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

Then at last he took notice of King and me again. He stood aside, and smiled, and motioned to us with his hand to enter the cage ahead of him. I have been several sorts of rash idiot in my time, and I daresay that King has too, for most of us have been young once; but I have also hunted panthers, and so has King, and to walk unarmed or even with weapons—into a black panther's cage is something that calls, I should say, for inexperience. The more you know about panthers the less likely you are to do it. It was almost pitch-dark; you could see the brute's yellow eyes gleaming, but no other part of him now, because he matched the shadows perfectly; but, being a cat, he could see us, and the odds against a man who should walk into that cage were, as a rough guess, ten trillion to one.

"Fear is the presence of death, and death is delusion. Follow me then," said the Mahatma.

He walked straight in, keeping the lighted lantern on the side of him farthest from the panther, whose claws I could hear scratching on the stone flags.

"Keep that light toward him for God's sake!" I urged, having myself had to use a lantern more than a score of times for protection at night against the big cats.

"Nay, it troubles his eyes. For God's sake I will hide it from him," the Mahatma answered. "We must not wait here."

"Come on," said King, and strode in through the open door. So I went in too, because I did not care to let King see me hesitate. Curiosity had vanished. I was simply in a blue funk, and rather angry as well at the absurdity of what we were doing.

The Gray Mahatma turned and shut the gate behind me, taking no notice at all of the black brute that crouched in the other corner, grumbling and moaning rather than growling.

Have you ever seen a panther spit and spring when a keeper shoved it out of the way with the cleaning rake? There is no beast in the world with whom it is more dangerous to play tricks. Yet in that dark corner, with the lantern held purposely so that it should not dazzle the panther's eyes, the Gray Mahatma stirred the beast with his toe and drove him away as carelessly and incautiously as you might shove your favorite dog aside! The panther crowded itself against the side of the cage and slunk away behind us—to the front of the cage that is to say, close by the padlocked gate—where he crouched again and moaned.

The dark, rear end of the cage was all masonry and formed part of the building behind it. In the right-hand corner, almost invisible from outside, was a narrow door of thick teak that opened very readily when the Mahatma fumbled with it although I saw no lock, hasp or keyhole on the side toward us. We followed him through into a stone vault.

"And now there is need to be careful," he said, his voice booming and echoing along unseen corridors. "For though those here, who can harm you if they will, are without evil intention, nevertheless injury begets desire to injure. And do either of you know how to make acceptable explanations to a she-cobra whose young have been trodden on? Therefore walk with care, observing the lantern light and remembering that as long as you injure none, none will injure you."

At that he turned on his heel abruptly and walked forward, swinging the lantern so that its light swept to and fro. We were walking through the heart of masonry whose blocks were nearly black with age; there was a smell of ancient sepulchers, and in places the walls were damp enough to be green and slippery. Presently we came to the top of a flight of stone steps, each step being made of one enormous block and worn smooth by the sandalled traffic of centuries. It grew damper as we descended, and those great blocks were tricky things for a man in boots to walk on; yet the Gray Mahatma, swinging his lantern several steps below us, kept calling back:

"Have a care! Have a care! He who falls can do as much injury as he who jumps! Shall the injured inquire into reasons?"

We descended forty or fifty steps and I, walking last, had just reached the bottom, when something dashed between my feet, and another something flicked like a whip-lash after it. As the Mahatma swung the lantern I just caught sight of an enormous rat closely pursued by a six-foot snake, and after that we might as well have been in hell for all the difference it would have made to me.

I don't know how long that tunnel was, but I do know I am not going back there to measure it. It was nearly as big as the New York Subway, only built of huge stone blocks instead of concrete. It seemed to be an inferno, in which cobras hunted rats perpetually; but we saw one swarm of fiery-eyed rats eating a dead snake.

There were baby cobras by the hundred—savage, six-inch things, and even smaller, that knew as much of evil, and could slay as surely, as the full-grown mother-snake that raised her hood and hissed as we passed.

The snakes seemed afraid of the Mahatma, and yet not afraid of him—much more careful to keep out from under his feet than ours, yet taking no other apparent notice of him, whereas hundreds of them raised their hoods and hissed at us. And though nothing touched him, at least fifty times rats and snakes raced over King's feet and mine, or slipped between our legs.

"This fellow has some use for us," King said over his shoulder. "He'll neither be killed himself, nor let us be if he can help it. This is no new trick. Lots of 'em can manage snakes."

The Gray Mahatma, twenty yards ahead, heard every word of that. He stopped and let us come quite close up to him.

"Have you seen this?" he asked.

There was a cobra swinging its head about two and a half feet off the ground within a yard of him. He passed the lantern to me, and holding out both hands coaxed the venomous thing to come to him as you or I might coax a stray dog. It obeyed. It laid its head on his hands, lowered its hood, and climbed until, within six inches of his face, its head rested on his left shoulder.

"Would you like to try that?" he asked. "You can do it if you wish."

We did not wish, and while we stood there the infernal reptiles were swarming all around us, rising knee-high and swaying, with their forked tongues flashing in and out, but showing no inclination to use their fangs, although many of them raised their hoods. At that moment there were certainly fifty of the filthy things close enough to strike; and the bite of any one of them would have meant certain death within fifteen minutes.

However, they did not bite. The Gray Mahatma set down very gently the snake that had done his bidding, and then shooed the rest away; they backed off like a flock of foolish geese, hissing and swaying pretty much as geese do.

"Come!" he boomed. "Cobras are foolish people, and folly is infectious. Come away!"

CHAPTER IV THE POOL OF TERRORS

We came soon to another flight of steps made of gigantic blocks of stone older than history, and groping our way up those we followed the Gray Mahatma to a gallery at the top, on the other side of which was a sheer drop and the smell of stagnant water. I could hear something sluggish that moved in the water, and somewhere in the distance was a turning around which light found its way so dimly that it hardly looked like light at all, but more like filmy mist. A heavy monster splashed somewhere beneath us and the Mahatma raised the lantern to peer into our faces.

"Those are muggers (alligators). You may see them now if you would rather. The same as with the snakes, the rule is you must do them no harm."

He looked at us keenly, as if making sure that we really were not enjoying ourselves, and then leaned his weight against an iron door in a corner. It swung open, and we followed him through into a pitch-dark chamber of some kind. But the door we came in by had hardly slammed behind us when a bright light broke through a square hole in the ceiling and displayed a flight of rock-hewn steps. Some one overhead had removed a stone plug from the hole.

The Mahatma motioned to King to go first, but as King refused he led the way again, going through the square hole overhead as handily as any seaman swinging himself into the cross-trees. King followed him and I stood on the top step with head and shoulders through the opening surveying the prospect before scrambling up after him.

I was looking between King's legs. The light came from three large wood-fires placed over at the left end of a rectangular chamber hewn out of solid rock. The chamber was at least a hundred feet long and thirty wide; its roof was lost in smoke, but seemed to be irregular, as if the walls of a natural cavern had been shaped by masons who left the high roof as they found it.

A very nearly naked man with a long beard, hair over his shoulders, and the general air of being some one in authority, was walking about with nothing in his hand except a seven-jointed bamboo cane. He was a very old man, but of magnificent physique and ribbed up like a race-horse in training. His principal business seemed to be the supervision of several absolutely naked individuals, who carried in wood through a dark gap in the wall and piled it on the three fires at the farther end with almost ludicrous precision.

And between the three fires, not spitted and not bound but absolutely motionless, there sat a human being, so dried out that not even that fierce heat could wring a drop of sweat from him, yet living, for you could see him breathe and the firelight shone on his living, yet unwinking eyes. Every draft of air that he drew into his lungs must have scorched him. Every single hair had disappeared from his body. And while we watched they came and fed him.

But he was only one of many, all undergoing torture in its most hideous and useless forms, and all as free as he was to deliver themselves if they saw fit. The least offensive was a man within six feet of me who sat on a conical stone no bigger than a cocoanut; that small stone was resting on top of a cone of rock about a yard high, in such fashion that it rocked at the slightest change of balance; the man's legs were crossed, however, exactly as if he were squatting on the floor—although they actually rested on nothing; and his arms had been crossed behind his back for so long, and held so steadily, that the fingernails of the right hand had grown through the left arm biceps, and vice versa. He, too, was fed with drops of water and about a dozen grains of rice—every second day, as the Mahatma told us afterward.

Space was at a premium in that gruesome madhouse. Close beside the fellow on the rocking stone there hung two ropes from rings in the roof. There were iron hooks on their lower ends, and these were passed through the back muscles of another naked man, who kept himself swinging by touching the floor with one toe. The muscles were so drawn by his weight that they formed loops several inches long and had turned to dry gristle; the strain had had some effect on one of his legs, for it was curled up under him and apparently useless, but the other, with which he toed the floor to swing himself, was apparently all right. His hands were folded over his breast, and his beard and hair hung like seaweed.

Near him again there was an arrangement like a medieval rack, only that instead of having a wheel or a lever the cords were drawn by heavy weights. A man lay on it with arms and legs stretched out toward its corners so tightly that his body did not touch the underlying strut; and he had been so long in that position that his hands and feet were dead from the pressure of the cords, and his limbs were stretched several inches beyond their normal length. In proof that