellency in the smoking-room after dinner, and whether I had infected him with my eloquence I don’t know, but I thought I never had heard our story sound so well as when Lidder took it in hand. Incredulous at first, Lord Armadale warmed up to it as it went on from wonder to wonder. He took King Mu at a gulp. He swallowed the Monsters that Run like so much spring water. He nodded approval of Murray. And it was only when the question of money was tabled that his face lengthened. Not at the sum—Murray had cut it as fine as fine could be—but because the Indian Government looks askance at a hundred rupees, and must do it in a country where almost every drop of water for the crops has to be paid for, and a poor monsoon may mean the loss of a million lives. I knew that, so my joy may be imagined when Lidder said craftily—

“Of course the Government imprimatur is what is wanted. They can’t go ahead without that. But as far as money goes the expense to the Government need be merely nominal.”

“As how?” asked Lord Armadale, laughing. He knew his man even better than I.

“Well, you know, I’m a bachelor. No diamond ‘tararas’ to buy. No frocks and frills. I don’t mind seeing this business through if just enough is given to give it the Government stamp. You could put that through, eh, your Ex.?”

He laughed as when they were boys together and had a game on, and Lord Armadale responded in kind. I believe to this day they thought it an escapade of two hot-headed fools; they encouraged it for the sake of the tribal tradition that sends us into a good few of the tight places of the world and generally brings us back with something to show for it. If otherwise, they hid it very well. But, anyhow, I think it pleased them. Even in men of affairs—and God knows the affairs of India sit heavy enough on her rulers—there lingers a spark of romance and adventure that lights up into a flame when it gets a chance. I knew they were pleased with me. I knew I should get the backing I wanted. I wrote it to Soames next mail, so certain was I. Nothing was said in the drawing-room, but her Excellency was perfectly charming to me. On Lidder’s account, of course. Perhaps it was indirectly on his account that Lady Meryon was so gracious also. But I only saw her through a haze of Splendours of Egypt and Abodes of Wisdom. I am not perfectly clear now what she was like: but if it was the departed nursery governess stunt the charm worked no longer. Did Joan’s? Lord Alistair Keith was there—an alarming rival; but I think I rather pitied him than otherwise as one sentenced to a lounging life in Simla when he might be on his way to the Palace of Aladdin and the Temple of Solomon and the Splendour of Egypt.

Ah, well, one can only be young once, and a wholesome anger with Miss Boston acted as an antidote against her fascinations. Or I thought for the time it did. I thought it even at the dance next evening, when I saw her a nymph in sea-water green and silver, scintillating, dazzling, the centre of a court of adorers, scattering favours like flowers, smiles like sunbeams, and never a one for me. I did not ask her to dance. What is the good of courting public disaster? Once I caught her eyes en route to Keith, and they were as cold as the turquoises they were so like. I coaxed Lidder away a good deal earlier than he wanted to go, for I had talked myself dry with Lady Meryon, and there was a gulf wider than the ballroom between me and the sea-nymph, who finally disappeared with Keith into a dim and bowered corner and was no more seen.

No more. I left Simla two days later, and she was still invisible. But I had Lidder’s blank cheque in my pocket—his promise to come round by Calcutta (a bit of a circle) on his way to his satrapy in Pampur, and I had the Viceroy’s final shake of the hand, and his—

“Don’t worry, Ross. We want a little information from the Back of Beyond, and there are other monsters besides running ones that we could do with news of. See you again when you get back.”

What room had I for worry about Joan Boston and her unreason? I ask the question, and leave it unanswered.

So you have seen from the beginning of my yarn how Soames roped me in, aided by Joan Boston, and how I did the same by old Lidderdale, and he by the Viceroy, and the Viceroy by the Government of India—a sort of glorified House that Jack built. Not, of course, that King Mu would have gone down with the Sirkar, which is by no means given to romance. As a matter of fact that priceless document did not get farther than the Viceroy. But Murray’s opinion was heavily in our favour, and there was no doubt that one or two Bolshies had been caught and man-handled and skinned alive, or boiled in oil or something of the kind, in trying their luck in Tibet, which showed they were laying the trail there; and so, on the whole, the Powers decided it would be worth while to spend about a tenth of what had been spent on Murray, and trust to luck for what we might bring back. That was all we wanted; and here we were at Darjiling.

To say we were in high spirits is to put it mildly. I know I was in rollicking good humour, and felt as I had not felt for months. Joan Boston and all my worries were left down in the steamy heats of Bengal, and the clean mountain air was like wine in my veins. Soames was quieter, but thoroughly satisfied. He had shouldered the bigger half of the arrangements—the men, the ponies, and, later, the route. He had mugged up every available bit of information about Tibet and the mountains above Sikkim; and I really felt myself to be not much more than a hanger-on, so complete and efficient was every detail. I know we went to sleep that night full of nothing but thoughts of triumph and success.

The morning dawned gay and glad, the perfection of that Alpine land of beauty. The Himalayas were like a sweep of frozen billows in the stainless sky, the mighty crests glittering high aloft in the sunlight. Darjiling is the place in the world to see them. I have tried pretty well along the length of the range right on to Kashmir, but give me Darjiling all the time if you want to see what Nature can do when she tries.

The men were stringing out for the start, and we were just off when an old Hindu woman came up and salaamed to me. Old and withered, a mummy ready for the grave, the only young thing about her was a pair of flashing eyes seen under the sari pulled over her head. She was singing to herself, as she came up, one of the queer songs of the hill people. Personally I thought she was a little mad. She sang—

She broke off.

“Gold, gold!” she whined. “The Presence is going up into the hills for gold. Shall I tell him what the spirits say—the spirits that sit on the Touch-the-Sky Mountain?”

Two or three of the men gave ear with deepest awe and I shuffled my feet uneasily. Yar had been warned that not a word of gold was to leak out to man or woman. We were simply officials of the Sirkar travelling on Government business. So this was a beastly nuisance at the least; and possibly worse. Very likely it was only a chance shot, but how to silence the old hag? I hurriedly consulted Soames, who was superintending the loading of the coolies.

“Tell her it’s real Sirkar business; no gold. Let her tell your fortune. That’s probably what she’s after, and we’ll see what she knows or guesses. Very likely there’s nothing to it.”

I returned, smiling graciously. I spoke Hindustani all right and a bit of Tibetan, though I had not the Pentecostal gifts of Soames, who was arguing in three different languages at the moment, exclusive of English. But the old lady addressed me in a Nepal dialect. Now that was beyond me, and I summoned Yar to the rescue.

“O daughter of hill devils,” he began politely, “what is this? To shamelessly accost the great lords who depart on business for the King-Emperor—what brazen talk is this? What words are these of gold that is as dross to the Presences?” Of course he had to interpret what he said for my benefit.

“Gold, gold!” she chanted, squatting before me and hugging her old knees. “Gold, not in money and paper and coins, but in loads, pony loads, yak loads! Let old Jehanira see the fortunate hand of the sahib.”

Again Yar interpreted each word.

She rose on her knees, bent and wizened, and I reluctantly tendered my hand to the unclean grip.

“Not that hand—not the hand of greeting—but the heart hand that man does not give to friend or enemy,” she chuckled; and with greater reluctance I offered the left. She grasped it greedily. “Lay a silver piece on the palm, Heaven-born. The precious metals for the noble spirits!”

I laid a rupee, feeling it to be extremely ill spent, and she pouched it in the rags of her garments and began a very unattractive, whining, monotonous singing which finally shaped into these words—

“The past. A home across the sea—the black water where are the fish that fly. Across the sea that is red like blood. Across the middle sea. Across the sea of the rain and storms. And a boy sahib running with other boy sahibs, and in his arms they put a cup of silver such as kings drink from. True sight, sahib?”

I started. I had clean forgotten—but yes, the May races at Cambridge, the winning, the triumph, the cup! Scarcely such as kings drink from, but a treasure for all that. I listened with more interest.

“A river—a narrow river like a ditch, and the sahib in a boat, alone. It is washed down the white water that falls with a roar, and he strikes his head, and a man—yes, with one eye—swims—swims like a fish and saves the sahib. True sight, sahib?”

True again, and queerer still. The scar was on my head now. The man was Young. He had saved me when I went over the weir at Mapledurham. He was killed at Ypres. I remembered the blinded eye. The voice went on, now with a soothing monotony—

“The spirits watch from the cradle to the end. But that is not yet. And now the sahib forgets the beautiful Miss Sahib with the gold hair and eyes of turquoise”—that was Joan—“and he is journeying for the mountain of gold. Old Jehanira knows, for the spirits speak with her when the moon is high. Great peril. Snow and ice and the Abominable Snow-men and a cold heart and hot anger and blood—blood! But the One Woman, and the strange place where the Things that Run are seen!”

My brain was spinning. But these were the very words of the old Chinese script—the writing of the King Mu. Yar interpreted stolidly, but with an air of entire disapproval.

“For Heaven’s sake!” I said in Hindustani, “what does she mean?”

“She knows not herself,” Yar replied. “This old woman does not speak. Great devil sitting up on the Touch-the-Sky Mountain—he speaks. This woman is but as the trumpet of bone that the lamas blow. She makes the noise, but she speaks not.”

And indeed as I looked I saw her eyes were glazed and stupid. Her head dropped painfully on her breast.

“Is there any warning to give?” I asked hastily, using the first question that came into my head.

“Beware of the man with the scarred jaw. Beware of the Things that Run. And, most of all, beware of Soames.”

The voice was hers no longer. It was a man’s deep voice. It had dropped the Oriental tokens of respect—sahib, huzoor. It had spoken as an equal or a superior, and it warned me to beware of Soames. Was it ventriloquism—delusion—what? I stared at the woman. To be candid, she was an unattractive object, for whatever possessed her had the look of drugs or drink; her breath came in heavy snores now, and the lids dropped.

“No more saying,” said Yar in English, and dragged her unceremoniously to the side of the trail. “She waking soon—not remember nothing.”

I drew from my pocket a little book and made notes. I was so bewildered I had not digested the thing, and I wanted to talk it over with Soames.

The rest had set forth—twenty men in all, laden with the light shelter tents and every necessity that our own or Government knowledge had provided. And Soames was whistling as he went. The great adventure had begun.

I joined him as he strode on, stick in hand, and put the matter before him. The change in the woman’s voice, her knowledge of the past, her knowledge of the document that was our hard-held secret—all these things disturbed him, for he was inclined to think that some one was behind it who had his own reasons for trying to frighten us off. The warning against himself we both laughed at—an obvious attempt to sow distrust between the heads of the expedition. But, on the whole, he took it more seriously than I expected.

“Queer fish, these people. You see, Ross, we haven’t by any means got to the bottom of human possibilities yet. I’ve seen and heard things among them that I don’t begin to account for. She might read a thing or two in your mind when she touched your hand. I knew a woman that could follow your thought as quick as you changed it—a native woman at Mundore. I thought out the first proposition in Euclid, and as I thought it slowly she repeated it in Hindustani. Our friend may have been doing that; or it may, as I said, be a put-up job.”

“Well, if she was poking about in my brain she certainly didn’t find a warning about you there, old man. How do you get over that?”

“I don’t,” said Soames curtly. “I may as likely go dotty as another; and if so, I give you free leave to heave me over the handiest cliff. And, what’s more, I’ll do the same by you. All the same,” he added, after a minute’s thought, “I’d as soon it hadn’t happened, for we want to keep this show as quiet as we can. But I don’t think Yar’s leaky. He’s too fond of us, and has a strong feeling that it’s his own show as well.”

We left it at that, and continued on our way.

The marches were to be done at about fourteen miles a day. You cannot get more out of laden coolies, for the climbs are stiff, and at the great heights it is hard enough for an unladen man to get along. So there are many days when one does much less. Each man carried about sixty pounds’ weight, and Soames looked like a general as he turned an eagle eye on his troops. Stations had already been established along the line of march, where stores were waiting for us, for it is no light matter to feed so many men in such country as we should strike later; and though something might be expected from the guns, it would not be much to count on. We should have ponies for several marches when we got up on the hills: a certain amount of yak transport, too, with luck.

The procession was quite picturesque. The coolies each had a wooden framework strapped on his back to which his load was fastened; and each carried a hollow bamboo to rest the load and to serve as a bottle on the sultry bits of the march. Yar’s deep-chested voice was heard at intervals marshalling the coolies and rounding up the stragglers. And so away we went on the first stage to the Teesta Valley.

I knew the first stage or two, for I had been up at Darjiling in the summer, when all the rank and fashion of Calcutta come up for life and health and turn the place into a playground; but soon after Lebong my knowledge gave out.

It all interested me enormously; and I even broke the march a minute to dash into the little lamaist monastery at Ging to pay my respects to the devils and deities that adorn the walls. Yar, from a different motive, dashed in also. No pains must be spared to propitiate the mountain devils on the sahibs’ behalf; and here was a tremendous one with flaring tusks and flapping tongue and a blood-drenched altar to which Yar contributed a fowl squawking and struggling, in order that the sacrifice might hold us to the Splendour of Egypt. Soames shook his head, but knew better than to interfere with customs that kept the men going and gave a general atmosphere of “cheeri-o” to the proceedings.

We were as hungry as hunters when we reached the little rest-house at Badamtan, after a 3,000-feet climb through the almost tropic forest in its splendid luxuriance of tree-ferns and vines, and sat down to a good meal washed down with the Murwa beer of the country, brewed from millet and served in a big hollow joint of bamboo. We sucked it up through the straws they brought, and found the mild acidity was just a faint remembrance of English beer.

No more was done that day. The men were all resting in various attitudes of comfort and enjoying the Murwa beer to the full. It was a scene of lazy comfort in the shade. The humming-birds were whirring about the bushes, there came the tap of the woodpeckers in the recesses of the glorious forest, and I was getting drowsier and drowsier while Soames toiled over his notes, when—crash!—the whole camp was alert in a minute.

What was it? I jumped up and reached out for my gun. Nothing alarming at all: four men, one leading a pony upon which a veiled woman sat. Probably Indian, for the hill women go free and unveiled, and this one was covered also with the burka that conceals every line of grace and makes young and old alike shapeless.

The man leading the pony was a Tibetan of the comfortable class. The turquoises in his ear-rings, his amulets, and the handle of his knife, were large and good; and his belt clasp, set with turquoise and hill rubies in an intricate design, had a kind of barbaric beauty. The saddle was handsomely worked, and the broad stirrups were certainly of rough silver.

The three men following were heavily armed, and clearly a guard. As far as we were concerned we would have let them pass without notice except for the rough greetings of the coolies—especially as these were sternly ignored. I confess I was not interested. I had seen too many of that sort of women to feel any excitement, and it was jolly to watch the Lepchas luring the humming-birds into sight by imitating the hooting of an owl and see the little fellows crowding out to see the enemy.

But the cavalcade stopped short beyond the rest-house, and the leader, singling out Soames, beckoned him—not rudely, but with an air that might be resented by a sahib in his own territory.

“Better not get their backs up, though!” he said, getting up. “We may want friends in the Debatable Land yonder,” and he strolled lazily up with an air of his own, while I followed.

A ceremonious “Good-day” in Tibetan was the first step, and we replied politely. The veiled figure sat like a statue, but somehow I was conscious of eyes that pierced the wrappings.

“Do the sahibs go up to the Passes?” was the first question.

“We do not ask your route—why do you ask ours?”

“Because every man’s life is precious to him, and it has not been told you that the soldiers of the Dalai Lama are guarding the Chang-La. They gave orders to bring all passers to His Ocean Greatness at Lhasa. It is my counsel that you would turn back at the end of British territory; or——”

A pause.

“Or what?”

“It will be wise,” the man said evasively.

I drew up a little nearer to Soames, fearing treachery, and laid my hand on the gun in my pocket. I was on the off side of the pony, with Soames and the woman’s guide on the other, and in a flash the woman laid her hand on my wrist, restraining me—a small, strong, brown hand with slender finger-tips—a young hand, for a hand is the greatest tale-teller of age that exists; and on the forefinger was the most extraordinary ring I had ever seen in my life. I was familiar with the jewels of most of the Maharajas, for a series of Durbars at Delhi is a glittering display; but this ring fairly dazzled me. For it was a new gem. Imagine a diamond with all its flash and sparkle magnified and enhanced—a network of blinding rays in the sun. But imagine it a pale, bright blue, like the shallows of a summer sea, with lights playing from it like the sunny dance of sparkles on the ocean. It all happened in a minute. The quick slim hand was instantly withdrawn, and I relaxed my hold of the gun.

Her guide went on in a measured Tibetan drawl—

“Her Divinity the Diamond Sow, the Abbess of Kamtok, has had a vision. She beheld white men climbing the Touch-the-Sky Mountain, and sent word east and west, and the soldiers are out in the Passes. The Dalai Lama is merciful—he would not willingly slay; but if His Ocean Greatness strikes, he strikes hard.”

Silence followed. Soames considered seriously. It was odd that the guide should allude to the Touch-the-Sky Mountain, which might be a myth for all we knew as yet. Half the world seemed to be thinking of the legendary peak. Very strange!

“Where and what is the Touch-the-Sky Mountain?” asked Soames carelessly.

“It is not to be found. It is the Mountain of the Gods. The search for it is inadvisable. Farewell. The counsel of a friend is to be heeded.”

Was it fancy? I could have sworn that like a whispered echo I heard a silver “Farewell” from beneath the veil.

The man jerked the pony forward, and they all disappeared round the great clump of tree-ferns beyond the rest-house. Soames turned away, his brow knotted, thinking hard.

“I say, Yar, who were those people?” I ventured.

“Big lord. Not knowing.” Yar, too, looked disturbed.

I suggested that big lords did not lead ponies nor travel with so small a tail of attendants; but Yar, in his deplorable English, stuck to his point.

“Big lord. Not talk like small man.”

I bearded Soames next. “Who is Her Divinity the Diamond Sow, when she’s at home?”

“The greatest lady in Tibet—a kind of lady pope. Years and years ago, when her convent was being besieged, a miracle was wrought, and the then abbess and all her flock were turned into pigs big and little, so that the besiegers went empty away. Hence her attractive title. I wish her ladyship had kept her finger out of our pie. It’s getting a bit hot.”

It was an hour later when a Lepcha child, pretty and snub-nosed, came running down the path with a basket of split bamboo in one hand and six eggs in it. Making straight for me, she set the thing at my feet with a droll little salaam.

“For the lord whose hair is like gold,” she said.

“Jolly little kiddie and jolly nice eggs!” I was feeling in my pocket for a small baksheesh, when I caught an elaborate grin on Yar’s broad mouth as he looked down at the little messenger.

“Who from?” he asked.

The child giggled, and muttering something, darted away and was lost in the jungle.

“What does it mean? Who sent them?” I asked impatiently.

Yar collected himself for explanation—

“Lady seeing sahib sending. Love gift.”

“Rot!”

Soames was looking over my shoulder, laughing.

“Didn’t you know the meaning of eggs up here? It’s one of their little ways of offering marriage. And it may be a little awkward if one doesn’t tumble to it. But I say—who’s the victim to your charms, Ross?”

“Heaven knows. Here, take these things away, Yar. Call back the kid.”

But we might as easily have whistled a humming-bird from the jungle; and Soames refused to part with the eggs, and the incident closed.

About and around the unromantic eggs, though, I heard the silver sighing of a voice that whispered “Farewell.” They were particularly good when boiled next morning.

We made our start in perfect weather and all promised well. But Soames was preoccupied, and inclined to be uneasy at the warning of the Tibetans. The jealousy of the Tibetan people about their frontier has not been lessened by contact with the British; but it was about the reappearance of the Touch-the-Sky Mountain that his anxiety centred. Here we were possessed of an ancient document known only to himself, Yar, and me—for we might leave Crosby out of the count—and yet interest in what it dealt with seemed to be awake and watchful. Soames pondered deeply as we marched down the windings of the forest to the fever-stricken gorge on the banks of the Rangit River, where quinine was served out to all hands.

Beyond the river British territory ended and native Sikkim began. The crossing, slow and toilsome in the miserable dugouts poled across by rough ferrymen, seemed to break the last tie with home, and gave one the feeling that the unknown was closing in upon us. But it was a blessed change from life in the big offices in Calcutta, with the dull routine going on all day to the drone of the punkahs stirring the hot and sticky air. Here it blew free and cool down the river directly the stagnant gorge was left behind. Adventure, keen, living, gold bright and steel bright, beckoned ahead. Did it beckon with the slim brown hand bearing a strange and radiant jewel? My thoughts fled winged to Simla. Joan would be out for her ride now. I could see her, the picture of fashionable grace, long coat, riding-breeches, tilted hat over the little impertinent nose and ambushed eyes, under the pines on the steep road; Durell at her bridle rein. Sweet, sophisticated, seductive beyond all words, as much for him as for me, would she care a single straw if she knew that that slim brown hand was beckoning me on? Soames called to me, and the dream shattered into a thousand fragments before I had even shaped an answer to the question.

“I’m not too well pleased about that meeting,” he began. “The question is whether there’s any connection between those folk and the old hag at Darjiling. Depend upon it every word she said was over the bazaar an hour afterwards. It’s one of the marvels of India how news travels. They may be tracking us up all the way.”

“Yar said she wouldn’t know a single word she had said when she sobered down again. In that case——”

“Rot! I’ve seen too much to believe in those trances. You can never bowl them out.”

“But why suppose she has any connection with these Tibetans? I don’t see how——”

Soames interrupted me roughly.

“I think you’ll allow that I’ve had a little more experience of the hill people than you. I know how much the expedition owes to you, Ross, but, all the same, I consider that my opinion carries more weight when a matter is discussed. The responsibility is chiefly mine after all.”

His manner was so unusual that I thought it better to say nothing, and let him see my surprise in that way only. What he said was true enough, and I was the first to allow it; but that was certainly not the way to say it. It blew over, for I meant it should; but he was a bit stand-off the next few days, which struck me as uncalled-for.

Now came the climb out of the river valley, a good 2,000 feet. Travel in Sikkim is apt to be a switchback business at best, but it took us out of the malarial depths, where no man who values his life would sleep unless he must.

We talked as we went, the coolies cheering themselves with a wild hill song punctuated with grunts and groans. Soames went over the route ahead of me, so far as he had worked it out from Murray’s remarks and failures, from Yar and from the document. It was all plain sailing, though uncommon hard travelling for some time yet. It would be on tackling the Pedong Pass that real trouble would start. But Soames was in hope of meeting wandering camps of herdsmen corresponding to the Kashmirian Gujars from whom we might get information; and it was possible that at the Dorje-Tak Monastery higher up some scraps of news might leak out if the fish were skilfully played.

Tents were pitched on a safe height above the malaria belt, and the village people came in with their offerings of Murwa beer and magnificent oranges. They were a kind-hearted, jolly sort of folk, generous and friendly as far as their little means went; and they chummed up with our men, who settled down to a good time, sipping their beer through reed pipes, while one of them warbled in a groaning minor, that made it highly comic, this ditty—

“After all, you know, it’s better sort of stuff than our ‘Stand from under, Sally,’ and ‘Come along, Dinah,’ business,” I said to Soames, who was sitting there as solemn and reflective as a buffalo in repose. Soames was splendid, of course, but he had not been particularly chummy lately.

“Don’t see it!” he said acidly. “Blue Butterfly indeed! However, it keeps them going, and that’s all that counts. Wait till we get up into the heights. You won’t hear much about Blue Butterflies then. For the matter of that, wait for the leeches in the Teesta Valley.”

I couldn’t help grinning. “Don’t be so disgruntled, old man! Take it all as a spree. If we pull it off, well and good. If we don’t, well and bad. In either case we shall have had a rattling good time.”

“I mean to win out,” he said slowly. “The treasure mayn’t count for much with you, Ross. You’ve got an uncle and a future. I’ve got nothing, and I must have hard cash and plenty of it to do what I want. Why, up here there’s knowledge worth millions just waiting for the man that can take hold. And I mean to be the man.”

“And you’ll do it, if any one can,” I replied, and believed every word I said.

He impressed every one that way; there was a sort of dull power and knowledge about him that would shoulder difficulties aside like an elephant in bamboos. He was pleased, and became a bit more expansive in the talk that followed, waving his pipe to stress the points, and we sat till evening was coming up through the trees.

Suddenly a little, light-foot messenger darted out of the jungle, and salaaming with every inch of his brown body, laid a bit of folded paper, not too clean, at my feet, and was off and away again into the green depths. I picked it up, bewildered.

“I say, they blow in as regularly as the postman! What’s this?” and I handed it to Soames. I leaned over his shoulder, and we studied it together. There was a rough drawing, or rather scrawl, indicating a winding river with the name written above it in Tibetan, “The Raging Secret One.” Beside it was a narrow track labelled “The Way of the Running Things.” At what was meant for a narrow defile the Way of the Running Things left the river and climbed an upward way inscribed “The Touch-the-Sky Mountain.” The whole was clearly a rude map drawn by a most inexperienced hand.

We stared at each other in wild surprise. What did it mean? Was the intention good or bad, false or true? Every one of the names but the last was new to us. We pored over it in intensest interest. A blind, or a friend’s guidance? It was just a toss-up. But what friend, and why? The plot was thickening.

Soames shouted for Yar, who came bearing his beer in a bamboo joint with two reeds sticking out of it. It had a false air of civilization that dimly recalled London and iced drinks in charming company—visions that faded before the grime of Yar’s honest flat face. He was no longer a clean Lepcha, but had reverted to type directly the march began. Soames made him squat before us, and began his catechism.

No, Yar had never heard of the Raging Secret One nor yet of the Way of the Running Things. Stay—there was Gyalpo, one of the coolies. Gyalpo had a grandfather, a wonderful old gentleman who had seen and spoken with more than one devil in the heights. He had indeed once come upon a party of them cooking in a big pot, and they had vanished on seeing him. Therefore Gyalpo might have heard his grandfather speak of these places. He went off, and presently produced him, very much alarmed but loquacious, a wiry fellow all string and muscle, with a dangerous one-edged knife stuck in his girdle and a squint that belied an honest face.

The Raging Secret One? Yes, that was a true name, but he did not know that any one had seen it. It was far beyond where his grandfather had seen the cooking devils. Men did not go to look for that river. Very hard to find. Very dangerous. None but his grandfather could say the road there. The Way of the Running Things? He once had heard that name. But there were said to be devils with beaks like birds that could tear the flesh from a man’s face. And worse and most terrible, there were the Abominable Snow-men, the ghastly dwellers in the heights, with the feet of a bear and huge hanging hands.

“Where is his grandfather now?” Soames asked.

“Grazing sheep at the beginning of the Pedong Pass.”

We dismissed him with a small baksheesh, and Soames turned to me.

“It’s a question of ‘Who’s your lady friend,’ Ross. A sequel to the eggs. This scrawl was never done by a man. And—smell the paper!”

I did. Even now, folded, unfolded, opened, it had a faint but decisive smell of musk; that scent which breathes of Eastern womanhood to all who know the East. I looked uncomfortably at it.

“It’s beyond me altogether,” I said. “I did think of the woman on the pony; but it seems madness, and there isn’t a woman in the world who either cares a rag about me or would do me a nasty one if she could.”

Again my thoughts fled to Simla. A far cry! Far enough to buttress what conviction I might have in the matter.

Soames laughed grimly.

“That’s a pretty bold statement. However, here’s a fact; there’s some woman takes enough interest either to lead or mislead you. We shall hear more. I won’t say it’s the woman on the pony, for it seems too obvious. All the same, it doesn’t always do to dismiss the obvious as impossible.”

That night when I was tucked up in my tent I distinctly heard footsteps outside, soft as thistledown, and a faint rustle of drapery. I moved with tensest quiet to the opening and looked out into an empty moon-washed world.

We had a stiff climb next day through the Mang-Pu Valley in hot damp air that made it a bit of a grind; and the day after also. But it landed us in the cooler heights where the chestnuts grow, and there were bits that reminded me of Europe. The head-man received us politely when we camped, bringing the usual gifts of beer and fruit, and yet another—a little piece of faded blue silk turned over to form a tiny bag. It was brought in, he said, by a Bhotiya child from up yonder. He pointed vaguely to the towering hills above. It was for the young lord with hair like gold; and he placed it in my embarrassed hand. The thing was getting beyond a joke and I was half inclined to chuck it away unopened; but Soames took possession and sailed in with his questions—

“Have you seen or have any of your people seen five travellers pass, going up into the mountains? A woman with a veil and four men? The Sirkar offers a reward of much money for news of these people.”

It was offered in vain. The head-man denied all knowledge of such people. Some single people had passed, but no party. He called to other men and asked. No good. It ended at that.

The message in the little bag was a drawing as rough as the last. A figure evidently meant for a woman sat on a mountain about the size of an ant-heap in proportion, stretching her hands out to some one unseen as if for help—or possibly in welcome. If in much higher works of art there is room for doubt there was much more here.

“She’s no artist, anyway,” said Soames; “but she means business, whatever it may be. There’s method in her madness. Oh, me! They’re the same all the world over. Here, Ross! Stop a mo’! Give me the magnifying glass.”

I had it in my pocket, and we held it over the remarkable work of art. Yes, undoubtedly there was something on a finger of the outstretched hands. It might be a mark of the very wobbly pencil—or it might be—what? A ring? And a blue gleam darted through my mind like a kingfisher—though Soames would not be positive. Again it was “too obvious”—his favourite word. All the hill women wore rings. We smelled the paper gravely and steadily. Yes, undoubtedly musk again. And I ventured the opinion that village women were not likely to carry musk about with them. Soames put the paper in his pocket, with a saturnine grin.

“I don’t know yet whether we’ve got to bless or curse your beauty, Ross, but it has certainly bowled over some lady up yonder.” He jerked a thumb at the peaks in the distance and added—“Of course, as likely as not, she’s a decoy. We must keep our eyes peeled and no mistake. Wish she’d send a reply paid. We might spot her then.”

I smoked in silence, but I knew as well whom it came from as if I had seen her send it. What I did not know was the motive; and that ought to be all that mattered.

Two days later we crossed the Uplifted Horn Mountain, over the shoulder that looks down upon the river, and it was here that a very queer thing happened. Two forbidding-looking lamas crossed with us, having politely enough asked leave to join the party. We could not well refuse, for our men viewed them with the utmost reverence, and it was our aim to keep every one in as good humour as possible. Yar described them as “magician lamas”; there was nothing they could not do. Let the sahibs give them food and ask for a taste of their magic. Every one knew they could move the mountains, call up devils, foretell the future, and so forth. These men are, of course, a distinct and well-known class in Tibet and the surrounding countries, and we were both interested; though Soames had seen a couple at work at Darjiling in the Ging Monastery and had not been much impressed. I suggested it would hearten up the men amazingly if they promised success.

“Yes; but suppose they don’t!”

In the end we chanced it; and an invitation to eat was given and a little ceremonial scarf of silk presented with it—an observance so universal in Tibet that we carried many of the flimsy things in our load. Both were graciously accepted, and at the appointed time the lamas approached, each extending a healthy-looking tongue to its longest length and pressing forward the left ear—the odd Tibetan greeting.

Luckily Soames and I were instructed as to its meaning, and did not repel it with the fury that it has called forth from Europeans who knew no better.

The camp-fire had been lit, for it was beginning to be very chilly at sundown, and a meal as gorgeous as our resources would run to was ready for the holy men. There was soup boiling hot from the big pot under the trees, savoury with two parrots—alas! too beautiful for soup—that had fallen to my gun. It was soup better than good when flavoured with the cunning herbs and peppers of the wilderness so well known to Wi-dong, our cook. A canned stew of beef followed, much enriched by the same herbs and with onions from the Lepcha cultivated plots. Nor did our guests turn up their flat broad noses at the stewed wild raspberries as served with canned evaporated cream. There was honey, too, for Gyalpo had discovered a wild black bees’ nest in a rotting tree. Later he would show us how to make a kind of mead from it. “Very good things in the jungle for understanding folk,” he said.

But the crown of the feast was when Soames produced his flask and poured a little into the bottom of each greedily extended bamboo joint. A little, a very little, water was added from the clear runnel that chattered down the rock beside us, and it was quickly seen that the lamas were not hostile to the fire drink of Feringistan. Again the bamboo joint came out, and once more I poured, but with a sparing hand.

They would not smoke—they shook their heads with disgust. There was some reason against it. But they would talk, and did with apparent frankness while Soames and I lit up, and the leaping flames of the fire made the dusk beautiful. They told stories of Tibet, wild stories of the horrible cruelties that awaited travellers who penetrated to the inhospitable Chang. Something with boiling oil in it appeared to be the invariable Tibetan welcome. We expected this. These stories are part of the propaganda of defence of the Hidden Land; and yet in spite of it travellers have gone and returned to tell its marvels.

We took it all seriously, however, professing amazement that any one should have ventured in the face of such dangers, and did our level best to gain a useful reputation for timidity. That done, we turned the talk to magic. The men talked big at first. Lhasa was the place for marvels. What was there that the Great Necromantic Lama could not do? He had charms that would turn every bullet that was not cast with silver.

“Curious to meet that Middle Ages superstition up here,” said Soames aside.

“Yes, or garnets,” the elder went on; “but, of course, even the humblest of the lamas who have studied magic have certain sorts of control. Trifles such as the discovery of gold, or turning the inferior metals into gold or silver—these things are nothing.”

I drew a wrench from my pocket, an old friend that never left me, and held it out. “This is steel. Could this be made into gold?”

The elder lama looked at it closely, turning it over and over, seemingly trying to decipher the trade-mark.

“A charm?” he asked laconically.

I shook my head.

“If a charm, impossible,” said the lama. “Otherwise, yes. Certainly gold or silver. Is it wished to see the power?”

“Certainly.”

“And what reward?”

We looked at each other. It seemed flat blasphemy to offer money to the master of the mighty spell. A golden wrench and two or three rupees scarcely seemed to go together.

“I’ve got it!” I said, and darted to my tent, whence I emerged waving a small but handy electric torch warranted to go for three months if used sparingly. I flashed it, and in the rapidly coming dusk the two men crowded to look, their eyes shining with avarice. The offer was good enough. The incantations began.

First the lamas drew from a bag a girdle of elaborately carved human bones, and then another, and put them on. Two rosaries of snake spines followed, and a trumpet made of a human thigh-bone, such as is commonly used in Tibet for monastic ceremonies.

And next the younger uttered a salutation and a prayer—

“Kye! Kye! In the boundary of the horizon is a yellow dragon-headed dragon. Oh, dragon-headed dragon, accept this ransom and call back all the injuring demons!”

He faced to the four quarters of the compass, bowing to each as he turned. This concluded, the elder blew a hollow blast on the thigh-bone trumpet, whereupon every man within hearing, excepting our two selves, stood up with every sign of terror. It was a weird scene in the firelight, with the sighing trees about us, and I own to feeling a sympathetic creeping in the roots of my own hair as the dolorous blast rang out about us. Then, making proclamation in a high, shrill cry, the lama commanded all present to turn their backs while the seventh magical power, control of all natural laws, was put into operation, and on no account to gaze with mortal eyes upon what, if seen, would cause those eyes to distil in liquid from the sockets.

As if on parade, every back was turned, and the weaker vessels threw themselves flat on the ground. Three more trumpet blasts and both lamas, passing the snake-spine rosaries rapidly through their fingers, moved round the fire muttering, in the strangest sing-song, mantrams, or spells. The shrill rising and falling cadences, the circling movements, threw me almost at once into a half-hypnotized state—it fascinated and repelled me. My eyes fixed on a bit of crystal in the lama’s queer hat, and the light flickered, grew larger, seemed to dazzle me, till I felt like a bird with the snake waving before me. Soames caught me by the arm and shook it with a stern word, but I only smiled foolishly, the light swaying before my eyes. I could think of nothing else.

The younger lama took a brand from the camp-fire and laid it on the ground beside us, heaping fresh wood upon it that instantly flared up high in the velvet dark of the night. He sprinkled it with a yellow powder from a box in his breast, and the flames burned green and blue. Now they both paced sunwise round the fire nine times and, sitting again, recited the charms, performing the mystic gestures with the fingers until even Soames felt his attention waver and his eyes daze. Then, with a swift motion, the elder flung the wrench into the fire and resumed the charms, while the younger caught my hand and a hand of Soames and in a loud wailing voice bade us see.

Immediately a screen of smoke rose from the fire, forming as it were a background for a picture that shaped itself upon it.

There appeared a mountain, peaked and pinnacled, with a great fortress held like a prey in its fangs; also a wild way climbing from a river through crags to the gateway. Beside it a white torrent flashed down the rocks. There was a banner with a gold dragon upon it. And even as we looked the smoke blew aside and the picture was gone.

It wafted together again for another picture—a woman’s face, with a very singular head-dress like a priest’s mitre, with jewels set in it—a face of the haughtiest beauty, cold and angry, and proud like a queen—not the face of a European, but dark of hair and eyes. But as we looked the smoke blew apart and it was gone.

A third picture—two men struggling together on a narrow plateau, a fearful drop of precipice beside them. I cried out on seeing it. And instantly the smoke blew apart and it was gone.

The voices stopped dead. I stirred and rubbed my eyes, half thinking I was dreaming. Soames was staring owlishly at the fire, which had dropped as if at a signal when the voices stopped. In a second more it was out—was black ash—and by the light of the camp-fire we could see the younger man raking in it with a small rod. He pushed something out, and, filling his bamboo at the stream, poured water hissing on the object twice, three times. Then, lifting it in a grimy rag, he laid it between us. To all appearance it was of pure soft gold with a queer embossed pattern running along it.

Three more blasts on the unpleasant trumpet permitted the camp to return to its normal condition, and the coolies turned frightened eyes upon where we sat with the magicians.

“You have shown us three pictures,” said Soames composedly. “Did you see them also?”

“Certainly we have seen. It is by the force of our mantrams that the spirits show them. How should we not see?”

“What are they?”

“Shadows of things to come. Your thoughts cast the shadows.”

“We have not seen the place or the woman. How, then, can our thoughts do this?”

“Past, present, and future are one with the spirits. You will see. It would be better if you turned; but this you will not do.”

“What is the fortress?”

“Very ancient. This can be seen.”

“Have you not heard of it?”

“Never. We know nothing. Your thoughts say these words: ‘The Glory of the East.’ But we know nothing.”

“The woman?”

“Your thoughts say: ‘The Imperial Princess.’ We know no more. Take the gold you seek, but give our reward and let us go. The air here is full of devils. We cannot stay.”

Their haste and uneasiness were evident. Whatever the cause might be, they were genuinely frightened. It was an unheard-of thing that they should set out in the dangerous dark, but nothing would keep them, and we yielded perforce. They gathered up all their possessions, took the electric torch, and were off—whereupon the younger turned for an instant.

“When you see the Touch-the-Sky Mountain, unless you seek worse than death turn and flee.”

The next minute the darkness had swallowed them.

“Well, what do you think of Tibetan mahatmas now, Ross?”

I couldn’t talk. I felt as if I had been on the bust for a week. I dragged myself off to my tent and Soames put the wrench in his pocket. No more of their sorceries for me! It was an unwholesome proceeding for all concerned. Far off I heard the sound of the trumpet receding into the distance.

When I came out in the morning I found the whole camp fluttering with rags tied on bamboos, the time-honoured offerings to the devils, and heard the shrill cry of “Graciously accept our offering. The spirits have conquered. The devils are brought low.”

The air was getting uncanny and our men were decidedly jumpy. Soames agreed we had better let the supernatural take a holiday.

We tested that wrench by every rough-and-ready test in our power, and the result was always the same—gold to the best of our belief. There was no more to say, but it opened up a lot of possibilities if there were even a grain of truth in it, and we walked in silence many an hour that day.

The next few hours were consecrated to leeches. Leeches! The ten plagues of Egypt are pale beside the single plague of the Upper Teesta Valley. Thin as wire, they hid in the grass and seized their victims as we went by. Boots and puttees were no protection, for they slipped through every crevice and then sucked their fill before they fell off into the grass again. They crept and crawled over the whole party, who left their traces in blood as they went, and it was sickening to see the horrors bloat themselves out and fall off replete and exhausted. The men came along, weary and bathed in trickles of red from arms and legs and even throats. The tak-toong (the blood-drinker) will certainly see to it that he does not fall out in the struggle for existence, whoever else may.

That night we camped in the precincts of the monastery of Dorje-Tak, and the whole lot of us, warmed and rested, fell asleep under the protection of the kindly lamas, about as dead beat as men could be.

The abbot, known as “The Omniscient White Lotus,” gave us audience next day before we started off, receiving us in state in a hall of the monastery with all his lamas, rosaries in hand. His own rosary was of turquoise in veneration of the Goddess of Mercy, Tara, whose complexion is blue. He wore a mitre-shaped cap of cloth with broad fillets falling over the ears, and his cup-bearer stood beside him.

We bowed low and gravely as we approached the great man, and he returned the courtesy, proffering his blessing, which, of course, we accepted. Seats were then brought, and we sat before his holiness, and were entertained with the horrible Tibetan tea flavoured with salt and butter which these people drink more or less all day. It could not be refused, and I choked it down as best I could. Soames tackled it with his usual impassive gravity, and went one better, swallowing a second go without turning a hair.

The abbot asked of our journey and our intentions—the usual small talk served up to travellers. He assumed as a matter of course that we had no idea of entering Tibet, and we said nothing. We were quite sufficiently on the qui vive to see the intention of some of the latter questions, and it was up to us to be uncommonly careful.

“You met two travelling lamas last night on their way to the Chang?” came at last from The Omniscient White Lotus.

“Certainly. Are they here?”

“No, they passed by another track. But we understand this from your men. Did they show you the metal-changing marvel?”

Extraordinary how all was known in this amazing country. None of the coolies had seen, yet it was known.

“They showed us a trifle of the kind.” Soames’s voice was very cautious.

“Those who have seen that marvel are favoured by the Incarnations,” the abbot replied politely. “You also saw the smoke marvel?”

“Yes, curious smoke effects. We could not see anything in them.”

The abbot turned and whispered to the man beside him. He stepped forward and laid in my hand three little flat brightly-coloured pictures. Strange and more than strange, they were the very pictures we had seen in the wavering smoke—the wild fortress set in the rocks, the beautiful dark princess, and the two men struggling in the heights. I passed them to Soames, and it was only by a strong effort I kept my self-possession.

“These are strange pictures, your holiness. May I ask why they are shown to us?”

“Because in the archives of the monastery are preserved many thousand such pictures. They foretell the future, and the date of each is known. For more than fifty years those three pictures have lain here, and it was known that on this day those whom they concerned would come to the monastery. What they mean we cannot say, but the event will show.”

“Do you give them to us?”

“We retain them. When the events represented take place, the pictures fade and are destroyed.”

No use to say more. The whole thing was puzzling in the extreme. It could have been understood if the travelling lamas had come from the direction of the Dorje-Tak Monastery, but they had overtaken us on the way from India. Also they could scarcely have reached the place yet, for we had made survey of the whole track as we came along.

Some small gifts we offered—a can of preserves, a box of frosted fruits, and so forth, all very graciously received, and we departed with a benediction from The Omniscient White Lotus and serious doubts of its sincerity. We were waiting outside on a little flat bit of ground, while Yar started the coolies, and Soames was laying down the law about the abbot and the pictures, and I was listening more to my own thoughts than to him. For it seemed to me that a strange destiny was watching proceedings with an eye to its own designs. Events were building themselves up in a regular sequence—the documents, the woman, the drawings, the smoke pictures, the abbot’s revelation—all followed, as it were, a plan. But whose? That was hidden as yet, but always I saw a veiled figure leading us on, beckoning with a hand on which blazed a strange jewel.

While Soames was talking, a voice broke through his discourse, a chatter of singing from the upper part of the many-windowed monastery—a man’s voice, hoarse and guttural, chanting:

It was staggering. Did all the world know our aim? Was the Touch-the-Sky Mountain the first thought in every man’s mind? We stared at each other.

“My sainted aunt! It’s a facer, and no mistake!” I said.

Soames looked me in the eyes squarely.

“I think, Ross, that as I have had more experience with these people than you it’s only fair to own up now that I believe our plans have got out. As for the bluff we put up, they’re not taking any. It’s meeting us at every turn, and I can’t doubt it any longer. And that being so, it’s up to us to decide what’s best. It’s dangerous, mighty dangerous. Now, Ross, shall we turn—shall we make this show into a common or garden trip, with a little playful excavation thrown in all along the Gyatsho route where a party of women would be safe on a picnic? Or——”

He spoke bitterly, frowning, not at me, but at Fate in general—Fate, that gives a man his chance and then flicks it adroitly away; that builds him a visible kingdom in the desert, and then—pouf!—disperses it with a whiff into the mirage it is. The irony of the immortals!

I knew this was the chance of Soames’s life—the one golden hope, whatever might be the upshot.

“Well, I’ve heard you, old man. But all the same I’m not for chucking. No, not by any manner of means. Of course it’s rotten bad luck and all that; and if Yar had been leaking I’d scrag him as soon as look at him. But I think he is sound. We couldn’t chuck now, Soames. It’d be selling the Sirkar as well as ourselves. No! Tails up! And let us take the road.”

“Sure you quite understand what we’re up against? The Tibetans haven’t got at all pretty little ways when they have a down on you.”

“Oh, stop jawing. Come along. Let’s clear out. I’ve a feeling they’re watching us from every eyehole.”

I looked back before we turned the corner, and at one opening I saw a sight that caught my breath. A woman stood there—a woman with her veil flung back, brilliant, proud, lovely, with ropes of silken black hair coiled upon her head. A vision, and gone like a vision. The veil fell swiftly as the curtain of a theatre, but not before I had seen a flash of the hand that pulled it.

“Soames,” I said with conviction, “if you argued till you were black in the face, if you had every reason and right on your side, if you turned back yourself, I’m for the Touch-the-Sky Mountain!”

“I also,” said Soames, striding forward.

Ten days later we were through the lovely Alpine valley of the Chank-La and scaling the Himalayas, and the temperature was dropping steadily. Up the rocky trail the coolies climbed and climbed, going easier now in spite of increasing difficulties, because this part of the trek could be helped by yaks and ponies, and a man travels with a lighter heart as well as legs when the load is mostly on the shoulders of a strong, hairy brute like the yak. Soames had been up in the mountains more than once, and though he did not know this especial part he knew the ropes, and went forward with a steady confidence. He and I mounted on sturdy Tibetan ponies, Yar always tramping ahead steadily, sometimes looming large in the mountain mists, sometimes lost entirely, but always reappearing, steady, reliable, good-humoured, the kind of man for a hare-brained expedition of the kind.

We were among the nomad Tibetans now in the Mendong-La, and more than once we had seen their tents of black yak’s hair. They follow the melting snows of the mountains, pasturing their herds on the sweet grass until they reach the top of the Mendong-La mountain, and from that they go down into Tibet proper. They mix a little trade with their herding, carrying small goods to Tashilunhpo; and picking up rough jewellery, tea, and such things there, they work their way down again before the snows close everything.

Now, two days after entering the valley of the Pass, a group of these people were sighted—the black tents showing out among the crags. The leaders came forward with protruded tongues, and there was evidently a wish to be civil, for they carried pitchers of the rich yak’s-milk, which is such a dainty in the heights.

Soames was doubtful of camping near them this night, knowing there is often bad blood between them and the Lepchas and Sikkimese, and fearing quarrels. He was therefore deciding to strike on when the men came up, grimy and weather-beaten. For all that, the belt of the leader and his massive ear-ring were set with turquoise of a very fine blue, and his tinder-box was inlaid with what looked very like gold unless I was much mistaken.

“Gold, gold everywhere,” said Soames to me. “A man who had been up here told me the goldfields of the world are here, and the Yukon is a fool to it. But as the Tibetans believe the big nuggets breed the little pellets and the gold dust, they never touch them, and there are difficulties in the way at present.”

I shrugged my shoulders. Gold was not the first thing in my thoughts just then, though I liked it as well as another.

The head-man saluted.

“Do the great Government lords go over the Mendong-La?”

“Why is this asked? When the Sirkar moves in India no questions are asked. All make way in silence.”

“Doubtless this is so, great lord. But the Dalai Lama rules in Tibet, and all his people are commanded to tell those who travel up the Passes that the air of Tibet is bad for white people. They do not live long if they breathe it.”

The old story. We put our ponies forward impatiently, but the man caught the rein.

“There is more, great lord. Do not be angry. Two days ago a party went up the Pass, going through our midst, and they gave us word for the Government lords when they should follow.”

“Speak quickly,” Soames said curtly. “Who were these people?”

“How should a poor herdsman know? One was a lord of the Bon-Pa—the ancient people that live up yonder”—he pointed vaguely north “and he wore a charm box set with shining stones.”

“Don’t know him.”

“A lady was there veiled; and whether young or old we cannot say. Three men followed with little guns such as the Government lords carry.”

But this was a miracle. I had seen her face at the Dorje-Tak Monastery, and now we were told they were two days ahead. Impossible. Absolutely absurd. In these vast solitudes, not a creature, not an animal, could have passed us unseen. Why—it was magic! And yet these men could not have invented the party; and if they could, what object could there be? My brain seemed to whirl.

“The message?” Soames was using the curt style one finds impressive with all Orientals. Fear or astonishment are never to be shown, and the less they are felt the better.

“The message was this, to be given to the elder lord: ‘Over the Mendong-La is the way to attainment of desire. Great are the dangers. But when the Beloved Sister Mountain is seen, know that the place is near.’ Such are the words, lord. He caused me to repeat it until I could say it in my sleep.”

Soames hesitated. The man was in earnest. Yar, standing by, put a strange question.

“Brother herdsman, have the lamas of Lhasa instructed you in this?”

“No one instructed me but this lord of the Bon-Pa.”

“Who are the Bon-Pa?” I asked at his shoulder.

Soames replied: “The ancient devil-worshipping people before Buddhism came to Tibet. Yar, go ahead! We don’t camp here to-night.”

He waited until the grumbling coolies and grunting yaks were started, Yar herding them on, and, calling the head-man, he put a couple of rupees in his hand and went on. As I delayed to look at my girths, the man drew up to me and spoke.

“Lord, it is best for a poor man to keep silence. Yet one thing will I say: It is better than best to turn back, turning aside neither to right nor left. For on one side is the great anger of the Dalai Lama, and on the other——”

A pause. I said nothing, looking steadily at him.

“On the other,” he went on, “the terrible ancient people and the Things that Run. Turn in haste and live.”

“What are these things? Many have spoken of them.”

He shuddered violently.

“Few have seen. But it is said they are great and awful, with six legs, and where they run the grass is burned. Poison comes from them. The ancient people live among them and they use them to hunt their foes. Once in the trail that goes from Mendong we found a man with the flesh torn from his face as with an iron beak, and before he died he said this—‘It is the Thing that Runs. I met it and I die.’ Go rather to His Ocean Greatness the Dalai Lama than to these.”

He turned abruptly away, and I rode slowly on. When I overtook Soames he was in grim meditation and I did not disturb him. I had plenty to think of myself. At last he shook meditation off.

“Look here, Ross, I intend to follow the tip and go over the Mendong-La. It’s the easiest way in any case, but that’s not all. These people for some reason seem to want us to follow, in spite of our having been told it is a dangerous business, and it is certain that all I could learn in India pointed to the Mendong-La as being the way. Murray thought so too. I’ve been weighing all the way up whether to try the trail straight to the north that the people talk about here, but I think that the Mendong-La is best. Murray saw the beginning of that trail, or what looked like it, as he came down, but no white foot has ever trodden it; and the stories about it—about the places up there—are so appalling that it might readily mean a mutiny and desertion among our men if they guessed what it meant. If we take the other way, we shall meet people going, and very possibly overtake our friends and question them. What do you say?”

I gave it up. It all seemed the merest lottery. Fate had taken us in hand. We could but follow.

But I could not sleep that night. It might be partly the high air which affects so many in the mountains, but it was also the strangeness of the facts. I gave up the struggle after a bit and lay looking at the undulating canvas and thinking hard as to whether we should follow the message left with the head-man or no. As I thought, I heard a light, indescribable noise like the scratching of a rat. I flashed a light, and behold! a tiny bit of paper pushed under the flap of the tent. Quick as thought I looked out. There was not a soul in sight, and the moon was shining coldly on the rocks. The lady chose her messengers well—they were nearly as elusive as herself! My hand shook as I untied the thread of scarlet silk that bound the paper and perceived the smell of musk that an Eastern woman shakes from her garments.

“Is it well with you?” the screed began abruptly. “I think and fear. Oh, light of my eyes, distrust all messages that this hand writes not. There is danger. I say—avoid the Mendong-La. It is a snare and there is an ambush. Take the old trail that none travel, and so, turning before the Mendong Pass, strike north. Pass by the Lake Where the Gods Sit. Continue to the south side of the mountain, and fear no devils, nor the Things that Run, for great are the rewards.”

It ended as abruptly as it began. It had the effect of the eager voice of a woman that from sheer strength of feeling cannot continue, but stops, trembling, with her earnest eyes on the hearer. I held it to the light—it was written in Hindustani, which I read like English—and when at last I drowsed I put it under my pillow. I was clear only about one thing—that the writer was not deceiving me as far as she knew. I would have sworn to that. It was the most amazing thing that, when remembrance came with the daylight, I could find the paper nowhere. There was not one inch of the tent I did not search. In my life I had never searched so minutely for anything, for, apart from my own private feeling, it was by no means a thing to leave about. Be that as it might, it was gone, and giving up hope, I went out to find Soames.

“I say, Soames, a word with you. A very curious business—we must talk it over.”

He came and sat down on a rock beside me, preoccupied with the work, and I told my tale eagerly. If I left out four words—that certainly did not concern any one but myself. All the rest I repeated word for word. I stressed the dangers of the Mendong-La, and the absolute necessity of following the trail, if it could be found. And still Soames brooded. If one had not known him well, his silences would have been irritating. They were charged with doubt and suspicion. I felt that especially at the moment.

“The paper?” he said, and stretched out his hand all weather-roughed and strong.

“Not got it,” I said uncomfortably, for I felt the loss would put a different complexion on the thing to him. I told the story of my useless search.

“But, my dear fellow,” said Soames impatiently, “you say you went to sleep with it under your pillow. Who could have got in? Who would have troubled to take it?”

“Who troubled to bring it?”

“I daresay—but—well, you know it looks to me uncommonly as if you had dreamed the whole thing. Fact. I think your mind was running on the woman and you dreamed the whole story.”

“Rot! Blether!” I said indignantly. “Don’t I tell you I got out of my bunk to get it. Don’t be ratty. I swear it happened exactly as I say. You’d better not discount what may be very important because you’ve got this wild idea about it.”

I was bitterly aggrieved. He was civil but determined.

“Sorry I can’t risk the whole expedition on your visions, Ross. Show me the paper and that’ll be talking, though even then I shouldn’t be disposed to take it very seriously. The woman’s a woman—if it is she. She must have some private reason for trailing us up some way that isn’t on any map. I know these Eastern women and their volcanic fancies that generally end in a knife between your ribs.”

With a great effort I controlled myself. I was furiously angry with Soames and could scarcely say why. I see now that things were never really cordial after that, though Heaven knows I did my best. It may seem a small thing to split on, but it was his manner that made it all so impossible. Poor fellow! I understood it better later! In common loyalty I had to accept his decision—he was the virtual head, in right of his experience and age. Still I had a last try.

“Of course you’ve got the casting vote and I can prove nothing; and I know it’s a strong point that you had decided on the Mendong-La. But you will do this—call Yar and get him to find out if anything is known of this trail by the Lake Where the Gods Sit?”

“It won’t alter my decision.”

“It ought to, if it alters the facts. Anyhow, hail Yar.”

Yar, wrapped up like a mummy and drinking bowls of greasy Tibetan tea, was hailed, and the question put. By a silent understanding nothing was said of the paper. No, he knew nothing—had never heard of such a trail. Soames looked triumphant. I spoke up coolly.

“What about Gyalpo and his grandfather? Let’s have him up. Better get to the bottom of the business.”

Yar made a peculiar hooting call. In that country, where to open your mouth or to withdraw your hand from its wrappings are things to be carefully avoided because of the bitter cold, men learn strange habits. Gyalpo came trotting up, his lips greasy with the unctuous tea.

“Aho!” he said on hearing the question. “Yes, I have heard the name of the God-sitting Lake. But this is strange talk for the lords. Is not the good trail over the Mendong-La and not up in the solitudes where the devils are? Now my grandfather——”

“Yes, your grandfather?” I could not restrain myself.

“He is grazing his sheep an hour, or it may be more, from here. And if there is a trail he will know. Very wise is my grandfather. When the birds get his flesh not one will be left who knows the mountains as he.”

The pride in Gyalpo’s face as he blinked and wagged his head rapidly was too much for Yar, who gave him a furious nudge in the ribs.

“Be humble before my lords. What is a foolish old Tibetan man to those who travel for the Sirkar?”

“Fetch this man here,” was Soames’s ultimatum, and they went off.

It was evening when Gyalpo returned, driving before him rather than leading a meek and timid old Tibetan, very far removed from the doughty mountaineer—an old man terribly frightened in the presence of Government lords, and protruding his tongue to such an extent that there seemed no prospect whatever of its returning to its right use.

“Foolish old one!” said Gyalpo, shoving him forward. “Behave with discretion in the presence of these mighty persons. They condescend to seek knowledge. Speak with truth, that my name may shine before my masters. Is there a God-sitting Lake or is there not?”

It was clearly difficult for the old fellow to get under way. He had never spoken with white men before, and Soames was at all times alarming to the native mind. But as soon as his tongue had returned to its native sphere he was timidly communicative.

“Certainly there is this trail. Have I not known it for fifty years? Have I not followed it, though not to the end? For there are running devils beyond the God-sitting Lake. And higher up the Abominable Snow-men.”

“Then there is a lake?”

“Very certainly. A lake like no other, with mists in which the gods walk. Voices may be heard crying to the traveller to leave the track, but he who does this is lost.”

“And the devils?”

The man looked furtively around and lowered his voice. “Of them it is not well to speak. They come out of the rocks. Where they go is burning.”

Gyalpo was listening open-mouthed to this revelation. It might be serious if it got about among the men, and Soames spoke sternly.

“Folly! The burning is the fluid white people carry for many uses. Had that trail ever a name?”

“None, lord, for none would use it. It was in following a yak in the days of my youth that I saw it. A man showed me the way, and he said it led to the castle of the ancient people.”

I saw a kind of quiver pass over Soames’s face. It was like a ripple and gone in a moment, but I knew he was alert enough now.

“The people? What people?”

“He said the ancient people that came over the mountains before even the Bon-Pa. A terrible people and place.”

“What place?” My voice was almost as shaky as the old man’s.

“It is in the Touch-the-Sky Mountain. A great castle. The man had seen it once, but knowing it was devil’s work he never spoke of it but to me. And but a week later he was found dead near the beginning of the Lost Trail, with the flesh torn from his body as if by mighty beaks.”

His voice had dwindled down to a thread. Gyalpo looked fearfully at his grandparent. The cheekiness of his manner had quite disappeared and he was a badly frightened man. I saw his eyes wander from Soames, the arbiter of his fate, to his quaking grandfather.

“How is the Lost Trail known if it is so hidden?”

“Lord, it is known to me, but if to any others I cannot tell. Four days’ march from here, at a very great height, is a rock shaped like a sitting woman. It is called the ‘Pure Goddess.’ Pass beyond the Pure Goddess, winding round her feet, and another rock will be seen like a dead man fallen on his back. Beyond that, strike to the north, and in half a day is a very small winding trail; and two weeks’ journey on that is the God-sitting Lake. Beyond that your slave knows nothing.”

There was much more talk, but that sums up all we really got. And afterward the old boy was warmed up with buttered tea and comforted with tsam-pa (wheaten cake), Gyalpo undertaking to return him in safety to his herd. I may add that in doing this pious office Gyalpo returned to us no more. He evidently preferred his grandfather’s society to the Lost Trail and its terrors.

It disquieted Soames, for it was the first desertion. It was not to be the last.

At tiffin he told me curtly that he was disposed to give the Lost Trail a trial—that local tradition could never be safely put aside, and therefore watch should be kept for the distinctive rocks and the Mendong-La plan given up or postponed. Of course this suited me all right, but I should have been glad, all the same, if the thing had been more cordially done.

I began to feel more strongly that Soames was not an easy man to live with, not altogether the fellow I would have chosen as a comrade in a tight place. You want more than courage for that—and of courage he had enough and to spare. But a spirit of partnership goes far, as does the cheerful word and the gay laugh. He made it pretty clear now that he resented the reversal of his plan even while accepting the thing. At all events he said very little, and the camp supper that night was even more silent than usual.

Four days we climbed steadily up the great mountain. The snow was at its summer lowest, but it lay all around us and was so dazzling that the coolies had got out their curious snow-goggles, primitive but effective—a kind of network of black yak’s hair plaited into gauze and tied round the head. We followed their example with circles of blue glass stuck into cloth, a precaution born of experience, for in great cold metal acts as if it were red-hot and actually sears the skin. We looked more like magnified insects of a motor-man’s nightmare than human beings; and the thought struck me with dreary humour that if the Unknown had seen me thus I should not have been favoured with any of the interest she had shown so far. But could it be possible that she—that any woman was before us in those awful uplifted wilds?

In the mornings the thermometer now registered twenty degrees below zero, and it was bitter cold work getting along. The cliff now looked sheer above us—a mere precipice; but closer looking out revealed a slender zigzag up its face; and Yar, pointing upward, said sententiously—

“The la-dook” (pass sickness) “meets us up there.”

True to tryst it did. And we could have done without it, for the mountain sickness is a terrible addition to the dangers and miseries of the great heights. As in Kashmir, the men set it down to a specific poison in the air, probably due to the devils who guard the Passes. Hence the name “la-dook”—the poison of the Passes. It was bad enough—a matter of panting breath, palpitating heart, intense giddiness, with a headache in the temples. The men sought eagerly for the wild onion or garlic which they say relieves the symptoms.

Boiling water became so difficult as to be almost impossible owing to the reduced atmospheric pressure, and so we roasted and baked what we could and trusted to canned foods. Boiling the thermometer now gave us an altitude of 18,000 feet; and the sun was so hot on the snow at midday that we moved in constant danger of avalanches. More than one came thundering down the precipices before and behind us, and plunged with an awful roar into the abysses below.

It was I who first caught sight of the Pure Goddess. And if the name was impressive, so was not she. But a heated imagination made something like a woman out of it, her hands laid in her lap; and evidently the coolies thought the same, for instantly the fluttering rags that represent homage to the divine were produced and fastened in every possible holding place. We respectfully circled her feet and found the Dead Man rock, and were then certain of our trail.

There was evident surprise among the men when a halt was called here. They crowded up even beyond the limits of respect to hear what was to be. Soames spoke briefly. This was the trail which the Government of the King-Emperor commanded us to take. We must go by this way and not by the Mendong-La. There was no more to be said.

Sullen doubt and fear appeared on many faces, and there was at once that grouping in twos and threes which all leaders dread. The discipline had been excellent up to this largely owing to Yar’s good management, but so also had been the travelling. It did not look healthy that on the first hint of the unexpected there might be trouble.

Soames said sternly, “It would be impossible to take the beasts the way we are going.” Consequently the head-man and a certain number were to descend a few thousand feet to the summer pastures and wait the return of the expedition. We should take ten men on, including Yar. Yar would choose them. There were open murmurs now, and clearly an anxiety to stay with the beasts. I believe it was not the material dangers, it was the unknown, coupled with the belief in the devildom that haunts the high mountains.

A man came forward and with an eloquent gesture pointed out to us what we had not noticed. Winding onward were large footprints, wide-toed and spread, leaving deep marks on the snow.

“Devils!” he said; and there was an answer in every face about us.

Yar came behind him and shoved him contemptuously aside.

“Lord, these are not devils. High up are the hairy wild men, bigger than the Abominable Snow-men. Not often will they come down as low as this. They live up on high with the white snow lions and they tear out their hearts and eat them. When they are very hungry they come down to tear the yaks or men. And they tear them with iron claws that grow on their hands—long, like bear claws.”

Clearly Yar was a bit off colour too. I must say I always admired Soames’s readiness in times of trouble. You could not get him at a loss. Laughing scornfully, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his leather case, and in it a photograph which he showed to Yar and told him to pass round. It was a mighty bear standing up like a man, fists held up for a fight and fierce little eyes gleaming under the shaggy pelt. The great flat feet were almost human but for the rending claws.

“Here are your hairy men. Here are your claws! I did not think the hillmen were women. Leave this child’s talk. Yar, choose your men, and fix the loads after we have eaten.”

It was done. We ate, and then an adjustment of the loads took place and the party divided; the beasts under the head-man began the slow descent to the next pasture and Soames led on with me into the unknown, the ten coolies, with Yar, tramping after us.

But before we parted I had asked myself a question. Should I entrust them with a letter to be given to any chance runner or trader they might meet on the lower levels on his way through Sikkim to Darjiling—a letter to a lady in Simla? Nothing sentimental—that goes without saying. Merely a message to tell her of our progress so far—a word that should recall me to her fickle memory. I stood so long staring at the ground, thinking this over as the last chance of communication, that Soames chaffed me rather roughly about wanting a change of air to the lowlands myself. The answer to my own inward question was a decided “No,” and I turned and followed him without a word.

We journeyed for eighteen days from that parting of the ways before we came to the God-sitting Lake. Indeed, we had almost given up hope of seeing it, and Soames was beginning to say unpleasant things about the certainty of the Mendong-La. But things were going better.

The coolies quickly recovered their stolid good humour as we descended to the comfortable height of 10,000 feet, and the guns of the two sahibs kept the cooking-pots full. I shot a great mountain sheep for one item—a splendid beast that rejoiced their inner man and did not come amiss to ourselves. We had our first misfortune soon after, for the bivouac was raided two nights before we reached the lake. We were waked by a wild storm of shouts and shrieks. I was out first in a staring moonlight to see what I took for a huge man in a fur cloak making off through the rocks and the men shouting to wake the dead. One lay motionless on the snow, staining it with a dark trickle from a hidden face.

I fired and Soames followed suit; and the retreating figure fell heavily, fighting furiously with legs and arms and uttering a dreadful yelling cry, weird as death in the echoing snow silence. I went after it, though Yar advised waiting until another barrel had been let drive into the flat bestial head. But when I came up I shouted aloud myself, for the most amazing sight met my eyes. No bear, as I could have sworn and would forever have sworn if he had escaped. It was a man, yellow and lean and tall, with masses of furry fleece growing about his body and matted like the pelt of a wolf—a horrible travesty of humanity. The face was beardless but for a few straggling hairs; the feet, with cushioned splayed toes, made a print in the snow easily to be misread for that of a gigantic bear, and the great corded muscles would not have disgraced a grizzly’s arm. But being man, the brute had a cunning no bear can boast, for on the mighty right hand were strapped two fierce iron claws, really frightful weapons for tearing and rending at close range. And it was these that accounted for the man who lay so silent on the snow. At once it recalled to me the trick of Sivaji the Maratha who, as Afzal Khan stooped to raise and embrace him, rent Afzal’s abdomen with the “tiger’s claw” of iron hidden in his hand. But how had the Abominable Snow-man learned the ruse of a semi-civilized India?

It was well I had plunked him. It did real good, for even our fellows found it difficult to believe the quarry invincible and supernatural as he lay on the snow before them. I unstrapped the claws from his hand and they examined them curiously. So this was how the Snow-men went about their hateful work! How our fellows would swagger when they got back to their villages! They were already swanking like men who knew no fear when I recalled to them the poor fellow who was done for. We buried him in the snow with big stones piled above, and so parted with a pang from the good-natured harmless companion who would never see his Lepcha village again, and then continued our way, converts to another wild belief of the mountains.

Two days later we came on the God-sitting Lake about four o’clock. Business first. Soames took out his aneroid and fixed the height at something like 10,000 feet; as for myself and the coolies, we stared in stupefaction at the sight that lay before us.

The water was a metallic blue, marked with patches of some glittering stuff that strangely resembled the eyes of a peacock’s tail—an effect so unusual and theatrical that one might almost expect the ballet to appear dancing from behind the rocks. I have never before or since seen anything in the least like it. There it lay—an immense peacock’s tail fanned out in the cold sunshine and gently rippling in a light breeze. As for the rocks—it was easy enough to see how the lake had got its name. For they bore the most startling resemblance to roughly sculptured figures sitting about it in solemn meditation, while towering above all was a mighty crag in the colossal shape of a woman, draped and hooded, looking down into the lake. The sculptors were wind and weather, though Soames declared he believed human hands had touched up the natural work. I cannot hope to convey the indescribable awfulness of those figures in the silence and desolation of the place; and if it were so in the sunshine, what would it be at night with a staring moon and a wild wind shrieking about it, or a veil of snow hiding and revealing the ghostly watchers?

Soames decided the camp was to be pitched there for the night, and I knew we should have trouble, for the men were visibly terrified; and there was everything in the place to fill them with the supernatural fears that add so much to the difficulty of travel in these parts. I may as well own up that I could sympathize with them up to a certain point, and I did not by any means approve his decision. It is never well to force men to unnecessary obedience, and it would have been well worth while to trek for another hour and get out of sight of the haunted lake.

Perched on some crags was what I took to be a lamasery (monastery). I thought I could see the slits of windows, story above story—and even a rocky way that led up to it. I turned to Yar.

“Lamasery up there? Lamas taking us in for night?”

His teeth actually chattered.

“Not lamasery. No one. Devils there. Suppose we stay here, we hearing their voice. Heaven-born, ask of our lord that we go on.”

I did, more than once, but being very roughly repelled could say no more. A kind of dourness was hardening upon Soames. He would not have acted thus at the beginning of our adventure, and it made me anxious to see it now. He was growing more and more difficult to live with. I tried to take it as all in the day’s work, but I won’t pretend I liked it.

So the tents were pitched, and one of the sudden storms came on that you get in the heights. No snow, but an icy gale sweeping down the lake. The temperature went well down below zero, and the whole place was as savage as it could be.

I knew before dawn why the men thought it demon-haunted, for no sooner did the dark settle down than the storm-blasts brought a wild shouting and crying to us across the water. There was a braying of trumpets, a loose thunder of drums, then shouts of defiance, and, later, a wild wailing like a city sacked and given over to death. A more horrid noise I never heard. I tell myself now it was some effect of the wind among the crags and windings of those lost and desolate mountains, but at least I did not believe it entirely then, for it kept me awake half the night in a state of suspense. And the men did not believe it either, as we had proof positive in the morning; for Soames and I slept late, and Yar roused us with the pleasant news that all the men except three had deserted in the night. They must have felt precious bad to risk it; but, of course, in the endless hiding-places of the caves and rocks they might be quite near us now, although hidden.

I never saw a man in a blacker fury than Soames. He swore he would follow them if it took a week. He would make them pay dear, etc., etc. One knows the kind of thing! But he knew as well as I that he could not and would not do it. It might mean the failure of the whole expedition, for every day is valuable in the brief summer of the mountains. We wasted an hour in this way, and then very sullenly he gave the order to get on, abandoning all we did not need for our lessened party. The deserters had taken a good bit with them, having left by no means empty-handed.

I will not describe the next ten days. We went steadily on our way, the trail being faintly marked but traceable. Yar and the three men did splendidly, and I got what enjoyment I could out of a bit of shooting here and there.

But I shorten my yarn up to the point where we came in sight of the end of the trek; and as yet we had seen no devils nor any sign of the Running Things. Soames and I often speculated about the latter. I think we banked upon snow-wolves as being the most likely solution.

We had been travelling nearly all day through a stony ravine that skirted a mountain of singularly peaked shape. It was horned like the Matterhorn, but if possible more of a snow needle—very beautiful and unattainable. Following the direction in my last message we kept to the south side of this. Suddenly we rounded a corner of high rocks and I looked up, and an astonishing sight met my eyes.

Held in the fangs of the mountain, but not at a very great height, we saw a massive fortress—half castle, half lamasery—at least eight stories high, and resembling strongly the pictures I had seen of the Dalai Lama’s castle monastery at Lhasa. It was too far away for us to see whether it was living or dead in the sense of being inhabited, but the sight was most wonderful as it rose among the crags and dominated them. It must have been a strong people that made such a fortress in such a place; and, with the wild sunset burning above it, it was a thing to remember.

But that in itself was not what struck me dumb. It was that here was the fortress of the smoke pictures—of the pictures at the Dorje-Tak lamasery! There was no mistaking the likeness. No artist could have drawn it more faithfully in its magnificent desolation than the lamas whose canvas had been smoke and magic. We stood side by side looking at it, now that the goal was in sight, and not a word did we say. Yar and the remaining coolies were stolid and dumb. It had broken upon us so suddenly as we toiled through the pass—and now such a stillness met us. We were prepared for danger and alarms, but no people were coming or going. The place might have been forgotten since the world’s beginning; the very wind seemed to have dropped dead about it, and we could not hear the rushing of the torrent which we could see suspended like white drapery from the heights by the gateway. It was truly an awful place.

Very often in moments of strong feeling words are inadequate.

“Well, we’re here,” said Soames, breaking the silence uncomfortably.

“Yes, and what next?”

“Food, I should say—and then reconnoitring. We mustn’t run any risks. We’re too few as it is—and to lose one man might be fatal.”

“Risks? It’s all risk. But food’s a good move.”

We set to work with a will, and finding a sheltered place among the rocks we made a fire with the scrubby juniper bushes and boiled as much sheep as we could eat, drinking the water. It made a lot of difference. Rested and refreshed, the savage wilderness and the mystery of the fortress seemed less oppressive to us. But the light was dying, and it was clear that nothing could be done till morning. It would be interesting to note, too, if any lights appeared in the fortress, any sign to mark it as alive.

So the darkness deepened, and in the piercing cold we huddled into the little shelter tents, Soames and I in one, the men in the other. When the night was about us we went out and stared up toward where we knew the fortress to be.

No gleam—no sound.

But, yes—hush—a sound! As we stood, a strange running noise was heard in the distance, as of something running swiftly; not feet, not paws, not claws—a strange running that caught our breath as we heard.

We were withdrawn among the rocks in our little camp. The way we had come went beside and beyond it—a rocky track leading to the foot of the Touch-the-Sky Mountain, as we knew it to be. Along this track the sound of the running came. As it drew nearer a dim glow was apparent. Whatever it was, there came with it some sort of a faint light.

“Hardly a place for wheels!” I whispered, but my voice sounded small and thin to myself. Soames was dead silent.

The Thing was upon us—it rushed—it was passing. What was it? A swiftly shambling body on bent legs, grotesque, horrible. We could see it dimly in the faint light that went before it. It seemed an insect rather than an animal, a gigantic insect, large as a mastiff, and as it passed it swayed a huge head and stared at us with dead, unseeing eyes that were the source of the dim phosphorescence that lit its way. If I compare it to a huge spider I repeat one of the confused thoughts that I had after its horrible passage. Yet there were differences—dreadful and unnameable. I felt my knees shake under me as the devil-face swayed away again. Now it was gone on its secret errand. The running died down and the night was silent. Only the carrion smell remained.

“Thank Heaven the men were asleep!” My voice was manageable now. “They couldn’t have stood it.”

“The question is—can we?”

No more was said until we got back into the tent; and there I lit a light and we looked at one another dry-lipped. I smiled foolishly.

“But I’m going on all the same,” I said. And I repeated it to hearten myself.

I felt as if I had had a bad dream. How could such things be? No, no, in this upper world of the mountains men saw visions and dreamed dreams! Such things don’t happen to sane men, for example, in Calcutta. Ah, but this was not Calcutta—it was the merciless desert.

It is certain I was not myself for a bit; my brain raced like a clock without the regulator; and it was a curious thing that Soames, the elder and the harder, was the more shaken of the two. He went outside the tent into the air and vomited, and came back with his hair in wet strands on his forehead, and white to the lips. But he was more himself again.

“We’ve got to talk this over, Ross. We shan’t get the men to face it if there’s that kind of beast up yonder.” He jerked a thumb at the mountain.

“Likely not, but we can go on. Yar will stick to us.”

“I wonder.”

“I don’t. He’ll come all right.”

“Sure you want to go on all the same?”

“Sure.”

“Then let’s get to bye-bye. Better be fit and sound for to-morrow. I heard once from a hunter in Sikkim that all the natives say there are giant forms of life in these mountains that come down from time immemorial and have died out in the rest of the world. I laughed at him then. But now——”

We said no more, but I did not sleep, and once in the night I could have sworn I heard a running, and a foul smell was blown in upon me.

When the day came it was possible to tell one’s self that it had all been worked up by the dark and the pinnacle put on the horror by our excitement. It was also possible not to believe this. But in any case omelets cannot be made without breaking eggs, and if you leave Chowringhi for the heights you take your luck.

There was little talk as the tents were struck, except that Soames ordered the men to hide the tents in a little cave. No one could see them there, and if a hurried retreat were necessary they might be useful. Yet it seemed strange to part with these little shelters and strike out into the blue. The sun was shining in strength upon rock and snow. Till a man has tried he cannot believe in the heat of the sun on the snow slopes. As a matter of fact the feet are often ice-cold while the head is burning. But we went on steadily, the four men following, and in an hour we had reached the lower ramps and looked up at the goal.

All things considered, it came as a surprise to see a trail leading up; faint, but a trail. I had felt it would be a guarded place, drawbridge up, portcullis down, and all that kind of thing. But no, there was no hindrance. We began the ascent doggedly, for it was a steep climb. And as we did so Yar edged up.

“Lords, a Thing passed in the night. Have you seen?”

“We have seen.”

“I also.”

This was unexpected. I looked him in the eyes.

“And did you not fear?”

“A little; but I made my heart hard. Death comes to all; and, late or soon, what matters? But see, lords, here is the powder that the men of Dong-Cha use for the great poison spiders that make webs like ropes. I cannot tell if it will help, but it is here.”

He took a small packet out of some hidden repository and thrust it into Soames’s hand, having spoken in Hindustani that the men might not understand. I must say the powder seemed an inadequate weapon; but it was all to the good that Yar should feel and speak as he did, and Soames gave him one of the rare smiles for which he would toil like a slave. Again we went forward, on and up to where the fortress held in the fangs of the mountain looked exactly like the drop scene of a theatre painted on the hard, clean air.

It was three in the afternoon when we reached the waterfall below the gates; and, looking back, the question arose: what in the name of heaven could have induced any people to set a human habitation in wilds so vast, so cruelly lonely, that the eyes ached in seeing the tossing billows of range after range of mountains until the sight could follow no more? Was it crime that had built it—or religion—or wisdom? Should we ever know?

Great gates of black wood, bound, nailed, and strengthened with brass and a darker metal, gates with huge barrel locks and hasps, sagged helplessly out and downward, ruined, broken, no longer a shield to what lay within. Walls of immense strength, with countless straight, narrow window spaces, rose above us, something like the great gates of Peking, ponderous, sinister. I whispered to Soames, for somehow the place compelled quiet, that they reminded me of the massive pylons of Egypt; and he agreed. But no head looked out, no voice hailed us.

There was no city. There never could have been room for one, whatever there may have been at the foot of the mountain; but even that did not seem likely. Lonely and grim, it looked down upon us with eyeless windows.

It was clear that we must go on and in. Night in the bitter cold would be death without shelter, and the place must be deserted. Any resistance would have begun by now. We looked silently at one another and again we led the way.

There was a bare empty courtyard like the inside of an Eastern caravanserai—a huge quadrangle where a regiment might have exercised, with rocks showing here and there as if the bones of the mountain were coming through. On one side were the gates we had passed; and elsewhere about us loomed the strange pylons of stone, full of windows peopled by silence. Thousands of eyes could have looked down upon it. None did.

We stood in the middle and stared about us. Yes, there was a pole with what had been a golden banner fluttering feebly from it in a dying wind, with a dragon sprawled on it in black. So much we could make out through the tatters. The last touch of the smoke pictures was complete!

“That can’t be more than a few years old,” Soames said, and his voice sounded harsh in the lonely place. “Men have been here within that time. Well—let us go in!”

We went through a square opening and found ourselves in a labyrinth, a rabbit warren of narrow passages and small rooms. Here and there rough stone stairways led to rooms above and yet above. One we climbed and found the floor an exact replica of that below. Silence, emptiness, decay everywhere. To say it was ghastly to see this huge abandoned place that must once have been humming with life is to say little. It struck cold into one’s blood. It gave the feeling of being at the world’s end and looking down into space. We returned to the ground floor.

“Of course,” said Soames, “the place must be thoroughly searched for the treasure and manuscripts of the document; and that will take time and plenty of it. We will fix our camp here, and to-morrow the men can go down for all our possessions except the tents. We can be quite comfortable here; and the guns will find us meat for as long as we want. Also it’s quite on the cards that we may find food in the place, if it’s a resort of any kind of people. And we certainly shan’t lack for water. There’s plenty of wood in the gates and fittings. Now, Yar, get to work.”

The men were glad to get busy—the eeriness of the place was more endurable when one did not stop to think of it. And Soames and I went cautiously from room to room, exploring.

I cannot tell how many we went into or looked into in passing. There were more cells than in a beehive. But suddenly the passage narrowed so that only one could pass at a time. The ghostly rags of an old curtain fluttered at the end of it in some dusty draught, and to this we went, wary and expectant, ready for action.

A crash! Soames had fallen down two steps into a lower room. And I only saved myself on the edge. He sat up rubbing his knee and we looked about us.

It was an astonishing, an amazing place in the dim light from one slit arrow-hole window. It was a temple, long, narrow, and of great height, that faded into the darkness of an unseen roof; and the stony eyes of an immense face looked over our heads away into infinity. Those were the first impressions. Gradually the head developed into a colossal figure of grey granite seated with mighty hands laid upon its knees. Great cobwebs hung from it. In fact we believed at first that the head was draped in heavy grey stuff, but again that weird draught from nowhere waved them aside and the face was seen in its impassive calm.

“What is it?” Soames whispered. One had to whisper there, whether one liked it or no. “Is it a Buddha?”

“No—no Buddha. But it can’t be—yes—it is. Soames, it’s Egyptian.”

He thought I had gone clean mad, and for the moment I could have believed it myself. Egyptian! And in the mountains of Tibet! Impossible! But I knew Egypt well, and if I had ever seen a statue of a Pharaoh I saw it here—the statue of a dead Pharaoh. In his hand the ankh—the symbol of immortality, dependent from the knee; his brows were crowned with the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt; he had full, almost Nubian lips, locked in a stern immobility. The Great King, as he sits at Abou Simbel, staring down upon the ancient river, the Nile—he sat here, his secret locked within his granite breast! Pygmies, we stood before his feet and marvelled.

A long silence. Then Soames said, whispering—

“Ross, this is stupendous. We have made the find of all time. It turns ancient history topsy-turvy, for if the Egyptians were here—if there was communication at the time through Turkestan—why—all the theories and beliefs of the ancient world go dead. Can you swear it’s Egyptian?”

I walked up to it, the awe of the thing a little wearing off now, and pointed to the base. It was covered with the hieroglyphics known to all the world, and with the images seen only on the Nile. Cartouches of the kings, the sacred beetle, kings offering strange gifts to vulture and jackal headed gods, queens, slender as reeds, with long-stemmed lotus flowers grasped in uplifted hands—all were depicted there.

“Unmistakable,” I said with conviction. “The sooner we get back the better. We have done a thing that has never yet been done.”

Soames stared incredulous, and yet could not deny it.

“But it’s simply staggering. The figure is grey granite and there’s no granite here. You don’t mean to tell me they dragged that graven image through these mountains? Why, that means mechanical transport we know nothing of ourselves. Am I going clean mad?”

“What’s that?” I stooped, for I saw something glittering on the ground—a yellow glitter. I looked curiously at it and passed it on to Soames in silence. It was a strangely ornamented gold charm, something like a European locket, with words on it. I could not decipher them, but it gave him no trouble.

“Dorje-p’ag-mo—‘the Precious Lady.’ It’s safe to conclude a woman wore this. It’s Tibetan, of course. Curious find—in company with this image.”

“Not if that party is on before us,” I said promptly. Soames shrugged his shoulders—that was a subject he always cold-watered. As for me, I put the charm in my pocket-book and subsided into wonderment before the Pharaoh once more.

We passed behind him now and, accustomed to the gloom, made out another image behind his Majesty. One? Many! The first, again in granite, I recognized as Ra, the Sun; but, most strange to tell—for in Egypt I have never seen the like—the mitre and fillets on his head were all jewelled. Later, we found that this was a detachable head-dress of extremest splendour, the jewels being of immense value, some of them great emeralds. This certainly proved it to be of a more modern date than the Pharaoh, though the type was the same.

Facing this was Hat-Hor, the Moon Goddess, with the great horns as a crown, supporting the disc of the full moon all gloriously jewelled with pearls and crystals.

“What’s that in the front of the crown?” Soames said, pointing eagerly. “That blue thing?”

It was larger, but the same mysterious stone I had seen on the hand that beckoned even in my dreams. No mistaking that. The scent was growing hot indeed.

“I see!” went on Soames’s urgent whisper. “The man is the sun—the woman the moon. And look—look behind them!”

He pulled me forward, and in the dim light we saw a solemn circle of smaller figures; but these were of a yellow metal that we thought surely was gold, each with a star on the brow, with jewelled eyes fixed upon the two figures in front of them.

“The sun and moon and planets! Count! You’ll see. Each has different jewels. Ross, this is a marvel, a wonder!”

“This is the find of finds!”

I stood and could not take it in. Murray’s finds were nothing to this. No one had come near it. Fortune, fame, everything man can wish for was within our reach. The whole thing was enough to drive one crazy. To-morrow we must make drawings of every inscription we could find.

To-morrow! We little knew what that would bring forth.

It was darkening rapidly now, and we prepared to go back, loath to leave our treasures. As I turned, I suddenly heard a running at the far end of the temple, and saw a dim and horrible shape shambling forward at the height of a great dog from the ground, and at the same time an evil odour assailed us.

I recognized the feeling of almost supernatural terror of the night before, but it was worse a thousand times in this ghostly place than in the clean open air. This might be its den—the abode of others even more ghastly. I caught Soames by the arm, and we ran for our lives up the steps and down the narrow passage and never drew breath till we stopped, as it seemed, miles away in the room where the men were at their homely work.

Useless to tell of our discussion of how that danger might be faced and met, for nothing came of it at the time. We kept it a dead secret from the men—even from Yar. But such was our wild excitement at the marvels of the temple that I think even that awful incident made less impression on us than it might have done otherwise. It seemed that nothing could hold us back from achievement now.

Yar had put what provisions we had in the bigger of the two rooms, on the trampled clay, for want of a table; and, drawing water from the stream outside the gates, he made some tea and we sat and ate what we could—not much, for the poisonous odour was about us still—talking of how to take specimens of our find down with us and of the danger of leaving these precious objects at the mercy of wandering Tibetan looters. We little knew how well they were guarded.

Soames lay down in his sleeping-bag after the meal, and I strolled out into the courtyard and stood looking up at the stars glittering frostily in the black square made by the great walls. Surely the strangest of all strange destinies had brought us here. The life in Calcutta seemed wholly unreal now. Joan Boston, the dances, the bridge, the daily grind at the office—had it all ever been, or was it the dream of a dream?

The veiled woman—that too was dream-like. Where had her party branched off? Had they gone on over the Mendong-La to Lhasa? Who—what was she?

And even as I remembered, I saw a dim light in a high-up opening at the other end of the vast quadrangle.

My heart stopped dead for a second. I could feel it halt and plunge forward. In that deserted place, in the bitter cold, the silence, the evidence of other life was a shock I felt in every nerve. Here, with the wild mountains about us, in the very heart of desolation, it could only be the mysterious people who had shadowed all our way. And as I looked, half telling myself it was fancy, the light disappeared for a moment, as if some one passed before it, and then was seen again.

My mind was made up now. I turned back to the room I had left. Yar was sitting with his arms about his knees gazing with Eastern apathy at the stars through the window. Soames and the two others were sleeping soundly. This was lucky, for I knew well what he would have said to the plan I had in view. I silently beckoned to Yar, who followed me out into the square. There I pointed to the light, telling him to stand there and watch. He was to wake the others if I shouted or if he heard a shot, keeping his weapons ready. His little eyes twinkled with interest as he promised, and I crept off, leaving him on duty.

Reaching the other end of the quadrangle I entered through a rough sort of arcading and a curiously carved doorway, the wood of it rotting visibly. Inside was the same rabbit warren of passages, narrow and criss-cross, also small rooms, all so bewildering that it seemed an army might have encamped in the unknown. I lit my way with my electric torch through the thick, musty air and darkness, going silently as a ghost. Finally I stopped, utterly mystified, for the aimless crossing of the passages made it impossible to find the way to the upper regions where I had seen the light. I had, in fact, lost all sense of direction, and there was a very good prospect of staying there all night as far as I could see.

And it was just then I heard a footstep above, and instinctively clicked the light out and stepped back into the nearest cell. Unless the new-comer carried a light and swept it round I was safe; and with a hand upon my service revolver I waited events.

The steps moved slowly above, but with distinct purpose. Now they were descending one of the countless stone stairways that led up into the gloom. The steps grew quicker, and I could hear a bursting sigh as if from an overcharged heart—a dreadful, groaning sigh; and now a very faint light, hardly disturbing the gloom, crept down the steps. With every nerve and muscle like a taut wire I watched as I had never watched before.

The unknown presence came nearer. It was breathing heavily now—and again that bursting sigh. A man’s voice! My wild hope vanished, and instead came a clean-cut rejoicing that no light of our own could show from the other end of the quadrangle. Hush! he was in sight now—a black-hooded figure, unnaturally tall. He carried a kind of Tibetan lamp in his hand, with the wick floating in the bronze cup; and the little light went straight before him. Within full sight he stopped and looked out into the frosty dark, sighing again as if his heart would break. No sound came from outside, Yar was silent and steady on his watch, and nothing was there to startle the man.

He put up a brown claw and dragged the hood back from his head, and even in that dim light I knew I was looking at a priest. No mistaking the thin ascetic face, the indescribable air of finesse that marks the priest out from other men. If his style and title had been proclaimed I could not have known it better. And what was this? For, as the hood dropped off, it disclosed the secret of the great height. He wore a tall divided mitre, the exact shape of that worn by the image in the temple; but this had coiled about it a golden serpent, darting its head forward as if in defiance. And it was then that I noticed a scar, white and long, deeply indented in the man’s jaw. And old Jehanira’s words at the outset of our journey came flashing back upon me, “Beware of the man with the scarred jaw.”

Standing, he muttered what I took to be a prayer in some unknown tongue and then went forward wearily—an old man and in deep trouble of mind. To follow—that was the one course clear before me. After all, the risk was not alarming as far as things had gone, even admitting Soames’s axiom that each man of a party owed his life to the others. I waited till the priest had entered the next passage and then I crept after him like a ghost—or, what I suppose is quieter, a burglar.

He led straight down. The labyrinth was no labyrinth to him, and after many turns he came to a door as heavily clamped with metal as the fortress doors themselves—not locked, but with a hasp that required knowledge. He twisted it either way, and opened it wide enough to pass through, leaving it ajar as though certain none was there to follow. I was on his heels as soon as I dared.

A horrible sight lay before me. Six steps led down to a deep, wide pit crossed by a tottering wooden bridge with a broken handrail at one side only. Was it water it crossed—or cloud—or—— Madness! It could not be true that the place was all creeping alive with life, with grey and awful shapes, heaving, crawling over one another, with hard sounds here and there as if horn rattled on horn and claw on claw! Writhing, monstrous forms—and, over all, an evil odour like a foul miasma. It was surely but a vile nightmare, for if it were true no man would cross that bridge, where a slip on the wet plank, a break, would send him down an abyss of horror.

A nightmare! Yes, but I could see broad eyes glaring from the seething mass below, forming and reforming, shifting and changing—eyes with a dim phosphorescent glare like death in its lowest shapes. I stopped, transfixed with horror. What deviltries were in this place of a dead people?

I must away and out of it!

The priest stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked down upon the mass of hateful life heaving itself upward. I saw a fearful shape sway over the others, grey, hairy claws struggled out of the chaos and gripped the bridge—a huge body followed, a hand, a face, not human, not animal, but rather the distorted malignity of a devil’s dream, a creature like a spider but beaked like a parrot, huge as a mastiff! And it climbed toward the man, whether for deviltry or in some monstrous affection, who could say? Standing his ground, the priest drew a box from his clothing and scattered some powder in the air above the crawling pit. The claws relaxed, the body fell back, the movement ceased, and the rattling of claws and beaks was silent. The man went on and I followed.

Another long passage going steadily downward, steps, another door, and we reached another temple—or so I judged it to be. And here the priest stopped and, stooping with his light, lit two of the Tibetan butter lamps which stood on what revealed itself as an altar. I whipped behind a tattered curtain just in time, as the place sprang into comparative light—the black shadows flickering all about me.

A wonderful place was revealed. Of all the mysteries that had met us, this seemed to me the most solemn and strange. On the low altar was nothing but the lamps, but above it towered an image, greater than a man, in black marble, brooding and terrible. The attitude resembled that of the image of the dead Pharaoh we had seen already. But—stay! There was one difference. A massive hand lay on the left knee, but the other held, as a king holds his orb, a globe of flashing light, prismatic, wonderful—the purest light congealed into a frozen radiance. A crystal? A diamond? But whoever saw a diamond the size of a small apple? What crystal ever sent forth those keen rays of blue and violet glory, shot with fierce reds and ardent greens? I knew the image of him who sleeps at Abydos—the dead, the ever-living Osiris of the most mysterious Egyptian worship. Awful, calm as in the mighty temples of the Nile, the same god held his state in the mountains of this secret land. A wonder incredible! Symbol of the ancient wisdom of Egypt!

The priest knelt, and touching the ground three times with his brow, intoned some prayers in a tongue unknown. It lasted until my arms and legs tingled from my constrained position as I half stooped behind the curtain; and desperate doubts and questions raced through my mind. Should I stun the man, seize the jewel, steal away and warn Soames, cross that awful bridge? Question after question, doubt after doubt. Chance, the blind goddess, settled it for me.

The priest raised himself and spoke aloud. But not to me.

“Royal Daughter!”

A faint voice, a woman’s voice, replied in Hindustani—the common ordinary Hindu of everyday life in Calcutta. The sound in that wild place almost shocked me into movement, but the voice itself was not ordinary, was most musical, and vibrating with either fear or anger.

“For all the sakes of all the gods, release me, Heaven-born, for I die of fear.”

There came no answer. The priest turned and took food from a receptacle near the altar, and put it within reach of a small hand that I could see stretch itself from the shadow. Again the voice—

“Heaven-born, I am guiltless. I swear it. How could I help it if the Sirkar in India knew of the Splendour and sent their servants? What have I done? Oh, take me from this awful dark and the noise of the devils struggling in the pit. Give me not living to them. Slay me here and now, if it must be, for the night is dread to think of!”

The priest spoke again with inhuman calm.

“Royal Daughter, what are you, or many like you, to the Splendour of Egypt? Is it not the custom of the Royal House of Egypt that in the day of danger a virgin princess should be made a sacrifice to the Black Osiris, to him that sleeps at Abydos? And was not this done in every generation, that the light of the jewel should not be extinguished and its glory depart from the house of your father? As your fathers fled across the great deserts when their ancient royalty was lost, did not the Princess Thamutis die in the wastes that the gods might be favourable and guide them to safety? And so it was that a refuge was found in the mountains.

“Now again the Splendour is menaced; and you die that your house may live, and that these heathen and outcast may go down over the Mendong-La and die in the hands of the wild people. For this were you brought up from India. Go, therefore, rejoicing to Amenti, and implore the great god that the day of restoration come now and the Pharaoh sit again upon his throne by the ancient river, the River Nile.”

The woman’s voice answered with infinite sadness—

“Do I not know this? Then slay me now. Cast me not alive to the devils. Give to me, who am of your blood and the imperial princess, a clean death by clean steel. Is it much to ask? When in India you sent tidings to me, oh Ptah-Sekt, that my father had need of me in the mountains. I trusted and came, for you said the day of restoration was at hand, that my father might again rule Egypt. Break not my trust.”

“I said it, and true it is. The English retreat from the august land; and as for the dogs that are left, it is easy to deal with them. But for this end also a sacrifice is needed, and therefore have I brought you to the Holy Place, and to the Osiris who is Death.”

“Then here and now!” The girl’s voice was inexpressibly mournful and entreating.

“Not now. For your father comes with the dawn, and only while you live can we read the pictures that tell of the white men’s journey. The watchers were out and they saw nothing. It may be the men have perished in the heights or have gone over the Mendong-La. This we shall know to-morrow. Eat, Royal Daughter. Sleep and have peace of mind. What are death and life that we should sorrow for either? The gods alone are eternal. Is it a great matter to die for your father’s house? In lives yet to be your deed will gladden you. And as for the devils, for to-night I have charmed them to sleep. Repeat now the prayer to the Hat-Hor that carries the moon on her brows—and wait the day in peace.”

He extinguished all the lamps but one; and even in that dim light the jewel flashed like a wild aurora with its lancing splendours. Then, sighing heavily again, he passed out through the door, and, still leaving it ajar, climbed the steps beyond, and I could hear the creaking of the frail bridge as his steps fell upon it.

Terrified, I waited. Yes, that was the upper door. He was gone.

Dead, appalling silence.

And then a clear, strong voice spoke from out of the shadows—

“Beloved—light of my eyes—speak with me. I saw you follow. That you might hear and know, I said what I have said. Come now and do not fear.”

I was past all amazement, so it seemed to me, as I pushed that curtain aside and saw her sitting upright, leaning against the altar—no weak suppliant for life, but a woman proud and haughty—the imperial princess indeed!

How shall I describe her? She was certainly more beautiful than any dream I had made of her—pearl-pale with suffering, with heavy clouds of midnight hair about her brows, the only colour in her face the great dark eyes and the crimson of lovely lips. A wonderful and royal lady. And yet, when I saw her face to face, my dreams vanished. There was between us a gulf—of race, of time, of station, of thought—of everything in the world that sets man and woman apart. If she had been a beautiful ghost she could not have seemed more remote from me, she could hardly have filled me with more dread and alienation. I cannot describe this strange feeling. But so it was. A bracelet of steel was about her right wrist, fastened to a slight, strong chain that permitted her to move a few feet, but no more; and on the pitiful chained hand was the blue fire of the stone I had seen in the mountains. I knelt before her and she laid her hand on my shoulder.

“Lord, our two fates are one. I have known this by the magic of my people. When our eyes met in the mountains, did your heart meet mine?”

What reply to make? Those eyes searched my soul with a kind of proud submission that was infinitely touching—a royal woman, if ever there was one! I gathered my wits together and spoke urgently, using Hindustani as she had done.

“Great lady, one thought and one only is now in my mind—how to save your life, and next to that my own. What room for aught else? Tell me—instruct me as you have done in our journey—and I will obey.”

She looked sweetly in my face.

“My life and my love are one. It is true the time is urgent. Beloved, you are in danger. To-morrow my father comes with certain men; and over my body they will make the smoke pictures, and they will see with my eyes and brain. Nor can I hinder this. So they will know all you have done and do. Fly, therefore, now in the night, taking me with you, for through me they will see. Without me they cannot.”

“Did you think I would go without you—that I would leave you to death?”

She smiled proudly.

“Our fate is one. Where you go I go. Thus it is decreed.”

“Then tell me all I must know. Are we safe here?”

“He will not return. To-night I keep the vigil of the dead. I will speak. Light of my eyes, I am Nephthys, a daughter of the kings of Egypt. For when the twelfth Rameses died, the High Priest of Amen seized the throne and we were driven forth, and the kingdoms broke away from Egypt and my forefather knew the end was come—slowly, but very sure——”

I interrupted—

“When was this?”

“It was nearly twelve hundred years before your Prophet was born in the land you call Holy. And they were then our slaves, but afterwards they broke away, for what land is strong when priests rule?”

The scorn on her lip was beautiful and terrible. Her thoughts seemed lost for the moment in that immense antiquity of which she was the inheritor. It struck me with awe—Three thousand years and more!—and who could tell to what ages still more remote and mighty her memories went back? Oh, to share her knowledge, to drink at the wells where she had drunk!

“So then,” she resumed hurriedly, “when our throne was taken from us by the priests we had fostered, my people fled from Egypt. Through the deserts they fled and by long and terrible ways, guided by the wisdom and magic of our race, until they came to these mountains. For they knew the prophecy that overshadowed them—that here they should abide through the troubles to come to our land, until a certain time known to us, and that a queen of our family should sit again on the throne reigning gloriously.”

“Here, in this lonely place?” I asked, incredulous.

“Not here. There is a strong place yet farther in the mountains—a place guarded with all our wisdom, where dwell my father the Pharaoh and my brother waiting their time. But this is a holy place, the warding place of our treasures and our Gods. And so it has been since the days of the flight of our forefathers.

“But it is a custom with my people that the king’s daughters are sent into India that they may learn the wisdom of the times; and I was sent to the house of the Maharaja of Kashi, he thinking me a lady from Bhotiya—as they have ever thought. And now has my father sent for me, knowing the English are gone out of Egypt and the day of his return is near. So I was brought to the priest, my uncle; and to-morrow I die before the Black Osiris, as is the custom of my house, that he may be gracious to the king. Also the priest has heard of your coming; and they will make the smoke pictures that they may see with my eyes and destroy you. For this great jewel is the Splendour of Egypt; it is the honour of our house, and they know well that the white men, having seen, will covet. For in all the world there is nothing like it. But this jewel is a free gift from me to you, O lord of my life.”

I listened, but scarcely grasped all she said. The one thing clear was that if our lives were to be saved we must make off and quickly. Even then it might not be possible. Yet one question I must ask.

“Princess, how and why have you loved one as unworthy as I?”

“Our fates are one,” she repeated. “In Darjiling I saw you, and then I knew what the gods would have. And again and yet again I saw you when you knew not that the veiled woman was the daughter of kings and your wife to be. Of the journey up the mountains you know even as I. But now, beloved, listen. I have forsaken my people for love’s sake; and my father has daughters that he may slaughter or wed as he wills. But for me, I am free, and I give all the treasure to my lord. Set me free and you shall know.”

She stretched out her slender wrist and I examined the chain. It was slight—entirely beyond a woman’s strength, but within a man’s. Aided by the strong knife I carried I set to work instantly, wasting no words. The one thing that mattered now was to get back to Soames and to get away with her. The rest must take its chance and I with it.

“I have been here since the dawn,” she said simply. “Ptah-Sekt took me because he had seen two of the vile creatures running up the mountain as if the nests below were disturbed, and he brought me here and chained me until my father should come.”

I worked steadily on at the chain as I asked, “What are these creatures?”

“I know not, but they tear men cruelly with their beaks, and they are full of poison. Dread them very greatly, beloved, for many and many are the men they have killed, and had I not known you were at hand I would have strangled myself with my own hand rather than be flung into the pit.”

As she spoke, the chain dropped at her feet, though the steel bracelet still clasped her slim wrist. She rose lightly to her feet. It seemed to me part of the strangeness of all about me that the chain was probably from Birmingham—a cheap sort of thing that you might walk into any store and buy. Yet it clasped the wrist of a princess of Egypt, and but for my arrival might have doomed her to death. She laid her hand on mine.

“Come now and see the treasure-house. No need of locks and bars here in the mountains and with the crawling devils for a guard.”

She led the way to a door at the far end of the temple, and holding the lamp from the altar lit up the strange sight in the cave—for a cave it was, partly natural and partly cut by the labour of many men.

I beheld many images—images of gold and silver, images of black marble, of dull granite; and each held in a mighty hand a great jewel, pulsing light. One was a ball of carbuncle, deep-glowing like the red heart of a smouldering fire; one, a glorious sphere of amber where the gold light swam like wine; another, clear green fire—could it be emerald? I doubted, marvelling at its beauty, because of the size—a tennis ball of pure green radiance. And another was flashing crystal. And thus the images of dead kings and gods sat in solemn conclave as the princess lifted her light upon each awful face. One figure, granite and stern, stood in the midst, offering before a cat-headed goddess a dish with fruits upon it. And as the princess raised the lamp the fruits glittered and sparkled. They were such as Aladdin found in the Cave of Dreams Come True.

“That is Seti, the king. See how he wears the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt,” she said softly. “From him we are descended. Should my father and brother die and I be childless, our line is ended, for my sisters are but the half-blood. They are naught.”

“And your line goes yet farther into the past?” Something of the vast antiquity I saw about me compelled me to ask the question.

“For many thousands of years, lord of my life. It is no upstart of yesterday that gives you her heart. Yet what is that? Here my father dwells like a Bedouin chief in the desert. But we shall come again—this we know.”

She was silent for a little space.

“I believe no more in the gods of my fathers,” she went on then. “It was truth in the beginning, but time changes truth into error. Only the wisdom of my people remains—the magic and the mysteries. The lamas who showed you the smoke pictures were the men with my father’s messenger and me. And these pictures were shown that they might know your thoughts, for the inmost thought declares itself in these visions when the right spells are said. I would have warned you, but I could not.”

“Then they were not lamas?”

“No. Tibetan servants of my father. They knew not the spells they said. They showed you also the trick of the metal changing. An idle thing. A deceit of the eyes.”

“And the pictures at the Dorje-Tak monastery?”

“We were there, and the pictures were given to the abbot that you might fear and turn. But well I knew my lord would not turn—that my spell was upon him!” Her eyes brimmed over with love and laughter.

“And the priest who bound you?”

“He is Ptah-Sekt, brother of my father. But look here!”

She held the light aloft again, and I saw vessels of gold tumbled in wildest confusion. They stretched away into the gloom till I could see no more. Great chests of dark wood stood about us on clawed feet of gold. What did they hold?

“Papyri, pictures, much learning in those chests,” said the princess. “For thousands of years they go back. They were brought on camels across the waste when my fathers fled from Egypt, and men bore them up here with the jewels and gold; and when they had done their work they were slaughtered and buried beneath this cave that their ghosts might guard the treasure. Some believe they have taken shape in the evil creatures of the pit and the rocks; but this I know not. Great riches are here, and great wisdom and magic.”

I shuddered a little. Gold and blood—always the same—inseparable in the world’s history. I looked about me at the splendours of the Egyptian kings where the granite Seti, with kingly hauteur, made his equal offering to the goddess. Then I roused myself from the dream of the dead ages.

“We must go back to my people. If I delay they will search for me and the priest will hear. But how to cross the bridge? Alone I could do it, but you—surely, princess, you will die with terror.”

“What do I fear if I am with you?” she said, looking up sweetly into my face. “But here, beloved, and here—a gift from me to you.”

She stood on tiptoe, looking divinely lovely as she did it, and took the emerald ball from the hand of the god and laid it in mine; so also with the glowing red jewel from another. And still clinging to my hand she drew me back into the temple and, pointing to the flashing glory in the grasp of the Black Osiris, said proudly—

“A gift of love. This is the Splendour of Egypt. Reach it down to me, beloved, and I will hide it in my dress, for it is the fortune of my house, and when we rule in Egypt, you and I, this will be our promise of greatness and joy. Yours it is and mine. It is the jewel that lighted the Temple of Sais. Its fellow is not known to man.”

Much against my judgment, and very much with the feeling of a man who endures the graciousness of a royal lioness, I climbed up the pedestal and lifted the jewel from the hollow of the marble hand. Instantly a wild wailing cry ran round the place, and so startled me that the sphere of light fell on the floor. Had it been less hard than adamant it would have broken in bits. She picked it up composedly, and quenched the Splendour in the folds of her dress.

“Bend forward the thumb of the hand and the crying will cease,” she commanded. “The vulgar believe it is the ghosts of the dead men, but it was a magic to rouse the priests.”

I obeyed, and the weird cries ceased instantly, but the silence was even more terrifying. It was full of dust and death. And what was that stirring and rattling outside? The devils of the pit awakening?

“Let us go—let us go!” I said sternly. “What are jewels now? Come—or stay!”

“Beloved, I follow.”

She took up her position behind me with the ritual obedience of an Eastern woman. We left the solitary lamp burning on the altar and ascended the steps to the bridge, I carrying my torch high.

There was a horrible dim heaving and creeping beneath the bridge—here and there a hairy claw protruded, gripping the air, here a head with staring eyes, there a rending steel-like beak. They were waking from the drug. One horror sprawled upon the bridge before us; of what avail was any weapon against such? I halted, and she passed swiftly before me and, raising her hands—her black shadow swaying grotesquely over the unnameable life below—she cried aloud in a high and terrible voice—

“By Sebek and Serqet, by the Dogs of Death and the Children of the Dark, make way, O devils of the pit! Food do I promise you within a day! Fear not! It lives—it hastes toward you. Make way!”

I clutched the frail handrail. My brain was swimming, reeling. In a minute more I should slip and fall among them if the strain lasted—if that voice went on.

The monster slipped off the bridge and fell wet and heavy among its kin below. Heads and eyes like unto those of the madness of a dream stared up at us, but none attempted the bridge.

“I have noted,” she said, drawing close to me, “how the priests call when they fling men to them. They hoped for food and were still.”

I answered nothing, and she led the way steadfastly along the narrow passages and out into the keen moonlight air of the quadrangle, having made me extinguish my torch.

Oh, how it revived us—how heavenly clean and fresh that air was after those haunts of dust and death! I took the lead again now and guided her round in the black shadow of the walls to the spot where Yar stood patiently on guard, though two hours that seemed to me like a year had gone by.

Can anything surprise an Asiatic? If so, I have not yet found it. He looked at my companion in stolid silence and followed us in without a word. She had muffled herself in her veil as I went in to rouse Soames, for it was instantly necessary that he should be told what had happened. He was awake and alert in a second, his eyes bright and keen.

I compressed the story as best I could, and he was on his feet before it was half done, revolving it in that swift, hard mind of his.

“Is the woman here?”

“Yes. The worst of it is—it sounds beastly to say it—but I think she has a liking for me. And for my part—I can’t feel that way. She’s like a long-ago goddess, beautiful and very dangerous. A man can’t——”

“Why, no—of course not. All the same you’re not going to let the lady know that until we’re in a very different position from the present. It is she, and she only, can get us out of this and give us hope of the treasure and the papyri. To think I was asleep! I’d have given ten years of my life to see what you’ve seen. Well, we must clear out with her before the king comes. He may bring a force. Rouse the men quietly and tell Yar we’re off. I’ll speak to her.”

He went into the outer room where the princess stood in statuesque patience, shrouded in her veil, and he bowed, certainly with no grace but with the strong masculinity that would always save him from being ill at ease in any presence. She saluted him Eastern fashion with hands and head. He remained as business-like as if an Egyptian princess with the jewel of the world in her keeping were an everyday occurrence. He spoke Hindustani as perfectly as she.

“Pray sit on that blanket. Do you know whether the king will come alone or with a guard?”

“He will come with my brother, with six priests for the sacrifice, and with a guard. If you would save your lives, let us go now.”

“Have they guns and weapons like ours?”

“They have all this and more. They have the magic of my people.”

He brushed that aside contemptuously. Stories to frighten children! But I knew better.

“Then it is your wish to come with us?”

“I follow my lord. And if I stay, they will read all you do through my thoughts before they slay me.”

Soames turned to me.

“We must plan as we go. My idea is to get back to the tents and hide till they go. Something of that sort. But it wants thinking out. How to get down these rocks in the dark?”

The men, headed by Yar, were waiting in stolid submission, though roused from a much-needed sleep. The princess spoke once more.

“I know the secret way from the fortress and the swift and secret way through the mountains. Beloved, fear nothing. Take my hand.”

I hung back imperceptibly, but Soames made an impatient gesture and she took my hand in a strong clasp and led the way.

It was not out into the courtyard again. She led through the intricacy of the passages until she came to a square opening in the wall. Passing through it, she brought us to steps—the steps of an interminable descent through walls of rock dripping with moisture. The air was dense and still. It almost had to be swallowed like something tangible. But down she resolutely went, and we followed. How long that descent lasted we never knew, but our knees were cracking with the strain when a cold air met us, fine and keen, and we came out into the night in a huddle of snow-covered rocks, exactly where we had begun the climb the day before.

“It is now for you to guide,” she said, and fell behind again, dropping my hand.

I had taken the bearings, and we all went forward to the place where the tents were hidden, thankful to be free from the sorceries and dangers of the fortress. And as we reached the rocks the darkness was thinning and the dawn not very far away.

“It is a good place,” she said decidedly. “My father comes from the other side—from the Chapka Mountains. Now let us sleep that we may be strong.”

It was as if she had taken command of the expedition. I foresaw discord if she attempted that; but the pressing question was sleep. And yet, after all these excitements, I felt as if I should never sleep again. Her unseen eyes saw and understood.

“Drink this cordial, one and all, before we part for sleep. It is the nepenthe of the Greeks, which Queen Helen learned in Egypt from my people when she sojourned there. Have no fear. There is no harm—only rest and forgetfulness of all griefs.”

She drew a flat metal vial from her dress and asked for a cup. Into it she dropped a few drops of clear, honey-coloured fluid and gave it to me. I drank, Soames also. Even to the men she gave a share.

“They are beasts,” she said haughtily, “but we need our beasts of burden and this heals all weariness. Sleep, beloved. I will wake you.”

How we slept! It was exquisite untroubled sleep, into the depths of which we sank as into an ocean of rest. It had seemed a long night of peace when her light hand touched us, and we sprang up fresh and alert.

“Come out and look, beloved. Let your friend look also.”

A sight of wonder awaited us. The brilliant sun was shining in a blue, unclouded sky, and all around the mountains glittered in spotless white, while the silence was so intense that a breath might be heard. The vapour from our lips went floating like clouds straight upward.

At the beginning of the ascent was a thin black line of men preparing to climb to the fortress. We could see what looked like a pennon on a lance, though at that distance it was impossible to be sure.

“There are my father, my brother, the priests, and twenty-five men. They do not go up by the steps, for that is a king’s secret. What now is your counsel?”

Soames looked at his watch.

“It is now eight o’clock. They will take about two hours to do the climb. What then?”

“Ptah-Sekt will then meet them and take them to the temple, and they will find my place empty. They will then make prayer, and drink of the holy wine. And they will afterward follow—if they can!”

Her face was so meaning that I shuddered slightly. I knew something terrible lay behind her smile.

“Beloved, the golden cup below the altar of Osiris was filled with wine for the sacrifice. It is the custom that all should share the wine of the god when it is set on the altar. I have put a drug in the cup. They will not follow. Some will die at the god’s feet. Some will reel over the bridge into the pit. Did I not promise food to the devils? I have seen this thing done to our enemies.”

Decidedly the princess was terrible. Her voice was sombre and calm, though she had doomed her race to extinction. Had she no remorse—no sorrow? Apparently none. They had doomed her to a frightful death. It was her turn now, and there was no more to be said.

“A very excellent thing if it comes off!” Soames said to me in English. “Well, we must wait on events. Yar, let us have some food.”

It brought things down to the level of every day, and in so far was reassuring. We dare not make a fire, so the meal consisted of cold meat and biscuit; and the princess took her share with appetite, throwing her veil back and disclosing her beautiful face with the full curved lips that resembled the goddess images of her Egyptian house. While we ate we watched the thin, straggling party of men toiling up the ascent, reaching the gates, and silently disappearing within them to their doom.

“The problem is,” said Soames later, smoking in deep meditation, “whether to return to the fortress and bring down some smaller valuables as a proof of what we have found, or to leave the whole thing untouched until we can get back with carriers and all that’s necessary.”

“I think, if you had seen that pit, you’d prefer to wait till the scientific chaps have fixed up something that would put those devils to sleep for good,” said I, and repeated his remark and my answer in Hindustani to the princess.

“As to this, beloved, it is best to wait if your wise men can help, for very terrible are the devils. But the danger is great here and now, for they come running very swiftly. Those above are kept for the slaying of our enemies and the guarding of the Osiris. And they are fed. They do not devour unless they are hungry, though they tear for the love of tearing.”

“ ‘I like not the security!’ ” I said, quoting Hamlet—and in vain, for my companions were looking fixedly at the fortress. Slowly the sun went up the sky and the heat and the glare of the snow strengthened, and all was quiet as a picnic instead of a scene of fear and danger. I felt as if I were moving in a dream; and most of all I felt this in the companionship of the princess. Beautiful, young, she sat beside us, strange as the inhabitant of some distant planet; and though her heart reached across the gulf to me it could find no answer. She sat as if immured in a crystal sphere, visible, but ages apart from us.

The sun was past his zenith and the shadows on the snow were lengthening when suddenly a wild and piercing yell broke forth from the fortress. We leaped to our feet. Two figures, black against the snow, were dashing from the gates of the fortress and down the trail where the king and his guard had gone up. Silence followed again, and there was not a sound as they sprang down the steeps, vaulting the stream where it flashed below the waterfall.

“Ready! They’re coming this way,” said Soames composedly, and fixed his field-glasses again. The two were evidently in wildest haste and fear—they ran as if the devil were after them. And he was! He was! For what was that appearing from behind a huge boulder to the left? What was that with great body and swaying head, and six monstrous legs that shambled over the rocks more swiftly and surely than any man can run? Not seeming to move quickly, the brute covered the ground with dreadful surety. It gained—it won! The grey blot of its hideous body seemed to obscure one of the runners, to dwell over him, to pause——

“It has been a pastime of my people to set criminals to run against them,” said the princess serenely. “But always they won. They can tire out a horse, though they do not go fast. Certainly they are devils. It cannot be doubted. Though what will become of the spirits of the men slain I cannot say. That devil will run no farther—he will devour. See, the other fugitive is pursued also. You will not need the guns.”

True. The other wretch, seeing the appalling end of his comrade, uttered a heart-piercing yell once more and redoubled his straining speed, for a second hound of death had crawled from its lair. With efforts beyond what human flesh and blood can endure the fleeing man raced the wild descent, with the heavy, noiseless shambling of the huge body following ever nearer, gaining little, but gaining always—and in a moment more the fugitive was heading straight for our hiding-place.

“Poor devil, poor devil!” I said, moved to sickened pity. “I say, Soames, I’m going to shoot that beast—or try. I can’t stand this.”

I aimed, and Soames struck up my arm.

“Do you want to show where we are when Heaven knows what and who may be on us soon? You may need that very shot to-night! Don’t be a weak fool. You should know better.”

I turned away, sick in heart and body, yet could not withdraw my eyes from the tragedy. The poor wretch was within fifty yards of us now, coming straight as if for help. But he would never gain it. The evil odour was about us—it must have choked the runner with its poison breath. Suddenly with a wild shriek he fell on his face, and the thing settled down upon him, gathering in its legs with a monstrous parody of a bird settling down upon its nest.

A loud sucking sound from the hidden head—sickening to hear—and that was all.

“I told you. They always win,” said the princess musically.

Even Soames paled. Yar and the other two men were shaking like leaves in a gale. Yar came up to us with his hands spread out.

“Take us away, lords! Take us away from this hill of devils! Men cannot endure it, and there is no lama here to defend us with charms. Come—now!”

“Don’t be an idiot, Yar,” was all Soames vouchsafed. “One would think you had never seen a man die before.”

“All the same, it’s not exactly a picnic!” I retorted. “And I think we shall have big trouble with the men if we don’t clear out. Besides, what’s the point of staying? We have all the bearings, and we can come again.”

“Yes, and have the king and his men carry off the treasures—and worse, the papyri! Who’s to know they’re dead? No, thank you!”

We had spoken English, but the princess interposed, calm as a goddess.

“I will now make the smoke picture that we may know what is in the fortress. Make me a small fire.”

We made one of some of the miserable scrub that grew here and there, and it took time to fan it from a pungent smoke into a flame. Meanwhile the princess had thrown off her veil, and if I had thought her beautiful in the flicker of the butter lamps she seemed almost supernatural now, with the great clear eyes and braided blackness of her hair in the pure light of the sun and snow. Lovely, yes, but no ornament for any man’s house. Every movement was grace, every glance of the eyes romance. She moved and spoke a queen. But one thought, and only one, was with me—that she was a snare, a danger, and a fear; and what the future would bring I dreaded to think. Her devotion struck me dumb. But her pursuit, for all I knew, might be as deadly as the one that had just ended beside us. And yet the very thought was a treachery to so much beauty—beauty bringing also such royal gifts in its hands.

She paced round the fire nine times, reciting a spell and holding in her hand the fylfot cross that is sacred throughout the world, offering it toward the sun as she went. She spoke in Tibetan.

“I offer you, O Holy Ones, the four continents and the Mountain of Paradise, and I pray you to make us see!

“I offer up this magic cross, through the virtue of which let no injury beset the path of purity, and I pray you to make us see.

“What virtue has been accumulated by all the virtuous I offer up, and I pray you to make us see.

“I humbly prostrate myself nine times to all of the evil spirits that are worthy of worship. Let night come.”

Followed mantrams in a tongue unknown to both of us; and then she ceased, and while the men sat staring at the fire with eyes as fixed and dull as owls she flung a powder on it from an amulet box which she wore like a Tibetan woman on her breast. And instantly the smoke wafted into a white background and we saw.

There appeared the Black Osiris seated, in his temple, with the raised and empty hand that had grasped the Splendour of Egypt. Appeared also a man, with a helmet wreathed with a snake, lying prone and dead at his feet; and beside him, dead too, Ptah-Sekt the priest; and men in attitudes that might betoken sleep, but very certainly meant death, lay about the two. The princess spoke—

“I count my father, my brother, the six priests, and Ptah-Sekt. I count also ten of the guard. Pass, picture, and let sight come again.”

The picture wavered and was gone. Instantly it re-formed. This time it was the pit of horror and the bridge. The bridge ran across it broken, as though the weight of men fleeing in terror had weighted it down. A man’s body clinging to the rail was being drawn down into the seething vortex of life by remorseless claws. A hand and arm here and there shot up from the grey moving mass to be swallowed up again. The princess spoke—

“I count the guard, all but two, dead in the horrible pit. Pass, picture, and let sight come.”

It wavered and re-formed. Now it showed two men fleeing from the gates—the tragedy we had ourselves seen, even to the monster living and within our sight, tearing and rending. As it had happened before our eyes so we saw it in the smoke. For the last time the princess spoke—

“Die; it is done!” And the flame fell instantly. “We have seen. I make my offering.” She cut a long black lock from her hair and cast it in the red ashes. “Against injury from all evil spirits preserve us. Resume the sight. We have seen.”

She turned to us and resumed her own talk as if nothing had happened—

“It is certain all are dead. And fear not that any will enter the fortress. All will be well. My counsel is that we depart.”

She took the extinction of her house as calmly as if it had been the kicking down of an ant-heap. What wild contriving lay behind it all? What was the goal of her hopes? I felt that every working of her mind was utterly beyond my comprehension. It was a most complex proposition.

Soames collected himself.

“If we can trust the pictures, the coast is certainly clear. But what about the treasure? Of course the Government will claim it.”

“The treasure is mine. I give it to whom I will,” said the princess. “I give it to my lord. I do not give it to the Government of India.”

We stared at her. This was a development that had never occurred to either of us. It illustrates the difference of a point of view.

“I am the Queen of Egypt. I am inheritress of the Black Osiris—and the Splendour of Egypt is mine alone. To my lord and to no one else I give it.”

“That is impossible,” said Soames curtly. “The day for such things is gone by. We are servants of the Government, and the treasure is the Government’s. Of this there is no question. The only question is whether my friend or I should stay on guard with two of the men until the Government can declare its will.”

But the great lady would not be silenced.

“My lord will speak later when he has heard my will. The treasure is mine. And if you have thought, O devil-born, that I am a woman and helpless, beware, and yet again, beware! What I counsel is this—that my lord and I reward you. Fidelity and valour are worthy of reward; and these you have shown. Then, having received great riches, go your way down into India in content. As for my lord and me, we will stay, and he shall learn the further secrets that you shall not know.”

Imagine Soames’s feelings, addressed thus as a servant! He was black with fury. I interposed hurriedly in this strange debate, speaking English that she might not know what I said.

“Of course I’m entirely with you, Soames. And, to be perfectly frank, I’ve no notion of staying with her here or anywhere. But, for Heaven’s sake, let us temporize. We are not by any means at the end of our difficulties yet; and, if I’m not mistaken, she is the biggest of them all. Don’t make an enemy of her. Remember she has her rights, or thinks so. Also, incidentally, I believe she may have powers we don’t understand yet.”

“Rubbish! As for those smoke pictures—any of the charlatan lamas can do them. It’s only a kind of hypnotism. We can’t leave her here, but if she gives any trouble I shall turn her over to the Chongdon lamas and they can do what they please with her. I’m not going to have the whole thing spoiled for the whims of a woman.”

“But, Soames,” I said, “remember this isn’t British territory. At least go cautiously, for some very difficult questions may crop up. The treasure is certainly hers as far as one can see, and surely it is better for the Sirkar’s sake as well as our own to be on good terms with her.”

“What is resolved?” The princess’s resolute voice intruded itself again.

“Nothing as yet. I will tell you, great lady, when it is.” Then I said to Soames, “That treasure is absolutely safe. The bridge is broken, and there isn’t a man living who could or would face that ordeal. Let’s all go down together, and then we’ll find a safe place for her and settle up with the Government for her. I see no other way.”

Soames reflected in silence. Naturally suspicious, valuing the treasure at a much higher rate than I did, he was not inclined to trust me either to stay or go alone. I saw it plainly. So also as to the princess. She was the storm centre, she represented the treasure. He was not going to trust her out of his sight, especially with me. She was a beautiful creature, and he was certain that her face, combined with the treasure, might be altogether too much for my loyalty to his purpose. I could see it all passing in his mind as he took his resolution and spoke cautiously in Hindustani.

“As head of the expedition, I think we should all go down to India together. The princess can come with us and can put her case before the Sirkar, which is always scrupulously just to natives.” He turned from her to me contemptuously.

“Natives!” The one word escaped her lips, and she clenched her teeth on it.

“Anyway, there need be no anxiety about that,” continued Soames. “As to your private arrangements with her, Ross, that is no concern of mine. Now we must start. It is too late to go far, but I do not wish to keep the men in this place. They all are as jumpy as they can be with this murderous business going on beside us. Yar, strike camp!”

I turned away, feeling thoroughly uneasy. I dreaded the rage, the disappointment of the imperious woman. Murderess she was, it is true, but she had served us well and her standards were none of ours—to say nothing of the consideration that her people had meant to kill her. I thought Soames brutal. A little soft speech, a little kindness, might grease the wheels, and they were creaking badly now. I did not like the dark glance she cast at him, nor his amazing sullenness. She and I were virtually alone now, for the men were busy with Soames. She drew a little roll from her dress.

“Beloved”—and the deep eyes looked into mine—“your heart is true, is it not so? When we go down into India your priests shall wed us—this is your thought? Then I give you this papyrus of the line of my fathers, for a man should know the pride of the house that is become his. And as for this thief and his insolence, bitterly shall he repent it. Already I have sent a dark devil into his heart to destroy him. Well did I see he would thrust himself between us, but this shall be poison in him, till death be welcome. It is a part of our wisdom that we can do this thing. As like as not he will fling himself over some precipice when it has worked in him. But for us—there is joy waiting in India!”

I stammered woefully in my answer.

“Princess, it is not our custom to wed without knowledge, the one of the other. Time to speak of this in India. And for the treasure—you shall speak before the Sirkar.”

“The Sirkar is nothing concerned in my treasure,” she replied proudly. “It is mine, and therefore yours. But I will pay this low-born man with gold for his pains”—a pause—“and with more than gold for his insolence!” she ended softly.

I did not like her threats. Not, of course, that I believed in the “dark devil,” though it was certain that Soames was in many ways a changed man since we had come up into the mountains; but that had seemed a natural development of his suspicious nature. Even now I cannot tell if it were so or no. Let those judge who hear.

I turned away, sighing, and the princess caught my hand, kissed it wildly, and walked on alone ahead of our little procession.

We started along the little trail and soon overtook her—Soames leading. The princess, light and active as a steel spring, walked beside me. She wore her veil only as a hood, and her beautiful strong face was bright with health and courage. For Soames she kept a Sphinx-like silence. With me she was more communicative.

“In the way I take you there is food laid by for the coming of our messengers—coming to and from India. A tent also of yak’s hair. Fear not, beloved, there is plenty and to spare. And know this, that in all things that are mine I will share with you as with myself. And as an earnest take this, for the Splendour of Egypt is the jewel of the kings of our house, and where I am queen you are king. Freely I give it.”

Carefully wrapped now in a little bit of silk, so that its brilliance was hidden, she put into my hand the greatest jewel of history. I would have refused it, for I was utterly perplexed with doubts; but I saw it would pain and possibly infuriate her, and I took it, saying—

“This I will keep for you, great lady, and if you require it at my hands it is yours.”

She smiled and said nothing more, having given it as lightly as a flower. So we went on our way.

An hour later she stopped and looked keenly about her, finally leaving the trail between two rocks, the one shaped like a wallowing seal, the other like a cone. There was nothing special to distinguish them as far as we could see, in that land of strange rocks, but she insisted this was the way. And when Soames objected, on the strength of her assertion, to leave the trail, she pointed disdainfully to a slight mark on the base of the cone and, not even waiting while he examined it, she led forward, saying to me—

“Come, beloved. The noble trust the noble. But for this man, let him take his own way and perish. This path leads swift and sure to the Dorje-Tak Monastery.”

If it were so, this certainly explained how she and her party had been able to beat us on the way up; and for my part I trusted her entirely in matters like this. I followed, and Soames later. Hidden cunningly among the rocks the way became, in about a mile, a well-contrived trail about two feet wide, going steadily downward. It took advantage of every aid of nature to make the way easy; and, where nature failed, work had done its share. We could make twice the speed we should have made on the other way, not to mention that it cut off a good slice of the trek in distance. Where the rocks were too steep rough footholds were made; at several dangerous places iron chains were put for hand-holds in climbing down the heights, and at stated intervals were caches of food and strong matting for rigging up shelters if they were desired. It was quite clear that her words were true, and that this had been a regular path down to the lower lands and to Sikkim, probably from time immemorial. I asked her if the Running Monsters were a danger along this route, and she answered that they had never been seen here.

Thus for ten days we trekked, the princess holding her own with steadfast courage, elastic and strong as a mountain deer. The way, as we now clearly saw, cut off that terrible angle of the mountains after leaving the Mendong-La. Nothing could have been better. But what frightened me was the ill-feeling steadily growing between her and Soames. I could not wonder. His treatment of her appeared to me as sheer madness. He outraged her pride, her sense of possession, at every turn.

In vain I interposed, reminding him that the very food we ate we owed her, for hidden all along the trail, at the points where we should need it, was food of the best, so that Yar and the Lepchas were cheerful with abundance, so contented as to make likely nothing but “fair weather” till we should reach Darjiling. Our debt to her was mounting daily, but I could not make Soames see it, and his behaviour to me personally was atrocious. Nothing but the anxiety of our position and the princess’s presence could have made me endure it. I would have struck off alone and stood my chance rather than endure the brooding gloom and sullenness of his manner. She made no remark now, but I saw her looking often at him fixedly as we went or sat, her lips moving, but not a word passing them. And once I saw him look up and whiten to ashen grey as her eyes met his.

It followed that she and I were thrown on each other’s society when he strode sullenly on ahead, and whatever I might feel about her from one point of view, from another I had never had such an interesting time in all my days. My only and bitter regret was that I had not more knowledge myself to meet what she told me. She had been trained in all the history and traditions of her house, and the utter seclusion in which her family had been hidden preserved everything intact except the ancient language. That, she owned, had dwindled and corrupted in the long centuries, and, except the king, the heir-apparent, and the high priest, none had kept it in its purity. The women especially had lost it from the custom of sending them to India for education. Yet what she retained would be the wonder and delight of every student, and I knew very well that in the princess herself we were carrying down a greater treasure into the living world than even the Splendour of Egypt. Here was the clue to the lost histories, the lost trade routes, the lost wisdom and magic that the wisest heads have pondered over in vain. She could explain the mystery of that scene in the court of Pharaoh when the rod of Aaron devoured the serpent rods of the king’s magicians. Who but she could lay open the secret of the Sphinx, the building and the purpose of the Pyramids! Sometimes she dropped a careless word that opened whole vistas of such breathless interest that I seemed to tremble on the verge of a discovery which would revolutionize all our beliefs and send us, children, to our alphabet again; and then she would glide off to some banality about the weariness of the solitudes or her life among the women of the ruler of Kashi that half infuriated me, knowing what she might say if she chose. Her mind, proud, strong, and obstinate, was extraordinarily undeveloped. For her politics did not exist. History had stood still. Some wild rumour had reached her people that the English were leaving Egypt, and that the Levantine peoples whom it was her tradition to despise would grasp the rule in hands so weak that any determined man, backed by wealth, might snatch it from them, and that was all she knew or cared to know. On one point she kept a stern silence—the secret of their dwelling-place in the mountains. I led the way to it more than once, and always she replied—

“When we are husband and wife what secret can there be between us, heart of my heart? But I am sworn by an oath, that withers the limbs if broken, to tell this on the morning of my marriage night and not till then. Ask me no more. Ask what else you will.”

And I asked, unsatisfied, of her great knowledge. This she preferred, for another thing I noticed was that if she had any settled plan for the future she would not speak of it except in the vaguest terms. That, too, must wait until the bond was bound between us. It was not distrust, I am certain. It was simply the tradition of the women of her house. But it flattered her pride to speak of the history of that house and its knowledge, riches, and power, and she told me things that when I write them will confer fame on a man who has done nothing to deserve it, and owes all to the magician Love.

Soames’s treatment of her seemed to me sheer madness from beginning to end, and that quite apart from any higher considerations. Several times again I pointed out the folly of it, going to the very limit that I dared, but it was useless. He went his own sullen way, and at last never spoke even to me unless it was absolutely needful. It is a paradox, but true, that the company of the princess turned my thoughts more and more to Joan. The first question, of course, was what she would think of our beautiful prize, and what effect it would have upon our quarrel. That might not matter one way or another, for so many months had gone by since our parting that my very existence might have faded out of her mind. She had not faded out of mine by any manner of means. In the strangeness of my companionship with a woman so alien, Joan drew nearer to me—infinitely sweet and desirable. I knew the way her mind worked as far as any man can know a woman. All our desires and hopes were comprehensible to each other—a look was enough, for we sprang from the same root. I bewildered the princess with every word I uttered, and she me. The more she clung to the hope of my love the more it drew away from her, and even though she feigned certainty she doubted. But the terrible thing was that she loved me with some deep passion that to me was perfectly incomprehensible, and the less it had to feed on the more it famished for plenty. The expression of her beautiful face was sometimes so heart-piercing that I could not endure it, and in defiance of all courtesy I would leave her as Soames always did, and go on ahead, looking back from time to time to see her following, lonely, patient, persisting, about as pathetic a figure as any in the wide world. Then I came back and led the talk to things of which she loved to speak—the pride and greatness of her royal ancestors—and hope kindled again in those fathomless eyes. Surely no man could reject a princess, and one who carried such splendours in her hand! I could read her thought, and quaked before it.

I think it was about the twelfth evening we came to a cave in the rocks, so hidden as to be unseen without her knowledge. And there we found a store of food, and even of wine. Fuel was piled in a corner, and by a blazing fire we sat and ate our meal, while Yar and the coolies, well fed also, crouched at the outside of the cave. A more picturesque scene was never in this world. The mouth of the cave opened on a flat plateau, from which the trail went on and down, skirting an appalling precipice. Twenty steps from where we sat would bring one to the giddy edge. Behind us was the little tent for the princess; and above that a mighty wall of sheer rock, overhanging and dangerous. And a sea of billowing mountains tossed away like frozen waves as far as we could see.

We sat in comfort looking out upon it all, warmed and fed. It might have been the unaccustomed drink or the sense that we were nearing the end of our toils, for the Dorje-Tak Monastery was but twenty-four hours away, but Soames was insufferably overbearing and insolent to the princess. At first treating her like a spoiled, petulant child, he spoke loudly, threateningly, telling her the treasure was hers no more, that the Government would acknowledge no claim, but might provide for her out of it, and this would be the utmost she could expect. As to her dreams of the Egyptian throne, he laughed them to scorn.

At first she retorted on Soames, with spirit and sharply; and this goaded him on into greater insolence, though I did my best to hush him down. With glittering eyes she laid her hand upon my arm.

“Let him speak, beloved. Let him fill the cup until it runs over. I learn from his speech. The devil is at work in him. Let it work.”

Soames laughed disagreeably.

“What the subject races have to learn is obedience. You do not seem to realize your position.”

His very tone was an insult.

“Pray stop this argument, Soames,” said I in English. “This is not the way to speak to any woman; and to this one we owe our lives. Her tent is ready; let’s all go to sleep and wake up fresh for to-morrow. I strongly object to the attitude you’ve chosen to take up.”

I turned to her and said much the same thing. I don’t think she heard; her eyes were fixed with a peculiar steely glitter on Soames, her lips a little apart. She was so still she scarcely seemed to breathe.

“Oh, all right. I’m pretty well fed up with all this,” he answered roughly; and pulling himself together he slouched out of the cave and stood looking at the night.

It was worth looking at—a perfect frosty stillness, a round, bright moon shining in a sky like black velvet with diamond points of stars. It was so dead still that the cry of some belated marmot was heard from the other side of the precipice as if it were beside us.

Directly he was outside she turned to me.

“The vile, the low-born, the outcast!” she said under her breath. “What has my beloved done that he should journey with such as this? And how trust him with our secret—with anything that is ours? Surely, surely he is a danger and an obstacle!”

Wishing to give it a lighter turn, I said—

“And what do you do with an obstacle in the mountains, princess?”

She made a slight but expressive gesture with her hand as though it held a dagger, and looked darkly down. I saw the matter was serious, and at once handled it seriously.

“Soames Sahib is my friend, and such talk, even though you cannot mean it, is as though you wounded me. I am ashamed for you that you can say things which no women utter.”

“My lord, my beloved,” she said entreatingly, “what have I said? Only that he is a danger and an obstacle, and this is most true. Have I not endured for your sake, when, but for that, I had——”

“What?”

She drew herself up proudly.

“I had taught him that a princess of Egypt is no mark for the tongue of the low-born and the ignorant. But I withheld. Now I tell you that you are in his danger, and if this is so I strike.”

I grasped her by the wrist.

“If you dare,” I said, “if you dare, never in all this world will I speak to you again. Have I not said he is my friend?”

“He is your enemy, and mine,” she cried, and melted instantly into a very passion of tears, sobbing through them: “Would I not die to save you, and do I not know that he hates you? Very sad is the life of a woman. There is none to speak for her, none to aid, and when she would save what she loves she is scorned and hated. Oh, my beloved, have pity, have pity upon me!”

She stretched her arms to me in utter abandonment, and with all my heart and soul I pitied her; but what could I do? She had real cause of complaint against Soames, and so indeed had I; but I could not think of him as an enemy even now, and every tie of loyalty bound me to my friend and the leader of our expedition. And remember I believed her hatred for him to be a very real danger for him and herself. Justice under the Sirkar does not run as it does in the mountains; but how explain to her what her position would be in India? Will it be forgiven me if I took the one way that I knew would soothe her? I opened my arms, and she flung herself against my breast, still sobbing.

“If you wish to please me, to make me believe that you love me, try to endure still,” I said. “The way in which a woman can help a man is obedience. It is but like a child to act hastily and violently. Be patient if you would have my gratitude.”

“Your love also?” she said, looking up with brimming eyes like a child; and how could I have the cruel heart to say no? I was silent, but I stroked her wonderful and silk-soft hair as the beautiful head lay upon my shoulder, and for the moment, in that new tenderness, she seemed a child to me. Only for a moment. She drew herself softly away and looked at me with a look that almost pierced my heart, so loving, so strange it was. All woman again.

“What you will, I do.”

No more. She waited awhile, and then went composedly out of the cave. Soames was standing there, lost in thought.

“Most beautiful is the night,” said the princess gently. “It is a wish-catching night—when it is but to ask and have.”

“Wish catching?” I asked, wanting to start some new subject.

“Yes. Form a wish to see anything you will, and you can see it now. Behold!”

For a bright mist was rising from the depths of the precipice at our feet and filling it with vaporous billows of cloud.

“It’s like that place in China where you look down two thousand feet into the mist and see what they call the Glory of Buddha reflected on it below,” said Soames. “It’s a trick of the monks.”

“Choose!” said the princess again with her gentlest smile; and it could be very gentle when she pleased.

“I think of a woman!” I said to test her.

“Of a woman? Look then at the mist.”

She stretched out her hand and clasped mine. Believe me or not as you will, on that white background of mist I saw Joan Boston, golden-haired, laughing, touching a man’s shoulder with a light hand as they swept round, dancing. And if I tried forever I could not tell you how real and yet unreal it was to see those figures swaying lifelike on the fleecy background of moonlit cloud. Sometimes a radiant billow would hide them, then they would sweep out into perfect clearness again. I could see them laughing, talking; only I could not hear.

“Soames, do you see? Do you see, man?” I cried.

“Nothing but the mist,” he answered morosely. “More of this magic clap-trap, I suppose. I’m pretty sick of it and of the whole business.”

He turned away from us again.

“What is that at your feet, beloved?” her soft voice said.

It was something shining white in the moonlight. I looked while she still held my hand, and it was a fan, with mother-of-pearl sticks—the fan I had given to Joan—my first gift. I glanced at the princess. Her face was pale and sternly beautiful in the moonlight. Suddenly it struck me with a pang. She had thought, had hoped, perhaps, that my thoughts would be of her. But she said nothing of that. Indeed, she smiled again.

“Lord, would you like to see it in her hand—where it should be? Look then!”

She whirled the fan lightly and flung it. And, as I live, the dancing figure caught it in her hand, and opening it and waving it to me, fluttered behind a billow of mist. Mirage of the mind, but a terrible revealer of a man’s inmost thought! The princess dropped my hand, and I saw no more.

Soames was standing behind me.

“Did you see that? Amazing!”

“Nothing but the mist. It boils up the precipice like a cauldron.”

“If the friend of my lord will give me his hand, he too can read the future—or the present if he will,” said the princess smoothly.

“Is it sense-cheating?”

“It is at least an art as old as Egypt,” she replied, looking at the ground.

“Well, here goes!”

He stretched his hand out roughly, and she took it in hers. I could see the wonder grow in his eyes as he stared at the mist, but now I could see nothing.

“Impossible!” he cried angrily. “If that were to be the reward of all my labour I would—— No, no! Show me the next!”

She still clasped his hand lightly yet firmly. Now, for the first time, I saw Yar, standing in the mouth of the cave, looking fixedly at his adored master. Not daring to interfere, scarcely even to see, for the ordinary Lepcha dreads witchcraft as he dreads nothing else, he still stood keeping an anxious watch. Soames’s voice was high and angry.

“What? Guillmard in my place at the office? Sitting in my chair! Ross with the Viceroy, and not I? Where do I come in?”

“Drop his hand,” I whispered to her. “I know not what he sees, but it is black magic. Drop his hand. It maddens him.”

She smiled maliciously. It was easy to see his fury was balm to her soul. The mist was boiling and seething in the gulf like wild billows, hiding the frightful depth below. Suddenly he turned on me.

“If you think you’re going to throw me over and reap the seed I’ve sown, you’re bitterly mistaken. You can’t——”

“You’re mad!” I said, and I thought no less. “Go quietly into the cave and sleep off the wine, and——”

She dropped his hand, and with a growl he flew at me like a mastiff. We were but a few feet from the abyss, and the unexpected rush flung me down with my head and shoulders over it before I could recover my footing. It was a ghastly moment. Deadly silent, the princess sprang at him as he reeled back, and in a moment, as I dragged myself back with my feet and hands, his body struck me as he fell—fell over the dreadful edge and was gone. I saw him plunge into the mist—and saw no more. Yes—one frightful thing more! For Yar, seeing what she had done, rushed from the cave, and taking the princess by the shoulders shook her like a rat in his rage and despair. And as I struggled half dazed to my knees he thrust her furiously from him on the edge. She flung up her arms and—Yar and I stood alone in the moonlight, he grinning like a dog and utterly unable to regain the mastery of his face or voice.

I pulled myself together somehow. I held him under my revolver and ordered him away. And the spirit went out of him, and he fell on the ground, sobbing and wailing as I never thought to hear a man. And there I left him. For myself, I went back into the cave and dropped my head in my hands, and tried to realize the incredible thing, and could not. The vessel Soames had drunk from still stood on the plank that served for a table. The fragments of our meal were there. The princess’s veil was on the ground, heaped as she had flung it. It seemed they had only gone out for a minute and would walk back, and all would be normal again.

After the staggering unbelief, pity seized me. I thought of him first. Poor fellow! the goal so near, the reward so great! And now—the prey of eagle and fox! And the woman—so proud and brave and beautiful!

So I kept my vigil, and all night long their ghosts mourned about me, praying for pity. In the dawn a blue glimmer caught my eye as the first frosty sunbeam stole into the cave, for a light wind fluttered the veil aside. I stooped, and saw that the glimmer came from the strange stone which had beckoned me to the Touch-the-Sky Mountain. It lay upon a bit of paper, folded and written upon in Hindustani. This was the writing—

Then she had meant to die! Was the attack on Soames a deliberate intention, or the wild impulse to save me? The latter, I was sure. She was no murderess then,—she was defending her own.

So all night my thoughts reeled to and fro, and in the dead waste and silence I suddenly remembered the old hag’s warning at Darjiling: “Beware of Soames.” I remembered the strange smoke pictures—the two men struggling on the frightful edge. All true—all true! And I had not believed—had taken no warning! Yet what could I have done, and what are men if they are to be the sport of devils and their devil’s foresight that wisdom itself cannot teach? It shakes the very roots of a man’s life when even for a moment he can believe that such agents of a knowledge he himself cannot reach are at large in the world, and watch his future—all unknown to him—with malice or pity. That was a hideous night. I shall never forget it. It has left behind it even now a sense of evil Presences moving in the dark behind curtains we may never lift. They lift them for a second—a bewildering and useless glimpse—and then again we walk blindfold to our fate.

In the dawn Yar came crawling to my feet for forgiveness with the humility of a dog. Though the wild mountain man loved Soames better, he loved me too, and his heart was sore with my anger. He swore he had not meant to kill her, only to punish her with terror for her murderous act. I don’t know. I never shall know the truth of that. Yet I could not be too hard on him. He implored me to strip him of all food and clothing and turn him adrift into the snows to die. He meant it, too.

I was pretty well worn out with the whole miserable business, but this had to be met.

“You must come down with me to India, and the truth must be told to the Sirkar. And if they punish, they punish. But I will bear witness that you loved your master and tried to defend him.”

“To avenge!” corrected Yar. “If a servant do not avenge his master, who should?” And that was as far as he could get on the moral side of it.

He seemed then to cast the load from his mind, and went back to his work and to preparing the coolies as composedly as if nothing had happened. These people are like that. I envied him. I carried the burden for many a long day. I went and looked over the precipice now the sun was up. A sheer drop of frightful depth; and at the bottom the river—the Secret Raging One, roaring unheard on its way. Hopeless to find them! I gave the word, and we left the fatal place, trudging doggedly down.

It was then I first remembered I carried a fortune and a glory with me—the Splendour of Egypt and the other temple gems; and at the moment it did not stir a pulse in me to remember. I was dead beat.

No need to tell of the trek down nor of how we picked up the other coolies and beasts. Yar was the perfection of guide and servant. He had begged for a worthless pencil Soames had been in the habit of using, and that was the only reference he made to the tragedy. The man had a faithful heart—no doubt of that.

We dismissed the coolies at Darjiling, and I went straight down with Yar to Calcutta. In the end the authorities found it in their hearts to pardon Yar.

Of course I was prepared for unbelief from the bosses as to all the wonders we had seen; and if it had not been for the jewels and the papyrus, I might have whistled for recognition in spite of Soames’s careful notes and my own. But even official unbelief quailed before those proofs. My account of Soames’s death, substantiated by Yar, was received with regret, for all knew what a sound student of the hill peoples and what a gallant adventurer was lost in him.

It may or may not have a connection with his strange behaviour during the quest that it came out that his father had died in an asylum, a homicidal lunatic. Poor fellow! Never an honour came my way that I did not think of him, and regret he was not there to take his share. And yet, if a doom like his father’s overshadowed him, perhaps the gods had shown him a stern mercy in his end.

For the princess there were regrets all over Europe and Asia. A royal Egyptian lady—wild and beautiful, holding the arts of Thebes and Sais, what a reception would there not have been for her? But I had mixed feelings. There was no room in the modern world for her sad royalty. I knew it well. No room for her either in my heart. It might be that the gods of her fathers had had pity on their royal daughter and had smoothed her way to the paradise of her people.

But day and night I thought of her. I was glad that for one moment she had lain in my arms, and that I had shown her some tenderness in poor return for all the love she had lavished on me—unworthy. I dreamed of her—could not be free of her at all. And yet I craved to see Joan. I had the feeling that she alone could deliver me from all these enchantments and restore me to the normal. Indeed I was a very sick man those days, worn out body and soul. I wanted her; I loved her, or I could never have turned to her so naturally and inevitably. I asked the one question which assured me that she was still in Calcutta, and then I never spoke of her to man or woman. I went about my business, and there was plenty of it, and made no sign. Nor did she.

But how I thought of her—how I dreamed of her—whenever the pressure relaxed! I should have heard if she were married; but no one in the world could tell me if she were engaged.

I would never see her again if that were so. I would coil up ropes neatly in this business and then throw in my lot with Murray. He would trek till he died, and I asked nothing better if I could not have the best. For I knew no life so good, and Europe and India would then be alike intolerable.

So I revolved it all, with a heap of newspapers at my feet full of my adventures, which had been wirelessed and cabled all over the world, and had roused such question, interest, incredulity, congratulation as had not been seen for a year of Sundays. And I, the hero of it all, sat a very perplexed and disquieted man—dear old Lidder triumphing in the next room—a letter from the Viceroy in my hand, and the unboiled peas in my boots of a bitter love affair that gave me no peace day or night. I could not get free of her at any price—the troublesome little intruder! If I had had a free hand—who knows—the princess might have appealed to me, and she would have been sitting before me now with her proud dark eyes and beautiful obedience, and Soames would have been living and rejoicing in his success, and——

So it all came back to Joan.

I kicked the papers aside and tiptoed past Lidder’s door, for I wanted to be alone—and out I went and made for the Eden Gardens, and for my favourite corner there by the water, under the Burmese pagoda. It was five o’clock, and the air was cooling and the gardens at their loveliest. There is nothing like India then—nothing in all the wide world. Old ghosts walk about it; our own people who made the Empire—proud old men in ruffles and swords, stately ladies in powder and pearls. Calcutta is full of them and their great tradition. Shall we hold it in the wild new days that are coming upon us? And romance more glittering and coloured still—that of the high princes and kings mighty before any history in this marvellous country. The Great Mogul and all the glory he represented—the many rulers who have ridden away into the darkness—the dead glories, the broken kingdoms. No, there is nothing like India, from Kashmir down to Madras, when the sun sets and the innumerable stars that have seen it all come quietly out and set their indifferent watch in the sky. I would sit by the ancient pagoda and see them come, and dream myself free of a foolish entanglement that would be all the same a hundred years hence, and not even an incident in the stupendous life of this stupendous land.

So I sat down by the pagoda, scarcely any one in sight except a woman reading, and tried to fix my thoughts on the return to the land of snow—to be carried through directly the ways were open once more for the brief summer. I should be up at Darjiling long before that, making my arrangements.

But there was a little lake of blue in the sky exactly the same colour as Joan’s eyes. I saw it at once—that lovely jewel blue. It brought me down with a run, and I got up impatiently to make for the club. There, at all events, in the loud and eager talk about my adventures, there would be no time or room to think.

And then she came quietly round the corner, making straight for the pagoda. I think I would have fled if I could, but am not certain. In fact I was certain of nothing but that she was coming, all in white, and that she looked pale and anxious. Also I could be quite certain that a wave of loveliest rose swept up her face when she saw me, and that she stopped dead for a second, and then made as if to take the path that led away from the pagoda.

I have not the least notion what I felt, beyond a queer, arrested sensation of things that seemed to halt breathless to wait for what would happen. Clumsy—but I can put it no better.

I think a minute passed, and then I said, “Joan!”—and she turned. She said nothing. We stood looking at each other. Presently I said, “Come here. Sit down. I must speak to you”—and she followed obediently as the princess herself.

There was a silence. Then, with her little hands folded meekly in her lap, she said—

“I want to tell you that I was wrong, and I knew it all the time. Don’t think I say this because you’ve succeeded. I knew it before you went, and if you’d come back a beggar I’d have said this just the same. I tried to be a weight round your neck, and all for my own conceit. I was all wrong.”

I took her hand and held it. You can do that in the Eden Gardens if you have luck. It was so sweet to listen to her that I said nothing for fear of breaking the charm.

“I’m not going to stay, but I want you to forgive me. Even in Simla I would have told you this if I’d had a chance, but I hadn’t. Now say ‘I forgive you,’ and then I’ll go.”

“There’s something I must ask you first. Is it chance that you’re here now?”

She coloured again painfully.

“No, it isn’t. I see you wish me to eat a large slice of humble pie. I saw you coming, and I came.”

“Why?”

“To say what I’ve said. I’ve said it, and now let me go.”

Her eyes were growing dangerous again. She had reached the limit of her humility. It was my turn now. I caught the other hand though it pulled for freedom, and so turned her face toward me.

“Joan, I love you. Need we talk of forgiveness? I think you were wrong, and I was a fool not to force you to own it then. It would have spared me some wretched hours. Would it have spared you anything?”

“A lot.”

It was a talk punctuated with silences. We sat awhile, holding hands like children. Then she said—the modern girl again—

“Of course if I was a knave you were a fool, Kit—indeed you were. If you’d been firm——”

“Firm? I thought I was adamant.”

“Not a bit of it. You just caved in at the wrong moment and ran away. Suppose I had married some one else?”

“You couldn’t.”

“I never know what I can do. No woman ever does. I didn’t—— That’s all one can say.”

“Why not?”

“They didn’t happen to please me.”

“Was that the only reason? Joan, you have never said you love me.”

“Unfortunately you know it. Why waste words? But though you know it, I’m not sure I know it myself.”

The little thorns that made the rose sweeter were prickly again.

“How can we make sure?”

She was silent—and then suddenly—

“Was the princess as beautiful as they say?”

“More beautiful. Most beautiful. Exquisite.”

“Tall, dark? The very opposite of me?”

“Like an Egyptian queen.”

“The papers don’t say this—but, of course, she loved you?”

That touched a jarring string.

“She’s dead. Let her rest.”

“Did you love her?”

“Not I. She was too beautiful—too far away. But I shall always remember her and wonder at her. It’s you I love. You seem to forget that.”

Another long silence, as if she were thinking. Presently two bright tears brimmed her eyes and fell over.

“You’ll always remember her. She’ll always be beautiful and young to you. If I grow old and dowdy she’ll always be hovering about you—exquisite, as you say.”

“Yes. It’s one of the few rewards of death,” I answered bitterly. “You can’t well strip her of that. She died to earn it.”

“A woman should always die or go away,” Joan said savagely. “It’s our only escape from being commonplace—to make an artistic exit. Kit, I’ve not got the courage to marry you!”

“You haven’t the courage to refuse me. We should be miserable apart.”

“You can live neither with her—nor without her,” she quoted miserably, the tears still brimming. “Suppose we part now, and agree never to meet again?”

“We should both be back here to-morrow. No, we’ve got to face life together. It won’t be perfection all the time. I know that. But there’ll be moments of heaven, and—we love each other. Isn’t it a good augury that we meet to-day in—Eden?”

“I don’t know. They were driven out.”

“But only into the wide, happy world. It would have been very dull in a garden always. Come out with me into the wide, happy world, Joan. Don’t try me any more. I’m weary. I’m sad. I’m done in pretty well altogether, and even my success seems to savour of dust and ashes. Be good to me. It’s only you that can, for I love you.”

Then she melted divinely. I had not known—could never have imagined—that she could be so tender. It doesn’t bear writing about. It just was. When we left the Eden Gardens half an hour later the stars were shining not indifferently, but with eyes like hers, and a mellow moon made heavenly lights and shadows through the trees. Outside, the lamps were glittering joyfully and all the world going happily about its happy errands. These are the times one does not forget.

Next summer I was made head of an expedition, and, with Yar beside me, I guided them up the way she had shown us. It was with a horrid shudder that I passed the plateau where the two had gone down. We were obliged to camp there much against my liking; and again in a silent moonlight I saw the waves of mist billowing up from the abyss and hiding it with treacherous beauty. And, believe it who will, I woke in the moonlight calm, and before the opening of my tent I saw the princess floating upon the billows with eyes fixed on mine and arms stretched out across the gulf no power could bridge. Shall I see her again when my time comes to follow?

When in due time we reached the fortress the way was easy before us. She had spoken truly. If any wanderers had passed by, none had dared to enter. The snow lay white and untroubled. A dreadful stillness possessed the place.

But a strange matter-of-factness came into it with us. I saw the awful pit once more, but the tide of hideous life in it was lower. They had found a way out over the canted bridge that hung forlornly down within their reach, and evidently went in and out seeking for food in the deserted place. But we did not fear them now, for a poison gas carried in our equipment was directed into the pit, and we waited in the courtyard of the thousand windows while it did its very efficient work.

Yet even when we went in the sight was evil. It was best to wait till the whole was covered with corrosive powder and the black fumes told us nothing was left but a hateful memory.

How it all came back upon me when we entered the temple of the Black Osiris where the princess had lain a prisoner—the memory of her voice, her proud eyes. What is life but the dream of a dream?

But the find, now that we had leisure to examine it—and I had two experts with me—was beyond the wildest visions of the wildest adventurer. Gold, jewels, vessels, ornaments of the earlier and later Pharaohs, pearls, sick and faded now, bags of fiery opals, amethysts, grass-green emeralds—it was indeed a marvellous discovery. And beyond and above all these things were the magnificent papyri going back to the time of those priests of Sais who, as Plato testified, lived many thousand years before his day. In these was made clear the manner and reason for the marvellous journey through desert and mountain which had brought these wonders where we found them—a story so full of magic and mystery that I will write it one day for those who care to hear of true marvels that outshine the wildest fiction.

They are excavating still. For the floor of the cave was found to be a receptacle for treasure we had not guessed. I need say no more of that for the present. Of course I got my share, and rewards and distinctions besides. And no one questioned my right to the Splendour of Egypt. It glitters in cold glory now in the greatest Museum in the world—the greatest jewel of the dim and mysterious past that has come down to us—or probably ever will. Its story occurred in the papyri, and is well worth telling in itself.

Wonderful things happened later. Joan—Joan herself—came up with me after our marriage, for I had to come and go for a considerable time, and still must do so. Surely that was the most delightful honeymoon trip ever known. There was nothing worse than a little wholesome roughing it then, which she enjoyed to the full as much as I, for the way had been made easy (comparatively speaking) along the route we owed to the princess. And as long as I live I shall never forget the strangeness of seeing her wandering through that wild deserted building held in the fangs of the Touch-the-Sky Mountain and standing in the temple of the Black Osiris bound up, for me, with such terrible and moving memories, and she herself so gay and young and happy. I did not like to see her there, somehow. I could not tell her how it touched me, and why. There are so many things a man can never make his wife understand, and the princess was a subject that made me wince even when we glanced near it. But all the rest was to be counted among the good days of life, and the whole thing brought us very near together. We are very happy—as happy as people are ever likely to be in this perplexing world, for we have youth, health, riches, love. And yet, yet—there are dark eyes that haunt me sometimes with a sense of something lost, gone, irrecoverable, even when the sweetest turquoise eyes in the world are looking into mine. Would it have been better—would there have been silent silver lights and darks undreamed of in that other love which I valued so little when it lay in my hand? I cannot tell. What man can weigh the value of what he threw away?

I rouse myself. I never speak to Joan of this. How could she understand when I know nothing? But of the two of us she is the happier—and that is as it should be.

Yar has never left me. With a devotion worthy of a better man than I, he has laid aside his habits and moulded himself into those of civilized life as it is understood in India, so that he may be possible in our home. Great were his rewards as the right-hand man of our expedition, and all our servants pay him honour. And when he holds the Missy Baba in his arms I think even Soames is for that brief space forgotten.

But I forget nothing.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover was created for this eBook and is placed in the public domain.

[The end of The Glory of Egypt by Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (as Louis Moresby).]