“You appear to be master of the situation, sahib,” he said in English.
“Quite so. Give me your weapon.”
The man glanced at Wu Tu. She watched Blair.
“Shoot him,” she suggested.
Two other men slunk away into the gloom where the wall projected and cast
deep shadow. Suddenly they took to their heels. They scampered like scared
rats through the temple and out through the gap in the broken wall into the
ash-floored cavern where the bones of burned women lay. A third man went and
stood near Wu Tu. He of the blackjack hesitated.
“You should know me,” he said. “I am well known to the police. I am from
Dur-i-Duran Singh of Naga Kulu. I am Grish Singh. I am Dur-i-Duran sahib’s
agent. I know all about this, I assure you. I will tell everything. But you
should shoot her.”
Blair kept his eyes on the man’s face. He expected treachery and
cobra-suddenness. He was ready for it. But if he could, he proposed to save
that one bullet. He could deal with this beast with his fist if
necessary.
“Did you hear me? Hand over your weapon.”
Instead of obeying, the man took a step backward. Blair still hesitated to
use that one remaining bullet. Grish Singh, as he called himself, began
talking at top speed:
“Don’t be unwise—listen to me—let me show
you—Dur-i-Duran Singh of Naga Kulu is my master—he
will—”
Suddenly he, too, tried to bolt for it, but he did not get far. As he
turned he screamed and threw up both hands. With his back toward Blair he
beat at someone’s brains. In that weird, mixed light it was difficult to tell
what happened. That other man. who had slunk away into the gloom, had
evidently taken Zaman Ali’s long knife. Perhaps Wu Tu gave it to him. He had
crept up from behind and used it. Grish Singh tell writhing, with blood
blubbering and foaming from his mouth. The other, with blackjacked brains on
his face, lay still beneath him. It was all over in a moment. Grish Singh’s
life sobbed out of him as he wrenched at the knife that was into him almost
hilt-deep.
Wu Tu’s voice came out of shadow. “So then, are they both dead? That means
Dur-i-Duran Singh is out of it as well as Zaman Ali. Taron Ling next! Where
is he?”
The blackjack, blood-hideous, had fallen between Blair’s feet and the
tunnel wall. He kicked it into a deep crack in the floor. Then he set his
foot on Grish Singh’s body and pulled out the long knife; he sent that after
the blackjack, out of further harm’s way. Wu Tu watched him; he could hardly
see more than her eyes and a faint film of light on one bare shoulder. The
Chinese girl was invisible.
“Come here and drop your dagger down that hole,” he commanded.
Wu Tu laughed tartly. “Oh, yes! For the use, I suppose, of the other two
who ran away! They will come back. They won’t care to meet Taron Ling in the
tunnel! They will need water, too. Don’t be foolish. You have only one
bullet. There was a quarrel and Zaman Ali used the others. You can’t shoot
more than one of us. And if you shoot me, then what?”
“Come out of that shadow,” he answered. She obeyed, but the Chinese girl
remained invisible. Standing again beside Zaman Ali’s body, Wu Tu showed no
fear, but excitement made her weirdly beautiful. She let one loose sari fall,
and she was naked enough then for her body to gleam like old ivory—a
carving done by a magician’s hand—motion and sensuous intelligence
revealed in pure line and balanced curve.
“I will speak to you, Blair.”
“Where is Henrietta Frensham?” he demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“Rot! You or Zaman Ali, or some of your party decoyed her to this place.
Zaman Ali admitted it to me. Where is she?”
“Perhaps Zaman Ali hid her. Perhaps,” she added, speaking slowly, “she
needs water! You need more than water. You need me, if you will break the
influence of Taron Ling! Where is he?”
She stepped toward him. The Chinese girl came out of a shadow and calmly
gathered up the fallen sari. Blair made a mental note of the probability that
the hidden dagger had changed owners. Standing within six feet of him, like a
slave for sale, Wu Tu delivered an ultimatum:
“Blair, be as honest as I am! You don’t want me, but you need me. I don’t
want you, but I need you! By the naked truth, I swear to be your friend. But
you must swear by your honor to be my friend! You are a savage. Swear then by
your honor and I will believe you! I will give you Henrietta Frensham—I
will give her to you. She shall be yours. I am not a savage. I am cultured,
so to me there is no such foolishness as honor. But I need you, and you need
me, and that is naked truth, so r swear by that.”
“Where’s Henrietta Frensham?” he repeated. She shrugged her shoulders,
smiled, narrowing her eyes. She spoke slowly. “Taron Ling will be the one of
whom to ask that, if you and I don’t agree! He shall have her. Only you and I
together can prevent that. And on my terms! As for you, you will die. As for
me—I gamble. What I seek is worth the gamble.” She came closer to
him.
“Keep your distance!”
She obeyed. “Blair, see what I will show you. After that, answer.”
“I’ll look. What is it?”
“Let me pass you.”
He stepped back to the wall. The Chinese girl came carrying the sari and
the two women walked past him toward the fierce light at the end of the
tunnel, speaking Chinese to each other. The Chinese girl stooped and picked
up the hilt of her broken dagger that Blair had crushed underfoot.
“Drop that!” he commanded. She looked at him over her shoulder as if he
were too contemptible to deserve an answer. He was not sure she was not
right. He funked the prospect of a fight with two women. He wondered whether
funk, emotion, lack of sleep and thirst were combining to make him
incompetent. He had found out practically nothing. He was more mystified now
than ever.
He decided to follow them, chiefly because he was thirsty. He needed a
drink like the devil. The few drops of water he had had were only a little
better than nothing; they had made him crave more. There was maddening
irritation in the dust that every footstep stirred. Wu Tu probably needed
drink, too, and almost certainly knew where to get it. He was sweating and
grimy; he kept imagining pools of cool water in which to plunge, drink, bathe
himself. He could not imagine Wu Tu remaining personally dirty a moment
longer than she could help. She was probably heading for water now—lots
of it. He quickened his pace. But what he saw, a moment later, almost drove
the thought of water from his mind.
The tunnel opened on a ledge that passed completely around the sheer wall
of an almost oval chasm. Its sides glittered with quartz and micah. It was
shaped like a womb—a retort. It narrowed upward to a curving neck,
through which daylight poured like molten, white-hot metal; the light turned
golden as it picked up color from the quartz on the flanks of the place.
The ledge on which he found himself was about a hundred feet above ‘a
floor that seemed covered with stuff like wax from a guttered, candle, but
the stuff glittered so that he could hardly see it. In the midst of that
floor was a rock shaped roughly like an upturned bowl. Down toward that, from
the curving roof, hung stalactites like icicles. Those were creamy, not
dazzling white. Eyes rested on them with relief. The longest of them—it
seemed to be forty or fifty feet long—pointed directly downward at an
object that looked like crystal or flaming opal. It flashed so that eyesight
refused to define it.
From the mouth of the tunnel where he stood staring, to the smooth wall on
the far side, the pit was not less than three hundred feet across. Its size
dwarfed that glittering thing in the midst, but the thing monopolized
attention. Eyes, that could not see it beneath puckered eyelids, hardly could
be forced to look away from it. It was not clear crystal; at moments it
looked like frosted glass or a colossal uncut diamond. A bird flew overhead
and was reflected in it. Gradually something else appeared, apparently inside
the thing—something that took human shape. It looked as if a human body
was encased in a cone of glass or ice. But it was too big to be a human body.
When Blair moved it vanished.
There were a few birds up near the neck where the sunlight streamed in.
There was such silence that their wing-beats were audible. It was a kind of
cathedral silence, punctuated by another delicious sound, of dripping water.
But there was no water anywhere to be seen. The stalactites were bone-dry;
the water that oozed from the rock to create them had dried up centuries
ago.
Wu Tu was sitting on the brink of the ledge, to the right, in comparative
shadow. She was staring at that central object. The Chinese girl, beside her,
stood holding Wu Tu’s sari over one arm and doing something to the broken
dagger-handle. It was easy to keep them in full view. There appeared to be no
way out except up that unclimbable curve toward daylight or else back through
the tunnel. Blair turned left, away from them, in full sunlight, shading his
eyes under his left hand, stopping at every third or fourth step to stare at
that glittering central cone. But it was no use. That was. all he could see;
it was cone-shaped, and even that discovery made his eyes ache. It seemed to
gather all the rays of light into itself and then reflect them again outward.
It would have been easier to stare at a sunlit mirror. There were momentary
glimpses of the thing within; then eyes swam, tortured by the brilliance.
He doubted the glimpses—thought they were imaginary, or the
reflections of some other object. But there was no other object that could
have caused them. He had to cover his eyes at last;, he was so blinded by the
glare that he could hardly see Wu Tu any longer. But he just could see her,
so he walked back around the ledge toward her, keeping close to the wall for
fear his eyes might play tricks; and when he reached the tunnel he stared
straight into it, resting his eyes On the weird gloom. Something moved
against the dim light at the far end. Wu Tu was right: the two men who had
fled toward the other tunnel had returned. They were making no noise. He
could not detect a sound, although he listened for nearly a minute.
When he approached Wu Tu the Chinese girl walked away and stood with her
back to the wall of the chasm. He passed between them and stood beyond them,
where he could watch them both and keep an eye, too, on the mouth of the
tunnel, where two men might appear at any moment.
“Where are we?” he demanded, pointing upward with the revolver. “Where’s
that opening?”
Wu Tu shrugged her shoulders. “Gaglajung. There is a sheer cliff on this
side of the summit; and there is a great crack in a fold of the cliff, but it
can’t be seen from above or below.”
“Where’s the way out?”
“The way you came in.”
“There’s another. Where is it?”
“Taron Ling knows.”
“You don’t?”
“No, and I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Win or lose all. Look.”
He was watching the Chinese girl. She had filled one dagger with the
little liquid that remained in the broken handle she had picked up. She
screwed the dagger-handle tight and tossed the broken one over the ledge. His
eyes followed it. It was only then that he saw clearly what he had hurt his
eyes trying to see from other angles. The ledge where Wu Tu sat was broken.
Carved stone-work, once erected there, had fallen and lay in ruins a hundred
feet below. Directly opposite, within that cone-shaped thing that shone
beneath the pointing stalactite, there stood—
“The ancient secret of the Caves of Gaglajung!” said Wu Tu. “Do you
understand it?”
The thing was staggering. It was not a statue: that was evident at the
first glance. It had no quality of sculpture, but an awful weirdness. Like Wu
Tu in her own surroundings, it stirred in Blair an instantaneous and exciting
impulse. He craved to interpret that thing unevasively, then, that moment,
and to set down his opinion savagely in line and color. It challenged him. He
was no longer, at that moment, a policeman, but an artist.
Thirst became unimportant. Danger dismissed itself from consciousness.
There remained one emotion—awe; one impulse, to create. Within that
conical, smooth, crystalline formation stood a woman. She could be seen
perfectly from where Wu Tu was seated. and from where Blair stood, exactly
behind her. If he moved six feet to the right or left he could see nothing
but dazzling stabs of light amid an opalescent cone.
The woman was not less than nine feet tall. She stood erect in an attitude
of mystic contemplation. She had been turned to stone within the stalagmitic
ooze that once dripped from the rocks of the vaulted roof. But the appearance
of life still remained, with all its color. She had light brown hair and she
was broad shouldered, with large feet and hands, and was muscled like an
athlete. Her legs looked capable of climbing mountains. Her skin was more
butter- than ivory-color. It was definitely not a statue. That woman had once
lived, moved, had her being.
She appeared even to breathe as the sun passed higher than the slot-like
opening in the cavern roof and the changing light touched flaws and wave-like
irregularities on the surface of the stuff that enclosed her. At one instant
it resembled mother-of-pearl—then opal—then clear glass. Gold and
silver flame with red sparks appeared to leap and die away within, until the
bright hair stole all the sunlight for a moment and the entire cone became
pale sapphire that changed to amethyst and then flashed white again.
“Strength!” said Wu Tu with her head between her hands. Her voice was
startling. It awoke hollow echoes. “Do you see how strong she was? Such as
she could crack rocks—by thinking!”
Blair looked down at her. That might be a new line on Wu Tu. Was that her
secret? Glutted with the loot of criminal intrigue and influence, was she
seeking a more occult strength and new fields for its use? Typically
oriental, that. Hundreds of thousands of orientals have abandoned material
means in the quest for spiritual causes. But it calls for a different
character than Wu Tu possessed— a different integrity. She looked
bizarre, dwarfed, pretty and so feeble in comparison to the gigantic grandeur
at which she stared, that Blair almost laughed aloud.