The Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK ®. Achmed Abdullah

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СКАЧАТЬ heat of March and April—and the birds, true weather prophets, the parrots and the minas, the tiny, blue-winged doves and the pert, ubiquitous crows, were opening their beaks with a painful effort and gasping for air—another week, and they would be off for the cool deodars of the higher hills.

      In the distance a dark mass was looming up: Oneypore—and the horses were about to give in. Their heads were bowed on their heaving, lathering chests, and they breathed with a deep, rattling noise.

      Thorneycroft dismounted and stretched his cramped legs.

      “Ride down there,” he said to the babu, pointing at a narrow valley to the west, black with trees and gnarled shrub, that cleft the land. “Wait until you hear from me. I fancy you’ll find some brother babu in the valley fattening his pouch and increasing his bank-account at the expense, of the Rajput villagers. He will give you food and drink and a roof over your head. Tell him anything you wish as long as you don’t tell him the truth.”

      “Of course I shall not tell him the truth,” replied the babu, slightly hurt. “Am I a fool or—”

      “An Englishman?” Thorneycroft completed the sentence. “Never mind. I am English. But I learned the art of deceit in Kashmere, the home of lies, and Youssef Ali, too, gave me some invaluable lessons.”

      And while the babu rode off to the valley, leading the other horse, Thorneycroft set off at a good clip toward Oneypore, which was becoming more distinct every minute as the morning mists rolled up and away like torn gauze veils. It was seven o’clock when he reached the western gate, an ancient marble structure, incrusted with symbolistic figures and archaic terra-cotta medallions, and topped by a lacy, fretted lotus-bud molding.

      Beyond, the city stretched like a flower of stone petals.

      Oneypore!

      The sacred city of Hindustan! The holy soil where the living descendants of the gods had ruled for over five thousand years—and one of them dead, on unclean, foreign soil—buried in unclean, foreign soil!

      An outcast! He, the descendant of Rama, an outcast!

      Oneypore! And it was a fascinating town, with crooked streets and low, white houses, cool gardens ablaze with mangoes and mellingtonia and flowering peepul-trees and, in the distance, a gigantic palace, built out of a granite hillside, and descending into the dip of the valley with an avalanche of bold masonry.

      Toward it, without hesitation, Thorneycroft set his face.

      He had to cross the Oneypore River, only second in holiness to the palace: the river which, for centuries, had been the last resting-place of thousands of Afghans and Rajputs massacred in the narrow streets of the city or slain in fierce combats outside its brown, bastioned walls. Sorrowing widows, in accordance with the marriage vows of their caste, had sought the solace of oblivion beneath its placid surface. Faithless wives and dancing girls had been hurled into the waters from the convenient battlements and windows of the palace.

      The river’s sinister reputation, in spite of its holiness, was such that though the natives bathed in its limpid depth they never, knowingly, allowed a drop of it to pass their lips. River of grim tragedies—and its hour of grim glory came when a Maharaja of Oneypore died, and when his corpse, attired in its most magnificent costume, the arms encircled by jeweled bracelets, shimmering necklaces of pearls and moonstones and diamonds descending to the waist, and a huge, carved emerald falling like a drop of green fire from the twisted, yellow Rajput turban, was carried out of the palace, through the streets of the town, sitting bolt upright on a chair of state, and back to the banks of the Oneypore River, where the body was burnt and its ashes thrown into the waters—while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while white-robed priests chanted longwinded litanies, while the conches brayed from the temples, and while the smoke from many ceremonial fires ascended to the sky in thick, wispy streams and hung in a ruddy, bloodshot cloud above the glare of the funeral pyre that lit up the palace and told to all the world that another one of the divine race of Oneypore had gone to join Brahm, his kinsman.

      Brahm, his kinsman!

      And Martab Singh had mingled the bones of his dead body with those of the mlechhas, the foreigners, the barbarians, the Christians—on foreign, Christian soil!

      * * * *

      Something like a shudder of apprehension passed over Thorneycroft, but he kept sturdily on his way, returning the salutations with which the hook-nosed, saber-rattling, swaggering Rajputs greeted him because of his Brahman garb. He went up a steep ascent that led to the chowk, the outer courtyard of the palace, and the soldiers salaamed and stepped aside:

      “Enter, O holy one!”

      Like a man sure of his way, he passed through a low gate, through another courtyard crammed with human life, and into still another, which was lifeless except for the whir and coo of hundreds of blue-winged pigeons and for the figure of a very old priest, squatting on a goat’s-skin rug and deep in the perusal of a massive Sanskrit tome.

      Chapter V

      The old priest looked up when Thorneycroft approached, and the latter gave an involuntary start, though rapidly suppressed.

      In former years, pursuing his vague, mysterious diplomatic career in different parts of that immense block of real estate called the British Empire, but a good half of the time in India, he had heard about this priest, the Swami Pel Krishna Srina. He knew that the man was the prime minister, that before him his father held the same position, before his father his grandfather, and thus back for many generations. For the Brahmans of the house of Pel Srina were cousins in blood and caste to the reigning house of Oneypore, and like them descendants of the gods.

      Neither the maharaja nor his prime minister had ever taken much interest in the muddy, coiling politics of India. It was indifferent to them what particular foreign barbarian—English or Afghan or Mogul or Persian—was overlord of the great peninsula. They seemed satisfied with ruling the little rocky, barren principality, with the faded glory of the dead centuries, and with the decidedly theological and just as decidedly unworldly fact that the Oneypores were considered the living representatives of the gods by the vast majority of Hindus.

      Thus Thorneycroft had never taken the trouble of meeting Swami Pel Srina, and now, seeing him for the first time, he was startled out of his customary English calm.

      Nor was it a psychic impression. Here, in this sheltered courtyard—and for the first time since that day when the Maharaja of Oneypore had made his appearance in the salon of the Duchess of Shropshire—he was unaware, quite unaware of the silent, gigantic whirring of wings.

      What made him suck in his breath was the face of the swami.

      “I wish I could picture it to you as I saw it,” he said afterward. “It would take the hand of some mad cubist sculptor to clout the meaning of it. The features? No, no. Nothing extraordinary about them. Just those of an elderly, dignified, rather conceited Brahman. But the expression of the thin, compressed lips, the great staring, gray eyes! Gad! I am an Englishman, a Christian—and a public school product. Thus I’m a jolly good Episcopalian, take me all round. But when I saw those eyes—oh—the whole cursed thing seemed suddenly rational, possible—inevitable even! Right then—Christian, Englishman, and public school product—I believed the absurd claim of the rajas and prime ministers of Oneypore that they were the descendants of Rama and Vishnu. It was all in those eyes that were staring at me. They looked—oh—unearthly—that’s the word!”

      Perhaps the whole sensation, the whole flash of superstitious emotions lasted СКАЧАТЬ