El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (19 page)

“Can you have your men guide me to the spot where you found this man, Baber Khan?” he asked at last.

“Aye,
sahib
. But it is an evil place. It is in the Gorge of Ghosts, close to the borders of
Ghulistan
, and —”

“Good. Lal Singh, you and the others go and sleep. We ride at dawn.”

“To Kabul,
sahib?
”

“No. To
Ghulistan.
”

“Then you think —”

“I think nothing — yet; I go in search of knowledge.”

Dusk was mantling the jumbled sky-line when Gordon’s Ghilzai guide halted. Ahead of them the rugged terrain was broken by a deep canyon and beyond the canyon rose a forbidding array of black crags and frowning cliffs. The change from grey shale, brown slopes and reddish stone was abrupt, as if the canyon marked a distinct geographical division. Beyond the gorge there was nothing to be seen except a wild, hag-like chaos of broken black rock.

“There begins
Ghulistan,
” said the Ghilzai, and his hawk-eyed, hook-nosed comrades instinctively loosened their knives and clicked the bolts of their rifles. “Beyond that gorge, the Gorge of Ghosts, begins the country of horror and death. We go no further,
sahib.
”

Gordon nodded, his keen gaze picking out a trail that looped down rugged slopes into the canyon. It was the fading trace of an ancient road they had been following for many miles, but it looked as if it had been used frequently, and lately.

The Ghilzai nodded, divining his thought.

“That trail is well-traveled. By it the demons of the black mountains come and go. But men who follow it will not return.”

Yar Ali Khan tugged his beard truculently and jeered, though he secretly shared their superstitions. “Demons? What need demons with a trail?”

“When demons take the shape of men they might walk like men,” Ahmed Shah grunted in his bushy beard. Lal Singh the Sikh was imperturbable. His own mythology was full of myriad-limbed demons, but he had scant respect for the superstitions of other races.

“Demons fly with wings like a bat!” asserted Yar Ali Khan.

The Ghilzai decided to ignore the Afridi, and pointed to the jutting ledge over which the trail wound.

“At the foot of that slope we found the man you called a Mongol. Doubtless his brother demons quarreled with him and cast him down.”

“Doubtless he tripped and fell and rolled off the trail,” grunted Gordon. “Mongols are desert men. They are unused to mountain climbing, and their legs are bowed and weakened by a life in the saddle. Such a one would stumble easily on a narrow trail.”

“If he was a man, perhaps,” conceded the Ghilzai. “I still say
— Allah!
”

All started except Gordon, and the Ghilzais turned pale and threw up their rifles, glaring like startled wolves. Out over the crags, from the south, rolled a strange sound of peculiar resonance and stridency — a harsh, braying roar that vibrated among the mountains.

“The voice of the
djinn!
” ejaculated the Ghilzai, unconsciously jerking the
rein of his horse so the brute squealed and reared. “
Sahib
, in the name of Allah the Compassionate, be wise! Return with us to Khor!”

“Go back to your village. That was the agreement. I am going on.”

“Baber Khan will weep for thee!” the leader of the band yelled reproachfully over his shoulder as he kicked his pony into a wild run. “He loves thee like a brother! There will be woe in Khor!
Aie! Ahai! Ohee!
” His lamentations died away amidst the clatter of hoofs on stone as the Ghilzais, flogging their ponies hard, topped a ridge and vanished from view.

“Run, sons of noseless dams!” yelled Yar Ali Khan, who never missed an opportunity to vent tribal prejudice and flaunt personal superiority. “We will brand your devils and drag them to Khor by their tails!” But he fell mute the instant the victims were out of hearing.

Gordon and his companions sat their steeds alone on the canyon’s rim, staring in the direction from which had come that ominous voice.

Ahmed Shah shifted nervously in his saddle, and Yar Ali Khan tugged his patriarchal beard and eyed Gordon sidewise, like an apprehensive ghoul with a three-foot knife. But El Borak spoke to Lal Singh: “Have you ever heard a sound like that before?”

The tall Sikh nodded.

“Yes,
sahib
, in the mountains of the men who serve the devil.”

Gordon lifted his reins without comment. He too had heard the roar of the ten-foot bronze trumpets that blare over the bare black mountains of forbidden Mongolia, in the hands of shaven-headed priests of Erlik.

Yar Ali Khan snorted. He had not heard those trumpets, and he had not been consulted. He was as bellicosely jealous of Gordon’s attention as a favorite wolfhound. He thrust his horse in ahead of Lal Singh, so as to be next to Gordon as they rode down the steep slopes in the purple dusk. He bared his teeth at the Sikh who was too much accustomed to such displays of savage vanity to take offense, and said roughly to the man whose friendship he prized above everything else in the world: “Now that we have been lured into this country of devils by treacherous Ghilzai dogs who will undoubtedly steal back and cut the
sahib’s
throat while he sleeps, what have you planned for us?”

It might have been a gaunt old wolfhound growling at his master for patting another dog; Gordon bent his head and spat to hide a grin.

“We’ll camp in the canyon tonight. The horses are tired, and there’s no point in struggling through these gulches in the dark. Tomorrow we’ll do some exploring and scouting. There’s no doubt that the Mongol was one of the Hidden Ones. He must have been on foot when he fell. If he’d been on a horse, he wouldn’t have fallen unless the horse fell too. The Ghilzai didn’t find a dead horse. Only a dead man. If he was afoot, it’s certain that he wasn’t far from
some camp or rendezvous. A Mongol wouldn’t walk far; wouldn’t walk a hundred feet unless he had to, in fact.

“The more I think of it the more it seems to me that the Hidden Ones have a rendezvous somewhere in that country across the gorge. It could make a perfect hide-out. The Hills in this particular corner of the globe aren’t thickly inhabited. Khor is the nearest village, and it’s a long day’s hard ride, as we’ve found. Wandering clans stay out of these parts, fearing the Ghilzais, and Baber Khan’s men are too superstitious to investigate much across that gorge. The Hidden Ones, hiding over there somewhere, could come and go pretty much undetected. That old road we’ve been following most of the day used to be a main caravan route, centuries ago, and it’s still practicable for men on horses. Better still, it doesn’t pass near any villages, and isn’t used by the tribes now. Men following it could get to within a day’s ride of Kabul without much fear of being seen by anyone. I remember seeing it on old maps, drawn on parchment, centuries ago.

“Frankly, I don’t know what we’ll do. Mainly we’ll keep our eyes open and await developments. Our actions will depend on circumstances. Our destiny,” said Gordon without cynicism, “is on Allah’s knees.”

“
La illaha illulah; Muhammad rassoul ullah!
” agreed Yar Ali Khan sonorously, stroking his beard like a reverent cut-throat, completely mollified.

As they came down into the canyon they saw that the trail led across the rock-strewn floor and into the mouth of a deep, narrow gorge which debouched into the canyon from the south. The south wall of the canyon was higher than the north wall, and much more sheer; it swept up like a sullen rampart of solid black rock, broken at intervals by narrow cleft-like gorge-mouths. Gordon rode into the gorge in which the trail wound and followed it to the first bend, finding that bend was but the first of a succession of kinks. The ravine, running between sheer walls of rock, writhed and twisted like the track of a serpent and was already filled to the brim with darkness.

“This is our road, tomorrow,” said Gordon, and his men nodded silently, as he led them back to the main canyon, where some light still lingered, ghostly in the thickening dusk. The clang of their horses’ hoofs on the flint seemed startlingly loud in the sullen, brutish silence.

A few hundred feet west of the trail-ravine another, narrower one opened into the canyon. Its rock floor showed no sign of any trail, and it narrowed so rapidly that Gordon was inclined to believe it ended in a blind alley.

About half-way between these ravine mouths, but near the north wall, which was at that point precipitous, a tiny spring bubbled up in a natural basin of age-hollowed rock. Behind it, in a cave-like niche in the cliff, dry wiry grass grew sparsely, and there they tethered the weary horses. They camped at the spring, eating from tins, not risking a fire which might be seen from afar
by hostile eyes — though they realized that there was a chance that they had been seen by hidden watchers already. There is always that chance in the Hills. The tents had been left in Khor. Blankets spread on the ground were luxuries enough for Gordon and his hardy followers.

His position seemed a strategic one. The party could not be attacked from the north, because of the sheer cliffs; no one could reach the horses without first passing through the camp. Gordon made provision against surprize from the south, or from east or west.

He divided his party into two watches. Lal Singh he placed on guard west of the camp, near the mouth of the narrower ravine, and Ahmed Shah had his station close to the mouth of the eastern ravine, up which, it was logical to suppose, peril was most likely to come. Ahmed Shah had that post instead of Lal Singh (who could have bested him in any sort of a battle) because his external senses were a shade more acute than the Sikh’s; the senses of any savage being naturally keener than the specially-trained faculties of a civilized man, however intensely cultivated.

Any hostile band coming up or down the canyon, or entering it from either ravine, would have to pass these sentries, whose vigilance Gordon had proven many times in the past. Later in the night he and Yar Ali Khan would take their places.

Darkness came swiftly in the canyon, seeming to flow in almost tangible waves down the black slopes, and ooze out of the blacker mouths of the ravines. Stars blinked out, cold, white and impersonal. Above the invaders brooded the great dusky bulks of the broken mountains, brutish, primordial. As Gordon fell asleep he was wondering what grim spectacles they had witnessed since the beginning of Time, and what inhuman creatures had crept through them before Man was.

Primitive instincts, slumbering in the average
man, are whetted to razor-edge by a life of constant hazard. Gordon awoke the instant Yar Ali Khan touched him, and at once, before the Afridi spoke, the American knew that peril was in the air. The tense grasp on his shoulder spoke plainly to him of imminent danger.

He came up on one knee instantly, gun in hand.

“What is it?”

Yar Ali Khan crouched be side him, gigantic shoulders bulking dimly in the gloom. The Afridi’s eyes glimmered like a cat’s in the dark. Back in the shadow of the cliffs the unseen horses moved restively, the only sound in the nighted canyon.

“Danger,
sahib!
” hissed the Afridi. “Close about us, creeping upon us in the dark!
Ahmed Shah is slain!
”

“What?”

“He lies near the mouth of the ravine with his throat cut from ear to ear. I dreamed that death was stealing upon us as we slept, and the fear of the dream awoke me. Without rousing you I stole to the mouth of the eastern ravine, and lo, there lay Ahmed Shah in his blood. He must have died silently and suddenly. I saw no one, heard no sound in the ravine, which was as black as the mouth of hell.

“Then I hurried along the south wall to the western ravine, and found no one! I speak truth, Allah be my witness. Ahmed is dead and Lal Singh is gone. The devils of the hills have slain one and snatched away the other, without waking us — we who sleep lightly as cats! No sound came from the ravine before which the Sikh had had his post. I saw nothing, heard nothing; but I
sensed
Death skulking there, with red eyes of awful hunger and fingers that dripped blood.
Sahib
, what
men
could have done away with such warriors as the Sikh and Ahmed Shah without a sound? This gorge is indeed the Gorge of Ghosts!”

Gordon made no reply, but crouched on his knee, straining eyes and ears into the darkness, while he considered the astounding thing that had occurred. It did not occur to him to doubt the Afridi’s statements. He could trust the man as he trusted his own eyes and ears. That Yar Ali Khan could have stolen away without awakening even him was not surprizing, for the Afridi was of that breed of men who glide naked through the mists to steal rifles from the guarded tents of English soldiers. But that Ahmed Shah should have died and that Lal Singh been spirited away without the sound of a struggle was incredible. It smacked of the diabolical.

“Who can fight devils,
sahib
? Let us mount the horses and ride —”