Complete Works of Talbot Mundy, page 597
“What have you done with the Russians?”
“Rahman locked them up.”
“What have you done with the men they had corrupted?”
Nothing. That was Rahman s idea. I thought it better to face my whole army to-night and try to win them back to me. But oh, I’m glad you came!”
“We will win them,” said Gup. “And we will turn your nightmare, Lottie, into a rather decent job of work! You know that the Amir is on the march? Let’s see how far he gets without our leave!” Then suddenly an argument occurred to him that he had never used to her. He wondered he had never thought of it before. “Do you realize that he would overrun Jullunder? You have built up this wonderful army. Now together let us save the Jullunder that you worked so hard to build up when you were Ranee.”
He felt jubilant, although he wondered at himself — at the ups and downs from morbid gloom to thrilled expectancy and back again. He felt ashamed of that, and the shame made him more determined.
“Whoever the Lords of Life are, Lottie, and whoever God is, let’s live to-day as if we die to-night and will have to answer for our deeds. No more welshing; both of us have had enough of that. Let’s play on-side.”
“It wasn’t always easy to do that, Gup, without some one I believed in, to do it with me. There was only Rahman, and Rahman is simply personal. If I ordered Rahman to march on Delhi or Kabul he would do either with equal readiness. He might grumble, but he would never dream of disobeying me.”
“Good,” said Gup. “We will give him orders fit to be obeyed.”
The moon had risen high above the ragged rim of crags, so that they rode on a silver pathway between gaunt cliffs streaked with soft dark shadow. There was a feeling of unreality. It was like a dream. The sky was almost day-blue, not a cloud in sight. To the east, where the moon was rising, hardly a star was visible, but to the westward they were like clustered, colored jewels. There appeared to be no back to anything. The cliffs and crags were surfaces, not solids, yet it was not like painted scenery. There was magic in the air that night — no other word for it. And Tom O’Hara rode a mule, alone, behind the women, hunched up, with his chin on his chest, in a loose, brown mullah’s robe, looking for all the world like some magician in a fairy-tale. He told Gup afterward that he was thinking of Copenhagen, but nobody who saw him would have believed that.
The great gap that opened into the Valley of Doab was a luminous mystery of silver and gloom. The naked rivers lay like crayon strokes where their low banks shed the moonlight. The walls of the valley on one side were in total darkness, jeweled with the crimson flicker of a thousand bivouac fires. The other side was liquid with a mystery of moonlit color. There was no sound. The silence made by thirty thousand men has vibrance of a sort that no word dignifies — a nameless thrill, inaudible yet sensed. Gup’s stallion neighed, and he was answered by the whinny of a hundred mares that set the crags reechoing for league on league until the maddening music of it died away in silence.
The path lay straight between the snakelike riverbeds. Gup’s horsemen two or three hundred feet ahead, they two rode side by side, Gup’s stallion cavorting as if he knew he bore the chieftain on whose shoulders rested hope and faith and the responsibility for thirty thousand lives. He snorted and his arched neck sweated as he tossed his head and ambled to the rhythm of some cosmic symphony.
Rahman had massed the lashkar into solid, serried ranks around three sides of an enormous rock like the lap of a seated mountain. Cliffs at the back of it rose like folds of monstrous drapery, against which fifteen hundred feet in air an enormous bonfire glowed like a ruby set in leaping shadows. Suddenly Rahman spurred his mare and reined her on her heels. He swung his saber and a roar went up from thirty thousand throats that seemed to shake the mountain.
“Akbar! Akbar!”
Echoes thunder-clapping through the crags. Then silence, while the Ranee and Gup rode side by side into the square in the midst of the men, where Rahman kissed his saber-hilt and sat his mare like the embodied spirit of armed arrogance obedient to nothing but his chosen leader. He looked solid. The rest were phantoms.
There were scores of mullahs crowded in the front ranks — men on whom the spirit of the Hills depends for energy that stirs and guides the savagery latent in all Hillman hearts. Gup knew, on them depended the result of this night’s work. He needed no whisper from Tom O’Hara; he had sensed the key-note of the situation. He gestured, upward, with his right hand.
“The Kalima!”
Tom got off his mule and scrambled up the rock. For a moment he stood recovering his breath. Then he gestured weirdly, like a brown, mad, solitary hermit-mullah whom the hand of God has touched with frenzied vision of the sights unseen by mortal eyes. And suddenly his voice went wailing over all that multitude, clarion clear, yet pleading none-the-less, as if the spirit of the night were giving tongue and wondering why men were faithless.
“La illaha illa’llah Muhammad Rasulu’llah!”
They chanted after him in unison the fundamental ritual of Islam, until all that valley murmured it and the rhythmic challenge that there is no god but God went rolling up to heaven through the throat of the thunderous cliffs. When all was still again a man who fed the bonfire on the ledge leaned over and repeated it, hands to his mouth, screaming the magical words that have stirred more hearts to frenzy than ever drink or the love of women did. So they chanted again, and Gup made note of the acoustics of the place. He had no hope of making thirty thousand men hear all he said, but he hoped to make half of them hear it, and it seemed to him that the rock where Tom O’Hara stood, with its cliffs at the rear to throw sound forward, was the key-position.
He dismounted and helped the Ranee to her feet. There was a path that Tom O’Hara had not noticed in his hurry to climb the rock. Up that he led the Ranee, and before the chant was finished she and he and Tom O’Hara stood side by side, looking down at a sea of faces glistening in moonlight.
“Like the old days, Lottie. There’s your audience!”
“Speak first,” she said. “This is yours. I yield it to you.”
And so Gup waited grimly until silence fell, not stage-struck and not doubting, but aware of his own ignorance and grim because he meant to let no ignorance limit inspiration. If the Lords of Time and Tide and Decency and Common Sense had use for him, he and his lips were at their service. It was as if he listened with an inward ear for guidance. And none came. He could think of no word that would grip that audience and bind it to his bidding.
“Always try your voice first,” Lottie whispered. “Feel your way. Don’t waste effort until you know you’ve got them by the ears.”
“Allaho Akbar!” he shouted, then repeated it. The second time he felt the vibrance that assured him he had pitched into the right key. Then, as suddenly as light leaps when a flint strikes steel, he knew he had the right idea.
“Nobles and men of the lashkar — Hillmen all!” he shouted, and his voice went forth as if it rolled on wheels. “In Allah’s sight we stand here willing enough to die, if we may die as men should. There is no man — none, in whom the breath of Allah hath not stirred a love of life. And shall a man love life but not his liberty?”
“Don’t tell ’em too much,” murmured Tom O’Hara in the long dramatic pause, wherein the champing of a horse’s bit was as distinct as sleigh-bells.
“Your Ranee gathered, fitted out and paid this lashkar for a purpose,” Gup went on. “But she has summoned it for a different purpose, and as Allah is my witness, I stand here ready to devote my whole integrity and honor to the cause confronting us. Noblemen and stalwarts of this lashkar, I demand the same of you!”
There was a rustling in the ranks, then silence, as a sea of faces strained to listen.
“Is this your land, or another’s? Whose salt have you eaten?”
“Good!” said Tom O’Hara. “Now you’ve got ’em!”
“Does it suit your sense of honor that an upstart Amir on a shaken throne should dare to send his spies to stab or poison her who has been so generous?”
There came an answering snarl of indignation.
“Is it your Honors’ pleasure that that same Amir, having failed in his attempted treachery because of the vigilance of faithful men, shall march unchallenged with an army through your land and seize your benefactress? Has izzat no answer to that insolence? Has Hillmen’s honor become dung beneath an Afghan Amir’s feet?”
A murmur grew and swelled into a roar — a veritable tide of anger. Waves of it leaped backward as the front ranks tossed their repetition of Gup’s speech to the men in the dense-packed distance. Gup raised his hand for silence.
“Do your Honors please that an insolent, upstart Amir shall invade your territory with an army — which he will feed on your corn and cattle — pay with the plunder of your villages — reward with the right to seize your wives and daughters?”
“Allah!” Yells began to punctuate the surge of anger. It was more than a minute before Gup’s raised hand imposed another stillness.
“Has he asked your leave? Has he offered to pay passage money? Has he guaranteed your liberties? And is his word worth the bleat of a goat without pledged security? And if he plunders India, what profit will you have? Will he not leave you starving at his rear, with your homes burned and your cattle slaughtered? If he fails, will he not try to retreat and leave you to face the revenge of the Indian army? I demand your judgment of this matter!”
They delivered judgment instantly. They made the mountains ring with execration of the Amir, summoning the wrath of Allah to resist him. Gup caught one swift glimpse of Rahman’s upturned face and saw him grin; he knew by that, far better than by all the noise, that he had won his audience. He had to wait a long time now for silence, because the mullahs were deliberately stirring passion; they had sensed a changing tide and, like all politicians, they were quick to swim with it and claim the credit for having caused it.
“I offer myself to lead you,” Gup said at last. “And I demand in Allah’s name your oath of loyalty to these eternal Hills that Allah gave you for a heritage! And if ye follow and obey me, I will pay you from the plunder of the Amir’s camp. Whereafter, ye shall find yourselves possessed of grateful friends in place of powerful enemies. And the next Amir and the next will think ten times before they trespass.”
Thirty thousand throats let loose a roar that made that vast valley a cauldron of monstrous sound, in which the mullahs began working up the maddening, rhythmic “Din! Din!” and there was no more silence, nor a chance for any man to get a word in. Crags and caverns echoed and reechoed with the “Din! Din!” that cannonaded back and forth from cliff to cliff. Gup took the Ranee in his arms and raised her shoulder-high, as if she were the standard of their savage izzat and the pledge of his fulfilment of his oath of leadership. They went wild. They broke ranks. Men in the outer pools of moonlight began firing off their rifles at the sky, and by the time Gup set the Ranee on her feet there were thirty thousand rifles spitting spurts of flame and Rahman was cursing the mullahs, raging at them, sending them scattering to stop that madness.
“Your one mistake,” said Tom O’Hara. “Now they’ll expect Lottie to ride with you into the thick of ut.”
“Why not?” Gup answered.
“I said ut. All along I said you were as crazy as a march hare! Man alive, she’s a woman. You can’t take a woman with you into battle.”
“Why not? Joan of Arc went in! Why shouldn’t a woman purge her soul as simply as a man? She made this situation. She shall mend it.”
The Ranee laid her hands in his and looked into his eyes:
“Oh, Gup, I love you!”
“Sing to them then, Lottie.”
Rahman’s efforts and the mullahs’ savage vehemence were restoring quiet. Tom O’Hara gradually drew attention to himself by posturing as if he preached a kutbah from the rock. Officers’ voices were already audible above the din. It only needed novelty to restore order. Discipline would follow.
“Sing to them, Lottie.”
“Sing what? I can’t make my voice heard.”
“Yes, you can. Sing that song you promised you would sing to me — that song that you said explains you — the one you wrote yourself and set to music.”
“But the words are English.”
“No matter. It’s the voice that counts — voice and sincerity. Sing to ’em.”
He raised both hands in air and silence fell. It fell mysteriously, like the mist that was now creeping in twin streams along the river beds and dimming the crimson bivouac fires. A vapor, shoulder-high, came flowing through the ranks and whitened as it gained intensity, until a horde of turbaned faces seemed to swim on a tide of sea-pearl. But the Ranee’s jewels glistened in the moonlight and her face was radiant — unearthly, as she sang:
High have I soared and only
I and the winds were lonely;
Uttermost peak and mountain crest
Mothered the young rain to their breast.
Higher I soared and only I and the winds were lonely;
Rain met the river, snow met the rill.
I and the winds sought still.
Love, I have sought you deeper than wells,
Deep in the anguish no tongue tells,
High in the light of hope. Wide ways I go,
Asking of purple crag, valley and snow:
Where is this depth? Where is this height?
Higher than sky be it, deeper than night,
Farther than footsteps ever have trod,
I’ll find though I must steal the key from God.
Then my own soul said: Blind thou art —
Blind, for the door stands open.
Nearer than death, nearer than breath,
Open in some one’s heart.
All universes answer to the thrill
Of one man’s victory. And one man’s fear
Is felt by millions. And one man’s will
Can make a vanguard of a beaten rear,
So be he feel the flood of vibrant rays
Like music leaping from the master bell
When each true bell in tune to it obeys
In far-flung carillon— “All’s well! All’s well!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“And a ticket to Copenhagen.”
THERE was no time lost and none to lose. Gup first of all reduced the risk of treachery; he weeded out such men as Rahman thought were doubtful quantities, deprived them of their weapons, sent them scattering whichever way they pleased and sent scouts, almost on their heels, to bring back news of the enemy’s movement.
“And now all prisoners, Rahman. They are a risk and a nuisance; turn them loose too. Where are the Russians?”
“Gup Bahadur, there has been another accident,” said Rahman. “They were taken to the summit of that crag for exercise. They fell. And when a man falls all that distance, he is dead, by God.”
If Rahman could have had his way he would have “accidented” more than Russians. Some of Gup’s scouts guided in an insolent Kabuli Khan commanding a whole squadron of the Amir’s mounted sowars. He demanded the surrender of the caverns and delivery of the Ranee’s person as a hostage for good behavior, toying with the white flag on a lance as if he thought such social amenities ridiculous. He felt he should have come with more men and have raped that stronghold. Rahman begged to be allowed to introduce him and all his squadron, excepting one man, to the execution crag; one man should be sent back with his head and eyebrows shaved, naked, on a baggage-camel, to relate to the Amir what had happened. But Gup gave the Afghans fifteen minutes to be out of sight and sent two squadrons to pursue them, Rahman objecting sorrowfully:
“Gup Bahadur, to make Hillmen stand and fight it is a wise way to offend their enemy so bitterly, by God, that they know they must fight or the enemy will treat them likewise.”
Then, for a space of three hours, there was mutiny. The lashkar was unanimous. To a man they were determined to invade the caverns and defend them, they not realizing that to do so would make them as helpless as bottled-up hornets.
“As a hole in the earth to a fox,” said Rahman, “so is a rocky refuge to a Hillman. A fortress fascinates them.”
And on top of that, while Gup sat the stallion Iskander in the gorge outside the entrance to the caverns, listening to the arguments of mullahs who had made themselves the spokesmen for the men, there came a runner from Peshawar, shepherded by Orak-zai Pathans who had been paid extravagantly to protect him to his destination. He bore an envelope wrapped in a piece of cloth, addressed to “Gup McLeod Bahadur,” which was either a sarcastic insult or else a mysterious compliment. Gup tore open the envelope. Within, on plain paper without heading or date, was a note in pencil signed with the initials of the High Commissioner:
“O’Hara’s reports have arrived. What can you do on the Amir’s right flank? If he once breaks through the Khyber there is no knowing what may happen.”
Gup folded that and put it in his pocket. Perfectly he understood that it was meant to be a tactful, unofficial promise of forgiveness by the Indian Government, contingent on his making himself useful now. But he sent no answer. He left liaison work to Tom O’Hara, who was down in the radio cavern, standing over an Eurasian who was trying to send signals to Peshawar. He set his teeth at the thought of any direct communication with the authorities until after something much more definite than that was done to rehabilitate his friends. He set himself last. There was Lottie first to be considered. And he counted as friend each man who dared to stand with him against the Amir’s hosts — even the fools with spittle on their lips who clamored at his stirrup to be let into the caverns.
“I will fill the place with death if one man tries to enter!” he announced. “There is poison-gas, made by the Russians. I will turn it loose. But any man who prefers the Amir’s service has my leave to go this minute.”
“Allah!”
“Yes, as Allah is my witness.”
Then he and Lottie rode to the Valley of Doab, those mullahs following, and once again they stirred the lashkar’s sense of the indignity that any Amir should dare to use their valleys as a high-road for his troops. Again Gup promised plunder from the Amir’s camp. Their mood changed and he inflamed it, telling the news, that the scouts had brought already, of a column coming down on them with the smoke of burning villages behind it. Then, because he knew that at any minute, for their own ends, the mullahs might try to resurrect that craving to be safe behind impenetrable walls, he galloped back and ordered Rahman to prepare to evacuate every living man and animal.
“Rahman locked them up.”
“What have you done with the men they had corrupted?”
Nothing. That was Rahman s idea. I thought it better to face my whole army to-night and try to win them back to me. But oh, I’m glad you came!”
“We will win them,” said Gup. “And we will turn your nightmare, Lottie, into a rather decent job of work! You know that the Amir is on the march? Let’s see how far he gets without our leave!” Then suddenly an argument occurred to him that he had never used to her. He wondered he had never thought of it before. “Do you realize that he would overrun Jullunder? You have built up this wonderful army. Now together let us save the Jullunder that you worked so hard to build up when you were Ranee.”
He felt jubilant, although he wondered at himself — at the ups and downs from morbid gloom to thrilled expectancy and back again. He felt ashamed of that, and the shame made him more determined.
“Whoever the Lords of Life are, Lottie, and whoever God is, let’s live to-day as if we die to-night and will have to answer for our deeds. No more welshing; both of us have had enough of that. Let’s play on-side.”
“It wasn’t always easy to do that, Gup, without some one I believed in, to do it with me. There was only Rahman, and Rahman is simply personal. If I ordered Rahman to march on Delhi or Kabul he would do either with equal readiness. He might grumble, but he would never dream of disobeying me.”
“Good,” said Gup. “We will give him orders fit to be obeyed.”
The moon had risen high above the ragged rim of crags, so that they rode on a silver pathway between gaunt cliffs streaked with soft dark shadow. There was a feeling of unreality. It was like a dream. The sky was almost day-blue, not a cloud in sight. To the east, where the moon was rising, hardly a star was visible, but to the westward they were like clustered, colored jewels. There appeared to be no back to anything. The cliffs and crags were surfaces, not solids, yet it was not like painted scenery. There was magic in the air that night — no other word for it. And Tom O’Hara rode a mule, alone, behind the women, hunched up, with his chin on his chest, in a loose, brown mullah’s robe, looking for all the world like some magician in a fairy-tale. He told Gup afterward that he was thinking of Copenhagen, but nobody who saw him would have believed that.
The great gap that opened into the Valley of Doab was a luminous mystery of silver and gloom. The naked rivers lay like crayon strokes where their low banks shed the moonlight. The walls of the valley on one side were in total darkness, jeweled with the crimson flicker of a thousand bivouac fires. The other side was liquid with a mystery of moonlit color. There was no sound. The silence made by thirty thousand men has vibrance of a sort that no word dignifies — a nameless thrill, inaudible yet sensed. Gup’s stallion neighed, and he was answered by the whinny of a hundred mares that set the crags reechoing for league on league until the maddening music of it died away in silence.
The path lay straight between the snakelike riverbeds. Gup’s horsemen two or three hundred feet ahead, they two rode side by side, Gup’s stallion cavorting as if he knew he bore the chieftain on whose shoulders rested hope and faith and the responsibility for thirty thousand lives. He snorted and his arched neck sweated as he tossed his head and ambled to the rhythm of some cosmic symphony.
Rahman had massed the lashkar into solid, serried ranks around three sides of an enormous rock like the lap of a seated mountain. Cliffs at the back of it rose like folds of monstrous drapery, against which fifteen hundred feet in air an enormous bonfire glowed like a ruby set in leaping shadows. Suddenly Rahman spurred his mare and reined her on her heels. He swung his saber and a roar went up from thirty thousand throats that seemed to shake the mountain.
“Akbar! Akbar!”
Echoes thunder-clapping through the crags. Then silence, while the Ranee and Gup rode side by side into the square in the midst of the men, where Rahman kissed his saber-hilt and sat his mare like the embodied spirit of armed arrogance obedient to nothing but his chosen leader. He looked solid. The rest were phantoms.
There were scores of mullahs crowded in the front ranks — men on whom the spirit of the Hills depends for energy that stirs and guides the savagery latent in all Hillman hearts. Gup knew, on them depended the result of this night’s work. He needed no whisper from Tom O’Hara; he had sensed the key-note of the situation. He gestured, upward, with his right hand.
“The Kalima!”
Tom got off his mule and scrambled up the rock. For a moment he stood recovering his breath. Then he gestured weirdly, like a brown, mad, solitary hermit-mullah whom the hand of God has touched with frenzied vision of the sights unseen by mortal eyes. And suddenly his voice went wailing over all that multitude, clarion clear, yet pleading none-the-less, as if the spirit of the night were giving tongue and wondering why men were faithless.
“La illaha illa’llah Muhammad Rasulu’llah!”
They chanted after him in unison the fundamental ritual of Islam, until all that valley murmured it and the rhythmic challenge that there is no god but God went rolling up to heaven through the throat of the thunderous cliffs. When all was still again a man who fed the bonfire on the ledge leaned over and repeated it, hands to his mouth, screaming the magical words that have stirred more hearts to frenzy than ever drink or the love of women did. So they chanted again, and Gup made note of the acoustics of the place. He had no hope of making thirty thousand men hear all he said, but he hoped to make half of them hear it, and it seemed to him that the rock where Tom O’Hara stood, with its cliffs at the rear to throw sound forward, was the key-position.
He dismounted and helped the Ranee to her feet. There was a path that Tom O’Hara had not noticed in his hurry to climb the rock. Up that he led the Ranee, and before the chant was finished she and he and Tom O’Hara stood side by side, looking down at a sea of faces glistening in moonlight.
“Like the old days, Lottie. There’s your audience!”
“Speak first,” she said. “This is yours. I yield it to you.”
And so Gup waited grimly until silence fell, not stage-struck and not doubting, but aware of his own ignorance and grim because he meant to let no ignorance limit inspiration. If the Lords of Time and Tide and Decency and Common Sense had use for him, he and his lips were at their service. It was as if he listened with an inward ear for guidance. And none came. He could think of no word that would grip that audience and bind it to his bidding.
“Always try your voice first,” Lottie whispered. “Feel your way. Don’t waste effort until you know you’ve got them by the ears.”
“Allaho Akbar!” he shouted, then repeated it. The second time he felt the vibrance that assured him he had pitched into the right key. Then, as suddenly as light leaps when a flint strikes steel, he knew he had the right idea.
“Nobles and men of the lashkar — Hillmen all!” he shouted, and his voice went forth as if it rolled on wheels. “In Allah’s sight we stand here willing enough to die, if we may die as men should. There is no man — none, in whom the breath of Allah hath not stirred a love of life. And shall a man love life but not his liberty?”
“Don’t tell ’em too much,” murmured Tom O’Hara in the long dramatic pause, wherein the champing of a horse’s bit was as distinct as sleigh-bells.
“Your Ranee gathered, fitted out and paid this lashkar for a purpose,” Gup went on. “But she has summoned it for a different purpose, and as Allah is my witness, I stand here ready to devote my whole integrity and honor to the cause confronting us. Noblemen and stalwarts of this lashkar, I demand the same of you!”
There was a rustling in the ranks, then silence, as a sea of faces strained to listen.
“Is this your land, or another’s? Whose salt have you eaten?”
“Good!” said Tom O’Hara. “Now you’ve got ’em!”
“Does it suit your sense of honor that an upstart Amir on a shaken throne should dare to send his spies to stab or poison her who has been so generous?”
There came an answering snarl of indignation.
“Is it your Honors’ pleasure that that same Amir, having failed in his attempted treachery because of the vigilance of faithful men, shall march unchallenged with an army through your land and seize your benefactress? Has izzat no answer to that insolence? Has Hillmen’s honor become dung beneath an Afghan Amir’s feet?”
A murmur grew and swelled into a roar — a veritable tide of anger. Waves of it leaped backward as the front ranks tossed their repetition of Gup’s speech to the men in the dense-packed distance. Gup raised his hand for silence.
“Do your Honors please that an insolent, upstart Amir shall invade your territory with an army — which he will feed on your corn and cattle — pay with the plunder of your villages — reward with the right to seize your wives and daughters?”
“Allah!” Yells began to punctuate the surge of anger. It was more than a minute before Gup’s raised hand imposed another stillness.
“Has he asked your leave? Has he offered to pay passage money? Has he guaranteed your liberties? And is his word worth the bleat of a goat without pledged security? And if he plunders India, what profit will you have? Will he not leave you starving at his rear, with your homes burned and your cattle slaughtered? If he fails, will he not try to retreat and leave you to face the revenge of the Indian army? I demand your judgment of this matter!”
They delivered judgment instantly. They made the mountains ring with execration of the Amir, summoning the wrath of Allah to resist him. Gup caught one swift glimpse of Rahman’s upturned face and saw him grin; he knew by that, far better than by all the noise, that he had won his audience. He had to wait a long time now for silence, because the mullahs were deliberately stirring passion; they had sensed a changing tide and, like all politicians, they were quick to swim with it and claim the credit for having caused it.
“I offer myself to lead you,” Gup said at last. “And I demand in Allah’s name your oath of loyalty to these eternal Hills that Allah gave you for a heritage! And if ye follow and obey me, I will pay you from the plunder of the Amir’s camp. Whereafter, ye shall find yourselves possessed of grateful friends in place of powerful enemies. And the next Amir and the next will think ten times before they trespass.”
Thirty thousand throats let loose a roar that made that vast valley a cauldron of monstrous sound, in which the mullahs began working up the maddening, rhythmic “Din! Din!” and there was no more silence, nor a chance for any man to get a word in. Crags and caverns echoed and reechoed with the “Din! Din!” that cannonaded back and forth from cliff to cliff. Gup took the Ranee in his arms and raised her shoulder-high, as if she were the standard of their savage izzat and the pledge of his fulfilment of his oath of leadership. They went wild. They broke ranks. Men in the outer pools of moonlight began firing off their rifles at the sky, and by the time Gup set the Ranee on her feet there were thirty thousand rifles spitting spurts of flame and Rahman was cursing the mullahs, raging at them, sending them scattering to stop that madness.
“Your one mistake,” said Tom O’Hara. “Now they’ll expect Lottie to ride with you into the thick of ut.”
“Why not?” Gup answered.
“I said ut. All along I said you were as crazy as a march hare! Man alive, she’s a woman. You can’t take a woman with you into battle.”
“Why not? Joan of Arc went in! Why shouldn’t a woman purge her soul as simply as a man? She made this situation. She shall mend it.”
The Ranee laid her hands in his and looked into his eyes:
“Oh, Gup, I love you!”
“Sing to them then, Lottie.”
Rahman’s efforts and the mullahs’ savage vehemence were restoring quiet. Tom O’Hara gradually drew attention to himself by posturing as if he preached a kutbah from the rock. Officers’ voices were already audible above the din. It only needed novelty to restore order. Discipline would follow.
“Sing to them, Lottie.”
“Sing what? I can’t make my voice heard.”
“Yes, you can. Sing that song you promised you would sing to me — that song that you said explains you — the one you wrote yourself and set to music.”
“But the words are English.”
“No matter. It’s the voice that counts — voice and sincerity. Sing to ’em.”
He raised both hands in air and silence fell. It fell mysteriously, like the mist that was now creeping in twin streams along the river beds and dimming the crimson bivouac fires. A vapor, shoulder-high, came flowing through the ranks and whitened as it gained intensity, until a horde of turbaned faces seemed to swim on a tide of sea-pearl. But the Ranee’s jewels glistened in the moonlight and her face was radiant — unearthly, as she sang:
High have I soared and only
I and the winds were lonely;
Uttermost peak and mountain crest
Mothered the young rain to their breast.
Higher I soared and only I and the winds were lonely;
Rain met the river, snow met the rill.
I and the winds sought still.
Love, I have sought you deeper than wells,
Deep in the anguish no tongue tells,
High in the light of hope. Wide ways I go,
Asking of purple crag, valley and snow:
Where is this depth? Where is this height?
Higher than sky be it, deeper than night,
Farther than footsteps ever have trod,
I’ll find though I must steal the key from God.
Then my own soul said: Blind thou art —
Blind, for the door stands open.
Nearer than death, nearer than breath,
Open in some one’s heart.
All universes answer to the thrill
Of one man’s victory. And one man’s fear
Is felt by millions. And one man’s will
Can make a vanguard of a beaten rear,
So be he feel the flood of vibrant rays
Like music leaping from the master bell
When each true bell in tune to it obeys
In far-flung carillon— “All’s well! All’s well!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“And a ticket to Copenhagen.”
THERE was no time lost and none to lose. Gup first of all reduced the risk of treachery; he weeded out such men as Rahman thought were doubtful quantities, deprived them of their weapons, sent them scattering whichever way they pleased and sent scouts, almost on their heels, to bring back news of the enemy’s movement.
“And now all prisoners, Rahman. They are a risk and a nuisance; turn them loose too. Where are the Russians?”
“Gup Bahadur, there has been another accident,” said Rahman. “They were taken to the summit of that crag for exercise. They fell. And when a man falls all that distance, he is dead, by God.”
If Rahman could have had his way he would have “accidented” more than Russians. Some of Gup’s scouts guided in an insolent Kabuli Khan commanding a whole squadron of the Amir’s mounted sowars. He demanded the surrender of the caverns and delivery of the Ranee’s person as a hostage for good behavior, toying with the white flag on a lance as if he thought such social amenities ridiculous. He felt he should have come with more men and have raped that stronghold. Rahman begged to be allowed to introduce him and all his squadron, excepting one man, to the execution crag; one man should be sent back with his head and eyebrows shaved, naked, on a baggage-camel, to relate to the Amir what had happened. But Gup gave the Afghans fifteen minutes to be out of sight and sent two squadrons to pursue them, Rahman objecting sorrowfully:
“Gup Bahadur, to make Hillmen stand and fight it is a wise way to offend their enemy so bitterly, by God, that they know they must fight or the enemy will treat them likewise.”
Then, for a space of three hours, there was mutiny. The lashkar was unanimous. To a man they were determined to invade the caverns and defend them, they not realizing that to do so would make them as helpless as bottled-up hornets.
“As a hole in the earth to a fox,” said Rahman, “so is a rocky refuge to a Hillman. A fortress fascinates them.”
And on top of that, while Gup sat the stallion Iskander in the gorge outside the entrance to the caverns, listening to the arguments of mullahs who had made themselves the spokesmen for the men, there came a runner from Peshawar, shepherded by Orak-zai Pathans who had been paid extravagantly to protect him to his destination. He bore an envelope wrapped in a piece of cloth, addressed to “Gup McLeod Bahadur,” which was either a sarcastic insult or else a mysterious compliment. Gup tore open the envelope. Within, on plain paper without heading or date, was a note in pencil signed with the initials of the High Commissioner:
“O’Hara’s reports have arrived. What can you do on the Amir’s right flank? If he once breaks through the Khyber there is no knowing what may happen.”
Gup folded that and put it in his pocket. Perfectly he understood that it was meant to be a tactful, unofficial promise of forgiveness by the Indian Government, contingent on his making himself useful now. But he sent no answer. He left liaison work to Tom O’Hara, who was down in the radio cavern, standing over an Eurasian who was trying to send signals to Peshawar. He set his teeth at the thought of any direct communication with the authorities until after something much more definite than that was done to rehabilitate his friends. He set himself last. There was Lottie first to be considered. And he counted as friend each man who dared to stand with him against the Amir’s hosts — even the fools with spittle on their lips who clamored at his stirrup to be let into the caverns.
“I will fill the place with death if one man tries to enter!” he announced. “There is poison-gas, made by the Russians. I will turn it loose. But any man who prefers the Amir’s service has my leave to go this minute.”
“Allah!”
“Yes, as Allah is my witness.”
Then he and Lottie rode to the Valley of Doab, those mullahs following, and once again they stirred the lashkar’s sense of the indignity that any Amir should dare to use their valleys as a high-road for his troops. Again Gup promised plunder from the Amir’s camp. Their mood changed and he inflamed it, telling the news, that the scouts had brought already, of a column coming down on them with the smoke of burning villages behind it. Then, because he knew that at any minute, for their own ends, the mullahs might try to resurrect that craving to be safe behind impenetrable walls, he galloped back and ordered Rahman to prepare to evacuate every living man and animal.
