The Ninth Vibration | Page 7

face. We passed on and Ali Khan looked fearfully back.
"Ajaib! (Wonderful!) A strange place to meet one of the purdah-nashin (veiled women)" he muttered. "What would she be doing up here in the heights? She walked like a Khanam (khan's wife) and I saw the gleam of gold under the boorka."
I turned with some curiosity as he spoke, and lo! there was no human being in sight. She had disappeared from the track behind us and it was impossible to say where. The darkening trees were beginning to hold the dusk and it seemed unimaginable that a woman should leave the way and take to the dangers of the woods.
"Puna-i-Khoda - God protect us!" said Ali Khan in a shuddering whisper. "She was a devil of the wilds. Press on, Sahib. We should not be here in the dark."
There was nothing else to do. We made the best speed we could, and the trees grew more dense and the trail fainter between the close trunks, and so the night came bewildering with the expectation that we must pass the night unfed and unarmed in the cold of the heights. They might send out a search party from The House in the Woods - that was still a hope, if there were no other. And then, very gradually and wonderfully the moon dawned over the tree tops and flooded the wood with mysterious silver lights and about her rolled the majesty of the stars. We pressed on into the heart of the night. From the dense black depths we emerged at last. An open glade lay before us - the trees falling back to right and left to disclose - what?
A long low house of marble, unlit, silent, bathed in pale splendour and shadow. About it stood great deodars, clothed in clouds of the white blossoming clematis, ghostly and still. Acacias hung motionless trails of heavily scented bloom as if carved in ivory. It was all silent as death. A flight of nobly sculptured steps led up to a broad veranda and a wide open door with darkness behind it. Nothing more.
I forced myself to shout in Hindustani - the cry seeming a brutal outrage upon the night, and an echo came back numbed in the black woods. I tried once more and in vain. We stood absorbed also into the silence.
"Ya Alla! it is a house of the dead!" whispered Ali Khan, shuddering at my shoulder, - and even as the words left his lips I understood where we were. "It is the Sukh Mandir." I said. "It is the House of the Maharao of Ranipur."
It was impossible to be in Ranipur and hear nothing of the dead house of the forest and Ali Khan had heard - God only knows what tales. In his terror all discipline, all the inborn respect of the native forsook him, and without word or sign he turned and fled along the track, crashing through the forest blind and mad with fear. It would have been insanity to follow him, and in India the first rule of life is that the Sahib shows no fear, so I left him to his fate whatever it might be, believing at the same time that a little reflection and dread of the lonely forest would bring him to heel quickly.
I stood there and the stillness flowed like water about me. It was as though I floated upon it - bathed in quiet. My thoughts adjusted themselves. Possibly it was not the Sukh Mandir. Olesen had spoken of ruin. I could see none. At least it was shelter from the chill which is always present at these heights when the sun sets, - and it was beautiful as a house not made with hands. There was a sense of awe but no fear as I went slowly up the great steps and into the gloom beyond and so gained the hall.
The moon went with me and from a carven arch filled with marble tracery rained radiance that revealed and hid. Pillars stood about me, wonderful with horses ramping forward as in the Siva Temple at Vellore. They appeared to spring from the pillars into the gloom urged by invisible riders, the effect barbarously rich and strange - motion arrested, struck dumb in a violent gesture, and behind them impenetrable darkness. I could not see the end of this hall - for the moon did not reach it, but looking up I beheld the walls fretted in great panels into the utmost splendour of sculpture, encircling the stories of the Gods amid a twining and under-weaving of leaves and flowers. It was more like a temple than a dwelling. Siva, as Nataraja the Cosmic Dancer, the Rhythm of the Universe, danced before me, flinging out his arms in the