King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure, Talbot Mundy [ebook smartphone TXT] 📗

As it receded he observed that the lowest course stones was laid on a bronze foundation, that keyed in wide bronze grooves. There was oil enough in the grooves to have greased a ship's ways and there neither squeak nor tremor as the tons of masonry slid back.

At the end of perhaps three minutes that section of the wall had become the fourth side of a twenty-foot-wide island that stood fair in the middle of a tunnel, splitting it in two to right and left. Judging by the angle of the two divisions they became one again before going very far.

The mullah stood aside and motioned King to enter. But the one-eyed guide who had led them to the mosque thrust himself between Darya Khan and Ismail, pushed King aside and took the lead.

“Nay!” he said, “I am responsible to her.”

It was the first time he had spoken and he appeared to resent the waste of words.

The tunnel that led to the left was pierced in twenty places in the roof for rifle-fire; a score of men with enough ammunition could have held it forever against an army. But the right-hand way looked undefended. Nevertheless, the guide led to the left, and King followed him, filled with curiosity.

“Many have entered!” sang the lashless mullah in a sing-song chant. “More have sought to enter! Some who remained without were wisest! I count them! I keep count! Many went in! Not all came out again by this road!”

“Then there is another road?” King wondered, but he held his tongue and followed the guide.

It proved to be fifty yards through part natural, part hand-hewn, tunnel to the neck of the fork where the left- and right-hand passages became one again. He stopped at the fork and looked back, for none of his men was following.

He caught the sound of scuffling of clattering hoofs, and grunts and shouted oaths--and started to run back, since even a native hakim may protect his own, should he care to, even in the “Hills.”

For the sake of principle he chose the other passage, for Cocker says, “Look! Look! Look!” But the guide seized him by the arm from behind and swung him back again.

“Not that way!” he growled. But he offered no explanation.

In the “Hills” it is not good to ask “why” of strangers. It is good to be glad one was not knifed, and to be deferent until more suitable occasion. King started to run again, but this time along the same defended passage down which they had come. And now the guide made no objection but leaned on his long gun and waited.

The charger proved to be making the trouble--the horse that King had exchanged with the jezailchi in the Khyber. The terrified brute was refusing to enter the passage, and all the men, including Ismail and the mullah, were shoving, or else tugging at the reins.

At the moment King appeared the united strength of six men was beginning to prevail. The mullah let go the reins, and in that instant the horse saw King advance toward him out of the tunnel; so, after the manner of horses, he chose the other passage. King ran at full speed round the corner after him, remembering that the guide had admitted responsibility, and therefore that the chances were he would be rescued should he run into a trap.

Suddenly, ten yards in the lead down the dark tunnel the horse threw his weight back with a clatter of sparks and screamed as only a horse can. After that there was neither sight nor sound of him.

Creeping forward with both arms outstretched against the left-hand wall, he reached the spot where, the horse had been, and shuddered on the smooth dark edge of a hole that went the full width of the floor. There came whispering up out of it, and a dank wet smell, as if there were running water a mile away below. He could feel that a little air flowed downward into it. Twenty yards away on the far side the path resumed, but there was neither hand nor foothold on the smooth damp walls between. He went back to his men with a shiver between his shoulder-blades, and the mullah, standing in the gap of the mosque wall, blinked at him with lashless eyes.

“Many have entered,” he chanted maliciously. “Some went out by a different road!”

“Come!” Ismail growled at the other men, seizing the mule's bridle himself and leading to the left. “The ghosts will have a charger now for their captain to ride! Lead on, Hakim sahib!”

“Come!” called the one-eyed guide from the neck of the fork ahead. And as they all pressed forward after King the hairless mullah gave a signal and the great stone door slid slowly into place. It was like a tombstone. It was as if the world that mortals know were a thing of the forgotten past and the underworld lay ahead.

“Lead along, Charon!” King grinned. He needed some sort of pleasantry to steady his nerves. But even so he wondered what the nerves of India would be like if her millions knew of this place.