Two-Gun Bob, page 118
The stricken beast reared high, screaming, and plunged backward. The ledge was narrow where the cave opened on it. The screams and plunges of the maddened animal, before it toppled over the edge, put the horses in confusion behind it. Three more got out of control and were carried over the cliff with their riders, and the other Kirghiz retreated into the cave. After a while they tried again, but a bullet spattering on the rock sent them scurrying back.
A glance over his shoulder showed Gordon his horsemen just dropping off the ridge onto the farther ledge. He reined about and sent his horse flying along the path. If he loitered, the Kirghiz might venture out again, find no one opposing them, and reach the bend of the trail in time to pick him off the causeway.
Most of his hardened band had dismounted, leading their horses at a walk. Gordon rode at a gallop with death yawning on either hand if the horse slipped or put a single foot wrong. But the beast was sure-footed as a mountain sheep.
Gordon’s head swam from lack of sleep as he glanced down into the blue haze of the abyss, but he did not slacken his pace. When he dropped down the slope onto the ledge where Yasmeena stood, white-faced and her nails biting into her pink palms, the Kirghiz had not yet appeared.
Gordon pushed his riders as hard as he dared, making them from time to time change to the spare horses, to save the animals as much as possible. Nearly a dozen of these still remained. Many of the men were giddy with dizziness caused by hunger and the altitude. He himself was mad for sleep and kept himself awake only by an effort of will that made the hills reel to his gaze.
He kept his grip on clarity of purpose as only a man toughened by a savagely hard life can do, and led them on, following the paths Yogok pointed out. They skirted ledges that hovered over ravines the bottoms of which were lost in shadowy gloom. They plunged through defiles like a knife cut where sheer walls rose up to the skies on either hand.
Behind them from time to time they heard faint yells, and once, when they toiled up over the shoulder of a breathtaking crag on a path where the horses fought for footing, they saw their pursuers far below and behind them. The Kirghiz and monks were not maintaining such a suicidal pace; hate is seldom as desperate as the will to live.
The snowy crest of Mount Erlik loomed higher and higher before them, and Yogok, when questioned, swore that the way to safety lay through the mountain. More he would not say; he was green with fear, and his mind held to but one thought — to keep the trail that would buy his life. He feared his captors no more than he feared that his pursuing subjects would overtake them and learn of his duplicity in regard to their goddess.
They pushed on like men already dead, beginning to stagger with weakness and exhaustion. The horses drooped and stumbled. The wind was like whetted steel. Darkness was gathering when they followed the backbone of a giant ridge which ran like a natural causeway to the sheer slope of Mount Erlik Khan.
The mountain towered gigantically above them, a brutish mass of crags and dizzy escarpments and colossal steeps, with the snow-clad pinnacle, glimpsed between the great spurs, dominating all. The ridge ended at a ledge high up among the cliffs, and in the sheer rock there stood a bronze door, thickly carved with inscriptions that Gordon could not decipher. It was heavy enough to have resisted an attack of artillery.
“This is sacred to Erlik,” said Yogok, but he showed about as much reverence as one of the Mohammedans. “Push against the door. Nay; fear not. On my life, there is no trap.”
“On your life it is,” Gordon assured him grimly, and himself set a shoulder to the door, almost falling as he dismounted.
X
The ponderous portal swung inward with a smoothness that showed the antique hinges had recently been oiled. A makeshift torch revealed the entrance to a tunnel, cut in solid rock. A few feet from the door the tunnel opened out like the neck of a bottle, and the flickering torch, held at the entrance, only hinted at the vastness of its dimensions.
“This tunnel runs clear through the mountain,” said Yogok. “By dawn we can be out of reach of those who follow, because even if they climb over the mountain by the most direct route, they must go by foot and it will take them all the rest of the night and all of another day. If they skirt the mountain and work their way through the passes of the surrounding hills, it will take them even longer; and their horses are weary, too.
“That is the way I was going to guide Ormond. I was not going to take him through the mountain. But it is the only way of escape for you. There is food here. At certain seasons of the year the monks work here. In that cell there are lamps.”
He pointed to a small chamber cut in the rock just inside the doorway. Gordon lighted several of the butter lamps, and gave them to the Turkomans to carry. He dared not follow the course which caution suggested and ride ahead to investigate before he led his men into the tunnel. The pursuers were too close behind them. He must bar the big door and plunge on, trusting the priest’s desire to save his own skin.
When the men were all in the tunnel, Yogok directed the barring of the door — giant bronze bars, thick as a man’s leg. It took half a dozen of the weakened Turkomans to lift one, but once they were in place, Gordon was certain that nothing short of siege guns could force the ton-heavy door, with its massive bronze sills and jambs set deep in the living rock.
He made Yogok ride between him and Orkhan, the Turkoman holding a lamp. There was no use trusting Yogok, even though the priest was getting some satisfaction out of the thought that he was at least ridding himself of the “goddess” he feared and hated, although it meant forgoing his vengeance on her.
Even with all his faculties occupied in a savage battle to keep from falling senseless with exhaustion, Gordon found space to be amazed at what the light showed him. He had never dreamed of the existence of such a place. Thirty men could have ridden abreast in the cavernlike passage, and the roof soared out of sight in some places; in others stalactites reflected the light in a thousand scintillant colors.
The floors and walls were as even as man-shaped marble, and Gordon wondered how many centuries had been required for the hand-cutting and smoothing of them. Cells appeared at irregular intervals, cut in the rock at the sides, and presently he saw marks of pick work, and then caught sight of dull yellow.
The light showed him the incredible truth. The tales of Mount Erlik Khan were true. The walls were patterned with veins of gold that could be dug out of the rock with a knife point.
The Turkomans, who smelled loot as vultures smell carrion, woke suddenly out of their daze of fatigue and began to take an almost painfully intense interest.
“This is where the monks get their gold, sahib,” said Orkhan, his eyes blazing in the lamplight. “Let me twist the old one’s toes for a space, and he will tell us where they have hidden that which they have dug out of the walls.”
But “the old one” did not need persuasion. He pointed out a square-hewn chamber in which stood stacks of peculiarly shaped objects that were ingots of virgin gold. In other, larger cells were the primitive contrivances with which they smelted the ore and cast the metal.
“Take what ye will,” said Yogok indifferently. “A thousand horses could not carry away the gold we have cast and stored, and we have scarcely dipped into the richness of the veins.”
Thin lips were licked greedily, drooping mustaches twisted in emotion, and eyes that burned like hawks’ were turned questioningly on Gordon.
“Ye have spare horses,” he suggested, and that was enough for them.
After that nothing could have convinced them that everything which had passed had not been planned by Gordon in order to lead them to the gold which was the plunder he had promised them. They loaded the extra ponies until he interfered, to save the animals’ strength. Then they hacked off chunks of the soft gold and stuffed their pouches and belts and girdles, and even so they had scarcely diminished the stacks. Some of the raiders lifted up their voices and wept when they saw how much they must leave behind.
“Assuredly,” they promised each other, “we shall return with wagons and many horses and secure every crumb of it, inshallah!”
“Dogs!” swore Gordon. “Ye have each man a fortune beyond your dreams. Are ye jackals to feast on carrion until your bellies burst? Will ye loiter here until the Kirghiz cross the mountain and cut us off? What of gold then, you crop-eared rogues?”
Of more interest to the American was a cell where barley was stored in leather sacks, and he made the tribesmen load some of the horses with food instead of gold. They grumbled but they obeyed him. They would obey him now, if he ordered them to ride with him into Jehannum.
Every nerve in his body shrieked for sleep, submerging hunger, but he gnawed a handful of raw barley and flogged his failing powers with the lash of his driving will. Yasmeena drooped in her saddle wearily, but her eyes shone unclouded in the lamplight, and Gordon was dully aware of a deep respect for her that dwarfed even his former admiration.
They rode on through that glittering, dream-palace cavern, the tribesmen munching barley and babbling ecstatically of the joys their gold would buy, and at last they came to a bronze door which was a counterpart of the one at the other end of the tunnel. It was not barred. Yogok maintained that none but the monks had visited Mount Erlik in centuries. The door swung inward at their efforts and they blinked in the glow of a white dawn.
They were looking out on a small ledge from which a narrow trail wound along the edge of a giant escarpment. On one side the land fell away sheer for thousands of feet, so that a stream at the bottom looked like a thread of silver, and on the other a sheer cliff rose for some five hundred feet.
This cliff limited the view to the left, but to the right Gordon could see some of the mountains which flanked Mount Erlik Khan, and the valley far below them wandered southward away to a pass in the distance, a notch in the savage rampart of the hills.
“This is life for you, El Borak,” said Yogok, pointing to the pass. “Three miles from the spot where we now stand this trail leads down into the valley where there is water and game and rich grass for the horses. You can follow it southward beyond the pass for three days’ journey when you will come into country you know well. It is inhabited by marauding tribes, but they will not attack a party as large as yours. You can be through the pass before the Kirghiz round the mountain, and they will not follow you through it. That is the limit of their country. Now let me go.”
“Not yet; I’ll release you at the pass. You can make your way back here easily and wait for the Kirghiz, and tell them any lie you want to about their goddess.”
Yogok glared angrily at Gordon. The American’s eyes were bloodshot, the skin stretched taut over the bones of his face. He looked like a man who had been sweated in hell’s fires, and he felt the same way. There was no reason for Yogok’s strident objections, except a desire to get out of the company of those he hated as quickly as possible.
In Gordon’s state a man reverts to primitive instincts, and the American held his thrumming nerves in an iron grip to keep from braining the priest with his gun butt. Dispute and importunities were like screaming insults to his struggling brain.
While the priest squawked, and Gordon hesitated between reasoning with him or knocking him down, the Turkomans, inspired by the gold and food, and eager for the trail, began to crowd past him. Half a dozen had emerged on the ledge when Gordon noticed them, and ordering Orkhan to bring Yogok along, he rode past those on the ledge, intending to take the lead as usual. But one of the men was already out to the path, and could neither turn back nor hug the wall close enough to let Gordon by.
The American, perforce, called to him to go ahead, and he would follow, and even as Gordon set his horse to the trail a volley of boulders came thundering down from above. They hit the wretched Turkoman and swept him and his horse off the trail as a broom sweeps a spider from a wall. One of the stones, bouncing from the ledge, hit Gordon’s horse and broke its leg, and the beast screamed and toppled over the side after the other.
Gordon threw himself clear as it fell, landed half over the edge, and clawed a desperate way to safety with Yasmeena’s screams and the yells of the Turkomans ringing in his ears. There was nothing seen to shoot at, but some of them loosed their rifles anyway, and the volley was greeted by a wild peal of mocking laughter from the cliffs above.
In no way unnerved by his narrow escape, Gordon drove his men back into the shelter of the cave. They were like wolves in a trap, ready to strike blind right and left, and a dozen tulwars hovered over Yogok’s head.
“Slay him! He has led us into a trap! Allah!”
Yogok’s face was a green, convulsed mask of fear. He squalled like a tortured cat.
“Nay! I led you swift and sure! The Kirghiz could not have reached this side of the mountain by this time!”
“Were there monks hiding in these cells?” asked Gordon. “They could have sneaked out when they saw us coming in. Is that a monk up there?”
“Nay; as Erlik is my witness! We work the gold three moons in the years; at other times it is death to go near Mount Erlik. I know not who it is.”
Gordon ventured out on the path again and was greeted by another shower of stones, which he barely avoided, and a voice yelled high above him:
“You Yankee dog, how do you like that? I’ve got you now, damn you! Thought I was done for when I fell into that fissure, didn’t you? Well, there was a ledge a few feet down that I landed on. You couldn’t see it because the sun wasn’t high enough to shine down into it. If I’d had a gun I’d have killed you when you looked down. I climbed out after you left.”
“Ormond!” snarled Gordon.
“Did you think I hadn’t wormed anything out of that monk?” the Englishman yelled. “He told me all about the paths and Mount Erlik after I’d caved in some of his teeth with a gun barrel. I saw old Yogok with you and knew he’d lead you to Erlik. I got here first. I’d have barred the door and locked you out to be butchered by the fellows who’re chasing you, but I couldn’t lift the bars. But, anyway, I’ve got you trapped. You can’t leave the cave; if you do I’ll mash you like insects on the path. I can see you on it, and you can’t see me. I’m going to keep you here until the Kirghiz come up. I’ve still got Yasmeena’s symbol. They’ll listen to me.
“I’ll tell them Yogok is helping you to kidnap her; they’ll kill you all except her. They’ll take her back, but I don’t care now. I don’t need that Kashmiri’s money. I’ve got the secret of Mount Erlik Khan!”
Gordon fell back into the doorway and repeated what the Englishman had said. Yogok turned a shade greener in his fear, and all stared silently at El Borak. His bloodshot gaze traveled over them as they stood blinking, disheveled, and haggard, with lamps paled by the dawn, like ghouls caught above earth by daybreak. Grimly he marshaled his straying wits. Gordon had never reached the ultimate limits of his endurance; always he had plumbed a deeper, hidden reservoir of vitality below what seemed the last.
“Is there another way out of here?” he demanded.
Yogok shook his head, chatting again with terror. “No way that men and horses can go.”
“What do you mean?”
The priest moved back into the darkness and held a lamp close to the flank of the wall where the tunnel narrowed for the entrance. Rusty bits of metal jutted from the rock.
“Here was once a ladder,” he said. “It led far up to a crevice in the wall where long ago one sat to watch the southern pass for invaders. But none has climbed it for many years, and the handholds are rusty and rotten. The crevice opens on the sheer of the outer cliffs, and even if a man reached it, he could scarcely climb down the outside.
“Well, maybe I can pick Ormond off from the crevice,” muttered Gordon, his head swimming with the effort of thinking.
Standing still was making infinitely harder his fight to keep awake. The muttering of the Turkomans was a meaningless tangle of sound, and Yasmeena’s dark anxious eyes seemed to be looking at him from a vast distance. He thought he felt her arms cling to him briefly, but he could not be sure. The lights were beginning to swim in a thick mist.
Beating himself into wakefulness by striking his own face with his open hand, he began the climb, a rifle slung to his back. Orkhan was plucking at him, begging to be allowed to make the attempt in his stead, but Gordon shook him off. In his dazed brain was a conviction that the responsibility was his own. He went up like an automaton, slowly, all his muddled faculties concentrating grimly on the task.
Fifty feet up, the light of the lamps ceased to aid him, and he groped upward in the gloom, feeling for the rusty bolts set in the wall. They were so rotten that he dared not put his full weight on any one of them. In some places they were missing and he clung with his fingers in the niches where they had been. Only the slant of the rock enabled him to accomplish the climb at all, and it seemed endless, a hell-born eternity of torture.
The lamps below him were like fireflies in the darkness, and the roof with its clustering stalactites was only a few yards above his head. Then he saw a gleam of light, and an instant later he was crouching in a cleft that opened on the outer air. It was only a couple of yards wide, and not tall enough for a man to stand upright.
He crawled along it for some thirty feet and then looked out on a rugged slant that pitched down to a crest of cliffs, a hundred feet below. He could not see the ledge where the door opened, nor the path that led from it, but he saw a figure crouching among the boulders along the lip of the cliff, and he unslung his rifle.
Ordinarily he could not have missed at that range. But his bloodshot eyes refused to line the sights. Slumber never assails a weary man so fiercely as in the growing light of dawn. The figure among the rocks below merged and blended fantastically with the scenery, and the sights of the rifle were mere blurs.
Setting his teeth, Gordon pulled the trigger, and the bullet smashed on the rock a foot from Ormond’s head. The Englishman dived out of sight among the boulders without pausing to find where the shot came from.
