CHAPTER XIII

SUSPENSE

For one instant I had a thought of trying to carry it off on an assumption of innocence, but Kalliboas very soon convinced me of the futility of that.

'So,' he hissed, his long arm thrown out towards us, 'it is thus you requite our hospitality, men of the outer world! Thus do you flout the will of our rulers, thinking that by a childish deceit your impious deed shall remain hidden! Blind fools, because you have chosen a time after darkness fell, do you fondly imagine you have not been seen by our eyes from your going to your coming back? Have you not learned that we of the valley see far, needing no light of sun or moon to see by? Have you not understood that the commands of the Nine, who graved upon the stranger's tomb their behest that his body remain inviolate, are commands to be disobeyed only on pain of death--and worse than death? You have understood, strangers, yet you have disobeyed!'

The wrath of the old man was so terrible to behold and feel, his words came out in such a scorching torrent, that I literally bowed my head, as if under a sudden tempest. I had no answer to make, no plea, and would have had none even if I hadn't been scared out of my wits by the old man's threats--which I am not ashamed to confess I was. If anything had been lacking to tell me our number was up, the fact that Kalliboas had, for the first time in my knowledge of him, named the Nine Shadows specifically, would have done so: no longer was there need to hide from us the hand of that dread body. We shouldn't live to spread the knowledge.

But if I was cowed, Poyning seemed not in the least disposed to be. He rushed up to the old man, his fists clenched, his face pale as death, and for a moment I thought he was going to hurl himself upon him; but he checked, and poured out a torrent of words no whit less furious than those we had just heard. It was the cry of a creature at bay, seeing death ahead but very fully determined to make a fight for it.

'Hospitality!' he cried, swinging round and pointing towards the south. 'In ancient time it was a sacred duty to your people: _there_ is how you practise it to-day! Truly, you have improved upon the old custom of your race! A stranger came into the valley, as it has been written, seeking rest from the weariness of his travel. You gave him rest--the rest from which there is no awakening. But it happens that after many years the stranger's son has come into this valley, seeking him. To the stranger's son you lie, without seeming to lie. No man, say you, was near the stranger when he died--truly said, for you of your great wisdom can slay without poison or steel. But it may be that the son shall see the body of his father and learn the manner of his death--therefore you hide your crime. Indeed you are a righteous people, that the discovery of murder is so repellent to you! Justly you shun contact with the outer world and its misdeeds--'

'Silence!' thundered Kalliboas. 'Silence, or it were better for you never to have been born! Here shall you remain, not setting foot over the threshold, while it is decided what shall become of you. Strive not to flee--as well strive to escape from the bowels of yonder mountains! You have defied the Nine, and the Nine shall settle your fate!'

With that he was gone, leaving on my mind, at least, a very distinct impression that the end would not be long coming. Poyning threw himself on to a couch, where he sat a long while in silence, his head buried in his hands. When he looked up, all the fury of passion was gone out of his face, and a deep-lined sorrow had taken its place.

'It's my doing, Mirlees!' he groaned. 'I have dragged you into this. Forgive me!'

'There's nothing for me to forgive you about,' I said. 'I came into the business with my eyes wide open. Had I known as much as I do now, I should have joined you more readily still.'

'It's decent of you to say that,' he replied, 'even if it isn't all true. But there's a good deal you don't know. Nor could I tell you before, for it was a matter I talked about to nobody--it concerned my father's honour.'

'That _is_ a point I'm still in the dark upon,' I observed.

Poyning sat twisting and untwisting his hands. 'It's an old story,' he said at last, 'and till now it has been a mysterious one even to me. You remember, back in China--my God, it seems ages ago!--I told you and Philipson I'd an ambition to explore these wildernesses. Neither of you pressed me for my exact motive, and I should not have told you if you had. But I had a very particular reason indeed.'

He paused, with a twitching of the lips, but after a while seemed to regain his grip, and continued in a steady voice.

'My father was an officer in the Indian Army, a good soldier, I believe, but never popular in his regiment. Men were inclined to look askance at him because of his strange, moody, mystic temperament. These traits became more pronounced in him after my mother's death, which occurred when I was born. He had always been deeply interested in oriental religions, and knew more of such matters than it is usually thought good for a European to know. There were even whispers--no doubt the sort of silly gossip which will gather round a man of his type--that he dabbled in eastern sorceries and devil-worship. All this tended more and more to make him a lonely man. Then came his mysterious disappearance. He was stationed on the frontier at the time, and had obtained six months' leave to go up country--as he gave out, to investigate certain obscure native traditions with a view to writing an account of them. My father crossed the frontier from Kashmir, having no other European with him, and from that point all trace of him was lost. Time went on, his leave expired, but my father never returned to his regiment. In the case of any other man his disappearance might have been explained by some climbing accident or encounter with wild beasts, but my father's reputation being what it was, stories began to be whispered about him. His name fell under a cloud. It was commonly believed that he still lived, and had buried himself among a native tribe in the wilderness where they practised the devilish cults in which he was known to have been interested.

'I was at school in England, and could do little towards clearing my father's name. Only on the rare occasions when officers who had known him were on leave could I make any inquiries at all, but one man, a Major Fetherston, with whom my father had been more intimate than with anybody else in India, showed me a letter he had received from him just before his departure for the interior. This gave me a new clew. My father's last letter to me had mentioned that he was going up country to investigate native traditions, but in this letter to Major Fetherston he actually specified the tradition. In former trips over the border, he said, he had come across a curious story, to the effect that somewhere far eastward of the mountains lay a large valley inhabited by ghosts, who lived in temples of white stone and possessed the power of transforming themselves into great birds. The tradition seemed so strange and unusual, wrote my father, that he was going to try and get more information about it. Major Fetherston gave me that letter. His manner was very kind, but it was clear enough to me that he shared the common view that Major Poyning had committed what, in the case of a private soldier, would be called desertion.

'The years passed. Never another hint of my father's fate reached me, but I resolved that when I grew up I would find out the truth about him, and that until his name was cleared, I would mention my father to nobody. Then, how to get to the East? Most of my small patrimony had been swallowed up in my education. Also, even if I could get to India it would be difficult to prosecute the search there without giving out that I was the son of a man disgraced. At last, however, I got into touch with an old scholar who was going to China to collect materials for a book on eastern history. This seemed my chance. I had read over and over again my father's letter to Major Fetherston, with the help of maps, and it seemed to me, since this valley of ghosts was supposed to be far _east_ of the mountains, that my father must have penetrated into Tibet, and that country could be approached quite as well from the China side as from India. So I closed with the old historian. I was to serve him as secretary for a year, by the end of which time I had no doubt I should have found something to support me until the opportunity came to go inland and follow my quest at closer quarters. We sailed together to Shanghai, but there, on the day after landing, he died very suddenly, leaving me on the rocks. How I hawked my learning in vain round the Treaty Ports you already know. The night I met Saunders Philipson I was at the end of my tether and desperate; I had expended my last dollars on a bend with two officers off a river steamer, fully intending to go to the British Consul next morning and present myself as a beachcomber in want of a passage home. Philipson's commission in Shanghai I naturally jumped at, and then, when I heard that he was going up country to investigate a legend apparently identical with what I had been brooding over for years, believe me, Mirlees, I very nearly collapsed. I fancy that one fact has done more to establish my faith in a Providence than all the chapels I ever attended at school and the 'Varsity.'

He stopped, with an air so grave you would never have believed this was the same casual young exquisite we had picked up at Nanking. If the adventure had done nothing more for Stephen Poyning, it had deepened his draught considerably.

'Then,' he resumed at length, 'when we reached this place and found there _had_ been a previous explorer, and a European at that, I felt I was near the end of my quest. I see now quite clearly that Kalliboas recognised me almost at once from my likeness to my father. It was no more than a vague suspicion at first, of course, but once I realised that he was deliberately putting obstacles in the way of our visiting the stranger's tomb, my suspicions began to take shape. Since then I have worked with one end: to unravel that secret. My first attempt was a failure, as I told you to-night. No doubt Kalliboas was aware of it, and no doubt the cold-blooded old fiend laughed to himself to think the locked door and the plaster casing would always prevent me from learning the truth. But he had reckoned without my ally.'

'You mean--'

'The Princess Helene. God knows what I've done to earn it, Mirlees, but Helene loves me a good deal more than she respects Kalliboas.'

'But how did you come to see her? I take it that is where you've been prowling these nights?'

Poyning looked uncomfortable. 'It's a queer thing for any sane man to tell,' he said, 'a very queer thing, but this is my version of it. On the second night after my accident, Helene came to me in a dream so vivid--well, it seemed too vivid to be merely that. She stood beside my bed and spoke to me, telling me again very positively that in another day I should walk. When she went away, I seemed to follow her, and hear her speak of herself as the Princess Helene. Then the vision, or whatever it was, faded away, and when I woke in the morning, I was well enough convinced it was no more than a common dream. But then, by the accident of talking to you, I discovered I knew her name and you did not. That set me thinking. Could there be, I wondered, more in it than I had supposed? I determined to put it to the test. The road I went with her in the dream had remained quite clear in my mind, and I followed it to the point where the vision faded. I was amazed to find everything fit in exactly, even down to the wall we had stood under together. I climbed that wall, Mirlees, and I found Helene--certainly real this time--waiting for me on the other side. It was then that I learned her name was indeed Helene, and that she was twin sister of the Princess Euphrosune. We met at the same place on the following night, and every night since, and she has told me many things known to hardly a soul in this valley but the Nine Shadows. My inquiries naturally enough were mainly for the stranger who had come here before. Helene had seen him, and remembered him. He was a man, she said, very like me in face, though much older. He came into the valley alone, nearly dead with exhaustion, and was tended and hospitably entertained; none of the secrets of the valley, however, were explained to him. He knew nothing of the Hall of Wandering Souls, or that languages of the outer world are understood there--which is a fact, Mirlees, incredible as it may seem--and as he could not speak the language of the valley, communication with him was conducted mostly by signs. After a time the stranger wanted to go back by the way he had come, but he was made to understand that he must remain. He persisted, however; left his house one night after dark and struck out for the mountains southward. His body was discovered on the foothills next day.'

'How did he die?'

'Helene says that was never known. According to her view, no action had been decreed by the Shadows, but one of them took the law into his own hands and--_acted_.'

'Then--then it _can_ be done?'

'I solemnly believe, Mirlees--though I would never expect any man who had not been here to believe it--that to prevent my father escaping from this valley and betraying its secret to the world, he was murdered, by some tremendous concentration of will power acting over a distance. It may even be, by the way, that the Tibetan Sbrang Chikya was similarly made away with, though I have gathered no information about him. The killing of my father gave rise, apparently, to considerable dissatisfaction, and the Nine decided to make amends--as if amends could be made for a cold-blooded murder!--by burying the stranger in state. Who the murderer was, too, I cannot find out from Helene. But I have my own suspicion.'

'Who?'

'Kalliboas.'

If this was so it would explain much. Admitting the amazing manner of the murder as a fact, if Kalliboas had indeed committed it he might well wish to hide the crime from the son of the murdered man, particularly as his action had been repudiated by the dread Nine. He might even have prevailed upon the rest to sanction shrouding the body in that opaque plaster case, taking advantage of the dangerous state of the hillside as a pretext for delaying our visit to the tomb until the work was complete.

'Well,' I said at last, 'we've thrown down the gauntlet to Kalliboas now. What do you propose to do?'

'Nothing,' said Poyning. 'At least for the present. I've ruined you, Mirlees, and if I'm not careful I shall ruin Philipson too--without bettering my own prospects one scrap. What he told us of his position here is more than confirmed by what I have learned from Helene. Our coming to the city has given rise to dissension and intrigues which had never been known in its history before. The Kalliphanes faction, who deny Philipson's claim to the throne, are desperately afraid our discovery of the valley will eventually lead to its being invaded by the outer world at large, and they will stick at nothing to prevent this. They are using the fear of it as a lever to win over the Nine, urging that if Philipson were the true Alexander he would not have brought danger--meaning us two--into the state from without. It is no pretended fear of theirs, either, nor confined to their faction. It was strong enough, as I believe, to cause Kalliboas to murder my father on the mere suspicion that he was trying to escape from the valley.'

'Pretty ghastly outlook for us if _we_ try to escape,' I said.

Poyning was staring straight ahead of him, as if into the far future. 'For me there will be no escape from this valley, Mirlees,' he said. 'I shall not attempt it.'

'D'you mean you'll be content to stay here always?'

'Here, or anywhere else Helene may be. I never loved a woman before, but I love one now. I love her more than my life, more than my honour. I shall never go back to the world to clear my father's name now. Even if it were possible for me to get out of the valley alive--which I don't think it is--I would not go. I shall stay here and see the business through. They may kill me for resisting the Nine, but till they do I shall demand and continue to demand that my father's murderer be punished. They may kill me on the score of Helene. She is looked upon by these people as little short of divine. God knows what is to happen to the stray foreigner who has dared to love her. And you, Mirlees, what will you think of me? If you try to escape you will be left to do it alone.'

'It won't be the first time in my life I've been in that situation,' I said. 'As for you, and Philipson too for that matter, it seems to me circumstances have been too strong for the both of you. Philipson may have known more than he chose to tell me, but he can hardly have guessed that if he brought me into this valley I should be unable to get out. And you weren't to know you would meet your fate here.'

Poyning's face brightened immeasurably. 'Then you don't think the worse of me for it?' he cried.

'There's one thing about me you seem to forget, Poyning,' I said, '--if you ever knew it. I loved a woman myself once. That was my wife. When she died, ten years ago, I prayed for death too. I've often prayed for it since, and if there hadn't been my work still to live for, I think I should have helped myself to an answer to the prayer before now. But there was my work--the digging out of obscure facts about the East--and that's what led me here. Just at present the chances seem to be against my getting back to the outer world and publishing an account of this valley, but if ever I'm able to do that, never fear but I shall let it be known the late Major Poyning met his death trying to return to his regiment like a good soldier. If I meet my own death here, it may bring me nearer to the only woman I ever loved. So there appear to be compensations either way.'

He took my hand in silence, and wrung it warmly.

'Come,' I said at length, 'if there are only a few days left to us we shan't materially extend them by staying awake all night.'

With that I turned in and slept--not well, it is true, but soundly enough to hear nothing of what happened during the night. That something had happened was very plain. Poyning had vanished. His bedchamber was empty and bare, and not a word could I extract from the one solemn attendant left to me--the rest were gone--as to what had become of him. Moreover, looking out through the tracery-windows of the house, I observed several stalwart figures disposed about it. At first I couldn't understand what these men were doing, but it soon broke upon me. They were my guards. I was a prisoner, in solitary confinement.

I must confess that Poyning's disappearance affected me with a peculiar sense of horror. There could have been hardly an hour between our going to bed and daylight, yet in that time he had been spirited away, without a cry, without a sound, and for all I knew he might be dead at this moment. I had put up a bold face to him when he was with me, perhaps as much for the purpose of encouraging myself as him, but I now began to be attacked by a vague uneasiness of mind. The attendant warned me not to attempt to go out, but that warning struck me as superfluous. The main door of the house had been shut and locked, and although I could hear no sound from without I knew well enough that the cordon of sentries was still surrounding the building. There, all day, I sat still or strode up and down in that lonely twilit house, sinking steadily lower in spirits, until by real twilight of the outer day I was in such a terrible depression as I had never known before. I couldn't account for it. My situation was perilous enough in all conscience; I might be led out to execution at any moment; but I had often faced death before--I had faced it many times on this adventure--with a light heart. Now abject terror, quaking cowardice--all the torturing emotions with which a craven spirit views danger--seemed to be rushing over me in waves.

Then, with a sudden thrill of horror that well nigh made me scream aloud, I realised the truth. Somewhere, I knew not where, the dark powers possessed by these people were being set in motion against me. I cannot hope to adequately portray my feelings--there are no words in our language equal to that terrible anguish of mind. At times I seemed to be undergoing agonies of alarm like those I had felt on the first occasion I was hypnotised in the Hall of Wandering Souls: the blackness of darkness that surrounded and penetrated my brain, and a ghastly _physical_ impression of falling miles through space; but what I had experienced then was mere play to what I felt now. I could not have believed it possible for human personality to plumb such abysses of anguish, for the sensations I underwent were deeper, intenser by far than anything I had ever dreamed; and beyond that, there was a terrifying distinctiveness about this awful obsession. It was a feeling of fear, yet it was not fear; it was like an epitome of all the stabbing sorrows of a lifetime, yet it was more than any human sorrow; and over all, that frightful sense of mental strangulation, as though it were my _soul_ that was writhing in the grip of some soul far mightier, which must soon crush it to nothingness and death.

What I did during this time I do not know, but afterwards, from the fact that both my legs were black and blue, I concluded I must have been from time to time beaten to my knees by the anguish of horror that surged over me, and that time after time I struggled again to my feet. Suddenly, after how long I cannot determine, the clouds lifted: my brain became clear and untroubled, and to my amazement I found myself in an excellent cheerfulness. The house was now quite dark, but the darkness did not distress me, nor had any shadow of fear remained on my mind. To my even greater astonishment I noticed I was healthily tired; and without more ado I went to my bedchamber, threw myself on to my couch, and slept a sound untroubled sleep till broad daylight. On awaking I was still in such buoyant spirits that I almost fancied the experience of yesterday must have been some elaborate delusion: that my sudden imprisonment and Poyning's uncanny disappearance had so preyed upon my mind that I had unconsciously magnified a mere ordinary fit of the blues into those horrors I have so feebly described.

As the day advanced, this impression deepened: I felt comparatively happy, and rambled round the now tiresome apartments, whistling to myself, and wondering what I should do in the event of my escaping from this beautiful but terrible valley. I fell to speculating upon what would be the end of Stephen Poyning--supposing he still lived. Would he remain in this city for the rest of his life, counting the outer world well lost for the boon of being near the woman he loved; and could it by any conceivable chance be possible that the dread Nine would pardon him and consent to his marriage with a woman who was to them, apparently, little less sacred than the goddesses of old Greece? What was Philipson doing? Was he aware of my captivity--was there any help to be expected from him? Could it be that he _was_ helping me--that he had set his powers of mind, which I knew to be tremendous, working against the forces that willed to destroy me, and that _that_ was the reason of my sudden release from the great mental anguish of last night?

Then, towards twilight, began again that terrible obsession. It came more swiftly this time, was more intense and, I believe, lasted longer. I will pass over the blinding, staggering horror of those hours. The details, indeed, I but remember vaguely myself; but I will say this much with assurance: the priests of the religions of this world, when they represented eternal punishment as a thing of burning fire and bodily torture, confessed themselves to be folk of a feeble, half-formed imagination; for there are gulfs of spiritual anguish into which humanity can be plunged more terrible by worlds than the materialistic hells of theology. When the first waves of depression swept over me I was taken with a mad desire to rush out into the open and die there--but I found I couldn't make one step towards the door, leave alone break it open. I screamed to the attendant to let me out--but I never heard the scream.

When I came to myself I was lying on a couch, and I noticed immediately that not only my robe but the lawn covering of the couch itself was wringing wet--drenched with the cold sweat of terror. The first thing I did on rising was to take off my sandal and with the buckle pin score two deep scratches on the marble wall of the chamber. I did this under a curious impulse to keep tally of the days of my captivity, and it is that record alone which enables me to say how long I was imprisoned; afterwards morning and evening became blurred in my memory in a sort of incoherent jumble of horror. I made several attempts to escape during what I will call the "lucid intervals," but the only escape from that house was by way of death, and that I couldn't bring myself to seek. Behind all the anguish and horror of those days there seemed to gleam a small spark of hope, and though the "lucid intervals" grew shorter and the attacks of mental anguish longer as time went on, I had formed an idea, and clung desperately to it, that there was a mind--or minds--fighting for me. And looking back over the ghastly episode now, I consider this view to be the true one, for on no other supposition can I explain the periodic respites from torment at all.

Thus far, I am aware, I shall have severely strained the credence of any reader of this narrative, yet what follows is stranger still. Those who have read what I have written of the strange spiritual power possessed by the people of this valley may find an adequate explanation there; others, having regard to the terrible experiences through which I had passed during the last few days, may prefer to think my overwrought brain was no longer capable of recording sane impressions. I set down my account of the affair not in full confidence that it will be accepted as truth, and I offer no explanation whatever, but write what I solemnly believe to be the bare facts as they presented themselves to my senses.

It was, by the scorings on the wall, the sixth night of my captivity. That day I had been prey to the longest and severest attack of mental anguish yet, but at what I take to have been about nine in the evening, this had suddenly lifted, leaving me in a buoyancy of spirit likewise more pronounced than I had known from the beginning. I had retired to bed, and lay for a long time wondering whether this abrupt lightening of the gloom meant that I was to be tortured no further, when a female figure noiselessly entered my room. The bedchamber, I may say, was at the side of the house, and was illuminated during daytime by a window of open marble tracery built into the wall, through which the beams of the moon, now nearing the full, eerily filtered. The woman glided towards me, and stood so close that I had no difficulty in recognising her as the maiden of Poyning's adventure on the last night we spent together.

'Princess Helene!' I gasped.

Her wonderful features broke into a smile. 'You have mistaken me, stranger,' she whispered. 'I am Euphrosune, wife of the Prince. Hearken! You have been in great danger, and you are in great danger still. You cannot fail to know that attempts have been made to kill you?'

'Only too well,' I said. 'Tell me, was it Kalliboas?'

'We will speak no ill of Kalliboas,' she replied solemnly. 'Kalliboas is dead. Seek not the manner of his death, for these are terrible matters and not good to be spoken of.'

'And Poyning?'

'The little one lives. My sister loves the little one, and no harm will befall him so long as we three, the Prince and my sister and I, live to shield him. But there are grave perils that beset us all. Your coming to the city from the great world without has set our rulers one against the other: we are in the cross-currents of a stormy sea. It is well that you should leave us, stranger.'

A tremendous new hope rose in me.

'You will help me to escape?' I cried in a hoarse whisper.

'There is one thing that can enable us to do that,' she said. 'My husband has told me that among the race from whom you come, oaths are sacred. If we contrive your escape, will you swear never by word or deed, now or henceforth, to betray the existence of our country to any man of the outer world?'

The words fell on my ears like a physical blow. My new-born hope was dashed rudely to the ground. In a flash I saw all my ambition fail: all the perils and hardships I had undergone in coming to this amazing land were undergone in vain if I were debarred from making it known to the world; never should I reap the rewards and fame of a discovery beside which whatever of discoveries I had made before--I, who had given my life to the making of discoveries in little-known lands--would seem humdrum and small; never should I see my name on the title page of the greatest book of exploration ever printed. I think she must have also learned from the Prince what my life-work in the outer world had been, and that she was aware of the struggle going on within me.

'Listen, stranger,' she said, speaking with an intensity of earnestness and persuasion. 'From that far-off day when our Prince, in the life that was before, bade us keep our land secret from the world, never have we risked contamination with the outer peoples. Year after year, century after century, have we reverenced this command, and taught it to our children as soon as they were old enough to understand, so that it has become the first law of our existence. You, stranger, have learned how by the skill of our wise ones we know what passes in the world without. You have seen, too, something of our life, and how wide is the gulf, not yet to be bridged, between us and the outer world. Our Prince came to this valley at the first fleeing from the brutish intolerance of men. Has the world yet cleansed itself of that stain? Well we know that it has not. Well we know that were our existence known to the world, many are the things in this valley which the world would look upon with covetousness and lust: those glinting pebbles alone, which we give to our children to play with, would draw from the very ends of the earth its lowest and worst. Terribly do our people not less than our rulers fear that pollution. It must not be!'

'And if I swear the oath?'

'The Prince will contrive your flight. When you have gone, there will be great tumult in this valley--it may even be that the Prince's own life will be in danger. But he will quell that uprising. He will make known to our rulers and if need be to our people that the secret of this valley is safe with you for ever--he will pledge his own sacred word.'

'And if I refuse to swear?'

'Can the Prince set at naught the command which he, in his former coming, gave us? Can he imperil the existence of his own people? Without an oath of secrecy, by all you hold most sacred, the Prince will not, cannot, countenance your return to the world without. And should you try to escape by your own devices, even though we will it, we may be powerless to save you from swift destruction.'

I remained gripping the coverlet of my couch as if it were my great chance slipping away from me. 'So be it,' I groaned at last. 'I swear by all I hold most sacred, never by word or deed, now or henceforth, to betray the existence of this country to any man of the outer world.'

'It is bravely said. At this time to-morrow, then, be ready to step out of this house and leave the valley for ever. And now, stranger, farewell. Only once again will you see me in this life, and then it may be that you shall not know it is I.'

She made a queenly gesture, and I, stirred by a sudden impulse of gratitude, had risen from my couch and stretched out my hand to take hers and raise it to my lips. You who have read thus far will now understand what I mean when I say I have set down this incident not in confidence that it will be believed.

_My hand passed through hers, and through her body, and I stumbled heavily against the marble wall of the room._