Little lost lambs, p.37
Little Lost Lambs, page 37
Afterward Grierson sat down in the tent allotted to Brant and the boy and talked entertainingly. He was in high good humor.
“Throughout Central Asia, the tribes have come into their own,” he said. “The law of Mahomet is absolute—what a man can take is his to keep. For a life, a life is exacted—” Grierson shrugged. “You know the legends, Brant. In these hills we are shut off from the world, rather. We deal with the older races of the earth.”
“And the law of the tribes is exacting, Mr. Grierson. Revenge is their religion. You remember that the Tartar merchant who gave you the cup was afraid to return here.”
Grierson laughed, stretching his long legs.
“You have been muttering about that like an old shrew, my friend. Why in the name of—Allah, the Forgiving—shouldn’t he want to please me when I employ so many of his countrymen? And as for the death of Mirnoff in Samarkand—the man was a consumptive.”
It was Brant’s turn to shrug his shoulders. “I’m merely saying that here we are not in Samarkand, Mr. Grierson. Undoubtedly, our venture will prove dangerous. And I think Lansing here should be informed—”
Grierson shook his big head impatiently.
“Steve, if I read him right,” he responded good-naturedly, “is no coward. Are you, Steve? Of course not. A little uncertainty seasons the monotony of living, eating and sleeping. Young man—”
He leaned forward to tap the attentive boy on the knee. “If you’re uncertain about anything, shoot.”
With that he was gone from the tent. The two friends sat under the open flap looking out over the mist-covered steppe. It was more than curious that they should have come to the Alai for gold that had come from Samarkand.
Out of the night he heard a low singing. The dim shape of a camel appeared swinging out of the mist, with a solitary rider. Coming abreast the lighted tents the rider’s song ceased abruptly. Steve could see him bend down to peer at them.
Then the camel was urged into a clumsy gallop and the man went careening off into the night, looking back over his shoulder. “Acts like something had scared him mighty bad,” muttered the boy.
Brant bent close to whisper. “Why don’t you take a camel to-night from the string, Lansing, and head back to Samarkand? I have been thinking”—he hesitated—“it is not the place for you, my boy. I will explain to Grierson in the morning.”
The youngster chuckled. “A right smart lot of explaining you would have to do, Professor. No, I took the job and told Grierson I’d stick.” He was silent awhile. “Look here, why aren’t you willing to beat it, Prof. Brant? Seems to me there’s powerful little for you to do hereabouts.”
“Leave the Alai?” There was incredulity in the old man’s low voice. “I have been waiting months for the opportunity to make my observations. No, I was only thinking of you.”
“You never do think of yourself.”
But Steve, before he slept that night, puzzled over the eagerness he had read in Brant. The savant was keen to visit the mountains. Yet he seemed to have a contempt for gold and the mining of gold. Then, something else induce him to journey with Grierson: into possible danger. Steve fell asleep pondering the matter.
IT WAS two days later before Steve could induce Brant to speak of what was on his mind. Meanwhile two things had happened.
They were winding through the clay terraces and gullies of the foothills to the south and east when a cloud of dust was seen coming across a level basin toward them. Steve made out the flying cloaks and gleaming muskets of native riders, and he laid hand on his Enfield.
The cavalcade of horsemen neared them, a stout turbaned warrior in the van, and began to circle with a great show of weapons. Brant shook his head reprovingly when he saw the boy raise his rifle.
“This is not an attack,” he explained quickly. “The local chieftain has heard of our coming and is greeting us in the prescribed fashion. Watch.”
To Steve it seemed as if the circling tribesmen meant to shoot the party down on the spot. Guns were fired off as the riders swept about the travelers. Loud shouts echoed back to them from nearby rocks.
Then the tribesmen reined down to a walk and the chieftain rode beside Grierson to a small village on the steppe. For the first time Steve saw the dome-like felt tents of the nomad tribes, surrounded by flocks of sheep, dogs of indecipherable breed and camels.
Here he noticed that, unlike the women of Samarkand, the wives and daughters of these Kirghiz came to stare unveiled and to offer refreshments of fruit, sugar candy and the inevitable milk, at the clean guest house, or rather tent.
That night the Kirghiz chief gave Grierson a feast.
“I’d rise to remark he was doing the honors in style,” whispered Steve to Brant. “This is hospitality, all right. Reminds me of the villages back home.”
He was silent at this, being more than a little homesick, and—the chief’s sugar candy had not agreed with him. (In fact Brant explained that the boy had committed a breach of etiquette by eating it. The candy, like the stuffed animals in some butchers’ shop windows, was a perpetual offering, to be seen and appreciated but not touched. It was, perhaps, several years old.)
“Yes,” answered the savant, “there we are no longer with the traders of the city. These men are nomads and open-hearted. The Kirghiz are like children. In the Alai we will meet still another people—”
Steve paid little attention. He was looking at a Kirghiz girl, the daughter of the chieftain who was gazing wide-eyed at them from the tent entrance. The round, olive-skinned face of the girl was mildly pretty, her black eyes-handsome as a deer’s. Tightly clutched in her small fist was the nose string of a white camel—her pet.
When their eyes met the Kirghiz maiden looked down bashfully. Then she stirred and slipped away, as loud singing from the camp-fire of Grierson’s native followers reached her ears.
Wine had been issued by the mine owner to his men, and he shared his supply with the chieftain who was soon drunk. The big Kirghiz rolled back on the carpets that strewed the tent, smiling and plucking uncertainly at his beard. Eventually he subsided into slumber.
It was an hour later when Steve sought his blankets that Brant came to him with a troubled face. “Kottek Ali Beg is talking to the girl, Chai Bala, the chieftain’s daughter,” he muttered, “out where she is picketing her camel for the night. I heard him say that if she did not come to his tent he would make her father sell him her camel. She, it seems, is devoted to the little white beast.”
The boy jumped up. “I’ll see Grierson.”
Brant shook his head. “I should not do that. Mr. Grierson likes Kottek Ali Beg, and the Sart can lie so cleverly it is quite impossible to accuse him of anything. Where are you going?”
But Steve was already out of the tent with his rifle in his hand. Circling the Kirghiz camp where the tribesmen and their women were still sitting about the fires, he sought the camel-lines where he could make out in the twilight the white hood of the Kirghiz girl close to the bulky form of the dragoman.
Chai Bala was standing in front of her camel, crying, while the Sart was speaking to her in a low voice.
“Kottek Ali,” observed Steve, “if you want any help tying up the camels, I’m a first rate animal tender. I learned it on ship board.”
The man stared at him sulkily. “W’at you want?”
“It’s a fine evening. A little walk will clear the wine out of your head, Kottek Ali.”
In the gloom he could see the flash of the Sart’s white teeth. The dragoman turned his shoulder to the American and caught the camel’s cord away from Chai Bala who uttered a stifled scream of anguish. Steve touched the powerful back in front of him.
“Grierson, effendi, says,” he drawled, “that we ain’t going to take camels on from here. Cut the comedy, Kottek Ali. Move on, you dog, you’re blocking the way—”
With a snarl the man swung around, his whip lifted in a quivering hand. The muzzle of Steve’s rifle touched him in the chest, and he paused. The boy waited, rigidly silent, and watched until Kottek Ali had walked away, muttering, toward the tents.
Then Steve lowered his weapon and smiled at the Kirghiz girl who was trembling violently.
“You’d better beat it for a while,” he confided, adding as he realized she could not understand him. “Vamoose, savvy?” Chai Bala shook her dark head and he ransacked his brains, recalling Grierson’s phrase, uttered when the mine owner entered the train. “Aida, aida, khanym!”
He pointed to the camel, to her, and waved a hand at the overhanging hills that thrust their black summits against the stars.
To his surprise this suggestion seemed to terrify the girl more than the aspect of Kottek Ali. She shook her head, pointing likewise at the mountains and fled away toward the tents with the clumsy beast in tow.
Steve scratched his head, gave it up and returned to his quarters. There he found the white camel hitched to a tent peg and within the tent Chai Bala huddled in a corner looking for all the world like a startled, but determined guinea pig.
For a space Steve wondered if she thought that he had taken her from Kottek Ali only to claim her for himself, and he flushed. Brant enlightened him.
“Chai Bala says that you wanted her to ride up into the hills to-night,” he smiled. “The Kirghiz of this region shun the mountains as they would a plague. In fact they seem uncommonly afraid of the Alai range. That is interesting.”
“But she can’t sleep here,” objected Steve.
“It would be difficult to convince her of that fact. She thinks she can, and that you are appointed by fate to be her protector.”
The woman had made herself quite at home and chatted in a lively fashion with Brant who questioned her at some length and then turned to Lansing who had taken his blanket and pipe to the tent entrance as far from the girl as possible.
“Never call a Moslem, such as Kottek Ali, a dog,” he remarked. “You don’t know it, but that is a mortal insult. You have made an enemy of the dragoman.
“This girl,” he went on, “is very anxious for you not to go with your caravan to the Alai, and the Kurama tribe. She says that her father thinks we will be dead when we return.”
“So he gave us a fine spread as a send-off?” laughed the boy. “I know. They do it in prison in the death-house. Wine and turkey and all that. But how could we-all come back here if we’re dead?”
Brant gazed up mildly at the dark bulk of the mountains.
“She has told me something I did not know before. It seems that Mirnoff, the Russian explorer who tried to map the Alai range before the war, stopped here on his way to the Kuramas. He was very ill when he returned. In fact, he died at Bokhara within a fortnight.”
“That makes a pair of them, professor,” grinned Steve. “First the Tartar who had the cup, then this Mirnoff person. You can’t frighten me with a pair of spooks.”
He was more than a little surprised, though, the next day when the native caravaneers to a man refused to go farther. Apparently, however, Grierson and Brant had expected this.
Under the directions of Kottek Ali the essential portions of their baggage including the tools were loaded on four pack horses obtained in exchange for the camels from the Kirghiz chieftain.
With the horses, Grierson, Brant and Steve moved off on foot, accompanied by Kottek Ali who was in a surly humor. The American, bringing up the rear of the cavalcade, his rifle over his shoulder, looked back at the Kirghiz camp through the dust.
Standing beside the stout chieftain he made out the slender form of the Kirghiz girl Chai Bala, outlined against the white camel. As he watched, she beckoned him.
Steve waved his hand. He could not be quite sure but he thought she was crying.
STEVE could not understand why the Sarts with the exception of Kottek Ali feared to go up into what looked to him like a quite ordinary mountain range. And it was still harder to understand why, when they refused, Grierson did not drive them on. Steve had seen the way his employer handled natives.
It must be, he thought, that Grierson, who knew his people well, was fully aware that no amount of swearing or physical punishment could take his men farther than the Kirghiz village.
The second unusual incident came to pass when Steve had been sent on ahead by Grierson to shoot some game for the pot. He had struck up through the rocky gullies to an open watershed where, eventually, he had sighted a group of mountain sheep grazing.
He had pocketed the field glasses Grierson had lent him and commenced a painful stalk that took him well to leeward of the animals, a good two hundred yards away. Steve had hunted deer in South Carolina and he had the patience that makes for success.
Building a small pyramid of stones, one by one, in front of him he sprawled out, drawing a careful sight. It was some time before he was satisfied that the beasts were near enough in their slow meandering, for a shot. He did not want to miss.
Then he marked down a fine ram and began to press the trigger. He never fired the shot.
Suddenly the sheep whirled and were off, bounding along like thistle balls before the wind. A horse had appeared suddenly at the edge of a tamarisk thicket. On the horse—a shaggy pony—a squat brown figure was mounted.
Steve swore heartily, believing at first that Kottek Ali had deliberately spoiled his stalk. Then he saw that the rider was not the Sart—was different in fact from any Sart he had seen. Tresses of black hair fell over the native’s shoulders, a brown cloak veiled the outlines of his figure.
Just a glimpse Steve had of a broad, dark face; then the rider and the sheep were lost to sight up the valley. When he last saw them, the sheep had slowed down as if reassured, and the horse was trotting placidly in the midst of the animals.
“From your description,” Brant observed precisely, when Steve reported his poor success, “you sighted several ovis poli, mountain sheep of the larger and very shy species. Such animals have never been known to be tamed. You must have been mistaken when you say they permitted a man and a horse to come up with them.”
“I tell you I saw it.” Steve was ruffled. “It was like a cow puncher, herding his cattle. The fellow saw me, too, and he rushed the sheep away before I could shoot.”
Grierson, who was listening, sneered.
“If you want to lie to me, Steve, be more artistic about it.”
But Brant knew that the youngster was telling the truth and he was puzzled.
Chapter III
THAT night they camped beside a dome-shaped mound of red clay in a long valley that was in reality more a plateau, between massive walls of loess cliffs. Steve noticed pillar-like rocks rising about the mound. He saw, too, that Brant was excited.
After supper the two men lit their pipes and the ethnologist drew his friend away from Grierson and Kottek Ali. Steve was staring about at the red waste which resembled a labyrinth carved by a gigantic hand.
“I want you to know,” said Brant, “the secret of the Alai.”
He pointed to the cliffs, rising to the vast heights of the timbered slopes of the mountains.
“See that conglomerate—regular turrets and bastions of it, my boy? In reality, it is a kind of castle that we are entering. These are the outer walls. Within a space of two days we shall have ascended into the timber and above the forest line to the morainic lake that is the lake of the Kuramas.”
“Yes,” said Steve.
“You heard Grierson and myself speak of the legend. It is curious, very. Grierson assumes it to be merely one of the myths of the hill tribes. I am not so certain. Mirnoff is dead.”
He nodded slowly as if collecting his thoughts. “The legend relates that any one may come to the lake of the Kuramas but on leaving it he will die.”
Steve laughed and shook his head. “Go on,” he protested. “Men don’t die like that. They die when they’re shot up or scoughed; and then they don’t walk a couple of hundred miles before they give up the ghost.”
“Wait!” frowned Brant. “You saw that the Sarts were afraid to accompany us. Kottek Ali, of course, is exceptional; besides being a born fatalist, he thinks that no harm can come to Grierson or his servants. Very well. But the friend of Kottek Ali—the one who gave him the cup—died.”
“He was sick, wasn’t he?”
“That does not alter the fact that he is dead now. Those who come back from the Kuramas lake do not die violently. Perhaps from fever, or bad water. But the climate at these altitudes is healthful and the water good.”
Steve was uncomfortably silent. He was wondering why in the name of Jefferson Davis men wanted to go to such places.
“This lake, the one that we are going to,” resumed Brant, “is said to be the home of the Kuramas. The Kuramas have never been studied! In fact, their origin is unknown.”
He pointed at the green slopes that rose above the red clay of the valley. “They are up there, my boy, a day’s march. Professor Mirnoff believes they inhabit caves in the cliffs around the lake. Here is all that he has recorded.”
Brant drew a slim volume printed in Russian characters from his pocket.
Certain writings on the cliffs and in the caves suggest that the Kuramas are occupying the homeland of a race that held empire in the Himalayas a thousand years before the time of Genghis Khan. It is known vaguely as the Kushan dynasty and its greatest monarch was Kadisphes the second. It came originally from western China.
A peculiar feature of the Kurama territory is the mounds. They are of ancient date, and until my opening one were never visited by Europeans. I found this mound, in a clay valley in the first spurs of the Alai range —
Here latitude and longitude were given. Steve nodded. He understood that.
I observed in the mound a single mummy or what seemed to be a lacquer figure, with a face apparently of gold. When I had barely begun to investigate the wrappings of this figure my bearers removed me from the mound by force. They had not until then seen the figure, and they were in mortal terror. They compelled me to leave the vicinity.
