The Ninth Vibration | Page 4

blinding heat
of Ranipur. Olesen put all his knowledge at my service and never
uttered a word of the envy that must have filled him as he looked at the
distant snows cool and luminous in blue air, and, shrugging
good-natured shoulders, spoke of the work that lay before him on the
burning plains until the terrible summer should drag itself to a close.
We had vanquished the details and were smoking in comparative
silence one night on the veranda, when he said in his slow reflective
way;
"You don't like the average hotel, Ormond, and you'll like it still less up

Simla way with all the Simla crowd of grass-widows and fellows out
for as good a time as they can cram into the hot weather. I wonder if I
could get you a permit for The House in the Woods while you re
waiting to fix up your men and route for Shipki."
He explained and of course I jumped at the chance. It belonged, he said,
to a man named Rup Singh, a pandit, or learned man of Ranipur. He
had always spent the summer there, but age and failing health made
this impossible now, and under certain conditions he would
occasionally allow people known to friends of his own to put up there.
"And Rup Singh and I are very good friends," Olesen said; "I won his
heart by discovering the lost Sukh Mandir, or Hall of Pleasure, built
many centuries ago by a Maharao of Ranipur for a summer retreat in
the great woods far beyond Simla. There are lots of legends about it
here in Ranipur. They call it The House of Beauty. Rup Singh's
ancestor had been a close friend of the Maharao and was with him to
the end, and that's why he himself sets such store on the place. You
have a good chance if I ask for a permit.
He told me the story and since it is the heart of my own I give it briefly.
Many centuries ago the Ranipur Kingdom was ruled by the Maharao
Rai Singh a prince of the great lunar house of the Rajputs. Expecting a
bride from some far away kingdom (the name of this is unrecorded) he
built the Hall of Pleasure as a summer palace, a house of rare and costly
beauty. A certain great chamber he lined with carved figures of the
Gods and their stories, almost unsurpassed for truth and life. So, with
the pine trees whispering about it the secret they sigh to tell, he hoped
to create an earthly Paradise with this Queen in whom all loveliness
was perfected. And then some mysterious tragedy ended all his hopes.
It was rumoured that when the Princess came to his court, she was, by
some terrible mistake, received with insult and offered the position
only of one of his women. After that nothing was known. Certain only
is it that he fled to the hills, to the home of his broken hope, and there
ended his days in solitude, save for the attendance of two faithful
friends who would not abandon him even in the ghostly quiet of the
winter when the pine boughs were heavy with snow and a spectral

moon stared at the panthers shuffling through the white wastes beneath.
Of these two Rup Singh's ancestor was one. And in his thirty fifth year
the Maharao died and his beauty and strength passed into legend and
his kingdom was taken by another and the jungle crept silently over his
Hall of Pleasure and the story ended.
"There was not a memory of the place up there," Olesen went on.
"Certainly I never heard anything of it when I went up to the Shipki in
1904. But I had been able to be useful to Rup Singh and he gave me a
permit for The House in the Woods, and I stopped there for a few days'
shooting. I remember that day so well. I was wandering in the dense
woods while my men got their midday grub, and I missed the trail
somehow and found myself in a part where the trees were dark and
thick and the silence heavy as lead. It was as if the trees were on guard
- they stood shoulder to shoulder and stopped the way. Well, I halted,
and had a notion there was something beyond that made me doubt
whether to go on. I must have stood there five minutes hesitating. Then
I pushed on, bruising the thick ferns under my shooting boots and
stooping under the knotted boughs. Suddenly I tramped out of the
jungle into a clearing, and lo and behold a ruined House, with blocks of
marble lying all about it, and carved pillars and a great roof all