The Road to Samarcand Page 21

  “I hope some poor fellow has not fallen in,” said the Professor.

  Sullivan was already running along the bank up the stream. He turned a corner where the rocks cut out the view and saw Olaf and Chingiz coming back. In a few moments he had reached them, and Olaf said, “Ay didn’t mean no harm, Cap’n, but this guy wouldn’t let us pass, and the other guy fetched me a bang with his stick. It was on that bridge along for’ard,” he said, pointing to a rough log crossing on the river.

  It appeared that they had meant to cross the river and that on the bridge they had met two men. The first, a tall man with a sword, had started to shout at them in a loud, hectoring voice and had barred their way. Olaf had listened for a while, and had then tried to edge past. The tall man had drawn his sword, the shorter one had hit Olaf with his staff, and Chingiz had whipped his keen dagger through the tall man’s ribs. The tall man had fallen into the water, and the second had ran off.

  “Well, it’s no good swearing now,” said Sullivan, running back to the yaks. “Professor,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid we have killed a Red-Hat lama. We shall have to get out of this as quickly as we possibly can. Their monastery is some way behind us, and we may be able to get past Thyondze before they catch us up. If not, we must take the valley that the abbot marked as closed. Please find out all you can about it from the guides.”

  “As I remember from the map,” said the Professor, “we should see the opening of that valley on our left quite soon.”

  “Yes. It is behind that mountain there. I am going forward to reconnoiter, and I will ask Ross to drop back as a rear-guard. In the meantime, please keep everything moving as fast as possible—no halts for food, no pitching camp tonight. I will take Olaf with me: he will only upset the Tibetans here. If anything happens, fire three shots, but only if it is absolutely necessary. We have not a round to spare.”

  He vanished up the river at a long, loping run, accompanied by Olaf. The Professor walked up and down the line, urging the sluggards along and talking to the Tibetans. He had received the news with the utmost steadiness: he had changed a great deal since their first encounter with Shun Chi.

  For a long time nothing happened, but in the afternoon they heard, faintly in the distance, the blaring of horns and the throbbing of a drum. Then, in the evening, they saw a file of men scrambling along the high ridge to their right: they were moving with incredible rapidity over the rocks towards Thyondze.

  Sullivan came back in the moonlight, exhausted but with good news. “I have seen the valley,” he said, “and it is not closed at all. The mouth of it runs down into this one, and there is a stream in it; it is so clear that we shall be able to strike it even in the night. There appears to be a fair-sized glacier half-way up, but from what I could see through my glasses it should not be too difficult. I could not see the pass—it was shut out by a spur running down from the left—but I could see three days’ march up it, and it looked all right to me. We shall have to take it: the men you saw on the ridge are certainly going to warn the monks at Thyondze, and if we go on we shall be caught between the two of them, exactly as it was down in the Takla Makan. What have you learnt from the Tibetans?”

  “I am sorry to say that they seem absolutely horrified by the suggestion. It was a long time before I could make them understand, but I succeeded in the end. They kept making gestures of the utmost refusal and one of them eventually whispered to me the word nahjedli, or nahjetli: he seemed unwilling even to say it, and he kept his hand over his mouth. Then, apparently as an explanation, he went over to a large patch of snow and made a hand-print in it, with another several yards away. I wish I could understand what he meant: the irritating thing is that I am almost sure that I have heard, or perhaps read, a word not unlike it. Nahjedli, nahjedli: what can it be?” He bowed his head in thought. “My memory is not what it was,” he said.

  “Would it mean devils, or something of that sort? You know how superstitious they are.”

  “That is probably it. Yet there are several other words that they use more commonly—I employed them myself, back at Tanglha-Tso. Nahjedli, nahjedli: or was it two words, nah jedli, or nah yeti?”

  As he repeated the words in a meditative voice, the Tibetans approached. They were carrying their personal belongings. The leader came to the front: he was obviously in a state of terror. He said something in a low and trembling voice, pointing up towards the valley and then back down the river: then he threw down the gold coins that they had been paid, and turned about. In another moment the four of them were running at full speed down the river.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “THIS IS NOT SO BAD,” said Sullivan, heaping wood on to the fire. The leaping flames glowed pink far over the snow beyond them and lit up the low dark forms of the yaks in their shelter under the rocks.

  “No, indeed,” said the Professor. “It is a very much pleasanter end to the day than I ever expected.”

  They were all in high spirits. Not more than ten hours before they had been lying behind a rough barricade of piled rocks in the mouth of the valley, awaiting the attack of the lamas. The Red-Hats from Thyondze had come down very much faster than they had expected, and the party had not had time to reach a good, defensible position high up the valley before they were forced to turn and fight. They all knew that they were in a bad position, exposed from the front, and what was worse, exposed to outflanking parties on either side. There were at least two hundred lamas there, and while a hundred came at them in front, fifty could advance at each side of the broad valley and take them in the rear. They had only six rounds each. The Professor and Li Han had only two apiece, to be used only in the closest fighting, and although Ross had a pocketful, they could not possibly account for half the lamas, even if every shot found its mark.

  They waited and waited. The forces of the Red-Hats grew at the valley’s mouth, not two hundred yards from them, as fresh contingents poured in from lower down the river. The blaring of the ram’s horns increased, and the drums thundered; but the attack never came. An ineffectual shower of arrows struck the ground well in front of the barricade, and one solitary musket sent its ball trundling over the stones behind them, and then burst at its second discharge. The main body of the lamas never moved, and although the beleaguered expedition watched anxiously, no flanking parties were sent out. The banners waved, and the chief men moved about down there, but not a single one advanced into the valley.

  After some hours, Sullivan gave the order for the others to withdraw, while he and Ross stayed at the barricade to cover their retreat. At the sight of the movement, the lamas raised a great cry, and the sound of a huge gong filled the air: there was another flight of arrows, but that was all. The lamas did not go away: they just stayed there, and presently Ross and Sullivan left the barricade.

  All the way along the straight stretch of the rising valley they had kept a close watch on the lamas through their glasses, but never did they move.

  Now the party was encamped in a comfortable, sheltered part of the valley’s bed, a little to one side of the stream from the glacier: the valley was narrower here, but the towering ridges on either hand were much too far away for an out-flanking party to roll stones down upon them, and indeed, those mighty ridges were so steep and craggy that no enemies could possibly reach them in anything under several days, if at all. Before them lay a clear, unimpeded view of their way up the valley: no one could approach them unseen, and as Sullivan had waited until the others, with the yaks, had retreated for a good half-day’s march, he felt confident that their pursuers, if they came on at all, could not reach them until well after sunrise: therefore it was safe enough to have the fire.

  “It is very strange,” he said, leaning forward to warm his hands, “they had us on toast, and yet they let us get away. They must have had very little stomach for the fight: we could have picked off their leaders easily as they stood there, but I am glad we did not, now. It might have gingered them up.”

  “Perhaps they did not wa
nt to fight because they are monks,” suggested Derrick.

  “No,” said the Professor. “I have read and heard a good deal about the Red-Hats. I am afraid they do not wear swords for nothing.”

  “But they are religious men, aren’t they, sir?”

  “Yes. In their way they are,” replied the Professor. “But when you get to school—it seems to be a long time coming, and I must admit that our road to Samarcand and thus to school has taken some turnings that I did not foresee—you will no doubt learn some history, and then you will see that religious men, or men who call themselves religious, have never been averse to cutting off the heads of those who disagree with them, or burning them alive, either. It is always the same terribly sad story, over and over again. With us it is Catholic and Protestant—first one oppressing the other with horrible cruelty, and then the oppressed taking over in his turn and using exactly the same beastly methods on the oppressor. With the Mohammedans you have the extreme, bloody-minded puritans, and then on the other hand the open-minded Sufi. And even with the Buddhist, who profess to follow the kindest, mildest teaching of non-violence, you find these fierce, intolerant, iconoclastic, barbarous . . . words fail me to describe the turpitude of religiosity run mad. And it is always the same, however pure the teaching.” He shook his head sadly, and after a pause he went on, “No, I should account for their backwardness by supposing that the place has some local sanctity.”

  “But would not that mean that they are taken in by their own superstition, Professor?” asked Sullivan. “Surely the Red-Hats are more likely to impose on others than to be imposed upon.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” said Ross. “I remember that voodoo priest in the Antilles who went nearly mad with fear when he heard that another of his kidney had put the evil eye on him. Don’t you remember him, Sullivan?”

  “Yes, I do. I dare say you’re right, and the lamas have gone on so long that in the end they have deceived themselves—they certainly deceived the good old abbot of Tanglha-Tso. But now that I come to think of that voodoo fellow, he had some reason for his blue funk: he swelled up and died just before we had those new cat’s-heads fitted. But of course, that was not a typical case. He probably ate something poisonous.”

  They were in a very strong position: an outcropping stratum had laid a litter of vast boulders which made a natural fortification for them, but nevertheless they kept watch all through the night. The middle watch fell to Derrick and the Professor. They were very quiet, not only for fear of waking the others, but also because they were tired: they had had very little sleep the night before—it had been their longest forced march, leading them just in time to the foot of the valley—and the going that day had been hard, quite apart from the tension of the expected battle. The stillness of the valley, too, kept them from talking much. It was a windless night for once, and even the stream flowed so evenly just there that it made no sound. It was a strange silence, somehow unlike the silence of the high snows; a heavy, brooding silence—a positive thing, not a mere absence of sound.

  At length the Professor began to tell Derrick something of his own life at school, long ago: Derrick, listening to his deep, quiet voice and staring into the embers of the fire, began to nod off. He fought against the sleep that kept engulfing him like a warm wave, and from time to time he glanced over his shoulder with a curious, disagreeable but unreasonable feeling that the silence was somehow wrong. But still saying to himself, “I must not go to sleep: I must not,” he slipped away into a doze, and from that into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  He awoke suddenly, instantly alert. The moon was up, lighting the whole valley, and the yaks were stirring, grunting and straining at their head-ropes. The Professor was asleep, with his spectacles fallen to the end of his nose and his rifle drooping from his arm. The fire had died very low. Derrick had an absolute certainty that there was something behind him: the Tibetans’ horror of the valley came strongly into his mind, but with a powerful effort he forced himself to whip round. There was nothing. But as he turned again he thought he saw something move in the shadow of the rocks behind the Professor: he felt the hair prickling on the back of his neck. “If there had been anything, Chang would have barked,” he said to himself, and reassured he pushed a half-burnt branch into the fire before going to see to the yaks. At that moment Sullivan got up. “Eight bells,” he said, stretching. Then he noticed the Professor. “Hey, what kind of a watch is this?” he cried, prodding him with his toe. He was about to make some caustic remark about sleeping on duty when his eye caught something in the snow a little way behind Derrick. He stared fixedly at it, and Derrick turned, following his gaze. Clear in the moonlight there was a footprint in the snow. One single footprint, monstrously large, and shaped like a man’s hand, an enormous hand with a shortened thumb.

  They stared at one another, and Derrick saw in his uncle’s face a look that he had never seen there before. In a moment the look was gone, and Sullivan walked over to the print. He called to Ross, who was already awake: the two men looked at the print, looked at each other and nodded. “That’s what it is, all right,” said Ross.

  The Professor joined them. “It is not at all unlike the mark that—why, how stupid of me. I remember perfectly now. Of course, that was the word the man was saying, nahjedli, the Abominable Snowman. In the southern dialects it is yeti, as I remember reading . . .” Sullivan nudged him violently, and at the same moment Olaf cried, “Hey, what ban the matter with this dog?”

  Chang lay at the edge of the firelight, crouched in a strange, unnatural position. Derrick ran over to him and raised his head, “He’s trembling all over,” he said. “Is he having a fit?”

  “No,” replied Sullivan, looking at him. “He’s all right. He’s just scared.”

  “But he’s not afraid of anything,” cried Derrick. “There’s nothing alive that could frighten . . .” His voice trailed away into silence, and for a long minute nobody spoke.

  “Well, you turn in,” said Sullivan at last, with an effort. “We’ll take over the watch.”

  They did as they were told, but Derrick for one had little sleep that night. He lay quiet, however, comforting Chang, and when the moon had gone half-way down the sky, he heard his uncle murmur to Ross, “I wish Ayrton hadn’t blurted that out in front of the others.”

  “Aye,” said Ross. And after a long pause, Derrick heard his deep voice ask, “What have you heard about them, Sullivan?”

  “Oh, the usual thing—huge, man-like creatures, white and hairless, who live in the high snows. Always mentioned in an undertone, as if there were something too horrible about them to mention—running in enormous leaps—chewing up snow-leopards like rabbits—smashing rocks with their teeth—nobody ever seeing one and living to tell the tale—all that sort of stuff, nine-tenths of it nonsense.”

  “Yes. But I’ll bet you five pounds the Red-Hats won’t set foot in this valley.”

  “That’s all to the good. Still I wish the sun would come up.”

  The sun did rise at last, and it brought another windless day. Ross and Sullivan set themselves to cheer the party up. “We’ll have a really good breakfast,” said Sullivan, piling up the fire with branches from underneath the boulders. “We might as well profit by this fuel: I don’t expect we shall find much more wood until we’re over the pass and down again.”

  “How long will that be?” asked the Professor, sipping his tea.

  “With good luck and no snow, I should say a fortnight. Eat hearty, everyone: we’ll make a long day’s march and get clean out of this place.”

  There was a feeling of unnaturalness and constraint hanging over them all: even Chingiz had somehow got the idea that was in each one’s mind, and Chang kept in very close to Derrick’s heel. But after they had been marching for an hour or two everything seemed much easier; it was as if they had left an evil, but half-forgotten dream behind. Only Olaf dampened the spirits of the party a little by telling a long, pointless and lugubrious story about a northern werew
olf until Sullivan told him to go and climb a tall pillar of rock on the side of the valley to see if there was any sign of the lamas.

  There was none, and they stopped at noon in an open, flat space for their midday meal. It was on the most open southern side, and although they were above the snow-line, and had been for many miles, the snow had not lain here, and there was herbage for the yaks. The valley was somewhat less shut in at this point, and the queer silence that had persisted all day seemed less oppressive here.

  “You know, Sullivan,” said the Professor, putting down his knife, “I have a curious feeling, a not wholly agreeable feeling, that something is watching us. Do you know that impression that one has when one is in a train, and without looking up, one knows that the person opposite is staring at one? A sense of ill-defined discomfort. I have exactly that feeling now.”

  “Oh, it’s just imagination. Have some more tea?”