Caves of Terror | Page 3

the bazaar the main street goes winding roughly parallel with the waterfront. Trees arch over it like a cathedral roof, and through the huge branches the sun turns everything beneath to gold, so that even the impious sacred monkeys achieve vicarious beauty, and the scavenger mongrel dogs scratch, sleep, and are miserable in an aureole.
There are modern signs, as for instance, a post office, some telegraph wires on which birds of a thousand colors perch with an air of perpetual surprise, and--tucked away in the city's busiest maze not four hundred yards from the western wall--the office of the Sikh apothecary Mulji Singh.
Mulji Singh takes life seriously, which is a laborious thing to do, and being an apostle of simple sanitation is looked at askance by the populace, but he persists.
King's specialty is making use of unconsidered trifles and misunderstood babus.
* * * * *
King was attired as a native, when we sought out Mulji Singh together and found him in a back street with a hundred-yard-long waiting list of low-caste and altogether casteless cripples.
And of course Mulji Singh had all the gossip of the city at his fingers' ends. When he closed his office at last, and we came inside to sit with him, he loosed his tongue and would have told us everything he knew if King had not steered the flow of information between channels.
"Aye, sahib, and this Mahatma, they say, is a very holy fellow, who works miracles. Sometimes he sits under a tree by the burning ghat, but at night he goes to the temple of the Tirthankers, where none dare follow him, although they sit in crowds outside to watch him enter and leave. The common rumor is that at night he leaves his body lifeless in a crypt in that Tirthanker temple and flies to heaven, where he fortifies himself with fresh magic. But I know where he goes by night. There comes to me with boils a one-legged sweeper who cleans a black panther's cage. The panther took his other leg. He sleeps in a cage beside the panther's, and it is a part of his duty to turn the panther loose on intruders. It is necessary that they warn this one-legged fellow whenever a stranger is expected by night, who should not be torn to pieces. Night after night he is warned. Night after night there comes this Mahatma to spend the hours in heaven! There are places less like heaven than her palace."
"Is he your only informant?" King demanded.
"Aye, sahib, the only one on that count. But there is another, whose foot was caught between stone and stone when they lowered a trap-door once in that Tirthanker temple. He bade the Tirthankers heal his foot, but instead they threw him out for having too much knowledge of matters that they said do not concern him. And he says that the trap-door opens into a passage that leads under the wall into a chamber from which access is obtained by another trap-door to a building inside her palace grounds within a stone-throw of that panther's cage. And he, too, says that the Mahatma goes nightly to her palace."
"Are there any stories of her?" King inquired.
"Thousands, sahib! But no two agree. It is known that she fell foul of the raj in some way, and they made her come to this place. I was here when she came. She has a household of a hundred women--maunds of furniture--maunds of it, sahib! She gave orders to her men-servants to be meek and inoffensive, so when they moved in there were not more than ten fights between them and the city-folk who thought they had as much right to the streets. There was a yellow-fanged northern devil who marshaled the serving-men, and it is he who keeps her palace gate. He keeps it well. None trespass."
"What other visitors does she entertain besides the Mahatma?"
"Many, sahib, though few enter by the front gate. There are tales of men being drawn up by ropes from boats in the river."
"Is there word of why they come?"
"Sahib, the little naked children weave stories of her doings. Each has a different tale. They call her empress of the hidden arts. They say that she knows all the secrets of the priests, and that there is nothing that she cannot do, because the gods love her and the Rakshasas (male evil spirits) and Apsaras (female evil spirits) do her bidding."
"What about this Tirthanker temple? Who controls it?"
"None knows that, sahib. It is so richly endowed that its priests despise men's gifts. None is encouraged to worship in that place. When those old Tirthankers stir abroad they have no dealings with folk in this city that any man knows of."
"Are you sure they are Tirthankers?" asked King.
"I am sure of nothing,