THE WHITE PYTHON

Mark Channing

Pseudonym of Leopold Aloysius M Jones (1879-1943)

1934

Text from the serial which appeared weekly in "Australasian", 2 February 1935 on.

Frontsipiece

Contents

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

Chapter 5 | Chapter 6

Chapter 7 | Chapter 8

Chapter 9 | Chapter 10

Chapter 11 | Chapter 12

Chapter 13 | Chapter 14

Chapter 15 | Chapter 16

Chapter 17 | Chapter 18

Chapter 19 | Chapter 20

Chapter 21 | Chapter 22

Chapter 23 | Chapter 24

Chapter 25 | Chapter 26

Chapter 27 | Chapter 28

Chapter 29 | Chapter 30

Chapter 31 | Chapter 32

Chapter 33 | Chapter 34

Chapter 35 | Chapter 36

Chapter 37 | Chapter 38

Chapter 39 | Chapter 40

Chapter 41 | Chapter 42

___________________

Author's Note.

There is a legend that under the holy city of Lhasa— the capital of Tibet— lies a subterranean lake, in the centre of which is an island inhabited by a huge python.

Ophiolatreia, or Serpent Worship, was practised by antediluvian man and, later, spread over the entire world.

The supernatural happenings experienced by Colin Gray are founded on personal experiences of the author during his 21 years in India.

1

The Call

BARELY twenty-seven, Colin Gray had looked danger in the eyes many times, and in many lands— felt the lure and awesomeness of great mountains, and the eerie mysteriousness of the windswept, brooding plains. And when he had left them, had laughingly broken their spell. Then came a day when Fate— perhaps determined by ten years' longing— sent him to a country that takes grim toll of men's minds and souls; a country where prodigies occur; and where ascetics command powers that are unquestionably supernatural: the powers of black magic and white. Which things are believed from the European Caucasus to Kamchatka, and from Buriat Siberia to Sikkim and Yunnan.

It is a barbarous land, inhabited by a kindly and credulous people, who know that it is haunted by Thabs-Yang, the Devil tiger.

The name of that country is Tibet.

COLIN GRAY pushed open the swing doors of the Babylonia club, a puff of March fog following him into the warm, pillared hall.

Outside, a newspaper seller, flourishing a poster as he ran, was shouting hoarsely:

"DEATH OF THE DALAI LAMA! RUMOURED INVASION OF TIBET..."

And diminishingly raucous, faded into the smothering fog.

"General Dalziell in?" asked Gray, pulling off his driving gloves.

The hall porter looked up from sorting the members' mail. This bronzed young giant in the camel fleece travelling ulster was expected.

"That is the General— over there, sir!" He indicated a short, wiry man who had been studying the tape machine.

General Dalziell turned quickly and came up to them.

The personality of "Needle" Dalziell, head of the Secret Service, was summed up in his nickname. Monocled and steely blue-eyed, he looked what he was— hard, bright, and piercing.

He held out a wrinkled brown hand.

"Glad to see you, Gray! Like a scrub?... Then we'll go straight in to dinner,  when you're ready."

"Jove, this fog's bad, sir!" said Gray, blinking the sting of it out of his eyes.

"Yes— bad for motoring. Any narrow shaves?"

Gray stuffed his neckwrap into an ulster pocket.

"Thickened up about five miles outside London, General." He laughed. "As a matter of fact I was nearly smashed up twice, and by the same car, too! Came out of a side road at fifty miles an hour, as if... "

He caught the General's eye.

"I wonder," he said softly. And stopped.

"I've an idea that it would have been worth quite a lot to some people to do you out of to-night's dinner," commented "Needle" Dalziell dryly. "It's an old trick, that— running into the man you want to stop.... Seen the evening papers, by any chance? Another of these Orientalist murders. Makes the third, Kahnberg, the expert on Pali manuscripts,  this time ... I hope you're hungry? Splendid!"

He led the way to a table in the far corner of the dining-room, discussing the menu as they went.

"Sit with your back to the curtains. Gray, if you don't mind. They'll deaden my voice. I'd like to hear your opinion about this latest Orientalist crime."

Colin Gray strove hard to read the steely blue eyes; but they were inscrutable. He knew that the urgent message which had brought him to London a week after he had arrived from India on leave was not the sort of call that ended in the discussing of a newspaper story.

"I don't know that I have any opinion, general!... The first two victims having been dealers in Oriental curios, though, and Kahnberg being— well, 'Pali' Kahnberg— seems to make it pretty clear that the same motive was behind all three murders. Don't you think so?"

"Of course.... Was the motive robbery, d'you think?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Robbery of what?"

"Of something... well, Eastern, I'd say, sir." Gray's interest was awake now.

The General smiled bleakly.

"I see. Your theory is that death automatically followed the possession of some sort of— cursed object. Am I right?"

"No. That's not quite what I meant. In these three cases, the murderer was uncertain who possessed the thing he wanted to get hold of."

The General propped the menu against a wineglass with meticulous attention to its angle.

"Why d'you think that?"

"Well, according to the newspapers, both curio shops were turned upside down!"

General Dalziell clicked his tongue impatiently.

"Not a thing in Kahnberg's study was touched! Pity you haven't read the evening papers ... Go on."

"I think that's about all I've got to say." Gray cut a slice of toast into fingers. " 'Dead men tell no tales' sums it all up pretty well, I think."

The General looked at him musingly.

"I've an idea they knew something, Gray. Something that somebody else desired to suppress. Seems more reasonable than to suppose they were murdered for the sake of some hypothetical curio. Look at the facts. A murderer kills three well-known connoisseurs— rifles the shops of two of them (filled with extremely valuable things, remember), and doesn't take away so much as a pin."

Something inside Gray jumped.

"What I'm going to say, General, may sound like a digression. But it isn't. When I was on sixty days' privilege leave in Ceylon last year I heard a curious rumour from one of the lamas at Kandy. He said that news had reached them that an Oriental manuscript containing occult secrets which would cause a world war if they became known, had found its way to Europe! He also said―"

General Dalziell smiled, and Gray stopped speaking.

For the next fifteen minutes, cookery held the field.

Suddenly Dalziell pushed his plate from him.

"Apropos of what you were saying about Ceylon, Gray. Have you read that 'Decay of Buddhism' correspondence in The Times?... Well, then, would you say that there was any connection between those letters and these murders?" The pupils of the steely blue eyes were pin-points.

Gray's first impulse was to reply "Certainly not!"

Rapidly he reviewed the facts.

A man named Sigurd Hellstrom had attacked what he had called "the effete and corrupt Buddhism of Tibet," urging that Tibet ought to be taken over by a certain Great Country in the interests of the Tibetan people. These letters had drawn vehement and equally learned replies from a pro-Tibetan signing himself S. Dod-Chambers... Well, and if they had? To connect with three Lon-don murders the polemics of two Orientalist scholars seemed to Gray illogical.

Puzzled, he glanced at the General.

"I don't see any connection at all. Do you?"

"If I didn't, Gray, you wouldn't be dining with me! This Montrachet's good— don't you think?" The General smacked his lips lightly, and, placing his napkin on his knee, took out a newspaper clipping.

"Read the marked bit at the end, will you," he said. "It's the latest of 'em."

Gray held it under the silk-shaded table lamp.

"Finally, I wish most strenuously to deny" (it concluded) "that Lamaic Buddhism in Tibet is either decadent or dead. The heart of the faith still beats strongly. Those deep in its secrets know that the teaching of the Lord Buddha will yet conquer the world. The enemies of Buddhism are admittedly many and ruthless; but its faithful guardians have at their disposal new and tremendous forces which will make the ultimate triumph of Nyin-ma Lamaic Buddhism a certainty..."

The letter was signed S. Dod-Chambers. Gray looked questioningly at the General. He knew that the Nyin-ma or "Red-hat" Lamas are Tantrist devil worshippers. Who then was this European, S. Dod-Chambers, that he should defend them?

"Who is he?" he asked.

The General shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know. I want you to find out. He lives at 33b Waldgrave square— quite close to here. Although he won't see anyone (we've tried it), I've an idea you may have better luck. We've been able to find out that the house was once owned by a wealthy Burmese. That's all we know about it."

"I still can't see any connection between those letters and the murders," insisted Gray.

General Dalziell removed his monocle and polished it carefully.

"That you'll find out when you get to Tibet, Gray," he said. And replaced the monocle.

Colin Gray stared at him. "By Jove, do you mean that I'm to go there? Why. I've wanted―"

"I most certainly do mean it. Two others were in the running, but I'm giving the job to you, Gray, because of the excellent work you have done for us; also, you're the only fellow we have who holds an honour degree in Tibetan and Russian." He glanced at the great spread of his guest's shoulders. "And I should add: Physically, you're the strongest man we've got!" The steely eyes twinkled. "If your brains match your strength, Gray, you ought to go far.... I've an idea that you'll shortly have to use both, quite a lot...."

Then he unmasked his guns.

"The fellow behind all the trouble in Tibet is a man named Chorjieff. He wants Tibet to cut loose from India and throw in its lot with the Buriat Tartars— which obviously won't suit the Government of India. K.B.— our man in Tibet— says that Chorjieff has terrorised the country. In addition to that, he's now given it out that he'll invade Tibet and proclaim himself King! I'll go into his reasons for it later. This sudden death of the Dalai Lama will precipitate things, of course. You've got to track down Chorjieff and undermine his propaganda— at all costs."

Gray nodded. It was perfectly obvious what would happen to India if Chorjieff succeeded.

"Now for his reasons. I seemed to pooh-pooh your story of that Sinhalese papyrus, Gray. As a matter of fact you were very near the truth: there is a papyrus in the case. In fact, a papyrus is Chorjieff's ace of trumps. The Tibetans call it the King prophecy, and it's as holy as high Heaven to 'em. They credit it with just such a lot of bunkum as your Sinhalese friend talked about. Mystical tosh. They swear that, provided its possessor fulfils some tradition or other, he's predestined King of Tibet!" Again the General drummed on the table.

"Sort of title deed to royalty!" smiled Gray.

"Exactly. But our Government has an-other reason for taking up the matter. They've learned— on good authority, they say— that this papyrus contains the secret of an immense hoard of gold! Well, you know the state of the world to-day, as far as gold is concerned! So they want to get hold of it. That's what it comes to!"

"But if any treasure were found in Tibet, surely the Tibetan Government would claim it?"

The General looked at him wryly.

"Our people have made a treaty with the Tibetan Government, Gray. If we'll knock Chorjieff's plans on the head for 'em, they'll let us keep any treasure trove we find while we're doing it. A lot of nonsense!"

"Anyone ever seen the papyrus, General? It'd make things a bit easier If one knew what it looked like!"

"Usual kind, I suppose. Rather like a Venetian blind.... About KB., Gray, you'll find him useful. He knows Tibet and the Tibetan inside and out. He's a Bengali ex-assistant surgeon. One of our best men. He says Chorjieff is absolutely treacherous and as ruthless as a tiger. The Tibetans have nicknamed him the 'Lame Devil'!... The sooner you get on his track the better. I'd thought of sending you by the Orlumba, sailing at dawn tomorrow; but I want you to give a day or two to Mr. S. Dod-Chambers."

Half an hour later the two men were standing near the swing doors of the Babylonia. Gray was shrugging himself into his travelling ulster.

"Well, good-bye, and good luck, Gray!... Except for the man in Sikkim, act independently of all our people. Unless, of course, you get in a tight corner.... And remember: you've been given leave to explore on your personal responsibility a country which you have expressed a wish to visit. That's all!... The fog's thicker, I think. Mind how you go! It's only a few minutes from here...."

An hour's blind fumbling along area railings and shopfronts ended up in Little Andrew street, Bloomsbury, the best part of half a mile from Waldgrave square. The fog seemed to be lifting a little. Gray stopped under a street lamp, looked up at the street name-plate, and listened.

He was lost. And he was being followed! He had heard the same foot-beats behind him ever since he left the Babylonia. He'd tried to shake them off, and failed. He decided to try an old trick. Darting into a doorway, he pressed himself flat against the door.

This time the footsteps came on. As they passed by him he glimpsed the dim outline of a man wearing a coat similar to his. A smallish man, evidently with rubber shoes, was creeping after him....

A quarter of an hour later Colin Gray had reached No. 33B Waldgrave square.

2

The House In Waldgrave Square

THE BIG HOUSE was in pitch darkness. By the light of his powerful electric torch Colin Gray saw that it was badly dilapidated. Its windows were dirty, and several panes in the lower ones broken. The inside shutters were closed.

Directing the circle of light downwards, he noticed that one half of the area had been bricked over, as if a passage had been constructed between the house and the cellars.

The old-fashioned heavy knobbed door-bell— one of those which look as if considerable force ought to be given to the pulling of it— proved to be lightly balanced, and rang furiously.

Hardly had its clangour died away when the door was swung open, to reveal standing in the gloomy hall a slovenly looking Mongolian hunchback, holding a lighted candle. His small-chinned face was like a mask— a crinkled yellow leather, slit in five places.

To Gray's surprise, he addressed him in Tibetan.

"The Lord Lama, Samdad Chiemba, awaits you," he said harshly. He stood waiting.

Samdad Chiemba, repeated Gray to himself. Could it be that "S. Dod-Chambers" and "Samdad Chiemba" were one and the same person? The sound of the two names was practically identical.... God, but General Dalziell was sharp!

The front of the door clicked and shut.

Gray glanced over his shoulder. No means of closing it from a distance was visible, nor had the hunchback moved. On the inside it was covered with iron plates.

Impassively, the Mongol indicated a flight of stone steps leading down into the basement. Gray descended, his right hand gripping the butt of a service revolver. At the bottom of the stairs was a door. He tried it. It was locked.

"I can go no farther! The door is fastened," he called back over his shoulder.

"All doors open only when the Master commands," growled the hunchback. At that moment the door opened and a wave of a peculiarly sweet incense floated through it.

A long, carpeted passage, with carved panels depicting the various Buddhist hells— the hideous figures of the devils and their writhing victims being picked out in staring colours. Through an archway stood an altar of gilt lattice-work with red glass bowls burning on either side of it. Immediately in front of the altar, seated cross-legged on a small dais about a foot high, was a gaunt, fair-skinned, oldish man, wearing the wine-coloured robes of a Nyin-ma lama. From the depths of two cavernous orbits his dark magnetic-looking eyes were fixed piercingly on Gray.

"Welcome to you, Gray Sahib," said the seated figure slowly, in English. "I am Lama Samdad Chiemba, Abbot of Hlampo, the writer of the letter you read tonight! Be pleased to take your hand from the weapon in your pocket."

"Greeting, and peace of the eightfold way to you, Lama Sambad Chiemba!" said Gray, withdrawing his hand. "My reason for coming―"

"―is because I wished it!" said the lama, gravely returning his smile. He seemed to be about 60, and was completely bald. "Your General thinks I know something about him they call 'Chorjieff,' or 'Hellstrom.' I do. He and I are bitter enemies, for the sake of the Faith!"

With a quick movement he struck his hands together. Immediately the hunch-back appeared in the archway.

Samdad Chiemba spoke to him in Chinese, and then turned to Gray.

"Give my servant your coat. It is warm in here."

Kind as was the voice, there was no disobeying the request.

"You say you sent for me," resumed Gray, when the dwarf had departed. "I received no message from you!"

The magnetic eyes looked into his.

"I sent, not one, but three messengers. Only few of the dead are seen.... Two of them were once authorities... on things like these." He waved a hand to-wards Chinese embroideries on the wall. "The third was once my friend, and a great scholar— one who knew much about things that you and I will yet discuss together. Him I sent that he might put into your General's mind the thought of sending you to Tibet."

An uncomfortable feeling was growing upon Gray that he was in the presence of a murderer.

With a disconcerting directness, the lama read his thoughts.

"To a Buddhist, life in all its forms is sacred. Why wrong you me by thinking the thought you are thinking?"

Gray flushed as he looked into that worn old face.

"Was it Chorjieff?"

The lama bent his head. Then he continued in his quiet monotone:

"Had you not come to-night, I would have sent another letter. See, it was ready. Read but the first three sentences of it."

He handed Gray what at first seemed a Greek manuscript, so small, square, and clear was that scholarly handwriting. The first three sentences ran as follows:

To rob a country of Wealth that is its by right is a crime. To rob a country of its Faith and Independence are still greater ones. Today there are those whose avowed object it is to commit all three of these crimes against Tibet....

Lifting his eyes from the paper. Gray saw that a narrow piece of lacquered wood was being held in front of him by two claw-like yellow hands.

Before taking one of the two porcelain bowls of scented tea which the hunchback was offering him he hesitated. It might  be drugged.

"Fear not," said Samdad Chiemba quietly. "It is not drugged. It is hsiang pien cha— China tea in which jasmin flowers have been dried." He sighed. "Yet I well understand your doubting. There are so many who are false followers of The Way— who have learned The Law no longer follow it.... Be not afraid. I say. Drink!"

Since he had entered the warm, per-fumed quietness of that underground room Gray's eyes had not quitted those of his host for more than a few seconds. He knew he was in the presence of an Adept— that is, of a being possessed of great psychic powers.

"To me it is not strange. Holy One," he said, "that you can see and hear things from afar. I have met other Yogis with such powers. But what know you about me?" A sudden desire had come to him to test the old lama's powers.

Samdad smiled.

"Much, Chela! (disciple). You and I have known each other in many lives! You have studied Yoga— the science of the concentration of the powers of the mind.... You know that time and space are one, and that the eyes of the enlightened may see the past and the future as easily as the present. ... I was with you when you were studying our Holy Books in Ceylon. And I saw you escape an assassin, to-night, as you stood in a doorway.... Is that enough?"

Gray nodded. Was there anything this old man with the piercing eyes did not know, he wondered? What a fight it was going to be between him and Chorjieff!

"Why were the three murdered, Holy One?"

"You know already. What your General said about a papyrus was correct."

"Were the three murdered because they knew of the existence of this papyrus, or because one of them had it and had told the others?"

"They have all three held it. Therefore it was they died. It is so written." The lama sighed.

"Look!" he said suddenly, "do you know that place?" He pointed towards a large Chinese painting on silk, hanging on the wall in front of Gray. It represented snow-capped mountains covered with dark green pine forests, at the foot of which was a lake of an intense sapphire blue, whose waters were here and there stained with patches of vivid turquoise. Crowning a precipitous spur that ran down to the lake, and almost surrounded by blue and white waterfalls, stood a red Buddhist lamasery (monastery), with a central gilded roof of Chinese design.

"Yes," Gray hesitated. "I seem to know it, but―"

"It is the valley of Hlampo. The gompa (monastery) is my gompa and yours. In a former life you studied there. It is a thousand years old. The lake is the 'Lake of the Peacock's Tail.' Beneath its waters are other and darker waters.... Yea, and the temple of the White Python— a place of evil, which you and I, together, will mayhap destroy!..."

Sipping many bowls of the perfumed tea, they talked of the far interior of Tibet and which of the many roads leading to it was the best to follow.

"Since I, too, am going there," said Samdad Chiemba, "and since we have a common enemy, I will gladly help you. My power as an abbot will be useful to you. In my monastery— which shall be your headquarters if you wish— we will draw up our plans...."

3

Piers Bryan

A PURPOSE formed in Gray's mind. To attempt to deceive this strange being would evidently be futile. Only by frankness could he hope to obtain his help. In addition to the fact that the support of a man like Samdad Chiemba would undoubtedly be a great asset, Hlampo might as well be his headquarters as any other place. So— to Hlampo he would go!

The chamber was now slowly growing darker. Very slowly, darker. A bluish phosphorescent glow seemed to emanate from the gaunt, motionless figure on the dais, the cold light of it concentrating in a curious way on the body of a silver python, whose coils formed the base of the gilt image of the Buddha. The rep-tile shone as if it were bathed in brilliant moonlight. The gilt statue appeared to have become black.

As Gray looked at it, it seemed to him that the evil head of the reptile was swaying slowly to and fro above the Buddha's head. Then came an even more weird happening.

The big oblong of painted tapestry on the wall, to which Samdad Chiemba had drawn his attention, was now deluged with yellow sunshine, as if it were an open window looking on to a mountainous countryside. Feathery white clouds moved above snow-clad mountain tops, and a breeze swayed the branches of the dark pine trees. He could even hear the song of birds, thinly sweet against a distant, thunderous diapason of falling water.

"Behold the secret heart of which I wrote, Chela," droned the lama.

The sonorous chanting of a choir of monks rolled through the room, organ-like. A mist was now rolling down into the valley, hiding the mountains and the monastery in wreathing masses of white vapour. Slowly these vapours contracted and thickened until they took the form of an immense white python— every inch of forty feet in length. Gray jumped. Clear-cut against a loathsome background of greenish black, he could see, fast in its coils, and struggling desperately, a human form.

"Watch!" commanded the lama. "You are beholding a servant of Sinje Gyalbo, the Lord of Death— O Sahib who was my Chela!"

Gray's skin prickled. The victim in the reptile's coils was none other than himself!

"The enemies of The Way say, that he, Death— who tempted even the Lord Buddha Gautama— shall be victorious," went on the lama, as if in prophetic ecstasy. "But they are wrong! To those who defy him shall be the victory!"

The vision faded and brightened again.

But the form in the grip of the great serpent had changed. The enormous reptile was now coiled about the sinuous body of a woman. Her white throat was bent backwards and her head pillowed on the reptile's thick body. As she looked at Gray, her slanting brown eyes were half-closed. Infinitely far away and ringingly imperious, he heard her voice:

"Come quickly, thou strong Seeker After Wisdom! I need thee! In our union lies power and greatness!"

There followed a sound as of distant thunder and a faint shouting of "Gynia!" by many voices. Then, the shattering, shivering clangour of a gong.

Involuntarily Gray pressed his hands to his eyes, and removing them stared bewilderedly at the lama.

The room was once more full of soft amber light.

"Well, what think you of what you have seen?" said the old man gravely. "Clearly, Death may come to you, if you go with me!" He squared spade-like shoulders and his chin jutted defiantly. "Will you come to Hlampo, Chela-that-was? Or go I alone?... Your path towards her who called to you will be fraught with many dangers; and its end I cannot see."

"I will go with you," answered Gray quietly.

"It is well! Place has been reserved for us on the ship that is called the Orlumba, which, as your General told you, sails at dawn to-morrow.

After leaving Tilbury, Colin Gray saw little of Samdad Chiemba. The lama took his meals in his cabin, his food being cooked for him by his Mongol servant. Gray had several times endeavoured to get into touch with him, but on each occasion he had received the same reply: "The Rimpoche is in meditation." That, and an oblique look from oblique black eyes.

One of the Orlumba's passengers was Piers Bryan— the world's most famous air-girl— as the newspapers called her.

Until they encountered each other in the companionway after dinner the first night out, Gray had hoped he wouldn't have to meet her. He had even gone so far as to ask the chief steward not to put them at the same table. He disapproved of women "stunters." But a pair of the deepest and yet merriest blue eyes he had ever looked into, plus the smile on a pair of perfect lips, caused him to change his mind. He also interviewed the chief steward about amending the seating arrangements in the dining saloon.

A few minutes later, in the darkness of the March night, he found her standing on the promenade deck, looking down at a tarpaulin-covered mound lashed on to the ringbolts of the forward hatchway.

"Looks like some lucky person's sport car," he said, casually, as he came up to her.

She snuggled deeper into her mink coat and the blue eyes smiled.

"You've very nearly got an X-ray eye, Mr. Gray— but not quite. It's my plane!"

"Good Lord !" he said, and stopped.

"Well, why don't you finish what you were going to say," she said, with a musical little laugh. " 'Women ought not to fly,' or something like that, wasn't it? I won't mind!"

Gray chuckled. Piers Bryan's laugh was infectious.

"I wasn't going to say anything of the kind," he protested. "I was just wondering.... Flying in India is pretty dangerous, isn't it? Air pockets, and all that?"

She nodded, suddenly grave. "Yes. But, you see, I happen to be the daughter of a man who believes in danger as an article of diet in the upbringing of the young!... Perhaps you don't agree with that?"

"There are some people I don't think should be in danger," said Gray slowly. "Perhaps you're one of them.... Where are you flying to this time?"

"Calcutta to Pekin— solo," she answered briskly.

Gray whistled. "I say! That really is dangerous, you know! If you're forced down in the Pamirs or some forsaken spot like that―!"

Piers glanced at him, sideways. Life was a short business, after all, and every bit as dangerous as flying.

"I might make a good landing!"

"And you might not!" he countered.

"Well, it wouldn't matter awfully much. A nose spin isn't so very unpleasant. Ever been in one?"

He shook his head.

"Nope! I'm not an easy one to fit into a 'plane!"

"You're in the Army, aren't you?"

"Yes, 150th Pathans."

"Finished your leave and going back?... Poor boy!"

He grinned. "I'm not so sorry I happen to be going back on the Orlumba!"

"I'm rather glad, too," she said quietly. She had gauged his shyness with women.

"Goes with me, partner!" he added, smiling back at her.

Then someone came up and claimed her for a dance.

GRAY took little part in the usual board-ship life. He spent most of his time― when he wasn't talking to Piers— in thinking out plans and disguises and studying the notes General Dalziell had given him. According to them, Chorjieff was a swarthy Mongolian Buriat, who had an early training in crime and intrigue as the Chela of a notorious magician in the Debchung monastery— a hot-bed of sedition in northern Tibet. Superstitious, a doctor, a drug addict, a clever linguist, and a born actor, he was known to have no less than 103 Tibetan aliases. The vast majority of the Tibetan people both hated and feared him. He had been concerned (the notes said) in the assassination of four "Living Buddhas"― accepted reincarnations of the highest plane saints.

Gray gave many hours of thought to his first evening with Samdad Chiemba, and to the vision he had seen in that underground chamber. What, he wondered, could possibly be the meaning of phrases like "darker waters under the lake"; "a world that is not a world!"; and "people who are not people"?... And who was the girl whom he had seen encircled by that gigantic leprous python? He had asked Samdad Chiemba, but the old man had merely said that there existed an ancient legend about a woman named Gynia, The Consort of the Serpent, and that one day they would talk of it together. That was all. The extraordinary brilliance of the girl's eyes haunted Gray; they reminded him of Samdad Chiemba's; but the imperiousness of her tones had jarred strangely. The idea of any woman giving him orders, however sweet her voice, ruffled Colin Gray.

4

The Prophecy of Hsui-Li-Chien

ONE WARM starlit night, just before reaching Aden, Piers and Gray were sitting looking out to sea.

"Do you know, I rather like your being worried about me, Colin," she said softly.

His big brown hand covered a small, strong one.

"That's good hearing! Why do you like it?"

"Well, I suppose it's because— well, because you are you!"

They both laughed.

"The Rimpoche wishes to see you, Sahib!" said a harsh voice in Tibetan. Samdad Chiemba's servant had come up to them, unnoticed. For a moment Gray wanted to swear. But reality won against romance.

"I've got to go and see this fellow Piers," he said. "He's an old friend of mine. I think you'd like him.... Excuse me, will you? Don't run away. I'll look for you here when I get back."

Striding past the long lines of deck-chairs— some of the passengers were reading by the brilliant moonlight— Gray hurried down to the main deck and swung himself up the iron ladder to the fo'c'sle, two rungs at a time.

Samdad Chiemba, dressed in his red lama's robes, was seated leaning against  a windlass, gazing pensively at the shimmering expanse of moonlit sea.

"Greeting, Chela!" he said gravely, saluting Gray.... "I have sent for you to speak of a secret matter. Sit near me and listen carefully.... When I was a novice, I read a prophecy in an ancient Chinese manuscript. So strange was it, that I took it to my Guru, who told me it would rule my destiny. I can never forget its wording, for he made me learn it by heart. It ran as follows:—

"These words are written by Hsui-Li-Chien, Astrologer and Master of Spirits. He who reads, if he be the Chosen One, shall through them find a Veiled World, and a People of Shadow ruled by a White Python and a woman. To them shall come a man greater than the White Python. In the day of his coming, the powers of the earth shall be loosed.... And if no child is to come forth from her womb, the Woman and her evil escort shall be destroyed, together with the world they inhabit, and all its riches and all its people. The heart of the Law shall be shut within linked mountains, even as the body of a warrior is shut within the links of his mail. And 333 shall watch over it―"

"Chela," interpolated Samdad Chiemba solemnly, "333 is the exact number of the brethren in Hlampo. Is it not strange?"

He resumed his reciting of the memorised prophecy.

"At the feet of the guardians shall lie a lake as beautiful as a peacock's tail, beneath the waters of which will dwell fire and the Evil Thing. A dead man shall speak to a ruler of 333, and the secret and the treasure beneath the lake shall be revealed to him, and to the Greater White Python...."

The lama paused. The cool swish of the waves as the ship cut knife edgewise through them seemed to Gray like the whispered comments of unseen listeners.

"Many, many years later, when I had become Abbot," thoughtfully resumed Samdad Chiemba, "one who was dead to the world did speak to me. And in this wise:— High above the monastery of Hlampo, in a cave in the rock face, dwelt a brother who had voluntarily immured himself until death should release him from the Wheel of Change. One small wicket only was there in the wall, through which he drew up food and water once every seven days. On a certain morning he forgot his oath and broke down the wall that shut him away from the world of the living, and, coming to the mouth of his cave, shouted down to us. We knew that he was possessed of a devil, but to such, one may sometimes listen with profit. 'I have seen a vision,' he cried, the wind bringing his voice to us gustily. 'The Evil coiled under the lake is about to raise its head! Let the Lord Abbot start before another sun rises, and go to a city of the Sahibs in a northern island, where another is gone to steal a golden key. That key he must get, or Hlampo will be destroyed! Thus was I, who was as one dead, bidden to come out and speak! If I have sinned, let me be pardoned'!"

"He fell three hundred feet, Chela," commented Samdad Chiemba, sadly. "A good brother and a faithful follower of The Way...."

"In obedience to that warning I came to London, and because of the protection of this talismanic prayer" (he tapped a silver cylinder suspended round his neck), "the evil power of Chorjieff was unable to harm me. So far, I have failed in my search for the papyrus!" He sighed.

"What made you fail?" asked Gray, gazing out to sea.

"I sinned, Chela. I waited three days before starting, whereas I should have left the day the warning came to me. It has been revealed to me, in my meditations, that having found you I must return. Success will come to me in Hlampo."

5

A Lama In Tibet

"IN THAT prophecy which you committed to memory," queried Gray, "Is there anything that particularly points to me as the one who should help you? What does it say?''

"Yea. There is much. For the present I have told you enough."

He fell silent for a few seconds. Then—

"I can see no farther into your future. Death, as I have said, threatens you. That I know. Of what is to happen to you and to the woman who is called Gynia, I repeat, I know nothing. Of one thing I am convinced, we are destined to work together for Chorjieff's defeat."

"How has he whom they call the Lame Devil become so powerful, Rimpoche?"

"How comes it that a rat fattens in a barn?" retorted the lama, wearily. "The common people are like sheep, Gray Sahib. The Lame Devil, as you call him, is a great master of magic. He can change his form as easily as he can change his garments."

"Have you ever met him?"

Somewhat to his surprise the lama seemed to welcome the question.

"Yes, in my meditations, many times. Also, once, in the Dalai Lama's Palace at Lhasa. That was when the Head of our Faith rejected his plan, and this accursed Chorjieff (he has a hundred other names, Chela) insulted the Living Buddha!"

"What plan?" asked Gray quietly.

"That the Chinese mandarins— who, he said, feared the English— should be driven out, and mandarins of a far vaster country should be asked to take their place!"

As he spoke a streak of silver light shot past Gray's throat, missing it by the fraction of an inch. Followed a dull thud against the taffrail.

Quivering in the wood was a long-bladed knife.

Gray swore. Leaping to his feet, he dashed down the ladder leading to the main deck shouting for a quartermaster....

The search for his assassin was in vain. He suspected the hunchback, but he might quite as usefully have suspected one of the ship's funnels.

Piers was still where he had left her, lying in her deck-chair. They smiled at each other. Gray passed some remark about the brilliance of the moonlight. He had decided to say no-thing about the knife-throwing incident.

"I don't know how much you like the friend you went to see, Colin," she said, drawing a filmy wrap about her small white shoulders, "but I certainly don't like his servant!"

"Why?" asked Gray, his own instinctive dislike for the hunchback deepening.

"Well, after you'd gone he sat under that boat over there and stared at me without moving! He only went away 10  minutes ago!"

Then came forgetfulness of everything  save their own two selves.

AND SO the days passed, and Calcutta  was reached.

Gray did not see Samdad Chiemba again before the Orlumba had docked. A vast crowd of natives, dressed in all colours of the rainbow, surrounded the flying-ground. Several hundred Europeans were gathered around a small blue and silver 'plane. In a few minutes Piers was due to start on her much-advertised Calcutta-Pekin solo flight. Dressed in her pilot's costume she seemed to Gray to be more attractive than  ever.

"I wish you weren't going on this stunt, Piers!" he said to her gloomily.

For a moment they were silent.

"You almost make me wish I weren't!" she told him in low tones. "Aren't you proud of yourself?"

"I didn't know there was any girl in the world who could make me care what she did!" retorted Gray. "I wonder when we'll meet again?"

Piers shrugged her small shoulders.

Colin longed to take her in his arms and kiss her. Piers would rather have liked it. But it couldn't be done.

Instead, lifting her wrist, she looked at him and kissed the mascot he had given her. It was a tiny black and white enamel spaniel on a thin threadlike gold chain. A desperate rush into Calcutta early that morning had enabled him to purchase it for her. Spaniels were her favourite dogs.

A young Air Force mechanic came up and touched his cap. "Ready, miss?"

"Well, it's good-bye at last, Colin!..." Lithely she swung herself into the cockpit.

A few minutes later the 'plane was a small speck in the sky.

COLIN GRAY and Samdad Chiemba— on the latter's stern insistence— parted company the same day.

When the time for the separation came it seemed to Gray that the lama was anxious and strained. Once again Gray suggested accompanying him. It was safer (he even urged that) for three to journey through the wild country that lay between them and Hlampo than for one. Actually he was disquieted at losing contact with an invaluable ally.

But Samdad Chiemba was inflexible. "Nay. You must travel alone, Chela," he said, looking gravely at Gray "At the monastery of Luntse you will receive a message from me."

"Shall I this time see your messenger?" questioned Gray, the flicker of a smile on his bronzed face.

"Yea," answered Samdad Chiemba, slowly. "This time you will see him! When he comes he will say, "A sick man needs you!"

The hunchback's pleasure on hearing the lama's decision was a curious setoff to the older man's evident reluctance to give it.

Pretending not to notice the deformed Mongol's malevolent satisfaction, Gray accompanied the pair as far as the suburbs of Calcutta. There, Samdad Chiemba halted. The moment of separation had come.

"Forget not to meditate each day at sunset, Chela! When you do that, if all be well, you shall hear and see my spirit! May the Master of Peace watch over you!"

He raised his hand in salutation, and they parted.

THE R.A.F. 'plane arranged for by Calcutta dropped Gray in the centre of a small plateau deep in the Himalayas, about a hundred miles from Luntse as the crow flies.

Dressed in lama's robes, which Samdad Chiemba had given him, he clambered out of the cockpit.

"Miss Bryan has signalled 'All's well' to our station at Gantok,' said the pilot, looking down at him. "We ought to get further news of her to-morrow.... Everything 'O.K.,' Gray?"

Gray waved his hand in farewell and sighed. To-morrow all the busy world would have news of her.

But he wouldn't!

A WEEK LATER the great Karakorum Mountains were towering about him like  the walls of a prison, cutting him off from the world of civilisation— perhaps forever. Somewhere beyond those icy barriers to the north-west were waiting for him his only two friends in all that danger-filled country. Two Orientals, both born and bred in the East. Samdad Chiemba, whom he knew to be an ascetic, whose human impulses and emotions were all but atrophied; and "K.B.," the Bengali secret service agent, whom he had never met.

The robes Samdad Chiemba had given him were the garnet-coloured robes of a Nyin-ma, devil-worshipping lama. Upon his head was the lappeted red cap of the order, his right arm being bare. In his hand was an eight-foot staff, the wood of which was of iron-like hardness. A rosary of 108 beads clicked as it dangled from his left hand. His head was clean-shaven. The crossed flap of the outer garment formed a capacious breast pocket, and contained his prayer-wheel and wooden drinking cup and begging bowl. He had had a real pocket lining sewn in to the left-hand flap of his robe for the safer keeping of papers.

At the top of a pass, kneeling down to drink at a tarn, he caught sight of his reflection in the still water.

He chuckled. Unless he were taken unawares no one would ever pierce his disguise.

From the point he had now reached he could see range after range of snow-capped mountains. Far below him lay a narrow, rapidly darkening valley, shut in by mountains covered with pine forests, here and there seamed with dazzling scars of snow. Down its centre— a silver thread in a purple robe— ran a foaming torrent, and one or two brownish-looking stone huts huddled under the shoulder of a low spur promised a night's lodging.

Tucking the skirts of his robe into his girdle, he began the steep descent, steadying himself with his staff, and leaping from rock to rock with a speed and judgment that testified to iron nerves and a sure eye.

Down, steadily down―

Suddenly the crack of a rifle sounded up the mountainside.

6

Danger

SPLINTERS FROM a nearby rock fell with a crisp, sharp sound. Instinctively Cray threw himself on his stomach. He peered cautiously round the base of the rock. A second report. This time the bullet smacked into the shale 10 yards away.

He wondered who the sniper could be. Obviously it was one of Chorjieff's men.

The realisation brought a low whistle. The secret service man in Sikkim had been right when he had told him that the Buriat's spy system was perfect. Well, the game had started at last!

Apart from the evident dangers of the track, Gray was anxious to get down to the valley before darkness fell. Heavy clouds were rolling up from the north, and it seemed likely that the day would close with a storm. But until the falling light made long-range sniping impossible he must remain where be was.

Lying there, scanning with keen eyes the mountainside from which the shots had come, his thoughts turned to Piers. When would he see her again? Something told him that they would meet, because they both wished it so much. A host of questions that he longed to ask her crowded his thoughts. As lovers have done through the ages, he cursed him-self for the chance he had missed of setting his mind at rest.

It was near sunset now. A wolf howled. At last Colin stood up and stretched him-self luxuriously.

Lit by the last flush of the afterglow, the snow-capped peaks, seemingly more aloof and majestic even than before, stood out clearcut and faintly pink against a slowly darkened band of amber sky. And a few seconds later a sullen, muttering rumble of thunder followed.

"Well, my sneaking enemy, whoever you may be," said Gray under his breath, "I've got to get down before nightfall, so here goes!"

IT WAS WELL after nightfall when he reached level going.

Heavy raindrops, the precursors of the coming storm, caused him to break into a run toward a caravanserai built of shale blocks and mud, which he could make out in the centre of an open space. Pushing open the door, he entered.

The stifling atmosphere of the long, low room was heavy with acrid exhalations from animals, cooking-pots, and unwashed humanity. Squatting on a raised platform some three feet high, which projected from the wall like a wide ledge, were a dozen or so travellers— evidently the members of a Sikkim-bound caravan. In one corner was squatting, cross-legged, a stout yellow-hat lama, his face hidden in shadow.

Everybody seemed to be talking and spitting with concentrated energy. The occasional bleating of a goat tethered to the uprights of the platform sounded almost like a protest.

In the centre of the hut stood a steaming cauldron on a circular base of mud and stones, which had live "fire-holes" in it for the warming of the room. The Tartar owner of the inn indicated a vacant corner of the raised platform.

"Will the Holy One be pleased to occupy it?" he asked, obsequiously.

At first Gray had thought of going to sit by the bespectacled lama, in the hope of being able to glean from him some bit of news about Chorjieff, but happening to look unexpectedly towards him, he was almost sure that he saw the other lama lower his eyes. Evidently he did not want to talk.

Taking out from the breast of his robe his begging bowl and drinking cup, Gray placed them in front of him, and folding his hands in his lap sat motionless and cross-legged, with downcast eyes. He knew that soon food would be put into the bowl and tea into his drinking cup, and a few minutes later the cup was filled with salty chocolate-coloured brick tea, oily with butter, and poured out from a huge copper teapot. Almost immediately afterwards some soup containing several uninviting-looking lumps of fat and a few shreds of goat flesh splashed into the bowl.

From under his drooped lids Gray could see the feet of the Tartar innkeeper, who was patiently awaiting his blessing.

"Eternal bliss be yours, Khan!" muttered Gray; and began to eat.

An altercation had started between two of the travellers. It seemed a one-sided sort of a quarrel, for one of the disputants seemed anxious to take flight. But the other would have none of it.

Clambering down from the raised platform, he shrieked out a string of oaths at the top of his raucous voice, each volley of abuse producing a crescendo clamour from the unwashed audience.

Then a knife flashed. The reluctant one, as he backed away, fell.

In the subsequent pandemonium, everybody except Gray and the stout lama leaped to the floor, shouting loudly and pressing round the fallen man.

Gray knew that if he could manage to finish his unsavoury meal before the squabble ended, he would be able to wrap his head in his patched outer robe and, pretending to be asleep, avoid having to answer possibly awkward questions about himself.

Suddenly, above Babel, rose the strident tones of the landlord.

"Is there an amchi (physician) here?" he bawled.

The caravan man seemed to be at the point of death. The murder of a guest under his roof would give a bad name to his caravanserai.

"I am an amchi! Make way!" The speaker was the yellow-hat monk, who was now wearing spectacles.

Gray looked intently at him. This man tallied exactly with the description of K.B. furnished by the secret service man in Sikkim. On the other hand, according to such calculations as Gray had been able to work out, he and the Bengali should not have met for something like another week. Evidently either his calculations were all wrong, or something had happened, and K.B. had come south to meet him.

He slipped to the ground and parted the crowd as a man pushes aside the packages in a bran pie.

"I, too, am a healer," he said in his vibrant bass.

The bespectacled monk glanced up sharply.

"The knife has reached the heart," he said. "Kneel and see, brother!"

Gray, as he knelt down, thought he saw the yellow-hat lama take a bloodstained, dirty piece of paper from inside the man's shirt, but he was not sure. It might equally well have been a piece of rag.

The right side of the man's body was deluged with the blood welling from an obviously fatal wound.

"He will not recover," said Gray, shaking his head.

"Therefore I will inscribe upon him a magical sign, that his passing may be easy," said the fat lama. "See!"

Outside Gray heard the muffled beat of galloping hoofs as the murderer made good his escape.

A pudgy reddened forefinger was moving quickly over the right side of that heaving brown chest.

Inside a glistening scarlet pentagram were traced the European letters "K.B."

K.B. caught the Englishman's glance of recognition, and with a fleeting gesture brushed a finger across his lips, making the action appear as if he were carrying out some magical incantation with a weaving of hands.

Gray understood. Rising to his feet he made an apparently perfunctory inquiry.

"I take the Lhasa road at dawn," returned Yellow-hat casually.

With a swift movement he effaced the revealing letters, wiped his hands on his robe, and walked away.

Long before dawn Gray was awake. While he was making tea K.B. joined him. Neither man spoke.

Returning their drinking cups to the bosoms of their robes and muttering a prayer of thanks for the benefit of possible listeners, the two rose and crossed to the door, K.B. rousing by a kick in the ribs as he passed him a young Tartar snoring nearby.

The youth scrambled to his feet, and seizing two heavy wicker baskets slung them across one shoulder, and followed the two lamas into the pine-scented morning air.

The sky was still spangled with stars and a chill breeze was blowing down from the pass.

Yet it almost seemed as if the trio's departure had been observed, for as the door shut softly behind them a red-legged chikor partridge uttered its call high up the mountainside, and as if in answer to it came the long-drawn howl of a wolf.

Not until they had covered a mile or more was a word exchanged. The only sounds to be heard were the sloppy grinding of shale under their feet and the slow moving hoofs of the yak, punctuated by the almost metallic impact or Gray's heavy staff as he struck it on rock or ground as he strode along.

The young Tartar left a good quarter of a mile behind, Gray gave a secret signal.

It was correctly answered.

"K.B.?" he asked, smilingly.

The Bengali Babu's eyes twinkled. He was short and ambled.

"Yes. Indubitably it is Mister Gray!"

"How did you know me last night?" asked Gray curiously, glad to know they had at last met.

K.B. stuck pudgy thumbs into an ample girdle.

"Sir, a full description and photograph of Your Honour reached me several weeks ago. (By the way, Mister Gray, when next we halt we shall exchange specimens of handwriting― block-letter and ordinary! It may prove useful!) Again, sir, no real lama would have omitted audibly to bless the inmates of that house on entering it, it being late for a traveller to arrive!" He took a quick look at Gray, "What name have you chosen?"

"If I have to use a Tibetan name, it'll be 'Tsong,' " smiled Gray.

7: Magnetic Eyes

BRIEFLY COLIN RELATED the history of the Oriental murders, and the papyrus and the underground World of Shadow. As he did so, he occasionally glanced down at his rotund companion.

For a while K.B. was silent.

"Trouble is brewing, Mister Gray," he said suddenly, in his clipped English, with its queer sing-song intonation. "Hlampo, I may say, has for some time been the axis of my investigations— which, although not subterranean, have been thorough! You will work with Reverend Abbot, sir?"

"Yes," answered Gray, somehow disliking the question.

Like most Bengali Babus, K.B. loved to use English slang, and the longest possible words. He never missed an opportunity of bringing in a Latin tag.

"He is, they say, much too strict a master," went on the Bengali. "I have heard that Chorjieff, also, is a too strict master for the Mongol Tartars, who, sub rosa, want their own prince, Timor Khan, to lead them!"

"Then why doesn't he lead them?" asked Gray.

"Because," said K.B. gravely, "he has cataract, and is, therefore, blind!"

"What's the news about Chorjieff?" asked Gray.

The Bengali outlined the situation quaintly but clearly.

"He has made much progress, sir! His army is daily preponderating. He has persuaded the Khans that there is much gold to be found in Tibet. But he has other plans, chiefly dealing with the invasion of India. About these I shall shortly learn.... That reminds me! I have to hand over to you, Mister Gray, a document!"

K.B. fumbled in his yellow robes, and produced the bloodstained piece of paper which Gray had noticed him take from the murdered man's shirt in the caravanserai.

"It is somewhat remarkable," said the Babu, unfolding it "that you should have had experience with the legend of the papyrus through Samdad Chiemba, and that then I should give you this! Evidently, the Abbot is a most learned man. This plan, Mister Gray, has connection with the subterranean matters which your Honour told me of. I refer to certain caves sub aquam."

"How did the man come to have it?" queried Gray, taking it from him.

The Babu scratched his head thoughtfully.

"It should have cost me one hundred rupees," he said ruefully. "I had a rendezvous with that man. He was one of my spies. Not quite an A1 at Lloyd's man, but useful. I sent him to Chorjieff's camp. There he found out that Chorjieff had a papyrus, or some such document. This paper is doubtless a copy of one portion of it. I assume that the late victim of Duty Done abstracted it from Mister Chorjieff, and that Mister Chorjieff, discovering the said theft, sent the man who escaped from the caravanserai to kill him and get it back.... I shall remit to his family by money order!"

"Have you had much difficulty in keeping in touch with Chorjieff's movements?"

The Babu fingered his double chin.

"I have followed Chorjieff Khan from Banjan to Kanla, only this week, for approximately about one hundred and two most devilish miles. As he was riding a Turkoman horse he could rest at nights. I being on yak was unable to stop for the nights. I am not a quadruped man, sir. Speaking, however, as a surveyor trained in Darjeeling with honours— not to mention the medico-surgical degree of Calcutta, Mister Gray— a straight line drawn from Banjan to Kanla and prolonged, would pass through Hlampo, representing exactly one day's journey from Kanla. Which please note."

"I understand."

"Therefore," continued K.B., "suspecting from such smoke the existence of a considerable fire, I made my deductions. They are, sir, that because beyond Hlampo there are only most fearful mountains, Hlampo must be of paramount importance to our friend that he should go there! That being so, what in Hlampo could interest him? Nothing, except the monastery, or what may lie beneath it! Therefore, Q.E.D., he and Reverend Samdad will most certainly one day meet."

"What happened at Kanla?" demanded Gray, studying the Bengali's placid face.

"Sir, owing to obstreperosity on the part of my yak, I most unwillingly dismounted."

"And fell asleep, eh?"

K.B. sighed.

"Yess. Only for two hours, exactlee, Mister Gray! But it was too long! When I awoke, our friend had gone. Immediately I sent the brother of my servant to follow him. At any moment he may return with news."

"If Chorjieff is making for Hlampo— and evidently he is— what is his reason?" Gray stopped suddenly, a great light had dawned in his mind. Samdad Chiemba was right! The prophecy which Chorjieff had was the same as that which the Abbot had discovered so many years before, and memorised!

He told K.B. his thought. The Bengali acquiesced.

"Since it is so, we must countermine! That is as plain as the nose on my face!"

"Countermine?" interrogated Gray.

"One of us must become inter amicos with him, Mister Gray!"

"And then?"

"And then, sir, we shall kidnap him!" Gray's eyes twinkled.

The sheer audacity of the plan and its succinct enunciation by this pudgy little man— one of a people by Nature timid— appealed to him. Not even the smallest village through which Gray had passed during the past, two weeks, when he urged its inhabitants to be ready to "rise and drive back the army of the Lame Devil when the time comes," but had responded by retorting that another lama "one wearing windows before his eyes," had already urged them.

He dropped a hand upon his companion's arm.

K.B., who had been watching a mountain hare, jumped as if a snake had bitten him.

"Babu-jee," said Gray, quietly, still speaking in English. "What do you think would happen to a Miss-Sahib who was flying alone... in an aeroplane... over the Pamirs, to Pekin— if she were forced down— say in this part of the world?"

"Sir," said the little Bengali gravely, "verbum sapientis! I would not like that she should be one of my family!"

Gray had expected an answer to that effect. He had asked the question just to be able to talk about Piers. As he looked up at the sheer, jagged and splintered crestline, coated in ice and snow, his heart sank.

"In twenty-four hours we shall reach the habitat of a holee friend of mine, a lama," said K.B., looking at Gray with shrewd eyes. "There I shall certainlee hear when Mister Chorjieff intends to invade Tibet with his raging army of Mongols, Tartars, and Buriats."

One important thing K.B. had told him; he had a close friend in the gompa librarian at Luntse: "A man who is" (the Babu had said) "a benevolent, harmless, and most industrious spider, if I may say so. Nothing happens in the Tibetan web that at once he does not know of it."

Late the following afternoon they had reached one of those small and unbelievably beautiful valleys to be found in certain parts of Tibet. At one end of the valley was a cave, outside which were the still-smoking ashes of a wood fire.

As they approached it, K.B. handed the yak's nose rope to Gray.

"I will go and inform," he said. Having taken two paces, he turned. "One last sapientis verbum! Hereafter we comport as holy lamas, speaking only Tibetan!" And Gray, understanding, nodded.

An aged and bent yellow-robed lama, upon whose million-wrinkled face rested the dignity of inward peace, greeted "lama Tsong."

The yak tethered, K.B. proceeded to build up the fire and make tea, while Gray rolled flat cakes of tsamba flour on a smooth stone, and set them to bake. The old recluse seemed to be lost in meditation.

That afternoon, Gray walked alone into the forest, and coming to a grassy knoll, sat down and clasped his hands about his knees. He seemed to sense the presence of Samdad Chiemba. Two small points of light glimmering in a patch of dark shadow slowly became the glittering magnetic eyes of the Abbot.

Nearer, and yet nearer they came.

"Greeting, Chela," said faraway tones he knew well. "The Lord of Death, Sinje Gyalbo, is standing near to you! ... He who is in charge of the Holy Books in Luntse gompa will seek to betray you. Therefore, between him and me shall be a striving of unseen force against unseen force. And he shall die! He shall fail to harm you, even as he has thrice failed to steal from the Dalai Lama the plans I drew up for the overthrowing of him we know as 'the Lame Devil.' Search diligently, therefore, in the cell of the Keeper of the Books. Counting nine pigeon holes from the left-hand corner, and eleven up, bring to me the document written by Chorjieff which you will find there. It says where the gold of the Prophecy is concealed. When my messenger comes, travel with all speed... . She who is called Gynia, the Consort of the Serpent." ... The voice faded in to the rustling of the leaves overhead.

"Brother!" called out K-B.'s voice. "We start for Luntse at once! Urgent news has come!"

8

Chorjieff Strikes

WITH A mental jolt, almost painful in its intensity, Gray came back to the world of reality as a man awakened from a sound sleep comes back to reality at the ringing of a telephone bell. For a few moments, he neither moved nor replied. He was watching a pair of phosphorescent green eyes in the undergrowth some twenty yards away. They were the eyes of wolf, he thought. As he spoke, they vanished.

"I'm ready! ... Just finished my daily meditation ... A short spell of concentration helps me to fix my thoughts, I find! Ever tried it?"

The Bengali shook his head vigorously. Gray looked at him sharply. In future he would not tell K.B. what Samdad Chiemba might telepathically say to him. Colin said:

"You know the Librarian of Luntse gompa well, don't you?"

"Yess. He is my good friend. Why so?"

"I want to ask him certain questions about the papyrus— and as soon as possible," he said, rising to his feet.

"Most certainlee he will answer you! He is most knowledgeable man. I shall arrange it!" He broke off and looked around him. "I have news," he said in low tones. "Most abominably true news!" He paused.

Somebody was coming towards them.

Hurriedly the Babu took his prayer wheel from the bosom of his robe and began to twirl it busily.

"Come, lama Tsong," he droned in Tibetan. "Let us go and join our Guru in evening prayer!"

But the footsteps proved to be those of the old recluse.

"Holy Ones," said the Ancient, deprecatingly, as he came towards them, "your servant tells me that you are going away! Is it true?"

"It is true, Guru Rimpoche," answered K.B., thankfully putting away his prayer wheel.

"Then ye will be four, when ye leave!" responded the old man.

"How four, Reverend Teacher? Count you my yak as a man?" asked K.B. smiling.

The old lama shook his head. "Nay, son, I count not a yak as a man! Though, as we know, within an animal may be imprisoned a human soul." He sighed. "Nay, I said ye will be four, because I go with ye."

The Bengali looked at him in astonishment.

Gray frowned.

"I have been called!" went on the old man garrulously. "A voice spoke to me in my meditations. It said: 'Two will lead thee to a stream, on the other side of which is a dwelling of peace', ... Mayhap it is Tharpa, the Supreme Liberation, to which ye are to lead me! ... Yea, I go with ye!" The decision was firm. "One day," he murmured, looking fixedly at Gray, "I will write down for you, Big Lama, that which is written in a certain verse of the Dhammapada. Then you will understand!"

Argue with him as they would, he stubbornly refused to remain in his valley.

As the moon rose, four men started for Luntse. One of them was intoning in cracked tones a quavering prayer to Sunje Gyalbo, the Lord of Death.

K.B. was able to give Gray much valuable information concerning the people and the country they were passing through. For Samdad Chiemba he had an evident respect. The Abbot, he said, was in great fear lest the lamas of Hlampo should be infected by the Chorjieff faction's anti-Buddhist propaganda.

The party now only numbered three, K.B.'s servant having again been sent ahead at dawn, with a message to the Great Master of the Monastery.

"Remember," K.B. had said, settling his spectacles on his nose, so as to get a better view of the lad, "Remember! If anyone in Luntse asks you where your Master is or whether you have met a Very Big Lama, you will answer— what will you answer?"

The sturdy young peasant smiled.

"That I have come from the very highest hills, and have not met even a little lama — let alone a big one!"

K.B. smiled and patted the youngster's shoulder.

"Good!" he said. "In a few days you shall have leave to visit your home. Go!"

The most trusted of his spies bent and touched the ground at his feet, and, rising, ran quickly down the hillside.

LUNTSE proved to be a biggish, walled town. On a low hill in the centre of it stood the lamasery, a collection of buildings clustered round a big central building, which was surmounted by a loop-holed, quadrate tower, with sloping walls. This gompa housed something like two thousand lamas, K.B. said.

About half a mile this side of the heavy wooden gates leading into the town, a funeral procession approached them at a dogtrot, and, with the jerky motions of its four carriers, the bamboo bier bumped up and down unpleasantly.

"Om Mane Padme Hum! ("Hail, O Holy Jewel in the Lotus Flower"!) droned the Ancient turning away his head. "All life is weariness! May he be reborn a man!"

As the bier passed the trio. K.B. and Gray looked at each other quickly. The bloodstained face of the corpse was the face of K.B.'s servant.

Betraying no sign of interest, Gray and K.B. passed on. The little Bengali was pale to the lips.

The market-place reached, a halt was called.

"Wait here!" said K.B. a trifle shakily, "I go to arrange for lodgings."

Gray looked round him, his folded arms resting on the top of the yak's load. He was thinking of Piers and wondering how long it would take him to polish off Chorjieff and find her. The Ancient, tired out after the hurried march, was sitting on a small block of stone, his eyes closed, telling his beads. Now and again the yak would lightly nuzzle the old man's neck, but he seemed not to notice it.

On all four sides of the market-place were poor-looking mud-hovel shops, mostly those of grain and butter-sellers, or purveyors of hot tea, soups, and cooked foods. Before one of them was gathered a little knot of people, who, from the way they kept looking over their shoulders, seemed to be expecting someone.

A powerfully built "Black-hat" naljorpa (sorcerer) halted a few yards from Gray and stared at him insolently. He was dressed in rags.

Around his lean waist was an open apron of carved human bones. On his head was a broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned black hat, its apex surmounted by a miniature human skull, from which fluttered in the wind five narrow ribbons of the five sacred colours— red, green, white, blue, and yellow. He seemed to be under the influence of some violent drug. Hashish, Gray suspected.

"I am a servant of Tagmar, the red Tiger Devil!" he shouted. "I match my magic against all other magics!" he bawled, looking at Gray. "Can your magic turn a dagger's point, thou mountain?"

From out of his rags flashed a dagger with a triangular blade.

With lightning quickness the Englishman's left hand smacked down on to the sorcerer's wrist, closing round it like a vice, and crushing the skin and bone until they were in the danger of cracking.  For a second neither man moved. Gray suddenly turned his vice-like grip sharply downwards.

The naljorpa sank to his knees with a howl of agony.

"How like you the magic of my left hand, naljorpa!" said Gray quietly, releasing him.

"May you be reborn a louse!" shouted the naljorpa. "May the ten Tanma she devils rend you limb from limb!"

At that moment there came a sound of the cracking of heavy whips. A little procession consisting of six stalwart monks, armed with heavy hide whips, their foreheads and arms barred with black stripes, were coming from the direction of the lamasery. Behind them stalked, sedately, a huge, grim-looking lama.

As unhurriedly as Fate, the procession made its way to the hovel before which Gray had noticed the small crowd, which had now melted away.

There, the big lama gave an order— Gray could hear his bass tones clearly in the stillness which had fallen over the market-place— and in a few seconds there came out from the mean-looking little shop the cowering figure of the butter seller.

"We hear that thou hast used false weights!" boomed the provost lama. "Is it true?"

A high-pitched squeal, eloquent of frantic denial and abject terror rang out.

The Gekhor lama gave another order. Six heavy hide whips rose, and whistling, fell.

"Om Mane Padme Hum!" moaned the Ancient, hearing the man's shrieks.

When Gray looked for the black-hat sorcerer he was not to be seen.

On the ground where he had been standing, lay something, the sight of which caused Gray's heart to miss a beat.

Bending, he picked it up, blowing the dust from it. It was a tiny black-and-white enamel spaniel. To the ring in its back were attached two links of a thin, almost thread-like gold chain.

9

The Enamelled Mascot

WHILE THESE THINGS were happening, K.B. was speaking with the Guest Master of the gompa, a gaunt and sallow lame man, with whom he had made friends by lending him some drugs during a previous visit to the monastery.

"It were better that ye stay outside the gompa," the lame lama was saying. "Did not your servant give you my message?"

"My servant... has told me nothing!" answered K.B. grimly.

"Then I will tell you," said the Guest Master. "Sickness and death are the guests in this monastery!"

"What is the sickness?" asked K.B. "A few weeks ago ye were all well!"

"A powerful devil has been angered," answered the Guest Master uneasily. "I like not to talk of such things. It is true I can raise the dead— if it be within three days of death," he said quietly. "But the soul of the Living Buddha I could not recall. My spells cannot affect souls as high as his!"

"Marvellous, indeed, are your powers!" lauded K.B. "Yet one of the lamas travelling with me has an even stranger power. At will, he can make the voices of the Dead come forth from a box. And he can bring music from Devaloka, the fifth Heaven. He will tell you how to do that Magic— after he has rested awhile in the cell you will give him."

The lame lama muttered under his breath.

"I will arrange it," he said, half grudgingly. "Think you this Talker with the Dead will impart to me such powers— tonight?"

"Perhaps, provided I ask him! ... Tell me, brother, walks a Lame Devil through the land these days?"

The sallow lama looked about him warily.

"News has come," he said, dropping his voice, "that an army is mustering!"

K.B. nodded. How many more times was he to hear that piece of news. Every man in Tibet knew it by now.

"What says Lhasa to that?" he probed.

The Guest Master sank his voice still lower.

"It is said that Lhasa has asked for Indian troops to drive out Chorjieff.... What voices can the big lama call from―"

But K.B. had gone.

THE BENGALI did not at once return to the market-place. Hurrying down a labyrinth of corridors, he knocked on the door of a cell near the temple.

The door was opened by an elderly, deep-chested Mongol-Tartar, whose eyes were covered by a surgical bandage.

He was armed, and though he could not see, his right hand gripped the hilt of his sword as he greeted the Bengali. His clothes, dignified carriage, and measured speech, indicated one accustomed to command.

"Greeting, O Lord of the Arrow, Timor Khan!" said K.B. glancing keenly at the bandage. "How goes it with you?" As he spoke he looked anxiously towards a low, wooden bed, on which was lying the emaciated figure of a man.

The Mongol-Tartar smiled grimly.

"It goes with me, physician, as quickly as a blind cat goes at night, having smelled a rat!"

"Art thou easier, brother?" asked K.B., going over to the sick man and taking his wrist.

There was no answer.

The Bengali pursed his fat lips. The Keeper of the Books had sunk into a coma. His heart might stop at any moment.

The Mongol-Tartar, who had felt his way over to the bed, touched K.B.'s shoulder imperiously.

"Cannot this thing be taken away?" he demanded, stabbing the bandage with his right forefinger at a spot between his eyes. "There is no longer any pain!"

K.B. glanced at the man on whom he had performed an operation for cataract.

"In an hour's time I will return and take off the bandages, and you shall see again— if the Divine Healer be willing!" Gently he drew down the sleeve of the librarian's robe.

"Since you will not allow me to have even one of my servants with me, send some friends of yours who will talk to me! I am not used to sitting with a sick man who never speaks," grumbled Timor Khan.

K.B. meditated for a moment. He had, as he had told Gray, studied deeply the brain. He had even written a brilliant thesis on "Hypnotism, and Its Post-Trance Effects"; and knew, well, its benefits and dangers. From what Gray had told him, the Babu was convinced that Samdad Chiemba— who evidently admired and was fond of Gray— could read Gray's mind. If that were so, the fewer gravely important things K.B. told this Sahib the better. It would, for example, perhaps at present be dangerous to tell him about Timor Khan. Samdad Chiemba was all right, of course; but K.B. knew the lamas' love of gossip; and this secret must be kept.

"Today I shall bring hither a young lama to speak with the Keeper of the Books— if he be still alive. Should you be present when I bring him, remember this, Timor Khan, Prince of the Mongol Tartars: You are no prince, but a wealthy merchant who has given many great gifts to this gompa, and whose eyes I have healed at the request of the Living Buddha... . If the Gekhor lama returns before I do, tell him these things."

"When I again lead my people, Physician, great shall be your reward! ... I will remember to tell the Gekhor lama these things," answered Timor. "Also, what I have sworn to do shall be done— and more!"

"It is well! Peace be with you!" K.B. went out.

His plan was simple. He had restored the sight of the deposed chief of the Mongol-Tartars. The price was to be the evacuation of Tibet and the imprisonment of Chorjieff, directly Timor had reassumed command of his army. And as sure as the coming of the dawn, that price would be paid!

The little Bengali chuckled to himself as he descended the sloping way leading to the market place.

He found Gray, tense and haggard, striding round and round the yak and the now slumbering Ancient, in an endless circle. The passers-by— chiefly women and lamas— thought his ceaseless movement to be merely the carrying out of an "Act of Merit," such as is performed by the many pilgrims who progress on their bellies, caterpillar-wise, over the miles of the rocky Lingkor road encircling the holy city of Lhasa— some of them journeying, in this exhausting manner, to shrines hundreds of miles distant.

"Thank God you've come back, K.B.!" muttered Gray, suddenly halting and holding out his hand with a glad smile.

The Bengali looked at him warily. It was not usual for lamas to be effusively glad to see one another. Already one or two curious passers-by had stopped to gaze at them.

"What disturbs the peace of your mind. Rimpoche?" he asked gravely. "Let us go to the gompa. We will talk there."

Almost fiercely Gray thrust towards him the enamelled mascot.

Held between his big finger and thumb, it looked absurdly small and unimportant.

10

The Living Buddha

K.B. FROWNED. Was his colleague going to have a mental breakdown, he wondered.

Walking towards the gompa, Gray told K.B. about Piers. As far as he could see, he said, one of three things had happened to her. She had either been killed, found by friendly Hill people, or fallen into the hands of Chorjieff's gang. What did K.B. think?

K.B. thought a lot. But he said little. He was sympathetic, but definite. Carefully avoiding any mention of a fourth possibility that she might be badly injured and not have been discovered at all— he warmly acquiesced that this accident (if there had been one) was an added reason for speeding-up the getting to grips with Chorjieff.

"I shall, however, ask that the Grand Lama shall this afternoon receive us in audience," he said. "If he does, when I have spoken to him he will order that the country around here be searched for a 'plane... and its passenger...  Of course," he went on, with a hurried effusiveness that was meant to be comforting, "it is just upon the cards that the lady is safe as a bell, having dropped a small piece of mascot from considerable altitude!"

"Yes, by Jove— that's right!" assented Gray heartily. "Stupid of me not to have thought of it. K.B., you're a tower of strength!"

"On the other hand," pursued K.B. with a sudden slumping into judicial gravity, "it may be most decidedly dam' difficult for us if she is safe! I mean, owing to what I shall tell His Honour the Grand Lama about her— as you shall see!"

THE GRAND LAMA accorded the audience. That afternoon they were bidden to his presence.

The Living Buddha of Luntse  proved to be a delicate-looking youth of under twenty, sitting cross-legged on a gilt cushion-covered dais about four feet high supported on four carved and gilded lions.

The three customary prostrations having, been duly performed on the highly polished floor— with some little difficulty in the case of the Ancient— the trio advanced.

"What seek you of Us?" the Grand Lama asked, motioning them to be seated.

The Bengali genuflected, raised his joined palms to his forehead, and, having assumed a cross-legged position, began his petition.

Adroit inquiries had revealed the fact that the Living Buddha had only a few days before denounced Chorjieff and his faction— to the Bengali's way of thinking, an excellent omen.

"Many years ago," began K.B., half chanting his words and swaying his body gently, "your Holiness knows that a powerful guardian deity of Tibet, the great goddess Pahlden-lhamo, was reincarnated in the person of a Queen of England named Victoria"— an actual belief among the Tibetans.

"It is well known," answered the Great Lama. He seemed to be in pain and was clasping and unclasping his hands about his calf-muscles as if suffering from cramp.

"Judge, then, how infinitely great is my happiness," went on K.B., with real fervour and watching him keenly, "to be the first to bring Your Blessedness the tidings of another reincarnation of the goddess!"

"From whom got you this news?" demanded the Living Buddha incredulously. "We know nothing of it!"

"It came to me from the holy Guru of Chomolo," answered K.B., throwing into his tones all the awe he was capable of simulating. He knew how much the Tibetans venerated the lonely ascetic who lived on Mount Chomolo who deigned to speak to his enthralled worshippers only once a year, on the birthday of the Gautama Buddha. Even then he only gave them his blessing and sent them about their business.

K.B. (as he had told Gray) had a trusted ally living half-way up Chomolo. This was a brother Bengali disguised as a fakir, who heliographed messages for him to a second ally on another mountain-top 60 miles away; and so linked up with India, via Sikkim.

"Since you heard it from him, it is surely true!" commented the Grand Lama, bowing his head reverently. "In whose body has the goddess deigned to reincarnate this time?"

"In that of another Inglis woman. She is on her way to visit Lhasa!" answered K.B., with an under-glance at the sudden whiteness of Gray's knuckles.

"Had we been informed before, we should have sent a deputation of lamas to welcome her!" said the Grand Lama, disappointedly. "Great, indeed, would have been the honour for this poor gompa. What place is the Divine One blessing with her presence?"

"How beautiful is the fatherliness of our Living Buddha's heart!" enthused K.B., warming up to his subject. "That such a deputation should at once be sent is precisely the request which I have come to lay before you! The Holy One on Chomolo says that the goddess is displeased because no lamas and helpers went out to bring her into your holy presence. The Inglis people sent her reincarnated spirit hither in a flying-machine. But because of her displeasure at the neglect shown to her she has hidden herself in the mountains and cannot be found!"

"We shall send search parties, who will ask pardon of her and bring her safely to us!"

"May they be sent today, Holiness?... The Chambal people— those dreaded robber bands— may seek to steal her!"

"It shall be done— today.... Have ye heard aught of a plan (hatched, it is said, by these Inglis people) to annex Tibet?" He turned his head toward the Gekhor Lama. "Is there not such a rumour?"

"Yea, Holy One," was the rumbling response. "Even now one of their spies is said to be nearing Luntse!" The Provost Lama folded his bare arms over a chest very little smaller than Gray's, and gazed intently at K.B.

"According to certain advisers, the Inglis would work ill on our people!" commented the Grand Lama to Gray, whose bearing and great stature had attracted his attention. "Yet what can be expected of a people which— so it is said— dare not leave the sea, but tremble and die like fish directly they touch land!"

"The ceremonial tea has been brought, Bestower of Blessings," grumbled the Gekhor Lama. "Have I leave to go to carry out certain work?"

"You have leave.... Order that search be made for this reincarnation of the blessed goddess Pahlden-lhamo...We will extend to the Inglis woman the welcome accorded to the Tashi Lama!"

K.B. took a sip of the delicately perfumed tea which an attendant lama had poured into his bowl.

At once the Bengali rendered unobtrusively into the palm of his half-closed hand the minute quantity he had sipped. Placing a hand on Gray's arm, he stopped the cup half-way to his lips, and knocked over the Ancient's cup as it stood on the polished floor beside him.

A sudden spasm of pain crossed the pale face of the Living Buddha.

K.B. half-rose; but a sign from the dais bade him remain seated.

"It is nothing!" The words were groaned more than spoken.

K.B. glanced at Gray. The spiritual ruler of Luntse was exhibiting unmistakable signs of arsenical poisoning.

"Grand Lama," he said, "I am an amchi, therefore may I be pardoned! Tea is not good for your illness! And since you may not drink tea we will not drink it! Drink it not, brothers!" he added, turning a meaning glance upon Gray and the Ancient.

The hollow eyes of the young Buddha looked at him anxiously.

"It is strange," he said. "After each taking of tea I am in pain. I consulted our Guest Master, who, as ye know, is also our Master of Magic, but he can do nothing save offer Holy Baling cakes to the devils.... What, then, is good for us?"

K.B. descanted on the virtues of raw eggs, oil, and milk....

The great bell of the monastery had begun to boom when the Gekhor Lama re-entered the audience chamber. It was time for the evening service, he said. The Living Buddha sighed and picked up a thin gold wand with which he touched lightly the heads of the trio in token of his potent blessing.

"Our Gekhor will take you to the temple, that ye may sit near to us!" he said, with a ghostly smile. "Your advice shall be remembered, amchi! May the holy Manjushri increase your already great knowledge!"

As the door of the audience chamber closed behind them the Gekhor Lama took K.B. aside— the two having walked ahead of Gray.

"Immediately the sun has set," he said, "meet me in the monastery garden, have news to impart to you that these walls must not hear!"

11

Chorjieff Speaks

SHEER ROCKY bastions shooting up almost perpendicularly three thousand feet or more, without a tree on their sides; a scorpion-shaped lake of a grayish green, the tip of the tail joining a river flowing through a gorge; a four-thousand foot gorge, not more than thirty feet wide at ground level and less than fifty at its top; an expanse of flat, stony plain dotted with brown tents and hundreds of animals― sturdy ponies and two-humped camels; everywhere, fur-capped or turbaned, bow-legged Mongolians and Buriats, bristling with weapons— such was the appearance of the Valley of Peace on the day that K.B. received word about the gathering there of an army.

Clustering round the spacious square tent of Chorjieff, with its four red pennants fluttering from four spears lashed to its corners, were the bivouacs of the advance guard of his army.

From the top of a small mound near the head of the lake sounded the thin, harsh blast of a jangling trumpet. Chorjieff was coming.

A small body of horsemen, moving at a hand gallop from the mouth of the gorge towards the mound, now made its appearance. The Lame Devil was accompanied by a group of Khans and a handful of orderlies.

Beaching the mound, Chorjieff flung the reins to a soldier who, quicker than his commander, had slipped from his horse to take them from him.

Slowly, and with obvious difficulty, the Lame Devil limped his way up to the summit of the mound, where was standing the sounder of the trumpet— the wild figure of his ame damnee, the Black-hat sorcerer, the only human being (it was said) who was in his confidence.

A second time the latter sounded a blast on his human thigh bone trumpet.

Three thousand men began slowly to move towards the mound— a wide, undulating compactness resembling a mass of dun-coloured ants.

The appearance of their hated and self-constituted leader, Ivan Chorjieff, was well calculated to inspire fear in a simple and credulous people. The grimness of this dark-skinned man was Satanic. From under a heavy cap of black yak fur a mass of greasy black hair hung down stragglingly. On his left shoulder was slung a modern rifle fitted with telescopic sights, and two leather bandoliers crammed with cartridge clips formed a brown St. Andrew's cross on his back and chest.

An expectant murmur, not unlike the sound of a distant, angry sea, gradually died away.

Not too contented was this advance guard of Buriats and Mongol-Tartars! A rumour had recently been started that Chorjieff had offended India, which great country intended to retaliate by sending an army bigger than the world had ever seen to burn their homes and carry away their families into captivity. Was it true?

Chorjieff's voice, harsh and resonant, rang through the still valley, the mighty sounding-board of its rocky walls, throwing back in multiple volume every syllable.

"Men of Mongol-Tartary!" he shouted. "In less than three days' time ye shall be led to the conquering of Bhot (Tibet)! A day's march away lie fabulous riches and fat lands! These shall be yours! I wait but the coming of as many again of ye as are here; then ye shall sweep away the puny defences of a statue worshipping monkey people who know not how to fight! Your princes and your leaders are right to despise them! Yea, as right as they were when they realised that only I— Ivan Chorjieff, the Terror of Kings, and the holder of the King Prophecy— could lead ye to victory!"

He paused.

A faint mutter ran through the two demi-lunes of Khans and Sirdars. From them it spread to the soldiery, growing in volume as the voice of the sea grows in volume when a rising wind whips it to anger.

"Where is our Prince Timor, Chorjieff Khan?" demanded a burly Sirdar fingering his grizzled beard. "We were told he went into Bhot to see you! Since then no one has heard of him! If he be dead, tell us!"

The mutter became a roar.

Chorjieff unslung his rifle, and resting his crossed hands on its muzzle, looked down at the rugged horde below him.

His incautious slur on the Khans and Sirdars' leadership was about to have far-reaching consequences, and for the moment he could not see how to stem the oncoming tide of fury.

The rank and file of this people loved Timor. He had been their gallant leader in many a fray until his blindness forced him to surrender the supreme leadership to one not of royal blood, but whom Chorjieff had won over with specious promises of loot, glory, and a princedom. Blind as he was, they now wanted their hereditary leader back. Distrust of Chorjieff was ousting their superstitious fear of the Buriat.

Immobile, Chorjieff gazed at them, his eyes flaming. How utterly he hated this rabble of savages and their blind puppet prince! Little did they know how completely he had planned for another and far vaster country than Mongol-Tartary to invade their country directly they had entered Tibet, and take it from them, together with the very land he was about to lead them to conquer! Little did they know that the same Far Vaster Country had promised to him the dual kingship of Tibet and Mongol-Tartary as the price of his treachery! ... When he had become the ruler of this ill-smelling, bandy-legged pack of mongrels he would make their cursed Khans drag their bellies on the ground when they came before him!

Raising his right arm, he held it above his head, and so stood motionless. Once more the hubbub subsided.

"Ye have asked: 'Where is Timor Khan?' " he thundered. "I will tell ye! He did enter Bhot! But the message that lured him thither came not from me!"

"From whom came it, then?" The voice was once more that of the burly Khan, who, though not of royal blood, stood next in authority after Timor Khan.

"It came from an Inglis spy, sent by the Government of the Sahib people— which, as ye know, has its armed heel upon the neck of India," shouted Chorjieff. "Yea, and it intends to plant its other heel upon your necks!... Therefore, it lured your prince into Bhot with a lying message — thinking that, without him, ye would not dare to Invade Bhot!"

"Where is Timor? Give us our Khan!" The roar grew louder.

But once again it subsided. They had a faint hope that their questions would be answered.

"He is a prisoner in the hands of the monks," vociferated Chorjieff, now in a white fury. "The gompa in which he is, is known to me! So is the accursed spy himself! Tonight our allies, the Khambas, have had my orders to seize that same Bengali spy! Yea, and ye shall see him nailed to a post and flayed! He is fat, and should flay well!"

"Timor! Timor! Give us Timor!"

Chorjieff ground his teeth in impotent anger. Would nothing make them forget their cursed blind Timor? Timor Khan should be blinded with the blindness of death before this rabble crossed the border of Tibet! And the killing of him should be done by one Ivan Chorjieff!

While Timor lived Ivan Chorjieff's plans were in danger.

"I will send for your Khan," he shouted at them. "He and I, together, will lead ye!"

With a savage gesture he notified the Khans and Sirdars that they were dismissed.

The durbar was over.

He turned to the naljorpa.

"... Make for Hlampo with all speed!" he ordered harshly. "I go thither by another road. Cast a spell upon the lama who is to do the thing I have told thee of — so that, as he raises the knife, he will cry out: 'Thus does Chorjieff slay his enemies, O Samdad Chiemba!' "...

The naljorpa's eyes glowed with a fanatical fury.

"If I use the knife―?" he snarled.

Chorjieff fixed the man with a tigerish glare.

"Beware lest I send one by night who shall slay thee," he said. "A match between thy power and mine would end evilly for thee! ... Well, why don't you go?"

A tremor ran through the naljorpa's body; his jaw muscles clenched and his lips drew back from his teeth. In his eyes was abject fear, try as he would, he could not move a muscle. All control of his limbs had left him.

"I cannot move," he gritted. "There are chains about me... Master!" The title was spoken as if it had been wrung from him by torture.

The Lame Devil laughed.

"Yea, I am thy master," he snarled. "Thou art free, thou dog of dogs! Go!"

12

Gray Sees Three Horrors

WHILE THESE THINGS were happening the trio, accompanied by the Gekhor lama, were walking toward the entrance to the temple.

It was strangely forbidding. The high roof of the portico was supported on tall, carved, wooden pillars, and seemed to be resting on the backs of three unwieldy yaks, the straw with which the shaggy skins were filled projecting spitefully from the eyeholes of the centre specimen. On each of the doors was painted a Japanese-looking, huge-paunched guardian demon, bestial, blue-skinned, protuberant-eyed, and red-clawed.

Just inside these great doors stood the Gekhor lama, his whip of office in his hand, counting the monks as they entered.

As the eyes of the party grew accustomed to the incense-saturated gloom of the dirty, but strangely mysterious, interior, they realised something of the vast size of the temple. Gray counted 22 side altars, all of them illuminated, and all of them cluttered with bunches of fly-blown paper flowers and statues. Above them were more pendant votive scrolls. Everywhere was gilding, vivid colour, shadow, mystery, and incense.

The holy precincts were soon full to overflowing. The trio were half-way up the central aisle, with its 2,000 sitting-mats, when the librarian's boy Chela wormed his way through the jostling crowd of monks and tugged at K.B.'s robe.

The Bengali bent his head.

"The Keeper of the Books sends salutations, Holy One," said the lad. "He says that he has news of a flying goddess, and that the merchant whose eyes you have healed must leave at once!"

K.B. tried to attract Gray's attention, but at that moment the Ancient seized upon the Englishman. The tubby Bengali also saw that the lame Guest Master lama was between Gray and himself.

"I stay with the Gekhor lama for two days," the old man whispered to Gray. "He says there is that which I can teach him. Go ye, therefore, to Hlampo, as arranged. Having fulfilled my duty to the Faith, I will follow."

A blast on a conch shell announced the coming of the Living Buddha. The service was in honour of Tara, the Goddess of Mercy.

A musical tinkling of a little bell. In the deep silence which followed an aged monk read extracts from a massive volume of the Holy Law. The air was now chokingly thick with incense.

After a long series of antiphonal chants the players of the huge horns and the trumpets and flutes pressed their unwieldy instruments to their lips and filled their lungs.

"Pargham!"

The signal had been given. Crashed out an inferno of noise. Every instrument was banged, blown, or blasted with a fanatical fury.

Just then Gray caught K.B.'s eye. The Bengali's mouth was wide open, and he was apparently chanting with the full force of his not inconsiderable lungs. But he was shouting, not in Tibetan, but in English!

"The Living Buddha is being poisoned with arsenic. I go to meet the Gekhor lama after the service. If I do not return go on without me."

Gray leaned toward him and took up the conversation in like manner. No one could possibly hear them, though the lame lama seemed vaguely interested.

"What can we do?" chanted Gray.

"Nothing," intoned KB. "The librarian has news of that 'plane. But it's likely we shall be separated for some time."

Came a shattering, apocalyptic crash; and then— silence. The service was over.

Mingling with the stream of monks as they poured out of the temple doors, Gray suddenly felt a hand upon his arm. Turning, he encountered the Guest Master's gaze.

"The amchi lama has told me of your truly great magical powers, Rimpoche!" he said.

"Of which of them?" probed Gray, mastering impatience with an effort.

"I refer to that power which makes the voice of the dead come from out a box!" answered the Guest Master, leering at him knowingly.

The phrase gave Gray a clue. The Bengali had evidently exploited the possibilities of the small portable gramophone he carried in one of the kiltas.

"Yea," he answered reflectively. "I have such a box." For some reason he neither liked nor trusted this sallow lama.

"He said you would perform an angkur and transmit the power to me!" pursued the lame monk. "Let us go together to a lonely place and do this magic!"

Gray's look of ennui displeased the Guest Master.

"There is to be a trial of justice in the market place, where a Bokhte lama will do maya (illusion) magic, and disembowel himself!" he said unctuously. "Let us first go and see these things together! Can you disembowel yourself and be none the worse for it, brother?"

Gray negatived the idea. The thought of witnessing such a spectacle in no way appealed to him. On the other hand he wanted to go down to the market place— after he had seen the Librarian— as Samdad Chiemba's messenger might have arrived.

"We will indeed see these things together," he assented with becoming gravity.

K.B. flatly declined to go with them. He had, he said, to administer an urgent treatment to the Keeper of the Books, which was a fact. But he also intended to get Timor Khan away before Gray came to the cell. That done, he would try to give a strychnine injection to the dying Librarian.

"Can't I go to see him now?" asked Gray impatiently.

"No," was the uncompromising answer. "It will be better for you to see him when you return! At present he is unable to speak."

Swallowing his disappointment, Gray left, accompanied by the Guest Master ...

The first two Trials of Justice— ordeals of primitive barbarism only less horrible than the third— was soon over.

The first victim was a frightened-looking peasant accused of stealing grain. One of six Whip-bearers held two smallish stones, one white and the other black. Wrapping each in a rag, he dropped them, separately, into a cauldron of boiling oil in the sight of the accused man.

The prisoner sunk to his knees protesting his innocence; washed his hands with water, and then with milk. He walked up to the cauldron, smoothing the milk up his right forearm as he went. With a sharp intake of his breath he dashed it into the cauldron and as swiftly withdrew it.

In his glistening fingers was one of the rag-wrapped stones.

"Open it!" ordered the Provost to the young lama.

With a quick gesture he shot the stone clear of the rag. On the ground lay the white stone.

"He is innocent!" exclaimed the Provost, inspecting the peasant's arm, which did not appeared to have been scalded.

From out the centre of the fire under the cauldron was kicked a red-hot stone ball the size of an ostrich's egg.

The accused man— a brutal-looking yak-herd accused of murder— washed his hands in water and milk.

"Take up the ball and carry it in thine open palm for five paces!" commanded the Provost's bass tones.

The man bent down and caught hold of the glowing ball.

The fifth pace completed, he collapsed. A white cotton bag was at once slipped over his hand by one of the whip-bearing lamas and sealed by the Gekhor. After five days it would be opened. If the hand proved to be unblistered, the man would be held innocent; if blistered, he would be declared guilty and put to death.

A sitting-mat was now spread a short distance from the fire, and a tall, cadaverous-faced lama took his seat upon it. Placing a long knife between his knees, he closed his eyes and began to pray aloud, invoking the aid of the demonic underworld. Soon he began to tremble convulsively. Then, suddenly sitting upright, with a quick movement he tore off his upper garments... .

What followed, Gray was convinced, was nothing but mass hypnotism. Eventually passing his hand over his stomach, he was evidently as whole as before.

"It is over!" said the Guest Master. "Let us return."

Gray was about to follow him when someone thrust a screw of paper into his hand.

He made no attempt to look at it. He would read it later.

Suddenly the deep droning of an aeroplane sounded high overhead, causing the crowd to look anxiously at the sky.

If only it had been a blue and silver monoplane! But it was a grey-coloured R.A.F. Scout with a wake of snowflakes drifting behind it slantingly and downward.

"R.A.F. scattering propaganda leaflets! Things are beginning to move!" muttered Gray. "I wish they were moving with me!"

He must somehow get hold of K.B.— and immediately!

13

The Guest Master Bargains

BY THE TIME Gray reached the monastery gates, night had fallen. In the East, darkness and dawn come with a quickness unknown in the West.

K.B.'s cell proved to be empty.  Where, Gray wondered, was the librarian's cell. K.B. might be with him. The monks had all retired for the evening meditation, and it looked very much as if he would have to ask one of them to direct him— a thing he was extremely anxious to avoid. The fewer people who knew about this visit the better.

"Where is our brother, the Gekhor?"

It was the deep voice of the Gekhor lama, who had come silently out of a cell near by.

"I know not, his room is empty," responded Gray.

For a moment the two men stood in silence.

"I had news for him," said the Gekhor lama, almost unwillingly.

Gray pricked up his ears, and decided to lie.

"He said that I was to take a message which you would give me. I was waiting here for it."

The Provost's eyes seemed to bore into Gray's brain. Would it be safe to tell this gigantic, worried-looking lama the news which he had just heard— that the Abbot Samdad Chiemba of Hlampo, had been murdered? He decided it would not.

"Tell the amchi not to go to Hlampo! There is work for him, here!" he said. And turning, walked quickly away.

Gray did not move. Something secret was afoot; he was going to find out what it was.

To the right and to the left he glanced. The Gekhor lama was making his way to the garden of the gompa. Gray supposed he had already looked there for K.B., and had failed to find him. The realisation of what that failing to find K.B., might easily mean, made him doubly anxious. There was not only something secret afoot; there was something seriously wrong— somewhere.

Once more he looked up and down the veranda. No one was in sight. A lizard was chuck-chucking in the rafters. Every cell door, save the Provost lama's, was closed. From under the lintels of one or two of them came thin pencils of light, but by far the greater number were darkly inhospitable.

He thrust open of the door of the Ghekor lama's cell and pushed it softly to. A butter lamp was burning brightly. On a low table lay a volume of Buddhist scriptures. There didn't seem to be any writing materials... Yes!... A swift further search had revealed them in a cupboard. A quick inspection of the papers on its shelves revealed nothing of interest, however.

Then an angle of white paper projecting from under the volume of the Buddhist scriptures caught his eye.

Gently he tried to pull it from under the book, but the ponderous tome was too heavy, and there was a risk of tearing the paper.

Carefully noting the angle at which the volume was lying, he lifted it. Underneath it were a number of other papers— copies of a proclamation, in Tibetan. At the head of each sheet was the Royal cypher of England.

They were propaganda pamphlets, notifying the Tibetans of Chorjieff's intention to hand over Tibet to that Vaster Country, and so betray the Mongol-Tartars and Buriats.

Gray thought hard. It was fortunate that the idea had suddenly come to him to search this cell. But having found these proclamations— what was he to do? Did they mean that the Gekhor lama was an agent of K.B.'s, or was he one of Chorjieff's, and privy to the murder of the distributor of these leaflets! Quite certainly he was either a very valuable ally or an extremely dangerous enemy.

Stuffing a copy of the proclamation into his robe. Gray's fingers felt the screw of paper that had been thrust into his hand in the market-place.

Taking it out, he spread it open.

To-day the Bengali has been accounted for. I go to Hlampo to account for another. Then it will be your turn. At present you are placing my game for me.

C.

Silently he slipped out into the corridor. It was now or never; he must question the librarian, search his cell, and be on his way to Hlampo before dawn. Every minute was precious.

About to knock on a cell door to ask his way, the sound of the Guest Master's voice froze him into immobility.

"The soul of the keeper of the Books departed for the Realms of Bliss an hour ago," said the lame monk, hollowly.

Gray stared at him without answering. The news had confused him.

"I would like to sit by the body for a while," he said, at length. He knew lamas sit with the dead shortly after death.

"Our amchi brother asked me, should our librarian die, to recall him to life," said the Guest Master slowly. "Had he not asked that favour of me I would have made a death mask of paper upon his face, and burning it, have called up a devil who would have answered certain questions which I desire to ask about the Inglis plans against Tibet. Only one reply can the recalled dead give if the recalled spirit refuses to remain in them."

Gray feigned uninterest. Here, quite clearly, was a possible enemy. It was a case of going warily.

"When do you this raising, O Master of Magic?" he asked casually.

The lama limped a step nearer to him and thrust his sallow face so close that Gray could see the decayed stumps in his lower jaw.

"Now," he breathed. "If you will teach me the magic that enables you to call voices out of a box, I will show you how to raise the dead. You and I will shut ourselves up together and do this thing. So we will exchange magics!" He studied Gray's face with glassy intentness.

Colin Gray cursed K.B.'s vetoing of his proposal to visit the librarian before he went to the market place. "I ought to have insisted," he told himself. Now, this lame maniac's suggestion (Gray thought him to be mad) was apparently his only chance...  Perhaps, while the Guest Master was making his preparations, he might be able to search for that manuscript. And if, by some hideous means, the naljorpa could revive the dead (he had seen such a thing done in Benares, the so-called "life" expiring again in a few seconds after a ventriloquial-sounding voice had spoken from the dead lips), he would put a question to the resuscitated before the lama had time to put his query.

"I will willingly exchange magics," said Gray. "Let us go to the body at once."

They entered the librarian's cell together— one intent on violating the peace of the dead, the other to thieve.

There were two doors in the cell. One from the outside gallery and one opening from it into the gompa library— a huge apartment containing thousands of palm leaf manuscripts resembling closed venetian blinds.

The cell itself, like almost every lama's cell, was simply furnished. A low and narrow plank bed on which the cell's late occupant now lay still and waxen-looking, a low table about nine inches high, a small altar, on which were an image of the Buddha and one or two ritualistic appliances, were all it contained. Against the end wall to the right of the door leading into the library was a sort of pigeon-hole arrangement containing some three or four hundred compartments, in each of which was jammed either a modern book or several bundles of manuscripts.

Gray's whole attention was focused on the ninth pigeon-hole from the left-hand wall of the corner— the 11th from floor level. In that pigeon-hole lay an important secret document penned by the elusive devil, Chorjieff... . Things seemed to be getting a move on at last.

Then he looked at the dead librarian.

So, that shrewd Voltaireian old face was the face of one who, had he lived, would have betrayed him. Despite that Gray preferred the waxen features to those of the living. A cruel, mad look had settled upon the Guest Master's sallow face.

The necromancer, who had been looking down the corpse's throat, suddenly shoved the dead man's jaws together and turned to Gray.

"I have just remembered," he said rapidly, "a messenger came an hour ago and asked to see you, brother. He said he would return after he had eaten, and wait for you at the monastery gates. He should be there now. Perhaps it would be better if I were alone when I do this magic." He glanced at the face of the corpse and shook his head. "His tongue is a very short tongue."

Gray looked at him, a flood of mingled feelings sweeping through his mind. Short of physical violence — and he wasn't afraid of that being tried on him — nothing was going to keep him from seeing this trial of the blackest of black magic.

14

Raising Of The Dead

"WHY DID the messenger want to see me?" Colin asked nonchalantly.

"He said that a sick man wants you to go to him."

It was Samdad Chiemba's messenger! That settled one point. He had now, somehow, to overcome this necromancer lama's sudden and inexplicable objection to allowing him to remain in the cell. K.B. had said that after a monk's death the Guest Master locked the door until the hour of burial, keeping the key in his personal charge. That being so— !

"I will go and see if this messenger waits," he said. "But, since we are to exchange magics, I will bring back with me the box— unless the amchi has taken it with him." Once more he spoke as casually as he could.

The lame lama, who was now busy stripping off the dead man's robes, dropped tugging hands on to his knees, and turned his head.

"Bring the box! You may stay!..."

Samdad Chiemba's messenger was waiting at the gate.

"I have to pass an hour in meditation," said Gray in an undertone. "Until I have done so I cannot start! Wait for me by the huts of the Breakers-up of Bodies."

Hurrying back to the Librarian's cell, Gray found it empty. The realisation that he was at last alone in the Librarian's cell gave Gray the first feeling of joy he had experienced in many hours. Frantically he began to rummage through the contents of the pigeon-hole which Samdad Chiemba had indicated.

A bundle of manuscripts was in his hand, when suddenly the Raiser of the Dead entered, carrying the five brass pots of holy water necessary for the making of a magic circle. Gray hid the documents by the effective expedient of sitting upon them.

For some minutes after that he was forced to sit in an idleness that was agony, watching the complicated preparations and listening to endless preliminary incantations. Uppermost In his thoughts was the warning he had received from Chorjieff. The recollection of it had come to him with a sudden shock. It explained the Gekhor lama's inability to find K.B. The Bengali had either been killed or carried off by the naljorpa and the Khambas mentioned by the lame lama at the trial of justice. If so, it definitely settled another important point. The Black-hat sorcerer was an agent of Chorjieff's... . But in what way was he— Colin Gray— playing Chorjieff's game? That was the nut he had to crack— and crack without delay! Chorjieff didn't utter threats without meaning them.

A second departure of the lama for further paraphernalia gave Gray the chance of another few minutes' desperate search. This time he came across a roll of manuscript tied with ribbons of the five mystical colours.

It was not Chorjieff's plans, as he had at first devoutly hoped. It was only a census of the monasteries of Tibet, showing, by a system of red crosses and blue circles, those who had been entrusted with the carrying out of the Dalai Lama's plans for stamping out Chorjieffs campaign of heresy and treason. Gray regarded it almost with hatred.

All hope of being able to make any further search vanished with the arrival of the lame lama, who— this time— bolted the door on the inside and began to strip.

Gray thrust the document he had just found into the breast of his gown, and bending down examined a fault he noticed in the stitching of one of his Tibetan boots. For a man's footgear to go wrong on a journey such as he was about to undertake―!

A guttural exclamation from the lama caused him to look up. The sight that met his eyes was enough to inspire horror— and even fear— in any normal person.

Sallowly nude, the Guest Master was standing at the foot of the bed, muttering incantations, and breathing as one seized with an attack of asthma.

The Kyilkhor, about six feet in diameter, had been traced at the side of the plank-bed, in red and yellow powder; at its outer edge were little bowls of rice, holy-water vessels, bunches of peacock feathers, a hand-bell, a dorje (a pair of conical open-work brass drums), a human skull, a magic phurba (dagger), and a cup made from the top of a human skull and filled with what looked like blood.

With a tiny plup, the lamp went out. For some minutes the darkness was absolute. Then Gray saw the dim outline of the corpse as it lay on the trestle bed. From the upper part of it was coming the same aura-like radiance— though fainter and somewhat colder-looking— that he had observed surrounding Samdad Chiemba, that night in Waldgrave Square.

There also seemed to be a faint luminousness streaming from the tips of the outstretched hands of the celebrant of these horrible rites.

Taking up the skull cup, the naljorpa dipped his fingers into it, sprinkled the lifeless figure, and stalked towards the bed. He slowly lowered himself until his body covered the nude corpse, as the prophet Elisha once lay, placing his lips over the open mouth of the corpse and exhaling into its chest and lungs.

A low groaning came from the bed. It might have been a man dying, or one returning, unwillingly, from the portals of death.

The dead man's eyes— which had been tightly closed— half opened. They were widening... They were open. The glassiness of death was departing from them as a breath vanishes from the surface of a cold mirror.

A violent twitching in the naljorpa's body either seemed to be shaking the corpse or had imparted to it a reciprocal jerking.

The dead man now seemed to be wrestling with the super-imposed living, man. The two bodies got up from the bed. A weird and indescribably horrific, half-dance, half-wrestling match then began. The dead seemed to be overcoming the living, for the naljorpa was now bending backwards, the body of the librarian bending above him.

Shakily Gray got to his feet. The moment had come for him to put his question.

For one swift moment, two questions fought for the right of utterance. Only one of them could be asked. Was it to be "Where is Chorjieff?" or should it be "Where is Piers Bryan?"

"Thou who wert dead!" he called loudly, "where is the Inglis girl?"

From the throat of the corpse came a thickish gurgling.

"...behind the... dragon... the... black... stone..." bubbled that choking voice.

With a harrowing scream, the naljorpa straightened his back with a jerk.

Somehow, Gray unbolted the door and stumbled out.

Hurrying to the end of the long gallery, his flesh prickling with waves of mingled fear, and disgust, he passed a number of lamas discussing some sensational piece of news. Other small groups of monks, grave-faced and preoccupied, were talking in low tones that betokened anxiety.

Glancing at these simple and earnest men, all of them firm believers in the sacredness of their vocation, he felt almost a sense of shame. They, at least, were not pretending to be something other than, they were— as he was. He detested wearing priestly trappings to which he had no title.

The thought of K.B., and an increasing anxiety to know what exactly had happened to him, proved a wholesome antidote to those gloomy thoughts. He had become fond of the pudgy, placid little Bengali with the piercing eyes... Well, if K.B. had handed in his checks, it was up to Colin Gray to carry on alone— and to win through, single-handed! He was thankful that he had been able to make two such powerful allies as the Living Buddha and Samdad Chiemba; and though the Living Buddha had not definitely offered his help, Gray sensed he was friendly; or, at any rate, far from hostile. Poor old K.B. was almost certainly, at that very moment, on his way into an imprisonment that would prove far worse than a quick death. Or he was already dead— in which case, he had been fortunate... Death seemed terribly near to everybody, tonight!

Another visit to K.B.'s cell having revealed that it was still empty, Gray went to the gompa courtyard, where he knew the yak was tethered.

"Where is the amchi  lama's yak?" he demanded of the Tibetan equivalent of a stable boy.

"Four Khambas came for it," answered the lad.

Then Gray knew that Chorjieff's written warning was grimly true. K.B. had been accounted for. Hastily collecting his meagre belongings, he hurried towards the entrance gates.

The booming blare of a ten-foot ceremonial trumpet rang out as he was, passing the doorkeeper.

Gray paused to question the man, who was feeding the monastery watchdogs, huge mongrel mastiffs.

"What is the meaning of the sound at such an hour?" he asked.

"The Living Buddha is dead!" grunted the lama, foraging in a basket full of bones.

Gray made no comment. Once again a sense of having taken on a fight against hopeless odds swept over him. The death of the Living Buddha had carried off a powerful friend. Almost certainly nothing would now be done about sending out search parties. More than ever was it urgent that he should get to Hlampo.

15

Peril On The Shale

Keeping in the shadows as much as possible— it was a full moon— Gray rapidly crossed the market place. In no country in the world is the moonlight so bright as in Tibet.

He wondered what would happen if the guide were not at the agreed-upon meeting place! The ordinary caravan route to Hlampo was nearly five days longer than the secret way which Samdad Chiemba had said his messenger would show him. If Chorjieff had got wind of the messenger's coming, he might have disposed of him as he had disposed of K.B.

But the Lepcha was there.

He rose into view from a deep hollow in the ground which he had been sharing with half a dozen scavenger pigs. A small, wiry man, with a thin straggling black moustache and a pair of restless slant eyes, he explained to Gray that any company is better than no company when there are devils about.

He was armed with a Lepcha ban— a straight-edged sword with a square end, chiefly used for cutting a way through the thick jungle that surrounds most Lepcha villages.

"Salaam, Rimpoche!" he said in low tones. "Two have already taken our way!"

"Khambas?" questioned Gray with sudden misgiving.

"Nay, a man and his beast!"

"A merchant and his yak!" Gray was intolerant of delay. "Lead— I follow!"

The Lepcha shook his head ominously.

"It was a naljorpa— a black sorcerer!'' he muttered. "A devil was with him. He had turned his servant into a snow leopard... They are evil omens."

"Go in front!" repeated Gray impatiently.

The man moved forward, muttering as he went, the mantram (charm) this big lama had given him.

The moon was now high in the heavens. In its cold, white light, every pebble and flake of shale— every leaf of even the smallest blue poppy swaying in the clean night wind, was visible to its minutest detail.

Although, outwardly, he had treated the guide's forebodings with amused contempt, inwardly Gray felt that the man was right. The naljorpa was certainly not up to any good in this part of the world. Well, if he met him again, and the swine tried any more of his dirty tricks―!

Gray whirled his staff round his head until the droning hum caused the Lepcha to turn his head inquiringly.

Just before dawn they reached a difficult stretch, with a gradient of something like one-in-four. On either hand of the narrow track high boulders formed a rough-walled passage-way.

A sharp bend to the right brought them into a sort of miniature amphitheatre— a sudden bulge in the narrow track. Immediately to the left of the exit-opening on the farther side stood a large, flat-topped rock, on top of which were growing a number of stunted bushes.

Moving with the curiously smooth, unhurried, yet rapid pace of hill people when they climb, the Lepcha reached the middle of the small amphitheatre-like space. There he suddenly halted, and slightly bending his knees, peered intently up at the stunted bushes, and quietly drew his glittering ban.

Then, still peering upwards, he started to walk backwards. Gray, who was a few yards behind him, stopped dead.

"What's wrong?" he growled. "Art thou a woman that thou seest ghosts in bushes?"

"A leopard!" hissed the Lepcha, balancing his weapon. "Said I not that we should meet Thabs-Yang?"

Keen eyes on the bushes. Gray gripped his heavy staff and took a boxer's stance on the balls of his toes.

The next second, a grey, furry streak shot down at him with a choking intake snarl. Fortunately he had seen the beast a fraction of a second before it leaped, and jumping sideways, caused it to miss him by a few inches. With a savage oath he leaped backwards and struck at it. Had that iron-hard salwood encountered the beast's head, it would have crushed it like an egg shell.

Quicker than he, and more deadly than his staff, was the Lepcha's sword.

Even as the beast sprang, the keen steel whistled through the air, and the headless body of the snow-leopardess lurched sideways— fell sideways, and lay kicking convulsively, dark fountains of blood spouting from the severed neck.

It was a magnificent bit of swordsmanship, and Gray's heart went out to this spare, Mongoloid tribesman, whom, physically, he could have broken as a child breaks a doll.

But the man seemed to see nothing extraordinary about his action, and, having wiped his sword on the dead animal's fur, prepared to skin it.

"Go forward!" snapped Gray, seizing his shoulder. "We've got to get away from here!"

"It is a good skin, and worth many rupees, in Gantok," grunted the little Lepcha, rubbing his shoulder ruefully.

Picking up his beloved blade, he resumed his way, keeping a wary eye to either side of him and ahead, lest the beast's master should be preparing to spring one of his devil's tricks on them. Although the dead leopard might have been a famished wild one (snow leopards seldom attack human beings) he distrusted all naljorpas, on principle.

Gray was ill at ease. He felt certain that the Black-hat sorcerer was somewhere near at hand— if the slain beast had been his. He had heard that there was a necromancer in Luntse who often went about with a snow-leopard on a chain. The man might of course have sent this leopardess to hunt them down. A certain rajah, in the old days, had a leopard which he had trained to hunt down his enemies by scent.

An hour later they were negotiating a ledge a few inches wide, which wound, midway, across an immense shale slope, the shale itself being piled at its utmost angle of repose. The slipping of a foot might start a landslide.

Slowly the edge of a bank of black cloud which Gray had been anxiously watching slid over the edge of the moon. The darkness which at once enveloped them for a few moments made climbing harrowingly dangerous by reason of their eyes being used to the brilliant moonlight of a few seconds before.

The two men halted for a moment. Suddenly the Lepcha uttered an exclamation. Far up that sloping black hillside could be heard the flat, shivery tinkle of falling shale.

"A mountain goat. Go forward," said Gray in subdued tones.

"Nay," whispered back the Lepcha, hoarsely.

The next second there floated down to them the sound of a man shouting.

"Oh, ye who slew that which served me!" it cried, "ye will not escape! I, who can veil the face of the moon at my will, I will destroy ye! ... See!"

Into the tense silence came the sound of the scrunching of a heavy stone on the shale, followed by a dull thud that was immediately followed by another. Then other, quicker, louder, thuds— mingled with a harsh, rapidly increasing roar.

The naljorpa had started an avalanche. "Run!" shouted Gray ...

Then the avalanche struck them. Two huge boulders crashed down between him and the Lepcha, who was now some 20 yards ahead of him, carrying away the narrow ledge between them, and leaving in its place a sloping, sliding, smoothness.

Commending his soul to his Maker, Gray dug his toes into the shifting mountainside, and made his way upwards.

After a perilous curved course up the hillside, he struck the continuation of the ledge the other side of the breach.

He found the Lepcha searching for his beloved ban, which had slipped from his hand.

From directly above them, and slithering rapidly down on to them, was coming what sounded like a second, smaller avalanche.

A hoarse scream out of the darkness, and a sprawling human body hurtled down. Knocking the Lepcha's feet from under him, it shot into space.

The Lepcha, half-buried in the shale that had flowed over him, was sliding rapidly downwards.

Gray seized a projecting arm, and throwing his great weight backwards, tugged the little man to safety.

Another second and he would have been smashed to red pulp on the jagged rocks a thousand feet below.

16

The Fate Of K.B.

K.B. GAZED AT Timor Khan complacently. He was perhaps more pleased with the joy written on that strong countenance, than with the success of the cataract operation he had carried out.

"It is good to be able to see again, is it not!" murmured the Bengali, studying Timor's face. "Now you can once more lead your people, Timor Khan!"

The Khan placed a hand on K.B.'s shoulder.

"Amchi, hearken! I go at once to the Valley of Peace, that my joy may be shared by my people. They shall acclaim you a khan! This Buriat dog shall be triply chained, and you shall command the escort which shall take him to India. Great, great indeed shall be your fame among us!"

"Within the first hour after the reins of power are in your hands. Khan," said K.B. impressively, brushing aside the Khan's thanks, "remember to flash the mirror in the way I have explained! Standing on a high place, let its face be directed to the sun, so that the light from it shall leap towards the summit of the mountain that is named Chomolo. Until a flash answer it, let it continue to be so flashed. In this manner I shall know that the time has come for certain things to happen!"

"It shall be done," answered Timor Khan.  He laid a hand on the hilt of his sword.

"Chorjieff Khan has threatened to let loose upon my people the power of that vast country which is our neighbour. What will happen, think you?"

"Nothing will happen— of that kind!" answered K.B. decisively. "You are leading your people back to your own country, and leaving Tibet for ever. The Dalai Lama is ready to make a treaty with you. What cause can there be for war, therefore? They will not dare to lift a finger against you," he went on, grimly. "India is ready to send an army to your aid. And they know it! I go, now, to meet the Gekhor lama," continued the little Bengali. "I will tell him you have gone back to your people. But travel with lightning speed, Khan Sahib! There is not a moment to be lost..."

Properly speaking, what was called the garden or the gompa was no garden at all, but a weed and grass grown open space  in which were many thorn bushes and one or two stunted trees. There is no twilight in the East, and night had fallen when the Bengali made his way towards the tallest of three funerary monuments, peering short-sightedly ahead of him.

A man came forward to meet him. It was the naljorpa.

"The Gekhor lama awaits you, Rimpoche," he said. And leaning back his weight on the chain of a snow-leopard he was leading, he passed on.

As K.B. neared the rendezvous he heard the snuffling of a yak. It struck him as strange that the animal should be there at this time of night. But K.B. had come here for a purpose, and that purpose should be fulfilled— uneasiness or no uneasiness.

The next second he was knocked senseless.

The four Khambas who had been lying in wait, dragged him into a clump of bushes. Forcing open his jaws they dropped a brown pellet between his teeth and threw his insensible form on to a quantity of unteased yak wool spread out on a solid cotton sheet. Heaping this over him they brought together the edges of the sheet and tied the resultant bulky package with camel-hair ropes, so that it looked like a large, ill-made bundle of wool. Heaving it on to the yak's broad back the party made for the gates of the gompa.

Barely had they started when the tall form of the Gekhor lama left the monastery and walked towards the chortens. He did not seem to see them.

Crossing the market place the party had just entered a narrow street when a broad-shouldered Mongol planted himself astride their path. It was the brother of K.B.'s servant.

"Where go ye, Khans?" he demanded, courageously enough, since his nearest approach to a weapon was a short spit he used for toasting collops of meat over a fire. "That beast is surely the property of one who owes me much money!"

That said, he began to howl and weep, and beat his breast violently, ceasing only suddenly to upbraid the patient carrier for its disloyalty in following its new masters.

Attracted by the sound of his lamentations some passers-by gathered round.

The Khamba leader glanced at them fiercely. This hitch— if the prisoner were freed— was likely to cost him his head. He knew the Lame Devil! Matters were further complicated for him by the yak lowering its shaggy head and giving a series of loud snorts, and beginning to back into the crowd.

"The man is right, Khan!" protested a burly Sikkim trader, straddling his legs, "if ye are taking away the beast of the master, how shall the servant hope to be paid?" In Tibet, a yak is often the sum total of a man's worldly possessions, outside his cooking pots.

An idea came to the Khamba leader. He could deal with this accused Mongol, later, if only they could get away from this steadily gathering crowd.

"Lead thou the beast, then!" he said. "When we reach the next stage of our journey we will go into the question of this debt. If it be a just one, you shall be paid!"

Amid a murmur of approval from the bystanders the Mongol (who wished nothing better) took over the animal's nose rope, and the party resumed its way.

Some hours later the leader of the Khambas called a halt.

"Here we rest for a short while!" he said to the Mongol. "Go apart and sleep over there!" He indicated a small wayside shrine some ten yards away, whose tall bamboo poles fluttering with votive flags, showed up clear cut against the starlit sky.

"This beast―" began the Mongol.

"We will look after thy beast! Keep thy hands from our bundle and cease croaking, lest thou be beaten to a jelly and left to regale the vultures!" growled the Khamba.

Lying at the foot of the shrine the Mongol kept his eyes fixed on the now peacefully munching yak. The kiltas and the bundle that had been lying between them were on the ground near it.

K.B. was no fool when it came to choosing his spies, whom he paid generously and treated well. This Mongol had known at once that foul play was afoot. His master had either been murdered and his body trussed up in that bundle, or he was alive and a prisoner in it. Somehow he must find out.

After swallowing a hasty meal three out of the four Khambas were soon asleep, their heads hidden under the ends of their long sleeping mats. The fourth, his back against a small piece of rock, was singing a native love song in an undertone. Intently the Mongol watched.

At the end of half an hour the sentinel rose to his feet, and walking over to the long bundle, examined it, muttered something under his breath, and disappeared into the darkness.

Swiftly the Mongol got to his knees, stood up, and ran, crouching, to the yak. There he fell flat upon his stomach, and with the help of his elbows wriggled forward.

"Rimpoche?" he whispered. And again:"Rimpoche!"

A sleepy, muffled voice answered him— so muffled that it was barely audible.

"Is it thou, Kanga?"

"Yea, it is Kanga!" was the breathless response.

" ....Go... to him... who... holds the mirror... on Chomolo... Tell him... of this happening... say... Timor Khan... becomes once more... the leader of his people... I will... inform... Gray Sahib... Gray Sahib..."

Silence.

Like a shadow the Mongol wormed his way into a depression in the ground— lay there listening to the steps of the returning guard— watched him bend down and once more examine the bundle.

Then, while the man was fumbling with the camel-hair ropes, he slipped away into the darkness.

17

A Message On The Mountain

COLIN GRAY and his guide were pushing forward rapidly. Two days after the terrible experience on the shale slope they reached the top of the last pass they would have to cross.

By good fortune the Lepcha had had with him a good supply of tsamba meal, which, mixed with chopped wild onions, had been their sole food. Twice they had crossed snow passes well over 20,000ft. in altitude— on one occasion in a blinding snow blizzard. Never had Gray experienced such cold.

The sound of the Lepcha coughing woke Gray from a deep sleep. Raising himself upon an elbow, he looked at the sun. It was about 10 o'clock, he judged.

The little Lepcha looked up from a fire he was blowing upon, and mingled respectful salutation with a friendly grin. But he knew that no lama likes to be spoken to before he had said his morning prayers, so he said nothing....

Walking sedately a short distance. Gray lifted his right arm and intoned the Lamaic prayer to the sun.

"It has arisen!... Om! ... The Glorious One has arisen! ... Om! ... The goddess Marici has arisen!... Om Maricinam Svaha!..."

Always when he uttered the words of that centuries-old hymn of praise there crept into his heart a realisation of the beauty and reasonableness of the old belief of the benign godhead of the Sun.

The Lepcha came towards him.

"Hlampo is over there, Rimpoche!'' he said, pointing a brown hand towards the farther end of the tableland that formed the top of the pass.

"It is well!" answered Gray in the idiom. "The Abbot Samdad Chiemba shall reward you for the good services you have rendered me!"

"I need no reward, Rimpoche! Thou art a man and one worth serving!... Knowest thou the holy abbot well?"

"He and I are good friends," replied Gray. "He, too, is 'a man worth serving'!"

Six thousand feet below them lay a scene of rare and tranquil beauty. In the centre of the deep, oval valley, bastioned round with pine-covered forests, lay a lake so intensely blue that the blue of a summer sky was not deeper or more beautiful. Never had Gray seen so many waterfalls in one place. Mechanically he counted them. There were 13 of them— long, narrow, "slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn." Mingled with their distant thunder came Samdad Chiemba's voice as it spoke to him that night in Waldgrave Square. "Do you know that place, Chela?" he had said.... If Gray had not known it then he recognised it now. He was today looking down into the valley depicted in that silken painting on the wall of the subterranean chamber!

The superb conception of the builders of the Hlampo Monastery thrilled him. Standing some hundreds of feet above the lake level and about 100 yards distant from it, the great "gompa," with its golden Chinese roof shining in the sun, faced due east. Its red-painted walls, pierced with innumerable windows and crossed and recrossed by a score of wide galleries, showed that it had been built to house probably ten times the number of monks that Samdad Chiemba had told him it now contained. In its great courtyard, on the galleries, and along the shores of the lake were scattered hundreds of diminutive red-clad forms. The great height from which he was looking down on them as they sunned themselves made the lamas look like the Nibelung dwarfs in the Rheingold legend.

Down the centre of the main building ran a brown-coloured patch, apparently about 100 feet in height and a quarter as broad, which he knew was a huge yak hair curtain hanging before the entrance to the Holy of Holies. The monastery of Hlampo possessed, he had heard, the largest statue of the Buddha in the world. Doubtless it was seated behind that curtain, radiating that strange peacefulness and patient but aloof acceptance of the inevitable which marks, so mysteriously, every statue of the Buddhist Blessed One.

"Under the Lake of the Peacock's Tail, Rimpoche, sleeps a god whose name is The Encompasser!" said the Lepcha. "He has the body of a serpent, and is so big that were he to hold his tail in his mouth he could lie coiled about the valley! It is said that, one day, he will awake and devour all the women in Tibet!"

This mention of a woman brought— like a stabbing pain— an instant and intense thought of Piers. No aviator who had been forced down among these jagged icy peaks could possibly survive. If she'd been forced down and had not been killed, she could not exist long in that foodless waste of snow and granite.

But something else was his mission. Soon he would have all his plans plotted out, and the drive would begin. Fate had sent him Samdad Chiemba; and in Samdad Chiemba his hopes now centred.

"What is the name of that lake?" he questioned, jerking his chin in the direction of an immense sheet of water lying in a basin in the hills, several thousand feet above the "gompa."

"It is called the Lake of the Tiger-devil," answered the Lepcha. "So deep is it that they say it has no bottom!"

"Point out to me the road by which we descend," said Gray, musingly.

He had been vainly looking for some sign of the continuation of the faint track which, like a falling coil of rope, led steeply down and was lost to sight in a maze of titanic pinnacles and enormous boulders.

One of the rock pinnacles, extraordinarily narrow for its immense height, shot upwards for something like 1,500 feet.

Observing the direction of his gaze, the Lepcha said:—

"That is called the Chimney of Hell, Rimpoche! One day it will smoke, and then the valley, too, will be swallowed by the Encompasser!... The road? The road passes round its base, Rimpoche."

Gray did not hear him. He was watching a series of blindingly bright flashes coming and going half-way up the snow-covered side of Mount Chomolo.

K.B.'s confederate was transmitting a message.

Fumbling desperately for a stump of pencil and the crumpled propaganda leaflet, Gray found them just as a small answering flash winked slowly from a mountain perhaps 50 miles distant.

Then, as Chomolo began to speak, he jotted down the Morse words as they were signalled.

"Am... prisoner... of... Chorjieff... Timor... Khan... resuming... leadership... informing... Gray... K.B."

A few hours later Gray and the Lepcha reached Hlampo Monastery.

The gates were locked. In response to his knocking the shutter of a barred grille shot back and the slant eyes of a hunchback looked out at him.

Without a word the shutter was slammed to, and one of the huge doors opened a few feet.

Mounting the long bricked slope and closely followed by the little Lepcha, Gray, as he neared the "gompa," noticed that the lamas were staring at him, curiously, as if they had heard something about his coming.

At the end of a wide corridor with a wooden-raftered roof, painted red, the hunchback halted in front of a small door and glanced contemptuously at the guide. Since Gray had saved his life on the shale slope, the Lepcha had stuck to him like his shadow.

"He cannot enter!" he snarled.

"He wants to wait outside!" retorted Gray, nettled by the open hostility of the tones.

The hunchback shrugged unequal shoulders.

"He can wait where he is allowed!" was the retort. "I have no orders about him!" Muttering savagely to himself, he ushered Gray into a dark antechamber at the farther side of which was another door, and the outer doors having been closed and barred, opened the two inner ones.

"Enter!" he said surlily.

18

News Of Piers Bryan

THE SMALL CHAMBER in which Gray found himself glowed with frescoes painted in bright colours. At one side stood an altar decorated with trailing silken presentation scarves and masses of peacocks' feathers. A frame of broad red planks, on which were painted gruesome representations of dismembered human anatomies, surrounded this altar as a frame surrounds a picture.

Beside the altar was seated the grave figure of Samdad Chiemba, dressed in his robes of wine-coloured silk, and wearing a crimson mitre with long jewelled lappets reaching down to his breast. Opposite him was a red-lacquered stool on which stood a gold incense-burner.

"Greeting, Chela!" said the Abbot, smiling faintly as Gray saluted him as an ordinary lama salutes his spiritual superior. "Your way has been hard and eventful. But I have been with you through it all."

Gray, subconsciously influenced by K.B.'s remark about hypnotic suggestion, received the Abbot's statement guardedly.

"It is many days, Holy One, since I have had a message from your spirit!"

Samdad Chiemba inclined his head.

"I sent none," he answered. "Perhaps because your spirit was too full of other thoughts."

Gray half shrugged his shoulders.

"Since you say you were with me, Rimpoche, it is the first time you have been near, and I have not known it."

"I will answer your doubting," responded the Abbot patiently. "For one thing I sent to you and your guide the power to keep your bodies warm without the aid of fire. Had I not sent it, you would have perished in the snow blizzard. I sent my death thoughts to slay a man for you." He leaned forward in his chair. "Did not a naljorpa die on the shale slope?"

Gray reddened slightly under his bronze.

"I am sorry, Rimpoche."

"Why did you not find the paper I told you of?" pursued Samdad Chiemba.

"I could not find it," answered Gray, whose chief desire was now to sleep after his arduous labours. "But I found this one!" He handed Samdad Chiemba the secret manuscript from Lhasa.

The Abbot took it from him silently, and without looking at it, thrust it into the breast of his robe.

"Have you forgotten the prophecy and what lies before us?" There was a challenge in his tones.

"No!" answered Gray. "I shall never forget it!"

It was quite true. The recollection of that fantastic prophecy had been with him night and day.

"It is well," commented Sambad Chiemba, motioning to him to be seated.

"A certain thing has happened to a great friend of mine, who needs your help," said Gray.

"As a wounded bird, fallen from the air, needs help that it may fly again! Is it  not so?"

The quick reference to Piers was startling.

"Is she... safe?" asked Gray.

"Yea. It seems that those who hold her prisoner have not taken her life," said the Abbot. "But her future safety depends upon you and the doing of certain things, of which we shall speak later―"

"For God's sake tell me where she is, if you know, Rimpoche!" broke in Gray, excitedly for him.

Samdad Chiemba's eyes grew sombre.

"Peace, Chela!" he remonstrated, quietly. "I will tell you at the proper time. You came to Tibet on another matter, in which I promised to help you. Chorjieff has learned that I am your friend, and his vengeance stalks me. Every day I send my spirit to The Lame Devil, to read his mind. He has got the King papyrus, and plans an invasion of Tibet," (the Abbot's voice shook). "He intends to make Hlampo the key to the door he would open, to bring war and death into Tibet!"

"Hlampo?" said Gray, incredulously. (K.B. had been right!).

The Abbot inclined his head.

"The time has come for me to reveal to you more of what was written in the prophecy I memorised."

Noticing the anxiety in Gray's face, he went on:

"What I am going to recite to you, will help her who is now in your thoughts!'' He made a sign to Gray to approach his chair closer.

"...'If the woman give herself to the Greater White Python, and that Greater One give himself to her and a child be born to them,' " droned the lama, as if he were repeating a well-known prayer, " 'then the West shall know the power of the East, and the valley of the lake shall become a place of all-power and pilgrimage.' "

The lama stopped, his eyes burning in their cavernous sockets.

"Have you not realised, Chela, that it is you who is to be that Greater White Python? Yea," he repeated. "Together, we will find the way into this half world, and then seek the woman whose name is Gynia. that the good of the world may be served!"

Gray smiled. "You know, Rimpoche," he said gravely, "that the finding of the King papyrus is my aim in life, at present. How can you help me to the getting of it? It may mean fighting in the world we know— not in the peaceful seeking-out of a world that is unknown to us!"

"I can indeed help you," answered Samdad Chiemba, pensively. "Every gompa has its arsenal. A million lamas are ready to fight for the Faith."

"Against Chorjieff and his army?" queried Gray, wondering if India would come into it.

"Against the ox-horned dread god of thunderbolts himself, if needs be!" responded Samdad Chiemba, sternly. "Tibet will need no help from India!"

"This woman Gynia―" began Gray.

"I say to you," said the abbot, looking deep into Gray's eyes, "it has been revealed to me that your heart and hers shall know each other— and love! Thus shall the prophecy be fulfilled!... It must be fulfilled, Chela, if we are to overthrow Chorjieff and give to the world peace, instead of a grim, choking death and bloody disaster!"

Gray frowned. The only woman he would ever love was Piers. Still, Samdad Chiemba's fanatical belief in him and in the realness of the prophecy were two high trumps, and the abbot must be humoured until the position became more clearly defined. To get hold of the truth about Chorjieff's plans was of paramount importance.

"In what manner do you think Chorjieff intends to make Hlampo the door by which he will enter, to bring war and death into Tibet?" he asked.

Samdad Chiemba closed his eyes as if a faintness had come over him.

"Speak not, Chela!" he whispered tensely. "The mind of Chorjieff is come in this room!... But... my... power shall drive it hence!"

So still was Samdad Chiemba now, that, seated in his dragon chair, with his crimson silk robes blazing against that colourful background of frescoes, he looked like some gorgeous painting of a necromancer pondering a spell.

Swallowing his anxiety. Gray studied the exquisite details of the dragon embroidered on a great square of mauve silk.

His heart started to thump. "Behind the dragon" was what the resuscitated librarian had said in answer to his question!

"Rimpoche―" blurted Gray.

The abbot silenced him with a gesture and passed a hand over his bald head.

"Now I can answer you!" he said. "The Lame Devil will enter Tibet from Hlampo, because a swift river runs under the earth from the valley called the Valley of Peace (in which his army is gathering), into the world of the woman, Gynia!... We must go at once to the place of danger, Chela!"

Gray began to see a glimmer of reason in what, up to now, had appeared to him to be a meaningless fantasy.

Rapidly he told Samdad Chiemba about the words spoken by the resuscitated librarian in answer to his question.

Samdad Chiemba sighed.

"We will surely search," he said, pinching his lip, meditatively.

"If ever we get there," mused Gray, half aloud, "the people of the Veiled World could surely be made to help us to fight against Chorjieff? Are there many of them, Rimpoche? How came they there?"

A great sombreness came into Samdad Chiemba's eyes.

"It is said that many, many centuries ago, more than a hundred men and women were trapped in a valley in these mountains during an earthquake. Ancient records say that it was so terrible that the very mountains changed their shapes, and falling, buried a thousand villages and a great city! Doubtless they have bred children..."

He rose to his feet.

"We will examine the wall behind the dragon picture, Chela," he said abruptly.

19

The Veiled World

THE FINDING of the secret door into the world which "lay beneath the waters of the lake" turned out to be far easier than either man had thought. Absurdly easy, it seemed to Gray.

Standing on the black stone (which they immediately saw) as the voice of the dead man had bidden him, he had sought for a hidden spring, but for half an hour found nothing. At last, pressing, simultaneously, two squares of stone much smaller than the surrounding blocks and some five feet apart, he fell two bolts or springs grate behind them.

With marvellous smoothness a great block of masonry swung round on a central pivot, revealing an inner darkness, out of which gushed a humid, warm air.

Full of joy, he turned to Samdad Chiemba. "I have found it!" he exclaimed.

"We will enter at once!" said Samdad Chiemba.

"Let the guide who brought me to Hlampo come with us, Rimpoche," suggested Gray. "He is a brave man!"

Samdad Chiemba meditated an instant.

"Perhaps it were better that my servant and the guides should go with us," he responded, thoughtfully.

He rang a gold handbell. The Mongol entered. Samdad Chiemba spoke to him in Chinese. A minute or two later the hunchback returned. With him was the lepcha carrying two lighted lamps.

Drawing himself up to his full height, Samdad Chiemba addressed the two servants.

"Hearken, both of ye!" he said. "You are about to go to a certain place. If you fail us or speak one word of what you shall see your souls shall lie a thousand years in each of the two hundred and fifty-six Hot and Cold Hells! At the end of that time, ye shall be reborn as lice!"

The two men fell upon their knees and knocked their foreheads on the floor.

"La-lis, la-lis, Rimpoche!" (It is well! Your will be done!) they protested. But the lepcha's voice was louder than the hunchback's; of which happening, Gray took note.

Pressing himself flat against the wall, his arms extended and his hands pressing the two square blocks, the Abbot stood for a few moments, motionless.

Then the door swung open once more. But so narrow was it, that Gray had to squeeze through, sideways. The swinging block of masonry closed. They were now in a narrow, low-roofed passage. Samdad Chiemba led, followed by Gray, the lepcha bringing up the rear. The descent was steep and continued for the best part of an hour, the air steadily becoming closer.

In about 10 minutes they entered the first of an endless succession of caverns, from the high roofs of which hung down inverted forests of fantastic stalactites, slender, strangely shaped pillar-stalagmites shooting upwards from the floors.

Every now and then Gray called a halt to examine the crumpled plan K.B. had given him. Without it, they would soon have lost their way.

As they advanced, a dull roaring became audible. A dull reddish glow far ahead of them betokened the existence of a fire of some sort. Then they came upon an awe-inspiring sight.

Roaring up through a profound fissure in the bed-rock of a cavern so vast that its roof was invisible, was a narrow, wavering wall of red flame, from the quick-flickering edge of which, curled and twisted, long fingers of striated vapour that pointed tortured lengths roofwards, their tips vanishing in the rusty murk overhead.

As in the other caves, immense stalactites encrusted with crystals hung from the roof. The leaping of these sudden, small flames of coloured light out of the overhead gloom, almost made it seem as if invisible hands held those mighty spear-shafts and were moving them. It was like looking at the fantastic creations of some demented master-magician.

Samdad Chiemba walked towards the wall of greenish flame, motioning to Gray to follow him. Standing by Gray's side he studied the plan.

The cavern they were now in had seven openings, leading apparently into seven other caverns in turn leading down to a river. The river was denoted by sets of three snakes wriggling in parallel curves. From the seventh cavern ran two parallel lines forking into a Y, the point of bifurcation being one point of a five-pointed star. In the centre of this star was a roughly depicted lotus bud, encircled by a snake. From the tip of the star point farthest from the bifurcation, ran two more, on shorter parallel lines, evidently denoting a passage at the open ends of which were rough drawings of trees and mountains, a sun, and a crescent moon, the horn of the crescent touching the centre of the sun's disc.

In the angle made by the two points of the star to the right of this passage, was the drawing of a snake within a circle.

The long, curved nail of Samdad Chiemba's forefinger followed the stalk of the Y to its bifurcation, and there lifting, tapped three times on the lotus bud.

Gray understood. The centre of the five-pointed star was their objective.

The Y stalk proved to be an excessively narrow gorge, rather than a passage, its sides appearing— for all that the four could see— to tower up into infinity.

Suddenly, with a stifled exclamation, Samdad Chiemba slipped on a smooth declivity in the rocky path, stumbled forward, and lurched sideways.

Gray gripped his shoulder just in time to stop him falling. Something went jangling down the deep slope of rock.

Samdad Chiemba's form stiffened and he turned quickly.

"Thou art more able to climb than I," he said sharply, addressing the hunch-back. "Go, bring back to me that which has fallen!" He peered anxiously over the edge of the path into the blackness.

"What have you lost, Rimpoche?" asked Gray.

The Abbot turned to him. Even in the poor light Gray could see the tense anxiety in his eyes.

"The sevenfold prayer!" he answered hoarsely. "May the Blessed One send that this be not an evil omen!"

Snatching the silver case from the hunchback when he returned, he thrust it into the breast of his robe, crossing the heavy silk tightly over it.

"The omen is good!" he said tersely. "I return thanks to the Blessed One!"

For some minutes after that they were at a loss as to which direction to take. The map indicated a passage-way leading to the five-pointed star. But there was no sign of any opening.

Then Gray noticed an oblong piece of rock about six inches thick and some three feet long, standing upright against the wall of the cavern, and projecting about two feet from the ground. It was dropped into a socket cut for it in the rocky floor. Just above it was a semi-lunar gash in the stone, a little larger than a man's hand.

They had reached another secret door, openable only from their side.

The oblong stone was easily lifted out. Thrusting his fingers beneath the under-cut edge of the semi-lunar notch Gray tugged at it until a section of the crystal-encrusted wall swung inwards.

If some of the previous caverns had caused him to marvel, the immensity and grandeur of the one he was now looking into took away his breath.

Before them lay the Temple of the White Python.

So stupendous was it that it was some time before they could take in its details. Four archways opened into it, three of them being in darkness and one of them closed by a curtain of what looked like sewn hides. The fourth entrance— smaller and lower than the others— was lighted from within by the flickering, greenish-blue glare of another, but invisible, flame.

As in the case of the Cavern of the Seven Entrances, light was provided by a column of volcanic fire, the blindingly bright undulating greenish-blue pillar of it shooting upwards with a rumbling roar.

Warily the party entered and crossed the great floor. Again the roof was invisible in overhead gloom, some two score irregularly shaped pillars formed of joined stalactites and stalagmites seeming to support it.

In the middle of the vast expanse of flood stood a sinister-looking altar of grey granite, having a depression in its centre the length of a small-sized man and about as wide. On its square sides and ends were carved, in bold relief, serpents and human figures, one huge reptile entirely encircling the stone.

There was no sign of life of any kind.

A few yards from the fourth entrance, and directly opposite its centre, was a slim, round-topped stone pillar, some 20 feet high and of the thickness of a young fir tree.

A strong smell of animal ammonia, like the odour of an ill-kept stable, filled the air. Samdad Chiemba halted, and, stretching out his arms, looked upwards in a sort of ecstasy.

20

Consort Of The Serpent

THE AWFULNESS of that spouting column of fire would have dwarfed to insignificance even a man as huge as Gray.

But Samdad Chiemba, his garnet-coloured lama's dress checkered with iridescent flashes of light, dominated even that terrific setting. His sonorous voice could be heard even through the spluttering roar of the fire pillar. "Come forth, O Gynia! He whom thou hast called is come!"

Very slowly there appeared framed in the fourth entrance a woman.

Like an ivory statue she stood, slimly beautiful; the background of evil, greenish light throwing into relief the long and polished curves of her exquisite body, the lit redness of her lips, and the hot fires of her dark, slanted eyes. About her slim waist was a shining serpent made of gold, which, like the snake carved on the altar, was holding its tail in its mouth — the most ancient emblem of eternity known to man.

Never in all his life had Gray conceived anything so physically perfect as this woman. Yet he felt there was nothing strange in seeing her. She seemed to be someone he had been destined to meet from the beginning of time.

Slowly Samdad Chiemba turned his rugged face to Gray.

"Go to her, Chela," he said. Gray walked towards her.

At each step the ageless charm of her beauty bound itself to his senses. Her eyes looked into his.

"When you spoke to me in a vision," he said, "I could not answer you. You said that you needed my help. It is I, now, who need yours! Will you give it to me?"

"Let us speak alone," said Gynia, looking at him.

Samdad Chiemba, his arms folded across his chest, came up to him.

"Follow her without fear, Chela! Listen well to what she will tell you. Go!... Now indeed is Chorjieff lost," he added.

Mechanically, Gray took her hand and suffered her to lead him across the wide floor of the temple to one of the three dark entrances.

Parting, with her other hand, the heavy hangings of sewn hides, she led him into a short corridor lighted with strange smelling oil lamps set in niches in the frescoed walls.

"I have long known of thy coming... . I have seen thee in visions," she said. And fell silent. Then:

"Am I displeasing to thee that thou wilt not sit by me?"

"How could you know that I would come?" questioned Gray, ignoring the invitation.

The control of the situation was some-how slipping from him.

Gynia hesitated. Twice her lips parted as if she were about to speak, and twice they closed, the sombre shadows gathering in her face and imparting to her a cold aloofness.

"I can help thee... . Thy coming has been awaited for longer than even Milaspa remembers, and he has lived longer than any other whom I know. Like the light flowers, the people of the veiled world live not very long."

"But all that was written hundreds of years ago," remonstrated Gray. "What concern can you have with what was written centuries ago?"

Into her fathomless dark eyes crept the same look of fanatical fervour which sometimes lighted those of Samdad Chiemba.

"I am not of time," she said gravely. "I am of eternity— for I am Eternal!"

"Eternal?" queried Gray, considering her intently.

"Even so, lord! But eternal as I am I know that I live only in what is happening in the Now. I was born that the prophecy might be fulfilled. The Holy One who brought you has surely told you of it. And it is about to be fulfilled; for it says; 'One whose strength and wisdom shall be greater than that of the White Python shall overcome the serpent.'

Assuredly there has never lived one stronger or more beautiful than thou!"

She sighed, plucking at the long white hairs or one of the snow leopard skins.

"Tell me about this White Python," said Gray, impressed by her evident sincerity.

"I will tell thee, lord," said Gynia simply. "Many are the centuries that have passed since his coming. He is the white lord of wisdom, the ivory god of strength! So deep is his knowledge that, compared to it, even the wisdom of Milaspa is as the prattling of a child. When I look into the serpent king's eyes and his coils are about my body I feel his wisdom flow into me."

"How can you, a woman, see wisdom and beauty in a snake," expostulated Gray, interrupting her.

Gynia rose.

"The White Python," she sold, "is not only the god of strength and wisdom. In his strength is sweetness, and he is the knower of all knowledge!"

"Let me hear something about yourself and this veiled world in which you live," Gray said quietly. "How did you come here?"

"Of my coming hither I know nothing. I know, only, that I, and the ageless Serpent of Wisdom, rule the People of the Shadow. I shall rule it alone no more, for thou art come to rule it— and with it me!" Her eyes were twin stars shining through a mist of tenderness and longing. "One half of me has slept until today, and sweet indeed is the awakening!" Her voice had deepened.

She moved closer to Gray.

"Am I not beautiful?" she whispered, laying her hand on one of his.

"Very beautiful," he answered; and was glad in the saying of the words.

"Seest thou any flaw in me?"

"None," responded Gray confusedly. "You said that you would help me. Tell me; know you anything of a Buriat robber named Chorjieff, who seeks to enter, Tibet by the underground river of this land?"

"Milaspa has told me that the Doors of Fire shall be locked against an impotent Buriat of that name, and through them no man can pass!"

Gynia frowned. She had humbled herself, and been treated with indifference.

"You have asked me to help you, Lord! If thou wilt give me thy love, then I will help thee. Milaspa's wisdom is a true wisdom; 'Only the favoured male is king!' What wilt thou give me?"

Gray realised that he was cornered. If only he could get Chorjieff here. Evidently she knew of him; and, more than probably, he knew of her.

"If you will help me by letting this Buriat come here to see you at once," he answered, cursing the lame sound of his words, "you will win my gratitude and the friendship of two great countries!"

An exclamation of bitter anger. The purring, submissive Gynia of a moment before had vanished. Before him was an outraged woman.

"What think you that any gratitude means to me?" she stormed. "If there is one to whom I should render this thing you call gratitude, it is to the serpent god, who has imparted to me his wisdom, and, asking nothing of me, harnessed his strength to my will!"

The slightly tilted eyes flashed.

"Why have you come, knowing the prophecy?"

"I came because I seek this Buriat man, whom you rightly despise. His influence is evil, and he will do you and your people grave harm. What you will give me for all that I am able to offer you depends on you. If you are more grateful to a crawling reptile than to a man who asks nothing better than to help you !" He shrugged his broad shoulders.

Her eyes narrowed; and the burning spate of her words hissed into Gray's consciousness like the pouring of molten metal into water.

"Thou insulter of wisdom! I will tell thee something! Upon what you give me depends the life of a girl who comes from your world! A 'crawling reptile' is at least natural! It but seeks to live where the gods have put it, killing only for its food. It has no speech to lie with, and the truth is in its eyes, and its heart is always the same. But this girl defied the gods and sought to become a bird. She came solitarily like a thief, with lying tongue and fear-filled eyes! Therefore she is only half human, and, to me, lower than a reptile! She is fit only to be killed!"

21

Samdad Chiemba Is Master

A FEW MINUTES after Gray and Gynia had disappeared from Samdad Chiemba's sight, a tall, long-necked man, wearing dark green robes and a broad leathern belt set with huge garnets, stalked into the temple. A vulturine nose and a greyish fringe of hair encircling a bald skull just above the tips of lobeless, pointed ears, accentuated a repugnant resemblance to a bird of prey.

It was Milaspa, high priest of the White Python.

He strode towards Samdad Chiemba, followed by six attendants, shaven-headed and naked to the waist.

Samdad Chiemba looked up from a fragment of paper he had been studying.

"Greeting!" he said harshly. "Art thou the high priest of this temple?"

"I am he," was the answer. "I am Milaspa, forty-eighth high priest of the White Python."

"Then assuredly thou knowest that I am come that the King's prophecy may be fulfilled," said Samdad Chiemba.

"The prophecy is known to us. The coming of its fulfilment was awaited," answered Milaspa, his face as black as thunder. "Greeting, Samdad Chiemba, Abbot of Hlampo!"

Samdad Chiemba's eyes glittered.

"Hearken, Milaspa! Danger threatens us both. To avert it a quarter share of the treasure hidden in thy veiled world must at once be placed at my disposal! Ask no questions, but obey! The reasons thou shalt know later. Give orders that it be sent to the last of the upper caverns."

Milaspa's long, slit-like nostrils  whitened.

"What buyest thou, Samdad Chiemba?" The abbot's glance flickered swiftly over the sacrificial altar and the great hierograms of winged serpents and discs painted on the wall, and returned to Milaspa's face.

"Naught," he answered, his slant eyes seeming to dart fire. "There is one from whose talons I seek to save, not only the greater treasure which will remain, but also a Faith which was thy forefathers' faith before they took another god. For this reason the gold is necessary... . Thou hast a traitor guide in thy midst. If my magic fail to save thee and thy panful of shadows from him who would slay, smash, and pilfer, then the river that flows through thy world will bring hither from a place called the Valley of Peace a horde of two-legged tigers who will leave not a grain of gold or a living soul behind them when they depart. Knowest thou of whom I speak?"

"I have seen his form, like a tree standing in the night. I have seen it in the Mirror of Black Water. Yea. And the whisper of his name has come to me through the darkness," answered Milaspa, writhing his long neck to gaze at the lighted fourth entrance. "Yet though I know of him and his plans I fear him not. In the Veiled World there is that with which even this tiger dare not light. Our god is a powerful god. The White Python is not to be defied!"

"There is but one way to safety," retorted Samdad Chiemba, the words falling from his lips like drops from a melting icicle. "Trust my power— which is great— and fulfil the prophecy by bringing about the wedding of her who is known as the consort of the serpent, to him who is her predestined mate!"

Milaspa regarded Samdad Chiemba sullenly.

"Her reign, it seems, bodes us little good," he snarled. "Therefore, whether she marry the man who has come with thee or another — or none — is of no consequence!"

Samdad Chiemba laughed.

"Thy gruntings are foolish, Milaspa! Was it not according to the Prophecy that she came to you— even as I come?"

"It is so," answered Milaspa, fingering the sacrificial knife dangling at his waist, its naked blade thrust through a gold ring suspended from two leathern thongs. "I said that her wedding is of no consequence! Nor is it," he insisted,

Samdad Chiemba's eyes seemed to read the high priest's soul. The lines in his stern face deepened.

"Beware, Milaspa! The destroyer whom I have mentioned knows of thy world, and is planning to take it from thee! Beware!"

Milaspa looked slowly round the great temple. All this was his world. And now it was threatened by one whom he knew not, but feared and hated with all his being. His supremacy was menaced and his authority challenged.

"It is thou who wilt conduct the ceremony on the Night of the Serpent, Samdad Chiemba," he snarled. "It is thou that wilt announce to my people that thou art the giver to them of a king! Thy voice will tell them that he is to be greater than the god whom I have extolled to them as the greatest of all gods! For, though the King prophecy is known, I speak not of it to them. Thus, thou wilt take away from me my honour among the people of the shadow, so that I shall stand before them, not as their supreme high priest, but as thy servant!" His face, as he stared at the roaring splendour of the column of greenish blue flame, was a mask of hatred.

Samdad Chiemba was rereading the paper in his hand.

"I said thy speeches were foolish speeches," he answered sharply, looking up from it. "But the speech thou hast just uttered is not foolish! I will return to Hlampo. You shall carry out all that is to be done, alone, and supreme in authority. When falls the Night of the Serpent?"

"On the third star time from that which is past," responded Milaspa, hoarsely. He intended to offer up on that night the greatest sacrifice the White Python had yet been given— a white woman of the upper world. But of this he said nothing.

Again the icicle dripped.

"Woe to thee and thy people if this I prophecy be not fulfilled!" commented Samdad Chiemba, gravely.

The high priest fingered, uneasily, the handle of his knife.

"What if the man— after he has seen that which he must see— will not wed?"

Samdad Chiemba's face darkened.

"The man will not refuse! He is of a people who refuse to hurt women. Remember that!"

Milaspa took a deep breath.

"Do these two return with thee to the upper world?" His cold eyes fixed themselves on the lepcha and the hunchback, who shifted uneasily under that basilisk glare.

"They remain— lest there be need of a messenger!"

Samdad Chiemba strode toward the leathern curtains, his hands clasped behind his back. Halfway across the temple he paused.

"I have heard that one who is said to be a reincarnation of the goddess Pahlden-lamo has found her way into the outer valley of your kingdom. Is it so?"

"Yea," responded Milaspa, his thin lips twitching. "But of what shall happen to her, I, and I alone, will be the judge! Rule thou in thy world! I rule in mine! Thou hast said it thyself!"

Samdad Chiemba walked on, but his masterful mind tightened its hold on the high priest.

"He of whom we have spoken is shortly to be the co-ruler of the veiled world,'' he said, speaking rapidly as he walked. "He will wield equal power with the woman, Gynia. If they wish that such and such a thing shall happen, let thy wisdom listen to theirs! The Inglis girl may prove a key to peace in the war which will shortly be waged."

Once again Milaspa's long nostrils whitened. He had had enough of this Abbot's intolerable arrogance. In spite of himself he had yielded up a quarter of his wealth. He had no intention of now yielding up this white girl as well.

Through the roar of the column of fire and the deadening barriers of the hide curtains and the passage, his acutely sensitive hearing had detected a sound utterly inaudible to Samdad Chiemba. The sound of angry voices.

"Whether my prisoner will be a key to peace, as thou sayest, abbot, I know not," he said viciously. "But while we speak the girl Gynia, and he whom you have seen fit to bring, are double-locking a door against peace that thou mayest find it difficult to open!"

Flinging a curt order over his shoulder to the chief watcher to see that the hunch-back and the lepcha were allotted quarters and given food, Milaspa stepped quickly in front of Samdad Chiemba.

But the gaunt abbot thrust him quietly to one side and entered first.

Gray, his eyes blazing, was confronting a savagely furious Gynia.

"Let there be an end to all this nonsense of my marrying this woman," he thundered, turning quickly in the direction of Samdad Chiemba. "A woman whom you know is dear to me is a prisoner in this damned hole, Rimpoche."

22

Pillars of flame

SAMDAD CHIEMBA'S eyes glowed. Halting a bare yard away he looked at Gray intently. For the space of half a minute the two men confronted one another in silence. Outside was heard the dulled roar of the pillar of flame in the temple and the occasional clink of a hearing rod haft.

Then the abbot spoke reproachfully. "Is it thus you betray my faith in you, Chela?"

"I betray no faith," retorted Gray hotly. "You once reproached me for thinking that you, a Buddhist lama, would countenance the killing of a man. This devilish creature"— he swung half-round and glared at Gynia—"is determined to kill a woman. Think you that I come of a people who tolerate murder? Or that I will have aught to do with a murderess?"

"Rimpoche," raged Gynia, "I ask that I be left in peace. Into my apartment none save my women may enter unless I bid them. There are two men present without my permission, and a third dares to stay in it against my wish. Seek fulfilment of the prophecy by other means than by joining me to this hill of lies."

She turned flaming eyes on Gray. If a look could have killed him he would have been stricken dead.

"An evil spirit has entered into ye both," returned Samdad Chiemba gravely, turning his magnetic gaze on her. "I will judge between ye in a moment. Chela," he went on, addressing Gray, "I am about to leave you―"

"Then I leave with you," announced Gray decisively.

"Chela, Chela," remonstrated Samdad Chiemba. Then he broke into English.

"You are acting madly," he said rapidly. "She is all-powerful. The man with me is her high priest. As she orders he must act. Everything is coming our way. Why antagonise the only ones who can help— a certain young person? Her safety depends more upon you than upon them. Unless you win them over you cannot save her.

Gray clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles ached, and it was some seconds before he could master his anger and bring himself to speak.

Then cool headedness won the day.

"It is well, Rimpoche," he said slowly in Tibetan. "I was wrong. I ask your pardon. And yours, Gynia." He smiled wryly.

Once again he noticed that Samdad Chiemba's forehead was damp with perspiration. The lama went up to Gynia.

"Child," he said, "let it be peace between two so fitted to be friends— and more! Let it be so."

The tempest of her anger passed. The quick heaving of Gynia's breast changed to a slower deeper rhythm as she gazed at Gray. Before he could stop her she had pulled him to her so that he lost his balance and fell sprawling on to the wide couch, her lips pressed to his.

The situation lasted only the few seconds it took him gently to free himself. The safety of Piers was in the balance, and all the world was too light to weigh against Piers Bryan. It might be a mean thing to do— but to save her, and to  further his mission, he intended to play up to Gynia and act as if he were really in love with her.

Neither of them noticed the departure of Samdad Chiemba and the High Priest. Gynia. an elbow denting a white knee. regarded him thoughtfully. She would use as her bait the one woman she knew he wanted to have. Perhaps when proximity to the Inglis girl had thawed his icy reserve the imminent possibility of that girl's death would do the rest! Gynia clapped her hands, and a squat, clumsily-built woman entered.

A more repulsive female than the chief of Gynia's women slaves Gray had never seen. Prognathous-jawed, heavy and powerful, her big arms reaching and below her thick knees, she resembled a female gorilla.

"Let a banquet be served in the Hall of Delights!" commanded Gynia.

The ape-like attendant turned pig-like eyes on Gray, and with a guttural sound of assent waddled from the room.

"Thou shalt see, Lord," said Gynia. "I will do all that lies in my power to prove that I am thy slave!"

Taking from a recess in the wall a slender necked golden jug and a small bowl of the same precious metal she came toward Gray.

"Not because I fear thy great strength will I seek to please thee, for a fear no man! I will minister to thy joys because I love thee!" She poured an amber coloured liquid into the small bowl, and raising it to her lips drank from it.

"Drink with me," she urged, her wine wet lips shining in the lamplight. "It is a wine that few save I have ever tasted. The half-men who make it are chained to the wine-press, and must call ceaselessly while the wine is there. If their calling cease even for a moment they die!"

She laughed huskily.

Gray looked at her in perplexity. How was it possible that one so graceful and gentle voiced as this girl could say such things unmoved? Taking the bowl from her hands he took a deep draught of it, for he was thirsty.

And then came the effect.

The wine Gynia gave him rushed through the throbbing veins of Colin Gray. Anxiety and preoccupation fell from him like garments thrown off by a swimmer at the brink of a pool in hot summer. A huge sense of mastery over circumstance, and a gigantic, unshakeable confidence in himself, swept away all recollection of his recent anger against Gynia, all remembrance of her unnaturalness and cruelty, all recollection of her evident and dangerous hatred of Piers ... Piers? Why, he could free Piers whenever he wished. All he had to do was to set his astounding subtleness of mind to work on the mind of this girl savage. The infinite, newly revealed penetration of his brain would sound the depths of her puny mind. He would read her like a primer! Punish her for any inadequate learning of the profound lesson he— and he alone— was going to teach her.

23

Golden Caverns

"LORD," GYNIA SAID, passing a smooth palm over Colin's bare right arm, "has the greatness of the wealth that is to be thine been explained to thee?"

"Nothing has been explained to me, beautiful," answered Gray, taking another tip of the wine. "Tell me of it!" He patted the caressing hand gently. She was more beautiful than any dream. More beautiful than all the poems of a thousand poets!

She nestled up to him like a bird settling down into its nest.

"The treasure that is hidden in the caverns of Herukapa, 'The Naked One,' " she said, "is beyond even thy imagination, Lord! There run through the rocky bodies of these caverns veins bursting with shining yellow blood; and even greater veins have yet to be tapped.... Shall I show thee something of thy wealth-to-be?"

"Yea," answered Gray, dreamily, revolving the cup, slantwise, on its base. (If he were enormously rich he and Piers could marry ... and build a temple to old Herukapa, the god of wealth! Certainly they could!)

"Come!" Slipping a band into one of his, she led him to a low door studded with hexagonal gold bosses.

"Open it!" she said, laughing softly. Gray tried, but could not move it.

"It is locked," he said, frowningly. "Let us talk instead―"

"Nay, it is open! See!" Gynia stretched out her hand, and twisted one of the gold knobs. "It is not always the strongest who wins!" She purred the words.

For almost an hour they wandered. The apparently endless succession of caverns through which they passed, their vastness, and the hopelessness of anyone lost in them ever being able to find his way out again without guide, struck a soon clearer-headed Gray, There might have been a thousand People of the Shadow living and moving in the evil filled semi-darkness; or two thousand— or three. It was impossible to say. Now and again he saw two of them coming from opposite directions, encounter each other, and stretching out their thin arms, feel each other's hands like two ants stroking antennae, and pass on. Sometimes a word or two was said, mutteringly; but in most cases they met and parted in an apathetic silence. It was dangerous to let one's voice be heard in what passed among the people of the Shadow for "the open."

Soon they came to a ledge which looked down a steep slope of rock, pitted and honeycombed with innumerable black openings. These openings were the dwellings of the People of the Shadow.

Some scores of nude workers, looking, by reason of the great height of the ledge, even more stunted and slower moving than they were by nature, were seated in several rings. In the centre of these rings were either one or two figures.

"What are they doing?" Colin asked.

"Where only one is sitting in the centre a dreamer is telling a dream."

"And in the rings in which two are seated, what is taking place?"

"The two have quarrelled or committed some offence. Their neighbours are deciding the right and the wrong of it. There are few whom I or Milaspa have to punish."

"What punishments do they get when you punish them?"

"See," answered Gynia, halting before a deep hole in the ground. "That is one punishment!"

"I can see nothing," said Gray, peering down into it.

He could hear the faint rushing of water at the bottom of the hole; and after a while distinguished what looked like a white tortoise crawling across the darkness. A thin, mewing cry floated up to him.

"That one killed a neighbour," said Gynia. "He will never come out. When water ceases to keep him alive he will die.... Come, I will show you the houses of the personages! After that you shall see the great treasure that is to be yours!"

Through a narrow archway in the rock, guarded by two sentries, Gray could see a long, double row of spacious cave entrances. Before them was an open space! covered with what looked like yellowish bracken, among which he noticed numerous flowers. There was no sign of human or animal life.

"The Personages sleep until something  that interests them causes them to wake," said Gynia. "And when that happens, they know it in their sleep."

Then Gynia told him of their food; of how it was prepared, and of the only animal known to them— a small, very short legged pig. In the Outer Valley, she said, there grew a plant which provided them with thread, which they spun.

They now reached the entrance to a series of caverns in which crouched parties of half-men, blind and huge-eared, working at the rock face. They were supervised by overseers carrying heavy whips. Apparently the workers were able to see with the tips of their great fingers, which every now and then were moved over the area of their task with a sensitiveness which, even from where he was standing. Gray could see to be astounding. With incredible speed and unfailing accuracy they picked out the shining gold from the rock-chips and debris. They did not seem to have to touch it. It was as the sensitiveness of the tips of those spatulate fingers was so great that they could almost see.

Two things struck Gray about this goldmining by the blind people of the shadow. First, that gold should be there at all; and secondly, that it was held in the quartz, not in mere sparkling flecks, but in glittering, wavy bands. What freak of Nature was responsible for this state of things, unreal to the point of being almost a fairy tale in a hideously material world?

"Behold, Lord," said Gynia. "We are come to they treasure house!"

Inside iron-barred gates, stood two gigantic guards, wearing heavily padded headdresses made of leopard skin. Their eyeballs were of an opaque whiteness. At first Gray thought that these men were unarmed, but on coming closer to them he saw that fitted on a sort of brass knuckle arrangement on each of their hands, was a curved knife, with a claw-like blade about six inches in length.

On the walls of this mammoth treasure house were painted fantastic frescoes in red and yellow. Everywhere, were heaps of gold dust, like spilled and up-piled grain. As he crossed the floor, gritty with flakes and nodules of gold, there leaped into Gray's mind the memory of his mission. But at last he was in touch with the treasure he had been instructed to get hold of. The reflection soothed the vivid sense of dissatisfaction with the progress he had so far been able to make towards checkmating Chorjieff. It would, of course, come— that checkmating.

The heaps of the precious metal were ranged in long rows, and here and there a golden spade thrust carelessly into the side or middle of a heap, was leaning at an angle. One side of the cave was packed to the roof with nuggets, some of them as large as a man's head.

Gold— everywhere gold! Even the light was golden!  In the centre of the treasure cavern, on a great block of polished lapis-lazuli, stood an immense statue of the god of wealth, Kerukapa.

About the idol's enormous head was bound a chaplet of human skulls; and on the dark, lividly-painted skin of its chest and protuberant paunch, shone strings of flashing red and blue stones. "All this wealth will be thine, husband to-be!" said Gynia, intently watching Gray's face.

"Of what use to you is all this wealth, Gynia? Do you intend to remain a prisoner in these caves for the rest of your life? In the land I come from, the possession of such stupendous riches would make you the most powerful woman in the world!"

"There is a happiness in being shut away, which those open to intrusions, know not!" she answered, sombrely. Let us return to the cavern of delights! I am hungry!"

24

Gynia's Banquet

THE BANQUET was spread in an oval shaped, low-roofed cave, lighted with hundreds of lamps. The walls were encrusted with large faceted crystals which threw back the light of these lamps in vivid flashes of blue, orange, crimson, and purple. At one side was a pile of skins arranged couch-wise, so roughly cured that they crackled when sat upon. In front of these was a low table covered with gold dishes containing appetising-looking viands cooked in the Oriental manner. In the centre stood a golden bowl filled with a smallish kind of fruit. The air was heavy with some exquisite perfume.

On the other side of the cavern was a big natural gallery about twenty feet. from the ground, in which were gathered some 200 people— mostly men— dressed in dull green material, wearing gold circlets round their beads and heavy bracelets of gold upon their wrists and upper arms.

That intensely attentive, unseeing audience made no sound. Their eyes had the mild, patient look of the blind.

"Are all the people of this world blind, Gynia?" demanded Gray, gazing at them.

As he spoke two hundred heads turned quickly in his direction, their enormous ears moving forward as the pricked ears of an animal move.

Gynia shook her head.

"The priests and those who work in the Outer Valley can see. So can certain of my women. Not many. But they can all see with their bodies. Can you understand that? Sound is not only sound to them. It has form, and some colours."

Gray did not answer her. The mention of an outer valley had brought back the thought of Piers. It must have been in that outer valley that she had made a landing when she was forced down. How long, he wondered, would he be forced to possess his soul in this torturing sham of patience before he could question Gynia — or somebody— and find out exactly what had happened to her?

As they entered the cavern in which the banquet was spread two guards standing each side of the entrance put a short length of slender gold tubing to their lips, and although Gray could hear no sound come from these whistles or pipes there evidently must have been a sound of some kind, too tenuously shrill for his ear to catch, for the people in the gallery at once rose to their feet and began to sway their heads quickly first towards one shoulder and then towards the other. It was their form of salutation.

As Gynia seated herself— nude, save for the golden serpent clasped about her waist and two small networks of flashing rubies about her breasts, the Personages also seated themselves, leaning forward slightly, their wide nostrils distended and their mouths half open, taking in the sensation of her presence, the feast, and its gorgeous setting.

Looking at her, Gray thought how much those sightless ones were missing. If only they could see the beauty of this woman — the soft lustre of her satiny white skin on which the bright fires of the rubies flashed and flamed as she moved, the ebon glory of her hair with its sheen of a raven's wing.

But they were blind; and their feelings meant nothing to her.

Filling a curiously carved goblet of rock crystal with the same amber-coloured wine, Gynia put her lips to it and then held it towards Gray.

Smiling at her, he drank deeply.

Prominent among the big throng of attendants was Gynia's gorilla-like head woman. Without uttering a sound, she moved here and there among the bringers of dishes and the sprinklers of perfume and the wavers of fans, ordering one to hasten, another to refill the slender golden-necked rose water bottles. Each dish as it came in she tasted, licking her fingers if she approved, or shaking them talon-wise, in the face of the slave carrying it, if she did not find it exactly to her liking.

"Who founded this Veiled World, Gynia. Beautiful One?" asked Gray.

"Many centuries ago," she answered, glancing sideways at him and nibbling at a yellow date, "there was a city set in a great valley. It had many lamas and gorgeous temples, and its people were happy. But there came a day when the gods of the mountain that is called Chomolo were offended. So all the mountains shook in their anger, and those who were on or near them fell and were killed. In that shaking the city was destroyed, for the great hills slid forward to crush it, as you might slide your foot over this plum. Yet, because there lay under the valley the god Lu-kang, the Encompasser, the mountain gods spared so much of the valley as is left today, and which we call the Outer Valley, although there is no inner one. It was spared that it might provide the Encompasser (or the white python in whom he is reincarnated) with sacrifices from among those who survived of the people." She pursed her red lips. "And so it has been ever since. No one has ever escaped from the Veiled World— for no exit is known from the remnant of the valley or from the caverns."

"A way is known to me," smiled Gray.

"The way by which you entered," said Gynia, "will not exist for ever. Milaspa intends to close it. He said that when the prophecy was fulfilled, he would close it with the doors of fire..."

The table and shining dishes of cooked food having been taken away, Gynia stretched out her hand, and taking a fruit from the big golden bowl offered it to Gray.

"Bite, while I hold it for thee, Lord," she said; and her slightly slanted dark eyes were again misty with longing.

Gray smiled amusedly, and did as she bade him.

Turning the fruit in her slender fingers— it was a kind of plum— she bit into the glistening sweetness of its flesh, so that the ends of the half circles of her sharp white teeth met one end of the wound in the fruit where Gray had bitten it.

"So close shall we be, Lord," she whispered; and pressed his arm to her.

Then, with a sudden, sinuous movement she slid downwards on the pile of skins and lay with her shoulders resting on his thigh, her head turned towards the open space in front of them.

"Whence get you such delicious fruits as these?" asked Gray, over whose mind was stealing forgetfulness of everything but the present.

"From the Outer Valley," she answered, gazing at him with her heavy white lids half closed.

Gray roused himself. Looking into his eyes Gynia knew exactly what thought her reply had called up in his mind. Instantly she writhed herself into a sitting posture. That quickened beating and the suddenly grim set of his jaw told her she had said too much. He was again thinking of the Inglis girl.

"Let the dancers enter!" she commanded, sharply.

Four young girls glided past the guards and halted in front of Gray, their perfect young bodies swaying like tall flowers in a wind. Slowly they began to dance. There was no music. They were dancing the dance of the senses, Gynia said, regarding them superciliously from under half-closed lids.

As he watched their abandoned, yet exquisitely graceful movements, Grey realised that this forgotten, miniature civilisation had plumbed sensuality to its depths. Without being gross, the movements of these four young girls (whose eyes could see) were as subtly intoxicating as the perfume of the poison-flower of the Kuen-lun mountains, the scent of which is so exquisite that any man smelling it is unable to tear himself away, and so dies from inhaling its sweetness.

Gray closed his eyes for a moment and Gynia smiled covertly.

25

The Voice Of Chorjieff

WITH an indescribable suppleness, Gynia stepped down from the couch of skins. Pushing the nearest pair of dancers from her, she bade them be gone. They fled like startled deer.

"Now I will dance my love for thee, Lord!" said Gynia, in low vibrant tones; and the flame in her eyes licked at Gray's brain as a fire licks at tinder.

The bodily suppleness which rendered possible the extraordinary undulating movements in which her dance reached its frenetic finale was a revelation to him. What he was looking at was not the dance of a beautiful woman in a frenzy. It was a perfect human body taking on the appearance of a snake. A python.

At last the dance was finished.

"Did my dance please thee, Lord?" demanded Gynia, nonchalantly feeling at the black coils of her hair as she came towards Gray, her hips swaying.

He regarded her fascinated.

"I have never seen the like," he answered, truthfully enough. And was at a loss for further words.

Gynia flung herself down beside him.

"Love me!" she said imperiously; and drew his face down to hers.

Glancing up at the gallery, Gray saw that it was empty. Attendants were extinguishing the lamps. Gray wrestled with his enchained senses, as one who is drugged wrestles with his mind. But the wine, the incense, and the hashish in the sweetmeats was rapidly overcoming him, thrusting him towards a precipice of luxurious surrender.

As she pressed a hot cheek to his, a harsh voice spoke to them out of the darkness.

"What do you with the woman who is to be mine?" said the harsh resonant tones of the unseen speaker. "I said that your turn to die should come. It is at hand!"

"It is the voice of Chorjieff, Lord!" whispered Gynia.

Gray's heart began to thump. At last the Lame Devil was within his reach.

With an effort he collected his reeling senses and sat up. He must not imperil Piers. He decided to play for time.

"Who are you?" he demanded hoarsely.

"If you be really Chorjieff," gritted Gray, impatiently disentangling himself from Gynia's embrace, "let us meet face to face! We shall then see whose turn to die is nearest! Show yourself!"

"Yama, the King of Hell, may see you before I do!" retorted the voice. "Answer me this question: Does an honourable man of your country dally with a woman who has confessed her love for him when he does not love her?"

"No!" answered Gray, biting his lips. He was being cleverly cornered.

"What would you do to me were I so to act to the Inglis girl?"

"I would kill you!" gritted Gray, shaking his feet free of the entangling skins and rising to his feet. "Call for lights!" he said fiercely to Gynia.

Once more came that harsh, mocking laugh.

"It were better for thee that thou shouldst love me, Gynia, consort of the serpent, rather than this dishonoured spy! For he is that, and no lama! I will prove my worthiness. I will give thee to him if he will swear, here and now, that he will wed thee!"

Gray felt the warmth of Gynia's body against his knees in the darkness.

"O thou who art to be a greater god than the White Python," she whispered, "swear it— that we may be free to love for ever!"

"I will not!" he said, setting his teeth. "End this chittering of bats in a tunnel! Let lamps be brought!... Gynia," he went on, in despairing appeal, "you know what love is— none better! I love this girl who is your prisoner! Set her free! ... I don't care what happens to me, if you'll do that!"... Then a furious anger seized upon him. "Let us have light, I say," he shouted.

Gynia struck her palms together. Immediately scared-looking attendants, lamp-bearers, and bodefully grim guards poured into the cavern.

No one uttered a sound.

Gray glared round him like a trapped tiger. The guards had encircled him and were waiting for an order from Gynia. There was no sign of Chorjieff. The gallery, from which he had thought the voice had come, was empty.

"Bind him!" she commanded.

"The first one of you devil's spawn who lays a hand on me dies with his back broken!" snarled Gray, baring his huge arms.

Then Gynia spoke again.

"One movement of thy big body, thou fool, and thy Inglis girl dies— and at once— a death that would put fear into even thy heart!"

The thought of Piers being tortured, or left without even the terrifyingly remote chance of his being able to aid her, caused him to allow his arms to be pinioned.

Fear, anger, and disgust were struggling for mastery in him— fear for Piers Bryan, anger against Chorjieff, and disgust at his own utter impotence in this woman's toils.

They were about to lead him away, when Gynia stopped them.

"Listen, thou lying insulter of many women," she exclaimed. "I will send thee to what may still be left of this Inglis girl, that ye may make the death that is shortly coming to ye the harder for each other!"

Only Gynia knew that those words were a lie, and what was really in her mind.

THE GORILLA-LIKE head slave stood before her mistress, her hands loosely clasped in front of her big knees.

"Did the hunchback say why he desires to see me?" asked Gynia, looking languidly into a golden mirror.

The small, reddened eyes of the slave became even more watchful.

"He said, only, that what he had to tell was for thy ears alone, mistress," answered the woman, her ape-like lips, working in and out.

Gynia pondered. She knew how deep in his master's confidence the hunchback was. Possibly he had been given secret information to convey to her.

"I will see him," she said.

Lost in thought, she suddenly felt the hand she had rested on the couch seized and kissed.

She snatched it away with a sharp exclamation of anger.

"What seekest thou, monstrosity?" she demanded. "A whipping?"

The hunchback's yellow face flushed into orange.

"My body may be crooked, lady," he said, his pig-like eyes glittering with suppressed fury, "but the blood in my veins is the blood of the great Genghis Khan! Not as one of thy servants, therefore, am I, but one sprung from the loins of a king! That which I have to say to thee concerns... us, lady!"

The hunchback gazed at the nude beauty of her and again licked his lips.

Gynia regarded him nonchalantly.

"Couple us not, even in thy talk! That thy eyes look upon me is insult enough!"

The baffled fury in the Mongol's eyes was demoniacal. Her beauty and her contempt were driving him mad.

"Lady, I have told thee! Soon— very soon— I shall be a king! That will happen, whatever thou mayest say, for it is written! Then,"— he bared yellow teeth, dog-wise— "then I will slay the lumbering travesty of a man whom they have brought thee for a husband! My body is as good as his, and my blood better!"

Gynia, seeing that rage was rapidly mastering him, fostered his anger. It would help the plan she had thought of.

"I discuss not my lovers with other people's servants, thou misshapen lump," she said contemptuously. "Were I to tell thy words to him of whom thou speakest he would break thy biggest bones as two thumb-nails crack a louse! Why thou art come?"

"I came to tell thee... of my love for thee... Nay, hear me!" he implored. "It was conceived in the twinkling of an eye! Thy beauty burns me, Gynia, consort of the serpent!... I, the hundredth son of a King's son, tell thee that I love thee! Not all thy crafty Milaspas can hinder―"

He stepped, suddenly realising the danger of what he had said.

For a moment Gynia studied the workings of that leather-like mask of a face. She had known this declaration was coming. She intended it should come, she knew that now she held this braggart's life in the hollow of her hand, and the thought pleased her. Soon, extraordinarily soon, she would empty her palm!

"If Is good to be loved— by some," she said slowly. "Yet those who truly know the meaning of love are few indeed! No woman ... no man . .. can live without love! I will give thee a chance to prove this stunted love' of thine! There is a white girl in the prison of the half-men. Knowest thou that?"

The Mongol nodded.

"A certain powder must be given," she went on, burning eyes on his. "Wilt thou give it?"

The hunchback, crowded superstitions aflame, blenched. Now he understood why a raven had flown across his path from left to right that dawn!

"The girl is dedicated to the White Python!" he protested, pale-yellow with fear. "The High Priest told me so himself! Thou knowest the punishment decreed for those who interfere with the offering of a sacrifice!"

"Yea," answered Gynia thoughtfully, "that is why thou shalt do it!"

26

The Hunchback Plots

ACTUALLY the thought of having his head and face flayed (that was the penalty for the crime Gynia was bidding him commit) terrified the Mongol less than the thought of the aftermath of hells and vile reincarnations that would follow.

Gynia opened a small gold box and glanced at its contents.

"Thou wilt see that this is given to her in her food!"

Watching him with cold, intent eyes, Gynia saw his Adam's apple rise and fall thrice. He was afraid now. Terrified.

"Will the powder kill— immediately?" he asked. Perhaps she would change her mind when he pointed out— as he intended to— the consequences that would ensue for her when those who possessed Black powers came to know of her intention— as most surely they would!

"Yea," answered Gynia. "It will kill— even if she takes but half of it! Less than half will but slay power of movement."

"Lady," exclaimed the terrified hunch-back, falling onto his knees. "Ask anything of me but this! Perhaps even as we speak my master— or Milaspa— have heard us! I came to offer thee half of my throne; a blind man is easy to overthrow!" He referred to Timor Khan, to whose people the hunchback intended to offer himself as king.

"Hearken, thou accursed foulness," hissed Gynia, her body tense with fury. "If they have heard then most surely thou art already sentenced to death! Wilt thou, then, that I send for Milaspa, or wilt thou wait until they send for thee?"

"Give me the box," said the hunch-back hoarsely.

Rising, he stuffed it into the breast of his robe.

"If only thou wouldst say one word of comfort, lady, before I go to do this work! Think! A king's son is your suppliant! And yet his heart is as a dog that has been whipped for trying to protect its mistress!"

"How protect me?" asked Gynia, sharply.

The Mongol glanced over his shoulder, half-fearfully.

"I tried to shoot that Hill of Lies from a hill-top when he was on his way to Luntse. But the light was bad... I will surely kill him before he weds thee, thou glorious goddess! If, possibly, some small token could be given to me―"

Gynia swooped at and killed a fly that had lighted on her white knee. "Yea, Deformity! I will give thee a token of my thanks!"

His hands outstretched, the hunchback took a step towards her, the masklike face alight with something that might have been happiness.

"I will give thee," replied Gynia, slowly, "since I shall be there, a little of the powder... before they start to skin thee! Go!"

Once in the temple the hunchback paused and, gnawing his finger-nails, gazed furtively around him. The emptiness of the temple seemed ominous. It was as if he was being watched by unseen eyes. Most certainly he was in deadly and imminent danger. He must do something to protect himself against the consequence of this madness, and at once. But what?

During the High Priest's talk with Samdad Chiemba in the temple the hunchback had watched Milaspa's face. Quite clearly Samdad Chiemba had antagonised Milaspa; and equally clearly the High Priest had resented Samdad Chiemba's arrival with the big lama. He would go to this venomously subtle High Priest and win him over!

Outside the first of the three caves in which Milaspa had his apartments, the Mongol's confidence received an icy check. By gestures the six watchers indicated that he was expected.

He had forgotten the hearing-rods!... What if Milaspa also knew the import of his coming or had heard from afar his words to Gynia! The thought sickened him.

"Greeting, Most Holy One!" he said, kneeling before the High Priest's chair, his flapped fur cap again revolving in twitching hands.

The vulturine head inclined slowly. The priest's cold, crafty eyes narrowed a trifle. But no answer was forthcoming. Milaspa had read the fear in the Mongol's eyes and intended to let it do its own work.

The hunchback gulped. Do what he would, he could not moisten his suddenly dry lips.

"The words spoken by the Rimpoche were not good words," he stammered. "Yet because I, too, have had unjust words spoken to me, I know the bitterness of them!"

"What would you have done?" Milaspa asked in a sibilant whisper.

The Mongol took the plunge.

"I would change my master," he said, hoarsely; and, sitting back upon his heels, took a deep breath.

"The changing might be difficult," murmured Milaspa, watching him.

"The master-opener of all locks is... Death!" spat the Mongol, recklessly.

The cold eyes gleamed.

"Think you of going to seek a key from Sinje Gyalbo, the lord of death, then?"

"Yea. But I fear to go to him— alone!" The hunchback drew the back of a hand swiftly across his forehead. "If... a holy priest were with me, I would go!"

"It is possible that such a one might be found," responded Milaspa. He had drawn the long knife from its gold ring and was feeling its needle-like point with a speculative thumb, his snake-like gaze fixed on the Mongol's face.

"Where... could he be found? The hunchback whispered the words.

"The lock must be near before the key can be put into it!" The spatulate thumb felt the edge of the knife.

"What is distant can be brought near!" suggested the Mongol uneasily. "A way must be found— and I will find it!"

There was no mistaking the look they exchanged.

His chin sunk on his breast, Milaspa drifted into a reverie. What this man had said was true. Listening to him, it had seemed as if his own mind had been speaking. Samdad Chiemba must die. And this big lama. It was quite clear. If they were not killed without delay the independence of the Veiled World would be for ever lost, and with it the authority of Milaspa, forty-eighth high priest of the White Python.

"It is better that we speak of these things in a remoter place," he said. "We will walk in the Outer Valley!"

As he entered the temple he spoke, by signs, to the six watchers. They were dumb. He alone knew that language of signs, for he had taught it to them.

The six men laid their hearing-rods on the ground, and, standing like bronze statues, watched their master and the hunchback walk slowly away. To disobey the commands of the High Priest, they knew, meant instant death.

Outside the dimly lighted fourth entrance Milaspa halted.

"You have not looked upon the god," he remarked, thoughtfully. "Perhaps it were as well for you to draw courage from the sight of him!"

"Nay," stammered the Mongol. "Not— tonight!"

Despite his unshakable faith in his destiny and the magic he had said he held, the hunchback was afraid. An invisible demon was bad enough, but a visible— a LIVE one―!

His fear of the White Python— the Eater of Men, as he had heard it called— was increased by the overpowering stench sucked through the low, rounded archway by the draught of the upward spouting column of flame. It seemed as if the huge forty-foot reptile were breathing upon, him preparatory to devouring him.

Milaspa's long, slit-like nostrils fluttered. To him the smell meant sacrifice. The offering of human sacrifices was a source of joy to the High Priest.

He resumed his way, almost reluctantly.

And so they passed Into the Outer Valley.

The moon had risen, and its soft light was shining down on what looked like an immense brooding white bird, resting on the ground a quarter of a mile away.

It was the wreckage of a blue-and-silver monoplane.

27

K.B. Steals A March

THE DAY FOLLOWING his kidnapping, K.B., his head still aching from the effects of the hashish they had given him, was released by the Khambas from his stifling captivity. Tying a rope round his waist, they made him walk in front of their leader's shaggy Manchurian pony.

Thinking with all the power of his keen brain, he was convinced that Kanga, his servant's brother, would deliver his message to the watcher on Chomolo, and that the news of the kidnapping and the Timor Khan bombshell would certainly be flashed to India and Lhasa; and some time or other reach Colin Gray. And then Colin Gray would "act," of course... In the meantime, he must find out exactly what the Khambas' orders were, and lay his plans accordingly.

Then his chance came.

Trying to slice off the corner of a brick of tea, the knife of the Khamba leader slipped, cutting a deep gash in his forearm.

"I am an 'amchi,' Khan," said K.B. impassively, watching the vain efforts of the other three to staunch the haemorrhage. "Shall I examine the wound and dress it?"

Rolling up his sleeves, K.B. took an artery forceps from his instrument case.

That evening he sat by the Khamba's fire, drinking the inevitable salty, buttered tea, a welcome and voluble guest.

But from his medicine case he extracted a three-ounce bottle of tincture of opium, which he slipped into the breast of his robe.

"Tea is better made by men than by women," said K.B., filling up his drinking bowl. "In Calcutta there lives a merchant so wealthy that he could build a hundred 'gompas' and feed all the lamas in them for ten years, and not know he had done it! He puts into his tea the juice of a tea plant which grows on the top of a devil-haunted mountain in China." K.B. smacked his lips in a gustatory ecstasy.

The Khambas pricked up their ears.

"Have you any of it left, 'amchi'?" queried the leader of the Khambas, his eyes glittering. The cut in his arm was hurting him badly; possibly this magic tea would soothe the pain.

K.B. poured a heavy dose of the narcotic into their four drinking bowls and pretended to put some into his own.

Four sausage-like forefingers at once stirred the contents of four wooden bowls, which were immediately drained to the dregs. But hardly had this happened when the distant sound of galloping hoofs coming from the direction of Luntse was heard.

K.B. glanced quickly around him. Two of the Khambas were already drowsing. The other two, hearing the sound, had risen clumsily to their feet after thumping their drowsier comrades in the ribs.

The newcomer turned out to be a dispatch rider on his way to the Valley of Peace with a message for Chorjieff. He said he had expected to meet the Great Khan at this place. He said he anticipated coming up with them at any moment.

His orders being to "ride at top speed," he and his sweating pony were soon off again.

"Heard ye what he said?" growled the chief of the Khambas uneasily, hitching forward his sword-hilt. "Tie up the prisoner! Our orders were to hand him over, bound, to Chorjieff Khan in person!"

The Bengali's mind worked swiftly. He must get away. If he were bound and his captors overcome by the drug, he would be at the mercy of any cut-throat bandit who might come along. And Chorjieff might arrive at any moment.

Gathering up his yellow robes in both hands, he ran into the night— ran as he had never run in his life.

The leader of the Khambas, realising what had happened, shouted to his drowsing companions and started off in pursuit. Normally he would soon have overhauled the Bengali, but, happily, the night was dark and the drug potent.

Then shortness of breath brought the Bengali to a standstill. K.B. listened in the rapid intervals of his own stertorous breathing. Again he started to run, labouring for every breath. Suddenly he tripped, pitched forward, and with a stifled exclamation of fear, rolled down an apparently endless slope, into unconsciousness.

HIS ARMS PINIONED behind him, Colin Gray's guards hustled him from Gynia's presence into the temple.

Turning sharply right through the third entrance, the long and wearisome progress to his prison house began.

Striding along, a tower of a man in his flowing robes, with his shaven head and mighty, pinioned arms, he might easily have been the captured Samson being led to his doom by the Philistines.

The atmosphere soon became fresher. They were nearing a waterfall. The quick drop in the temperature as they came in sight of it made him shiver involuntarily, causing his guards to jest at what they took for a display of fear.

Shooting downwards with terrific force through a long S-shaped fissure in the roof, the ceaselessly crashing edge of this hissing water curtain had worn a deep groove in the rocky floor. It seemed to be a leakage from some large body of water lying high overhead, which had been started by an earthquake tremor uncounted centuries before, and had percolated through the riven mass of the mountain ever since.

His observations ceased abruptly. The lamp-bearers had suddenly disappeared. Now the party entered an area of volcanic hot springs.

The walls and roofs now dripped with moisture, and some kind of dank lichen hung downwards in long beardlike masses, while along the edges of the smoking streams— he counted as many as 15 of them in one cavern— grew in profusion what looked like stunted yellow ferns.

At last the weary progress came to an end in front of heavy barred entrance gates closing yet another immense cavern.

To his astonishment it was dimly lighted by daylight. A terrifically deep overhead fissure shot upwards, sheerly, for something like 3,000ft., the thread of blue sky visible above it, looking like a curved piece of bluely incandescent wire.

"Where are we?" demanded Gray.

One of the guards, more communicative than the others, answered Gray:

"Thou art to dwell among the food of the White Python!"

Hooking his prisoner's shoulder deftly with the steel claw he pulled him closer and lapped the bars of the gate with the back of the knife in his disengaged hand.

A revolting-looking pair appeared in answer to the signal. They were fattish, stunted men, glabrous, and narrow shouldered, whose doughy flesh (for they were nude) was of leprous whiteness.

Round the necks of these homuncules was passed a gold chain attached to the keys they were holding. The outside key-bearer— one of whose legs was swathed in bandages— opened a lock of the gate on the outside.

By now, accustomed to seeing in semi-obscurity, after a quick glance at the hairless key-bearers, Gray took in the weird scene before him.

A score of other individuals, exactly similar in type to the janitors, were sprawling on the amber-coloured herbage like, fat white slugs. They seemed to be of an infantile level of intelligence, for they were laughing, in a curiously shrill way, apparently at nothing, while they played with the yellow down-curling fern fronds, and occasionally put bits of them into their small mouths.

One of the guards asked a guttural question, to which the keeper of the inner key replied in high-pitched, almost feminine, tones, his small eyes gleaming sharply as he glanced at Gray.

His key turned, and half the gateway was pushed open.

Had it not been for the presence of the lamps, the arrival of the party might have passed unnoticed, but as the light came nearer to them the slug-like forms of the half-men and their women rose, and they began to scream shrilly, hiding round, white faces with stumpy, dimpled arms.

"Go in!" exclaimed one of the escort, giving Gray a powerful shove with the back of his hand.

Then came for Gray a moment when no other sound, save one, existed.

"If you come near me, you beasts, I'll kill myself!"

It was the ghost of Piers's voice speaking.

Oblivious of the flesh-cutting ropes and the sinister clang of the gate, Gray stared into the gloom.

"Piers? Where are you? Are you hurt?" he asked tensely, and strode uncertainly in the direction of those changed tones.

28

Prisoners

COLIN GRAY WAS not expecting what followed. A slim young form flung itself against him, nearly knocking him off his feet. It was Piers.

Frantically she clung to him, pressing herself to him like a child half-mad with fear.

"Colin, oh, Colin!" she sobbed, the trembling of her body shaking him as he stood there, tower-like. "Thank God, you've come, Colin! Take me away from here. Take me away, I say!"

"Steady, Piers!" soothed Gray, inwardly cursing his shaky tones. "It's quite all right, old girl! I'll get you out of it!"

She found his face and stroked it, whimpering softly the while. Then her hands found the thongs binding his arms and she gave a little cry of despair.

"Are you a prisoner, too, Colin?" she gasped, hoping against hope that it wasn't true. Then realising that it was true, she began to sob again, clinging to him.

"Look here, child," comforted Gray. "I'm trussed like a blessed chicken, I know that; but it's only for a few minutes! It's rather a joke, I think! Got a knife?"

"Yes. I'm just opening it, Colin dear," she said shakily. "They took nothing from me, except my nerve— and I've got that back, now you've come!"

Gray glanced down at her. As if she felt his glance, she looked up, and they kissed.

"Now, young woman, tell me how you got here!" he said.

"I had engine trouble, Colin! I knew I'd got to land somewhere. I wanted to circle back and land near a biggish town I'd just flown over... Luntse is the name on the map, I think. But I couldn't manage it!" She paused. "I broke the chain of the mascot you gave me when I was opening a side window to look down! And it fell out. I nearly wept. In fact, I think I did— just a tiny bit!" Grey smiled.

"The faithful hound came back to his master all right!" he said. "I found it on  the ground, in Luntse market-place!"

Taking out the little black-and-white enamel spaniel, he handed it to her, almost reluctantly.

"I'll bet he'd wag his tail if he could," he said with a laugh.

Piers kissed the tiny mascot. "Any way, I looked for the nearest possible landing place. It was a sort of tableland, at the top of a pass, with a smallish valley. below it and a big monastery standing by a glorious-looking lake. Know it?"

"I was on that same old tableland only this morning! Seems incredible!" responded Gray.

"Well, I couldn't make it, Colin! Or the valley! Then, as the 'bus banked, I saw a very long, wicked-looking and appallingly narrow gash in the mountains. My poor old 'bus won't do any more flying! The bump put "Paid" to its account on the spot!"

"How on earth did you get into this place, though?" questioned Gray. Piers's answer was concise.

"I didn't. I was dragged in— by the  heels."

Gray swore softly.

"You mean they thought you were dead?"

"Yes, I suppose so. But they soon found out I wasn't! I kicked myself free of the loathsome little creatures. The big Blacks they fetched weren't having any nonsense, though! They got sort of steel claws fixed on their hands, Colin! And they soon got 'em into me! You ought to see my shoulders! Talk about nursing an angry torn cat! Even the loathsome little wretch outside the gate seemed sorry forme, and spoke to them!"

"God! What swine!"

"Well, they're better than the woman they took me to, Colin! She's an absolute devil incarnate!"

"Yanked you along to see my friend Miss Gynia, did they! I like her about as much as Adam liked the snake after he'd done the trick for him," responded Gray gloomily. "But she's a whale of a power in this funny old land! It's Gynia-the-Great we've got to reckon with! But you haven't told me what she said to you."

"Well, I couldn't understand her! Not one word. So she fetched in a sort of female human monkey, who spoke some sort of Pekinese. I was able to understand some of her jabber. Gynia seemed fairly reasonable until I asked for you. That did it!"

"What on earth made you ask her for me?" queried Gray, puzzled.

"Well, I said I wanted a message sent through to Sikkim, to say where I was. And since you had told me that you were going to Sikkim to catch butterflies or something, I asked that the message might be given to you, too. I described your size— by gestures and so on. She seemed to know all about you, and got into an awful paddy. I think she's mad, Colin!"

"If she is, there's a lot of method in her madness!" commented Gray sombrely.

"Now it's your turn to report!" said Piers.

Briefly Gray recounted his mission and his adventures from the time they parted in Calcutta up to his offending of Gynia in the Cavern of Delights.

"Therefore, as far as I can see," he concluded, "the outlook is about as cheerful as any confirmed pessimist could wish!"

"If you married her, it'd solve the problem," remarked Piers thoughtfully. "She's a thorough-going savage, of course. But she's beautiful.... You're the sort who'd be able to make her do what you wanted, though. Drill her— sort of. I wouldn't mind betting she adores you!"

Gray looked at her sharply. The shrill laughter of the half-men and their women outside seemed suddenly to become louder; as if this fantastic world in which he and Piers found themselves, was mocking them.

"Piers," he said strainedly, "I can't understand you! Do you ready think it possible that I would marry this she-devil? Listen, Piers! If ever we get out of this cursed hole I'm going to ask you to marry me." He tried to gather her into his arms again, but her small form stiffened slightly, and she drew away from him.

She was cogitating. She knew he loved her— or that he thought he did. But the idea of marrying— even Colin Gray— didn't thrill her. Marriage meant the sacrificing of too much freedom, independence and development. She admired him, yes. But she doubted whether she or Colin Gray had a dominating purpose in their respective lives. Therefore to tie him to her, or for her to cling to him, would be simply beading for a crash.

"Why don't you answer, Piers?... Dear, you mean so much to me!"

Outside he could see two stunted, white forms peering through the bars whispering in a high key.

Slowly she put out her hand and found his.

"We re together in this jolly old tailspin, Colin! And the end of it looks uncommonly like a smash and cinders. But if we do ever get out of it we'll both be so glad to be alive that we'll be too busy enjoying life again ever to want to settle down! I don't want to settle down, Colin! I admire you— awfully. I think you're a darling. But, honestly, I don't want to marry yet. I want lots and lots more of risk and adventure, with only myself to look after when I take it. Let's talk of something else, Colin!" She came near to him again and gave his arm a little squeeze.

Gray didn't answer. That was what she'd said on the Orlumba, the first night they'd met. Strangely enough, he did not find the recollection disheartening. It brought an admiration of her unswerving purpose and gave him a courage that no yielding to him of her love, he felt, could have inspired.

"I'm so tired, Colin!" she murmured a few minutes later. "Do you mind if I go to sleep? It's all been a bit of a strain..."   Her voice trailed away in silence.

He slipped a protecting arm about her. And holding her to him, slept also.

29

K.B. Sends A Message

WHEN HE CAME TO himself, K.B. felt his limbs gingerly. No bones appeared to be broken. For a few agonised moments he tested a heart-stopping belief that his spine was fractured. But that fear was soon dispelled. His mind, as well as his body, had been badly shaken. Rubbing a bruised elbow, he reflected.

His situation— sitting there at the edge of the bed of a dry watercourse in the middle of an open valley— was hair-raisingly dangerous. Chorjieff would undoubtedly order the surrounding country to be scoured until he was found.

The Bengali's ample form shuddered at the thought of what would happen when they did find him.

The position of the newly risen moon in the heavens told him that barely an hour had passed since his escape. Which meant that, excluding the horribly probable arrival of Chorjieff, he had nothing to fear from the four Khambas until long after sunrise.

"My verree dear sir! As Bengali gentleman, we must indubitably rise to the present occasion," he muttered, still rubbing his elbow. "The question is, how? The official notebooks are in number kilta.... These must be obtained!" He shrugged fat shoulders. "Therefore, we go back hell-for-leather!"

If his flight had been a nightmare horror, the search for those close-written cipher notebooks— the painfully gathered fruits of two years' work— was a veritable delirium of fear. Every step towards the Khambas' encampment was only taken after a superhuman effort on the part of the terror-stricken Bengali.

Then came the crowning of a piece of real heroism.

Standing astride the body of one of the robbers. K.B. pressed his quivering stoutness close against number 1 kilta, and, with the sweat of fear trickling into his eyes, rummaged in it and found the notebooks.

SUNRISE found him 15 miles away, climbing hard. He was soon on a small tableland about 1,200 feet above the plain level. Forty odd gruelling miles lay between him and the Valley of Peace. He could see the top of the gorge on the farther side of it, from where he sat. He glanced up at the sun. It was to his right.

Taking off his glasses, he polished them carefully on a minute square of grimed chamois leather. From the same capacious lamaic purse that had provided it he produced a concave mirror.

For some minutes he moved it to and fro in the manner of a heliograph, trying to get an answering flash from the watcher on the top of the gorge. But with no success.

Disappointedly he replaced it and resumed his way.

The faint droning of an aeroplane engine caused him to stop and anxiously scan the sky. An R.A.F. scout, flying very low, was coming in his direction. The pilot seemed to be having engine trouble.

A spate of mingled Latin, English, and Bengali poured forth from K.B. as he tore off his yellow robe and starting running this way and that, waving it frantically.

Apparently his signal was seen. The drone of the engine ceased; the plane dropped still slower; glided down towards the tableland; came lower; lower still; touched; and taxied forward.

K.B. ran to it breathless.

"Sir— Colonel— I beg you to excuse as deus ex machina the emotion experienced at the moment!"

The young R.A.F. lieutenant looked at him over the edge of the cockpit, puzzledly.

"Who are you? I had engine trouble, so your luck was in! Anything wrong?"

K.B. laughed hysterically, and, exhausted by his exertions, squatted on his hams and dredged his forehead with a crooked forefinger.

The pilot scrutinised him keenly.

"Anything wrong?" he repeated. "You're a Bengali, aren't you?"

K.B.'s fat calves quivered.

"Absolutely. But brave as lion on demand!" he responded. "I am also more. I am on most bally important Government business! I am Secret Service! Known to Simla as K.B. I have most important news, sir! The army of Chorjieff, in the Valley of Peace―"

"I've seen 'em. Dirty-looking lot of scallywags. What about 'em. Chorjieff, of course―"

"General Sahib! The said army is Mongol-Tartar Buriat; and few of the said third kind. But it is no longer commanded by Mister Chorjieff! That is the thing!"

"Who's running it, then?"

"Sir, a grateful patient, if I may so say. His Serene Highness The Imperial and Most Royal Prince Timor Khan! A few hours ago I was a prisoner of the said Chorjieff, but I escaped. It is most necessary that you should petition the head-quarters to send a devilish lot of aeroplanes over the Valley of Peace as soon as possible. To impress. Also, sir, a colleague of mine— recorded on Simla flies as G.1, otherwise Mister Gray— has gone to Hlampo. He should be warned of this."

"We've been told to keep a look-out for a fellow of that name! Big chap, isn't he? Where d'you say he's gone?"

"Hlampo— H-L-A-M-P-O, sir! A most dangerous place because of situation. But there is good landing place for aeroplane on top of the pass, which leads down into that valley. I have the honour to suggest that an aeroplane may watch that pass!"

"Anything else?"

"Yess! There is a young lady, who, like yourself, is an aviator— but of female gender. She has had a descendent accident―"

Efficiency's eyes snapped sparks.

"Good Lord! That's important! Miss Bryan, of course! D'you know where she's been forced down?"

"Sir, I am, in plain words, most ignorant of the lady. She is a friend of Mister Gray, and now is probably lying disjecta membra, in Hlampo district."

"Anything else? I'd better get a move on!" The pilot busied himself with the plane's engine.

The Bengali pondered.

"Sir," he said gravely. "I am proceeding with all available speed to the Valley of Peace. From there I shall report, I hope."

While the pilot was testing his engine K.B. again tried to get the observer on the gorge. But there was no answering flash, and his heart sank. There was a spluttering roar. The propeller had started to revolve.

Efficiency was hastily making notes.

"I'll just read 'em over to you... O.K?... Well, good-bye, old K.B.! I'll do my best to get H.Q. to send a watching plane to this Hlampo place." An elastic band snapped round a field service notebook. "Want to send anything back?"

For a moment K.B. hesitated. Then he slid a reluctant hand into the folds of his lama's robe and, taking out two notebooks, thrust them towards the pilot.

"I think, cave canem, it is better that I should not have these upon me," he said slowly, and sighed. "Please hand them to Babu Surendranath Bopaljee, in Gantok. He will act accordingly."

Efficiency put out his hand. He understood.

"They'll be safe! Cheerio, sir!"

K.B. did not see that plane start. He was wiping his glasses.

30

Impending Fate

FOOTSORE, HAGGARD, and hungry though the little Bengali was, when he reached the camp of the Mongol-Tartar forces in the Valley of Peace, in the eyes of the lounging soldiery there was nothing at all remarkable in his appearance. Mendicant lamas, poor and half-starved, were a common sight.

"Take me to your Khan!" said KB. "I have news for him.

The meeting between Timor Khan and K.B. was probably the greatest moment of the Bengali's existence. He was hugged and embraced by a succession of burly Khans, each vying with the other in energetic displays of gratitude and esteem and the paying of extravagant compliments. Timor himself— the proud possessor of a pair of spectacles which he was continually taking off, inspecting, and replacing again — looked on joyfully, laughing uproariously at the Babu's obvious discomfiture.

In the midst of this rough welcome, an orderly entered. A lama with a letter from the Abbot of Hlampo, he said, desired an audience.

"Bring him before us!" roared the Khan, jovially.

A few minutes later, a decrepit old lama dismounted from a barrel-like pony. Humbly saluting Timor Khan, the ancient monk proffered a letter.

"Read it for us, Amchi Khan!" said Timor Khan, smilingly.

K.B. opened it and read it aloud:—

To Timor Khan,

Benign Commander of a Great People,

Defender of the Faith, "Greeting!

We thank the Most holy and Blessed One that you are once more at the head of your people. As a humble follower of The Way, and the sworn enemy of him whose name is accursed, and who is known to us as Chorjieff.

I, Samdad Chiemba, Abbot of Hlampo, offer to place at your Excellency's disposal, sufficient treasure to pay your army all that may have become due to it since it left your country to follow the disciple of evil whose name I do not desire again to mention.

Furthermore, we, the humble Lamas of Hlampo, bind ourselves to deliver into your hands, within one week the body of that persecutor of The Faith, dead or alive.

May our messenger, the Holy lama Srsong-kapa, be blessed by a favourable reply from you. In which case we shall salute your Excellency, in person, at the setting of the sun, today, to take counsel with you.

SAMDAD CHIEMBA.

"By all the gods of the five heavens," shouted Timor Khan, delightedly. "Will you go to this holy abbot as our envoy, and bring him to me? He shall have the reception I would give to a king!"

"I will go," answered K.B. simply. And glanced toward the top of the gorge. G.1 must be told of all this.

AND SO THE weary days and night passed. Colin and Piers were well fed, and were not molested. Their eyes had become accustomed to the twilight gloom, and they were able to distinguish each other dimly.

And so, talking and scheming, hope alternating with despair, as one plan of escape after another was considered and rejected, they wondered when the end of it all would come.

The clang of their prison gate woke them from sleep.

This time the gaoler, who was carrying a butter lamp, was followed by an enormously corpulent half-man.

"Stand up, prisoners!" piped the keeper of the gate, in Tibetan, placing the golden key-hook over his huge right ear as he entered. "The Gyal-po (king) of our people has deigned to honour ye with a visit!"

"Up we get, Piers! Its the local king on a tour of inspection!"

Despite his apparent cheeriness, as he looked at Piers in the flickering light of the lamp a sharp pang of anxiety shot through Gray. The flying costume made her look very boyish and self-reliant. He put an arm about her small shoulders and gave her an encouraging hug.

The Gyal-po of the half-people halted a few paces from them. Gray saluted him smilingly, holding out his left hand.

His gesture turned out to be a fortunate one. Among these unfortunate cretin dwarfs— as among a certain great Eastern people— the left hand is considered the hand of honour.

For a moment the newcomer hesitated.

"Salutation, Rimpoche," said the abdominous man, in a husky contralto.

"Thank you for coming to set us free, Gyal-po!" proclaimed Gray briskly. "Cannot we talk alone?"

"Yea, surely, mountain-man!" The Gyal-po signed to the gaoler to place the lamp on a rocky projection, and withdraw.

When they were alone Gray asked whether they might sit down, as Piers was tired.

"Standing is only for slaves," was the sighful answer. "How came you here? Of her coming,"— the heavy lids lifted a trifle, and he looked slowly toward Piers— "I have heard the circumstances.... What is she doing now?" he asked curiously.

Gray glanced at Piers. She had taken out her compact and was regarding, disapprovingly, the reflection of her pretty face and fair curls in its tiny mirror, now and then dabbing at her straight little nose with a ridiculously inadequate puff.

The fragrant perfume in the powder stirred Gray strangely. It seemed so civilised and delicately feminine in this loathsome place.

"In your honour, Gyal-po, she is making herself more beautiful," he explained.

"She is too thin— even in that bag!" commented Corpulence, his fishy eyes appraising Piers's slight form in her flying suit.

Colin changed the subject. "What do you intend to do with us?" he demanded, fixing the Gyal-po with a stern gaze. "A country far greater than yours will call you to account if any harm happens to us!"

"You talk of things I cannot understand, mountain man!" retorted the Gyal-po, shaking his hairless head, unhappily.

Patiently, Gray repeated his question as to what was going to happen to them. The limited range of the cretin's mind was now terribly apparent, and since time was precious, and a quick decision imperative, the realisation was heartrending.

"Surely you have some idea of what will happen to us— of what they will do with us?" queried Gray, speaking very slowly.

"With you, I know not what they will do. But they have said that she is to be given to the White Python on the feast of the Night of the Serpent— after the god has killed one of my subjects."

Gray thanked God that Piers didn't understand Tibetan.

"Listen, Gyal-po," he said tensely. "You are a king, and your greatness must not be limited by another ruler. I will confess to you. I am no Rimpoche. I am wearing the clothes of a lama because I was travelling in Tibet, and had much studying to do in the gompas. I admire the Buddhist faith and its lamas. But I am the envoy of a king!"

"I have no faith in priests," answered the Gyal-po wearily. "How would you that I should have, when every few star times, at the order of a high priest, I have to send one of my subjects to be crushed to death by the White Python? In our history it is written that we were once worshippers of the sun god. In those days, we did not slay men that our god might be pleased— though it is said that others did. Our people were happy and being happy, honoured their chiefs. Now, my people are happy only when they eat of those ferns that bring happiness. Even their Gyal-po must eat of it, because he has to remain behind the gates to be safe. But my kingdom is a very vast kingdom," he went on, nodding the glabrous dome of his great skull. "Not even I know how far it extends. There are caves beyond caves―"

"Do you never see the sun?" asked Gray, forgetting for the moment that Piers had been found by some of the half-people in the Outer Valley. He hoped to get some comprehension into the Gyal-po's mind as to what being set free meant to them.

"Yea. I, and those of my people who not yet are white enough or sufficiently soft to be the food of the White Python, may see it if they will. But it is a cruel light. It hurts us! Why ask you?"

"If we are kept in this place, we shall die," explained Gray. "We come of a people which cannot live without its light."

"After another waning of the star's she will no longer be alive," sighed the Gyal-po. "It is a pity. Had we been able to keep her here for a dozen moons, she would have grown whiter and softer."

31

Sacrifice

THE GRUESOME speech brought home to Gray an agonisingly intense realisation of their plight. Piers had twenty-four hours to live! It was unthinkable. It took all his self-control to keep him from tearing to pieces the monstrous being before him, in a frenzied rebellion against the hideousness and mad injustice of this incredibly evil underworld. Peeling for Piers's hand, he held it tightly.

"What's the old thing say, Colin?" She gave a quick pat to her fair curls.

"Piers," said Gray huskily. (It was better that he should tell her....) "he's got some crazy idea that these devils want you for— for sacrifice." He stopped, unable to go on.

Piers's eyes widened till their pupils were two round black islands set in a narrow rim of deep-blue seas. Holding her to him closely, Gray told her — lightening, by a painfully forced jocularity and an assumed scepticism, the hideousness of what he was saying. She clung to him, the round, black islands submerged in a glistening tidal wave of tears.

"Colin, I'll kill myself! Or you must kill me! It's too horrible—  too, too horrible!"

The pallor of her small face frightened him.

"It is a ghastly story; but I don't think there's any truth in it, Piers! This poor devil has got the mind of a child of eight," he comforted. "We aren't cornered yet— not by a long chalk! 'Up with the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee,' and all that!" The lump in his throat was almost choking him.

"What are we going to do, Colin?" she questioned frantically.

He had thought of a way out— one that he would not yet reveal to her. He in tended to send a message to Gynia, saying he was ready to become the husband of the consort of the serpent. Surely in the next few hours something would happen, and they would be saved!

He decided to risk everything and trust the Gyal-po.

"Gyal-po," he said, looking deep into the pink, lashless eyes. "I offer you and your people freedom from the priests.

You shall be the supreme ruler of your kingdom— not one of your subjects shall ever again be sacrificed to the White Python. You shall have great honour and happiness. My country— which is the greatest country in. the world— will be your friend. But you must set us free at once!"

"I dare not!" The fear in the pasty face was that of an animal which knows it is about to be killed. "Greater than all is she whom they call Gynia, the consort of the serpent! Her word is death! Even the White Python obeys her! I fear her. I am afraid of her!" blubbered the abdominous manikin.

A sense of utter hopelessness descended upon Gray.

"A servant came with me into this veiled world. I beg you give orders that he may be brought to me! I must speak with him!" And Colin described the Lepcha's appearance.

"This thing I can perhaps do, mountain-man," said the Gyal-po watching Pier's eyes. He hoped she would cry again. They were prettier, he thought, when she cried.

Then, rising, he left them, saying he would return shortly.

To Colin Gray had come two disheartening reflections. Samdad Chiemba seemed to have lost all touch with him. And there was Chorjieff. The heliograph message he had read, standing on that tableland, had told him volumes. K.B. was at work checkmating Chorjieff, while he, Colin Gray, was going to fail in his mission!... What would Needle Dalziell say, he wondered gloomily.

In that moment a flood tide of despondency rolled over him. He seemed to feel it sweeping his bewildered, utterly tired soul to the white feet of Gynia. To Gynia, in whose caressing hands lay power, freedom, comfort, and happiness.

"Colin," said Pier's clear voice. "Wake up! Don't dream nightmares! We've got a real one to tackle!" She had seen his face and the look in it horrified her.

Laying her strong young hands on his shoulders, she shook him gently.

With a terrific effort he threw off the overwhelming sense of depression. As she had said, he was a man and everything did depend on him! Like a flash of forked lightning rending a dark night sky, there tore across the gloom of Colin Gray's mind, the thought of his mission. India, Piers, his honour — everything depended on his succeeding!

"God, Piers, dear," he gasped, shaking himself like a great dog that had been swimming, "it was a nightmare! Thank God you've wakened the from it!"

Clearly, the Gyal-po was their only hope.

"Is there no exit from the Outer Valley, Gyal-po?" His voice shook in spite of his efforts to steady it. The Gyal-po who had just returned, looked around him fearfully.

"There is an opening, mountain-man!  But I know not where," he said in a husky whisper. "Only Milaspa knows. He, and the priest who will succeed him. None other!"

The inside gaoler now returned.

Halting in front of the Gyal-po he bowed profoundly.

"A messenger has come from the high priest, Majestic One! You are to go to him at once!"

The corpulent white form— pathetically childlike in its instant abandonment to blubbering but tearless fright— rose uncertainly to its small and almost useless feet.

"I have said too much, Rimpoche!" he quavered, staring at Gray with mingled  fear and dislike. "He has heard me!"

WHILE COLIN GRAY was talking with the Gyal-po, Milaspa, and the hunchback were walking in the Outer Valley.

Overhead, was the dark blue night sky ablaze with iridescent watch fires of the glorious stars.

"Canst thou not use thy magics to compel him to return?" queried the hunchback, referring to their plot to murder Samdad Chiemba.

"His magics are greater than mine― all, save one."

"Then use that one! If there be no true news to send, we must invent news! Let a messenger say that this hulking lama is willing to marry the consort of the serpent!"

"Wilt thou carry it to Samdad Chiemba, hunchback?"

"Not I!" was the hasty response. "Let the so-called lama's servant carry it. I will go and tell him. Have I thy leave?"

"Yea— and go quickly, for he who will one day succeed me is coming towards us."

The hunchback needed no spurring. He ran.

THE HIGH priest's deputy was well built with small back eyes, which twitched and shifted ceaselessly.

"Greeting to thee. Holy Brother!" said Milaspa as he came up. "Thou sawest the twisted thing that has just left me?"

"I saw him."

"He is dangerous," hissed Milaspa. "He must die!"

"It is good," responded Shifty-eyes. "When and how?"

"He shall die on the 'Night of the Feats.' When the madness comes upon me in the temple, I will slay him. Come closer," whispered Milaspa, laying a claw-like hand on his shoulder. "It concerns the consort of the serpent! It is time to replace her!"

"May the wrath of the White Python not fall upon us for thy words!" protested his assistant.

"Nay, it will not! It is twenty-two years since I fetched her— killing her mother in that taking. But an evil power has got into her, despite all my teaching. I go out from the valley by the secret way, after the feast," said Milaspa hoarsely, "to get another and more beautiful child. That child shall replace her!"

"What wishest thou that I should do, Greatest One?"

"The killing of her must be done by thee! At that moment when she intones the Hymn of Praise to the serpent."

"Most Mighty One," suggested Shifty-eyes, now openly croaking with fright, "hast thou reckoned with the power of this abbot, Samdad Chiemba, who came according to the prophecy? Surely he will know of these things and frustrate thee?"

"I will do a Gyal-po magic," hissed Milaspa, which involved the sacrificing of a king.

"Whom wilt thou offer up?" queried Shifty-eyes.

"Behold him!"

Up the centre of the Outer Valley was stumbling the ungainly form of the Gyal-po. The two priests went towards him.

Without a word they each seized a clammy white arm, and ignoring his terrified questionings conducted him into the temple. Save for the watchers squatting as motionless as bronze statues, it was empty.

"Mount upon the altar!" repeated Milaspa hissingly. "Or wilt thou that I have thee thrown there?"

The Gyal-po fell upon knees which refused any longer to support him.

"Take all of my people! Let a thousand of them be offered up! Take not my life. I am a Gyal-po. A Gyal-po gives sacrifices! He is not made one!"

Milaspa signed to the watchers, who crossed the temple and seized the king of the half men. The sixth strode over to the great bell and took up the gold hammer lying by it.

"Mercy, O, mercy!" screamed the unfortunate victim.

As the knife sank into the quivering mountain of fat, the mellow reverberations of the great bell mingled with the roar of the spouting column of greenish-blue fire wherein shot a blood red streak of flame.

With a gasping groan Milaspa pitched forward on to his face, twitching convulsively.

32

Gynia Speaks With Milaspa

EVER SINCE she had sent Gray into the world of the half-men, Gynia had fought an intense longing to see him again. The strain had not been borne philosophically, it had made her more savagely cruel than ever. An attempt on the part of the gorilla woman to placate her mistress by recounting how she had overheard the hunchback talking with the big lama's servant about carrying the message of recall to Samdad Chiemba, had been seized upon as a bone is seized by a hungry tigress.

"What said that fool?" she demanded.

The woman repeated the hunchback's instructions; and then she added:

"He bade the lepcha say to the rimpoche that she should return at ones, as the big lama had consented to marry thee."

One of Gynia's lips was bleeding. "Said he aught else?"

"He said that he was not to return without the holy one. He was to say also: 'See that he understands that important affairs in his service hold me here.' "

The news sent Gynia into a cold, unreasoning fury. She reached for a hide whip with a gold-banded handle.

"What thinkest thou about this message, ape-like one?"

"My heart is glad that it was carried by the lepcha," answered the gorilla woman; and sighed.

"Why so?" The whip swished viciously.

"Because, deformed though he be, the hunchback is the better man!... It is well to have the pick of the men about one, mistress!" The slave giggled uncouthly.

Gynia's eyes closed for a moment.

"Before I lash thy back to red meat, answer me; is there aught between thee and that twisted lump of sinfulness?"

"I love him," said the gorilla woman defiantly.

Gynia laughed. "Summon the whippers!"

Silently the gorilla woman made herself ready.

A few minutes later a slave entered, and knelt.

"A half-man is come with a message for thee, lady!" She glanced fearfully at the prone figure of the gorilla woman, who was lying in a corner of the room, weeping loudly.

"By the serpent god! Am I to have nothing but half-men to think about?" hissed Gynia. "Bid him enter! If his news please me as little as hers, his back shall wear the same red livery!"

The terrified half-man fell upon his face before her.

"Well, thou white worm, what message bringest thou? Art thou sent for me to kill?"

"Nay, goddess!... The message the Gyal-po gave me was from the big lama, saying that he wished to see thee before the night on which thou and he are to wed!"

The angry, astute mind thought quickly. That meant grave danger for the big lama. Assuredly they were plotting to kill him.

"Thou hast done well. Take these for thy reward!" She took two handfuls of the small plum-like fresh fruits that Gray had tasted, and dropped them into the eagerly outstretched hands.

"Go!" she ordered. "Bring hither at once my spouse-to-be! Two of my guards will accompany thee!"

With a lithe suppleness she swept into the temple, followed by six of her bodyguard, whom she summoned by a sign.

The high priest designate was raising Milaspa's senseless form. Four of the watchers were dragging away the body of the slaughtered Gyal-po on a golden sled.

She glanced at the wet stone of the altar. "Who has been given to the Holy Knife?"

"One whose death served a greater purpose than his life!" said Milaspa faintly. Slowly he rose.

Like a narrow flame rising from the ground, Gynia straightened her slim height.

"I know what thou hast done! Evil will come of it! Be warned! If thou layest a finger on the big lama or the white girl, high priest though thou art, there is one who will make thee scream for mercy, louder even than another screamed in this temple a short while since!"

With the departure of the Gyal-po from their prison cave, hope once more died in Gray's heart. They could expect nothing from a fear-ridden, apathetic being such as this king of the half-men. Quite clearly, they would have to make a breakaway on their own.

As the gate clanged to, he turned to Piers.

"I don't think he's out to do a thing for us, Piers! We've got to make a breakaway!"

Gray was trying to account for the Gyal-po and the jailer not remarking that he had been freed from his bonds. It seemed incredible that a woman as astute as Gynia should trust her prisoners to the care of two weakly creatures like the keepers of the keys... There must be guards outside.

"What's puzzling you, Colin? Thinking when to start?"

"I'm wondering whether we'll have to tackle half a dozen of your tom-cat friends! Nasty things to run up against in the dark, those claw knives!"

Piers felt her shoulder reminiscently.

"Let's risk everything, Colin, no matter what it is! Anything's better than lying in this foul hole!"

"Piers!" he blurted, suddenly, "I've got it! Why on earth I didn't think of it long ago, Lord knows! All you'll have to do is to lie down and pretend to be asleep!"

Rapidly he explained his plan.

"The keeper of the outside key has a gammy leg, tied up in bandages and all that. You happen to be the world's greatest witch-doctor, with a special line in curing gammy legs. See? They'll bring 'em both in to see the curing done!"

Piers chuckled. Gray placed his hands each side of his mouth, trumpet-fashion.

"Prepared for a noise. Piers? Right! Tally-ho, tally-ho! Gone aw-a-ay!" he howled.

The jailer came hurrying to the gate, lamp in hand.

"Ye cannot have food, prisoner!" he shrilled. "It is not yet the hour of the stars!"

"I am not calling for food. I am calling for help," protested Gray, simulating pain. "Take us to a lighter and cooler prison at once! We are people who cannot live without light. Here, we shall die! And if we do, you, too, will die. Milaspa has said he will hold you responsible for our deaths. I heard him say so."

"Why don't you take off some of your clothes?" suggested the jailer, practically enough. "Are the people of your country subject to this sickness?"

"Yes!" answered Gray, dejectedly. "I think she will probably die tonight!" He nodded his head significantly toward Piers. "I wonder whether Milaspa will torture you before he kills you? Have you much sickness among your people?" he continued in lugubrious tones, edging up to his objective.

"We know no sickness but the leg-sickness."

"Such as the keeper of the outer key has?" suggested Gray, inwardly triumphant. "We are so grateful to you, that my companion— who is the greatest witch doctoress in our country will cure the leg of the keeper of the outer key!"

"Will she send out a magic to him?" asked the jailer in awe-struck tones.

"Nay," retorted Gray, "you must bring him here! I have asked her that."

The jailer seemed struck with the idea.

"I will fetch him!... Is she awake?"

"She is in preparatory meditation— though very sick."

The keeper went out.

"The plan's working!" said Gray happily. "The outside key-bearer'll be here in a minute. I'll grab both the keys When I've got 'em, be ready to bolt!"

In a couple of minutes the two keepers appeared.

"What does the witch-women wish that I should do?" questioned the half-man with the bandaged leg, saluting a now kneeling Piers with profound respect.

"I'm going to grab the keys. Ready?" asked Gray.

"Contact!" murmured Piers.

Gray snatched simultaneously at the two keys. The chain attached to the inner one snapped at once, the unfortunate jailer, his neck half-dislocated, pitching forward on to his face. The chain on the outer key held.

Seizing the loop of the chain, with a savage two-handed jerk Gray smashed it and flung the broken links from him.

"Now!" he shouted.

Hitting out at the half-men he knocked them over like two heaps of putty. The two fugitives sprinted towards the gate which Gray locked, hurling the key into the darkness. Behind them was pandemonium. Hand-in-hand they raced down the passage.

"Making for the waterfall, Piers!... Outer valley, then!"

Luck seemed to be with them despite the darkness. Almost before they realised it they found themselves in a thunderous, spray-filled blackness. For more than ten precious minutes they felt blindly round the walls, never daring to separate. No opening was to be found.

In despair they stood. Down the passage they had just traversed was coming a dull yellow glow.

"They've tracked us!" Gray swore. Then a sudden thought struck him.

"Piers, we'll bolt through the waterfall!.. . That'll put 'em off the scent. Take my hand!"

33

A Death Pact

THEY WONDERED what lay beyond that unseen wall of icy water. Was there a yawning chasm on the other side of it, or midway in it? If only there were some light! Lowering their heads they ran at the hissing curtain of water, stumbling over the unevenness of the ground, hit the fall, gasped, clung, staggered, drove forward, and emerged— drenched and half-blinded— on the farther side of it. The force of the water had beaten Piers to her knees half-way through, and only Gray's great strength had saved her being knocked breathless, and drowned.

A few seconds' rest enabled their water-blinded eyes to clear and become accustomed to the gloom.

"There's an opening!" exclaimed Piers, suddenly. "Look! Over there!"

Gray saw an oval-shaped patch of an intense dark blue slowly outlining itself on an ebon blackness.

"Let's make a sprint for it! Come on, Piers!"

" 'Fraid I'll have to go a bit slow, Colin," she replied glumly. "I lost one of my shoes in that shower bath!"

Gray's heart sank. With one foot bare, Piers could never climb— if it ever came to rock climbing.... He wondered, too, whether that small shoe would be washed from under the fall and prove a clue to the direction of their flight? There was nothing to be done.

"We'll have to take it easy, then," he said quietly, fighting the great surges of despair which were battering at him.

Giving her his left arm, they took their slow way towards the Outer Valley, which they entered about half-way up.

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Piers excitedly. "There's my dear old bus! It is a devil of a mess, isn't it?... There should be an automatic in the locker under the dashboard, if those devils haven't stolen it! Let's get it!"

Hopping, limping, dot-and-go-one— every step of her progress deepened Grey's despair. They found the pistol, and Gray took charge of it.

After some time they had progressed far enough towards the farther end of the valley (the sides were utterly impossible to climb), to be able to see before them— sheer, black and threatening— a dead-end! No wonder the People of the Veiled World never got out of it, they told each other, craning their necks to look up at that smooth wall of rock.

They were trapped.

Gray almost welcomed the sight of glimmering lights and the sound of hoarse cries, and the shrill voices of half-people carrying lamps. The end had got to come, and the sooner the better. They'd put up some sort of a fight, of course. To die that way would be infinitely preferable to being thrown to a snake or disembowelled on a stone altar.

Piers understood his thoughts. But she envisaged a different ending.

"Got that automatic, Colin?" who forgotten he had the pistol, assented.

"In the back of my neck would be best, I think," she said slowly. "I've heard that's quickest and most certain."

She came close to him and held up her face.

"You'll do it for me, Colin dear, won't you? Swear it!"

Huskily he swore that he would kill her— and at once. He bent and kissed her.

Then he heard Samdad Chiemba's voice speaking to him.

"...Chela," it said, "you are in danger, and I know it. A powerful magic protects him who seeks to work you evil, or I would slay him. I am on my way to the Valley of Peace, to defeat our common enemy... Do not do that which you have been asked to do!"

The distant tones faded— bell-like.

Piers did not seem to have heard them.

"Now, Colin," she whispered, turning her small back to him, and with two hands, pulling down the neck of her brown jumper.

Until that moment Gray had never known how much indescribable agony could be crammed into one short half-minute. Had he heard that voice? Or was it a phantasm of an over-wrought mind? The circumstances did not justify his forswearing himself to the woman whom he loved more than any other, and so letting her fall into the hands of these debased devil worshippers, because of a to imagination. He had sworn to carry out Piers' dreadful request. He owed it to her that he should fulfil his oath. After all, it would be the last and greatest kindness he...

There was a dull click. The automatic was not loaded. With a little sigh. Piers fell senseless.

Their pursuers were now only a few yards away.

Clenching his teeth, Colin Gray stood astride Piers's prostrate form, prepared to grapple with the first attackers. Then suddenly he dropped his arms. Stooping, he picked up Piers and slung the warm limpness of her across his shoulder and strode forward to meet the oncoming line.

"I have a message for the Lady Gynia— my wife-to-be!"

At the sound of Gynia's name their pursuers wavered.

Then a personage, wearing the usual gold circlet and bracelets, came forward and asked what the message was.

Gray hedged. "The high priest," he said, had been given orders by the magician-lama (Samdad Chiemba) that the wishes of the future spouse of the consort of the serpent, were to be respected. His present wish was to remain with this girl. She was sick, and she would die unless he were there to look after her. The Lady Gynia had said that he was to remain with her, and remain he would!

It was a bluff, and a weak one at that, but it worked. After some grumbling comments, his request was granted.

Gray laid the unconscious form of Piers on the ground. He went towards the two guards standing outside the gate-less cave mouth. Immediately the steel claws with which their hands were armed fell upon his shoulders.

"Go back!" they ordered.

"I'm not trying to escape!" said Gray impatiently, "it is cold! The girl is ill. If she die, ye shall die also. That I swear! Let one of ye get furry skins for her that she may he upon them, and bring food and hot soup! Go, or I shall slay ye both with my naked hands!"

A heated argument between the guards ended by one of them starting off in the direction which the party had taken.

Consciousness soon returned to Piers, but the shock, coming after days and nights of terrible strain, had been a severe one.

"Well, it seems rather like checkmate, now, doesn't it, Colin?" she exclaimed, staring at the small butter lamp set on a projection in the rocky wall outside, and which was flickering uncertainly in the draught. "What on earth are we to do?"

Gray told her of his plan to marry Gynia.

"It was the only thing to do, Colin dear," she said. (A trifle wistfully, it seemed to him.) "Do you know, I sometimes feel that we're both dreaming all this! That we'll wake up, safe and sound, in nice clean beds somewhere. Doesn't it seem to you like a dream?"

And so they sat and talked of London. Then they drifted back to grim reality....

If Gynia consented to Gray's plan (Piers said), then, as king of this hideous underworld, Colin would be able to secure her release. He agreed. Even if he couldn't bring it about, Samdad Chiemba would undoubtedly see that she was set free. Samdad Chiemba would also help him to get back to a world where there were trees, birds, and rain, and sun, and open skies. This marriage with Gynia be had no intention of making a marriage in the ordinary sense. He recognised his power over Gynia, he said. He trusted to that and his wits and his strength— plus the abbot's powerful aid— to do everything that was necessary.

The return of the guard, carrying a load of skins, a huge bowl of smoking soup, some flat round cakes of unleavened bread, and a dish of some sort of sweetmeats, was welcomed with a burst of forced gaiety.

Seated on the piled-up skins, they attacked the food wholeheartedly. They had barely finished their meal, when a guard appeared at the cave mouth.

"The Lady Gynia has sent for you, prisoner!" he said, addressing Gray.

"Well, here we go round the mulberry bush!" jested Gray. "I'll make you comfy before I go, Piers!"

Deftly he arranged a bed for her, and taking the softest of the skins, draped it about her shoulders. He bent down and they kissed.

"Turn in and get some sleep! When the maid brings up the tea in the morning I'll drop in and tell you the latest news from Mayfair! Cheerio, Piers!"

"God bless you, old Colin! Shut the front door gently, please, dear!"

She chuckled, but sleepily.

34

The Chimney Of Hell

WHEN THE LEPCHA reached the secret entrance, he pressed back the fastening holding the block of masonry in place, and entered, swinging it to behind him.

He had hoped to find Samdad Chiemba in the audience chamber, and deliver the hunchback's message to him at once. But the room was empty. He went out on to the open-air gallery. Taking a deep breath, he looked up at the stars, muttering a prayer of thanks to his tutelary deity for his safe arrival.

At first he had hesitated to obey the order of the hunchback. It meant leaving the big lama— whom he had come to adore as a demi-god— alone in that devil haunted underworld. But, on the day of their arrival in it, he had lost him. All his questioning of the dwarf as to where Gray was, had been met with the one unchallengeable, unvarying answer: "The rimpoche is in meditation."

Selecting a corner, the lepcha squatted on his haunches, and folding his arms on top of his knees, dropped his head on to them, and slept.

Before the dawn, he was awake.

Going to the edge of the gallery, he looked down into the valley. In the garden below could be heard sleepy cheepings and muted whistlings. He descended. In a corner of the garden, under a heap of dew-soaked dead leaves, the tribesman found some dry twigs. Producing his flint and steel, he struck a spark and proceeded to kindle a fire.

The morning meal over, he made his way towards the lake.

"Ho, Chela!" called out a voice he recognised.

It was that of the ancient, who had spoken with him at the gateway of the Luntse gompa.

The Lepcha walked up to him and saluted him reverently. Here, the gods be thankful, was another friend of the big lama! The ancient's first question sounded as if be had read his thoughts.

"Where are the two who are to lead me to the stream and the abode of peace, Chela? I speak of one who is a giant among lamas. Where is he, and his companion?"

"I knew not that he had a companion," answered the lepcha, saluting such astounding Omniscience again, this time even more reverently. "But where he is, I do know! Have you had morning-tea?"

The old man smiled.

"I cook not often. It is good to fast! Take me to the big lama. I would go to him!"

There was no answer. The little tribesman was prone on his stomach, blowing continuously and crescendo on to another collection of leaves and twigs, from which there soon mounted into the clean morning air a thin spiral of smoke... .

"Get out thy bowl, rimpoche. The tea is ready."

Sipping the steaming beverage, the old man looked up at the great gompa, his wrinkled lips working.

"Its face to the east; a lake before, and rock behind! The builders have upheld The Law!... Maybe this is the dwelling of peace that my dream promised I should find! Thy tea is good... . Art thou content?"

"Now I go to see the abbot, rimpoche," he announced decisively. "Where shall I find you when I return, Holy One?"

The ancient, who was scouring his drinking bowl with a handful of sand, looked up, shaking finger knocking against shaky finger.

"Where else should I be but here?" he answered mildly. "I shall meditate, Chela!"

The lepcha's inquiries were disheartening in their results. No one seemed to know where Samdad Chlemba was. The general consensus of opinion inclined to his being in meditation.

Disconsolately, the lepcha returned to the ancient and recounted his fruitless search.

"Let be, until the afternoon, chela! I will tell thee when it is good to go again. Sit at my feet and tell me of the big lama. I love him, though the weakness is a shame to me."

ABOUT SUNSET, a sound like distant thunder woke the lepcha.

Lulled by the droning voice of the old lama as he alternately twirled his prayer wheel or told his beads, he had fallen asleep. It was stiflingly hot. The sky was a flaming scarlet, tinged, towards the east, with an ominous purple.

A quick, convulsive trembling of the earth caused him to glance critically at the lake. Its shining surface was scarred with ripples, though not a breath of air was stirring. Normally, earthquakes mean little to a Himalayan hill man. Therefore, it was not the earthquake which made his face whiten and his right hand grasp the ban lying across his knees.

The Chimney of Hell was smoking.

It was come! The Encompasser was about to devour all the women of Tibet— or, at best, the entire valley of Hlampo! He sprang to his feet and shook himself. For a moment he stood stock still— thinking. If The Encompasser swallowed the valley, he would swallow the big lama!

Another trembling of the ground caused the lepcha to throw religious etiquette to the four winds of Heaven.

He gripped the old man's arm.

"Hearken, rimpoche," he said grimly. "You must help me to find this hidden abbot!"

The ancient laid a wrinkled hand on the strong, gripping finger.

"My bones are old, chela!" he said gently. "What must I do?"

"Follow me!" responded the little tribesman, and started towards the gompa.

The birds were now fluttering wildly hither and thither with whirring wings, crying shrilly in their terror. Over the tops of the mountains was gathering a congested mass of cloud. At the eastern end of the valley a huge column of mingled smoke and steam was rising into the air in a writhing column half a mile high, the top of it spreading into a dun-and-grey mushroom shape. On all sides, fear-stricken lamas were scurrying by, making for the mountains, their harsh jabbering and occasional hoarse cries adding to the clamant confusion of Nature.

"The gods are indeed wrath, Chela," murmured the ancient. "Whither shall we go?"

The lepcha took command of the situation. This old priest was a friend of the big lama. Very good. That made him responsible to the big lama for his safety. Therefore, the rimpoche would do as he was told!

"Come! We go to the big lama!" snapped the little man, grasping a fleeing lama by his cloak. "Where is the abbot?" he asked sharply.

"I know not," answered the lama excitedly. "Let me go!"

There was a rending of cloth as the terrified lama fled.

"Stay here, rimpoche," gritted the exasperated Lepcha. "I go to this abbot's room! If he answer not, I will splinter the door! Stay here! Do you understand?"

"Om! Peace, chela! I will wait!"

"It is useless, rimpoche," said the little man, a few minutes later. "He is not here! Let us go!"

Taking the bony elbow in his strong grasp, he helped the ancient to mount the staircase. As they entered the audience chamber he struck his forehead violently with his own palm.

"Son of a fool that I am!" he shouted. "I know not how to open the secret door!"

"Yet it must be opened," said the ancient gently, nodding his bald head. "We must get to him. I also have a message for him. Try to open it, son! Were I able, I would help thee. But I cannot. I will sit and pray to the Opener of all doors."

Frantically the lepcha felt the wall for some knob or spring.

He remembered having seen Samdad Chiemba stand flat against it with his two arms extended.

Ten— twenty times he adopted a similar posture.

Ten— twenty times, he swore frantically at his failure.

At last, looking downwards, he saw a small square of black stone let into the floor. Perhaps he ought to stand on that and push!

The door swung open.

"Great is the Blessed One!" muttered the old lama, gathering his withered hams under him and rising unsteadily to his feet. "Great is the power of prayer! Om! I am tired and would fain sleep!"

The wearer of the ban clucked his tongue impatiently.

"Keep as close to me as a leech, holy one! There are many false ways in this accursed underworld as there are devils in hell!"

"There is but one true way," answered the ancient, stooping his head as he followed him into the passage. "Against that way, no number of devils can prevail!"

As if answering his challenge, the earth shuddered violently. This time, for nearly a minute.

35

Colin Pleads With Gynia

WALKING IN FRONT of his escort on his way to Gynia's apartment, a sudden trembling of the ground caused Colin's guards to start muttering among themselves.

Now, an earthquake above ground is one thing, but an earthquake when the woman you love is in an underground cavern, the roof of which is filled with masses of stalactites, is quite another.

A few small fragments fell from the overhead darkness, the sound of their impact on the rocky floor echoing hollowly in the vast emptiness. A spasm of fear for Piers shot through Gray. For a moment he thought of insisting on going back, but a grim reflection made him over rule the impulse.

"Greeting to you, lord!" Gynia half smiled as he entered.

She was overjoyed to see him; but he should not know it— yet! The strain was evidently telling on him, for his face was strained and pale, and in his eyes was fear. Doubtless he was afraid of her. Or was it fear of what might happen to his fellow prisoner?

A fierce satisfaction filled her mind. "Thy message reached me, lord!" "I gathered so," answered Gray.

"Was thy prison to thy liking? Surely not! Prisons slay beauty!"

"Our quarrel was a foolish one, Gynia!" he said, almost humbly.

"It was of thy seeking!"

He glanced round the lighted cavern with its great couch and smoking incense burners, took in the table set with wine and fruit and food.

"Before we talk of that which I have to say to you, I beg of you to release the Inglis girl and order that she be properly cared for!"

"Is she, then, ill?" Gynia's eyes glittered.

Gray looked at her sombrely.

"You have no cause to be jealous of her!"

The admiration in his glance pleased the lamia, and she laughed.

"Thinkest thou that if I had had cause to be jealous of her, I would have sent you to her? Nay! Her beauty, compared to mine, is as a lamp to the sun!" She looked at him pensively a moment. "Yet it is also true that a spark may light a destroying fire! What I shall do for her depends on what thou wilt do for me! Anger me not, therefore, by making her the sound of the bell that you have come to ring before me!" A glint came into the tilted eyes.

Taking a sweetmeat from a golden dish, she stretched herself at full length on the great couch and looked at him languorously.

"Hast thou hunger, man whom I love? If they have not fed thee well, thy jailor shall be put down such a hole as that in which, thou sawest a half roan recently!"

"I have no hunger," answered Gray. "I am only thirsty."

She sighed.

"There is wine, lord!.. .. Since thou hast no hunger, let us talk as two whose minds are to be one in happiness! Come, here beside me."

Gray put down the empty goblet.

To anger her might well mean the frustration of all his hopes which, balanced as they were on the knife edge of her fickle temper, could instantly topple to disaster. For a brief moment he hesitated, then sank down beside her upon the show leopard skins.

Gynia twined her soft fingers in his strong brown ones. He could feel the pulses in her satiny wrists beating against his own.

"Give me a son!" she whispered. "The holy one hopes for it as much as I do!"

"Yea, I know his hopes," returned Gray. "I would do all that lay in my power to please him!"

Gynia kissed him.

Once more, the slow fires of the wine were alight in his veins. The beauty of this woman could make him forget, for a while, his nightmare dread of what might happen to Piers.

"I saw the Holy One last night!" said Gynia dreamily.

"Saw him? Where?"

"Last night!" she responded, enjoying! his bafflement. "It was in a dream! He had been sent for," she went on, "Art thou pleased?"

Almost impatiently Gray's mind faced the recalled reality of his and Piers's danger.

"He told me he was on his way to some place, beloved," she went on whisperingly. "The sending for him which I mentioned, is the work of Milaspa the high priest—  an evil dog!"

Gray studied her strange eyes. "Is not Milaspa to be trusted?"

"Thou knowest he is not to be trusted! Dost thou trust me, husband-to-be?"

"What, think you, is Milaspa's plan?" asked Gray.

"He seeks the abbot's death. My death— and yours," she replied fiercely. "I read it in his eyes! On the night of the serpent feast, he will set the powers of evil to work against us! Therefore,  against him thou and I must be one and indivisible, even as we shall be— afterwards! There will be dread happenings in the temple, lord! Death will claim his brides and bridegrooms. The holy one warned me of a coming danger and bade me tell thee of it."

Gray held the satiny wrists tightly. Somehow it gave him a helpful sense of power over her.

"Yea, Gynia! We will fight the cunning of Milaspa with our cunning; and we shall defeat him!"

The lamia writhed herself closer to him.

"Kiss me, my king!"

He struggled into a sitting position.

"Gynia!" he exclaimed hoarsely, "tomorrow you and I will be as two that have become one in our fighting of Milaspa. The Inglis girl is sick! I am her countryman and her friend, and she needs me! Let me take some food and wine to her! I will return before the ceremony in the temple of the White Python."

Gynia shook back her loosened hair. Her eyes were hard and bright.

"Answer me truly! Lovest thou this doll?"

"I— she and I are great friends. That is all. We shall never marry. She does not love me!"

She caught the sadness in his voice and smiled at him, dazzlingly.

"Thou shalt take her wine and food! But forget not thy promise to return to me!"

She clapped her hands.

"Mistress?" demanded the gorilla woman, writhing sore shoulders.

"Carry for my lord the flagon of wine that is yonder, and a dish of sweet cakes." ....

"THOU WERT angry with my mistress!" insinuated the gorilla woman just before they reached the prison cave. "Thou art right to go to her whom thou lovest! I, too, love. But the man I love is not handsome, as thou art. When I told my mistress she beat me. Assuredly, love is but another name for suffering!"

The hatred which gleamed in her eyes told Gray that this woman would help him in any way she could— if only to thwart her mistress.

"Listen," he said to her. "Will you betray me if I trust you?"

The woman shook her head violently, hissing an angry negative.

"Can you get the Inglis girl some sandals?"

"She shall have mine," answered the woman.

The sandals fitted. Despite her physical clumsiness the gorilla woman had very small feet. A moment later Gray saw Piers examining a small gold box filled with a brown powder.

"She gave me this!" said Piers, greeting him with a glad smile. "What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Why have you given us this powder?" demanded Gray, sniffing it. It was hashish.

"He whom I love gave it to me," was the answer... "It may be necessary for someone to die; and it may not. Therefore, I have given it. A little makes one brave. A lot— !" She rolled her eyes eloquently, smiling at them.

The woman took the box from Piers, and crushing some of the sweetmeats, mixed the hashish with them and rolled the resultant mixture into four small balls. She gave two each to Piers Bryan — and Colin Gray.

"I will see that a messenger come for you in good time, lord," she said. "But let neither of you eat the hashish until ye be come into the temple, and then not at once. Many things may happen!"

With which enigmatic remark she left them.

A few minutes later they were both sound asleep.

36

Samdad Chiemba Arrives

TIMOR KHAN had been as good as his word. Preparations had been made to give the abbot of Hlampo a royal reception.

The fact that there had been several earthquake shocks that afternoon had damped nobody's spirits. They were far too common an occurrence in these great hills. Also, the army's excitement over the coming visit of Samdad Chiemba was at fever heat, He would bring the Lame Devil with him  as a prisoner, rumour said.

The floor of the circular marquee of felt that Chorjieff had caused to be pitched in tire centre of the encampment was covered with a mass of overlapping silken carpets as gorgeous as the east window of a cathedral. Inside and out were set low tables covered with a profusion of eatables, while smoking fires told of toasting meats and a great cauldron of snow-white rice. A guard of honour, consisting of a hundred stalwart Buriats was drawn up in two lines, forming a short lane up which the guest would pass to meet the Khan.

Timor Khan's burly form appeared between the curtains of the entrance. He was dressed in vivid green silk, his broad breast ablaze with emeralds, and the gold scabbard of his scimitar a curving river of green fire.

A blast on a cracked bugle announced the arrival of K.B. and Samdad Chiemba.

Wearing his abbatial mitre, and riding a little ahead of the Bengali, Samdad Chiemba's face was pale and grave. He evidently felt the responsibility which his offer to Timor Khan had thrown upon him— not so much, perhaps, in connection with possible difficulties in handing over so much gold; but as regards the finding and handing over— dead or alive— of Chorjieff.

Behind the abbot, hunched, jockey-wise on a high-peaked, turquoise-studded Tartar saddle, his robes tucked about his knees, was K.B. His fat calves were bare, and every now and then an expression of acute agony passed over his face as the long hairs on his legs were caught between stirrup leather and saddle-flap.

At that moment rang out the cracked bugle. The pony shied sideways.

Picking himself up in a veritable spate of objurgatory remonstrance, the stout Bengali rose, and, adjusting his spectacles as he ran, seized the bridle of the abbot's horse. At all dismounting that duty was expected of him as Timor  Khan's ambassador.

Sedately they walked towards the emerald splendour that was Timor Khan. K.B. knocking clouds of dust from his disordered robes.

"Greeting, abbot!" shouted Timor, coming forward with outstretched hands.

Samdad Chiemba returned his salutation, and looked at him gravely.

"How came you to know of my return to my people, abbot?" asked Timor Khan.

"The keeper of the books said that he had cast a spell about me which no other magic could pierce!"

"The keeper of the books is dead— even as I said he would be," answered Samdad Chiemba dourly. "I knew otherwise than through magic. See! This was found upon a mountain road and brought to me by one of my lamas. The amchi will tell you that it speaks of you, Timor Khan." He thrust a crumpled paper towards K.B.

The Bengali's sharp eyes scanned it quickly. Then he read it aloud, translating it into the vernacular:

" 'K.B... prisoner... of... Chorjieff... Timor Khan... Resuming... leadership... informing... Gray... KB.' "

So G.1. had written down the message delivered to the watcher on Chomolo by Kanga! It was unlike Gray to drop important papers, K.B. said to himself.

Timor Khan made no comment on the reading, but led Samdad Chiemba to the seat of honour prepared for him, motioning K.B. to stand on his right hand.

One of the first to greet the Bengali had been that same Kanga, the brother of the Babu's most trusted spy.

"Go at once," said K.B. to him in low tones, "and bid the watcher at the gorge to make his mirror tell Chomolo of the abbot's arrival here! Say, also, that he and I return together to Luntse today." The Bengali knew that it was Samdad Chiemba's intention to return to Luntse immediately after his audience with Timor Khan; and he had decided not to let the abbot out of his sight until he knew that Gray was safe.

The discussion of the line of action to be taken by the Khan and the Hlampo lamas was now in full swing.

"This lame dog's jaws have snapped at your flanks for a long time, abbot," said Timor Khan, doubtfully.

Samdad Chiemba smiled faintly, refusing with a courteous gesture the dish the Khan was pressing upon him.

"It is known to me that he will come to Luntse," he said pensively. "No doubt, to work more evil!"

"Then you know something that all my spies have failed to tell me, abbot! Why think you, will Chorjieff go to Luntse?"

"To you, Timor Khan, the power of my magic over men's bodies and minds is not known," retorted Samdad Chiemba, impassively. "I forsee his coming!"

"Why comes he, I say?" repeated Timor Khan.

"A few days ago," said Samdad Chiemba in clear tones, "it was revealed to me in my meditations that the treasure for which the Lame Devil has been searching lies beneath the waters of the lake which faces my gompa!"

K.B.'s spectacles flashed as he turned his head. But he said nothing.

Timor's roar of laughter was echoed by those of his khans in his immediate vicinity. "Is it from the drowned treasure which no man has seen that you have so generously promised to pay my army?" he queried, combing a few stray crumbs from his beard.

Samdad Chiemba inclined his dome-like skull.

"From that!" he answered. "But it is not unseen! I have seen it. So great is it that it would buy all Tibet! Aye, and India too!" His voice rang out triumphantly. "With those vast riches, the law shall be established! No country in the world— and no enemy, however powerful, will henceforward be able to injure our holy faith. We shall build about it a wall to protect it, the bricks of which shall be of gold. So shall all opposition die!"

A murmur of discontent filled the great tent.

The effect of the abbot's words on K.B. was electrical. This priest was doubtless exaggerating. But, even so, he had unwittingly thrown a lighted brand on a heap of brushwood. Even though Timor Khan's sworn and signed promise was on its way to India, and the messenger beyond recall, K.B. knew that his soldiers regretted his order to abandon Tibet without looting the monasteries.

K.B. made up his mind with lightning speed. This danger must be met.

"The great generosity of the holy abbot," he said, speaking loudly, so that all within earshot might hear, "will doubtless lead him to share this great treasure with those whose arms, instead of being turned against the faith, have been deliberately turned aside from it, and are even ready to protect it!"

A murmur of approval filled the tent.

The grizzled khan who stood next in authority after the Prince paramount was about to voice the reassurance of his brother khans when a messenger was heard running towards the tent, shouting as he ran. All further talk was ended.

"The Chimney of Hell is smoking, mighty khan!" he declared, kneeling before Timor.

The news caused a stir. The legend about the smoking of the Chimney of Hell was known in every village for a thousand miles round Hlampo.

Hurriedly Samdad Chiemba left the tent. Gazing in the direction of Luntse he saw the great pillar of dun-and-grey smoke. His face went white.

"I return to Hlampo," he exclaimed. "Wilt thou lend me a fast horse, Khan? I can ride!"

Timor Khan's beard bunched in his fingers. This accursed fairy tale must not be allowed to interfere with the plans they had made for the capturing of the Lame Devil!

"Yea, abbot," he said. "I will lend you fast horses! But my amchi returns with you. He shall command your escort. That, I wish!"

He turned to K.B.

"This time I will give thee a bigger horse, amchi Khan!"

K.B. clenched his teeth. He knew that this second purgatorial ride must be ridden. In this mad-brained abbot lay their only chance of getting hold of Chorjieff before he fled the country. Besides, Gray was in Hlampo. How could he sit in the Valley of Peace twiddling his thumbs, while G.1. was lying buried alive for lack of energetic measure to rescue him? It could not be done!

The horses were trotted up,

"Let not the Lame Devil slip through a half-open door, abbot," roared the bluff Timor Khan from the tent entrance.

Samdad Chiemba did not smile.

"Be not afraid, Khan! If I live, I shall hold him!" he returned, settling himself in his saddle.

"And you die, holy one," muttered K.B., taking the reins and a bunch of the horse's mane in each hand, "I shall be there to look after Chorjieff— if this most accursed quadruped does not kill me!"

37

The Feast Of The Serpent

ON THE NIGHT of the feast of the serpent, an expectant and densely packed throng filled the great temple of the White Python. The people of the shadow— huge-eared and big-handed— were present, both through curiosity and by inclination, through curiosity because the oldest among them could not remember a similar happening— that all work should cease — and by inclination, because, hypersensitive as centuries of this underground life had made them, they were afraid. A sudden overwhelming fear of something dread and unknown had awakened in them the long dormant herd instinct. They wanted to get together to defy this fear.

The strange behaviour of the gods and devils had inspired this unwonted uneasiness that was slowly but surely turning, into terror. Subterranean explosions had succeeded each other with increasing frequency, each trembling of the earth being accompanied by heavy falls of rock in the caverns. The statue of Herukapa, the Naked One, had toppled from its plinth and was lying smashed into a thousand pieces.

Those of the people of the shadow who could see found relief in exchanging quick glances. There is some strange comfort in looking upon the participators in a common fate. The blind workers sought comfort in a quicker touching of hands, not only in those hand touchings carried out by themselves, but also in sensing those taking place near them. Each individual of this strangely degenerated people was telepathically in touch with his fellow. In the whole two thousand of them, confluent anxieties and merged individual fears were rapidly brimming over the dam top of self control.

The roar of the central column of flame prevented their husky, anxious murmurs being heard. Sacrifices to the white python were nothing new. Indeed, few among them even troubled to be present at one. But the most incredible rumours were abroad. The serpent god was to be deposed. His consort would be split into two halves by lightning, and each half would turn into a complete woman of astounding beauty These twin goddesses were then to wed a godlike man who would come up from the earth via the spouting column of flame.

So do rumours grow; so are facts distorted; so are religions made.

The crowd in the temple was divided into three wedge-shaped blocks, the apices of which pointed towards the altar, a gangway, some four paces wide, separating each wedge.

In the first block were the personages, wearing their golden filets and bracelets. They numbered two or three hundred. The second block was composed of the blind workers and their families. There were something like two thousand of them. In the third block were the servants of the personages, women slaves, and minor officials. The guards, amounting to a bare hundred, were massed near the opening leading to the Outer Valley, only half a dozen of Gynia's bodyguards being grouped near the entrance to her apartment.

The rapt attention of the gathered serpent worshippers was focused on the fourth entrance. Was it not the door of the sacred house of the serpent, the dwelling of the dread white python god?

Brilliantly lighted, the yawning mouth of a thirty-foot circular pit with smooth, pinkish walls, was clearly visible to those who could see. Those who could not see were told about it.

From the centre of the pit rose a stalagmite having a certain gross resemblance to the body of a woman. It was the coign of vantage of the White Python. As yet, there was no sign of the god. Usually he rose into view only when the victim began to scream.

To the left of the fourth entrance and near the golden bell and its tripod were two thrones, seemingly made of fire, so blindingly bright was the refulgence of the red stones and crystals with which they were encrusted. The seats of these thrones were a trifle higher than the altar.

Behind one of them stood the hunch-back, holding a fan of peacock's feathers on a long golden handle. At their foot was the high priest, stripped to the waist, his vulturine head craned forward, watching the leathern curtains that closed the entrance into Gynia's apartment. Occasionally his eyes turned towards the secret door, which was standing ajar.

The curtains moved. Raising one arm, Milaspa began a chant.

"The sharer of god-like wisdom comes!" he vociferated.

A forest of arms rose into the air.

"Behold her!" screamed the assembled worshippers, the bass voices of the guards dominant.

"Behold him whose wisdom and strength, joined to hers, is greater than that of the White Python!" roared Milaspa.

"Behold them!" shrieked the crowd in a delirium of delighted expectation.

"Behold the splendour of her, who shall bear a son to rule ye!" howled Milaspa, throwing both arms above his head, slavering on to his chin.

Slowly, Gynia passed up one of the gangways.

Over her beautiful body was thrown a thin, sheet-like garment of the thinnest black silk, the ivory whiteness of her limbs glinting dully through its texture.

By her side walked Colin Gray in his lama's dress.

Of what was to happen, she would say nothing. When he had pressed her to tell him how he was going to prove himself greater than the White Python, she looked at him with something like fear in her eyes.

"It is written that you shall be greater than he," she had answered fiercely. "Therefore it will be so!"

Gray was looking eagerly on all sides for Piers. But there was no sign of her.

The eyes that were said by those who knew him to miss nothing saw many other things, however. They saw a glittering, serpent-handled knife lying on the altar stone, and knew its sinister import. They saw that, at the threshold of the fourth entrance, the floor of the temple sloped steeply downwards towards the pit of the White Python; they saw that the three yards of that slope glistened as if it had been smeared with some greasy substance, as it was. And they saw the diabolical evil in the hunchback's eyes.

Whatever happened, Gray knew that he must watch the hunchback. Quite clearly, what Gynia had told him was right. The Mongol was in league with Milaspa.

The assistant high priest, who had been in the valley waiting for the rising of the first horn of the new moon, came swiftly to Milaspa. Gynia beckoned to him, but he feigned not to have seen her signal.

"It is about to come, Milaspa!" he said hoarsely.

Gray, who had seen this disregarding of Gynia's gesture, knew that the moment had come to put a safer distance between the hunchback and themselves.

"Get down, thou!" he ordered.

"The high priest bade me remain here," snarled Samdad Chiemba's servant.

"If you don't get down, I'll throw you down!" gritted Gray. "Get down, I say!"

Seeing that the man had no intention of obeying him, he reached out an arm, and, gripping the dwarf's wrist, with a sharp twist and an outward thrust hurled him to the ground.

Milaspa strode forward and looked up at him, livid with fury.

"Thou are not yet king!" he hissed. "Let the man be!"

"Thou art still alive— let well alone!" flung back Gray. "If he mounts again I'll break his neck!"

A shrill, sustained screaming was now heard. As if answering it, a muffled explosion shook the earth, causing the column of flame to waver. The screaming became rapidly louder. The ranks of the guards opened out. The sight of the procession which then appeared froze the blood in Gray's veins.

In front danced the assistant high priest, clapping his hands together over his head and howling discordantly. Behind him were two guards, dragging by his wrists with his legs trailing on the ground a half man, whose leprous white skin shone with perspiration. Close behind the shrieking victim walked Piers Bryan, a guard on either side of her, her blue eyes two pools of glittering blackness in a deathly white face.

38

The Pit Of Death

"STOP THIS hellish business!" shouted Gray to Milaspa. "Stop it, I say!"

Gynia leaned forward and seized his forearm. "Be wise, lord!" she said. "It is only the half-man they will sacrifice! Not the girl!"

"They shall sacrifice no one, if I can stop it," vociferated Gray, his great voice booming through the temple. "If they lay a finger on her I'll tear them to pieces!"

His fighting blood was up, but there was a deadly sickness at the pit of his stomach. "When we are declared united, she will be freed," soothed Gynia. "I have so ordered it!"

Gray looked at her with burning eyes.

"If you are lying," he gritted, "I swear by my God— and He is a God of Power!— that I will kill you with my naked hands!" "It shall be as my lord says," she said.

The eyes of Gray and Piers met. The shadow of a twisted smile flickered on her lips and died to whiteness.

Gray gripped the arms of the throne until the sharp edges of the cut stones and crystals pierced the flesh. A deathlike stillness, as of the mesmerised, had fallen on the people of the shadow, whose faces were turned towards the fourth entrance. They had ceased their murmurs. Only the roar of the fire and the shrill screams of the half-man as Milaspa chanted the prayer of dismissal were unabated.

Then a gasp of fear came from two thousand throats. The White Python was looking into the temple, and this half-blind people sensed it!

The coffin-shaped head and reared neck were as still as carven stone. But cream-coloured coils as thick as a man's thigh, and patterned with pale lemon, diamond shaped reticulations, were sliding over the woman-like stalactite. Six inches of black forked tongue, as broad as a man's little finger, was flickering ceaselessly.

The high priest was strutting behind the guards, who were now dragging the miserable victim more slowly, so that the prayer of dismissal might be finished before he was given to that watching forty-foot death.

Milaspa was now howling the terrible death chant.

The agonised screams of the victim merged in one shrill, siren-like howl, broken only by hissing intakes or breath as he filled his small lungs again and again, writhing in convulsive efforts to break the iron grip on his wrists.

The guards pushed the biting, fighting, whiteness to the edge of the thickly greased incline. For a moment it balanced in a frantic effort to keep its equilibrium, waving the stumpy arms as if exulting in renewed freedom. Then the half-man's feet slid from under him, and he shot downwards. Like lightning the monstrous reptile was after him, a swift-moving stream of cream-coloured death.

Too horrified to move (he had even ceased to wonder when the moment would come for him to seize Piers and make a dash for the secret entrance). Gray stared at the awful scene, fascinated. Gray thought that it was his own sense of nausea which was giving him the impression that the whole temple was rocking. But it was not. It was an earthquake.

At that moment the secret door swung wide. Into the temple rushed the lepcha. his ban glittering in his hand. He stared around for Gray. Behind him, dimly seen, stood the yellow-robed form of the ancient.

"The chimney of hell is smoking!" bawled the tribesman, rushing towards the thrones.

At the sound of the lepcha's words the whole assembly made a mad rush for the entrance to the outer valley, screaming repetitions of his cry. The legend of the encompasser was known to them all. Another subterranean explosion was followed by a deep bubbling noise. The great mass of inscribed rock standing near the column of flame, swayed gently; swayed still more; toppled, and fell, blocking the exit of the flame, so that it now shot outwards, a flattened circle of bluish-green fire, spurting sideways, as water spurts from a tap when a compressing thumb is placed upon its nozzle.

Gray knew the moment had come.

Leaping down, he rushed towards Piers. Quicker than he were Gynia's guards. At a sign from her they intercepted him. Rushing at them he heard her shout some order. Evidently they were to take him alive, for none of them drew their weapons.

A straight left and right dropped two, and a vicious uppercut accounted for a third. A fourth— a bigger man than the others— was aiming a sweeping blow at his head, when Gray bent double, and, ramming the man in the solar plexus, knocked him out. But stumbled himself and fell, carried forward by his impetus.

The next moment a grunting half-dozen guards were sprawling on top of him.

Then the lepcha took a hand in things. There was no question with him of not using his weapon. The straight-edged ban flashed here and there like a streak of fire, growing ever redder as he hewed savagely at that heap of brawn backs.

Near the altar were Gynia and Milaspa. Gripping the serpent-handled sacrificial knife, the high priest moved nearer to her. She knew, but did not flinch. Her eyes met his eyes, and held him.

"Kill thyself, thou dog!" she sneered. "Thy accursed reign is ended!"

"And thine!" he grated, coming slowly towards her.

The temple floor buckled under his feet, and he reeled sideways.

Followed a mad, rapid twisting of the ground, and a deafening report high up in the gloom overhead. A mass of stalactites weighing several tons, crashed downwards, burying the high priest beneath their glittering mass.

With barely a glance at the still-slithering heap, Gynia moved swiftly over to where the lepcha, having slain four of the guards, was helping Gray to his feet. Her face was as the face of a fiendess.

"Surrender thyself! Thou art mine!" she called to him.

"Go to your foul serpent, you she-devil," exclaimed Gray, hatred flaming in his eyes.

Turning, he dashed towards Piers, who was struggling desperately in the grip of the hunchback. Fighting every inch of the way, the Mongol was dragging her towards the sinister fourth entrance.

The assistant high priest ran forward. Gynia acted swiftly. With her, it was either love or hatred. Now it was hatred— black, boiling, and double damned.

Picking up the golden hammer, she swung it round her head and suddenly loosed her hold. It flew through the air, and struck Colin Gray at the base of the neck, knocking him senseless. The lepcha ran to him.

Gynia snatched up a knife, and bounded like an infuriated pantheress over dead and dying, towards Piers.

Coming up behind the assistant priest, she drove the knife downwards between his shoulder-blades with all her lithe strength. Coughing thickly, he fell on his face, clawing the ground.

"Release her, beast!" she screamed at the hunchback. "It is I who will give her to death!"

The Mongol, lust and madness in his eyes, let the half-fainting girl slip to her knees, and himself faced the consort of the serpent. Only for a second. Once again the knife struck. And once again its point went home. The stricken man ran round  in circles, uttering bubbling cries and trying to pull out the knife, which, transfixing his throat, was wedged in his back bone.

Gynia jerked Piers to her knees. For a moment the English girl thought she intended to help her. But the next  instant, Gynia's arms were locked about her and she had lifted her off her feet.

Frantically Piers screamed Gray's name. What all the efforts of the lepcha had  failed to achieve, that cry brought about. Gray's eyes opened and he sat up. He leaped to his feet.

"Come!" he shouted to the lepcha, and raced across the temple.  But he was too late.

As he reached the top of the greased slope, the two women slid over the end of it and disappeared from sight, Piers struggling desperately.

39

The Python Strikes

FOR one horror-filled moment Gray thought of jumping after her. But his brain was now working with the speed of light. The snake had already been given a victim. Almost certainly it would not attack her. That pit had overhanging sides. Once he was in it, there would be no saving Piers's life!

Wildly he glared round the now deserted temple.

Something made him look up at a slim stone column. If that were broken off at its base―

"Drag those bodies out of the way!" he shouted to the lepcha, and dashed back to the opposite side of the temple.

The lepcha worked frantically to carry out his order, swearing horribly, and firmly convinced that his big lama had been driven mad by the hammer blow he had received.

The far side reached, Gray took a deep breath and ran at the slim stone pillar. Six feet away from it he hurled himself through the air and struck the slender column with the full weight of his great body. With a dull crack it toppled over, its fall being broken by the two thrones, against which it remained leaning.

"Catch hold of that end!" he shouted.

Their veins almost bursting, and their muscles bulging under the strain, the two men lowered one end of the stone pillar towards the top of the woman-like stalagmite fourteen feet away in the centre of the pit.

It dropped and held, resting on one of the shoulder-like projections. Quickly Gray kicked off his Tibetan boots and started to cross it barefooted.

Foot by foot the interior of the pit slowly became visible. For the fraction of a second he glanced downwards. He could see Piers lying in a dead faint. Gynia, like a marble statue, was kneeling before the enormous python, which, constricted about its motionless prey, seemed to be considering her avidly with its lidless eyes. Glancing up sideways, she saw Gray.

Instantly she placed her hands one on either side of the flat, coffin-shaped head, and bending her own head, crowned with those heavy coils of silky, black hair, she breathed deeply into its loathsome nostrils; spoke to it whisperingly.

As if it understood, the enormous reptile slowly uncoiled from about the crushed half-man. Gliding to the stalagmite, the snake slid up it. Coiled round the head and shoulders of the stone woman, its thick tail trailing on the pit floor, the white python glared at Gray.

The white python was going to give battle, and Gray knew it.

"Piers!" he called tensely, praying God to waken her from her unconsciousness. He dared not look down again. His eyes were fixed on the eyes of the reptile. It was still too far away for it to strike.

Inch by inch he moved forward. Once, the prone pillar turned a little, under the pressure of his advanced foot, and he nearly fell.

"Ohe; lepcha!"

"Wilt thou that I throw thee my ban, rimpoche?"

"Keep this pillar from rolling," called back Gray in English. "Sit on it!" he corrected in Tibetan.

As he stared into the python's eyes, Gray thought that he could see, deep in them, the inner wickedness, moving. He hated those shallow, brilliant topaz eyes with a hatred every bit as fierce and cold as the snake's hatred of him... . Evil knowledge— the essence of sin of ages— was looking out of them.

He must kill those eyes!

As long as they could see, he could not save Piers. And Piers he was going to save— or die with her! Something— perhaps he was reading it in the python's glare— seemed to tell him he would win.

The memory of the king prophecy came back to him. He was going to be the greater white python! He would kill this coiling damnableness, having no other weapons than it had. His strength and cunning should be pitted against its strength and cunning, the quickness of his eyes against its eyes.

Inch by inch he slid his feet forward. Heel touched instep, slowly and carefully, like those of a tight-rope walker.

He heard a little gasp below him, and instinctively knew that Piers was recovering. But he could only stare, stonily, in to the moveless orange eyes of the white python. Another yard, and the fight would begin. Thirty-six inches that seemed six miles.

The savage, sharpened roar of the column of flame in the temple was muffled now, but a faint, shrill screaming, as of many people overtaken by a violent death, came to him. And then— the pillar was shaking!

Instantly his arms moved outwards from his shoulder, unhurriedly, and arrow straight. Fortunately, the earth tremor, though severe, was short. But it was followed by a louder subterranean moaning and bubbling. A puff of steam billowed out from under a long, low opening in the farther side of the pit, where the python's bath pool, fed by a volcanic stream, was situated.

His plan of battle was vivid and clear cut in his mind, and it seemed good to him, knowing that a python has no poison fangs, but kills by constriction— its terrific strength rendering the awful pressure of its coils fatal in a few seconds.

He prayed as he had never prayed before. He heard Piers calling to him:

"I'm all right, Colin! You'll win! Go in! Go in! Go in!"

And Colin Gray went in.

He pushed his left arm forwards towards the snake. Like a flash, the python's head shot forward. What followed happened inside six seconds.

Two feet down that pinkish throat Gray droved his left hand before the great curved teeth transfixed his flesh. He felt no pain. His left grip on the python's smooth cold gullet, tightened into a steely hold, and in the same fraction of a second his right hand shot forward, the thumb and second finger crooked pincer-wise to nip the orange lenses. In— in went his nails. In another fraction of the same second he was dragged violently forward. Desperately he dug the fingers of his right hand under the python's blunt snout. And pushing upwards and downwards in the same movement, tore the snake's jaws apart.

Even as he fell headlong into the pit, he tore at them. With him went a desperate cry from the lepcha. There followed a scene so terrible that even to this day Gray will not talk of it.

The forty-foot monster, blind, mutilated, and mad with pain, was lashing and writhing its huge length, sweeping its tail with terrific speed and a harsh, rustling sound. Every few seconds it rammed its mangled head against the pink walls of the pit.

Quickly Gray got to his feet. Piers ran to him and he thrust her behind him.

"Watch his tail," he shouted.

Suddenly, a jagged fissure yawned in the floor, and up through it gushed a bubbling flood of hot water. Steam was now pouring in clouds from the bath hole.

Gynia, her eyes fixed in a glassy stare, was watching the death agony of the white python as if in a trance. She was chanting something.

Then came the crowning horror. In one terrific convulsion the white python flung its glistening, blood-smeared coils about the white body of Gynia. She made no attempt to struggle.

A rope of silky black hair fell over the rippling ivory coils as the dying white python slid with her into the dark bath hole.

Foot by foot, that seemingly endless, beautifully marked reptilian body vanished from sight. Piers hid her face against Gray.

40

Over The Pass

THE WATER was now rapidly filling the pit.

"We'll be able to swim out of it soon. Piers!" said Gray, choosing, purposely, the phrase and a matter-of-fact tone. They had, in fact, to swim a few seconds later.

"Catch hold, rimpoche!" called the lepcha's voice from the top of the greased slope. Gray grabbed the dangling double length of knotted hide thongs.

"Up you go, Piers!"

"You go first, Colin. Pull me up afterwards!"

As he and the lepcha pulled her to safety, Gray's heart was too full for speech.

"Let's get out of this evil hole!" he said, stomping his feet into his boots.

"There is a devil. Look!" exclaimed the lepcha suddenly. And in truth it might have been a devil.

Streaming with blood, a hand on the handle of the knife still transfixing his throat, the hunchback had risen to his knees near the flat circle of greenish-blue flame. In his hand vas a scroll or silk with four pendant red ribbons, and hanging from a thin ivory roller. He was trying to read it, and did not seem conscious of their presence.

"Let him be! He is dying," said Gray to the lepcha, who had unsheathed his ban. "No man kills the dying."

He had recognised the silken scroll with the four pendant ribbons. It was Samdad Chiemba's seven-fold prayer of the rishis! The hunchback must have abstracted it from its silver case when he climbed down to fetch it alter the abbot had dropped it.

As they reached the secret door, a faint voice called to Gray from the shadows.

"Come to me, big lama," it said. "I have a writing for thee!"

Lying near the temple wall was the ancient. A piece of rock from the roof had fallen on him. Gray could see that he had only a few moments to live.

"Take it from my hand," gasped the old man. "I have found Tharpa. You have led me well. May the Blessed One―"

Stooping, Gray took the letter from the dead lama's fingers, and thrust it into the bosom of his wet robe.

"Come!" he said to Piers, huskily.

A rending sound made them look back. The temple floor had split. Volumes of smoke and steam, lit by a dull red glow from below, were pouring up from the huge crack.

The hunchback was now shuffling himself towards the fissure. With a convulsive movement he tore out the knife.

"Behold the end of thy king prophecy, Samdad Chiemba!" he screamed. "I hold it! I hold It! The king prophecy is mine!"

And he fell into subterranean fires.

RUNNING STUMBLINGLY, at times half carrying Piers, Gray followed the lepcha up the passage. More than once the open lamp which the tribesman was carrying shielded with one hand, nearly flickered out. Crossing the last of the big caverns his elbow knocked against an angle in the rock wall, and the lamp fell and was extinguished. Though they felt long and carefully in the darkness, they could not find it.

The horror of their situation was increased by the thunderous noise of falling invisible masses of rock and the grinding and groaning of the mountain. The vastness of the cavern and its towering roof caused every sound to be multiplied a thousandfold. But only once did fragments fall near them, and then the wind created by a fall of rock drove clouds of dust into their faces and half-blinded them.

At last the upper door was reached. But they could not open it. The earthquake shocks had shifted the wall, and it was jammed. Frantically Gray and the lepcha laboured at it, Piers sitting in silent terror, listening.

"We'll have to wait for the next tremor and try while it's on!" said Gray, momentarily pausing to wipe the sweat from his eyes.

His plan only half worked: The door swung partly open, towards the end of the tremor, and again stuck.

He pushed Piers through, and insisted on the lepcha following. His own bulk was too great to allow him to pass.

Alone on the other side of it he allowed himself to think of what was going to happen to him. He must get through— or die. Placing his back against the edge of the pivoted block of masonry he dug his heels into a groove in the rock and shoved with all his huge strength, his back muscles cracking under the strain.

The door gave grudgingly, but sufficiently for him to squeeze past.

Samdad Chiemba's audience chamber was in wild contusion. A lighted lamp hanging from the ceiling by five chains, was still swinging to and fro. Cupboard doors were wide open. The dragon embroidery had fallen a trailing glory on the littered floor. The altar of black magic was overset, statues had fallen from their niches, books and papers, scattered from the pigeon-hole book case arrangement, were lying everywhere. Great cracks yawned in the painted walls.

Crossing towards the exit passage Piers suddenly gave a cry of astonishment, and stooping, picked up something from the floor.

"Why, here's a photograph of you, Colin! How on earth did it come here?"

"Give it to me," snapped Gray worriedly. "We haven't a moment to lose!

His eyes fixed on the door in front of them, mechanically he reached out and took it from her. As he thrust it into the pocket in his robe he remembered, disjointedly, entering his cabin on the Orlumba and missing from the breast pocket of the ulster he had taken off in the house in Waldgrave Square, one of half-a-dozen photos, he had brought with him to get ready for posting during the voyage.

Looking across the valley from the outer gallery, they saw that a murky gloom shrouded everything. On the far side, high in the darkness, glowed a dull red, inverted cone. Slightly to the left of it was a white light. What the white light was, he could not tell. The dull red cone he knew to be the glow of the subterranean fires beneath the Chimney of Hell reflected on steam and smoke.

They were fortunate in having the lepcha for their guide. He had not boasted when he said he knew these hills as the veins on the back of his hands. He knew every path in them. Guided by him they soon reached the track leading up to the tableland. Then began the upward climb.

In that lightning-stabbed murk, with  the hills shaking every few minutes (the tremors were gradually becoming slighter) they tackled the strenuous climb in a spirit that was half thankful and half fearful. Gray was afraid lest one of the huge rocks which they could hear rumbling and thundering down the mountain sides followed by miniature avalanches of shale and stones, might sweep down upon them. Piers found the going difficult. Three weeks of darkness and no exercise had slackened even her splendid young muscles. More than once they were forced to stop for her to rest awhile. Suddenly, exactly what Gray had been fearing would happen, happened. From above them came quick, thudding shocks mingled with a sharp cracking of tree trunks.

A gigantic boulder had pitched down from the mountain top and was thundering and bumping, blunderingly, towards them. Owing to the darkness, it was only possible to approximately judge its probable course. Straining his eyes. Gray tried to pierce the gloom enveloping the track. But he could see nothing above them.

"It's an avalanche! Run!" he shouted.

He seized hold of Piers's hand and drew her upwards, half running. He was making for an overhanging mass of rocks just in front of them, to which a solitary pine, dimly visible against the night sky, had fortunately attracted his attention. Barely had they reached it, when the boulder hit the overhanging mass of rock with a terrific report, and the ground trembled. An immense dark mass zoomed into space.

The top of the uprooted pine struck the hillside a few yards from the cowering fugitives, balanced so a moment, the white of its trunk and splintered branches silver gashes in the darkness. Then it toppled into invisibility with a sharp snapping and a shuddering rustle of protesting foliage.

Ten seconds later, up from the lower darkness rolled a dull boom. The boulder had come to rest in some unseen ravine.

And so, after some hours, the tableland was safely reached.

41

The Landslide

AS GRAY'S HEAD came level with the tableland, he saw the bright light again. This time it was close at hand. It was an acetylene lamp, and by it were sitting two R.A.F. officers. Behind them loomed the grey mass of a biplane.

Efficiency had kept faith with K.B.

A few minutes later, the trio were being looked after by the pilot and his observer. Hot tea, dashed with whisky, soon put new life into the tired trio.

The last thing Gray remembered before sinking into the dreamless sleep of utter fatigue, was hearing the lepcha crooning a battle song, the soft slithering of a whetstone on steel, keeping time to the lilt of its verses.

Through flesh and bone it sleaves, my ban!

My enemies are dead— all save one!

Him I go to find— singing!

"Him I go to find— singing," repeated Gray, drowsily. And knew that it was true.

Tired though he was, dawn saw Colin Gray awake and taking stock of his tattered robes. The lepcha was busily following out his favourite morning occupation— blowing, crescendo, on a smoking pile of leaves and twigs.

Gray walked over to the big 'plane and laid a hand on it, caressingly. A queer thrill passed through him. Touching this light, yet mighty thing of steel and aluminium, seemed to him like patting a thoroughbred. It was a something that was bound to win its race— something which embodied generations of indomitable spirit, high endeavour, and ever-increasing courage.

He strolled towards the edge of the tableland and looked down into the valley. His thoughts were strangely jumbled. It all seemed so unreal. Gynia? Had there really ever been a woman so beautiful and so wicked? He could almost hear her voice: "As wind, to flame, so art thou to me!" A vision of her came back to him with a strange touch of sadness. Milaspa? Was he, too, the fleeting phantasm of a dream, like the wretched Gyal-po? He remembered the sinisterness of the hunchback. Why had Samdad Chiemba's servant stolen a prayer, of all things? It was strange, that! But even stranger was it that he should have called it the prophecy! Gray whistled softly between his teeth — and thought hard. And then— for the first time in many, many weeks— he laughed. His thought seemed so impossible ! He wished the sun would rise, so that they could start.

The other members of his party had now joined him. All of them were curious to see what the R.A.F. pilot, in one unintentional moment of poetry, aptly described as a cursed valley of death.

The Chimney of Hell was no longer smoking. A heat haze shimmered glassily above the now much lower crater, but that was all. The valley seemed to be sleeping like a beautiful woman. The lake of the Peacock's Tall was a sullen, steely gray, as if it were brooding over an evil dream, or resenting the violation of its secrets. Secrets? Where was Samdad Chiemba, Gray wondered. When would he return to his beloved Hlampo?

The valley answered his unspoken question. First came the cries of the terrified birds, sharply vibrant on the clean morning air. Then, outlining the contour of the hillside, like a titanic trench dug instantly by a million invisible arms, there suddenly opened out a terrific, widening chasm in the mountainside, where the six thousand foot upward slope from the lake stopped and the sheer walls of unscaleable rock began. Piers gave a cry of alarm and clung to Gray's arm.

The great trench-like gash yawned. The mountainside rippled. The pine trees hurled their tall trunks this way and that. In less than a minute the forest no longer existed, the straight pillars of its pride lay prone, and tangled inextricably. A diapasonic, subterranean moaning made the air quiver.

The great gompa, with its glistening gold roof and stately red-and-white striped walls, stood like a lone and defiant sentinel guarding a doomed order of things. It seemed to be awaiting its inevitable end. And it came almost instantly.

The great yak hair curtain fell, revealing a colossal golden image of the Buddha. For one brief minute that seated statue of the Blessed One shone with a golden refulgence never before visible to mortal eyes, the impassiveness of that towering figure seeming to embody the teaching of the Buddha: "All changes. Nothing remains— only Nirvana!"

With a sharp crackling, as if an immense matchbox were being crushed under a giant's foot, the whole mountainside gave way— slid, like a slab of snow, down a roof in a thaw, with rapidly increasing velocity into the valley below. Great masses of rocks, and trees with trailing, earth-clogged roots, boomed and hurtled through the slowly dispersing darkness, their harnessed sounds producing one continuous roar. Boulders half the size of the gompa leapt into the air like rubber balls, struck a projection, and bounded outwards: then, falling on to lower rocks, they pounded and smashed them to powder, in a sinister confusion of sparks and rolling clouds of dust, to the accompaniment of a sullen, belching thunder. Smaller boulders ricocheted and bounded madly, splashing down into the shuddering, helplessly open lake.

Then the landslide struck the monastery, piled up behind if, curled over it, like a breaking wave in an advancing tide, and wiped Hlampo gompa out of existence.

With a roar that made the inferno of sound that had preceded it seem as the tapping of a woodpecker, the solid gray mountain split, and through a vast wedge-shaped cleft spurted a million ice-green tons.

The Lake of the Tiger had burst its bounds.

The thunder of that avalanche of water as it hit the lake below shook the heavens. The spray of it was like the rainstorm on Ararat. The annihilation of the Valley of Hlampo was complete. Where the Lake of the Peacock's Tail had lain so tranquil and so blue through thousands of years, now surged a muddy sea, boiling and billowing; frothing and churning; swirling in its tortured vortices sixty-foot pines, thrusting them into mad dances so that they flung to heaven, in drunken alternation, up-wrenched roots and then their green heads.

Then the sun rose.

"LUNTSE, GRAY?" asked the pilot, settling himself in the cockpit.

Gray nodded without speaking. He was reading a series of blinding flashes coming from half-way up Chomolo:

"G.1... G.1... K.B... . Escorting ... Samdad .... from... valley... of... peace... reaches... Luntse... today... G.1... G.1...  G.1 ... ."

"How long'll it take us to make Luntse?"  snapped Gray.

"An hour."

"Right!"

"Contact?"

"Contact!"

The propellers roared. The biplane taxied into the wind, lifted, soared. While the 'plane gently rose and fell as it swept onwards towards Luntse, Gray tried to unravel the tangle of recent events, separating from the ruck of them such as might conceivably have had some useful bearing on his mission. The dwarf's cry that he had stolen the king prophecy from the Lame Devil, when he was apparently holding what had been Samdad Chiemba's most treasured possession, was the one ray of light in a welter of sombre reflections.

Taking out the photograph which Piers had picked up, he studied it carefully.

IN THE COURTYARD of the Luntse gompa lounged the escort Timor Khan had sent with K.B. "Where is the amchi lama?"

The Buriats studied Gray's frowning face and towering form. "The lamas are inside the gompa! Ten of us are with them," they answered quickly.

He found K.B. and Samdad Chiemba in the audience chamber. On the living Buddha's dais sat the huge, saturnine figure of the Gekhor Lama. As guardian of lamaic law and order, he was presiding over a conclave assembled to consider Samdad Chiemba's plans for the capturing of Chorjieff. The sitting had just started.

"Lock the doors!" ordered Gray as he strode in.

The Bengali's eyes goggled.

Saluting Samdad Chiemba, Gray took a seat by the side of the Gekhor Lama at the latter's invitation. A dead silence fell upon the small gathering.

Gray's powerful personality immediately took command.

"Will you show me the sevenfold prayer of the rishis, rimpoche?" he asked.

Samdad Chiemba shook his head.

"I have lost it," he said. "Have you found it?"

"Your servant stole it from you. Now let us hear your plans for the capturing of Chorjieff!"

"I have captured Chorjieff!"

42

Chorjieff

THE ASSEMBLY stirred. "Where is he?"

"In the guest master's cell," answered the abbot. "Did I not tell you," he went on, addressing K.B., "that I would hand him over to you today?"

K.B. fixed his keen eyes on Samdad Chiemba's face, but did not reply.

"Where is the guest master?" demanded Gray.

"He is gone to the mountains to fetch herbs necessary for a magic," replied Samdad Chiemba.

Gray addressed the gekhor lama.

"Send for him, gekhor lama! It is most urgent!... Let us go and see this— Chorjieff."

Surrounded by the troopers of Timor Khan, Samdad Chiemba led them to the guest master's cell. Taking a key from his pocket he opened the door.

Sitting cross-legged on the ground was a dark-skinned, spade-shouldered man in a Buriat Tartar's dress. He was wearing a heavy cap of black yak fur, from under which a greasy mass of black hair hung down stragglingly, hiding his eyes.

As the party entered he lifted his face from his hands. He seemed to be ill.

"Wah! It is indeed Chorjieff Khan!" exclaimed the escort, as one man.

"Are you Ivan Chorjieff?" demanded Gray.

"I am!"

Gray made a sign, and two troopers slipped a running noose about the Tartar's arms.

"Are you also Sigismond Hellstrom, Michael Morosoff, Serge Kratenkin?" Gray mentioned a dozen of Chorjieff's most prominent aliases.

"Yes."

"Did you murder three men in London?" The prisoner nodded, and raising his head fixed his one visible eye on Samdad Chiemba.

"You intended to invade Tibet?"

"Yes. I would have made myself king."

"Have you the king prophecy?"

"I have it not."

"But you had it. Where is it?"

"I— it has been destroyed."

"Will you swear that upon your most sacred oath?"

"I swear it by the Blessed One!"

"Are you a Buddhist?'

There was a moment's hesitation. Then:

"No!"

Gray turned from him, shrugging his shoulders.

K.B. approached the prisoner and stared at him with professional curiosity.

"Rimpoche," said Gray to Samdad Chiemba, "you have indeed carried out your promise! The Government of India will doubtless express its gratitude to you. This man goes to Gantok by 'plane. Will you not write a short letter to the Viceroy of India, expressing your satisfaction at having been able to effect this splendid capture?"

"Since you suggest it, I will do so— though the credit is all yours, chela," smiled Samdad Chiemba. "I have done little, except serve the faith."

Motioning the soldiers to one side, Gray led the abbot to a table on which were paper and writing materials.

"What should I write?" queried Samdad Chiemba doubtfully.

"Oh— just a few lines will suffice, rimpoche! In English, I suggest. Say you're glad that a dangerous criminal is under control. If you care to mention that you've worked with me— it might help me with Simla!"

"I will write the words you have spoken," answered Samdad Chiemba gravely. "And I shall most certainly mention your name. Also that of your colleague, K.B. I only wish I had known of his existence sooner!"

Gray went over to the prisoner, who was now hiccoughing violently.

"If you feel able to do so, Chorjieff," he said, "it were as well that you, also, should write to the Viceroy asking for clemency. I will endorse it, if you will write in English!"

"I cannot write English. I am―" He groaned and lurched sideways to the floor.

Gray walked up to Samdad Chiemba.

"Show me the palms of your hands, rimpoche," he said.

The next second the Englishman's great hands smacked down on to the abbot's wrists and held them in a grip of steel.

"The game's up, Chorjieff!" he said.

A HALF AN HOUR LATER, watching Chorjieff, alias Samdad Chiemba, bundled into the 'plane, bound hand and foot, Gray reviewed the whole astounding business.

The wedge of truth had split the wall of illusion which Chorjieff— master schemer and hypnotiser— had built round the mind of one, Colin Gray. Everything was clear to him now. The casting of the spell had taken place that night in Waldgrave Square... The words of the hunchback— "I hold it! I hold it! The king prophecy is mine"—  just before he leaped into the subterranean fires in the temple of the white python, had struck the first hammer blow. The sevenfold prayer of the rishis was the king prophecy! That realised, the wall had rapidly crumbled under the battering-ram of a succession of astounding facts. Gray had elicited from Samdad Chiemba that his visit to Pali Kahnberg had coincided, almost to the minute, with the murder of that great authority on Oriental manuscripts. Then there was Samdad Chiemba's accurate knowledge of the king prophecy. His statement that he had come across a manuscript in his youth which he had memorised was a lie. He had confessed to that.

The breaking of the spell had come when Gray had examined the back of the photograph which Piers had picked up.

On it was written, in the same unmistakable Greek script of the letter to the Viceroy and the unsent letter, signed "S. Dod-Chambers," which Samdad Chiemba had shown him in Waldgrave Square, the following words:—

Colin Gray. S. Ser. (G.1.) Dangerous.

Under control.

Works with K.B.

C.

The death of the supposed Chorjieff had revealed that he was none other than the guest master, whose resemblance to Chorjieff (Samdad Chiemba) Gray had noticed the first time he met him. Chorjieff had hypnotised him, darkened his skin with the dye he used himself, and suggested to him antecedently the answers that the unfortunate naljorpa lama had given when Gray had questioned him. Post-hypnotic suggestion. The hypnotising and the disguising effected, Chorjieff had given him poison, to make certain that he would not in some way betray him.

A lengthy cross-examination had further tightened an unbreakable chain of evidence against Chorjieff. Incredibly superstitious and unable himself to beget a child— and therefore unable to fulfil the prophecy which would make him king of Tibet— he had, he said, chosen Gray for the role, intending to murder him as soon as the child had been born.

IN A GANTOK bungalow, Colin Gray and Piers Bryan were listening to a conversation between K.B. and the lepcha, who were sitting at the far end of the veranda.

"I offer you a most first-class position, brother!" K.B. was saying. "Work with me for the Government! You shall be well paid!"

The lepcha shook his head vigorously

"The big lama has given me many rupees, babu! I return to my village to become once more a hunter of tigers!"

K.B. polished his glasses thoughtfully.

"As a potential recipient of the Most Exalted Order of the Indian Empire, my friend, I deprecate wild animals— though, myself, able to be as brave as any tiger upon demand."

"Colin," said Piers, reaching out a hand to Gray, "you said you would read me the letter which that poor old lama gave you in the temple!"

"I hadn't forgotten, Piers!"

He took it out of an inside pocket of his khaki jacket, and translating it, read it aloud:

To My Soul's Friend, the Big Lama, greeting.

In the house of the world there is no peace. Only the noise of the wheel of change. Patient has been my waiting and long. Now— through thee— I go to Tharpa, the supreme liberation. May the Blessed One, and Manjushri, the Bodhisat god, lead thy steps to its door. I have written down the verse of the Dhammapada as I promised. Perhaps in it thou, too, wilt find a key.

...through many a round of birth and death I ran.

Nor found the Builder that I sought.

Life's stream

Is birth and death and birth, with sorrow filled.

Now, housebullder, thou'rt seen! No more shalt build!

Broken are all thy rafters, split thy beam.

All that made up this mortal self is gone;

Mind hath slain craving. I have crossed the stream.'

End

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42