HARILEK

HARILEK
A Romance

BY
“GANPAT”

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1923

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TO
ARYENIS
SOMETIMES DELICIOUSLY
SAPIENTISSIMA
SOMETIMES ADORABLY
BABETTE

THE
STORY-TELLER’S INVITATION

I’ll tell you a tale of a far-off land,

Cliff-girt o’er the yellow desert sand,

And crowned with peaks of snow;

Of forests of pine and a garden gay,

Of shirts of mail in a steel-capped fray,

And shafts from the six-foot bow.

Of soldier-men and of maidens fair—

Of a fairy princess with red-gold hair

In a stronghold of wizards cruel;

Of a fight or two of an old-world kind—

Magazine-rifle and spear combined,

And death in a hand-locked duel.

Of men and women like me and you,

Of love old-fashioned yet ever new,

Brave eyes in a valley of fear;

Of the cold grey steel and the long warm kiss,

With a proper ending of honeymoon bliss—

Won’t you gather round me and hear?

“Ganpat”

FOREWORD

In giving this story to the world I must frankly confess that I do not know whether it is a remarkable record of actual adventure, or a fantastic romance from the pen of some one gifted with a particularly vivid imagination.

Harry Lake and I last parted in 1920 near Sorarogha in Waziristan, on the Indian frontier—I bound for home on leave, he in charge of the picketing troops, whose business it was to ensure the reasonably safe passage of wearied soldiery like me through the knife-edged hills, where the Mahsud snipers made night noisy and day sometimes dangerous.

I have known him on and off for many years. Stationed together before the war, our paths led apart in 1914—he to France with his regiment, I to East Africa with mine—to meet again in a London hospital in late 1915. With him once more in India in 1917, I then lost sight of him for over two years, till January, 1920, brought us together in a rather noisy brawl in Mahsud Waziristan, where the tribesmen were taking exception to our military promenade up their pet valley.

I know his people slightly, more particularly his sister, Ethel Wheeler, to whom he refers in his story, but she does not often favour me with letters. It was somewhat of a surprise, therefore, when in October last year, while a student at the Staff College, Quetta, an English mail brought me a bulky parcel and a letter from her, enclosing one from Lake, in which was the following passage:

I don’t know if you are still doing anything in the author line, but if you are you might amuse yourself editing this record which I have made up from my diary. You are always keen on out-of-the-way places, and in sending this off, on the very shadowy chance of it ever reaching home, it occurred to me that you might like to see it, so I am telling Ethel to pass it on to you. If you care to get it published, you are welcome, the more so since I think the world could do with such a record of simple adventure as an antidote to the kind of stuff appearing when I left civilization.

I opened the parcel that night and dipped into the stained pages. There was a good deal of work on hand, but I’m afraid it got left over, for it was past four in the morning before I turned the last pages with a rather dazed brain, but a firm determination to edit the story. The kind assistance of Miss Douie—sister of a fellow-student—enabled me to get it typed in the little spare time snatched—mostly very late at night—from a strenuous course of instruction; while the local knowledge of Central Asia of Major Blacker—another fellow-student—was of the greatest help in following Lake’s rather hieroglyphic record of his journey to Sakaeland.

Whether red-gold-haired Aryenis and her grave-eyed father, stalwart Henga and his Sake bowmen, Philos and his pretty wife and blue-eyed baby, crippled Paulos, the fiendish Shamans and the murderous brown Sakae are real living people, I cannot pretend to say, any more than I can tell whether pine-fringed Aornos, the snow-peaks of Saghar Mor, or the gloomy Shaman citadel, with its red-hot trapdoor, exist outside Lake’s brain. All I can say is that he has never told me anything but the truth all the years I have known him. Payindah I remember well, while Wrexham I met several times in 1917, and both are very accurately described.

If the story is true, then I cannot say how the letters and the manuscript reached us, save that, from the vernacular inscriptions on the original wrapping which Ethel Wheeler sent me, it has clearly been passed from hand to hand by Indian merchants on the Chinese trade route. Perhaps Lake and his friends found the missing camels, and built up a sufficient store of water at stages across the desert to enable one or two determined men to make a flying journey out and back to hand over their letters to some Indian trader. But he has given no details as to how he proposed to get their letters home.

If Lake’s record is genuine, then I envy him intensely, and hope that it will be many, many years before any explorer, even of the type of genial Sir Aurel Stein, penetrates to Sakaeland, for it and its people seem to me far too pleasing for one to wish them spoilt by the contact of twentieth-century civilization.

If, on the other hand, it is merely an invention of Lake’s to while away monotonous evenings during his explorations in unknown Central Asia, where he certainly is, then I hope that his readers will find it as interesting and realistic as I and others here have done.

“Ganpat”

Staff College
Quetta, Baluchistan
1st January, 1923

CONTENTS

HARILEK

HARILEK

CHAPTER I
I MEET WREXHAM AND FORSYTH

Most of the big things in life hinge on very small beginnings. I wonder if the people who pose as pure materialists ever reflect on that fact when they hold forth on their complete and absolute certainty that there is no guiding hand in men’s affairs or in the conception, creation, and control of that most wonderfully intricate piece of machinery, the universe.

Missing a train, accepting an invitation, having a dance cut, all may prove the turning-point in a life if you take the trouble to trace things back to their beginnings.

Take my own case, as I sit writing here with a glimpse of the twin snow-peaks of Saghar Mor through my open window, rose-red in the last light of the setting sun, above a level haze of lilac. Here am I with all I ever sought of life, all and far more. And yet, but for a chance visit to the Karachi Gymkhana Club some two years ago, I should probably to-day be smoking a pipe in my old Sussex manor farmhouse, after a day in the stubble, leading a quiet uneventful life, content—in a way—but having savoured only a fraction of what life really holds.

A gymkhana club bar does not sound the ideal starting-point for a life’s romance, for a complete change in all that life may mean, and yet it so happened to me, as doubtless it has happened before and may happen again to others.

I’ve been thinking for some time of writing down the events of the last two years, partly because they sometimes seem so unreal that the only way to bring home their concreteness—if I may coin a word—is to put them down in cold, hard black-and-white, partly because I think they may serve to show others that romance is not yet dead, and that adventure is still to be found for those who will but pluck up heart and seek.

What is that passage of Kipling’s about Truth being an undressed lady at the bottom of a well, and that if you meet her—well, as a gentleman there are only two things to do, one to look away, the other to give her a print dress? So I, being, I hope, a gentleman, choose the latter.

To begin at the very beginning, I must revert to the bar at the gymkhana club which I have mentioned, and, before beginning my tale, I suppose I had better introduce myself as I was when the story started, late in 1920.

My name is Lake, and Harry Lake is what most people call me. My father—God rest his soul—was the owner of a small place in Sussex, which he used to farm and shoot in the intervals of travelling, and which he expected me to take over when he died.

But farming—even with a certain backing of cash—did not appeal to me, and I drifted into the army. Then, much to the annoyance of my father, who wanted me to soldier at home since I would go into the service, I transferred to an Indian regiment. Travel always appealed to me, especially in the less well-known parts of the globe, and India seemed a convenient kicking-off place. One got long leave, which the army at home does not legislate for; and blessed with a little money, I was able to indulge my hobby to the full.

Central Asia became my playground, and, whenever I could get leave, I sped up to Kashmir and thence up one or other of the valleys into the great sleepy spaces that lie behind, the desiccated bone-dry spaces of Ladakh, or among the snow-clad mountains that fringe the north of Lalla Rookh’s country.

Then came the war, and, after frantic panics that I was going to be out of it all, tearful wires to pals at Simla, despairing appeals to every general I had ever met, I found myself in France, and entered upon a series of panics for fear I shouldn’t get away again.

After longer or shorter periods of mud, boredom, and fright, with a spell of hospital inserted, my regiment went on to that benighted back front, East Africa, a spot for which I conceived the most intense loathing, and was glad to find myself back once more in India in late 1917. A spell of dépôt work, and off again to Palestine and later to Cyprus, where, though life was uneventful, I amused myself brushing up the Greek I had learnt travelling during the holidays with my father. I am pretty good at languages, and had kept up my Greek, so that by the time I left Cyprus I spoke it as fluently as ever again.

In 1919 my father’s death led me home to settle up the estate, and then out again, with the firm intention of leaving the army within the year.

A bout of frontier scrapping in the 1920 Waziristan show was my last effort, and then I really made up my mind to go straight away. I was blessed with ample independent means—ample enough for me anyway; most of my regimental pals were dead, and so in 1920 I sent in my papers.

I had shot most things to be found about Northern India, but had never secured a tiger, and so made up my mind for a visit to the Central Provinces before going home. I wandered down to Karachi en route south to spend a few days there, and that’s where this story really begins.

The first night there I did what one always does in the East—I went down to the club bar to pass the time of day with any old acquaintances that might be there. I had known Karachi fair to middling well in the old pre-war days, and I thought I was pretty sure to find friends, but, as a matter of fact, the club was rather deserted.

So I lit a cheroot and sat down, feeling rather lonesome, as one does in a place where one has spent many cheery evenings with a crowd of good fellows, most of whom have gone west. I was thinking about going across to the Sind Club when a man entered the bar. I looked twice to make quite sure, and then walked over to him.

“Long time since we shared a flask in the Jordan Valley, John,” said I, tapping him on the shoulder.

He spun round.

“Hulloa, Harry! D——d glad to see you, old bird! What on earth are you doing here? I saw your push only last week, and they said you’d chucked it and gone home. Family acres and all that sort of thing.”

“First part’s true; for the rest, you see me here, large as life, very much at a loose end, and contemplating trying for a tiger in the C.P. before I go home. They tell me England hasn’t quite recovered from the war yet, and when it isn’t coal-striking it’s doing something equally unpleasant, so I thought I’d give it a miss for a few months.”

“Funny thing running into you here; I was just writing to your home address. I’ve been up on a globe trot Kashgar way. I’m demobbed now, too. Good thing to be one’s own master once more.”

Being on his own was a thing that would appeal to John Wrexham, independent by nature. An engineer by trade, swept up in the vortex of the war as an Indian Army reserve officer, I first met him in a particularly offensive trench Givenchy way. I met him frequently after that, always cheery, always busy, beloved of every battalion commander, to whose needs he ministered in the capacity of subaltern of a sapper-and-miner field company.

A brave soul, too, John, of the most heroic, despite his inclination to stoutness. He amassed some very pretty ribbons before the war was out, and a reputation among those who knew him worth more than all the ribbons in the world.

Later I picked him up again in Palestine, commanding a field company this time, in the most professional manner. I remember well our first encounter in Palestine, where I ran into him superintending a working party under close fire. It was such a typical picture of John. Sucking a pipe, methodical, cheerful, and utterly devoid of fear, his helmet on one side of his rather bullet head, his shrewd grey eyes taking in everything, quick and caustic comments for those who weren’t putting their backs into it, a woman’s touch and a woman’s kindly word for any one who had “taken it,” red knees over blue puttees, ruddy face with the chin puckered over a long white gash picked up in an argument with a Hun near Festubert—very much a man all over is John Wrexham.

“What were you writing about, John? It’s not like you.”

John’s inability to put pen to paper except under direct necessity was as well known as his practical efficiency at every point of his trade, or as his personal courage. In Palestine he was the despair of his C.R.E., a ponderous soul, and a lover of paper.

“Wanted to find out what you were doing. I’ve got a stunt on, and I want company. I’ve got one fellow coming along, but I want another, and I thought you might be at a loose end. Come under the fan and I’ll show you something.”

When we had installed ourselves under the electric fan in two armchairs, he pulled out his pipe, filled it methodically, lit it, and then proceeded. One never hurries John when he has something to say. It’s always worth waiting for.

“Did you ever trek into Kashgar, Harry?” he asked at last.

“No, I never got as far as that. Why?”

“I was up that way last year, and found one or two things rather interesting.”

“What were you doing? I didn’t know you were keen on Central Asia.”

“I am to a certain extent. I had a great-great-uncle who was a bit of a rolling stone. He wandered a bit in those parts, and he left a diary, written rather like I write, but you could follow it in parts. I’ll show it you later on. There’s some quaint stuff in it. But it interested me, and last year when I was demobbed after the Armistice, I toddled up there to have a look-see. I was not keen on going back to my old job in Bengal, and, as I’d saved a bit of cash, I thought I’d take a holiday, which I hadn’t really done since I left school. So I trekked off to Kashgar and then east.”

He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a worn pocketbook, and extracted something which he passed across.

“Ever see anything like this?” he queried.

I examined the object closely. A silver coin, new-looking, but rough at the edges. On one side was a mass of Greek lettering. On the obverse was a man’s head, rather clear-cut.

I turned it over again. The names on the coin were unfamiliar, and the head was unlike any coin I knew.

“What country is it, John? It’s Greek, though the lettering is quaint, but whose is the head? It’s not from Greece. Is it one of the funny little new States that the Peace Conference of the war to end war has started to ensure war going on?”

Wrexham looked at me despondently.

“You handle a pen quickly, Harry, but you’re slow sometimes at deductions. Yes, it’s Greek; but it’s a long time since any one wrote Greek quite like that, and I think that the country it came from never heard of the Great War of 1914-18.”

“Antique, is it?” I looked at it again. “It looks fairly new-make. Is it a copy? Central Asia’s full of old Greek relics, I know. Have they started an antique mint in Kashgar in the hope of a tourist boom after the war? Where did you come by it?”

“Well, it’s a long story, but, if you’re doing nothing to-night, come over to my hotel and dine and I’ll tell you. By itself the coin isn’t much, but I’ve got two other exhibits which fit in. What is it ‘Sapper’ says? ‘Once is nothing, twice is coincidence, three times is a moral certainty.’ I think I’ve got a moral cert.”

And not another word would he say on the matter then, shifting the conversation to France and Palestine, old scraps, old friends, all the miscellany of memories that make up the wandering soldier’s life.

I slipped home and changed, and then to his hotel, where I found him awaiting me in the lounge with a tall, clean-shaven, fair-haired, blue-eyed man who seemed to carry a smack of the sea about him, though somehow I did not set him down as a sailor.

“You’ve not met Forsyth, have you, Harry?” said Wrexham. “This is Lake, Alec; you’ve heard me speak of him often enough.”

As we shook hands while Wrexham busied himself attracting a servant for short drinks, I took stock of Forsyth. Taller than me by at least three inches—and I stand five feet ten in my socks—and broad with it, he looked the epitome of fitness. His skin was clear and smooth as a girl’s, yet tanned to a ruddy brick colour that spoke of days of open air, clean fresh winds, and hot sunshine.

I couldn’t quite place him, but somehow he conveyed an idea of big open spaces, and all the breadth of clean mental outlook that sometimes goes therewith.

Wrexham handed us out sherries, and marshalled us into a cool corner.

“Three wanderers well met, I think. Here’s to us.” He turned to me.

“Forsyth knows, perhaps, more Greek than you, Harry. He describes himself as a doctor, and tags weird letters after his name. But his real amusement in life is studying ethnology and anthropology and things like that.”

“I’ve always been keen on ethnology, especially that of Eastern Europe, as a hobby; and after finishing my medical studies, I spent some months pottering about Greece on my own. It’s a fascinating mixture of people down in the Balkan Peninsula to any one keen on studying different races. Also, I was one of those freaks with a leaning to Greek, even at school, before I came over to England.”

“One of our Empire liaison links from Canada,” continued Wrexham, “ex-R.N.A.S., sometimes amateur of ethnology, specially Greek; anything more, Alec?”

“You forget the ex-R.A.F., which landed me in this country to renew the threads of your acquaintanceship from Palestine days.”

“True, O king, a somewhat murky past. But now, like me, you’ve cut adrift once more.”

“And here I am to listen to a cock-and-bull story of yours tied up with old or new coins and a ragged diary, with which baits you propose to lug me many hundred miles into the back of beyond, instead of going back and looking for a decent job to earn an honest living. You have a persuasive manner, John. I suppose Lake is another babe in your hands?”

“He will be, I hope, before we’ve done with him. However, what about food? Then we can go up to my quarters and get down to the real stuff. Finished your drinks?”

He marshalled us into the dining-room, and once again the conversation slid west and north in the old grooves of war, till we finally adjourned to his room, and stretched ourselves on long chairs in the verandah. When his servant had deposited sodas, glasses, and whiskey and departed, Wrexham went to a metal despatch-case, and produced from it a small wooden box carefully tied up, which he placed mysteriously on the table.

Then, filling his ancient pipe, he spread himself in a long chair and commenced.

“First of all, I’m going to tell you about my trip beyond Yarkand last year. When you’ve swallowed that, I’ll show you a thing or two.

“After my company left Palestine in January, ’19, and came back to India, I got myself demobbed and pondered what I should do. Home lacked attraction, I’d been away so long. There was I with a certain amount of dibs, no calls, my own master, up in Pindi at the end of the Kashmir road with the hot weather coming on, and all the earth in front of me.

“I’ve always wanted to travel up that way, and this seemed the absolute chance. If I went home or back to my old job in Bengal, I might not get another opportunity for years; my old firm in Bengal were good, but sticky in the matter of leave. So I packed my kit, dumped what I didn’t want, motored to Srinagar, and took the road for Yarkand.

“I stuck to the main road practically all the way, steady, easy marches. And as I went I read everything I could find on the country. Most of my kit was books, I think, but by the time I hit Yarkand I had a working knowledge of Kashgaria at other people’s expense.

“I moved fairly light, but I lugged the books along and also a few survey instruments. You remember that in Palestine I used to play about with survey toys.

“I stopped a bit at Yarkand to study local conditions, and work up the smattering of Turki that I’d been assimilating on the road up with the aid of a prehistoric textbook.

“From there I pushed on to Aksu, and hence towards Hami, always keeping to the main road. There’s nothing to talk about during that part of the show. But when I got Hami-way, I put aside the printed books and restudied my great-great-uncle’s diary.”

He stopped and pulled meditatively at his pipe.

“What was the great-great-uncle doing up there, John?” I asked.

“He was a bit of a rolling stone, rather like me, I fancy. He started with a commission in the East India Company’s army, got tired of it, went north, and joined the Sikh army. Then he dropped that and took to wandering. Went up into Kashmir. Thence he conceived the idea of following the old trade route into China. His library apparently consisted of Marco Polo.

“Three years later he turned up again in Ferozepur, where my great-grandfather, his brother, was commanding a regiment, and announced his intention of fitting out and going off again to Central Asia. But before he could start again he went out with cholera. However, before he died he gave my great-grandfather a diary and a bundle of old papers, and said that, if ever any other member of the family got the wanderlust, the papers were to be given to him.

“My great-grandfather, who was married, had no particular desire to travel, and, I fancy, after reading through the stuff, he locked it up and dismissed the whole lot as a traveller’s yarn, due to overmuch Marco Polo combined with fever.

“My grandfather and my father were stay-at-homes, and I’m the first of the family to come back here. I brought with me the old papers and the diary that was with them more as idle curiosities—happened to notice them when I was on leave before coming back from France to Mespot in 1916.

“Having nothing much to do, I read them through on board ship, and after that I read them fairly often, until I know bits, I think, by heart.

“A lot of them are mere scrappy notes about his journeys, rough drawings of places and types, and it’s only after he struck east from Urumchi that the real interest comes into the diary. Pass me over that box, will you?”

Forsyth reached the box across to Wrexham, who undid it, and took out a small shabby leather-covered notebook.

“I’m going to read you something,” he said, “that will tell you why I went north. As I said before, once is nothing, twice is a coincidence, three times is a moral cert. This is the ‘once’; part of the ‘twice’ you’ve both seen in the shape of that coin; the ‘three times’ I’ve got here, and will show you presently.”

He put the box on the table by him, opened the notebook—stained yellowish paper and crabbed writing in faded brown ink—and began to read aloud.

He read for a quarter of an hour, and at the end of that time both Forsyth and I had let our pipes go out, and were hanging on his words.

CHAPTER II
OLD JOHN WREXHAM’S DIARY

20th Jany. 1822

I wonder if any one who read these lines would ever believe that I, John Wrexham, am writing naught but the sober truth. When I think over the events of the last month, it seems to me as if it were all a wild dream fantasy. And yet....

Islam Akhun’s story of a king and his army engulfed in the sands and of the buried cities set me wandering, and lo! the city seems to be there after all these hundreds of years, and I, John Wrexham, am the first to have seen its gates. Or, stay, after what I saw in the valley, perhaps it were more true to say the first living man, for others less fortunate than myself would seem to have reached the entrance to the Gates, to find them only the Gates of Death.

But I must stop me musing, and set down the bare happenings ere my memory plays me tricks and fever come on anew.

It was the 2d December that I conceived my ill-fated trip, at least it was ill-fated for Islam and Arslan Bai. Was it ill-fated for me? Time alone can tell.

Northeast they pointed over the wastes of sand, and said that many days out into the desert lay a buried city, rich with treasures, in whose streets you might walk as though men left them yestereve, and gather up riches if you could but escape from the wiles of the spirits that guarded them, spirits that called you by name and bade you stay.

No; they had never seen it, but in their grandfather’s father’s time, one man, a treasure-seeker, one of the idle ne’er-do-wells that haunt the villages fringing the waste sands, had gone out with other two into the deserts in search of treasure, hoping perchance to gather in a few days wealth beyond the wildest dreams.

Many days later he returned, a ragged skeleton, gaunt eyes and blackened lips, nigh dead with thirst and fever. He died that night, and ere he died, close to the road where the story-tellers found him, he babbled a little of a gate, of armed men, of death.

None ever followed his quest: there are too many tales of hidden cities and treasures all up and down this sunburnt land, and men still fear the trackless deserts, as they did when Messer Marco Polo traversed the desert of Lop, ‘so great that ’tis said it would take a year and more to ride from one end of it to the other....’ And still talk they of the spirits that Polo mentions in his travels, which beguile men from their caravans and leave them to perish in the sands, so that ‘in making this journey ’tis customary for travellers to keep close together.’

What was it that stirred my mind, so that all night long, when men and beasts lay sleeping, I sat wrapt in my furs in the cold wind gazing out to the northeast pondering? Was it chance? Was it fate? I know not, nor shall ever know, perhaps. But, ere the false dawn’s faint light pearled the sky above me, I had made up my mind that, come what might, I, too, would face the desert and see whether it would reveal its secrets, or remain inscrutably mocking to the end.

Perchance my men thought I had been maddened by these same spirits when, next day, instead of continuing our road, I said I had changed my mind and wished to voyage northeast into the desert.

At first they refused to come, but finally, after much persuasion, they agreed on my promise that when half our water was used we would retrace our steps if naught had been found. The reward I spoke of, the chance of hidden wealth, and the guarantee of return ere our water failed, just outweighed their fears of the unknown desert of death, and of the spirits of evil that roamed in it.

Even then only Islam and Arslan would accompany me. But, indeed, I preferred a small party, since it was the less water to take. The others of our party and some of my gear we left to await our return. Not till the 11th December did we set forth—three men and three camels, one laden with food and gear, and two with skins of water.

Our way at first was easy, over sand-dunes of no immense height, though growing as we went, and we covered sixty miles in the first four days. Nothing to see but sand, sand, sand, trackless and rippled as the wild ocean’s wave. Since I possessed neither map nor guide, I marched by compass, as might a sailor in an uncharted sea. Due northeast from our starting-point was the direction I chose. The old Chinese road lay southeast, and the men spoke of a track that led northward, so that our route midway between the two should bring us into the desert’s heart.

It was on the evening of the fourth day that, far off on the northeast horizon I remarked what seemed like some faint cloud hanging in the sky. After looking at it through my glass, I pointed it out to Islam, saying, “Snow,” but he insisted it was but cloud.

But next evening again we beheld it, the same form, the same direction, and not a cloud beside in all the brazen sky.

Far mountain beyond a doubt. If there were no hidden cities, there were at least strange hills, and snow hills must mean water. Even Islam agreed now, though I saw he would liefer have found his city of gold than all the snow hills of wild Asia.

We pressed on, and on the evening of the sixth day, as the sun was sinking to his rest, perceived what I had sought all day in vain, the faint lilac haze below the white that I have noted marks always the lower hills below high snow.

The dunes were now greatly higher and more formidable, curved half-moons of sand, most wearisome to the legs, and the camels showed their distress from lack of water, since our scanty stock permitted but a mouthful for the beasts.

On the eighth day the snow-peak gleamed more clearly, and in the light of evening the low hills showed sharp and clear maybe a bare thirty miles away.

Never a sign of water so far, and I thanked Providence greatly that we had made sixteen days’ provision, though by now I felt assured that we should discover some at the foot of the hills. The next three days to the hills were in great measure easier, the dunes were daily lower, but we had perforce to give part of our water to the camels.

On the evening of the eleventh day we reached the foot of the hills, and then, alas! the foreboding that all day had clung to me was realized. The wall of hills was, indeed, a wall, almost sheer scarped cliff like the sides of an old Indian hill-fort, and many hundred feet high, with naught at foot but a short slope of tumbled rock half-buried in sand.

That night we camped below the gloomy cliffs, and I held that our earliest preoccupation in the morning must be to seek water along the foot. Surely somewhere the melting snow must find its way down, unless it drained to the northward.

Next morning we travelled twelve or thirteen miles, always under sheer scarped cliff, never a drop of water, never a sign of slope that we might climb. We moved eastward, since from far off it had seemed to me that the cliffs were lower that way. We had now but four days’ scanty water left, and the heat of the desert, even at this cold season, was causing some loss by sweating through the skins in which we carried it.

Islam prayed me to start back forthwith making forced marches, but I was sure that water was to be found. Arslan, moreover, said that unless the camels could be fully watered they would die in the desert, and with them we also should perish, leaving our bones to whiten in the wastes of sand.

So next day again we started early, and all day travelled below the unfriendly cliffs, but never finding water, until late in the evening the camels, which till now had been barely able to drag their lank limbs along, quickened their dragging pace; and presently Islam, who was on ahead, called out loudly to me.

I hastened on to where he stood on a high rock, and saw before me a narrow valley opening into the cliff, and in the bed of the valley a little stream of clear water, and men and beasts drank their fill.

The cleft at whose dark mouth we stood was narrow, a bare twenty paces wide, and with the same scarped sides of incredible height. It wound away into the cliff, already partly hidden in the evening dusk, though where we stood was yet lit with the sun’s last rays.

Reassured now by our find of water, we settled us down for the night, and in the morning refilled all water-skins. The dawn light showed a few stunted bushes and a dwarf tree or two, but no sign of human beings.

Leaving Arslan to tend the beasts, which found some scant grazing in the valley entrance, and taking Islam with me, I set about exploring the cleft. It got more and more narrow and darker and darker, until, after some three miles, we could touch the sides of smooth rock with our outstretched hands, but never, never a place that a man might climb. The cold was intense in this dark confined slit that knew the warm sun but for a brief space each day.

Then, rounding a sudden corner, came we to the end. The narrow valley opened upon a circus perhaps two hundred paces in diameter, sheer cliffs around it. But oh! the wonder of that evil place.

The valley closed again, and there before us, carved at the foot of the towering rock, was a gateway of old fashion with an inscription and a design of serpents upon it.

But even more strange was the ground at our feet. For it was covered with bones of men.

The bones were clean and white, and maybe old. But as we stood there concealed in the narrow cleft, there was a rush above us and a great white-necked vulture swept out from the cliff above, and then another and then another, circling down and down on their wide outstretched pinions.

We drew farther back into the shelter of the rock, thinking, perchance, they were spying us after the fashion these birds have in desert places where life is scarce, waiting on life for death to come.

But no, instead they fluttered down on the farther side, and gathered in ill-omened circle about something. Islam plucked my sleeve. “Come away, quick! Come away! ’Tis a place of ill-omen; these be spirits more like than birds.”

But my curiosity was awakened, and, shaking him off, I advanced. As I got close the vultures flapped heavily away, and I saw what their foul wings had hidden. It was a man’s body, of recent date, with no signs of death’s grim decay, and the birds had not yet had time to disfigure it, so that I could see clearly what manner of man he was. A young man but—white—as white as I am. And of the manner of his death there was no doubt, for driven through his throat was an arrow, and below him on the ground was a pool of blood which had not yet dried, for when I tried to move him to see his hands it showed wet still.

I say his hands, for he lay stretched face upwards, but with his arms twisted under him, and then I perceived that his hands were bound behind him.

There were no clothes to show what class of person he had been; whoever had slain him had stripped off all he had.

I considered him with care. Features clear-cut like a statue of old time, with short dark-brown curls. Then I noticed the arrow. Black-shafted and steel-barbed, with white marks upon the shaft. Writing surely in some strange tongue.

Islam by now had recovered a little of his courage and came over, but just as he reached me a sudden sound above us caused us to fly in unreasoning panic to the cleft whence we had emerged. It was but one of the heavy flying vultures, but it was some time ere we breathed easily again.

I stared out once more over the evil-smelling place of stone and sand and bone, dazzling white in the sun between the walls of black rock. Over against us the gateway loomed sinister and silent. The great stone portals were closed, nor were there windows, save on either side some arrow-slits as of an archer’s gallery cut in the rock.

“Let us go,” said Islam, “before we also are slain. Whoever killed that yonder must be within the gates.”

But curiosity was stronger in me at that moment than fear.

“Stay you here, Islam,” I said, “and if aught moves at the gate be ready to shoot.” He was fumbling with his old matchlock.

Then, despite his appeals, I returned to the body with eyes fixed on the arrow-slits, ready to flee at sight or sound. But nothing moved nor stirred.

I studied the arrow again, and then tried to pull it out. It was of unfamiliar type, and might give the key to much. But I could not draw it forth, and so was forced to put my knee upon the dead man’s chest, when presently, with some exertion of strength, I pulled it through. It had been shot from behind, and, entering to one side of the spine, stood out a foot and more beyond the throat.

As I stood holding it in my hand there was a crash like thunder, and I leapt across the open space like a deer to the cloud of smoke where Islam crouched behind a rock holding his smoking piece.

“Something moved in that slit,” he gasped, and turned to flee.

Discretion seemed the better part of valour, and I followed him down the narrow waterway, splashing through the little pools, leaping from stone to stone.

But still I wonder whether he truly saw anything, or if his fancies overcame him.

By the entrance we found Arslan, who had heard not the shot, peacefully preparing food by the camels.

Islam contrived to scare him into the same unreasoning frame of mind as himself. Although I desired much to remain, there was no staying them, nor could I continue there by myself. Also, there was some reason, doubtless, in their arguments, three men against a savage tribe; ’twas poor odds in our favour. Speedily we roped up our gear and once more set out across the desert, as I judged, in the direction whence we had come.

Ploughing through the sand, I pondered over the events of the morning, but nothing could I understand. Of one thing alone I was assured, that the dead man was of some people I had never met in Asia. There are fair-skinned people a many there, but none to compare with him I had seen. Could he, perchance, have been a European? But had such a one been in the country, I must surely have heard of him. Save for myself, no European had been known up there.

When we halted that night, I studied the lettered arrow again, for the lettering seemed familiar. Finally, I recognized the unfamiliar script—the letters were Greek. My studies had long since fled, but there was no mistaking some of the letters, for not knowing the which my father had ofttimes caned me. I was clear bewildered by now. What folk could these be in the heart of the great desert with arrows lettered in Greek?

As I write, the arrow is by me, sole token of my journey, sole witness of my tale.

The men were very silent that night, and their one thought seemed to be to put as many miles of sand as possible between themselves and the ill-omened cliff that faded behind us against the darkling sky.

Next day we started at dawn, and, as the light grew, I noticed that here and there among the sand-dunes were rock outcrops, which we had not seen coming. But the little stream had disappeared in the thirsty sand when we had gone a dozen miles, and once again there was no water save what the camels carried.

It was on the second evening that misfortune showed her ugly head. Arslan was troubled concerning one of the camels which paced very slowly. That night it refused the oil and the handful of grain we gave it, and laid its head on the sand, as these beasts do when they are sick.

The next morning it could scarcely walk, and ere evening it died. Here was, indeed, a serious loss, since we must part with either our gear or much of our water.

However, we reckoned that we had a sufficiency of water. The skins had been refilled ere we left the hills, and we had been but twelve days coming, while we had still thirteen days’ supply. Even though our present route were somewhat longer, we should reach the main road in another ten days, eleven at most.

So, next morning, abandoning the dead camel and its load, we started on again. The wind, which had hitherto been little, freshened, and ere midday we were in the midst of a blinding sandstorm, and, though it cleared by evening, we covered but a few miles.

That day the second camel sickened, and within two days was dead. Thus were we forced to abandon the most of our gear. With naught save the scantiest food for ourselves and some powder and ball, we could just load enough water for seven days on the camel. By the evening of the seventh day we should surely reach the old Chinese road.

But once more sandstorms delayed us. Then two days later our last camel sickened. We dragged it along all next day, but it died that evening.

I calculated that we were now not much more than forty miles from the road. There was nothing for it but to take as much water as each man could carry in a goatskin, with a scanty ration of food, abandon our gear, and plod on.

Whether it was that something had affected my compass, or whether in the sandstorms my computation of distance was inaccurate, I cannot say, but after traversing another thirty miles there was but a cupful of water left, and nothing in front but sand-dunes—high ones—a bad sign, since toward the desert’s edge they grow lower.

The rest of the journey was a nightmare that I cannot write. Arlsan went mad and refused to move, so that we had perforce to leave him while we struggled on seeking water and help. Two days later Islam collapsed, and I pushed on alone, and at dawn found myself among trees and fainted. When I came to, I found a wandering shepherd pouring water on my face.

When I was somewhat recovered, I had vast difficulty in getting him and his friends to come with me to search for Islam, but at last the sight of my money persuaded them. Following my tracks (by great good fortune the wind had dropped), we found Islam still breathing, but unconscious. Whether he was already weakly I cannot say, or whether the prolonged strain had been too much for him I know not, but he never recovered consciousness, and died that night. I could not induce them to go any farther, nor, indeed, was there any possibility of finding Arslan alive.

I made my way back westward, and found that I had reached the road seventy miles from where we had set out, which accounted for the extra length of our journey. I picked up my other men and the rest of my gear. Since Islam and Arslan were dead, I said naught to any man of our adventures beyond our failure to discover any ruined city, and our terrible journey back.

Some day I hope to go back and find out the secret of those unknown hills, but for the moment I feel drawn once more to look upon my kith and kin, and I shall make my way back to India and refit.

Wrexham closed the ragged diary and looked up. “Well,” he said in his deliberate way, “and that is what I call the ‘once,’ which is nothing. When I’ve had a drink, I’ll tell you about ‘twice,’ which, according to the expert, is merely coincidence. Manœuvre the whiskey, will you, Alec?”

Forsyth got up and opened the bottle and some sodas.

“Your old great-great-uncle either ought to have been a journalist, or else he found something d——d quaint. Have you got the arrow at home?”

“No. I suppose it was stolen from his kit. He evidently had it with him all right, unless, as my great-grandfather seemed to think, he invented the whole yarn under the influence of fever.”

I filled my glass. “It’s the queerest tale I’ve heard for years. Of course, all deserts are full of fables, and I remember reading of the one your great-great-uncle mentions of the king and his army who were buried in the sand.”

Wrexham sipped his drink. “Well, now, I’ll get on with the second part, which is where I come in.”

CHAPTER III
WREXHAM’S STORY

We relit our pipes and settled back in our chairs, and Wrexham began:

“As I told you, when I got near Hami last year, I pulled out the old diary and read it again, especially the part I’ve just read to you two fellows.

“I won’t go into details of how I found the tiny village, which, from certain entries in the diary, I am sure must have been my great-great-uncle’s starting-point. I found the place, and there I decided to stop a bit. I can’t tell you why I should want to stop in a tiny little hole like that with nothing to see, not even any old ruins in the neighbourhood; but somehow my old relative’s story had taken hold of me, and I wanted to reconstruct it on the spot.

“You know how traditions linger in the East, more especially in those parts of it that are as yet untouched by the railway. Well, I made a few discreet questions, and sure enough there was a yarn of a white man who years before had gone out into the desert seeking old cities, and had come to grief owing to losing his way. The story was not too coherent, needless to say: sometimes he found a ruined city, sometimes he and all his people had died, and one particular version went on to the effect that he had found much gold, and got safely back, but was carried away by the spirits who watched over the treasure, and who were very wroth at its having been touched. It was a lot of trouble to get out the story—you know how difficult it is to get ignorant people like that to talk to strangers.

“But it was clear enough that some wandering white man had been there ages before, and, further, the local people seemed pretty afraid of wandering into the desert. I did not let on about the old man having had anything to do with me. It’s not a good thing to talk about bad luck being in the family, and certainly the old man did not hit it lucky that trip.

“I hung about prospecting and smelling out the ground, which, by the way, is very little known directly you get off the main route. Northeast you come slap on to the desert practically at once.

“The maps of it are quite useless, compiled from hearsay of wandering Indian or Chinese merchants, I think. I had the most up-to-date ones I could get from the Survey of India. Got hold of old Jones, who was our mapping expert in Palestine; you remember him, Harry.

“He sent me the best he had before I went off, but he wrote to the effect that I would be wise not to rely too much on anything north of the Hami-Urumchi road, barring the triangulated peaks.

“If you look at that atlas on the table there you will see that there is a big stretch of nothingness northeast of Kashgaria labelled Gobi Desert. It is part of the Gobi. For over three hundred miles in every direction it’s got not a single name on it, not even a track. Northward there are two lakes shown with fifty miles of river leading nowhere; and, although I’ve not been there, I’m prepared to make a modest bet that they’re not within one hundred miles of their proper location, even if they do exist. North again of that is Chinese Mongolia, almost unknown even now, and very vaguely mapped.

“So that between known Kashgaria and Mongolia there’s a piece of country much bigger than England, almost unmapped, without even a known road in it. The southern edges of it are known to be desert; of the rest we know just nothing. And the northern side may be—as shown—some three hundred miles from the southern, or, on the other hand, it’s just as likely to be five hundred or six hundred miles away.

“You could hide a country almost as big as Wales in it and never know of its existence, even if it were full of high snow mountains. So you see, although my old namesake’s story may be the result of a fever-stricken imagination, it’s no ways impossible.

“Well, somehow, that country drew me more and more, but I saw that to try and explore it would require a good deal of preparation, and I had no idea of taking it on by myself if I could get another fellow or two to come along. So I decided to come back to India, and see if I could get hold of some one with globe-trotting tastes. I had you two in my mind’s eye, and then I found Forsyth, and later on heard that you’d gone home, Harry.

“I stayed on up there a while just to get a bit more local knowledge, and the last week I came across that coin, and the finding of that is what I call ‘twice’ in my deduction series.

“Some miles from the village there’s a bit of a rise where the sand-dunes on the desert’s edge are rather big. One in particular is noticeably high: it’s by a deserted building of sorts, quite a modern outfit, been abandoned perhaps twenty or fifty, at most a hundred, years. It bears northeast, and must be more or less the direction my great-great-uncle started from. I took rather a fancy to the place, and rode out there two or three times to study the country. A few extra feet elevation make a lot of difference in the desert.

“My men were accustomed to my going out there, and as a rule I took one or other to hold my horse while I did a bit of map-work, to try and get something more or less accurate.

“One particular day, the air being very clear—we’d had rain twice in the week, an uncommon phenomenon at that time of year—I thought I’d go and make a final visit to have a last check of the map.

“I rode out by myself that day on my old Kara Tagh mare. She was very quiet, and if you knee-haltered her loosely would stay for hours without trying to stray. I climbed up the high dune, and sat looking out over the desert, thinking about my old relative’s tragic journey. It was warm in the sun, and I had not slept well the previous night—an uncommon thing for me, as you know.”

I have seen Wrexham sleep quietly in the most noisy, disturbing places, when circumstances prevented him doing any work, and he had a little sleep to make up, or thought a reserve would be handy the next night or two. He is a most extraordinarily imperturbable person.

“It may be that I dozed for a few minutes and probably dreamt a bit. You see, I’d been reading my old great-great-uncle’s diary during the night when I couldn’t sleep. But I seemed awake all right. Well, presently a most extraordinary feeling came over me, of some one trying to attract my attention, some one very anxious that I should hear him.

“I really can’t explain what it was, but it got stronger and stronger. It was as though some one out in the desert was calling and calling to me, although, mind you, there was no sound.

“I sat staring out over the dazzling sand, and then, despite the peculiar sensation, I suppose I really did sleep, for the next thing that happened was that I saw a man in the desert, plodding through the sand. How far he was from me I could not say, but the impression was exactly the one you get looking at a fellow through a very high-power telescope. You can see him apparently only a few feet away, and yet you know—although you can make out the buttons on his coat and almost see the colour of his eyes—that he’s really quite a long way off.

“You remember that Hun sniper you showed me through a signal telescope one day in France, Harry: seemed as if he was six feet away instead of nearly a hundred yards? Well, that was the impression.

“This fellow was plodding drearily through the sand, dragging his feet as though dead beat. His face was grey and haggard, and his lips black and swollen, and his eyes all red. I didn’t see his clothes clearly at all, and have no recollection of what they were like, although, I remember the absolutely done-in appearance of his whole figure.

“As I watched him staggering on, he fell, and lay still a minute. Then he pulled himself up on one arm—he gave me the impression, by the way, of having only one arm—and looked my way, and his lips seemed to be working. Then again I got that inexplicable sensation of some one trying to make me hear over great spaces.

“I suppose I woke up then, for suddenly the man disappeared, and there was only the bare empty desert before me once more. But stronger than ever was the sensation of some one far off calling and calling in a silent voice.

“Well, I sat there a bit, and sometimes the feeling was stronger and sometimes fainter, but always there, rather like when you’re listening to a distant sound across a valley, and sometimes the wind almost sweeps it away, and then suddenly there it is again clear and sharp.

“Well, eventually I went back to camp.

“I’m not a fanciful bloke, and I don’t believe in spooks or all this spiritualistic tosh, most of which is faked. But I am ready to admit that there are lots of things we don’t understand, things like telepathy and so on; and do what I could, I could not get rid of the feeling that some one was calling to me out in the desert.

“Although I tried to put it down to the aftermath of a vivid dream, I could not rid myself of it; and further, something seemed to keep on reminding me that I hadn’t really been to sleep, and the reasonable part of me that insisted on the dream theory couldn’t say that I had either.

“Eventually I decided that I would do something—for me—quite mad. I would push out a little into the desert. I had chagals[1] and things to take enough water for myself and a couple of men for four days, and the camels could do without any for that time. That meant about thirty miles out and back.

“So I told Sadiq, my head camel fellow, and another man that I wanted to look at the desert a bit, and left old Firoz—you remember him in my company in France: he’s with me now as sort of orderly since he left the army—to look after the camp.

“We went out two days in the direction I figured out that my old relative must have taken.

“By the way, the most extraordinary thing was that the moment I gave my orders to Sadiq, the feeling of some one wanting me suddenly vanished.

“We found nothing either day, absolute dead desert. The third morning, while the men were roping up things for our return, the feeling suddenly came on again. Only this time, for some unaccountable reason, it seemed as if the thing or person were close at hand. It worried me a lot. I couldn’t go on, of course; we had only enough water to see us back.

“There was a particularly high dune about six hundred or seven hundred yards from the camp, and finally I said to myself that I’d go up and have a last look from the top with my glasses. I told the men to finish loading up and then wait for me.

“The feeling was very strong as I trudged over the sand, and then, just as I got to the top, it absolutely disappeared again. It never came back either.

“But as I looked down from the top I knew why the feeling had left me. There, in the dip of the sand below me on the far side, lay a man, curled up as though asleep. I knew then that I had not been asleep that first day.

“I ran down the dune to his side hoping that he was only asleep, though somehow at heart I doubted it. Then, as I bent over him, I knew he was not sleeping, or rather that he had gone to sleep for good and all.

“There was nothing much in that; one had seen plenty of dead men before. Besides, it was the ’flu-time still in those parts, and I had picked up people dying or dead along the roadside more than once. But the point was that this was not the roadside, and it puzzled me as to what the man could have been doing in this out-of-the-way corner miles and miles away from any road, even what Central Asia calls a road.

“I examined him closely, and then I sat down and thought quick and hard. Remember that at that time I had been reading the old diary rather a lot, and this man was a shock to me apart from the way I had located him.

“He was gaunt and haggard, and by the look of him had suffered from hunger and thirst before he pegged out; in fact, I rather thought he had died of thirst.

“But that was nothing much; it was first his colour, for as I lifted his arm the loose sleeve slipped back, and the arm was nearly as white as mine. I don’t think he can have been dead more than a couple of days at most. And his type of features was quite unlike the average man in those parts, far too straight and regular. However, fair-skinned people are common enough in North Asia, though not as a rule quite as fair as this man.

“But the next thing I noted was that his wrists were all chafed, as though his hands had been bound recently. Remember I had been reading that diary. I looked at them very carefully for fear I might be imagining things, and the marks were more noticeable on the other arm than on the one I first touched.

“I pulled his clothes open to see if there were any marks or papers, and then I got the shock of my life. Around the shoulder was a blood-clotted bandage that had slipped to one side, and below it showed an open wound in the muscles just below the joint. There was a similar wound at the back.

“It was the sort of wound a sharp shell-splinter makes, or, if you like, the sort of wound that would be made by a steel-shod arrow that had passed right through the top of the arm, and then perhaps been pulled through or broken off.”

Wrexham paused and refilled his pipe. I think he was waiting for us to say something, but we both were silent. I’ve known Wrexham pretty intimately for some years, and he does not invent things, nor does it intrigue him to pull people’s legs with fairy stories. He is, moreover, a most matter-of-fact person, rather sceptical as a rule, and not inclined to believe anything that he cannot see himself. His reports in the field, albeit painfully written and laboriously compiled, used to be masterpieces of accurate information.

Seeing neither of us ventured any remark, he went on:

“Then I started hunting through his kit. His clothes were rather unfamiliar in type: there was a short skin outer garment, much like the poshtin[2] common to most of the cold parts of Asia, though the embroidery on it was of unfamiliar pattern. Under that he wore a sort of short pleated smock of very fine cloth though worn, a fawn-coloured linen it seemed to be; and around the throat, and at the skirt edges, it was embroidered, again in the same unfamiliar pattern in green.

“He had long drawers of the same material as the smock, gartered in below the knees with thin strips of fineish green leather, and on his feet twisted leather sandals of a pattern quite new to me, not unlike Kashmiri chaplis, but with far more intricate plaiting.

“Round his waist was a twisted leather girdle, from which hung a short knife and a leather wallet. I opened the wallet and found some coins—you’ve seen one of them, and as you can imagine they, too, set me thinking—and there was something more besides that I’ll show you presently. There was nothing else of note. But while searching him I came to the conclusion that, if he hadn’t died of thirst, he might have died from sepsis from his wound. I had to bend pretty close, you see.

“Well, I did some pretty quick thinking. The coincidence between this fellow and what old John Wrexham wrote was too marked not simply to stick out. I felt sure then that the old man wrote cold, sober truth. Now for many reasons I didn’t want my men to see this body. They might start thinking too much and making up yarns that would queer my pitch if I managed to start an expedition. I can tell you, the sight of this man made me absolutely resolved to set out across the desert as soon as I could fix up a show that would give some chance of success.

“So I straightened him out and left him, but, before doing this, I cut the straps of his wallet and pushed it and the short knife into the big haversack I was carrying.

“Then I went back to the top of the sand-dune and got out my mapping stuff—not that I had any intention of doing much: I was too busy wondering about it all and trying to evolve theories, but I didn’t want my men to notice anything unusual. I expect, if they looked up at me at all, they thought I was carrying on in the usual way with my map spread out all businesslike.

“That night, when the men had dossed down, I sat up studying the contents of the wallet, and the next day made up my mind to come back to India as fast as I could travel and set about finding one of you two and going north again.”

“‘Once is nothing, twice is coincidence,’” quoted Forsyth. “You’ve got hold of the queerest kind of story, but as yet I see no light, save that it seems to substantiate your ancient uncle’s yarn. But why in hell you should find a man in practically the same circumstances as he did one hundred years ago has me cold. If I didn’t know you, I should say you were pulling our legs.”

“Then you can just imagine how much I wondered that night and many after. The coincidence was too absurdly striking, too close to be real, it seemed; and yet there it was, hard, undeniable fact. But before I go on I’ll show you what I call ‘three times,’ the ‘moral cert.’”

He reached over for the box on the table, opened it, and pulled out just such a leather wallet as he had described, and then a short knife of unusual shape, which he laid beside it under the light.

“Ever seen a knife like that?” he asked.

I shook my head. It was unusual in shape, short, rather broad-bladed with curved hand-guard, obviously a stabbing dagger, but of what nationality I could not say. But what held my eye more than its shape was the faint filigree of silvery metal lines hammered or welded into the bluish steel of the blade. They seemed to form letters of a kind, though not easily decipherable.

Forsyth picked it up and examined it. “I have, but”—he looked at us both—“they were in a museum, and labelled ‘Scandinavian—old,’ and they didn’t have this filigree stuff.”

“I thought you’d say something like that,” said Wrexham. “I looked up a book on old weapons as soon as I got back to India. Now for exhibit No. 2, as the policeman calls it.”

He opened the wallet and took out a flat object wrapped in folds of soft cloth, which he unrolled.

“I don’t think you’ve ever seen things like that in any museum,” he said as he laid the object down.

We both bent over it and simultaneously exclaimed.

It was a little portrait of a girl, painted on what seemed to be a sort of matt-stone or very hard plaster. The colours were fresh and vivid, and the art was of a high standard. But the face held us more then than the fashion of its depicting.

It was a girl looking slightly downward, as though at something she was holding in her hands. Masses of heavy brown hair with a glint of gold, eyes of deepest blue with a violet tinge screened with long lashes, under finely pencilled dark-brown eyebrows, and a skin of rose and ivory with faint blue transparent shadows down the graceful curve where the neck entered the filmy garment that swathed the outlined shoulders.

“I’d cross a good many deserts to meet a girl like that at the far side,” said Forsyth, as he laid down the picture. “Do you mean to say that that was in the wallet?”

“It was,” said Wrexham; “but you’ve not seen all there is to see.”

He turned over the picture, and pointed to some words written on the back, in unmistakable Greek, a clear-cut delicate writing, in vivid black.

“Tell me what that means, either of you?”

We bent over it again. Some of the letters differed slightly from the usual type of classic Greek, but the meaning was quite clear, though the word-endings were unusual.

The long Canadian was the first to speak.

“It’s Greek of a semi-classical type, I should say. I’ve seen stuff not unlike it before, though there are unusual points about it. It runs: ‘God keep my brother safe where’er he go. Euphrosine.’ You agree with that, Lake?”

“Absolutely. It’s perfectly easy to read, though the terminations are neither modern nor quite classical.”

I turned to Wrexham.

“Read us the riddle, John. I think you’ve found the ‘three times,’ the ‘moral cert,’ though God knows what it all means.”

CHAPTER IV
THE GREAT DECISION

Wrexham refilled his pipe and settled back in his chair once more. Then he went on:

“I’ll give you first of all my reading of the things I’ve just told you, and you can tell me whether you think I’m on the right lines.

“In the first place, what do we know for certain? That somewhere in the west corner of the Gobi Desert, a large unknown bit of country, a man of apparently white race has been found. Also, a hundred years ago, my great-great-uncle says he found these unknown mountains, an old gate, and a dead white man.

“Further, that the weapons and other things found on my man are of old type. Then these strange people use Greek, or a form of it. As probably you both know, there was a lot of Greek intercourse with Central Asia about the dawn of the Christian era, and before it. There are races in Afghanistan and the north of India with unmistakable Greek characteristics to this day, and numerous legends of the days of Alexander still survive all up and down the Indian border.

“Now, to my mind all these facts are capable of but one explanation—namely, that hidden in that desert is some isolated settlement of fair-skinned people, perhaps from the old days of Greek domination in Central Asia. Since there is not even a legend about them in the local countryside, it is pretty clear that they have been cut off for a good many centuries. Possibly at some remote period they crossed the desert, which, perhaps, was not so extensive then, before the dry area which has buried so many towns in that part began to form. Or perhaps they were driven out by one of the succeeding waves of invasion from China, and fled northward until they came upon this hidden refuge.

“Whether they are all still of pure white type is not clear, though the two individuals seen seem to be. My man certainly was. The picture of the girl further points to at least some of them having retained all their original racial characteristics.

“I take it both of you agree with this part of my theory?”

“I can think of nothing else that fits the facts,” said I. “What has Forsyth got to say about it?”

“I agree entirely with Wrexham. The writing on the back of the picture is certainly recent. I’ve done a bit of research work with old manuscripts and so on—rather a hobby of mine one time—and I’ll take my oath that that writing is not more than a few years old, judging by the ink, although the type of script must go back hundreds of years. It’s impossible that any of the present Turki or Chinese inhabitants could or would write stuff of that sort. And how could they imagine or invent an old Greek name like ‘Euphrosine’? Unless some daft European, with a gift for forgery and a knowledge of old Greek script, is faking antiques in the middle of the Gobi Desert, there’s only one reading, and that’s the one Wrexham has given us.”

“Well, since you agree with the first part of my thesis, I shall go on with the second,” continued Wrexham. “The first part establishes, as far as one can, the probability of some forgotten Greek settlement to be found beyond the northeast corner of Kashgaria. If so, it’s more than worth looking for. But before I go on, are either of you prepared to come with me? It’s an eighteen months’ job at the very least, and possibly longer. But it’s worth it, I think. Think of the old scientific blokes in Europe if we come back with an authentic account, complete with photos, and records, and perhaps with some of the inhabitants of an old Greek settlement probably much as it was in the days of Alexander.

“Whether or not there’s money in it, I don’t know. You, Harry, are probably not out for money, having enough for your wants. I am personally, but not much. I’m rather a wanderer, and nothing would please me more than a life of exploration. If we can pull this off, we shall be made men in the exploring world, and can be sure of getting sufficient financial support in future to make further expeditions.”

I’ve said that I’ve always had a taste for travel, and have spent not a little time and money on gratifying it. And here was Wrexham not only holding out a prospect of exploring an entirely unknown bit of the world, but gilding the lily with what looked like very good presumptive evidence of living survivals from past centuries. There was nothing much to draw me home. My only close relative was my sister, made a widow by Loos, who, with her two boys, kept the old manor-house farm warm for me. I had settled part of my income on her, and with that and her own little bit of money, she could keep the manor-house home up comfortably and pay for the boys’ schooling. On chucking the service, my idea had been to spend the summers at home and the winters globe-trotting.

So my mind required no making up.

“Count me in,” I said to Wrexham. “Central Asia’s called me ever since I first came East, and here you are with a whole lot of extra attractions.”

“And you, Alec? You weren’t certain before,” said Wrexham.

Forsyth leaned across the table, took up the picture, and gazed at it again.

“No, but you’d only told me part of the story. I’ll start to-morrow if you like.”

“Good! I thought you would both come. Then, now I’ll go on with the second part of my thesis as to how my great-great-uncle and I found two men under such very similar circumstances. You admit that the coincidence is more than strange.

“You remember that the old man came upon a small enclosed space at the end of the valley full of bones, and among them a new corpse killed by an arrow under the entrance gates.

“I find a man whose hands have been bound, and who has been also wounded by what might have been an arrow. Note further that No. 1 was found stripped, although his hands were bound. Ergo, he was stripped before he was killed, otherwise they’d have had to undo his hands to get his kit off.

“No. 2, on the other hand, has clothes and escapes, and what is more is armed. You don’t tie up an armed man to shoot. Note also that my old relative makes no mention of his fellow’s legs having been tied, and my man’s did not seem to have been.

“Now, I thought an awful lot over these two. And this is what it seems to me. Quite obviously men whose arms are bound are prisoners. Execution without the gates was a very typical method in all old countries, and common even now in the East.

“My own idea—perhaps fanciful—is, therefore, that whoever run this place, when they want to kill off any one, they put him outside the gates with his arms bound, and shoot him with arrows either from the gates or from the arrow-slits. Possibly the idea of leaving his legs free is to give the fellow a last sporting chance of getting away to take his luck in the desert if he can bolt before he’s killed.

“Now, my fellow seems to have had a sister—a cultured person, one would say—not the sort of sister you’d associate with a common criminal.

“My idea is that she bribed the executioners not to shoot straight, and that he bolted into the valley, where, by some preconceived arrangement, he found clothes and food, and then freed his hands against a sharp rock. He was a strongly built young fellow, and probably would make the best fight he could, even despite his wound. Possibly he knew that they were going to drop him stuff over the cliffs somewhere in the valley.

“Now, in view of the sister, it seems unlikely that he was a common criminal. A more likely solution would be either some particularly tyrannical rulers, or possibly some kind of bitter civil war. I have my own ideas as to how he got across the desert, which I can explain better when we get there.

“What do you think of my solution so far?”

We had to agree that it was as logical as any interpretation we could put upon it.

“Well, then, and this is why I’ve given it at length. If we find the place, and if we succeed in getting in, we want to be well armed, and, what’s more, have some one more reliable than the local Turkestani camel men. I have Firoz still. Could you, Harry, rake up a reliable sepoy to come?”

“I’ve got Payindah here now. Like Firoz, he’s left the army and toddles round with me. You remember him that day near Festubert when you got that gash across your face. Big Punjabi with green eyes.”

“By Jove, yes. Chap that had his bayonet smashed, and then killed another fellow with the broken end?”

“Yes, that’s him. He was very excited to-night when I said I’d run across you and was coming over to dine here. I expect he’ll come to make his salaams to-morrow.”

“He’s just the very article. Used to be pally with Firoz, too, I remember.

“Well, the other thing is, that we may find when we get there that the gate and the valley are peculiarly unhealthy. Therefore, I suggest that in making up our kit we include some kind of light strong ropes and other climbing gear. You, Harry, I know are a good climber, and Alec says he has done a bit of mountaineering at different times. Then, if the gate is no go, we can hunt around and try and find some other way in over the cliffs.”

“There’s something in that,” said Forsyth. “From your great-great-uncle’s account, the valley did not seem exactly the sort of place you could walk in by if the folk inside hadn’t invited you and didn’t like your face.”

“The last thing I want to suggest is that we take along some kind of medical kit for Alec. If we find these people are really there, they are likely to be fair to middling mediæval, if not even more primitive, though the girl’s picture rather rules out their being anything approaching savages. Therefore, a perfectly good and moderately well-equipped medicine-man might prove a most useful passport in the country. For the same reason I’m lugging along a few oddments in the engineering line to startle the natives with.”

“Yes,” said I, “all that seems very sound. Now, when do you propose that we start? The passes are no good before April, and that’s four months away.”

“Well, first of all we’ve got to fit out. I’ve got a list of kit all worked out, but we must get down to Bombay or Calcutta where one can get things. This place is no good.”

“Then I shall go on down to the C.P. and carry on with my shoot. Would you care to come as well? From there we can go on to Calcutta and fit out.”

“Yes, rather. I’ve never seen a tiger outside of a cage,” said Forsyth. “What about you, John?”

“Yes, I’ll come along, but I won’t stop long. Directly after Christmas I’ll push on and start getting things together, and you can meet me at Calcutta.”

“Then that’s that, and now for bed. One thing, John. How do you account for finding your man? I don’t mean the shooting part and the sister, but the rest? It’s one of the most extraordinary things I ever heard.”

“I don’t attempt to account for it really. But although, as you know, I don’t profess any particular kind of religion, I do believe that something or some one runs the show with some very clear design. And just as the smallest part in the biggest machine has to be made to work on appointed lines, so, too, each one of us must have some definite part to play, though we may not know what it’s all about while we’re doing it. In this case I hope it doesn’t sound as if I was talking through my hat when I say that I really do believe that for some reason or other we’re meant to get to this country which we think exists.

“Remember that my getting there didn’t save that fellow’s life. Also, you can’t quite account by mere telepathy for my feeling of some one calling me. The first day, perhaps, yes. He was probably just about dying then, and maybe his calls for help travelled in some unknown way to me, the nearest human being.

“But—when I started off into the desert—the impression disappeared, and did not reappear until I was on the point of turning back. Then it suddenly reappeared stronger than ever, and the man had been dead two days.

“I was clearly not meant to save his life, but I do think, queer as it may sound, that I was meant to find his body.

“That, combined with the chance of my great-great-uncle finding the country, the chance, if you call it so, of my picking up those old papers at home before I came out, and the chance of my being able to go up to Central Asia and of being there just at that particular moment, to me point to the fact of our being intended to get to that hidden country.

“Why I or either of you or all of us are wanted there, and what we are to do when we get there, the Power that starts us off alone knows. But I cannot help the feeling that we are meant to get there, and that we shall get there. Then beyond that all is a blank. But the getting-there part seems to me Sapper’s ‘three times’—simply a moral cert.”

“As for me, I don’t believe in anything particularly, and it’s all quite beyond me,” said Forsyth. “But the prospect is pleasing enough without worrying about the why and wherefore. I shall look forward to trying twentieth-century medicine on second-century Greeks.”

And on that we went off to bed, after arranging to meet next morning to fix up our journey on to Bombay.

But—unlike Wrexham and Forsyth—I do profess a belief—a very definite, concrete one; and, when I said my prayers that night, I prayed that we might have fortune in our undertaking, and if He meant us to go there—which, after Wrexham’s story, I could not but believe—that we might have grace and strength to carry out whatever He wanted of us.

Before I went to sleep, I read one of my “bed books,” and happened upon the verse of Psalm 23: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.”

A suitable verse for old John Wrexham’s gateway, I thought, and so went to sleep.

CHAPTER V
THE JUMPING-OFF LINE

I shall not lengthen out an already long record by describing our journey from Calcutta, where we did much of our fitting out, up to Kashmir, on over the passes to Yarkand, and thence round the north of the Tarim Desert. Nor shall I describe the high passes of the snow-line, nor the precipitous cliff roads and the overhanging paris, nor the grey snow-fed torrents we traversed. The journey was full of interest and incident, and we met all kinds of strange peoples. Ladakhis, in heavy duffle clothes, Chinese merchants in high felt boots, Khirgiz men in big mushroom hats, and Khirgiz women in tall white head-dresses recalling pictures of Plantagenet days, long caravans of shaggy camels, droves of fat-tailed sheep—such were our acquaintances as we wound along day after brief day and week after long week on our little mountain ponies or on foot over the towering heights. Nor is there space to describe our adventures with officious Chinese Ambans, who were over-punctilious in the matter of passports, and who had to be pacified in various ways.

Sufficient has already been written by various writers concerning these well-known highways, and this aims at being a record of adventure rather than a guide-book. In any case, beyond Aksu I have altered the names and localities and the compass bearings pretty considerably. Having made a few discoveries, we are not inclined to give them away. Recent happenings have altered our ideas on the commercial value of book, photo, and lecture rights, and for the moment, anyway, we have no desire to indicate our footsteps too closely to others who might wish to follow.

So, saving for the fact that we passed within measurable distance of Hami on our way into the Gobi Desert beyond it, this record will not give any particularly valuable data.

It was the end of November when we met in the Gymkhana at Karachi; it was late September of the following year that at last saw us at our starting-place, the tiny village Wrexham had visited on his first trip. The particular point from where I am now taking up the story is vivid in my memory, because it was the day after we had lost our cook. He had long been a thorn in our sides, more particularly in Wrexham’s, who ran our messing arrangements. Still he had some ideas of the preparation of food in a form more or less consumable by Europeans.

Whether he was tired of long marches, or whether he was afraid of going too far toward China, or whether he considered that Wrexham was too knowledgeable a person for an “honest” Ladakhi to get rich on, and that more profitable pickings could be got with some passably ignorant sahib whose business was the securing of record heads in the mountains, one or two of which folk we had met on our journey up, I can’t say.

Anyway, the day we left Aksu (he had drawn the balance of his pay the day before under the pretext of remitting it home through some Indian money-lenders who had cashed cheques for us) he just was not. Wrexham rode back to Aksu to see if he could be found, but failed to discover any traces of him. The man had just vanished. Doubtless he had joined some passing caravan or else hidden with some acquaintance in Aksu. This put us in rather a quandary, for we did not relish the idea of living for the future on purely native food.

And that was the point where we first realized the extraordinary value of that Admirable Crichton, Firoz Khan, Punjabi Mohammedan, of the Salt Range, ex-sapper and miner and devoted slave of Wrexham. He had served on three fronts, finally cutting his name, to follow Wrexham as body-servant and orderly and general master of the household to Central Asia in 1919.

Possibly in India pride of race would have prevented him offering his services, but here in the wastes of Kashgaria, among a people who know not caste, the old Hindu traditions which tend to hamper the Mussulman in India fell from him completely.

We were rather despondently making our evening meal off tinned stuffs requiring no cooking which Payindah Khan, my ex-sepoy orderly and present body-servant, had laid out for us. Payindah had learnt the art of waiting at table in East Africa, when most of our Indian servants had faded away into hospital. When I sent in my papers Payindah had demanded to be taken along wherever I was going, to superintend my “household,” as he called my odd servants and grooms.

Wounded in France, again in East Africa, again in Palestine, the last time pretty badly, he was a Punjabi Mussulman of the old type pre-war soldier. Uneducated yeoman farmer, whose knowledge of letters amounted to a painful slow scrawl which purported to be his signature, and a rapid and accurate but utterly incomprehensible method of doing accounts which saved me a good deal monthly on the bills my following produced, he was gifted with a quick mother-wit and a shrewd skill in judging men that was worth all the cheap board-school type of education that we are trying to thrust on unwilling India at the request of the babu politician.

He was a childless man, wifeless, too, since the ’flu year, and for some reason had not married again. I asked him one day who was going to inherit his land in Salt Range if he didn’t marry, and he told me that his nephew, a fine strapping lad who had been in my company during the war, would take it on, and there were two smaller editions at home waiting to get big enough to join the regiment and let the nephew go back to their land.

Fighting stock were Payindah’s folk. Of the five brothers three were buried on different fronts. Another—crippled from a shell wound—helped the old white-bearded grandfather, with the string of early frontier campaign ribbons, to run the family acres in the Salt Range that their folk had held since time immemorial.

However, I was really talking about Firoz.

After we had finished our meal, and Payindah was clearing away, Firoz came and started on the subject of the cook.

He lamented that he had not had the presence of mind to tie the low-born, self-styled Mussulman—might his face be blackened for all time—to a camel-saddle that night after he had drawn his money. After a lot of talk he got down to the real business—namely, that, until we could get a decent cook, he would feed us, and appealed to Payindah for support in the suggestion.

“Without doubt, sahibs,” said Payindah, “Firoz is a cook of the best after the manner of our folk. It is better that the sahibs should eat decent Punjabi food cleanly cooked by a person of repute than shorten their days by that which one of these half heathen—such as might be got for a price in the bazaars—would prepare.”

“Even so,” chorused Firoz; “and although I know not the ‘side dishes’ and the ‘first-carses’ of the sahibs, still I can cook good pillaus and kababs such as the sahibs have in mess sometimes. Also my chupattis will be far better than the bread that son of perdition used to make, such that Wrexham sahib once broke a knife cutting it.”

This last remark was true, and the resultant disturbance may have been one of the causes of the cook’s going.

Anyway, we heartily agreed that a turn of Punjabi cuisine by Firoz could not be worse and might be far better than what we had suffered at our late cook’s hands. And so it proved once we had broken him of the habit of smothering things in oil.

This disappearance of the cook was in one way a blessing, as it was one less mouth for our expedition across the desert. We were anxious not to take any of the local people with us, since, if we found anything worth having, we wished rather to keep the knowledge to ourselves. We had bought our own camels at Yarkand so as to render us independent. The only local man we kept on continuously was a Turki camel-driver. Since the country we were going into was quite unknown, there was nothing to be gained from the knowledge the local people possessed. Hence we had simply hired extra men for a few stages at a time, replacing them by others as we went along.

The one exception, the camel-driver, a man who had accompanied Wrexham in 1919, Sadiq by name, was passably honest and trustworthy, and seemed to be a wanderer with no particular relatives. He had, however, sufficient local standing to serve to keep us in touch with the countryside on our way up from Yarkand, and was extremely useful in looking after the camels and the hired men. Both Firoz and Payindah had a good knowledge of the beasts, Firoz having learnt much about them in Palestine, where he had been transport lance naik of his unit.

For our journey across the desert we had reduced our kit to a minimum.

The main question was water, and for that we had brought special tanks from India of galvanized iron, holding seventeen gallons apiece, two full tanks making the camel-load. We had four camel-loads of water, making one hundred and thirty-six gallons in all, which, considering men alone, would give us rather over five gallons a day for the seven of us for twenty-five days. If we did not find the hills old John Wrexham had written about, we ought to be able to make our way back all right, since the consumption of food and water would automatically lighten the loads of the camels, and heavier stores could be shifted off the other beasts, who by that time would be pretty tucked up.

Still, I don’t think any of us feared not finding the hills and the stream or water of sorts. We were all thoroughly convinced that the story was true. The coincidence of Wrexham finding the dead man in the desert tallied too much with the account in his great-great-uncle’s diary for the original story to be an invention. Our main preoccupation was how to get into the country, and the kind of reception we were likely to get. We had also arranged to start with one camel-load of full rations for men, which should last us three weeks easily, or a month if we were very careful, and about one and a half camel-loads of grain and oil for camels, giving starvation ration for about the same period. We were chancing our arm over the matter of food for the camels, and they could not possibly stay anything like that period without water; but within five days of starting we could count on ascertaining whether or not there was any snow mountain in the distance, and if so we could safely risk giving part of our water to the camels. If nothing whatever was seen after six days, we should, of course, have to consider the question of returning.

One camel carried our personal baggage, a very limited amount for each, our books, maps, survey instruments, and so on. Another carried ammunition, of which we brought a fair amount. We might, if we got into the country alive, have to fight, and we all agreed that ammunition was a sine qua non. To save complications in the matter we had standardized our armament. There were five .303 rifles, one for each of us, and one each for the two Punjabis. These we carried ourselves. We had two thousand rounds of ammunition, a liberal allowance for eventualities.

Wrexham, Forsyth, and I each had a forty-five automatic Colt pistol with one hundred and fifty rounds apiece. And on the ammunition camel we had a twelve-bore gun with some three hundred cartridges for shooting for the pot. The rest of the camel’s load was made up of a small tool outfit for Wrexham, who, unlike many sappers, was a man of his hands, and never better pleased than when doing odd jobs, and a goodly medical outfit for Forsyth, as we had agreed at Karachi.

The ninth camel carried climbing gear, ropes, and the like, oddments of camp kit, and an eighty-pound tent, with nearly a half-load of rations for the camels.

Lastly, we had one spare beast which could be used for riding at a pinch if any of us fell sick, but was primarily intended to replace any casualty. All ten were very carefully picked animals, and we had got them into the best of condition against the hardships they would have to face once we struck out into the desert.

We had decided to leave the road at Wrexham’s village and march by compass on a bearing, of fifty-two degrees. Old John Wrexham said he went due northeast (forty-five degrees), and then had had to go right-handed for nearly two days before he reached the valley. On the assumption that his records were accurate, the bearing of fifty-two would bring us to the hills about a day’s march from the valley. On the other hand, if—as was likely in view of his troubles coming back—the distance was more than he had estimated on the outward journey, it would put us closer still to the valley, perhaps within a mile or two.

At Wrexham’s village we filled up with water—we had made up our food loads at the last town and lived on local produce since—and added a little in the way of such fresh vegetables as were procurable. We spent two busy days there, finally fitting out and doing various odd repairs to gear such as are rendered necessary after a long march.

Wrexham, who had now a pretty useful knowledge of Turki, spent most of his time talking to the inhabitants, and asking questions about routes in the desert, and in carefully creating an atmosphere favourable to the reasons he gave for our trip. He announced that we intended travelling on to the next big town, but, instead of following the road, we were going to move parallel to it about two days’ distance into the desert in search of ruined towns, abandoned as the country desiccated and the desert grew.

All the way along we had displayed a keen (and not altogether fictitious) interest in archæology, employing our various halts in visiting old ruins, and here and there buying small antique or pseudo-antique relics.

As a consequence we had no difficulty in making people believe our story, and in any case there was no reason for them to think that we were mad enough to want to strike straight into the unknown and pathless desert to the north. We had not told either the Punjabis or Sadiq what our real destination was, lest they should give it out to all and sundry.

Our final departure was fixed for the 1st October, and we intended to make an early start and carry out as long a march as possible.

We had everything except the barest necessities packed up the night before ready for loading, and held a final inspection of water-tanks and stores before it got dark.

After we had finished our evening meal and the two Punjabis were packing up the last oddments, we three sat out at the entrance of our little tent muffled up in poshtins, for the nights were by now pretty cold.

“We’ve reached the jumping-off line, and zero hour’s pretty near,” said Forsyth. “I wonder what we shall find at the far end?”

“Water, I trust,” said Wrexham, the ever practical; “for if we don’t we shall have to turn about and scuttle back double time.”

“I wasn’t thinking of water, you unromantic materialist. I want to know the kind of people we’re going to find. Think of finding a bit of the ancient world still in being. Lord, think of the yarns one would have to tell when one got back home! I’d make a few stuffy professors I know sit up some,” replied the doctor.

“If the local inhabitants are as pleasant-looking as the lady Euphrosine of the picture, I should think you could make even the driest of old inhabitants sit up,” said I. “I wonder whether your passion for ethnology in general would blind you to a keener interest in specific living specimens in that case.”

Our stay in Calcutta had proved to me that Forsyth was far from being averse to the society of fair maidens; in fact, at one time I had serious fears lest the attractions of certain damsels might not prove more potent than that of mythical Greek relics in the heart of Asia.

“Oh, dry up, Harry. You can never get away from your innuendoes about frocks and frills, merely because when I’m in civilization I like to enjoy it.”

“I didn’t make any innuendoes. Your guilty conscience betrays you. Did you leave any address in Calcutta, or leave touching messages about how your thoughts would travel from far sand-buried Khotan, or how sweet certain memories would seem in forgotten Lop Nor?”

I ducked the tobacco-pouch he threw at me, and while he was looking for it resumed in a more serious vein:

“Have you ever worked out, Wrexham, how that fellow you found could have got so far across the desert without water?”

“Yes; I’ve thought about that a good deal. My own idea is that he must have had some with him as a start. If you remember, the old diary refers to the stream running out about a dozen miles. That would give him a start, nearly a day’s march. He might have carried a load of twenty pounds—say two gallons. He carried little else, presumably a little food. Two small skins at a gallon apiece would have lasted him four days, even allowing for his being wounded. That takes him five days out—say, sixty miles. Remember, he was apparently fighting for his life.

“The question is, what did he do after that? My own theory on the point is that he was saved for a time by the rain. You may remember I said—at least I think I told you—that we had had rain on and off for a week. In the diary you remember that my great-great-uncle mentions having noticed some rock outcrops on his way back. Well, they might have hollows in them which would fill up in rain, not necessarily big ones, but things holding a few gallons, like you see in most of the hills about here. A good shower would give him another refill, and so carry him on another thirty miles or so. Probably thereafter there would be no more outcrops, and the last bit he had to do without water, and that—perhaps combined with his wound—is to my mind what finished the poor devil off. Rotten luck pegging out like that only two days short of help.

“That theory, by the way, is one of my reasons for heading a bit more south than the course steered by my great-great-uncle. If there are such rock outcrops, and if we have any more rain such as we had last week, we might get an opportunity of giving the camels a bit more to drink.”

“Quite a sound bit of deduction. It will be interesting to see if we find any little rock-pools or places that could be pools on the way. Well, I see the men have turned in, and I think we might do worse than follow suit. It’s past nine, and we’ve got to be up at four and see the camels loaded and get a meal before we start.”

“I think so, too,” said Forsyth, getting to his feet. “Lord, aren’t the stars extra gorgeous to-night? I wonder if we shall find these people use the old Greek names still?”

“Dunno about that, but I’ll take a bet they still say the same kind of things to the same kind of girls out under the same stars. Human nature’s the one thing that does not change much through the ages. History shows you that, all right.”

“With you, Harry. It’s the one unchanging factor in a very changeable world. However, what about the bed stakes?” Wrexham, a podgy figure in his poshtin, knocked the ashes of his pipe out against the heel of his boot and made for his bedding roll.

Ten minutes later we were all rolled up in our blankets, and Forsyth turned down the light.

CHAPTER VI
THE DESERT

At 4 A.M. Wrexham, who has the faculty of waking at whatever time he wishes, kicked us out of our blankets and said it was time to move. Outside the tent Firoz was busy with breakfast, while Payindah and Sadiq were roping up the last bundles of kit. The moment we were outside, Payindah rolled up our valises, and then they struck and packed our eighty-pound tent.

We ate a pretty solid meal, for long travelling and campaigning had inured us to food at the small hours, and we wanted to make as long a march as possible that day, when the camels would be at their freshest. Breakfast over, the camels were brought up by Sadiq and a friend picked up in the village, who hung about our camp while we were there.

Then we set to loading the beasts, who were fairly tractable after their long marches, though, of course, in the manner of all camels, they gurgled and snarled incessantly, or blew out pink bladders from their cavernous, ill-smelling mouths while voicing their complaints. There was no trouble over the water camels; it was the miscellaneous collections such as that carried by the ammunition camel which caused us many anxious moments trying to secure the various odd-shaped packets into two compact loads. Fortunately, they were constant ones that would not have to be broken en route—at least, we hoped not.

By 5.30 A.M. the last camel stood up finally loaded, Firoz hurriedly attaching two hurricane-lamps and a bundle of kitchen oddments to the peak of the saddle, after the manner of the immemorial East.

It was still dark, but there was a faint, faint glimmer in the east that foreshadowed the coming dawn, and the dark velvet of the starlit sky was beginning to show a tinge of indigo above the far horizon. Away on the outskirts of the village a mournful dog wailed his sorrows to the unheeding dark.

A final inspection of the loads by the aid of a lantern, a last look round our camp-site, and then Wrexham—unanimously appointed Caravan Bashi—gave the order to start.

The first part of our way lay along a little track fringing some fields, the last bits of cultivation on the edge of the desert. Thereafter we were to march by Wrexham’s oil compass. We had reconnoitred the first five or six miles the day before, dead level going, so there was no danger of delay by unforeseen obstacles.

With Wrexham and Firoz at the head of the little string of silent-footed camels, Forsyth and Sadiq in the middle to see that no loads slipped or beasts strayed aside before dawn, and Payindah and myself bringing up the rear, we moved out along the sandy track with no sound save the monotonous tinkling of the leading camel’s bell.

Sadiq’s friend, after embracing Sadiq three times in Eastern fashion, stood at the edge of the camp-site to wish us luck as we went. Then he disappeared in the dark, the last fellow-being we were like to see for the next ten days at the most optimistic computation.

There was a slight check as we neared the end of the fields, from which I guessed that Wrexham was getting his bearings; then the leading camel’s bell rang out again on the chill dawn air, the ghostly great beasts in front of me quickened their pace once more, and we passed out into the desert.

The full dawn saw us just emerging from the last vegetation, odd dried-up thickets and reeds, while in front lay the rolling low sand-dunes that were to be our home for some time to come. The air was cold and still, a blessing for which we were devoutly thankful. The first day we had looked out over the desert there had been a strong northeast wind, which blew great yellow sand-spouts along, blinding us from time to time. But to-day, as if for a favourable omen, hardly a breath stirred, and the blue distances were clear.

At first we passed over ground covered with fine soft dust, here and there splashed with white and grey salt deposits that crackled underfoot, and now and then small terraces of friable clay, last relics of the days when all this area was the bottom of the great inland sea. Then, after an hour or so, we got into low sand-ridges, the high-water mark of the restless ocean, which stretched before us on three sides as far as the eye could reach.

A little farther and we were well out of our depth—to continue the simile of the sea—in ridges and ridges of sand from ten to fifteen feet high, like the breakers along a coast, swelling up gently from the direction of the prevailing northeast wind, and steeper-faced—sometimes almost concave at the top—on the south and west where we approached them, for all the world like waves about to break and solidified in the process.

All day we travelled hour after plodding hour through this trackless sea of fine greyish sand. The last of the scanty vegetation had been left behind when we made our midday halt, not a blade of grass, not a tamarisk, nothing but sand, utterly void of life. The sun beat down on to the sand, and the glare was blinding, but even at midday the heat was not oppressive. We were thankful for our coloured glasses, and even the two Punjabis were glad to put on those we had brought for them, much as they had jested at the idea at first.

We covered eighteen miles that day, and camped in a little valley among the dunes, where by good fortune we found some dried-up tamarisk roots, which gave us a good fire, for the evening temperature fell fast once the sun was down, and we were glad enough to slip into our poshtins once more. The heat absorbed by the sand in the day radiates off at an immense pace after dusk, if one can talk about that period of the day, almost non-existent in sand countries.

After our evening meal that night, we decided—as we had previously arranged—to tell the men something about our destination. We began with the two Punjabis.

“Listen, Payindah and Firoz,” began Wrexham, “to an old tale of my father’s grandfather’s brother, who was once in the army of John Company Bahadur. He left the army and came up here travelling, even as I have done, and he came by the same road into this very desert.

“After many days he found in its very heart high hills with snow mountains, and at the gate of the hills he found an old fort and outside that a dead man. And the dead man was white, even as I or as Lake sahib or as Forsyth sahib.

“But when he wished to enter the hills the two men with him became afraid, so that he had to return across the desert, and the water he had was finished, and first his camels and then his men died. And he himself all but died. And not wishing to tell the people here aught of his discovery until he should have searched more, he said nothing but returned to Hind, to his brother who commanded a regiment; and there he also died.

“Now, we three desire much to see these hills, for, as you know, the sahibs consider greatly the finding of strange lands and of strange peoples.

“And of these hills and of the people who must live in them because of the white man my great-grandfather’s brother saw, there is nothing known either to the people living around the desert or even to the sahibs who have travelled in this part.

“But it may be that my great-grandfather’s brother dreamt this thing, or it may be that he was out of his senses with fever. If so we shall have a long hard journey for nothing, and we also may come to die of thirst, even as his men did.

“Or if we get there, we may find that the people are as the Mahsuds or Wazirs of the Punjab border, and we may be attacked and perhaps slain.

“Now, all this we have told you that, before it is too late, you may yet say whether you will come with us or not. For it is not the custom of the sahibs to take men into danger unless those men be willing.

“If you consider that you would rather return to the Punjab, you shall have money and papers, and shall go back to-morrow. But we are determined to go on and see what there is to be seen. We have said nothing to any man till now, because had it been known others might have followed, and we do not wish any one to find this land until we have seen it with our own eyes.”

Without hesitation Payindah replied:

“For ten years have I followed Lake sahib, since he was a chota sahib in the regiment. I have fought with him in three campaigns, and do I leave his service now that he goes into a new country? If God has decreed that we be swallowed by the sands or die of thirst or perchance be slain—well, we shall, whether we go on or whether we go back.”

“And so say I,” chimed in Firoz. “For twelve years have I been with sahibs, and for seven years have I served Wrexham sahib, and whither he goes, there go I, too, till he casts me out. We are not like the men who went with his great-uncle, doubtless sons of Hindustan from Delhi or elsewhere such as were found in Jan Kampni’s[3] regiments, or perchance knaves such as the Ladakhi cook. We be Awans of the Punjab, Payindah and I, and as for there being Mahsuds or such in these hills that the sahib’s great-uncle saw, we have spoken with Mahsuds and Wazirs—aye, with Mohmands also, and they did not talk too loudly. Do I not speak truth, Payindah?”

“Without doubt. Rememberest also certain Germani in Farance the day thy sahib got that love token on his cheek. They were bigger than Mahsuds, and we were but a few among many. But they fell down very quickly when we spoke to them with bayonets, not knowing their foul talk. And my bayonet was already broken, I recall.”

“It was as thou sayest. That Germani sergeant had a stout breast-bone. Wrexham sahib says that his people thirst after seeing new lands. But, as the sahibs know, we of the Punjab are not children to play about the house-door always. We also like seeing new lands. My own grandfather went up into Tibet with a sahib not long after the Mutiny.” Firoz broke off his string of reminiscences. “Whither the sahibs go, thither we also come.”

With Sadiq it was not quite so easy. He feared the desert not a little, but the promise of extra baksheesh finally allayed his fears. Also, the prospect of finding new places which might have treasure—the dream of so many of his folk—was perhaps alluring. Anyway, after pondering a bit, he said he would come.

Next morning we started early again, and made good progress once more, though by now the dunes were growing in height, up to twenty-five to thirty-five feet. We remarked that both to right and left they seemed higher still, but that may only have been the effect of looking out to the horizon. That day we made sixteen miles, for the higher dunes exacted their toll in the day’s march, although actually the pace did not seem much slower.

On the way Wrexham looked in vain for the place where he had found the dead man. The continually shifting sand-dunes left no chance of locating any spot not marked by some definite permanent feature, such as a clump of dead trees. By now the man’s bones or his mummified body were doubtless buried under the sands, perhaps to show up again centuries hence.

That night we looked out from a high dune—nearly fifty feet it must have been—over our route of next day, and saw that the dunes ahead were bigger than those we had crossed so far, and the sky, which had hitherto been cloudless, showed windy streakings to the northeast.

“Harder going to-morrow, I think,” said Wrexham, pointing to the wind-clouds on the horizon.

Sure enough, next morning at dawn a strong northeast wind was blowing, and everything was smothered in sand. Our tea was full of it, our food was gritty with it, and our hair and our clothes ran sand.

The dunes were higher now; fifty to sixty feet was about the average, and still we had the impression that our route was lower than the surrounding country. We covered only thirteen miles that day owing to the wind, the sand devils, and the heavier going and higher dunes. Our faces were masks of sand and perspiration, and we looked out with sand-reddened eyes under sand-whitened eyebrows.

That night we had to give the camels, who were showing signs of fatigue, a small water ration from our precious store. While we were watering them, Sadiq came up to suggest our turning back the next day. There could be no ruins in this wilderness of sand, he said, and there was not a vestige of a sign of any hills. But, if we would go back, he knew a man who had found really first-class ruins, and if we wanted mountains—well, there were lashings of them quite close to the trade route. Finding us obdurate, he gave up his endeavours, but I could see that he was convinced that all sanity had departed from us, and was doubtless entreating Allah to turn us back soon.

“To-morrow evening, anyway, we ought to get the first view of the snow, provided that the air clears a bit,” said Wrexham, as we sat in the stuffy tent with the flies laced up, trying to eat food that was not more than one third sand.

“If there is any snow in the world,” said Forsyth, whose eyes seemed to have suffered more than ours from the driving gritty wind. “I had an idea that the dust of Mespot was the last word, but it’s only toilet powder compared to this article.”

He ruefully scraped the top of his chupatti, hoping to get below the outer layers of sand.

The following morning the wind was less, but it freshened again later. The dunes were now great billows sloping up to seventy and eighty feet, and taxed the camels severely. Still we pushed on, struggling hour after hour, through the heavy loose sand among the little spumes and fountains that danced and tossed on the brinks of the dunes where the cutting wind beat into our faces. When we halted that evening, after doing thirteen miles, the wind was perhaps a little less, but all around the horizon was veiled and grey with sand.

Next day the going was as bad—dunes up to nearly one hundred feet in places—and the wind stronger, while about midday the father and mother of all dust-storms came on, one of the kind that makes you think it’s midnight in Hades. For an hour we sat huddled up in the lee of a dune, a circle of dumb men and dumb beasts, under the biting lash of a sand-laden wind that seemed to flow past like some torrent of grit. The two Punjabis had swathed their faces in the ends of their pagris, and the rest of us buried ours as well as we could in the big collars of our poshtins.

It passed at last, but it was another hour ere we thought it was worth going on. Nine miles was all we made that day, and some of the dunes must have been over one hundred and twenty feet high.

The camels were showing clearly their weariness and lack of water, as they swayed along slowly, with lack-lustre eyes, dragging gait, and heavy breathing through distended nostrils. That night again we had to give them some more of our precious water, and it became clear that, unless we could get some definite proof of hills in front within the next thirty-six hours there could be no question of going on.

“Perhaps we shall get a fine day to-morrow,” said the ever-optimistic Wrexham. “I want to see the snow the diary talks about.”

“If ever I see snow or water again, I shall go and lie in them and refuse to move again till all the sand I’ve absorbed these last forty-eight hours is washed right out of my system,” snorted Forsyth, bathing his sore eyes in half a teacupful of water.

“Well, I hope you’ll see some to-morrow, though it will be a bit far off for bathing. It’s still absolutely hidden by sand to-night.”

Next day the wind had dropped, though a heavy dust haze still hung in the air. Like the previous day, the dunes were great high slopes, anything from eighty to one hundred feet. But the cessation of the wind made going easier, and the thinning atmosphere made us hopeful of a glimpse of the promised hills.

By the midday halt the sky was pretty clear all round, save in the one direction we wanted to see, and there, instead of our hills, was a heavy bank of cloud. Wrexham and I sat down despondently on the high dune up which we had climbed while Payindah was getting out some food, and looked out with our glasses at the distant clouds. We scanned each little bit of the bank, seeking in vain for the white glint of snow.

Suddenly Wrexham gripped my shoulder.

“Look there, Harry! Just in the middle of that dark bit like a camel’s hump. Isn’t that something white?”

“Which one?”

He pointed, but I couldn’t make out anything.

Then he laid the telescope on it and bade me look.

I looked through the glass, and there, sure enough, just below the dark cloud showed a faint whiteness that might be cloud or might be—could it be?—the longed-for snow.

The cloud-bank was slowly changing in shape from moment to moment. The big dark cloud that Wrexham had indicated was slowly moving to one side. But the white patch seemed not to shift. Then for a fleeting instant it showed clear, a sharp point of blue-veined white that could be no cloud.

“I think you’re right, John,” I said as I sat up. “Look!”

He glued his eye to the telescope, gave a whoop, hurriedly fished out his compass, and laid it on the line of the telescope.

“See,” he said, “bearing of fifty-six degrees. We’re not far out, old man, and if that’s not snow, then I’ve never seen it.”

We shouted at the top of our voices to Forsyth below, “Snow! Snow! Snow!”

He came up the slope as fast as the sand would let him, and got just a glimpse before the clouds veiled it again, a faint, tiny peak like a distant pearl in the dark mass of clouds. Then the heavy masses veiled it once more, and it disappeared from our gaze.

One more entry of the old diary was verified. We felt almost reckless now, though there must be many marches ahead, and our fatigue fell from us like a wet blanket as we glissaded down the sand-slope among the men. The two Punjabis seemed to take it as all in the day’s work. Doubtless if we expected snow ahead, there would be snow. They were of the pre-war type, with a prodigious belief in anything their sahibs said.

In a short while the wind had sprung up again, and we travelled on over the same high wind-tossed dunes of yellow grey sand. As much of the sky as was visible showed broken wisps of cloud. I remarked on this to Wrexham, and wondered whether there was any chance of rain. Such rainy season as there is in the desert was practically finished.

We were just going up the highest dune we had yet struck, a toilsome effort, when the question of rain arose. As we got to the top, Wrexham stopped and looked ahead. The wind had dropped a little once more.

“What’s that?” he said, pointing; “it looks like rock.”

I looked in the direction he indicated, and there, about a mile ahead, what seemed to be a low hillock of rock, dark in colour, broke the monotony of the grey landscape.

“Is rock, I think,” said I. “If so, it will be a pleasant change to camping on sand.”

“Seems as if we must have got on to the line the great-great-uncle followed on his way back.”

“It’s quaint finding an outcrop like that in the middle of the desert. I suppose it must be a peak in the buried strata that joins the hills on either side. Let’s go on and see what it is.”

Pushing ahead, we climbed to the top of the rocky hill, and to our amazement found a sort of rock basin perhaps three hundred yards long by fifty to sixty yards broad with jagged edges of limestone. It looked for all the world what it probably was, the top of a long ridge which had either broken through the earth at some prehistoric period, or else been gradually silted up on all sides as the sand encroached. It stood perhaps one hundred feet above the tops of the highest dunes, and on a clear day must have been a fine vantage point.

“A few hours’ heavy rain would make that into a good thing in lakes,” I said.

“Yes,” replied Wrexham; “you can see there has been water upon occasion. Look at that thin layer of clay in the middle with the cracks in it. I vote we camp here to-night. We can’t do much more to-day, and this is better than settling down in the sand. We shall be out of the worst of it at this height, and if by any chance there is rain we stand more chance of collecting some than among the sand-dunes. Not that I have much hopes, because the rainfall in these parts at this time of year is about two hundredths of an inch in the month.”

The camels had halted at the foot of the hill, so we shouted down to Forsyth to bring them up, and presently we were all busy setting up camp for the night except Wrexham, who went wandering round the rocky basin. I wondered what he was doing, and when presently I saw him sitting down with a notebook I went up and asked him what he was at.

“I was just calculating the size of this hollow. It’s a fine natural catchment area, as it slopes inward on every side except just the narrow south end, where it’s broken away. It forms a regular sort of trough. That probably explains why it’s so comparatively free of sand. The only sand that gets in is that blown up high by the wind, and then the prevailing wind sweeps it out at the south end again. If that end was blocked now and it did rain, we could catch enough water to give the camels a decent drink.”

“Then let’s do it,” said I.

“That’s just why I was figuring out the area. I make out that, if the end was blocked, this would give a yield of something like three hundred gallons from a couple of hours’ decent rain. Say two hundred, allowing for what would be sucked up by cracks. It wouldn’t require much of a stop at the end either, since the open part is narrow and the slope very gradual.”

“Well, let’s do it quick. It would make all the difference to the camels if they could get a real drink. They’ve done well so far, but there’s no mistake about it they’re beginning to tire fast.”

We got all hands on to it, and blocked up the end of the long, shallow, trough-like hill with stones mixed with loose sand. Not a very waterproof dam, but it might hold once it got wet.

Then we sat down to wait for the rain. But none came, and at last we retired to bed, uncheered even by another glimpse of the distant snow. The air was still heavy with sand, and, though the little vistas of sky that we could see among the whirling dust were covered with lead-coloured clouds, never a grateful drop fell.

That night we figured out that we should have to push on now, and trust to finding water at the end, or else turn back next day. The water—although it would have been just sufficient for men for the double journey—allowed nothing for the camels, and we had had to give them water, and realized now that they would have to be given more in future. It was three very grave-faced, unshaven men who sat discussing by the light of the hurricane-lamp.

Said Wrexham finally:

“If we start back to-morrow we’ve just the minimum to get us home. If we go on—assuming that we’ve passed the halfway line—we may just get to the hills as we finish our water. Then, if we don’t find it, or if the great-great-uncle’s stream has dried up—we’re done, finished. Apart from water, we’re chancing things a bit over the camels’ grub for getting back.”

He looked at us as though seeking our thoughts, and for a moment or two neither of us spoke. Then I made up my mind.

“Personally I’m for pushing on,” said I; “some of the loads are getting lighter now, and, if any full-load camels show signs of crocking up, we can put the empty tanks on them. There’s certainly snow ahead, and that must mean water, and water will mean grazing for the camels. Also, if we go back now, we’ve given the whole show away.”

“Yes,” put in Forsyth; “and next time we start everybody would know what was up. Even if the Punjabis kept their mouths shut, Sadiq would talk. That snow is not on the map, and the next explorer fellow who came along would be sure to have a shot at it. I’m in favour of our taking the chance of water and going on. Your uncle’s story points to all sorts of things worth finding, and it’s working out truer every day.”

“Yes, most of it seems to have been substantiated now,” said I. “John found a similar kind of man, we’ve seen the snow—unmistakable snow to my mind, though far off; and last, we’ve found one of the peculiar outcrops of rock he mentioned seeing on his return. There are too many coincidences about it for me to want to turn back.” I turned to Wrexham. “I’m all for shoving on, John, and Alec is, too.”

“Then, if you two are for pushing on, that settles it. I’d no ideas of going back myself—I think we’re intended to go on; but, since we are chancing our luck badly over this water question, I thought I ought to find out your ideas first.”

We turned in then, after a last lookout to see if anything could be seen of the sky. The wind was still blowing up sand, but such patches of sky as were visible seemed not quite so cloudy, and here and there a star showed through the murk.

“No luck, I’m afraid,” said I, as I crawled into my valise. “However, it looks clearer, and should be better going to-morrow.”

“I hope the dunes get lower. They ought to, for we must be leaving the middle of the desert now; I figure we’ve done over eighty miles. It was about seventy yesterday, and we did quite twelve to-day. Lord, I’m sleepy! Night, night!” Wrexham curled up into his blankets, and was asleep almost at once, and within five minutes Forsyth’s heavy breathing showed that he, too, had slipped into dreamland.

Tired though I was, it was some little time before I got to sleep that night. I’m not given to pessimistic forebodings, but I could not help wondering, as I lay awake in the dark, whether we were wise in going on. Things look so different when you think them out by yourself in the dark from what they seem in the light in company. However, I do believe in Providence very firmly, and the coincidences we had met and heard of in this quest seemed too marked for me to disbelieve. So, finally pushing my doubts firmly into the background, I fell asleep to the whistling music of the sand-laden wind outside.

CHAPTER VII
THE DISTANT HILLS

It must have been about four in the morning that I woke, with the same sort of feeling of something being different as you have when a ship stops at night, and the absence of the engines’ murmur, which kept you awake the first night or two, now wakes you up seeking the accustomed sound.

Then I realized that the wind had stopped. I unlaced the tent flies to see if the sky was cloudy or clear, but as I came out I heard a rushing sound and a gust beat on the tent as if it would tear it from its pegs. A thick whirl of sand filled the air, and the rush of it woke the others.

“What’s up?” called out Wrexham as I struggled with the flies.

I explained as best I could, and while doing so smelt the unmistakable fresh smell of rain.

“By Jove, I believe it’s rain coming up!” I called out, and pulled the flies apart again. The wind dropped, and was succeeded by a steady patter on the tent wall.

It got harder and harder and steadier and steadier, and we heard the men stirring.

“Come on!” called Wrexham, “all hands outside with every d——d pot and pan you can get and see if we can fill ’em.”

By the light of the rain-dimmed hurricane-lamp I could see Firoz spreading out the cooking-pots, and Payindah taking advantage of the wind stopping to peg out a waterproof-sheet. Cold as it was, we stood out in the rain for the sheer pleasure of feeling the sand being washed off our faces and our skins expanding again. Our scanty water ration had allowed nothing for washing. It rained more or less continuously for nearly two hours, and stopped just as the dawn was breaking.

After it had gone on for a quarter of an hour or so, we three, with Firoz carrying our two spades and a pick, went to the far end where we had made the dam.

We already found a thin trickle of water reaching it and apparently being sucked up by the sand. But a little later the dam had bound together, and we stood there in the rain watching with delighted eyes the growth of a small black pool that spread and spread until the end of it passed out of the misty halo of light. Wrexham stayed there till dawn like a Dutchman saving a dyke, getting up at intervals with Firoz to heap more and more sand on to the outer and upper sides of his dam.

“Not bad calculations,” he said, when the growing dawn revealed to us a pool of water—somewhat sandy, but still water—some thirty feet long, as much as three feet wide in places, and nearly a foot deep in the middle of the deepest pool. “I should say there was at least one hundred and fifty gallons there.”

Our first care was to fill up every utensil we had, and from them, straining through several thicknesses of cloth, to replenish all the tanks. Then we gave the camels as much as they could swallow. You could almost see the poor beasts swelling as they drank. Even after that there was a certain amount left, rather sandy and muddy.

Wrexham looked at it.

“If I thought that would last the day, I would suggest stopping here till to-morrow to give the camels a rest and another drink, but what doesn’t evaporate will soak through the dam, so it would be no score. We’d better use what’s left for a bath.”

So we did, and felt new men once more. The two Punjabis followed, but Sadiq, beyond washing his face and hands, did not appear interested. The removal of the sand crust from his face seemed quite enough ablutions in his estimation. We started rather later than usual, and, although the rain had ceased, the sky was yet heavy with clouds. The air was clear, but there was no great visibility in the horizon.

Once we left the rock where we had camped, the rain seemed to have made little difference to the sands, save that the upper surface was somewhat caked, but it was refreshing to breathe air that was air and not part sand. There was only a gentle breeze, and it was free from the irritating particles that we had been breathing for the last few days. The dunes were still very high, despite Wrexham’s opinion that they ought to be getting lower. I estimated that the majority of them were little under eighty feet in height most of that day. There was a very slight steaminess in the air as the sun warmed, but as the sky cleared we began to see farther and farther.

Men and beasts alike stepped out briskly, for the downpour had put new life into us all. As we went, we climbed each fresh dune in the hope of seeing a new glimpse of the hills in front, but for a long time saw nothing beyond the desert’s yellow edge. A thick bank of cloud still hung to the northeast, although the sky above us was by now clear blue.

We halted about one o’clock, and it was after that, as the sun began to start down on his journey westward, that we were rewarded by our first view of the hills. Forsyth was the first to draw our attention to the clouds to the northeast having thinned considerably, and a little later Payindah called to me as we topped a dune. Wrexham was down in the dip in front.

“Look, sahib, those be surely hills in front!”

I looked, and there was a rift in the cloud-bank that had baffled us all day, and in it showed hills, real, unmistakable, blue-shadowed hills, such as one sees from the northern stations of India as you look out over the sunburnt expanse of plain. They were a long way off—forty or fifty miles, I estimated—although in the clean, rain-washed air they looked closer with the sun falling directly upon them. These must be the hills below the high snow we had seen.

“Surely, Payindah, hills like the hills of the Punjab.”

I called to Wrexham breasting the slope ahead with the leading camels:

“Hills, John! Hills ahead!”

He stopped as I called, and then, as my words reached him, he broke into something like a run up the steep slope and stopped. Then I saw his glasses come out. I slithered down the dune I was on, and raced up to him, picking up Forsyth as I went.

The clouds were thinning even as I looked, and presently there stretched before us to right and left a long wall of hills, faint heather colour, below a long veil of clouds.

“‘What I had sought all day in vain, the faint lilae haze below the white that I have noted marks always the lower hills below high snow,’” said Wrexham, quoting from his great-great-uncle’s diary. “We’ve found them, after all! Thank God, we didn’t turn back. I think that rain must have been sent on purpose.”

Wrexham is not what you would call a religious man in the strict sense of the word, but I think—and I know him well—that under his very practical and somewhat materialistic exterior is a very strong belief in a Creator who takes an active interest in His creation. But that was the first time I had ever heard him make such a definite confession of his faith, sure sign of his being deeply moved. We stood in silence a space, and up behind us climbed the camels and stopped, too. Even Sadiq was convinced now, as he stood looking out on the far hills, the first of his people to have faced the desert and seen what lay on the far side.

Forsyth was the first to break the silence.

“How far do you say they are, John?” he asked.

“Anything from forty miles upwards; impossible to tell from here. When we camp I’ll plot some kind of a base-line and see if I can get an estimate. But the main point is that now we know we can reach them.”

He led off again down the slope, and we continued the march. Owing to our late start and the high dunes, we made but ten miles that day, but we camped with joyous hearts. The cloud-cap still hung over the hills, but seemed to be thinning toward sunset.

The tent was up, and Firoz busy with the evening meal, when Wrexham, who had been taking bearings from two dunes nearly a mile apart and was now at work on a rise above us, called to Forsyth and me sitting by the tent.

“Quick, you two! The clouds are lifting, and you can see the snow.”

We ran up to the top where he stood, and there, above the hills which showed sharp and clear—a long jagged wall—we could see to one side of the centre a patch of white below the clouds. A minute or two later these rolled off it, and there, stabbing the sky with two sharp-toothed peaks, was a great snow mountain vivid in the low rays of the westering sun. The last clouds lifted ere the sun went down as though to give us a full view.

The mountain rose in a long swell, not unlike a camel’s back, from the centre of the wall of lower hills, and after rising gently for some way sheered up steeper in a high wall of snow topped with two great peaks with a sharp dip between. The snow-line lay considerably below the bases of the peaks, which looked like the horns on the head of some gigantic beast. Below the snow was faint blue haze that told us that the mountain was a considerable distance behind the low hills we had first seen, since these stood out clear and sharp.

“That mountain is on no map in the world,” said Wrexham as he took its bearing. “You remember all this part and several hundred miles on it is empty desert even on the latest maps. We shall have the pleasure of naming a new mountain among our other finds. It’s high, too—I should say twelve thousand or thirteen thousand feet, at least—to show snow at this time of year so low as that. What shall we call it?”

“I think we’d better wait till we get there. The white-skinned people have probably got a name already.”

“I wonder if it will be a name redolent of old Greece,” said Forsyth. “Perhaps one of the goddesses of old times. Anyway, if it hasn’t, I’m for giving it something a d——d sight more poetic than K2 or K5 or any other of the beastly insults that the Survey of India put on some of the most beautiful things in the world. Even the unpoetic Indian treats them better than that. Nanga Parbat is at least graceful.”

“The lady blushes at the suggestion,” I said. “Look, really blushes.” The sun had just sunk below the horizon, and the great peaks ahead, still catching the rays now hidden to us, turned rose-colour, then darker red, then faded to purple, and last cold blue. A minute later they were but a white patch against the opal sky, and then they had disappeared.

“She thinks your remarks are flippant and has veiled herself, Forsyth,” I continued.

“Well, what about a meal if Wrexham has done his calculations? The lower hills, too, are fading fast now.”

We moved back to the tent, and while Payindah was bringing food Wrexham told us how his calculations had worked out. By his reckoning the hills should be about fifty-odd miles away: the low hills, of course, not the snow-peak which was not showing when he had taken his bearings from the two ends of his base-line. The fifth day from now should, therefore, see us at the foot, reckoning on twelve miles a day average if we started early each morning.

During the next three days we did thirty-eight miles, and as we went the dunes began to get lower, and by the evening of the second day, the ninth day of our march, were not more than thirty feet high. The desert was ever the same, greyish sand-dunes, now wind-tossed once more, for the wind had risen again, though not with the same violence that had marked the earlier days of our journey.

On the evening of the ninth day the snow-peak had sunk much lower, from which we were the more convinced that it lay some way behind the long wall of rock which now filled all our northeast horizon. Wrexham measured it again, and made us out twenty-three miles from the near hills, somewhat more than his last estimate had been, taken at much over double the distance. The snow mountain he considered at least fifty miles beyond the first hills.

On the eleventh day we did a good march, covering thirteen miles, thanks to much lower dunes. Not bad going for the camels, who were very done by now from want of grazing and water. In the afternoon we remarked some distance away to our right another bit of rock formation, and Forsyth was for making for it. He said it must be the line that was mentioned in the diary. Wrexham at first considered it would be better to stick to our original bearing which had done us so well. Then, since going was now easy and the rock formation not more than a couple of miles off our line, we decided to head for it. It added a little to the march, but nothing noticeable. As we got near, we could see that the hill was somewhat higher and longer than the last, as, indeed, one would expect, it being nearer to the main chain. It must have been one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy feet above the surrounding sand.

As we got closer, Forsyth and I pushed on ahead, climbing up it some way in front of the rest, and, to our surprise, as we neared the top, a couple of birds flew up. This first sign of life after eleven days of barren, lifeless desert was a pleasant find, and made us feel that we had surmounted the first lap of our difficulties, and that, whatever lay before us, at least we were in habitable country once more.

This formation differed from the last in being a razor-back all along with no central depression. Clearly we should have to camp at the foot of it. But it would give us a fine view of the hills from which to plan the morrow’s march.

But our greatest surprise was when Forsyth climbed to the crest line and then shouted to me:

“Water below, Harry; real water!”

I hurried after him, and he pointed out to me a thin shining line about half a mile away, a little ribbon of silver in the glaring sands, a ribbon that seemed to lead away toward the hills, which now, only about ten miles distant, towered up like a giant wall, steep and apparently unscaleable. The previous evening Wrexham had estimated their height at not less than two thousand feet. From here they looked, as, indeed, they proved to be in many places, even more, and as far as one could see sheer cliffs of scarped rocks, with only a short expanse of tumbled slope at their feet. They gave one the impression of springing straight out of the desert sands.

“That must be the great-great-uncle’s little stream, and somewhere at the end of it should be his valley,” said Forsyth, as he sat down and lit a cigarette, a form of luxury that was drawing near its close. “This gives one almost an aeroplane view, doesn’t it? Can you see any signs of life yonder—fields or houses or anything?”

I had got out my glasses on reaching the top, and while he was speaking was studying the distant hills, but could see nothing whatever that looked like signs of human habitation.

“Can’t see any. It looks all as barren as the Aden coast, and not unlike it with these rocks springing clear out of the sand. Toss you who goes down and sends John up here and then leads the camels round to the stream.”

“Right-o!” Forsyth pulled a coin out of his pocket and spun it.

“Heads,” I called.

“Heads it is. What am I to do?”

“Go down and send John up. Tell him about the stream, and then lead the camels round to it below where we are now. The south side will be the shortest way.”

Before he got to the bottom of the slope, he met Wrexham starting up, explained the lie of the land, and then led the camels off while John joined me on top.

“Your uncle’s stream unless I’m a Dutchman,” I said, pointing. “We can camp by water to-night, thank goodness.”

Wrexham looked down without speaking. Then he turned to me. “Considering we marched on a guesswork bearing calculated from a vague entry in a hundred-year-old diary, it’s unfair to call it chance.”

“Yes, I don’t think there’s much chance about it. Not that there really is about anything, for that matter, to my way of thinking.”

Sometimes, especially when things go crooked, one feels that it’s all chance, that the only controlling hand is one vast mocking deity or fate; but, generally, if you look back afterwards, you see that there’s been method in it all through, although at the time there seemed to be none unless it were malevolent. After all, we are but shuttles, and as we drive our way through the loom there doesn’t seem much sense in the whole thing, the steady monotony, over and under, over and under. But later, when perhaps we’re laid on the rack for a space and can see the pattern as a whole, we realize how the apparently aimless movements each had their part to play in the finished pattern of beauty that the weaver had intended.

As we were speaking, the first of the gaunt, weary camels came round the corner of the hill below us, and we watched them pacing slowly along till they came to the bank of the stream, then stopped and buried their muzzles in the water.

“Nice to camp by running water again. I wonder where it goes to,” I said.

“Swallowed up in the sand, I fancy, before very far,” said Wrexham. “Can you see if there is any valley at the far end in the hills?”

“I was looking for that as you came up, but I can’t see any break. If there is one, it must be very narrow. But you remember, according to the diary, it is narrow, and I doubt if you could see it from here unless there was a big dip in the cliffs.”

“There’s a long line of shadow that looks as if it might be something, but, as you say, it’s hard to make out from here. One thing is pretty clear, that the people, if there are people, can’t live below the hills. I can’t make out a single vestige of a field or even a tree, and the hills themselves look absolutely bare.”

“Probably such vegetation as there is on this first ridge is on the other side. You see that very markedly sometimes in hills. One side quite bare and the other all green,” said I.

“Well, anyway, here we are at the entrance or somewhere near it, and the next thing is how are we going to get in?”

“We’d better push on to-morrow morning and get up to the cliffs, and then start looking round for the valley with the gateway. There’s nothing to be seen from here, so our best course is to follow straight up the stream to wherever it runs into the hills. You remember your great-great-uncle travelled nearly three days skirting them before he found a way in at all.”

“True. Our best course will certainly be the stream. And now we’d better get down to camp and look over things for to-morrow. There’s no more need for the compass, anyway. I’m jolly tired of marching on it all day.” Wrexham led away down the rock slope, and I followed.

After dinner we sat outside and listened to the pleasant ripple of the little stream in the starry stillness. The wind had dropped entirely and the air was clear, so that we could see the sharp outline of the hills against the sky.

“To-morrow we shall know our fate, more or less,” said Wrexham, “as to whether we can get into these hills peacefully or not. But I think we ought to be prepared for possible trouble, so a couple of us had better work ahead. There’s no difficulty about keeping our direction, since all we’ve got to do is to follow the stream. What do you think, Harry? You’re the professional soldier man.”

“Quite agree. I think, if I and Payindah keep half a mile or so ahead and you keep the two camels well closed up, we shall get warning in time of any one moving in front. We’re all armed except Sadiq, and he’s safer without anything.”

“If we start at 7.30 A.M. we shall be in the hills before midday, and that will give us plenty of time to look around before dark if this is not the actual stream we’re looking for, though I feel sure it must be. A longer rest will do us all good to-night; don’t you think so?”

“Every time, John. I shall be d——d glad to feel that I needn’t stir out of bed before six to-morrow, and when I do, that I can get a decent wash for once in a way. I’m contemplating shaving, too.” Forsyth rubbed his hand over his stubby chin, and then we all remembered our peculiarly dirty appearance, and then and there decided to commence the morrow with a shave, hitherto abandoned owing to lack of water.

“I don’t want to enter the promised land of the Gobi Greeks, or whoever they may be, with ten days’ stubble on my face,” continued Forsyth, who had some consideration for his personal appearance.

“No; you might meet the Lady Euphrosine at the door,” said Wrexham. “I hope you’ve got a string of nice classical compliments ready at the tip of your tongue.”

“Well, if you haven’t it’s not my fault after all the trouble I’ve taken with you for the last nine months.”

It was true. We had both taken considerable pains with Wrexham day after day trying to push Greek into him, and I must say we had succeeded passably well in that he could now make shift to read the language easily. We had brought up a pocket edition of the more famous classics and one or two modern books with us, and every day during our long journey from India he had spent an hour or two, and sometimes a great deal more, in study. Conversation was, of course, his weak point, although Forsyth and I had endeavoured to make him talk to us in a combination of modern idioms and old classical Greek.

“We shall look pretty silly if they don’t talk Greek or if they’ve got some special brand of their own,” said Wrexham.

“Well, if they do talk it, it’s sure to be different after all the centuries they must have been here. Consider American after a mere hundred years and a bit. But the basis will probably be unchanged, and pronunciation and idiom can be picked up pretty quickly when you’re actually among the people. Besides, if they’ve been cut off from the rest of the world, they will have been saved from new importations from other tongues, so that the only changes will be definite alterations of old forms. Some find to take back home for the philologists. I can see myself writing a treatise on phonetic changes through the ages in a pure tongue.”

It was strange how Forsyth spoke as though we knew the people in those hills would speak Greek. And yet he only voiced all our thoughts. We had long ago ceased to think there was any doubt in the matter, and only wondered what sort of a reception we should get and what manner of life we should find them leading. We speculated a good deal on that point, but none of us had any very clear theories. Forsyth favoured some kind of city-state, such as he was familiar with from his readings of the classics. Wrexham, on the other hand, I think, expected to find a mixture of Arabian Nights Bagdad with a prehistoric Pathan village. I had no very clear-cut ideas on the point at all.

“I’ll tell the men we don’t start till 7.30 to-morrow,” said Wrexham, “and then I vote for bed. We may as well get a good sleep, for Heaven alone knows whether we shall get one to-morrow night.”

He went over to the men’s fire, for we found a certain amount of reeds by the stream brink, and the men had taken the opportunity to make up a fire—a comforting thing to sit over, after the miserable oil-stove which was all we had had for cooking during our desert journey.

We turned in a few minutes later, and my last recollection of that night is of Wrexham gravely asking Forsyth whether the ancient Greeks understood the “Kamerad” gesture.

CHAPTER VIII
THE GATE

“Look, sahib, the hills open in front like a Waziristan tangi,” said Payindah, pointing.

It was getting on for midday, and we had nearly reached the wall of hills, which now towered, grim and threatening, above us, a long line of sheer cliff, incredibly high; and, though the face was scarred and furrowed, there seemed to be no place where it could be ascended except in true mountaineering fashion with ropes and other aids.

Nor was there any sign of life in all the expanse of bare brown rock that rose before us, not even a wheeling kite in the sky. If life there were ahead, it must lie all on the other side of this great barrier that stretched away on either hand as far as we could see, merging from dead lifeless brown to warmer reds and madders and purples, and then finally to hazy blues as the distance softened the hard outlines.

We two were standing on the edge of the sand looking up a short slope of rock, tumbled with big boulders and smaller stones that ended abruptly at the foot of the wall-like cliff. Some half a mile or more behind us our string of camels plodded slowly along over the low sand ripples, here only a foot or two in height.

The whole scene rather reminded me of the Derajat—the plain that lies between the Indus and Waziristan—save that the hills here were far more formidable. Behind us, the expanse of yellow sand, not unlike the sun-dried soil below the frontier hills. In front, those frowning walls of rock, and just ahead of me in the white sunlight, Payindah with his short poshtin, his loose tied khaki pagri round his bobbed black locks, his baggy khaki breeches and worn chaplis, for all the world like any tribal levy man of the Indian border, save that his rifle, even now after the long march, was spotless, and his bandolier had been new-cleaned overnight. Evidently Payindah, like Forsyth, believed in first impressions.

Ahead of us, as he said, the little stream—now somewhat wider—ran into the rock wall in a narrow cleft, where it vanished.

“Wouldst like to picket the top?” I asked, pointing up.

“Wah, what could get up that save a fly?” said he; and, indeed, I think he was about right. It was not often that Payindah admitted that anything was out of his power, for he possessed to the full that boastfulness so characteristic of the Punjabi, a relic, perhaps, of the old Greek strain from Alexander’s time that the Punjab talks of even to this day.

Travel along the Punjab frontier, yes, and right down into Baluchistan, and any old ruin, any disused water-channel faced with big stone blocks, any uncommon feature that might be the work of men, and local fable will tell you that it was built by the great Sikandar.

“Well, let us push on to the mouth, and then, if we see naught, we will halt the camels here,” said I.

We went on forward right up to the mouth of the cleft—a narrow sword-cut such as one meets all along the Indian frontier, but narrower than most, perhaps a bare thirty feet from rock wall to rock wall, with the babbling stream running in the stony bed between.

But the height of it was more than any tangi I had ever seen, comparable only to a Doré picture. On either hand the walls of bare rock shot up straight, hundreds of feet above us, striated lime rock, splintered and cracked and twisted, but offering neither foothold nor hand-hold for any but the boldest and most experienced climber equipped with every aid. At the foot were little whitened rock plants, and clumps of coarse grass.

A couple of hundred yards farther on and we could see the valley turning, but when we reached the turn, lo! another again in front. And a silence that was eerie, naught save the murmur of the water, here perhaps three or four feet wide and a foot or more deep in places, running fairly fast.

We went back to the entrance, and, seeing the camels just approaching, signalled to Wrexham to stop.

“Here we are, and I think the thing is to halt now and make camp. Afterwards, we can explore the valley. If it’s your great-great-uncle’s one, it runs in about three miles according to the diary. It’ll probably take nearly an hour going up and as much coming back, and say an hour pottering round, and by that time there’ll not be much point in going on. So we might as well stop now, and look for a camp. There are some overhanging rocks there that would give a certain amount of shelter from the wind if it gets up. In this sort of place one often gets howling gales, and a bit of shelter is welcome. What do you think?”

“Yes; I never thought we should get beyond the foot of the hills to-day,” said Wrexham. “I’m with you in the matter of getting a camp-site before we start exploring. There doesn’t seem to be much grazing here for the camels, worse luck.”

“There’s a little scrub stuff inside at the foot of the cliffs, but I think we’d be wise not to let the animals touch it to-day. Remember your old uncle’s beasts. The stuff may be poisonous. It seems a new kind to me. Payindah will stop in the valley entrance and do sentry while the rest of us fix up camp.”

Another hour saw us settled in, the camels unloaded, and our little tent snuggled under the lee of a big rock. We made a hasty lunch, and then, leaving the men to set up things, we three started up the valley, rifles very much at the alert. As we entered the tangi mouth, Wrexham, who had been thoughtful during lunch, turned round to Forsyth and me just behind.

“Look here, you fellows, I’ve been thinking about what we ought to do when we get to the far end if we find the gate my great-great-uncle wrote about.

“It’s not exactly a suburban villa where you can walk straight up and ring the bell. The people who live here are presumably not accustomed to strangers, and they might be nasty. One is not at one’s best standing outside a fort gate trying to induce the people inside—who may not even know any language we speak—to let us in. My idea is that, if this is the valley, and if we come across that stone gate, we should hang about a bit under cover and see if anything materializes.”

“I was thinking of that, too,” put in Forsyth. “We’ve plenty of water now, and so there’s no immediate hurry, though the camels could do with some grazing. I’m all for trying to get to know the inhabitants somewhere out in the open. From the diary the place sounded what you might call average inhospitable, and I should prefer to try my Greek on some bloke out in the open rather than have to shout it at a narrow loophole with the tip of a three-foot arrow wavering about just inside.”

“We all seem wonderfully unanimous in our thoughts,” said I; “the same thing occurred to me as we were starting. I suggest, further, we don’t even show ourselves at first. Let’s see if they materialize before we sound a tucket, or whatever the mediæval wanderer used to do when he struck a strange fortress and observed the occupants getting handy with the boiling lead in case they didn’t like his face.”

So we decided—and, as it turned out, it was well that we did so—to reconnoitre as carefully as if the inhabitants were Huns and we a bashful trench crawling party, and, if we found the gateway, not to go out of cover until we saw some chance of meeting the owners on more even terms.

As we went on, Forsyth remarked on the fact that the valley was getting still narrower. We had gone about a mile, and it was now not much above fifteen or sixteen feet wide. The bottom was of rounded stones and pebbles, obviously water-worn, but whether the whole valley was due to water action it was hard to say. It must have taken æons and æons for the stream to cut down those many hundred feet, unless at some time it contained a far greater flow of water than existed now.

Wrexham opined that originally it must have been a fault in the rock, and pointed out that the strata here were tilted up vertically on edge. He said that probably the valley we walked in had once been a layer of very soft rock—easily decomposed—between two harder ones, and that when the rocks had been tilted up the gradual percolation of water had started a groove, and then the stream had done the rest.

The walls were of a grey-green limestone here, though at the entrance the general tinge had been brown. There was practically no vegetation save for here and there, just at the foot, blanched shrubs and small plants of the type common in rock country over middle Asia. Just now the sun was nearly overhead, and some stray sunbeams filtered down, but for the greater part of the day the valley must have been—indeed, we soon found out that it was—shrouded in a grey gloom. By the time we had gone another mile, the walls had closed in to barely ten feet apart.

“I wouldn’t like to be caught in a spate here,” said I. “The place would be a seething torrent fifty or sixty feet deep in a few minutes if there was a heavy fall beyond. It rather makes me think of the Narrows on the Wana road from Jandola, only on a bigger scale.”

“Never been up there,” said Wrexham; “but, if you birds had to fight in stuff like this last year, I’m glad I wasn’t there. One thing here is that it’s so high above that, short of heaving over rocks blindly, the other side couldn’t get at you at all if you had command of the end. If the inhabitants are unpleasing, we could manage to hold them up in this pretty easily with rifles, and if we couldn’t get in, at least they won’t be able to get out at us. What a topping entrance for a real mediæval fortress!”

“Or even for a modern one. You couldn’t get guns up the cliff anywhere near here, and so you’d have to fight through this in pure primitive fashion; and if, as it must, it opens out in front, all they’ve got to do is to stick a few men with rifles, or even with bows, a little way beyond under cover to prevent you ever getting out at all.”

We were just rounding a turn as we spoke, Forsyth leading. We heard him exclaim suddenly, and then, coming round the corner, saw him standing staring at the rock walls.

“Well, I’m d——d!” was all he said.

It took us a second to realize about what he was exclaiming. The stream split into two branches, and twenty yards farther on these two branches disappeared into tunnels in the rock, low, square tunnels, perhaps three feet high by two broad, obviously the work of man, cut foursquare out of the solid limestone.

“Now I wonder what they did that for?” said Wrexham. “It doesn’t look as if these were springs. It seems rather as if somewhere higher up they had deliberately diverted the water.”

We studied the little tunnels, but there was nothing to show who had made them. Unornamented, they might have been of any date. Just plain tunnelling through the rock much as you can see in Northern India to-day, where the tribesmen tunnel along in the river-banks to lead water off to fields lower down, up above the natural water-level of the stream.

In front the valley continued its sinuous course, but dry now. We followed for about one hundred yards, and then Wrexham stopped and sniffed. He has a keen nose.

“Something dead about these parts,” he said at last.

There was just a faint movement of air, and undoubtedly, as Wrexham said, it was bringing down to us odours that evoked other scenes back in the war years. Two minutes later, rounding another bend, we were aware of brighter light in front.

“Steady,” said I; “I think we’ve come to the end. Stop here a minute while I look ahead.”

Another fifty yards round a still sharper and narrower bend, and then I drew back quickly into the shadow of the valley, which had suddenly widened, and was partly filled with some masses of fallen rock. I drew in my breath as I looked, and then, stepping back, waved up the others, signalling silence as I did so. When they came up, I motioned them behind the rocks and pointed. As they craned their heads cautiously up, I heard Wrexham give a low whistle of surprise.

For there, straight in front, was the open clearing and the rock gate, cut into the solid face of the cliff just as the old diary described it. And on the white stones of the clearing were bones, in large numbers—gaunt ribs and rounded skulls—and a pervading smell of death. While, most ominous of all, in the centre of the clearing a huddle of draggle-winged vultures jostled and flapped and writhed their foul necks about something hidden beneath them.

We crouched there, staring breathlessly across the clearing at the gate on the far side.

Imagine a sheer rock wall just like the cleft we had come up, but rock of a darker colour, that surrounded with the same unscaleable sides the little open space, about two hundred yards in diameter, at whose edge we were hidden in the valley mouth. On the far side of it, and facing us, the rock had been carved for some hundred feet across and sixty feet up into the semblance of a fort gateway.

There was the big central gate, with its massive pillars and great lintel carved after the fashion of a huge beam. Under this two great stone doors, embossed with stone spikes and square heads of nails in stone. On either side a small gate with similar stone-fashioned doors, each a single leaf, and on these again—worked in stone—the replicas of iron bar and spike and nail.

The big gate and the two small side doors were again all three enclosed in a frame fashioned like the projection of a fort, rounded towers on either side and crenelated bastions above. And in these bastions were long arrow-slips—real, these seemed, though showing dead black shadows.

On the long stone block that ran under the bastions were carvings of twisted serpents, whose heads met in a fan in the centre, above which was the full-rayed sun. This last, I think, had been gilded at some time, for it was brown and discoloured in places, as if at some earlier date it had been covered with colour, though now no trace of it remained.

Below that, and just above the main entrance, was lettering, standing up clear from the background.

“Can you read that?” I whispered as Forsyth focused his glasses.

“Too far,” he whispered back. “Pass me the telescope.” We had brought the telescope along with us luckily.

I passed it to him, and he undid the strap, fitted in the high-power eye-piece, and slid it into position with as much care as though stalking a markhor. He studied it a minute, and then turned to us. “Greek, and it’s more like the old Greek than what’s on the picture, though not quite the same,” he said. “It runs like this: ‘To those to north, the gate of life; but to those to south, the gate of death.’”

“It seems to be that, all right,” whispered back Wrexham; “this is the south side of the gate, and there are plenty of poor devils who have looked their last on life the last time they looked up at the arrow-slits. There’s a man there under the birds—foul beasts—or rather it was a man some time ago. They pulled his foot up just now while I was watching through my glasses. He’s not new.”

“Wish I could smoke,” muttered Forsyth; “not safe now, I suppose. This is foul!”

“Guess I know now why they diverted the water,” said Wrexham. “The stream probably comes down on the far side of that gateway, and they diverted it to keep the entrance clear. Any one seen any movement in front?”

“Not a sign,” said Forsyth. “I’ve been putting my telescope on the loopholes. I should say they were real, not fakes like the rest of the carving.”

We lay there for perhaps three quarters of an hour watching, but never a sign of life in the gateway. At last I said to Wrexham, “Well, what’s the next move?”

He turned over and slid back down the rock.

“‘When in doubt put out pickets.’ Isn’t that what your frontier experts say? We must have some one always here in case any one appears. One of us three with one of the men. I propose that we do three shifts during the day, say six to ten, ten to two, and two to six. They may not use this place often; depends on the number of people they have to kill off, and we don’t want to miss a chance of seeing what sort of creatures they are. It’s after two o’clock now, and, if you two will stay here, I’ll scuttle back and get one of the men and then come and relieve you for the evening watch. Then to-night we can talk over the future.”

“What’s the programme if anything turns up?” asked Forsyth.

“Question of discretion, I think. Have a good look, and if they’re peaceful you might venture conversation. If not, don’t, but at least we shall know something about what they’re like. I’ll be as quick as I can.” And, picking up his rifle, Wrexham trotted off down the valley.

“Well, of all the d——d family graveyards I’ve ever struck,” said Forsyth as we settled down to our watch. “I wonder if it is a graveyard, by the way, in spite of Wrexham’s theory about killing people. We may have found the back entry into a sort of Parsi Tower of Silence place, where they put their dead because earth and fire are sacred elements and mustn’t be contaminated by corpses.”

“By Jove! I never thought of that,” I answered. “It might very well be that, after all. One can imagine this is rather like what the inside of one of those places on Malabar Hill would be, for instance. Only, if the diary is true, it knocks the cemetery theory out of count. And everything in it has panned out so far.”

“Yes, that’s so. Old Wrexham would have found a nicely laid out corpse and not a fellow with his hands tied and an arrow in him. Phew! When I come on a job like this again, I’m going to bring a gas-mask.”

It must have been nearly four o’clock when Wrexham, accompanied by Payindah, came up behind us. The latter grimaced a bit as he took up post.

“This is like Farance again, sahib,” he whispered to me. Evidently Wrexham had told him that it was sentry duty in the front line, and that he was not to make a noise.

We left them there, and went back down the valley to camp. Wrexham said he would come back as soon as it was dark.

On arrival in the camp, we found Firoz had some tea ready for us, and after that we checked through some of our stores, took photos of the tangi entrance, and did various odd jobs of overhauling.

We also got out the twelve-bore, an old hammer-gun of mine. I thought if Sadiq was to take a hand in the lookout work he had better be armed, but it was no good giving him a .303 rifle. But he did know enough about a hammer-gun to work it, and there are worse things than a twelve-bore with buckshot at close quarters. I dropped a charging panther once with that same old gun and a charge of buckshot, and it stopped him as no high-velocity rifle would ever have done.

It was dark by six, and we expected to see Wrexham by seven. But he did not come, and about eight o’clock we began to get anxious, and Forsyth suggested going up the valley to look for him. I counselled waiting a bit, as I did not see how he could well come to grief. He had Payindah with him, and both were armed, and nobody could get into the valley except at each end; of that I was sure. And I was equally sure that no one could get in at the far end with two shots like Wrexham and Payindah waiting for them.

But when half-past eight had gone and there was no signs of them, I began to agree with Forsyth. We had just started into the tangi when we heard footsteps ahead on the stones, and Wrexham and Payindah loomed up out of the gloom.

“What happened to you?” I said, as we turned back toward the tent. “It’s been dark for hours.”

“I know; that’s why I wanted the evening watch. I’ve been doing trench crawls quite in the old style with Payindah as covering party.”

“What on earth for?”

“Wanted to see what was on the far side of the clearing by the gates. Shout for food; I must go and wash first. I feel like a cemetery at present.”

He put down his rifle, and now, by the light of the lanterns, I saw that he had what looked like a thin bundle of sticks.

“What have you got there?” I asked.

“Show you after dinner,” was all he vouchsafed, as he made for the stream with a towel and a piece of soap.

During dinner he expanded. Nothing had happened during his watch, but the moment it got dark he left Payindah in position, and crept off in the gloom across the clearing. He has no nerves has Wrexham. I should have wanted very good reasons to take me out among that tangle of smelly bones. The first thing he had made for was the corpse we had seen. With the darkness the vultures had left it.

“I crawled up to him first. I was right this afternoon when I said he wasn’t new. He wasn’t by a long chalk. But in the faint light I could see that he had had no clothes, and also that his hands were tied. I expected that, because I’ve got a great respect for my great-great-uncle’s accuracy after all we’ve found. What I was looking for was the arrow, which was a messy job to get away. But I did it, and it’s there. There were two in this bloke as a matter of fact, but one was broken. I suppose he pitched on it as he fell.

“I did a circular tour after that, and found nothing much except bones, or what you might call ‘nearly’ bones. Once I caught my hand in something that I thought was string, and then realized that it was hair, long hair. They’re not only man’s bones there, unless some of them wear long hair like Baluchis or Sikhs, which I should think unlikely. I also picked up another arrow or two.

“It was practically pitch-dark now, but I headed for the gateway. I crawled up to it d——d quietly, and got right up against the central door. They’re real gates, all right. I pushed my knife its whole length into the crack between the two bits of the centre one.

“I glued my ear to the cracks, and listened for quite a long time, but nothing stirred inside, so far as I could hear.

“I tried the little doors after that, but they seemed to slide in the rock and fitted jolly tightly. They’re real, all right, too.

“The big one hasn’t been opened for a long time, I fancy, because the crack was packed with sand and grit. The grooves round the little ones, on the other hand, seem fairly clear.

“On my way back I stubbed my toe on another arrow sticking up in the ground, and brought that along, too. There’s no other entrance except the gate and the valley mouth where we stopped. It’s smooth rock wall all round like the sides of a well.

“After a last look in case we might see a glimmer of light in the loopholes, we came back. I’ve got the arrows tied up there. Pass ’em over, Alec.”

He spread them out on the top of the yakhdan[4] that served us as a table. “I cleaned ’em up a bit on the way down. Look, just as the diary said, there is writing on them.” He pointed to the stem below the draggled feathers. “What do you make of it?”

“They’re not the same, anyway. And they’re very indistinct. Here, put the light nearer,” said I.

“One thing, they’ve all got the same coloured shafts. See, they’re all black.”

“This one’s different,” said Forsyth. “Look, there’s a red ring round under the feathers.”

“Well, what’s the writing?” queried Wrexham.

“I’ve got mine,” said I. “It’s ‘Freedom.’”

“And I’ve got mine, too, now,” said Forsyth. “It runs ‘A little time.’ What on earth does that mean?”

“The Lord only knows,” said Wrexham. “Why on earth any one should want to paint things like that on an arrow beats me. Look at this one. It’s rather obliterated, an oldish one, I should say. But isn’t that ‘to-morrow’?”

“It is,” said Forsyth. “They’re a queer crowd with their mottoed arrows. Any one see a glimmering of sense in them? Let me see the other two.” He looked at them. “Duplicates. See; there’s another ‘Freedom’ one, and this is again, ‘A little time.’ Well, I give it up.”

We did, too.

“Anything else?” I asked Wrexham.

He shook his head. “Nothing else I could see. It was practically dark in there, just a faint glimmer of moon which hardly did anything except make the darkness darker. Well, now, about to-morrow. Whatever happens, we’ll stop here for a day or two. In the first place, we want to know if there’s anything to be seen, and in the second, we must give the camels a rest. I propose we watch in turns during the day. I’ll take first shift with Sadiq, then Forsyth and Firoz can relieve us. That’ll let Firoz get breakfast, and also be back in time to get evening food. You, Harry, with Payindah, can relieve Alec and Firoz. That suit every one?”

We both agreed that it would do.

“I think,” I said, “that we ought to have a sentry all night. You say you’ve seen nothing, but there may be people moving at night, though it’s not likely. Still, it’s best to prepare for the worst, even while firmly expecting the best. If we each do a two-hour shift, it won’t come very heavy.”

The others agreed it might be sound, so we arranged that we three and the two sepoys should do two hours each at the entrance to the tangi. Wrexham went on first, followed by Firoz, who was relieved by Forsyth. Payindah took over from him, and I had the dawn watch. However, nothing happened all night, and none of us heard a sound.

Shortly after the first dawn, Wrexham and Sadiq started up the tangi, and I went back to my blankets for another hour’s sleep, feeling very chilled, for the dawn air was biting. About half-past nine, after we had had breakfast, Forsyth and Firoz started off, and an hour and a half later Wrexham and Sadiq, who looked rather as if he had been seeing ghosts, came back with nothing whatever to report.

At a quarter-past one, I turned out Payindah, and the two of us went off to relieve Forsyth and Firoz at the mouth of the clearing. All was just as it had been the day before. The same heavy smell, the same litter of bones, the same filthy vultures, the same frowning, lifeless gateway in front.

“Cheerio,” said Forsyth as he went off. “Hope you’ll enjoy the family vault as much as I have. I’ve taken some photos, and I don’t believe any one ever comes here except, perhaps, once a month or so.”

Payindah and I settled down to our monotonous watch, and nothing moved before us save the obscene birds.

CHAPTER IX
A LADY JOINS US

Payindah took first shift, while I settled myself into a corner of the rock below him with a pocket edition of Browning, which I generally carry when travelling. It is an old friend that has solaced many a lonely hour and many a lonely place.

I had been reading for about three quarters of an hour—I remember the poem was “One Word More”—when Payindah gave a low hiss. I looked up and saw he had turned his head round.

“There’s some one in the gate,” he said.

I slipped the book into my pocket, climbed up beside him, and stared out across the open space, but saw nothing.

“Where?” I asked.

“Something moved in the third loophole. There it is again! Look!”

I gazed through the glasses, and then just caught a faint flicker. It might have been anything—a man’s hand, a flutter of cloth; but something certainly moved in the shadow of the arrow-slit. We crouched there silently for perhaps ten minutes, and nothing more happened. Then suddenly Payindah spoke, and I saw his rifle slip forward.

“Sahib, the gate opens; the little one on the right there.”

I looked, and, as he said, there was a growing shadow as if it was being opened slowly. Then the chink widened, the gate opened, and two figures stumbled out.

I say “stumbled,” for they gave me the impression of being pushed out. The gate swung to behind them noiselessly.

The leading figure was that of an old man with long white beard and white locks. His arms were bound behind his back, and he moved slowly, walking rather oddly, as though something dragged at his feet. But the second figure was that of a woman, young and white, with a mass of auburn hair. She, too, had her hands bound behind her.

The old man tripped, and I saw the girl all but fall. Then they moved forward a few slow paces and stopped.

Then again onward, and now I realized, as I watched through my glasses, why they stumbled. Their movement seemed constrained, and it was only as they came over a little rise that I grasped the fact that they were shackled together, left ankle to right.

I heard Payindah’s guttural grunt behind me.

“Who be these swine that maltreat an old man and a woman like that, turning them out of the gates stripped and bound?”

A few more yards and the old man halted, looking dazedly up at the sky. Then he moved forward once more, the girl stepping jerkily at his side. Again he checked and swayed, and then I saw the girl bend toward him and evidently say something. I think she was urging him to another effort. Poor soul; I suppose they thought they might yet escape.

They had come slowly and hesitatingly perhaps sixty yards, and I was racking my brain as to some means of helping them, when suddenly the old man stopped dead, then shot forward on to his face, pulling the girl to the ground. I could see him as he lay; he only moved once, and up from between his shoulders stuck a long arrow-shaft.

What happened after that will take a long time to tell, though it took but a few minutes to act.

The girl writhed herself up again, and bent piteously over the old man. Then she dragged herself to her knees, and stayed looking at the gate.

At first I had hesitated. One did not want to introduce one’s self to a new country by attacking the local police in the execution of their legitimate—if unpleasant—duties. But the sight of the girl decided me. This could be no decent form of justice.

I laid my rifle down by Payindah and said:

“Shoot into the loopholes. Shoot like hell!”

As his rifle spoke, I was slipping off the rock, and a second later I was out in the open, my big hunting-knife in my hand, running as I hadn’t run since I played outside left for my regiment before the war.

Payindah was not much in the brain line as far as education went. But even before the war, when straight shooting was the common possession of most regular soldiers, he stood out as a marksman. And his star specialty was rapid shooting. I have seen him put thirteen shots into a two-foot target at two hundred yards in thirty seconds, and do it often.

As I ran over the stones, picking my way among the scattered heaps of what had once been men, I heard the steady rapid crack of his rifle behind me, and before me I could catch the “smack” “smack” of the bullets about the arrow-slits.

The men inside were evidently not accustomed to firearms, and the sudden noise—magnified by the enclosed space, and, as we learnt later, the effect of the shots that went home—paralyzed them.

Probably another factor in saving us was my utterly unexpected appearance in that place of death, where no living being, save captives stripped and bound, had ever been seen before. Possibly, for a minute or two, they—a superstitious, half-savage people—took me for an evil spirit.

Anyway, not a single arrow was fired at me as I tore across the clearing.

The girl, hearing the noise behind, turned her head bewilderedly, and then, seeing me leaping over the stones, struggled to her feet. I don’t know what she took me for, but with the knife bare in my hand she probably thought me Death in some new form. But she stood there bravely facing me with steady eyes, her poor arms cruelly twisted behind her back, her red-gold hair falling in a loose bundle on one shoulder, her breath coming quickly between her parted lips.

I hadn’t breath to speak nor time to waste, and I didn’t definitely know what her language was, so I did the only possible thing. I put my arm round her and swung her to the ground as gently, but as quickly as I could, so that she would be the smaller target while I got her free.

I think she expected to feel the knife in her heart, and was amazed to be still alive. Anyway, she lay still, which was all I asked. I didn’t worry about her arms; what I wanted to see was her leg. And then to my horror I found that instead of a rope as I had hoped, she was fastened to the old man by a short length of chain riveted in each case to an iron ring round the ankle.

I think I put up some kind of incoherent prayer, and then bethought me of my pistol. I squatted with both feet on the chain, pulled out the big Colt forty-five automatic, pushed it up hard against the riveted boss on the ring round the old man’s ankle, and pressed the trigger. Did I mention, by the way, that the old man was stone dead with two inches of the arrow sticking through his ribs over the heart? His being dead helped me, since I had not to worry where the bullet went.

The recoil nearly dislocated my wrist, but I saw that the rivet had smashed away, and with a violent wrench I pulled the chain free.

My hasty glance at the girl’s arm, smothered in many times knotted rope, had shown me that it would be quicker to carry her than try to free the knots in the green hide that bound her arms together. To have tried to make her run over the stones with her arms literally racked back, and a length of chain dangling from one ankle, would have been equally slow; she would have fallen time and again.

I put my left arm round her shoulders, my right under her knees, swung her up, and started at a slow jog-trot over the stones toward Payindah, and then an arrow flicked past us, to stand quivering in the ground beyond.

By this time doubtless the people inside had sized up me and my mission, and between the rifle-cracks I heard shouting in the gate. I had gone a matter of thirty yards when the girl said something I didn’t understand, but obviously to attract my attention backwards. Her head was resting on my left shoulder, so that she could just see over it.

I looked back. There was the little gate open and five men running over the stones after us, men in steel caps and short leather and mail jerkins.

I thought that was the end. I struggled on twenty paces or so and then stopped, slipped my arm from under the girl’s knees so that she could stand, and with my left arm round her shoulders turned, drawing my pistol as I did, and covering her body as best I could with my own.

The leading man, a sinister, dark-visaged fellow, was within twenty yards of me, a short heavy sword in his hand. Practically level with him was another man. Ten yards behind them was a third, and beyond that again two more, all running fast, with guttural shouts, while two or three more showed in the open gate.

As I turned I saw one of the hindmost pair stop, sink slowly to his knees, and then roll over sideways. Payindah had caught him, all right. I asked him afterwards why he picked the last man, and found that we had been between him and the leading man, and he dared not shoot at them for fear of hitting us.

The leaders were within ten yards as I fired. The heavy bullet took the first low in the middle of the body, and he smashed down in a heap, his steel cap ringing over the stones nearly to our feet. His feet drummed a second on the ground, and then he lay still—face buried in a huddle of bones, one of his earlier victims. The girl gave a little gasp as he went over. The second man had leaped in at the same moment, and was barely three yards from me when my second shot caught him in the chest, and he flung forward at my feet. He tried to struggle up, but sank again, blood pouring from mouth and nose.

Seeing his leaders drop, the third man, checked at this new fashion of killing, turned his head to see if he was supported, missed the fifth man, and as he looked saw the fourth pitch backwards with a ringing crash of metal, and then turned to fly. I fired, but missed him, and he made for the gate.

I thrust the pistol back into its holster, swung the girl up again, and made off once more. And as we started, out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the last fellow shooting forward on to his face, roll over, wriggle up on his hands again trying to claw his way forward, struggling and screaming like a wounded rabbit. I think Payindah must have broken his spine low down. From what I learnt of him and his kind afterwards, I’m glad he took some little time to die.

Then Payindah turned on to the gate, and within fifteen seconds that was shut again hurriedly. I expect the bullets ricocheting round corners into the passage behind, as arrows could never have done, was pretty scaring to the men inside, leaving out the sudden incomprehensible deaths of the party in the open.

But his switching off the loopholes gave the men above a chance. Probably some bold spirit had rallied them after their first surprise, and as we started off the second time two arrows shot by, just missing us; then two more, one of which went through the skirt of my coat.

So far I had not had much time to consider the girl, but I glanced down at her as the arrows came over, and tried to get her head below the level of my shoulder. She was quite conscious, and cooler than most people would have been in her circumstances; and yet as I stumbled along over the stones she must have been suffering agonies, with her arms bound so tight that her shoulder-joints seemed to stick clean out of her body. There was no colour in her drawn face, and there were dark shadows below her big hazel-grey eyes. But she lay there in my arms with never a moan.

Then I caught my foot in some snag and nearly fell. Something tore across my face, and I heard the girl give a little faint cry. An arrow had flicked in between us as I stumbled and, tearing open my cheek, had grazed a couple of inches below her right shoulder. But she didn’t scream, just looked down at the wound and up at me again.

I must have been a fairly unpleasing sight by that time, panting for breath, with the blood streaming down from my face on to her white neck and shoulders.

But Payindah had got back on to the arrow-slits, I think. Two last arrows flicked past, one passably near, the other a good bit overhead. There were only thirty yards to go now, and it was done at a stumbling walk. Thank goodness, no more arrows came, and then I got round the corner of the rock, where Payindah’s rifle—the sweetest music I have ever heard—cracked steadily above me, and, I am ashamed to say, slid forward on to my knees, nearly pitching on my face altogether. Luckily I saved myself. Then I laid the girl down, mopped the blood off my face with my sleeve, and fumbled for my knife.

As I was getting the knife out, I called to Payindah to ask if he wanted aid.

“No need, sahib. These spawn of hell have shut the gate, and now they dare not even shoot from the loopholes. Three lie dead in the open, and two more are dying noisily near them.” He fired a burst of rapid shots, and then, stopping, hurriedly slipped off his poshtin and pushed it down to me, saying as he took up his rifle again, “The memsahib will be cold.”

Payindah, like most decent fighting men, is a gentleman of nature.

So I turned again to the girl, who was sitting up, and with a somewhat unsteady hand hacked and tore at the twisted leather that bound her arms. The man who had tied her up was an artist and also a fiend. She told me later that he was the third man who followed us, the one whose back Payindah had broken. It took me with a sharp knife about three minutes to get her arms loose.

The swine had wound the raw hides into a sort of crisscross network, and pulled it up so that her arms practically met from the wrists to the elbows behind her back. Her nails were blue, and her hands all swollen up with great knotted veins standing out. She was a good plucked ’un not to scream while I tried to get her free. When I’d cut the last of the knots and peeled off the ropes which had sunk into weals in the flesh, though luckily not breaking the skin, her arms fell limp and helpless to her sides.

With my handkerchief I wiped the blood off her shoulder and then tied it up. There was only a small tear an inch or so long, and not deep.

Then I pulled Payindah’s poshtin on to her, and settling her against a rock tried to massage her arms. Once the blood started moving, she nearly fainted, and I could see the pain was pretty bad. Luckily I had the little brandy-flask I always carry, so I poured some out and held it to her lips.

She made rather a grimace, coughed, and choked, but swallowed it, and a little spot of colour came into her cheeks. After a few more minutes she was able to move her arms and just bend her elbows a bit.

We had brought a thermos of hot tea for use during our watch, as it was very cold in the gloomy valley, so I reached that down and gave her some, which she swallowed gratefully enough. Payindah was only firing occasional shots now, and said there was no movement to be seen at the arrow-slits.

While rubbing the girl’s arms, I tried to talk to her. I said a word or two in Greek; then I tried my halting Turki, then Greek again. The second time she seemed to recognize something, and said slowly, in unmistakable Greek, though idiom and accent were strange at first: “Who are you? You are not of those of the gate?”

“Friends, lady,” said I; “friends from a far country. You are safe now.”

Then the pain stopped her speaking more, and she closed her eyes and leant back against the rock.

Five minutes later, she was just beginning to bend her wrists and the swollen veins were going down, but I could see how the efforts hurt her.

I stood up and spoke to Payindah.

“Can you hold this place alone, Payindah? It’s the narrowest place to stop any one. If you can, I will take the memsahib back and send up the others to relieve you. We shall have to get away from here now that we’ve killed these men.”

“Wah, sahib, one shot like me could hold this against an army. Have no fear. They have no guns, and, so long as it’s light, nothing will cross the stones alive while I am here. But what when it gets dark?”

I looked at my watch—just on 3.15.

“The others will be here before dark. Stay you here and hold the valley.” I took off my bandolier and passed it up to him. “I will leave my rifle in case yours should jam at any time.”

I helped the girl to her feet. “You will have to walk now. It’s too far to carry you. Can you walk if I help?”

“I will try,” she said.

Then I took off my puttees and made slings for her arms, so that the blood flowing down should not hurt too much as she walked. The last thing I did was to knot up some of the cut leather rope, twist it into the chain fastened to her ankle, and tie it up in a loop to the skirt of Payindah’s poshtin which came down to her knees.

As I was doing this last, Payindah looked down. “The mem cannot walk over the stones with bare feet,” and he loosed his chaplis and dropped them down to me.

They were a bit large, but most Easterns have smaller hands and feet than we have, and I managed to knot them on to the girl’s feet fairly well with the aid of the lanyard of my knife. Then I put my arm about her, and we started slowly down the valley.

When we came to the stream, I made her sit down, and bathed her hands and arms, washed the cut on her shoulder, and tied it up again. Then I washed as much of the blood off my face and neck as I could—I was still bleeding a bit—and made a crude bandage with a second handkerchief I had in my pocket.

The girl tried to help me with this last, but her swollen hands still refused to do anything, and with a gesture of despair she gave it up. “I cannot use my hands,” she said piteously. Then, looking at my face, “Are you much hurt?”

“Nothing really,” I said; “keep your arms still now for a while.”

We went fairly slowly, and it took us an hour to get to the tent. I didn’t try to talk to her much, for I could see that her arms hurt a lot as we walked over the rough stones.

“My God!” said Forsyth, whom we ran into just at the tangi mouth examining plants. “What on earth have you been doing? And who have you got here?”

Then he shouted to Wrexham to get the medicine-chest out quick.

“Had a fight, killed some unpleasing gentlemen, picked up this lady, and left Payindah with two rifles holding the valley.”

By this time the others had run up to us, and Wrexham had brought the medicine-chest, so I said to Forsyth:

“Tackle her first, arrow gash on right shoulder, and arms all to hell from ropes. Talks strange Greek slowly.”

He gathered up the medicine-chest and piloted the girl to the tent. While he was overhauling her and dressing the cut on her shoulder, I turned to Wrexham and hurriedly explained things.

“Right-o,” he said, “I’ll cut along now and join Payindah. Two men can hold that pass all night. As soon as Firoz has put some food out—the girl looks as if some wouldn’t hurt her—send him along and Alec, too, as soon as he’s done with you both. You’d better sit down and keep quiet a bit; you look a trifle war-worn. Have you talked to the damsel yet?”

As he spoke he was pulling open the ammunition-boxes, from one of which he took out a small square tin and from another a little round cylinder.

“Yes. She talks Greek, all right, though it sounds funny. But I didn’t worry her much; she was looking pretty cheap. What’s that you’re digging out?”

“A few pounds of powder and some lighters that I brought. With that and some string I’ll rig up some booby-traps in case we have to come away in a hurry.” He opened his little tool-chest and pulled out a hacksaw. “That’ll get the chain off the girl’s ankle. Put a pad underneath while you work.”

“Good idea. I’ll do it when Forsyth’s done with her. Do you think we shall have to bolt from here?”

“I fancy so, but I don’t want to go till we’ve found out something from the girl. She will be able to tell us what’s going on inside. Nor do I want to trek by night if we can hold on till morning and then slip away quietly. They’ll be shy of trying to cross the open space in daylight if they think we’re still there.”

He stuffed his treasures into a big haversack, slung two bandoliers round his neck (we had loaded our sporting .303 into clips and packed it into bandoliers), filled my empty thermos from the teapot on the table, got his rifle, and started off, saying as he went:

“Get all the loads roped up in case we have to scuttle quick.”

I went over to the tent, where I found Forsyth had fixed up the girl in one of our beds, dressed her shoulder, fitted her out with a suit of his silk pyjamas (he is particular about his underclothing), and was rubbing her arms with something or other. She could move her fingers by now, and the swelling had gone down a lot. They were carrying on a conversation, both speaking rather slowly.

As I came in, she looked up, and seeing me caught hold of my hand with a torrent of words rather too quick for me to follow exactly with her strange accent, but it was mostly thanking me for getting her away from the gate. Feeling distinctly embarrassed, I murmured something about “nothing to make a fuss over.”

“Are you feeling better now?” I asked.

“Yes, much better already.”

“You’ve got some luck, old man,” said Forsyth, “to get a chance of rescuing a girl like this. Jolly nice-looking and lots of pluck. She must have been through hell, but no whining.”

He had a final look at her arms and then pulled the blankets up over them.

“What about her shoulder?” I asked.

“Oh, only a deep scratch, and there’s nothing else the matter. Her arms will be all right to-morrow. We must get the chain off her leg, though.”

I showed him the hacksaw.

“Good! Can you tackle that job now while I get some food for her?”

“Yes. But I shall want you to hold the ring steady while I saw it. We want something under it, too; a towel will do.”

He reached for a towel he had been using, and the girl, who had been listening to us, asked me if he was going to do my face.

“Presently,” said I. “But first of all we’re going to get that ring off your leg. Then we’ll give you some food and something warm to drink. After that you must try and tell us what happened to you and where you live. Now keep your leg still. We shan’t hurt.”

Forsyth turned back the end of the blanket and wrapped a twisted towel round her ankle, pushing it up under the ring. Then he held the ring steady, and I got to work. The iron was soft, and the hacksaw went through it with no trouble. A bit of a wrench at the cut ends and it pulled open enough to let me slip her ankle—a particularly slim neat one—through it.

“Well, now I’ll get her some food. I’ve told Firoz to bring boiling water, and I’ve got a bottle of bovril here. The rest will have to be chupattis and tinned stuff. We’re not exactly equipped for hospital feeding.” Forsyth went out and shouted for Firoz.

“You must try and eat, even if you’re not feeling hungry,” said I. “We may have to go a long way to-morrow, I expect.”

“Where are you going?” she asked, looking at me anxiously.

“Try and take you back to your own folk, if we can find a way in, or if you can show us one.”

She was clearly relieved at this, I could see.

“But don’t worry about that for a bit. Here’s food coming. When you’ve eaten and feel stronger, we’ll talk about it.”

Forsyth reappeared, carrying our cherished bazaar tea-tray, with some food on it, and, propping the girl up on the pillows, proceeded to feed her. She tried to take the cup herself, but her wrists were still too stiff, and he had to help her. When she had finished, there was a little more colour in her cheeks.

“Pass me those brushes,” said Forsyth.

I passed them over, and he brushed out her hair, and made it into two plaits in a notably skilful manner, I thought.

“He’s a good nurse; isn’t he?” said I.

She smiled wanly at him.

“Hasn’t she topping hair?” he said. “Real Titian red. Reminds me of some one I used to know.”

Every pretty girl reminds Forsyth of some one he used to know. I suppose that’s why he escaped unmarried. There’s a certain safety in numbers.

When he had finished, the girl said that it was time my face was done.

“Just going to now. You rest a little and then we’ll come back.” He smoothed out the blankets and slipped another pillow under her head.

“Now come along outside, Harry, and let’s have a look at that face of yours.” He picked up the medicine-chest as he spoke, and I followed him out of the tent, where he called Firoz for a basin of water. Then, pulling off my extemporized bandage, he cleaned up my face, which was getting moderately painful.

“A fairly big gash, Harry. You’ll wear your face in a sling for some days to come. Now hold steady. I’m going to hurt a bit.”

He did.

“There, that’s done,” he said at last, reaching for a roll of lint. “It’ll stop hurting presently; it’s a fairly clean cut, though deep. They keep their arrows sharp, which is a blessing. That cut the girl’s got might have been done with a razor.” He was twisting a bandage round my head as he spoke.

“Well, now, we’d better go and ask the girl what’s been happening,” I said, as he finished and began putting his things away.

“Yes. But first I’ll tell Firoz to get ready. I’ll tell him to pack up some food for Wrexham and Payindah; they’ll want something up there. The gorge must be perishing cold by now. It’s none too warm even at midday.”

When we had given Firoz his instructions, we went back to the tent, and sat down on Wrexham’s bedding next to the girl, who had been put into mine. She was looking better already from the food and the warmth.

“Now will you tell us one or two things about what’s happened?” I said. “Are the people in the gate people you’re at war with, or who are they?”

“They are Shamans, a tribe who live round the gate. They are not yet at war with us, though my father expects war some day. They captured me when I was stopping with an old chief, who is a friend of my father’s, just outside our country.”

I was getting accustomed to her accent now, and she had the sense not to talk too fast.

“Why did they capture you, then?”

“They and certain others attacked the old chief’s house when I was there. He was the old man with me in the gate.” She shuddered a bit.

“Then why were they going to kill you?”

“They weren’t—just yet. But ... the chief Shaman ... wanted me ... and so I thought I’d better make him angry—as angry as I could—so that he would kill me quick. They say once he is angry, nothing but blood pleases him, so I thought that was my only chance.”

The colour had gone from her face again, and she breathed rather quickly, so I turned on to something else.

“Do you think the Shamans”—I hesitated over the word, and she repeated it—“the Shamans will attack us to-night?”

“I do not think they will dare face your weapons that kill with only a noise. Moreover, I think they are afraid of the outside of the gate by night. They say there are devils there. Last night they kept me above the gate to frighten me. But I thought that there were worse devils inside than out.... Also they will not know what you are. No man has ever come into the country for hundreds of years, and I think that the common people do not even believe there are men outside.” She looked at us, and then went on again: “You are certainly men, and of course I know there are other countries. But how came you across the desert, and why? And who are you?”

“We came from very far away, lady. We came because we heard that there were white people like ourselves here, and we wished to see. But we will tell you all about that later on. Now you just said the old man with you was a friend of your father’s. Who is your father?”

“He is chief of the Blue Sakae, as we call our clan.”

“Are there several clans in the country, then?”

“Yes, four; but the Shamans have overcome three of them, and seek now to overcome us, being very, very evil.”

“Are your people far away from here?” I asked.

“About three days’ journey—on horseback—to the east.”

“Is there any way up the cliffs into your country, or any other gate like this one?”

“There is no gate.” She thought a little; then continued: “Have you ropes?”

“Yes; we have ropes which we brought to help us climb the cliffs if we could not enter the gate.”

“Then if you can climb well—very well—I can show you a way that might be climbed. It leads to some caves near a country house we have on the edge of our country.”

“Then to-morrow, lady, we will start for there and take you back to your people. At least, we will if you can show us a way up the cliffs.”

I turned to Forsyth.

“Well, now we know where we are, and the thing is to get hold of John. I suggest that we move east the first thing in the morning, unless he’s seen anything which makes him think we ought to go to-night.”

I turned to the girl.

“Now you lie still and rest, and, if you can, sleep. We are going to get things ready to start to-morrow. Presently we’ll come back and fix you up for the night.”

“I wonder if John has seen anything,” said I as we left the tent. “The girl does not seem to think that the enemy will come out to-night, and I expect they’re pretty well scared, what with our guns and our unexpected appearance in a place where no one ever comes. Thank goodness, the moon gets up soon. It will give some light in that beastly place if the enemy try to come out. I’ll go up with Firoz and tell John about things.”

“No, you won’t; not much. You’ll just sit quiet here and rest that face of yours. I’ll go along with Firoz as soon as I’ve made up some stuff to send that young woman to sleep. She’s had enough shocks to last her a lifetime, and I want her to get to sleep. When I’ve gone—say, in another half an hour—give her this stuff I’m going to make up; it ought to send her off pretty quick.”

He was opening the medicine-chest as he talked, and proceeded to mix up some drugs.

“Did you notice the way she talked?” he continued. “I’m sure Greek is not her mother tongue. You noticed how strange words slipped in every now and then, and when she saw we didn’t understand them she substituted Greek ones, sometimes thinking a second or two. She’s got her wits about her, all right, that young person.”

“Yes; I noticed that. Her Greek is different from any I’ve heard, although one can follow it easily enough. I wonder if it’s the old classic Greek just been changing through the ages, or whether it’s some old forgotten dialect. But did you realize her clan name, the ‘Sakae’? I’ve met them somewhere in one of the classics, I’m sure.”

“Yes; I remarked that, all right. They were a tribe of sorts in middle Asia in Alexander’s time. The chief points about them were their being very stout fighters, and their women being particularly independent. There’s some old story about their marriage customs, including a decision in each case as to whether the man or the woman should rule the house. Rather fits in with the present case, for it’s clear that this damsel is accustomed to treat with men on an equal footing. None of your Eastern purdah about her.”

“Jolly refreshing to meet after some years in the East, isn’t it? I wonder if this crowd are the original Sakae? Were they supposed to be white?” I asked.

“I fancy so. At least, the old writers differentiate between them and the Indians, whom Arrian refers to as being ‘blacker than any other men except the Æthiopians.’ If the Sakae were dark, they’d have mentioned it. But this girl is as white as you or me, and you’d remark on her fairness even in England. I wonder who they can be. Not pure Greek, I’m sure, if they’re all like her.”

He handed me the stuff he had made up, closed his case, and called to Firoz, who came up with his rifle slung over his shoulder, Payindah’s chaplis and poshtin, our second thermos and a bundle, presumably food. Forsyth got his rifle, slung on a bandolier, and the two set off. I set Sadiq to roping up the loads, so as to be ready to move quickly if necessary, and then I went into the tent.

The girl was still awake so I lit the lantern which I had brought, for it was getting dark. Her colour had come back a lot now, and I realized more than I had before how really beautiful she must be when she was well.

“Are you warm enough?” I asked. The evenings were getting chilly, and a cold wind had sprung up.

“Yes; quite warm now, thank you.”

“Well, anyway, I’ll put this rug over your feet, so that you can pull it up later if you feel cold.”

I took the rug off Wrexham’s bedding and spread it over the end of her bed. Then I began to pull out the two other bedding-rolls.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Taking our bedding outside,” said I.

“Whose bed have I got?” she asked.

“Mine, as a matter of fact. Why?”

“And what are you going to do? You won’t have enough things if you give me all these.”

“Yes, we shall. One of us, if not two, will be up in the valley watching all night in case the Shamans try to come out of the gate. They won’t get far if they do, though,” I added to reassure her.

Then I tidied up the tent, and finally brought her Forsyth’s medicine.

“The doctor sent you this to make you sleep. He says you’re to go to sleep now.”

She drank it without a murmur.

“Is the tall fair man a doctor?”

“Yes,” said I.

“And what are you?”

“A soldier. At least I have been one for many years.”

“I thought so,” she said reflectively.

“And why?”

“Because you look as if you made people do what they’re told quickly without asking questions. Many soldiers look like that. My cousins do.”

“Are they soldiers?”

“Yes. But most of our people are soldiers to begin with until they’re old enough to take over their father’s land.”

“Well, you go to sleep now. You’re quite safe here, so don’t worry. One or other of us will be sleeping just outside the tent, so you can call if you want anything, and I’ll leave the light burning.”

Her eyes were bright, and she looked, as Forsyth said, as if sleep was the only thing for her after what she’d been through.

“How can I call if I don’t know your names?” she said.

“Mine’s Harry Lake, and the doctor’s is Forsyth.”

She didn’t worry much about the latter name, but mine seemed to give a little difficulty, for she repeated it two or three times, finally compromising on ‘Harilek.’ And ‘Harilek’ I remained ever afterwards.

I was just going to turn down the light when she asked—woman-like—in a very anxious voice—

“O Harilek! What about some clothes for to-morrow?”

I admit I hadn’t thought about that matter. How on earth were three wandering bachelors going to fit out a young woman—of remarkably pleasing looks I thought again as I looked at her—from our exiguous male wardrobes?

“We’ll find something for you, all right,” I said, in my most reassuring tones. “But ... we haven’t got any skirts,” I added.

She laughed then—a real laugh—the first I’d heard from her, and thought it a good sign that she was getting back her spirits.

“I didn’t think you would have, Harilek. You’re not the sort of people that would have skirts with you.”

“You seem to understand very quickly just what sort of people we are,” I said, rather nettled as I turned the light half down.

“You are not at all difficult to understand—soldier man—at least not to a woman, though doubtless you think your soldiers can’t read your mind.”

“Time you went to sleep, lady. By the way, you haven’t told me your name yet.”

“Aryenis,”[5] she said, snuggling down on my worn pillow.

“Sleep well, Aryenis; you’re quite safe now, so don’t dream.”

She closed her eyes. Then she opened them again, looked at me, and said very slowly:

“Good-night, Harilek; good-night ... and thank you.”

I felt I’d had my reward as I went out and softly pulled to the tent flies.

I pottered about watching Sadiq rope up loads, lending him a hand with the more difficult ones. Then I made him refill the last tank, inspected the others, went over the loads—nearly everything except our sleeping kit and the tent was roped up—and finally, realizing that I was very weary, rolled into Wrexham’s bedding, and lay out in the stillness watching the moon rising over the desert to the east of the shadowy hills.

I suppose it was nearly three hours later that I heard footsteps on the stones, and got up to find Firoz coming back with a note from Wrexham:

No movement in front, but saw lights in arrow-slits at dusk, so sent some shots over and lights went out.

A bit jumpy till the moon got high, and fired precautionary shots at intervals. After the moon was up did another crawl to see the fellows you laid out. A villainous-looking crowd. Three dead, one just on it, and the fifth won’t last long. Couldn’t pull the old man over to our side owing to the noise, or might have buried him decently.

Alec will come back later. He told me what the girl said, and we will trek at dawn, hugging the cliffs eastward. A. will give you further details.

Payindah full of blood and battle. Wants to know who the “mem” is?

J. W.

I explained things to Firoz, and went up to the tent door and peeped in. The girl was asleep, her eyes closed, and her breathing slow and regular. Evidently Forsyth’s medicine was working all right.

Then, feeling thoroughly tired, I told Firoz to keep awake, curled up in Wrexham’s bedding again, and in a few minutes, despite a very tender face, was asleep. A somewhat broken sleep it was, full of dreams about arrows and savage men, sometimes my mail-jacketed friends of the afternoon, sometimes older souvenirs; and in the midst of them all a vision, big hazel-grey eyes, a very kissable kind of mouth, and a cloud of red-gold hair over white shoulders. Then once a picture of all that with a slim white body waiting bravely for death, and lastly, a sweet, low voice saying, “Good-night, Harilek; good-night ... and thank you.” I had no more dreams after that.

CHAPTER X
BELOW THE CLIFFS

It was past four o’clock when Forsyth woke me up, and I rolled out of my blankets into the cold dawn. The wind had dropped now, however.

“Time to turn out, old thing,” he said. “We’ve got to be under way by six. How’s the face?”

“A bit sore,” said I, as I tightened up my chaplis. “Where’s John?”

“Still sitting up at the end of the pass. He’s not coming back. We’re to pack up and start off to the east. He and Payindah will stay there till it’s light, and then come away following us as rear-guard. Nothing happened all the time I was there. But old Wrexham’s a hard nut. Wish I had half his nerve. He went crawling among the bones nearly up to the gate to look-see.”

Firoz was setting out cups and plates on the yakhdans by the light of a hurricane-lamp. In the moonlight I could see the camels kneeling down and Sadiq carrying up loads. Evidently Forsyth had been busy since he came back.

“First thing is to get some clothes for the lady,” he continued. “You’re the nearest size; I’m too long and John’s too fat. What can you raise? That pair of grey flannel trousers you keep for state occasions and your other shooting-coat will do as a start.”

“I’ve got a Jaeger sweater, too, and a pair of old tennis-shoes.”

“Good, and I’ve got my one and only silk shirt. Don’t suppose she’ll want to wear your sweater next to her skin. Thank goodness, I’ve got a lot of safety-pins in my outfit. That’s the chief essential as far as women go. Well, if you help Sadiq, I’ll go and wake her up; I’m glad she got to sleep. I was afraid she might break down if she didn’t.”

Ten minutes later, he returned chuckling to where I was helping Sadiq rope things on to the camels.

“D——d lucky you have a fellow with you who’s been brought up by a crowd of sisters. I wonder what the wretched girl would have done if she’d been handed over to the tender mercies of you and John.”

Considering the trouble I’d taken to collect the lady, and the fact that I have a perfectly good sister myself, I thought the taunt was unmerited. So I merely asked:

“Whose sisters?” whereupon Forsyth answered in quite a peeved way that he meant his own.

By a quarter to five, we had everything loaded up save the food yakhdans, the tent, and my valise, which Aryenis was using. We cast anxious eyes on the tent as time went on, but it was just on five when she emerged and came over to us, rather shyly, I thought. I got up (Forsyth, seeing her coming, had gone to get Sadiq to strike the tent) and said good-morning, inquiring after her shoulder and arms.

“My arms are all right now, and my shoulder’s not hurting much,” she said, and asked after my face.

Being a woman, she had done a lot with the miscellaneous outfit, mostly mine, which Forsyth had presented to her. I noticed that, as he prophesied, the silk shirt was inside the sweater, and, being a mere man, wished it was the other way about. You see, the sweater was mine.

I felt sorry for her having to make her appearance like this, with my baggy grey trousers tucked into a pair of very old stockings ending in my tennis-shoes, about four sizes too big. She had swathed her hair in a big silk handkerchief, rather moth-eaten, but an old treasure which had outlasted me many dhobis.

I made her put on my poshtin, which came right down to her feet, and I think she was glad of the warmth. Then I offered her Wrexham’s valise to sit on, and sat down on one of the yakhdans. She looked a great deal better than the night before, though still a bit worn. I expect she was feeling the strain of all she’d been through.

Firoz appeared with a teapot, some chupattis, and a dish of salmon, the kind that grows in tins. As he put them down, he greeted Aryenis with, “Salaam, Miss Sahib. Ab achhe hain?” It was noticeable the way the men treated her from the very beginning as a person of consequence. I explained that he was asking if she was feeling better, and she smiled at him and thanked him in Greek. Doubtless Payindah had told him how brave she had been, and they were both her very devoted slaves ever afterwards.

I poured out some tea and helped her to some fish. I noticed that knife and spoon were familiar enough, but that the fork rather defeated her, and could see that she was watching carefully to see what I did with mine.

“Did you sleep last night, Harilek? You must have been cold out in the wind.”

“Pretty well, thanks. And you?”

“More than well, as I ought to have, since you have given me your tent and all your things. And this morning when the doctor brought me the clothes, he gave me the most wonderful mirror I have ever seen. I thought I was looking at a real person, not a mirror, when I looked in it. It was like the glass round the lamp, but I’ve never seen glass that you can see through before. Ours is thick and coloured, and we only make plates and beads of it.”

“What do you do for mirrors, then?”

“Metal. I’ve got two of bronze, but they are not nearly as good as your glass ones. Yours must be a wonderful country if three men travelling on a journey in the desert have all sorts of things like that with them.”

“Yes, I expect our things must seem strange to you, having been cut off from the big world so long.”

“What am I eating, Harilek? This pink stuff?”

“That’s a fish of our country.”

“But you said your country was ever so far away! How could you bring fish with you?”

“Oh, we seal it up in boxes, and it keeps for months and years. It tastes all right, doesn’t it?”

“Quite. But how very wonderful.”

“Not half as wonderful as finding some one like you here, just like our own people.”

“Am I like your women?”

“Yes, only nicer-looking than most.”

“Nice compliments, Harilek, considering the things I’m wearing. I know what I look like to-day. If you wanted to make pretty speeches, you shouldn’t have let the doctor give me the mirror. But I mean are your women fair like me? And what sort of clothes do they wear?”

“Don’t ask me. All sorts.”

“I see. Not trousers like these things, I hope!”

“No; not trousers like those. Skirts. I hope you don’t wear trousers—like that.”

She gave a sniff of disgust.

“No, Harilek! Skirts. Nice short ones.”

Having loaded the tent, Forsyth came over, made a hurried breakfast, looked at his watch, and said:

“We’d better finish packing up. It’s twenty-five past five, and I told John we’d get away by six.”

“What’s left to pack?” I asked.

“Only the mess things, but that’ll take a quarter of an hour, at least. Hi, Firoz!”

“Look here, we’d better take a hand at washing up these things. We don’t want to pack ’em up all dirty,” said I. “I’ll just dip ’em in the stream.”

Forsyth had turned Aryenis off the valise and was roping it up. Seeing me with my hands full of plates going to the stream, thirty yards away, she gathered up the remaining cups and saucers and followed. I was on my knees by the stream when she arrived, evidently anxious to help. She said something about that being woman’s work, from which I imagine she thought I might be doing something more useful. However, we finished the job together, and, coming back with the lot washed up, packed them into the yakhdans. Then we roped on the last loads, and cast a final glance over everything.

Firoz brought up the spare camel and made it kneel down. You remember it had a riding-saddle on. The grunts and gurgles and the long, writhing neck and open mouth rather frightened Aryenis, who drew back a pace. She was evidently not familiar with camels, for she had been looking at them curiously before. At last she asked me what beasts they were.

“Camels,” I said. “Have you none in your country?” I had to say the word several times in different forms before she understood it.

“Camels. Yes, I have read of them in old books. No, we have none.”

I was just going to make the camel get up, having settled her as comfortably as I could in the saddle, when Forsyth told me to mount.

“You’d better ride as well, Harry,” he said. “You can see better aloft, and it’ll be company for the lady. It may also be less painful for your face than stumbling along over the stones.”

As that camel had carried nothing for its keep for the last fortnight, I was very ready. Besides, it would give me a chance of talking a bit more to Aryenis. Since she was, so to speak, the captive of my bow and spear, or rather of my pistol and my particular slave’s rifle, I did not see why Forsyth should do the talking. So I swung myself into the front seat, made her hold on tight, and pulled the camel to its feet.

The coming dawn had lightened the sky, and everything showed ghostly in the faint mixture of moonlight and dawn. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes past six.

“All aboard,” I called to Forsyth.

“Right-o. All ready. Lead straight along, hugging the cliffs.”

The camel stepped out; behind me the big black leader’s bell tinkled, and looking back I saw the long line of swaying necks, with Firoz with his slung rifle and Sadiq trailing the shot-gun on foot beside them. Forsyth was evidently at the tail.

We crossed the tangi mouth, and passed on beyond under the frowning cliffs. Aryenis looked up the gorge with a little shiver as we passed. She must have been glad to see the last of it.

The going was not bad at the foot of the slope on the edge of the sand. Above us towered the cliffs, gaunt, bare rock, grey in the light of the growing dawn, and on our right was the trackless ocean of rippled sand with the dunes growing in height toward the horizon. The sky was colourless, and the stars, already faint in the moonlight, were rapidly paling before the coming sun, hidden from us as yet by the giant wall above. But the western sky flung back a faint reflection of the coming glory, and soon the western edge of the desert grew golden as the sun swung up and the mountains’ shadow shortened eastward toward us.

“The dawn is very beautiful, Harilek,” said Aryenis, pointing to the translucent sky and the golden light on the desert’s fringe. “I never thought to look on it again yesterday. Think you will be able to get me back home all right?” There was an anxious note in her voice.

“I hope so, Aryenis. But you’ve got to show us the way. Still, I don’t think we should have found you if we weren’t going to get you home. Some day I’ll tell you how we came here. To my mind it’s all too wonderful to be nothing but chance. I think it must have been meant. No, I think we shall get you home all right to the people who are waiting for you; your father and—who else?”

A sudden thought had struck me, a most unpleasing one. I’m not more sentimental than the average Englishman is underneath his veneer, but, after all, I had taken some trouble over Aryenis, and the idea of having salved some one else’s property was naturally unattractive. Besides, every moment seemed to show her as a person exceptionally worth taking trouble over. I had expected to find—if we did find white folk—something half-barbaric, and here was a distinctly cultured and exceptionally attractive girl.

“There’s my brother Stephnos and old Uncle Paulos and heaps more people. I’ve got lots of friends.”

I breathed a distinct sigh of relief. I didn’t mind taking trouble about salving people’s daughters or sisters or mere friends.

“Oh, Harilek. You said you thought you were meant to find me. What did you mean? Who meant it?”

“Who meant it? Why, who could mean a thing like that except one person? God, of course.”

“Did you say God or the gods?”

“God. We only believe in one. How many do you believe in?”

“We only believe in one, although some of our people believe in many, a thing that brings strife sometimes. My father says part of the Shamans’ enmity comes from this, since they believe in many very evil gods.”

This was a bit of a surprise. I had hardly expected to find monotheists in this country. It was fairly clear that these people were some old prehistoric survival of the original white races, and could hardly have received Mohammedanism. Anyway, Aryenis’s independence showed clearly that the tents of Islam had not reached her country when they had swamped the greater part of Central Asia.

“But, Harilek, you say you only believe in one. How is He called?” She seemed very interested.

“Just God. But if you can understand, we also believe that He had a son Christ, who came into the world in the guise of a man—”

“But,” she said excitedly, “then you are Christians even as we are!”

I could hardly believe my ears. It is true that there are scattered Nestorian Christians in Chinese Turkestan, but how on earth could these isolated people be Christians! I turned round to Aryenis in bewilderment.

“You seem surprised.”

“So are you, Aryenis.”

“Well, it is rather wonderful. I think—with you, Harilek—that all this must be meant.”

She was silent for a minute. Then she went on.

“Are all of you Christians? The doctor and the other, and the darker-faced men?”

“The darker-faced men are not, though they also believe in one God, but they do not believe in Christ, saying that He was only a great prophet, not God. My two friends are Christians by birth, but the doctor says that such things are beyond him, and he will not believe in anything he cannot see or handle and prove for himself. Wrexham—the stout man you saw for a minute last night—believes in God, I think, but he pretends he is not sure, and so, like many people, from wanting to be quite sure of everything, he is not even sure of not believing.”

“That must be very sad for him.”

“It is, since he is such a good man. However, if we get to heaven we shall find him and lots more up above us, all right, for all the good things they have done so much better than we who, knowing more, should be better than they.”

“True, Harilek. You, like me, are clearly a believer in the faith. I am more than glad.”

We were silent a little after that, and then she asked where Wrexham was, so I told her what he was doing, and how he had tried to get the old chief’s body back to bury.

“He is clearly a brave man. Fancy crawling right up to the gates like that,” said Aryenis. “Is he also a soldier?”

“Not always, though he has fought much. He is an engineer, one who has knowledge of building and mines, and the making of all kinds of metal-work and such things.”

“And the darker-faced men?”

“Yes, they are soldiers. One of them—the one who spoke to you this morning—is one of the kind skilled in making forts and in attacking them. He was with Wrexham in the wars. The other is an ordinary soldier who was under my command. Both are very brave and have seen many battles.”

“But why have they darker faces than you? At least, their faces are not much darker than yours, Harilek, but their skins are, as I can tell by their hands and feet. But your face is only dark from sun, for your skin is white like mine. I could see that when your hat was off. Are they of a different race?”

“Yes. They live in a very hot country which is ruled by my people.”

“And were you a commander of many men there?”

“During the war I was a commander of a thousand men, like the one who helped us in the gate.”

This was a bit of an exaggeration considering the frequently pitiable proportions of my battalion in the more hectic days of the war. Still, at the dépôt I once commanded nearly thirteen hundred, so the average was not too bad. Besides, “commander of a thousand” sounded something like an old Greek title I remembered, and I couldn’t go into details of modern military organization.

“‘Commander of a thousand.’ Then you must be a big chief.”

“Not a bit. Only quite a little one. My country is very big.”

“Well, when you were older—for you are not old, any of you—you would have been a commander of many more—a really big chief,” said she, with feminine ignorance and optimism.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. But, anyway, I gave up being a soldier, and was going back to my land in my own country where my sister lives. Then Wrexham persuaded me to come with him to look for these hills which were once seen by one of his ancestors.”

Just then Forsyth came up and suggested our halting for a while. Wrexham and Payindah ought to be up with us, for we had been going over two hours. If not, we ought to wait, and, if they did not come soon, go back.

We dismounted and caused Aryenis intense astonishment with our pipes. Evidently tobacco was unknown in the Sakae country. However, a shock or two more was nothing after the number she’d had. But the box of matches intrigued her tremendously. I think, after the mirror, the matches were the thing which took her fancy most of all. Both were articles of practical utility, whereas guns and watches—especially watches—were obviously inconsequential frills to the feminine mind, playthings for the stupider sex, but of no use to the more practical one intent on much bigger problems of dress and the household. Aryenis, like most women, had only three times she took notice of—past, Present (with a capital P), and future. The idea of a finicky division into hours and minutes struck her severely logical mind as absolutely unnecessary.

The more I saw of Aryenis, the more convinced did I become that woman—the ever-changing—never changes at all in reality. Except that Aryenis is much nicer-looking and cleverer, there is not the slightest difference between her and the various women I used to meet at home.

Half an hour later Wrexham and Payindah came up, the latter carrying the steel cap of the first fellow I had killed. The irrepressible Wrexham had collected it as a souvenir. Nothing would have induced me to crawl out into the clearing under the gate merely to gather a useless bit of loot.

He said that they had seen no signs of life all night, save for the lights mentioned in his note. At daybreak some arrows had been fired rather aimlessly from the loopholes toward the gorge, whereupon he and Payindah had opened rapid fire at the arrow-slits, and the arrows forthwith ceased for good.

After spending an hour sniping the gate at longer and longer intervals, they had connected up the booby-traps Wrexham had prepared with his little tin of powder and slipped noiselessly away.

He reckoned the enemy would not venture to follow us for a while, and if they did the booby-traps would stop them the first time they tried, even if not indefinitely. All five of the men in the clearing were dead now, and no effort had been made from the gate to get them in, so the enemy were obviously pretty panicky. Still, for the rest of the time we were under the cliffs we never dispensed with a sentry at night.

We travelled steadily for three days, following the line of cliffs, which curved very gradually toward the northeast, with, to our right, always the waste of sand. Aryenis told us that, as far as she knew, the whole country was ringed with hills and surrounded by desert on all sides. According to her, it was a big country, since it was six days’ journey from one side to the other even on horseback. Allowing twenty miles a day as a maximum, and taking off something for the roads being winding, as they must be in a country obviously hilly, that meant at least a hundred miles across. As a matter of fact, our estimate proved pretty accurate, for later on Wrexham made a rough survey of it, and it was over the hundred in length and nearly seventy in breadth.

The marches were as monotonous as the one across the desert had been, and we saw no signs of life and found no water. It was lucky we had been able to water the animals and fill up our tanks before we started from the gate. The camels were now very gaunt and getting weak, for we had had to reduce their ration to a minimum. It was clear that, if we could not get into the country, our chances of ever getting back home again were small, since the camels would be too weak for the long marches back across the desert, even although we had water. They wanted rest and grazing badly. Still, I think that none of us felt really depressed, since up to date things had worked out so extraordinarily well. The rain in the desert and our finding Aryenis both served to strengthen our idea that we were meant to get through.

Aryenis herself kept our spirits up. She had quite recovered her own, and the prospect of getting back to her home, of which she was clearly passionately fond, kept her ever cheerful, even despite the trials of her wardrobe.

I never wish to meet more cheerful company. She was bonne camarade from the very beginning. She had apparently sized us up the first night; had come to the conclusion that for mere men we were quite respectable beings, and treated us accordingly. By the end of the second day she had taken command of the table, and especially of the teapot. Tea, like tobacco, was unknown to her, but she took to the former at once, and, when Wrexham had instructed her in the art of making it, made it herself at every meal, Firoz coming obediently with really boiling water. It was a notable change from the gun-fire type which we had drunk hitherto.

I was afraid at first that Firoz might resent her taking charge, remembering the speedy disappearance of the old servants of my various bachelor acquaintances when their masters took unto themselves wives. But Firoz took it absolutely lying down, until Aryenis—not knowing a word of his language—superintended all our meals. The third day, while we were fixing up camp, I saw her over at Firoz’s fire, much gesticulating going on, and the lady herself apparently cooking something.

That night she was first at table, and, after the inevitable corned beef, Firoz uncovered with great pride two plates of crisp cakes and some sweets. Aryenis, investigating our kitchen arrangements, had inquired concerning our chupattis, which she considered extremely nasty, and the upshot had been Forsyth’s producing some baking powder, unheeded since the flight of the cook, and explaining its use. She annexed it forthwith, as well as a tin of condensed milk, a discovery that delighted her when she was told what it was.

“There,” said Aryenis, “those are worth eating. I made them myself, and I know. Why do men when they do not have a woman to nurse them content themselves with anything that a servant puts in front of them?”

We were dumb, as always, when Aryenis reproved us. I’ve never seen two unattached men lie down to be kicked so meekly as did Wrexham and Forsyth once she announced—not in words, of course—her intention of ruling the place as long as she honoured us with her presence. I, myself, having for many years been under a masterful elder sister who took me over at the age of three when my mother died, had long since learnt the folly of pretending to have a will of my own, except when I could get out of range, and, of course, situated as we were, we could not get out of range of Aryenis.

The first evening out she commandeered all our available stack of needles, thread, and the like, and proceeded to overhaul our frayed and much-worn clothes, so that by the third day there were buttons where buttons should be, and patches where had hitherto been only openwork.

Yes; she took charge of us as if we were a trio of small boys mislaid by their parents, and—we liked it.

She gazed upon us in turn after her remarks about our manner of living, as though defying us to produce any reasonable reason, and, seeing that we were suitably worm-like, passed the sweets round. Sugar was evidently familiar enough to her. We had only the coarse bazaar article, and found much the same in Sakae land.

We began once more to consider our personal appearance, even though water was so scarce. Forsyth wore a tie at every meal, for instance—only a khaki one, it is true, but still a tie. This excited Aryenis’s emulation, and, searching among our kit under pretence of repairs, she found an old regimental tie of mine which had somehow failed to get lost or stolen during our six months’ march. She forthwith took it into wear, knotted about her throat rather à la Montmartre, and asked me why I had hidden such a treasure when I was getting clothes for her.

Despite anxiety about the future, the weakening camels, our limited water-supply, and the possibility of not finding a way up—a possibility we did not like to reflect on overmuch, since it spelt something not unlike a two to one chance of dying in the sand trying to get back, we were, thanks to Aryenis, a comparatively cheerful little party, especially in the evenings. We had picked up a certain amount of fuel by the stream banks outside the gate where there were some small trees and a good quantity of thick reeds, and after the evening meal each night Firoz brought us over the remains of his cooking fire and a handful or two of fuel, and we sat round it under the starlit sky. Aryenis, with the firelight playing on her face, my old tie making a splash of colour in the big black collar of her poshtin, the skirts of which mostly concealed the offending blot of the flannel trousers, curled up on the rugs we spread for her; the rest of us sitting round smoking, while we answered her endless questions about our country, or Forsyth strummed to us on his tiny banjoline, and gave us revue selections in his pleasing baritone, and then Aryenis in a real clear soprano sang us haunting snatches—music like old, old Western chant. And in the background the dim forms of the camels, the silhouette of the little tent, and the low murmur of the men’s talk round their bubbling hookah.