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

had changed lead into gold before our eyes. The pit in the center of the cavern in which the fire-walkers had performed, still held ashes, but the ashes were cold and had either been slaked with water, or else water had been admitted into the pit from below. At any rate, the pit was flooded, and nobody wanted the job of wading into it to look for apparatus. So there may have been paraphernalia hidden under those ashes for aught that I know. It was a perfectly ridiculous investigation; its findings were not worth a moment's attention of any genuine scientist. Subsequently, newspaper editors wrote glibly of the gullibility of the human mind, with King's name and mine in full-sized letters in the middle of the article.

About the only circumstance that the investigating committee could not make jokes about was the cleanliness of all the passages and chambers. There was no dust, no dirt anywhere. You could have eaten off the floor, and there was no way of explaining how the dust of ages had not accumulated, unless those caverns had been occupied and thoroughly cleaned within a short space of time.

The air down there was getting foul already. There was no trace of the ventilation that had been so obvious when King and I were there before. Nevertheless, no trace could be found of any ventilating shaft; and that was another puzzle—how to account for the cleanliness and lack of air combined, added to the fact that such air as there was was still too fresh to be centuries old.

One fat fool on the committee wiped the sweat from the back of his neck in the lantern light and proposed at last that the committee should find that King and I had been the victims of delusion—perhaps of hypnotism. I asked him point blank what he knew about hypnotism. He tried to side-step the question, but I pinned him down to it, and he had to confess that he knew nothing about it whatever; whereat I asked each member of the committee whether or not he could diagnose hypnotism, and they all had to plead ignorance. So nobody seconded that motion.

King had lapsed into a sort of speechless rage. He had long been used to having his bare word accepted on any point whatever, having labored all his military years to just that end, craving that integrity of vision and perception that is so vastly more than honesty alone, that the blatant unbelief of these opinionative asses overwhelmed him for the moment.

There was not one man on the committee who had ever done anything more dangerous than shooting snipe, nor one who had seen anything more inexplicable than spots before his eyes after too much dinner. Yet they mocked King and me, in a sort of way that monkeys in the tree-tops mock a tiger.

Their remarks were on a par with those the cave-man must have used when some one came from over the sky-line and told them that fire could be made by rubbing bits of wood together. They recalled to us what the Gray Mahatma had said about Galileo trying to make the Pope believe that the earth moved around the sun. The Pope threatened to burn Galileo for heresy; they only offered to pillory us with public ridicule; so the world has gone forward a little bit.

"Let's go," said somebody at last. "I've had enough of this. We're trespassing, as well as heaping indignity on estimable Hindus."

"Go!" retorted King. "I wish you would! Leave Ramsden and me alone in here. There's a cavern we haven't seen yet. You've formed your opinions. Go and publish them; they'll interest your friends."

He produced a flashlight of his own and led the way along the passage, I following. The committee hesitated, and then one by one came after us, more anxious, I think, to complete the fiasco than to unearth facts.

But the door that King tried to open would not yield. It was the only door in all those caverns that had refused to swing open at the first touch, and this one was fastened so rigidly that it might have been one with the frame for all the movement our blows on it produced. Our guide swore he did not know the secret of it, and our letter of authority included no permission to break down doors or destroy property in any way at all.

It looked as though we were blocked, and the committee were all for the air and leaving that door unopened. King urged them to go and leave it—told them flatly that neither they nor the world would be any wiser for anything whatever that they might do—was as beastly rude, in fact, as he knew how to be; with the result that they set their minds on seeing it through, for fear lest we should find something after all that would serve for an argument against their criticism.

Neither King nor I were worried by the letter of the committee's orders, and I went to look for a rock to break the door down with. They objected, of course, and so did the priest, but I told them they might blame the violence on me, and furthermore suggested that if they supposed they were able to prevent me they might try. Whereat the priest did discover a way of opening the door, and that was the only action in the least resembling the occult that any of us saw that day.

There were so many shadows, and they so deep, that a knob or trigger of some kind might easily have been hidden in the darkness beyond our view; but the strange part was that there was no bolt to the door, nor any slot into which a bolt could slide. I believe the door was held shut by the pressure of the surrounding rock, and that the priest knew some way of releasing it.

We entered a bare cavern which was apparently an exact cube of about forty feet. It was the only cavern in all that system of caverns whose walls, corners, roof and floor were all exactly smooth. It contained no furniture of any kind.

But exactly in the middle of the floor, with hands and feet pointing to the four corners of the cavern, was a grown man's skeleton, complete to the last tooth. King had brought a compass with him, and if that was reasonably accurate then the arms and legs of the skeleton were exactly oriented, north, south, east and west; there was an apparent inaccuracy of a little less than five degrees, which was no doubt attributable to the pocket instrument.

One of the committee members tried to pick a bone up, and it fell to pieces in his fingers. Another man touched a rib, and that broke brittlely. I picked up the broken piece of rib and held it in the rays of King's flashlight.

"You remember?" said King in an undertone to me. "You recall the Gray Mahatma's words? 'There will be nothing left for the alligators!' There's neither fat nor moisture in that bone, it's like chalk. See?"

He squeezed it in his fingers and it crumbled.

"Huh! This fellow has been dead for centuries," said somebody. "He can't have been a Hindu, or they'd have burned him. No use wondering who he was; there's nothing to identify him with—no hair, no clothing—nothing but dead bone."

"Nothing! Nothing whatever!" said the priest with a dry laugh, and began kicking the bones here and there all over the cavern. They crumbled as his foot struck them, and turned to dust as he trod on them—all except the teeth. As he kicked the skull across the floor the teeth scattered, but King and I picked up a few of them, and I have mine yet—two molars and two incisors belonging to a man, who to my mind was as much an honest martyr as any in Fox's book.

"Well, Mr. King," asked one of the committee in his choicest note of sarcasm, "have you any more marvels to exhibit, or shall we adjourn?"

"Adjourn by all means," King advised him.

"We know it all, eh?"

"Truly, you know it all," King answered without a smile.

Then speaking sidewise in an undertone to me:

"And you and I know nothing. That's a better place to start from, Ramsden. I don't know how you feel, but I'm going to track their science down until I'm dead or master of it. The very highest knowledge we've attained is ignorance compared to what these fellows showed us. I'm going to discover their secret or break my neck!"