In the Dwellings of the Wilderness/Chapter II
CHAPTER II
The Door Which was Called Forbidden
efore dawn the men had breakfast, and began work when there was light enough to see their tools. Holloway, trailing his tripod behind him, and followed by a boy with a case of plates, went from spot to spot, taking views. He was a cheery youth, lithe and active, with amazingly light hair, a pair of humourous blue eyes, a square-jawed face burned to a consistent and apoplectic scarlet, and hands much stained by chemicals.
Merritt, his helmet jammed well over his eyes, climbed up and down the trenches tirelessly, a wad of crumpled plans in hand. He was in all places at once, keen, clear-eyed, practical, overseeing and directing, called upon for help and advice in all directions. The mood of the night had come and gone; again he was as the world knew him. The labourers swarmed over and around the mounds like busy ants. At one side of a hill of earth and rubbish a file ascended the steep steps of trampled earth which ran down into the trenches, unending, ceaseless, bearing baskets of dirt. At the other side, down more steps, a file descended with empty baskets; from the bottom came the thud of pick and spade and the hoarse shouts of the foremen of the gangs. Above them was the clear morning sky, not yet heated to molten brass; around them the desert, vast and soundless; beneath them the fragments of an olden world, whose story was lost in the dimness of bygone ages.
Ibraheem climbed agilely to the top of the trench which had been opened farthest into the mound, spied Deane making cabalistic signs in a notebook, using one knee as desk, and hurried over.
"Saar," he announced, swelling with importance and the pride of his discovery, "the mens find a wall, unruinated, with a door and a writing upon it. Where are Mister Merritt?"
"By the temple wall, with Mr. Holloway," Deane answered. "Go call him quick."
Ibraheem went, at a dignified dog-trot; and Deane stuffed his notes into a pocket and ran down the trench to where the workmen, chattering shrilly, were gathered around a mass of débris. It was not the first find of the expedition, but each fresh discovery sent the same tingle of excitement through the entire outfit. For there is nothing more stirring than to stand at the threshold of a long-dead world, on the verge of entering, knowing that the next blow of the pick, the next step forward, may reveal either lost secrets of dead peoples which will shed fresh light through the grey mists of ages—or nothing; may turn a new page in the sealed Book of the Things that Were, or disclose a blank. Even the basket-men swarmed to look, craning over the shoulders of the pickmen.
The trench was close on a hundred and fifty feet wide, bounded on either side by towering walls of earth. That it revealed a section of the ancient palace was to be inferred from the fragments of brick pavement, the bases of a line of broken pillars deep bedded in the ground. In the side of the trench where the men were gathered, a fragment of wall, rising nearly ten feet in height, with a walled-up doorway, was visible. Merritt, arriving breathless, took command, restraining too ardent impatience on the part of the workmen. Carefully the earth was removed and the find laid bare.
"Looks like a tomb," said Holloway, leaving his camera and coming up. "Bricks, laid in bitumen, as usual. Hi! look out, you fellows! careful with your tools, there! There's an inscription over the door that you don't want to injure. Deane, bring your wisdom to bear on this."
"Scrape away the dirt, one of you," Merritt ordered; and a half-naked labourer sprang on the shoulders of a comrade and cleared away the clogging earth. Deane caught a sudden glimpse of Merritt's face and was reminded sharply of his outbreak of the night before. It was quite white with excitement, though his hands were steady, and his voice was cool. Then Deane, instantly alive with eagerness at sight of the carven words, took a careful copy of them in his notebook and hied himself away to decipher their meaning. Holloway placed his tripod in position, found the focus, and took an exposure of the wall and the low blocked-up doorway with its mysterious sign above. He was hot with excitement, as always upon such occasions, and begged strenuously that the door be instantly broken down.
"We have a couple of hours yet before it's too hot to work," Merritt observed. He pushed his helmet back and consulted his watch. "We'll make a beginning anyhow and keep it up as long as we can. From the appearance of the place, and the plan of what we've unearthed, I should say that this tomb, or whatever it was, must have been several feet below what was then the level of the ground. Got it already, Deane?"
Deane strolled up to the doorway, his pipe clenched between his teeth, his hat on the back of his head, and studied the inscription intently. Then he compared it with the copy he had made, and with various pages of his notebook. From time to time he mumbled unintelligibly. At last he turned upon them.
"I thought it was a tomb," he observed with satisfaction. "If I'm not mistaken, with this short time to go over it, the inscription says something like this: 'Whoso cometh, now or hereafter'—hereafter?—yes, that's right—'wake not the soul that sleeps within.'"
"He must have wanted to sleep sound, whoever he was," Holloway observed with flippancy. "Can't we make a beginning? If the old man's still here, I'd like to collect him before it gets too dark."
Soon a force of men was at work, a swarm of ants prying around the edges of the walled-up door, where, above, the ancient message gave its warning. From this inscription Deane found himself unaccountably unable to keep his eyes. He and Holloway discussed it in low tones, to the accompaniment of the thud of falling pick and spade. Holloway wavered between the seductive idea of buried treasure, whose owner had perhaps sought to guard it with a theatrical warning, and the bejewelled mummy of the king he wished to collect. Deane hoped there would be tablets to decipher; Merritt said nothing. When Holloway questioned, wishing his theories on the subject, Merritt answered shortly:
"I'm not expecting anything in these countries any more. It's the unexpected that turns up and floors you, no matter what you think you'll get."
"You're right about these countries!" quoth Holloway with sudden enthusiasm. "They don't follow the rules and regulations of Home. After all, I suppose there's no reason why queer things shouldn't happen in queer lands. You don't understand 'em—you can't understand 'em—but, my aunt! don't they catch you right where you live sometimes! There's something about these Eastern lands that goes beyond the depth of a Westerner. It's in the very air of the place, and it's got into the people. I've knocked around some in India and Egypt and all that, but I know precious little more about them, except on the surface, than when I began. There's something that gets away from you; you can't get close enough to it to analyse it; you know it's there, but you can't give it a name. Even the little simple things seem somehow different. I've stood for hours outside a Buddhist temple, just listening to a woman praying that prayer of theirs—'Om mani padme Hum!' until I could almost fancy I was a Buddhist myself, praying with her. There's mystery all through it to me, and always will be. You see things and know them to exist, as well as you know anything, and can't account for them. And—well, once or twice I haven't seen things, but I knew they were there all the same. I think it must be what's behind all this—the past back of it, that makes it so deuced queer. Why, when I was in Darjeeling"
But his audience melted away, and Holloway, his spirits nowise dampened by the curtailment of his reminiscences, went and helped the workmen dig, and sang their weird labour chants with them, with the harsh rattling chorus of pick and spade in them, and succeeded in infusing the men with his own overflowing enthusiasm, so that the work went on by strides.
The sun climbed higher, and the heat became great. Some of the men showed signs of exhaustion.
"We'll have to knock off for a while," Merritt said with reluctance. "It's ten o'clock already. Deane, better keep your hat on if you're going up. It's hot enough in the sun to give you a stroke in ten minutes."
Deane sat on the stump of a broken column and fanned his flushed face with his grey campaign hat.
"I've got a nasty headache on already," he admitted. "Hi! Ibraheem! Go to my tent, will you, and get the blue bottle out of my medicine chest. The blue bottle, remember; it's the only blue bottle there. Put a spoonful in a cup of water and bring it here."
Ibraheem departed.
"Better try something a bit stronger," Merritt suggested.
Deane demurred.
"No; it's nothing but the beginning of a headache. Bromo will cure it quicker than anything."
Ibraheem returned shortly with the cup. Deane drank his dose, put on his hat, and went off among the workmen to watch the progress.
When a halt was called, the rubbish had been cleared away considerably, and some of the smaller bricks that blocked the entrance were out. Each man came up and peered solemnly through the gap, expressing disappointment when he saw nothing but blackness. Holloway created a mild sensation by declaring with his wonted vigour that he saw a pin-point of light within. He was greatly chaffed, but stuck to his point manfully, even though he admitted that it "looked queer," and he could not at all account for it.
The men came filing up from the trenches to stretch themselves in the shade of the mounds. Holloway, being young and of indomitable enthusiasms, took himself off to develop his negatives, refusing to rest. Deane spread a mosquito net carefully over himself to keep off marauding flies, and went to sleep in the lee of the nearest mound. Merritt, pipe in mouth, sat where he and Deane had talked the night before, and stared out over the plain with sombre, thoughtful eyes.
As the burning day wore on, the ribald chatter of the natives ceased. They slept serenely while the shade lasted, making the most of their time of rest. When the sun, striding across the brazen sky, touched them where they lay, they woke, rose, moved in a body to fresh shelter, and slept again. Also the white men moved, in unison with them; Deane, half-awake, feverish with sleep, stumbling in his mosquito net. Where he fell he lay and slept again, breathing heavily, with restless turnings. In his dreams was a vast procession of brown-legged creatures who trailed endlessly up and down, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, who, each as it passed him, emptied a hod of dry brown earth upon him so that its weight pressed him down, and always down, into the earth, and shouted in his ears: "Whoso cometh, now or hereafter, let him not wake the soul that sleeps within!" Each voice grew louder and more menacing, though he could not understand why the brown creatures should threaten him; and as he tried to escape, they piled more earth upon him; so that, as he smothered to death, he woke with a gasp to find Holloway's hands heavy on his shoulders, and Holloway's voice crying:
"Get up, man! Oh, get up, I tell you! They've got the door down, and we're going in while the light lasts."
Deane jumped to his feet, his head still aswim, casting aside the mosquito net; and together they raced down the trench to where a crowd had gathered about a four-foot opening, yawning black. Nearest the entrance was Merritt, his face always pale with excitement, a shovel in his hands. He was as a detective who has found a clue to a tangled mystery—a miner who sees long-hoped-for signs of gold. Above his head the strange message blazoned forth its warning, the East guarding her secrets, even in death, from the eyes of the all-seeking West. To him it was never the routine of work, but the unfolding of a page whereon dead hands had traced the history of a vanished world. Over his shoulder he beckoned Deane and Holloway to him, stooping the while to peer into the low entrance. Before this was a mass of rubbish, with the bricks which had been removed.
"Look in there!" he exclaimed. His words snapped like a whip-lash. His eyes were keen and eager. "Does either of you see a—a light?"
Instantly they craned closer. Deane said:
"A what?"—and glanced at Merritt apprehensively; Holloway ejaculated:
"A—light!" in incredulous italics.
But then Holloway, gazing within, clutched Deane beside him, and said shrilly:
"It is! By George, it is! Didn't I say I saw a gleam when the first break was made, and didn't you rot me for it? But, oh, my Lord! how could a light get in there, fifty feet below the ground!"
"A reflection of outside light on something burnished within," Deane suggested at random.
Merritt lighted his lantern.
"We'll have time to take a look," he said, quietly enough. "It's in a first-class state of preservation—the first chamber we've found not crushed in and filled with rubbish. Come along, you two, but bring your lamps."
He picked his way through the débris, and lifted one leg over the stone which formed the threshold, flinging the light of his lantern ahead. Deane and Holloway followed close upon his heels. The three stood within the tomb. Earth and stone had done what might be done to hold the secret given to their keeping, but man had conquered. The grave of the past was giving up its dead.
Before them was a short passage, not high enough for them to stand erect, slanting sharply downward, and turning to the right a rod ahead. The angle of the wall hid what lay beyond. By the light of the three lamps, which cast itself into the blackness, it could be seen that walls and roofs were of great blocks of stone, roughly hammer-dressed.
"I expected to find it caved in," came Holloway's voice from the background. "Think of the pressure on top."
"Yes; but this was deep underground in the beginning. The intermediate layer of earth must have helped support the mass which gradually formed above. Besides, it would take a"
It was then that Deane, somewhat in the lead, turned the corner of the passage, and gave back upon them with a gasp and an oath, cutting Merritt's speech in two.
"There's something queer about this!" he muttered.
The turn of the passage led on a level a couple of yards farther. Here it was blocked by another entrance, likewise walled up. On a square stone beside this door stood a lamp of clay from which came, not a flame, but a pale radiance as from some material highly phosphorescent within, dim and feeble as though all but burned out. It was as though some living hand had placed it there but a little while before, behind those sealed-up walls, far down below the ground; a small atom of life, set in the midst of universal death, that smote them with an instant's shock as of something supernatural, not of earth.
Merritt said—"Good God! look at that!" below his breath, and halted, as one in presence of some power which had risen suddenly from the opened grave to mock at men. Confronting them thus, it was uncanny—a sentient thing with an individuality of its own. Deane, staring at it in fascination, said:
"It can't have been burning here these thousand years, ever since that outer door was bricked up—why, it's impossible. It's absurd. There must be some other way of entering. Someone must have been here before us."
They drew together, all three, and looked at it with wonder and with awe. The suggestion of it held them silent; the unexpectedness of it left them blank. Holloway, peering among the shadows, said abruptly:
"Turn your lanterns away a minute. Or shade them so the light won't fall ahead. So! Now!" His voice fairly shook with eagerness. "Look over the top of this door. There's an inscription—see? right over it—in big letters—and that lamp is placed precisely where it will throw light on it. That's why it is here—so that no one could possibly come to this door without seeing those letters. And when the light was brighter they must have been plain as print. Read 'em, Deane, quick."
Deane read, recognizing the word as one he had seen at times before. It was a single word:
"Forbidden."
But as they moved forward to look at it, the pale radiance, shining for untold years in that silent place, brightened in the wave of air they swept on with them, burned bravely an instant, and went quietly into nothingness. At once the clutch of death, held a thousand years at bay by its faint spark of life, settled heavily on the place. Merritt gave an exclamation of bitter disappointment.
"This must be where the old king lies," Holloway observed. "Shall we try it now? See here; these stones aren't one-fifth as heavy as those outside. I—by George! Here's one I can move. It might as well be dark as daylight, because we'll have to work with lanterns anyhow. I'll call up Ibraheem."
Ibraheem came, with two men and weapons of attack. The passage was too narrow to admit of more than two working at once; as it was, they were cramped for room and gasped for breath.
But by degrees, each man taking his turn, the door was broken out. Merritt, trimming his lamp afresh, stepped inside. Those waiting heard a stumble and a shout.
"Come in, you fellows! Bring lights. There's something here."
Promptly the two were after him. As they came, Merritt cried out sharply:
"Take care! You'll step on it! It's lying just inside the threshold."
Deane, entering first, threw his light ahead, and saw a thing huddled close to the door. Over it he stepped with care, and stooped beside Merritt to examine. Holloway, half in and half out of the low doorway, peered down at them; over his shoulder Ibraheem stretched his swarthy face.
"It's a mummy, sure enough," Holloway said, holding his light close. "But it's not wrapped in bandages, and it's not in any mummy-case. Just naturally dried up, I guess. Turn it over, Deane."