Little Lost Lambs, page 39
After a long hour Brant came out, a mud-stained notebook in his hand.
“It is practically undamaged.” His feeble eyes peered at Steve triumphantly. “Only a small portion of the gilt layer on one cheek was torn by Kottek Ali. As I assured Grierson, it is a human body, the face covered with lacquer which in turn is gilded in a very deft manner.”
“Then it is still there.” The boy breathed a sigh of relief, “Say, Professor, how do you account for the gilt on Kottek Ali’s chin?”
Brant closed his notebook reluctantly and his eyes snapped. “Steve, for Heaven’s sake rid yourself of the idea that the mummy-statue had anything to do with the death of the poor Sart. Probably Kottek Ali put his hand to his face when he was stricken; some of the gilt covering of the mummified head stuck to his fingers, I presume.”
“It might have been poisoned.”
“I think not. There are very few poisons so deadly as to penetrate the skin tissues unless inserted in a wound.” The ethnologist opened his hand and smilingly indicated some yellow dust on his fingers. “At all events, it would not have killed Kottek Ali and spared me.”
Steve shook his head. “I don’t like the looks of things at all, Professor. We’re out of luck, I think. Why”—his gray eyes hardened as he looked at his friend—“didn’t you tell me the truth, back there in the train at Samarkand? You said Grierson was going to prospect for gold.”
Brant seated himself on the side of the excavation and sighed.
“My boy, others were listening, and it doesn’t do to talk about Grierson behind his back. As a matter of fact, you jumped at the conclusion yourself.”
“You said the Zarafshan lode might extend up here, in the Alai.”
“Yes, and so it might. John Grierson believes that we will find the Kuramas dug whatever treasure they may possess out of the ground here. My employer is a man who deals in facts. He doubts my theory that the Kuramas are the remnant of the Kushan dynasty. But—”
The old man shrugged his shoulders. “John Grierson has satisfied himself that there is wealth to be found in the valley above us. He knows that gold has come out of here, having seen that cup—”
“Steady, as you were,” remarked Steve. “I’ve better eyes than you, Professor. I saw a Samarkand trade-mark on the cup.”
Brant blinked, and a look of alert apprehension came over his thin features. “Lansing, don’t say that to Grierson. It might make him change his mind, you know. Let him believe as he does that the burial mounds are the concealed openings of shafts to a turquoise mine, or immense gold deposits which have been carefully concealed by the Kuramas. Then we will be sure to go on, to the Alai, and visit the mounds above us which have never been entered even by Mirnoff—”
“Are you-all going on?” Steve frowned. “Look here, Brantie, don’t you know when you’ve had enough? I don’t care what Grierson says he thinks. He’s out to rob the Kuramas, because he thinks they may have some treasure Maybe he wants the turquoise and gold mines of the Kuramas, too. Maybe he don’t but—”
He jumped up and shook his fist tensely.
“I’m telling you Brantie, you and me and him would be gosh-almighty fools to walk in where we’re not wanted with guns in our hands when we can’t even see where we’re going and yell for the Kurama guys to give us all they’ve got! I’m going to tell Grierson that and say that I’m through, see? I’m through, if you won’t quit this thing.”
But when he did, the mine owner merely stared at the boy and continued what he had been busied with—separating their outfit into three piles small enough to be carried in packs. The rest of the tools and food he cached under the loess cliff, carefully taking the bearings of the spot.
Brant, too, refused to listen to a proposal to turn back, although he quietly urged that it might be well for Steve to do so. The ethnologist had set his heart on investigating the mounds.
“Then I’m through,” observed Steve sitting down on his pack.
“Meaning that you go back on your contract?” responded Grierson coldly.
“My agreement doesn’t call for any robbing of people. That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it? I was raised among decent people who don’t hold with such things.”
He faced his employer, his rifle gripped firmly, expecting that Grierson would strike him or even shoot. The mine owner glanced at him appraisingly and shrugged. “As you wish. But I’m sorry for Brant’s sake; I hired you to look after him. He’s not used to hardships.”
Grierson had touched cleverly upon the one weak spot in Steve’s position. The boy looked at the frail old man, grunted and grumbled. He even watched them shoulder their packs and step off up the gully, where mist still hung in the depressions.
Before they had climbed an hour the boy was with them again, silent and out-of-humor.
“Oh, rats,” he said to Brant when the latter questioned him. But after an interval Steve touched Grierson on the shoulder. “There was something moving down the canyon,” he muttered, “when I started off. I thought I heard someone calling. You’d better look.”
The sun was behind the clouds and a damp mist twined about the pedestals of the clay buttresses of the valley behind them. Grierson levelled his glasses and scrutinized the site of their camp.
It was no longer deserted. A shape was visible over the grave of Kottek Ali, half hidden in the mist. Grierson handed the glasses to Brant.
“Looks like a native with a white horse,” he gave his opinion. “Maybe one of the Kuramas has come down to plunder a bit.”
“It does seem to have long hair,” assented the ethnologist, “and a species of long robe. I can’t make out the animal—”
“You can hear it.” Grierson held up a scarred hand. “Listen!” The wind blew fitfully up the gorge and brought a shrill sound in their ears. “A horse neighing,” he concluded.
“It does not sound to me like that,” murmured Brant. “In fact, it resembles a human being wailing—a kind of native ululation.”
“Ulu—ula—nothing!” Steve was scornful of guesses. “I know a spook when I see one and hear one. Guess I caught up with you quickly enough!”
They went on with the identity of the visitor still an open question. After a hasty mid-day meal cooked under the pines of the upper slopes they felt somewhat more cheerful—with the exception of Lansing.
That young adventurer dawdled behind, grumbling.
Exercise had inclined Brant to talk. He had been pondering the vault with its single figure and the possible relation of these two factors to the death of Kottek Ali, he said.
When Mirnoff visited the place, he reasoned, there had been bodies lying on the clay shelves which were certainly shaped and built for just this purpose. Mirnoff had died from exposure and hardships of the trip, probably accentuated by the reckless flight of his followers. After this the Kuramas, seeing that the mound had been opened, had removed the bodies to a safer place.
As for Kottek Ali, the Sart had been wrought up when he approached the mummy. Taking fright at the sudden darkness when the candle went out he had started to run and had struck his head against a stone pillar. Steve had heard him move, in the darkness. The blow had fractured his skull and ruptured a blood vessel in the brain thus rendering him speechless.
“We examined his body and face more thoroughly than his skull,” he concluded. “The bone might have been shattered without—possibly—breaking the skin.”
“Reasonable,” remarked Grierson, “but useless. Why was the mummy left in the mound when the other bodies were removed? And if Kottek Ali’s thick skull had hit one of the stone columns hard enough to crack it, we’d have heard it.”
“Have you a counter suggestion?”
Grierson shifted his pack and smiled callously. “I don’t theorize. There was just one thing could have happened, Brant, and you ought to know it. The same man that lifted our horses came down into the tomb after us through the hole; when the candle went out he attacked Kottek Ali and made good his escape before I could strike a match. Wish I could get a shot at the—”
He turned—almost jumped—at the sound of a mirthless chuckle from Steve.
“The dead left their graves,” cried the boy, his eyes wide. “Don’t you see? That’s why the horses broke their ropes—I don’t care how strong they were. You didn’t see any foot marks around the horses, did you? Well, animals can see spooks and are scared of ‘em.”
“Apparently, then,” scoffed Grierson, “the dead left one of their number behind—the mummy, he was.”
“Sure,” nodded Steve, “as a warning, or—or, a decoy.” Whistling through his teeth he strode ahead grimly. “A dead man came past me and touched Kottek Ali on the face where the gold mark was, and then Kottek Ali died. And there’s one of ‘em back there now gibbering over his grave. You can’t tell me.
“It will be our turn next,” he added.
In reasoning as they did, each one according to his lights, they were all in a measure correct; the truth of what had happened was self-evident to their senses. But the minds of men are so fashioned that no two minds draw similar conclusions from the same sort of facts. Furthermore, of course, every one of the three was for the most part in error.
Chapter V
No beast may be slain, nor any bird. The trees shall not be injured. Whatever grows or lives is to be spared.
The soil of the earth is not to be upturned; especially that which is under the earth is to be kept inviolate.
THE TABLET OF THE KURAMA LAKE.
THE mountains of the earth are the abodes of peace, more so than the valleys where the villages and the factory cities of men have located themselves. The sea is never quiet.
And it would be hard to find a more tranquil spot than the plateau of the Alai in which lies the Kurama lake. It is not a valley exactly, because it is some four thousand feet above sea level. Yet the surrounding mountains which shut it off from the world, in places tower above the lake to the height of ten thousand feet. Their green shoulders and snow peaks are mirrored in the turquoise surface of the lake.
Herds, tended by children feed over the grass of the plain. The children are few, however. Isolation has played its part in reducing the numbers of the Kuramas. No gardens are visible, although the children collect berries in season. In the clay regions that are the approach to the Alai the Kuramas have their wheat fields and raise enough to subsist upon, thanks to the richness of the alluvial deposits.
The goat and cattle herds, with the horse droves supply milk—the Kuramas mix all three. Owing to the immunity from harm that is one of the laws of the tribe, animals of the nearby ranges are unusually tame.
The Kurama riders—each man and woman has horses to spare—can frequently go among the gazelles or mountain sheep without exciting alarm. They carry no weapons—except that which is their unique mode of assassination. They are a hardy race and exist, so myth has it, for one of the most curious customs in the world. Of their intelligence, the Grierson party soon made proof.
The three white men had stood for some time on a rock at the side of the upper pass leading from the loess region. They had been inspecting the panorama of the plain through the field glasses.
Around the lake, ranged at symmetrical intervals, extensive green mounds were visible; Brant could estimate the size of these by comparison with the animals that grazed by them.
At intervals mounted figures could be seen trotting in and out of the forest belt that lined the plain.
“The floating, long hair is similar to the Tartar fashion,” commented the ethnologist. “The Tartars take their styles not from Paris but from the horse; they imitate its mane, and—in their boots—its short hoof.”
“Any signs of work going on underground?” inquired Grierson persistently. He had been disappointed in the verdant aspect of the plain. Where he had expected to see gullies and waterfalls and rock heaps he discovered only interminable forest and a lake.
“Looks like a cemetery, kept up very decently,” remarked Steve who had keen eyes. “And those sheep—Lawd, I saw them once in Central Park , New York City.”
“We could hardly have expected to find mines,” argued Brant, “after I interpreted the stone placard at the head of the pass. It stated that the ground should not be disturbed—”
“By others.”
“A regular ‘Keep Off the Grass’ sign,” groaned Steve. “No trespassing under penalty of the law.”
Brant smiled and pointed. “Here comes your policeman, I fancy—a mounted policeman.”
Grierson and Steve who had not found the silence of the valley soothing to suspicion, caught up their rifles. A peculiar figure had trotted out into the clearing under their rock. A squat man with powerful, long arms and a broad, brown face confronted them.
Under a square woolen hat alert brown eyes peered up at them. Beneath a goatskin vest the rider wore what seemed to be a silk tunic. Horsehide boots and nankeen breeches completed his attire.
“Timur kad temen dura,” he cried in a guttural voice.
Brant gazed questioningly, then squealed in sudden excitement.
“Almost pure Tartar,” he explained. “The older form of the language, similar to the classic mandarin of the Chinese. It is hardly ever heard in these days. He is saying something—I am not very familiar with the dialect—about putting down our weapons, and he calls us friends, brothers.”
“No shooting allowed,” grinned Steve. “Private game preserve. Didn’t you read the sign?”
The rider did not seem at all surprised to see them. Perceiving that he was weaponless Grierson lowered his piece hesitatingly. Brant could not carry on a conversation in the language of Kubla Khan, but the stranger seemed to understand Arabic.
“He reminds us of the placard at the head of the pass,” summed up Brant. “And says that we must not shoot animals, as one of us attempted to do down the valley.”
The rider was turning away, heading his shaggy pony about by his knees as a Central Asian will. Grierson called for him to halt, and, as the man looked up inquiringly, barked at Brant.
“What’s this chap’s name? Is he the chief of the tribe? If so I’ll have a word with him about stealing our horses.”
Brant hesitated and when he came to repeat the man’s answer his face was a study.
“This man is Yuan Khan—a name that is found in the older Mongol annals and means something like Lord of the Kingdom. He is not a chieftain because all the Kuramas are of equal status—a peculiarity of the bee-like Mongol horde that—”
“Leave out your drooling,” snarled Grierson.
“Yuan Khan says the Kuramas took our horses, in the hopes of turning us back before it was too late. He says the horses are much better treated now than before. As for Kottek Ali—”
Brant frowned, plainly disturbed. “They did something to him that they call ‘stopping his breath.’ Probably that is a synonym for putting to death. They did it because he had tried to destroy something that belonged to the Kuramas. Unfortunate, very, because now we shall be unable to take to pieces any of the tombs or the treasures of ethnology they may contain—”
“Without having our breath stopped,” nodded Steve.
“In which case our observations would not reach the outer world,” concluded Brant.
Yuan Khan had left apparently without any fear that he might be shot down, or harmed by the white men. They gazed at each other curiously.
“It is as I thought,” Brant was rambling on. “The Kuramas bear unmistakable evidence of Mongolian origin. Oh, why did I not examine his skull—”
“But,” put in Steve, “that fellow’s a murderer.”
Neither of his companions seemed stirred by this thought. Grierson was intent on his own projects; Brant on the discovery of the Kuramas. To the boy there was something disquieting in the tranquility of the valley. Yuan Khan, who knew that a human being had been snuffed out, like a candle in a wind, considered it an insignificant detail. Steve had never before seen a native who could outface white men with rifles.
That night he and Grierson rolled up heavy stones around the site of their camp on the knoll. They built a small fire and cooked and ate dinner by turns, keeping a sharp watch on the surrounding hillside. Once Brant, sunk in meditation by the fire, glanced up quizzically.
“If they attack us the same way they put Kottek Ali to death, my friends,” he inquired, “what are you going to do about it?”
“Shoot,” responded Steve, as Grierson was silent, “and shoot damn quick. That’s what you told us to do.”
“If I am not mistaken we possessed a rifle when Kottek Ali died,” Brant remarked.
“If you have an idea,” growled Grierson, “spit it out. But don’t think I’m going to leave the valley until I get to the bottom of those mounds. Remember what the stone tablet said about something treasured under the earth—”
“I was merely thinking,” ventured Brant, “that nothing is to be harmed here. We are now subject to the Kurama law, and the tribesmen seem not in the least afraid of us.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I believe what happened to Mirnoff.”
Grierson swung away from the seat he had fashioned for himself behind the rocks and spread his blanket by the fire moodily. “I think you’re right,” he acknowledged, after a while. “This is the first time in my life I’ve gone among a native tribe when they didn’t all crowd around to curse me.”
“Exactly. The Kuramas believe that we are already eliminated, as it were, from life.”
“Gosh-almighty!” Steve wriggled uncomfortably. “Then it’s us that are the walking corpses.”
“Precisely,” nodded the ethnologist, “in the estimation of the Kuramas. It goes to confirm my opinion that the Kuramas are of Mongol affiliation. Mongols—Tartars, and Chinese—place a very low value on human life—”
BY THE feel of the cold air and the state of the fire it was in the small hours of the morning that Steve awakened from the healthy sleep of fatigued youth.
