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“The name?” they growled, looking up. “The name, the name?”
“General Raynier Sahib,” answered the mullah, fairly quivering with delight. “Say now, Chief of the Gularzai. Is the Sahib yonder at Mazaran still as thy brother?”
“What has he to do with this?” thundered the chief.
“Ya, Allah! Observe, O Nawab. He who is now as the Sirkar at Mazaran is named Raynier Sahib. He is the son of the man who thus slew the brother of the chief of the Gularzai. Say; is he still as thy brother?”
Chapter Ten
The Syyed’s Tangi
“Are you superstitious, Miss Clive?”
“Well, I don’t know. Not more than other people, I suppose.”
“That is tantamount to an answer in the affirmative,” rejoined Raynier. “Believer in ‘luck.’ Observances connected with the new moon – the finding of a horse-shoe. Things of that kind.”
“Oh no, I’m not,” she answered decidedly.
“What? You would really upset the salt, and omit to throw some over your shoulder – or walk under a ladder?”
“As to that, I’d make sure there was no one on it with a paint-pot first.”
“That’s better. And you’re not afraid of ghosts, eh?”
“Well, I’ve never seen one,” she answered, demurely mischievous. And then they both laughed.
It was near sundown – also near the camp. They were returning from an afternoon ride, and the rest of the party, Haslam and the Tarletons to wit, were some way on ahead. These two were alone together.
This they had frequently been, since accident had thus thrown them together, and in that brief period of time Raynier had fallen to wondering more and more what there was about Hilda Clive that already he had begun to think how he would miss her later on, and how on earth they could have been shut up together on board a ship all the time they had, and yet that he should hardly have taken any notice of her. Now in their daily intercourse she was so companionable and tactful – and withal feminine. She was really attractive too, he thought, not for the first time, as he looked at her and noticed how well she sat her horse. As an actual fact she really had improved in the point of appearance, and that vastly; for the healthy outdoor life in that high climate had added a colour to her face which gave it just that amount of softness in which it had seemed lacking before.
“If you are absolutely sure you are free from superstition,” went on Raynier, “I’d like to show you something that’s worth seeing.”
“What is it?”
“There’s a real thrill of curiosity in that question,” he laughed. “It’s a tangi– and a haunted one.”
“Oh, I must see it. Where is it, Mr Raynier?”
“Close here. But before you venture you had better think over the penalty. The belief is that whoever enters it meets his death in some shape or form before the end of the next moon.”
“That’s creepy, at any rate. But is the idea borne out by fact?”
“They say it is, without exception. You would not get any of the people here to set foot in it on any consideration whatever.”
“Then none of them ever set foot in it?”
“I should rather think not.”
“Then how do they know what would happen if they did?”
“They know what has happened – at least, they say so. This is the place.”
They had been riding over a nearly level plain, sparsely grown with stunted vegetation, and shut in by hills, stony and desolate, breaking up here and there into a network of chasms. Under one of these and at the further edge of the plain was pitched their camp, and from where they now halted they could distinguish the smoke of the fires rising straight upward on the still air, could make out the glimmer of a white tent or two. Right in front of them reared a mountain side, steep and lofty, rising in terraced slopes – and, cleaving this there yawned the entrance of a gigantic rift.
“I’m not surprised they should weave all sorts of superstitions about such a place as this,” said Hilda Clive, as she gazed up, with admiration not unmixed with awe, at the sheer of the stupendous rock portals, so regular in their smooth immensity as almost to preclude the possibility of being the work of Nature unaided.
“Well, now, I’ve warned you what the penalty is,” went on the other. “Do you still want to go in?”
“Why, you are so solemn over it, Mr Raynier, that anyone would think you believed in it yourself.”
“They could hardly think that, could they, seeing that I’ve been through it already.”
“Been through it? Have you really? How long ago?”
“From end to end. A couple of days after we came up here.”
“But did you know the tradition?”
“Yes. Haslam told me. I questioned Mehrab Khan about it, and he is a firm believer in it. In fact, all the people are. That’s the reason I sent him on to the camp now. I didn’t want him to know what we were going to do, if only that there’s nothing to be gained by jumping with both feet upon other people’s prejudices, especially natives’. And these might look upon it as a desecration.”
“Has Mr Haslam been through it himself?”
Raynier whistled, then laughed.
“Haslam! Why, he’d about as soon go into it as Mehrab Khan.”
“Really, Mr Raynier, I couldn’t have believed you people out here were so superstitious. You are as bad as the natives themselves. I suppose you get it from them.”
“‘You’? Count me out, please. Didn’t I just say I’d been through the place? I’m doomed anyhow, you see,” he added banteringly, “but there’s no reason why you should be. So now we’ll get back to camp.”
“No. I want to go through it too.”
“Quite sure you won’t feel uncomfortable about it afterwards?” he said. “You might, you know.”
But a strange expression had come over her face, the set, far-away look of one whose thoughts were not with her words. In after times that look came back to him.
“I want to go through it too,” she repeated.
“Very well, then – you’ve been warned.”
As they entered the grim portal the sun was just touching the horizon, but it occurred to neither of them that it might be pitch dark before they emerged. At first the slant of the rock walls caused one of these to overhang, shutting out the sky, but the rift gradually widening, they could see the brow of these stupendous cliffs, far above against the sky at a dizzy height. Unconsciously the tones of both were lowered as they conversed.
“It isn’t healthy taking too long to get through a tangi like this when there are rain storms going about,” Raynier was saying. “It makes a most effective waterway for ten, twenty, forty feet of flood. Ah, I thought so. Look.”
High over their heads, caught here and there in a crevice of the rock, was a wisp of withered grass or a few sticks. There was no mistaking how these objects had got there, and the awful magnitude of the flood which at times bellowed through this grisly rift.
“Why is the place supposed to be haunted?” said Hilda Clive. “You didn’t tell me.”
“The usual thing – a curse. There was a man killed here by the people of the neighbourhood – not an incident of very great moment in this country, you would think. But this one was a great character in the sanctity line of business – a Syyed or a Hadji, or something of the sort – and so his ghost appeared and took it out of the neighbourhood, and indeed the human race in general, by planting a rigid embargo on the place. And it was a pretty practical way of taking it out of them too, for they used this tangi as a thoroughfare – it’s scarcely a mile long, you know – whereas now they’ve got to go round the mountain instead of through it, which makes a difference of at least eight.”
“It’s an eerie place, anyhow,” said the girl, looking up a little awe-stricken at the immensity of the cliff walls. The sun had gone off the world now, and a tomb-like twilight prevailed here in the heart of the mountain. It was chilling enough to have begotten a whole volume of grim legends.
“Wonder if the old Syyed’s ghost is on hand now,” said Raynier, who was cynically and frankly sceptical in such matters. “We’ll give him the salaam anyhow.” Then, raising his voice but very slightly, he exclaimed, —
“Salaam, Syyed!”
What was this? The whole of the immense vault was roaring and bellowing with sound. In waves it rolled, now running along the ground at their feet, now tossed on high as though escaping into outer air. “Salaam, salaam, salaam!” it replied in every conceivable tone and key, then roared along the cliffs again as in a peal of thunder, the whole accompanied by a mighty rattling. The noise was simply appalling.
Raynier, the sceptical, was more than startled. Not to put too line a point on it, he was just a little bit scared, though no manifestation of it escaped him. The horses of both, too, were backing and snorting, evincing a degree of terror not at all calculated to soothe the nerves of their riders. The suddenness of it all, the booming of the spectral voices here in the grisly depths, was rather startling.
He looked at his companion somewhat apprehensively, expecting to see her pale and shaking, perhaps hysterical. To his surprise she was laughing. His first thought even then was that this was a form of hysteria.
“Don’t you see?” she said.
“Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” boomed the vault around. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” shrieked and wailed the heights above. And then Raynier felt secretly more than a little ashamed of himself – for he did see.
As they were talking they had rounded a sudden bend in the defile, and the salute he had jocosely directed to the dead Syyed – if such a person had ever existed in fact – had been caught up by a most astounding echo, which, for no apparent reason, was given forth precisely at that spot. Still, it was not a little curious that they should have entered within its scope simultaneously with the utterance of the half-mocking words, which, mingling with the rattle of the horses’ hoofs upon the loose stones of the tangi, had produced the horrible din.
Now it was she who said in a whisper, —
“We had better not talk out loud or these horses will go quite mad. It is all I can do to stay on mine as it is.”
In fact the animals were in the wildest stage of snorting, trembling fear, and could hardly be persuaded to proceed at all. Their shying and plunging created a rattle which the echo reproduced and magnified as before. At length they quieted down.
“We may be through the sphere of the echo,” said Raynier, tentatively raising his voice a little. And the result showed that they were.
“How is it the same thing did not happen when you came through here before?” said Hilda Clive, as soon as it became safe to converse again.
“Easily explained. I left my horse at the entrance and walked. I always wear very silent boots, and I had nobody to talk to. Look, we are through now, but we sha’n’t have much time to admire the view on the other side because it’s rather late, and we ought to get back to camp.”
A tower of light now rose in front of them, light only in comparison to the gloom of the tangi. It was the exit at the other end, similar in every particular to the entrance.
They stood looking out over a wild wide valley shut in by the same eternal hills. From far beneath among the gloomy rifts and sparse vegetation arose the long-drawn howl of a wolf.
“What a wilderness!” exclaimed the girl. “Do you know, it’s splendid. I’m so glad I came.”
She had turned her eyes full upon his face. What wonderful eyes they were, he thought – and they were fascinating too. How on earth had he been so long in making the discovery? He thought, too, how she had been the one whose nerves had remained entirely unshaken during that very startling surprise – how she it was – not he – who had at once seen through its perfectly natural solution, and he felt small accordingly. But his admiration for her had strangely increased.
They turned to retrace their way, hardly able to make it out in the gloom. They had been descending all the time, and now it took a little longer, for the floor of the tangi was stony and rough.
“I’m not surprised they have set up a ghost here,” said Raynier, when they had passed the echo point. “That is one of the most extraordinary effects I have ever experienced.”
“Is it not?” she answered quietly. “Don’t look up just yet – it has disappeared – but there was the head of someone watching us just over the ledge a little above you on the right. There. Now look.”
Raynier could hardly repress a start, as his hand went instinctively to his pistol pocket nor did he feel any the easier because, by some inadvertence, it was empty. Then he looked up.
Right over the way they were to pass was a small ledge, apparently inaccessible to mortal foot, or incapable of sustaining a single human being could such attain to it. Yet, there was the head again – huge, shaggy, menacing – staring down upon them in the gloom. Then it again disappeared.
Chapter Eleven
Concerning the Occult
“How would it be to move camp to-morrow?” Tarleton was saying. “We’ve been here long enough, and there’s nothing to shoot, or next to nothing. What do you think, Raynier?”
“No great hurry, is there? It’s breezy and picturesque here, and has its advantages. What do you think, Haslam?”
“I’m with Tarleton,” said the Forest Officer. “All our fellows are grumbling. They say it’s an unlucky place.”
It was the evening after the somewhat eventful ride just recorded, and they were all assembled within the large tent which was used as a common dining-room. Dinner was over and cheroots were being discussed.
“Yes. My Babu was telling me something of the kind only to-day,” rejoined Raynier, tranquilly. “By the way, Haslam, how is it all this while we’ve never been through that tangi? You know, the one you were telling me the yarn about?”
Haslam stared.
“Well, you know, old chap – I – I told you the yarn, didn’t I? Well, that explains it.”
“But you don’t really mean to say you believe in such arrant tomfoolery?”
“I don’t know about believing in it. But – well, it’s best to be on the safe side.”
“Goodness gracious, I should think so,” struck in Mrs Tarleton. “Why, I wouldn’t go into that place if anyone were to offer me a million pounds.”
“Well, I wish they’d offer it to me, that’s all,” said Raynier. “For I mean to go through it to-morrow, gratis. Who’ll volunteer? What do you say, Miss Clive?”
“I’ll go, with pleasure,” was the answer.
It will be seen that these two had kept their former experience to themselves, and this they had done by mutual agreement, mainly to get some fun out of the rest of the party, and it was to this object Raynier was now leading up. The head which both had seen watching them they had since accounted for by optical delusion, even as the startling sounds had been accounted for by perfectly natural causes.
Mrs Tarleton gave a cry of genuine consternation.
“Hilda, you must not go,” she implored. “Oh, Mr Raynier, don’t take her – if only as a favour to me.”
“But I’m not in the least superstitious, Mrs Tarleton,” said the girl, looking up from the work she was engaged upon. “In fact, I like to demonstrate the absurdity of these childish beliefs. Why, I can hardly count the number of times I’ve got up first of thirteen from table.”
“Well, there must be something in these ideas, I suppose, or else they wouldn’t be so universally accepted,” cut in Tarleton.
“No? Then of course the world has only lately become round, seeing that for ages it was ‘universally accepted’ as flat,” said Raynier.
“Ah, but that’s quite a different thing.”
Then Haslam told a weird and wonderful story or two illustrating the strange power of native prophecy, which interested Hilda, and Tarleton would cap such with the coincidence type of anecdote, such as the first of thirteen at table – and at these she laughed.
“None of those instances come anywhere near carrying conviction,” she said. “Now, remember. In good time I will supply you with just such an instance to the contrary. No; I won’t tell you anything about it now. But you’ll see at the right time.”
“I believe Miss Clive means to go into the tangi,” said Haslam.
“No, I don’t,” Hilda answered. “I won’t go into it now. I don’t want to frighten all you poor creatures.”
They laughed, rather weakly it must be owned – all but Raynier, that is, for he was in the know, and was enjoying the situation immensely. How well she looked when she was animated and her face lighted up like that – was what he was thinking as he sat watching her. Somebody touched on the subject of clairvoyance. In a moment Hilda’s manner changed. She became grave, almost earnest.
“Hullo!” cried Tarleton. “We’ve got hold of something at last that Miss Clive does believe in.”
“To a certain extent, yes.”
“I remember going to a séance once,” said Mrs Tarleton. “There was a dreadful woman going into trances, and pointing out people’s dead relations standing behind their chairs. She described them, and all sorts of things. It made me feel quite creepy.”
“Yes, but how many times was she wide of the mark for every time she made a good shot?” said Raynier.
“Hardly once. It is quite wonderful.”
“There’s nothing in that sort of clairvoyance; it’s sheer quackery,” said Hilda, speaking in a decisive, authoritative tone that astonished her hearers.
“I should think so,” said Raynier. “Whatever may be the state or locality of the dead, it is not to be supposed that they would be empowered, or would even wish, to appear in London, to enable a cad in a second-hand dress-suit to take up so much a head in gate money, nor a female fraud either, for the matter of that.”
“Well, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t,” cut in Tarleton, characteristically.
“No! It doesn’t strike you as improbable?” said Hilda, with a pitying look.
“Why should they be quacks?” persisted Tarleton. “Why shouldn’t there be anything in what they do?”
“I don’t know why there shouldn’t be, I only know there isn’t,” she replied. “Why, the gift – for clairvoyance is a gift – is so rare that it is hardly surprising its very existence is disbelieved in. I know it – at least, I mean – er – anybody can reason out the matter for themselves.”
The concluding words were lame and stammering, and the change from the firmness and decision of tone which had marked her utterances hitherto, as though she had suddenly found herself out in saying too much, could not but strike her hearers as strange, to say the least of it. To Raynier it suggested a new idea, which indeed came to him with a sort of mental start. But he came to the rescue.
“Its existence is undoubted, though as rare as Miss Clive says. Why, that feeling that comes to us sometimes of having done or said some given thing before, or found ourselves in some given place, is a sort of an approach to the art, or gift, or whatever you like to call it.”
“Oh, I don’t know what that is,” said Mrs Tarleton. “Thank goodness that sort of thing doesn’t come my way. But we’ve been talking about creepy things all the evening. I’m sure I shall dream. Ugh!” with a shiver. “What is it like outside?”
It was time to separate for the night, but they lingered a while chatting in front of the tent. There was a very wildness of desolation in this sudden transition from light to darkness. All within the camp was silent, and away beyond, the loom of the hills was just discernible, black against the stars. The ghostly cry of a night bird echoed from the craggy height which overhung the camp, and far away over the plain a most weird and melancholy howling was borne upon the night wind.
“That’s a wolf – or wolves,” said Haslam, his shikari instincts metaphorically pricking up his ears. “Aren’t you afraid, Miss Clive? There’s nothing between you and them but a strip of canvas, all night through.”
Hilda laughed.
“Afraid?” she repeated. “Why, this is positively delightful. It is such a contrast. Inside the tents – why, we might be in Mazaran, or even in London. Outside – the very ideal of savage wildness. Afraid? Why, I’m positively revelling in it. I like to hear that. Hark! There it is again. I’d like to see those wolves close – to watch them prowling for prey and doubling back and signalling to each other – if only I could get near enough to observe them without scaring them.”
“My goodness, child! Why, they’d eat you,” said Mrs Tarleton.
“Not they.” And Hilda laughed again.
“I say, old chap,” said Haslam, later, as Raynier lounged into his tent for another “peg” and a final smoke, “that’s a strange sort of girl the Tarletons have picked up. Who is she? Do you know?”
“No more than you do.”
“Well, there’s something dashed uncanny about her. The way she talks – there’s something sort of creepy about it. Eh? And did you ever see such eyes as she’s got? Eh?”
“N-no, I don’t think I ever did,” answered Raynier, slowly and between puffs, but in no wise with the same meaning as Haslam had in his mind.
“I say, she’d make a rum sort of a wife for most fellows, with those rum uncanny ideas of hers. Eh?” And then the speaker stopped rather short, remembering, all of a sudden, that Raynier and the object of his remarks had been getting a bit thick of late. But, then, Raynier was rather a queer chap himself, he reflected. Anyway, he felt a trifle embarrassed, as though he had been putting his foot in it.
“I daresay,” answered Raynier, equably. “‘Most fellows’ are like shot – assorted into sizes, and might safely be numbered in the same way.” At bottom, however, the remark jarred upon him, and set him wondering for the fiftieth time what insidious fascination the strange personality of Hilda Clive was beginning to set up within his innermost being, and that such was the case he was only beginning to admit, hugging to himself the very secrecy of the thought, and the subtle stimulus it afforded. Yet, what did it all mean? He was not in love with Hilda Clive, but some strange fascination radiated from her. It might be uncanny – as Haslam had said – yet he liked it – nor would he have bartered it for the artless advances of conventional attractions, and of such he was not without experience, for natural and unassuming as he constitutionally was, the Political Agent of Mazaran, on the right side of forty, was something of a parti, by reason of his position and its emoluments; and when, added to this, he who filled the one and enjoyed the other was in the prime of physical health and strength, why, then, so much the more eligible did that parti become.
Haslam the while had turned in, and was yawning profusely – in fact, could hardly give a coherent answer to any question or remark, wherefore Raynier adjourned to his own tent. But not the slightest inclination was on him to follow Haslam’s example. He felt extraordinarily wide awake, wherefore he got out a camp-chair, and, having extinguished the lamp within his tent, lit another cheroot and sat there to enjoy the beauty of the night and think.
It was very still. What little wind there had been had dropped completely. A glow had begun to suffuse the velvety darkness of the star-gemmed sky, and, widening, the black loom of a rocky ridge away beyond the plain became clearly defined, then a rim of fire, and lo! – a broad moon soared majestically upward.
It was beautiful. The white tents lay like blocks of marble in its light, which silvered over the plain and the scant foliage of a few scattered junipers. The crunch, crunch of ruminating camels, and the stamp and snort of a horse, alone broke the stillness, save for the long-drawn howl still heard from time to time over the wilderness afar, where wolves prowled. Dark peaks, in softened outline, stood clear against the sky.
His thoughts ran back to the time of his furlough, to England and what had transpired there. Again and again he congratulated himself that he was free from that bond; how on earth he could ever have entered into it seemed more incomprehensible than ever. And what a long while ago it seemed, and —
What was this? A figure moving in the moonlight, a figure clothed in white draperies. In a brief flash the solution of a midnight marauder – the first of others – occurred to him, and his hand went to his pistol pocket – this time not empty. But he quickly withdrew it. For as the figure glided swiftly among the tents he knew it – knew it for that of Hilda Clive.
Heavens! What was she doing, what was she bent upon, just as she had risen from bed like this? She was walking, erect and rather swiftly, and now in a straight line; stepping forward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, yet there was something about the gait that was not usual, a something as though she was walking unconsciously. And – she had left the tents behind her now, and was walking swiftly and straight for the open country. He gazed for a moment, dumbfounded, after the receding form, then, rising, started to follow.
