Caves of Terror, Talbot Mundy [best books under 200 pages txt] 📗

"It was in my mind," he went on, "to drive a hard bargain with the Mahatma. I was going to offer him protection in return for knowledge. But it is not fair to drive bargains with a man so closely beset as he is. Therefore I offer him protection without terms."

With that he tossed the black sari aside and strode down the narrow carpet to where the Mahatma sat beside me, giving Yasmini a mere nod of courtesy as he turned his back on her. And until King reached us, the Mahatma squatted there beckoning one crooked forefinger, like a man trying to coax a snake out of its hole. King stood there smiling and looked down into his eyes, which suddenly lost their look of staring into infinity. He recognized King, and actually smiled.

"Well spoken!" he said rather patronizingly. "You are brave and honest. Your Government is helpless, but you and your friend shall live because of that offer you just made to me."

Yasmini was collecting eyes behind King's back, and it needed no expert to know that a hurricane was cooking; but King, who knew her temper well and must have been perfectly aware of danger, went on talking calmly to the Mahatma.

"You're reprieved too, my friend."

The Mahatma shook his head.

"Your Government is powerless. Listen!"

At that moment I thought he intended us to listen to Yasmini, who was giving orders to about a dozen women, who had entered the hall through a door behind the throne. But as I tried to catch the purport of her orders I heard another sound that, however distant, is as perfectly unmistakable as the boom of a bell, for instance, or any other that conveys its instant message to the mind. If you have ever heard the roar of a mob, never mind what mob, or where, or which language it roared in, you will never again mistake that sound for anything else.

"They have told the people," said the Mahatma. "Now the people will tear the palace down unless I am released. Thus I go free to my assignation."

We were not the only ones who recognized that tumult. Yasmini was almost the first to be aware of it; and a second after her ears had caught the sound, women came running in with word from Ismail that a mob was thundering at the gate demanding the Mahatma. A second after that the news had spread all through the hall, and although there was no panic there was perfectly unanimous decision what to do. The mob wanted the Mahatma. Let it have him! They clamored to have the Mahatma driven forth!

King turned and faced Yasmini again at last, and their eyes met down the length of that long carpet. He smiled, and she laughed back at him.

"Nevertheless," said the Mahatma, laying a hand on King's shoulder, and reaching for me with his other hand, "she is no more to be trusted than the lull of the typhoon. Come with me."

And with an arm about each of us he started to lead the way out through the maze of corridors and halls.

He was right. She was not to be trusted. She had laughed at King, but the laugh hid desperation, and before we reached the door of the audience hall at least a score of women pounced on King and me to drag us away from the Mahatma and make us prisoners again. And at that the Mahatma showed a new phase of his extraordinary character.

I was well weary by that time of being mauled by women. Suddenly the Mahatma seized my arm, and gave tongue in a resounding, strange, metallic voice such as I never heard before. It brought the whole surging assembly to rigid attention. It was a note of command, alarm, announcement, challenge, and it carried in its sharp reverberations something of the solemnity of an opening salvo of big guns. You could have heard a pin drop.

"I go. These two come with me. Shall I wait and let the mob come in to fetch me forth?"

But Yasmini had had time now in which to recover her self-possession, and she was in no mood to be out-generaled by any man whom she had once tricked so badly as to win his secrets from him. Her ringing laugh was an answering challenge, as she stood with one hand holding an arm of the throne in the attitude of royal arrogance.

"Good! Let the mob come! I, too, can manage mobs!"

Her voice was as arresting as his, although hers lacked the clamorous quality. There was no doubting her bravery, nor her conviction that she could deal with any horde that might come surging through the gates. But she was not the only woman in the room by more than ninety-nine and certainly ninety-nine of them were not her servants, but invited guests whom she had coaxed from their purdah strongholds partly by the lure of curiosity and partly by skilful playing on their new-born aspirations.

Doubtless her own women knew her resourcefulness and they might have lined up behind her to resist the mob. But not those others! They knew too well what the resulting reaction would be, if they should ever be defiled by such surging "untouchables" as clamored at the gate for a sight of their beloved Mahatma. To be as much as seen by those casteless folk within doors was such an outrage as never would be forgiven by husbands all too glad of an excuse for clamping tighter yet the bars of tyranny.

There was a perfect scream of fear and indignation. It was like the clamor of a thousand angry parrots, although there was worse in it than the hideous anger of any birds. Humanity afraid outscandals, outshames anything.

Yasmini, who would no more have feared the same number of men than if they had been trained animals, knew well enough that she had to deal now with something as ruthless as herself, with all her determination but without her understanding. It was an education to see her face change, as she stood and eyed those women, first accepting the challenge, because of her own indomitable spirit, then realizing that they could not be browbeaten into bravery, as men often can be, but that they must be yielded to if they were not to stampede from under her hand. She stood there reading them as a two-gun man might read the posse that had summoned him to surrender; and she deliberately chose surrender, with all the future chances that entailed, rather than the certain, absolute defeat that was the alternative. But she carried a high hand even while surrendering.

"You are afraid, all you women?" she exclaimed with one of her golden laughs. "Well—who shall blame you? This is too much to ask of you so soon. We will let the Mahatma go and take his friends with him. You may go!" she said, nodding regally to us three.

But that was not enough for some of them. The she-bear with her cubs in Springtime is a mild creature compared to a woman whose ancient prejudices have been interfered with, and a typhoon is more reasonable. Half-a-dozen of them screamed that two of us were white men who had trespassed within the purdah, and that we should be killed.

"Come!" urged the Mahatma, tugging at King and me. We went out of that hall at a dead run with screams of "Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!" shrilling behind us. And it may be that Yasmini conceded that point too, or perhaps she was unable to prevent, for we heard swift footsteps following, and I threw off that fifteen thousand dollar toga in order to be able to run more swiftly.

The Mahatma seemed to know that palace as a rat knows the runs among the tree-roots, and he took us down dark passages and stairs into the open with a speed that, if it did not baffle pursuit, at any rate made it easier for pursuers to pretend to lose us. Yasmini was no fool. She probably called the pursuit off.

We emerged into the same courtyard, where the marble stairs descended to the pool containing one great alligator. And we hurried from court to court to the same cage where the panther pressed himself against the bars, simultaneously showing fangs at King and me, and begging to have his ears rubbed. The Mahatma opened the cage-door, again using no key that I could detect, although it was a padlock that he unfastened and shoved the brute to one side, holding him by the scruff of the neck while King and I made swift tracks for the door at the back of the cage.

But this time we did not go through the tunnel full of rats and cobras. There was another passage on the same level with the courtyard that led from dark chamber to chamber until we emerged at last through an opening in the wall behind the huge image of a god into the gloom of the Tirthankers' temple—not that part of it that we had visited before, but another section fronting on the street.

And we could hear the crowd now very distinctly, egging one another on to commit the unforgivable offense and storm a woman's gates. They were shouting for the Gray Mahatma in chorus; it had grown into a chant already, and when a crowd once turns its collective yearnings into a single chant, it is only a matter of minutes before the gates go down, and blood flows, and all those outrages occur that none can account for afterward.

As long as men do their own thinking, decency and self-restraint are uppermost, but once let what the leaders call a slogan usher in the crowd-psychology, and let the slogan turn into a chant, and the Gardarene swine become patterns of conduct that the wisest crowd in the world could improve itself by imitating.

"Think! Think for yourselves!" said the Gray Mahatma, as if he recognized the thoughts that were occurring to King and me.

Then, making a sign to us to stay where we were, he left us and strode out on to the temple porch, looking down on the street that was choked to the bursting point with men who sweated and slobbered as they swayed in time to the chant of "Mahatma! O Mahatma! Come to us, Mahatma!"

King and I could see them through the jambs of the double-folding temple door.

The Mahatma stood looking down at them for about a minute before they recognized him. One by one, then by sixes, then by dozens they grew aware of him; and as that happened they grew silent, until the whole street was more still than a forest. They held their breath, and let it out in sibilant whispers like the voice of a little wind moving among leaves; and he did not speak until they were almost aburst with expectation.

"Go home!" he said then sternly. "Am I your property that ye break gates to get me? Go home!"

And they obeyed him, in sixes, in dozens, and at last in one great stream.

CHAPTER XII THE CAVE OF BONES

The Gray Mahatma stood watching the crowd until the last sweating nondescript had obediently disappeared, and then returned into the temple to dismiss King and me.

"Come with us," King urged him; but he shook his head, looking more lionlike than ever, for in his yellow eyes now there was a blaze as of conquest.

He carried his head like a man who has looked fear in the face and laughed at it.

"I have my assignation to keep," he said quietly.

"You mean with death?" King asked him, and he nodded.

"Don't be too sure!"

King's retort was confident, and his smile was like the surgeon's who proposes to reassure his patient in advance of the operation. But the Mahatma's mind was set on the end appointed for him, and there was neither grief nor discontent in his voice as he answered.

"There is no such thing as being too sure."

"I shall use the telegraph, of course," King assured him. "If necessary to save your life I shall have you arrested."

The Mahatma smiled.

"Have you money?" he asked pleasantly.

"I shan't need money. I can send an official telegram."

"I meant for your own needs," said the Mahatma.

"I think I know where to borrow a few rupees," King answered. "They'll trust me for the railway tickets."

"Pardon me, my friend. It was my fault that your bag and clothes got separated from you. You had money in the bag. That shall be adjusted. Never mind how much money. Let us see how much is here."

That seemed a strange way of adjusting accounts, but there was logic in it nevertheless. There would be no use in offering us more than was available, and as for himself, he