El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (27 page)

And with a brusk word to his followers, he disappeared. The turbans vanished from the parapet like apples rolled off a wall, and Gordon stood alone except for the dead man sprawling near his feet.

Gordon frowned as he looked suspiciously about him. He knew that the southern end of the plateau was cut up into a network of ravines, and obviously he was in one which ran out of that network to the south of the palace. It was a straight gulch, like a giant knife-cut, thirty feet in width, which ran out of a maze of gullies straight toward the city, ceasing abruptly at a sheer cliff of solid stone below the garden wall from which he had fallen. This cliff was fifteen feet in height and too smooth to be wholly the work of nature.

Ten feet from the end-wall, the ravine deepened abruptly, the rocky floor falling away some five feet. He stood on a kind of natural shelf at the end of the ravine. The side-walls were sheer, showing evidences of having been smoothed by tools. Across the rim of the wall at the end, and for fifteen feet on each side, ran a strip of iron with short razor-edged blades slanting down. They had not cut him as he fell over them, but anyone trying to climb the wall, even if he reached the rim by some miracle, would be gored to pieces trying to swarm up over them. The strips on the side walls overreached the edge of the shelf below, and beyond that point the walls were more than twenty feet in height. Gordon was in a prison, partly natural, partly man-made.

Looking down the ravine he saw that it widened and broke into a tangle of smaller gulches, separated by ridges of solid stone, beyond and above which he saw the gaunt bulk of the mountain looming up. The other end of the ravine was not blocked in any way, but he knew that his captors would not use so much care in safeguarding one end of his prison while allowing some avenue of escape at the other. But it was not his nature to resign himself to whatever fate they had planned for him. Obviously they thought they had him safely trapped; but other men had thought that before.

He pulled the knife out of the Kurd’s carcass, wiped off the blood and went down the ravine.

A hundred yards from the city-end, he came to the mouths of the smaller ravines, selected one at random, and immediately found himself in a nightmarish labyrinth. Channels hollowed in the almost solid rock meandered bafflingly though a crumbling waste of stone. Mostly they ran roughly north and south, but they merged with one another, split apart, and looped in crisscross
chaos. Most of them seemed to begin without reason and to go nowhere. He was forever coming to the ends of blind alleys which, if he surmounted them, it was only to descend into another equally confusing branch of the insane network.

Sliding down a gaunt ridge his heel crunched something that broke with a dry crack. He had stepped upon the dried rib-bones of a headless skeleton. A few yards away lay the skull, crushed and splintered. He began to stumble upon similar grisly relics with appalling frequency. Each skeleton showed broken bones and a smashed skull. The action of the elements could not have had that destructive an effect. He went more warily, narrowly eyeing every spur of rock or shadowed recess. But he saw no tracks in the few sandy places where a track would have shown that would indicate the presence of any of the large carnivora. In one such place he did indeed come upon a partially effaced track, but it was not the spoor of a leopard, bear or tiger. It looked more like the print of a bare, misshapen human foot. And the bones had not been gnawed as they would have been in the case of a man-eater. They showed no tooth-marks; they seemed simply to have been crushed and broken, as an incredibly powerful man might have broken them. But once he came upon a rough out-jut of rock to which clung strands of coarse grey hair that might have been rubbed off against the stone, and here and there an unpleasant rank odor which he could not define hung in the cave-like recesses beneath the ridges where a beast — or man, or demon! — might conceivably curl up and sleep.

Baffled and balked in his efforts to steer a straight course through the stony maze, he scrambled up a weathered ridge which looked to be higher than most, and crouching on its sharp angle, stared out over the nightmarish waste. His view was limited except to the north, but the glimpses he had of sheer cliffs rising above the spurs and ridges to east, west and south, made him believe that they formed parts of a continuous wall which enclosed the tangle of gullies. To the north this wall was split by the ravine which ran to the outer palace garden.

Presently the nature of the labyrinth became evident. At one time or another a section of that part of the plateau which lay between the site of the present city and the mountain had sunk, leaving a great bowl-like depression, and the surface of the depression had been cut up into gullies by the action of the elements over an immense period of time. There was no use wasting time wandering about in the midst of the gulches. His problem was to make his way to the cliffs that hemmed in the corrugated bowl, and skirt them, to find if there was any way to surmount them. Looking southward he believed he could trace the route of a ravine which was more continuous than the others, and which ran in a more or less direct route to the base of the mountain whose sheer wall hung over the bowl. He also saw that to reach this ravine he would save
time by returning to the gulch below the city wall and following another one of the ravines which debouched into it, instead of scrambling over a score or so of knife-edged ridges which lay between him and the gully he wished to reach.

With this purpose in mind he climbed down the ridge and retraced his steps. The sun was swinging low as he re-entered the mouth of the outer ravine, and started toward the gulch he believed would lead him to his objective. He glanced idly toward the cliff at the other end of the wider ravine — and stopped dead in his tracks. The body still lay on the shelf — but it was not lying in the same position in which he had left it — it did not seem so bulky, and the garments looked different. An instant later he was racing along the ravine, springing up on the shelf, bending over the motionless figure. The Kurd he had killed was gone; the man who lay there was Lal Singh!

There was a great lump, clotted with blood, on the back of his head, but the Sikh was not dead. Even as Gordon lifted his head, he blinked dazedly, lifted a hand to his wound, and stared blankly at Gordon.

“Sahib!
What has happened? Are we dead and in Hell?”

“In Hell, perhaps, but not dead. Do you have any idea how you came here?”

The Sikh sat up dizzily, holding his head in his hands. He stared about him in amazement.

“Where are we?”

“In a ravine behind the palace. Do you remember being thrown in here?”

“No,
sahib
. I remember the fight in the palace; nothing thereafter. As I waited in the darkness on the hidden stair, the girl Azizun came in haste and said you had been confronted by a man who knew you. She led me to the chamber adjoining that one in which you were fighting, and I used your pistol to some advantage, as I remember. I was running to the outer door to join you — then something happened. I do not know. I do not remember anything.”

“A fedaui
hiding among the tapestries knocked you in the head,” grunted Gordon. “Doubtless saw you enter the chamber and sneaked in after you and hid in a secret alcove. The palace seems to be full of them. He slugged you and pulled a rope to open a trap in the floor for you to fall through. I got over a garden wall and fell into this infernal ravine, with a dead Kurd. Evidently while I was exploring down the ravine they took his body out and threw you down here.

“Wait a minute, though! You weren’t thrown. You’d have broken bones, probably a broken neck. They might have come down on ladders, and hoisted the Kurd up, but they certainly wouldn’t take the trouble to ease you down gently. There’s only one alternative. They shoved you through some kind of door in the cliff somewhere.”

A few minutes careful searching disclosed the door whose existence he suspected. The thin cracks which advertised its presence would have escaped
the casual glance. The door on that side was of the same material as the cliff, and fitted perfectly. It did not yield a particle as both men thrust powerfully upon it.

Gordon marshalled his scraps of knowledge concerning the architecture of the palace, and his eyes narrowed at the conclusion he reached, though he said nothing to the Sikh. He believed that they were looking on the outer side of that curiously decorated door beneath the palace against which Azizun had warned him. The door to Hell! Then he and Lal Singh were in “Hell,” and those splintered bones he had seen lent a sinister confirmation to the legend of a
djinn
which devoured humans — though he did not believe the owners of those bones had been literally devoured. But
something
inimical to human beings haunted that maze of ravines. He abandoned all thought of breaking in the door, as he remembered its heavy, metal-bound material and powerful bolts. It would take a company of men with a battering ram to shake that door.

He turned and looked down the gully toward the mysterious labyrinth, wondering what skulking horror its mazes hid. The sun had not yet set, but it was hidden from the gulches; the ravine was full of shadows, though visibility had not yet been appreciably affected.

“The walls are high here,” muttered the Sikh, pressing his hands to his throbbing head. “But they are higher further along the ravine. If you stood on my shoulders and leaped —”

“I’d cut my hands off on those blades.”

“Oh!” The cobwebs were clearing from the Sikh’s brain. “I did not notice. What shall we do, then?”

“Cross that maze of gulches and see what lies beyond it. You know nothing of what became of Azizun, of course?”

“She was running ahead of me until we came to the chamber whence I fired your pistol. I supposed she followed me as I rushed past her into that chamber. But I did not see after I entered it.”

“The
fedaui
who slugged you must have grabbed her and shoved her into some secret compartment,” growled Gordon, veins swelling slightly on his neck. “Damn them, they’ll torture and kill her — we’ve got to get out of here. Come on.”

A mystical blue twilight hovered over the gulches as Lal Singh and Gordon entered the labyrinth. Threading among winding channels they came out into a slightly wider gully which Gordon believed was the one he had seen from the ridge, and which ran to the south wall of the bowl. But they had not gone fifty yards when it split on a sharp-edged spur into two narrower gorges. This division had not been visible from the ridge, and Gordon did not know which branch to follow. He decided that the two branches merely ran past the narrow spur, one on each side, and joined again further on. When he spoke his belief
to the Sikh, Lal Singh said: “Yet one may be but a blind alley, instead. You take the right branch, and I will take the left, and we will explore them separately.”

And before Gordon could stop him, he was off, half-running down the left hand ravine, and passed out of sight almost instantly. Gordon started to call him back, then stiffened without shouting. Ahead of him, on the right, the mouth of a yet narrower ravine opened into the right-hand gorge, a well of blue shadows. And in that well
something
moved. Gordon tensed rigidly, staring unbelievingly at the monstrous man-like being which stood in the twilight before him.

It was like the embodied spirit of this nightmare country, a ghoulish incarnation of a terrible legend, clad in flesh and bone and blood.

The creature was a giant ape, as tall on its gnarled legs as a gorilla. But the shaggy hair which covered it was of a strange ashy grey, longer and thicker than the hair on a gorilla. Its feet and hands were more man-like, the great toes and thumbs more like those of the human than of the anthropoid. It was no arboreal creature, but a beast bred on great plains and barren mountains. The face was gorilloid in general appearance, but the nose-bridge was more pronounced, the jaw less bestial, though there was no chin. But its man-like features merely served to increase the dreadfulness of its aspect, and the intelligence which gleamed from its small red eyes was wholly malignant.

Gordon knew it for what it was: the monster whose existence even he had refused to credit, the beast named in myth and legend of the north — the Snow-Ape, the Desert Man of forbidden Mongolia. He had heard rumors of its existence many times, in wild tales drifting down from a lost, bleak plateau-country of the Gobi never explored by white men. Tribesmen had sworn to the stories of a man-like beast which had dwelt there since time immemorial, adapted to the famine and bitter chill of the northern uplands. But Gordon had never seen a man who could prove he had seen one of the brutes.

But here was indisputable proof. How the nomads who served Othman had managed to bring the monster from Mongolia Gordon could not guess, but here was the
djinn
which haunted the ravines behind mysterious Shalizahr.

All this flashed through Gordon’s mind in the moment the two stood facing each other, man and beast, in menacing tenseness. Then the rocky walls of the ravine echoed to the ape’s deep sullen roar as it charged, low-hanging arms swinging wide, yellow fangs bared and dripping.

Gordon did not shout to his companion. Lal Singh was unarmed. Nor did he try to flee. He waited, poised on the balls of his feet, craft and long knife pitted against the brute strength of the mighty ape.

The monster’s victims had been given to it broken and shattered from the torture that only an Oriental knows how to inflict. The semi-human spark in its brain which set it apart from the true beasts had found a horrible exultation in the death agonies of its prey. This man was only another weak creature to
be torn and twisted and dismembered, even though he stood upright and held a gleaming thing in his hand.

Gordon, as he faced that onrushing death, knew his only chance was to keep out of the grip of those huge arms which could crush him in an instant. The monster was clumsy but swift, as it rolled over the ground, and it hurled itself through the air for the last few feet in a giant grotesque spring. Not until it was looming over him, the great arms closing upon him, did Gordon move, and then his shift would have shamed a striking catamount.