Full Moon (19 page)

The human habit of explaining everything at once assured him he was face
to face with something older than Egypt—than history—older,
perhaps, than legend. It filled him with awe and excitement. It revealed the
essential littleness of Wu Tu. But intuition warned him not to. let her know
he had seen that. He could feel his own littleness. In the presence of such
fabulous antiquity he felt of no importance—an impertinence—a
mere policeman— ignorant. But he hungered to draw and paint what he
saw.

Henrietta? Was this her secret, that she had said she could tell to a
lover perhaps, but not to a policeman? Was Henrietta yearning too, to “crack
rocks”—to steal some prehistoric scientific truth, of which this
giantess within the stalagmite perhaps had been the sibyl? Did that account
for Frensham’s disappearance? Did it account for Taron Ling? Zaman Ali?
Dur-i-Duran Singh of Naga Kulu? The golden box in the commissioner’s office?
Was there a discoverable secret? Or were they all mad? Within the transparent
cone, glowing golden now, the monstrous woman smiled like an image of Kali,
bride of the Destroyer—pondered like Rodin’s Thinker. What had she
known, that marked her with so much dignity?

“Who built Gizeh, the Great Pyramid?” asked Wu Tu suddenly in a low,
throaty voice that filled the cavern full of murmurs. “Who built Stonehenge
and the temples of Peru? There were giants on the earth in those days
—giants and magicians. They knew, but we don’t know. What if we did
know? Anyone who did know—”

Blair interrupted. “Where’s that water that I hear dripping?”

He had not noticed where the Chinese girl went. He had almost forgotten
her. She came now along the ledge toward him, carrying water in a golden bowl
that had the same smooth character and color as the ornament he had seen on
Wu Tu’s table in Bombay.

The sudden memory made him stare again at the woman within the cone. There
was a resemblance. Her features were less sphinx-like, more human, but
vaguely like those on that figurine. He had drawn it in the train, from
memory—had made forty or fifty efforts to catch with his pencil the
strangely subhuman quality. Perhaps he had failed because he had thought it
subhuman. Perhaps it was something else. Anyhow, he remembered it; it was
much easier to remember than to set down in black and white.

The Chinese girl gave him the bowl. It was large and heavy; he had to take
it in both hands, so he held the revolver between his knees. Then he stood at
the brink of the ledge and, conscious that both women watched him although
they pretended not to, raised the bowl to the level of his lips and poured
the contents to the floor a hundred feet below.

“Hail—and libation and obeisance to whatever gods there be!” he
shouted. Then he gave the bowl back. Echoes picked up his words and
cannonaded them until they died in a whisper—“There be—there be!”
He glanced at Wu Tu: “Damn you, not poison! I said water!”

“Water! Water!” said the echoes.

For a moment he thought the Chinese girl would try to push him off the
ledge, but she had a less murderous motive. He was in time to prevent her
snatching the revolver. Her hand went to the opening of her jacket then and
he glimpsed the dagger-handle. But Wu Tu spoke to her in Chinese and she
turned away, shaking the last drops of water out of the bowl with an air of
calm indifference. Apparently quite unconcerned, she began to descend the
sheer flank of the cavern. There seemed to be steps on the far side of a
projection of the ledge about thirty feet from where Blair was standing. When
her chin was level with the ledge she turned and waited, watching for a
signal.

“You shall have champagne,” said Wu Tu.

“Water. Where is it?”

Wu Tu got up in silence and signed to him to follow the Chinese girl,
whose head promptly disappeared below the ledge. Blair ignored that
invitation. Those two men in the tunnel undoubtedly had heard the echoes.
They were very likely lurking near the tunnel entrance. They might be in Wu
Tu’s confidence, although they had probably been Zaman Ali’s dependents;
Zaman Ali was notorious for having cutthroats on his payroll. Having lost
their master they were probably willing to murder anyone, to betray or work
for anyone—or all three. They were rats in a trap, dangerous
opportunists. Wu Tu probably wished to have word with them. Blair took a
stride along the ledge toward the tunnel.

“Come,” said Wu Tu.

“Come, come, come!” said the echoes.

She began to lead toward the steps, but Blair ignored her and went to the
tunnel entrance. He heard someone with bare feet scampering away ahead of
him. but when he peered along the tunnel there was no one visible. Wu Tu
beckoned. He followed her, then, to the head of the steps and she went down
them quickly with her face to the wall. But to Blair those steps were not
more than just negotiable. They were irregularly spaced, some of them less
than a foot wide, all of them more than eighteen inches deep, and there were
gaps between. They overhung a hundred feet of air, with glaring rock beneath.
There was nothing to cling to, not a crack in the smooth surface of the hot,
hewn wall.

He dreaded unfenced heights and precipices. He stared at the cone and
retraced his steps until he could clearly see the face of the woman inside
it. Curiosity then became stronger than dread of the dangerous stairway.
There must be some way of getting closer to that mystery. He followed Wu Tu.
She was out of sight already and he was glad she would not see him groping
his way with his heart in his teeth.

The eighth or ninth step was a big one. It projected nearly three feet and
he rested there a moment, leaning his back against the wall and staring at
the cone. From that angle he could only see the woman’s face, magnified and
distorted by a wave on the cone’s surface. Her eyelids seemed to move when he
moved. Fierce lips seemed to mumble unimaginable things. The ridge of her
nose grew cynical and eaglish, cruel. Then, at the next step downward her
head looked too small to be human, but the body bulged like a fat gorilla’s.
Lower again, she looked like someone swimming in reddish water amid deep-blue
seaweed.

After that there was a gap. A step was missing. There was a yard of
glaring air to cross, to a square foot of step on the far side —not
much—nothing to a man in good condition— hardly more than a
stride. Wu Tu and the Chinese girl had done it. But Blair’s head reeled. It
was a stride so ghastly, on smooth stone in slippery boots, that he had to
shut his eyes for sixty seconds before he could force himself to look, and
make the effort. On the step below, his boot soils slipped, perhaps an inch
that made his hair rise and his backbone tighten like a racked rope.

When he recovered balance, his knees trembled and felt so unsteady that he
had to kneel, then sprawl on two steps. After about a minute he looked
downward to test his nerve. At the bottom, seventy or eighty feet below, in
the shadow of the wall, very close to the edge of the glare, he saw a man’s
corpse that appeared to move in spasms.

It was nearly a minute before he could see that the body lay still and was
being torn by vultures. Two of the filthy brutes had scented carrion even in
that pit. While he watched, a third one circled downward from the opening,
around and around the cone, its shadow splurging black on the crystal and
its. wings disturbing silence with a noise like wind in a forest. Two more of
the death-watch from the broken fangs of Gaglajung followed, and cast their
shadows on the cone. With his head on the step, Blair thought the woman in
the cone suggested then, from that angle, a figure of Despair, frozen in
self-contemplation.

He crawled after that on hands and knees, hugging the wall as he groped
his way downward one step at a time, until he reached a smooth, projecting
stone about six feet wide that formed the threshold of an opening in the
wall. But the opening was only half the width of the stone slab. It was
smooth-hewn, shaped like an elongated horse-collar, with the narrowed part at
the bottom. Wu Tu stood in the opening with her back to a passage that grew
dim ten feet behind her.

“Now you look less like a strong savage!” she observed with a mean smile
that made her look ten years older.

Blair thought of having to reclimb those steps. The thought sickened him.
But it felt good to be standing on wide stone. It was good enough for the
moment. Anger returned to his aid, along with primitive emotions that
included a desire to kill Wu Tu and hurl her below to the vultures. She was
watching his eyes and choosing words. She chose with peculiar skill, if she
meant to enrage him further:

“In uniform, Blair, with all the greatness of the government’s authority,
you’re one thing. But now you’re naked—and there’s, no government! How
does it feel to be mere Blair Warrender without a friend or a servant? Why
not blow your whistle?”

It was true, he did feel naked. Not nude, naked. His torn, soiled uniform
had lost the quality which cloaks bewilderment beneath assumed official calm.
He had lost self-assurance. He was nakedly scared. But the truth is a
two-edged weapon. It stiffens some men, though it weakens others. He began to
try to ride fear—to command it, compel it, change it into alertness. Wu
Tu detected a change in his eyes.

“Look.” She pointed. He turned. There was no room to stand beside her in
the opening so he leaned against the curiously carved edge and stared again
at the wonderful cone, with the sweat running out of his sleeve on to the
revolver in his right hand. Seen from that point the cone took a different
shape. It was crystal-clear, faintly golden colored, with ruby-red and
emerald and sapphire points of sunlight dancing to the beat of the observer’s
pulse.

The woman within the cone appeared to stand exactly on the level of that
opening in the rock-wall. She faced exactly toward it—gazed straight
into it. Her eyes seemed alive and deep blue. Human, huge, incredible,
unlovely, splendid, ponderous but not coarse, clothed in mystery that numbed
imagination, she imposed a silence that was silvered by the echo of running
water. Even thought obeyed her. Millions of years of living silence brooded
in the dead, who had once lived, who had perhaps loved.

“Come and drink champagne,” said Wu Tu suddenly. “I can’t bear it. She
makes me solemn. When I’m that way I want to smash things. That’s why vandals
break old monuments. They can’t endure them. I’m a vandal in spite of myself.
If I had some dynamite I would blow her to hell.”

She led the way into the tunnel—sharply
up-hill—stifling—barely head-room. Blair pulled off his tunic.
The sound of splashing water, that had emphasized the silence of the cavern,
grew louder and made thirst almost maddening. There were hundreds of bats
squeaking and swarming in dark fissures in the sides of the tunnel; the
sloping floor had very recently been swept clean of their excreta, but its
stench was in the hot air. The tunnel was shaped strangely.

It rose sharply from the entrance. Down the midst. the floor was worn in a
hollow trough that forced him to walk carefully; it resembled hollows he had
seen that he knew had been made by bare feet century after century.

At last a platform, pitch-dark, with a sensation, of an opening in the
darkness beyond— perhaps, another tunnel. But on the left hand there
was a low square opening; and light beyond it. Wu Tu ducked and passed
through. The, sound of water splashed like music on his ears, so Blair
followed, holding the revolver in front of him. He had to bend almost, double
to avoid the low roof. It felt like, crawling into a nest of specters. Three
candle-flames in red-glazed lanterns cast a blood-red glow and leaping
shadows on the walls of a room, apparently a perfect cube of twenty-eight or
thirty feet, hewn from the rock.

All around, except at the low opening, was a ledge about eighteen inches
high and two feet, deep, forming a shelf on which golden-looking objects
stood. In one far corner was a big stone cistern like the one in the Great
Pyramid of Gizeh. Above that was a gash in the wall, through which water,
beautifully colored by the candlelight, poured into the cistern, overflowing
through a deep slot in the brim to a hole in the floor, where it vanished.
The Chinese girl was kneeling on the floor beside three hampers of
provisions.

Wu Tu, with her face blood-red in the lantern-light, pointed to Blair’s
revolver. “One shot left! Save it for Taron Ling! The fool who had Zaman
Ali’s extra cartridges lies below, where he can’t be reached. Zaman Ali shot
four fools. He would have shot those others, they had served their purpose
and weren’t to be trusted; but he had to husband ammunition after the fool he
thought he could trust fell from the steps and smashed himself. It doesn’t
pay to trust fools—ever.”

Under cover of his tunic Blair opened the revolver, removed the one unused
cartridge and put that in his pocket. Wu Tu started at the noise of the
breech snapping shut, but she could not see what he had done.

“The safety catch?” she asked him.

“Yes.” He strode toward the water, laid, his folded tunic on the ledge
beside a golden-looking vessel, stuck the revolver into a crack in the wall,
put his helmet on top of the tunic —all neatly and slowly to prove to
himself that he was in no haste. Then, suddenly, he plunged his head info the
cistern and let the descending water splash on the back of his neck. That was
heaven, if a contrast of experience is heaven or hell, as some say.

He drank very little but rinsed his mouth and throat. Then he raised his
head, and pulled off his shirt. The girl on the floor beside the hampers
cursed in Chinese because he had splashed her, but Wu Tu laughed and came
beside him. In a moment she had dropped her sari and jumped into the cistern,
ducking her head under, plunging and revelling in the cool, clean water.

“Come on, Blair, in with you!” she gasped. He had a mind to go in boots
and all but thought better of that, and took them off. In a moment he was in
there with her, slipping against the slimy sides and, digging hot toes into
the cool, soft sediment of centuries that lay inches deep on the bottom.