THE RIVER OF NIGHT
The major's clenched fist was caught as it drove, by a scientific guard from the Master's right. The Master dropped his lamp, and with a straight left-hander sprawled Bohannan on the slimy pave. Impersonally he stood over the crazed Celt.
"Will you jump, voluntarily," demanded he, "or shall we be under the painful necessity of having to throw you down that pit?"
Enough rationality remained in the major to spur his pride. He crawled to his feet, chastened.
"You win, sir," he answered. "Who goes first?"
A dull reverberation shuddered the rock, the air.
"Vive Nissr!" exulted Leclair. "Ah, now our men, they attack the city!"
"I'm sorry to disillusion you," the Master answered, "but my explosive produces an entirely different type of concussion. What we have just heard is the blowing-in of the treasure-crypt door. There's no time to lose, now. Who jumps, first?"
"Wait a minute!" cried "Captain Alden." Her eyes were gleaming through the mask, with keen excitement. "Why neglect any chance of possibly surviving?"
"What do you mean?" the Master demanded.
"Those wine-sacks!"
"Well?"
"Emptied, inflated, and tied up again, they'll float us! It's the oldest kind of device used in the Orient!"
"By Allah, inspiration! Quick, men, the wine-skins!"
Himself, he set the example. Knife in hand, while Emilio held the lamp for him, he crumbled the seals on one of the goat-skins, then cut the leather thong that secured the neck, and quickly unwound it. He dragged the sack to the black pit and tipped it up.
With a gulp and a gurgle, the precious old wine, clear ruby under the dim light, gushed away down the steaming shaft that plunged to the River of Night.
"Oh, faith now, but that's a damned shame, sir!" Bohannan protested, rubbing an ugly welt on his brow. His voice was thick, dull, unnatural. Madness glimmered in his blinking eyes. "With the blessed tongue of me parched to a cinder! And wine like that! Here, sir—take a handful of diamonds, or whatever, and give me just one little drink!"
'"'Bristol! Restrain that man!" the Master ordered. "If you can't handle him, get help!"
As a couple of Legionaries laid hands on the major, another voice spoke up. It was that of Ferrara, the Italian ace:
"The major is right, sir, in spite of all! Good wine in our throats would make death less bitter. 'We who are about to die, salute thee'—and ask wine!"
The Master peered sharply from beneath black brows. Discipline seemed crumbling. Now at what might be, perhaps, the last minute of his command, was the Master's word to be made light of? Were his orders to be gainsaid?
"No wine!" he flung at all of them, his voice tense as wire. "Who says we are about to die? Why, there may be a fighting chance, even yet! This underground river may come to light, somewhere. And if it does, it may bear us back to day, again.
"But the confusion of wine may just turn the scale against our getting through. No wine! We started on that basis. That's the basis we're going through on. No wine, I say—no wine!"
Murmurs answered him, but no man dared rebel. Discipline still gripped the Legionaries. The Master drove them to labor. "Come, quick now! Prepare a sack, apiece! I'll show you how!"
He set lips to the emptied skin, and with many lungfuls of strong breath inflated it. The leather thong tightly wrapped the neck. He doubled that neck over, and took more turns with the thong, then tied it in a tight square knot.
"Get to work, men!" he ordered. "To work!"
They obeyed. Even the major, brain-shaken as he was, fell in with the orders. The floor, all round the black pit, ran red with precious wine, a single cupful of which would have delighted the heart of the world's most Lucullian gourmet.
Up from that floor and from the jetty, steaming walls of the pit drifted ambrosial perfume that evoked visions of ancient vineyards where, under the Eastern sun, bloomy clusters of grape—mayhap even the very grape sung by the Tent-maker—hung ripening.
Still, none stooped to the mouths of the wine-skins, to taste. None drank from cupped palm. Dry-mouthed, hot, panting, the Legionaries still obeyed. And thus the rare wine of Araby ran guttering to the unseen blackness of the mystery river far below.
The Master, hands on hips, watched this labor; and as he watched he laughed.
"Whatever comes to us, men," judged he, "we are here and now doing great evil to the men of El Barr. My only regret is that we haven't time to return up through the labyrinth, to the jewel-crypt, fill the skins with jewels and dump them all down this shaft like the wine. These Moslem swine would then remember us, many a long day. Ah, well, some day we may come back—who knows?"
He fell silent, while the last of the skins were being filled and lashed. The last, that is to say, needed by the Legionaries. Ten in all, were now blown up and securely tied. But a good many more still remained full of the rare wine.
With his simitar, the Master slashed these quickly, one by one.
"They took our blood," he cried. "We have taken theirs—and their wine, too. And have destroyed Myzab and the Black Stone, no doubt. Well, it's a bargain!"
"C'est égal!" exclaimed Leclair. "More than that, eh, my Captain?"
The Master returned to the shaft, his bare feet red through the run and welter of the wine on the stone floor.
"Now men," said he, crisply, as he flung down the pit his simitar
which could have no further use, "this may be the final chapter. Our
Legion was organized for adventure. We've had it. No one can complain.
If it's good-bye, now—so be it.
"There may be a chance, however, of winning through. Hold fast to your goat-skins; and if the hidden river isn't too hot, and if there's head-room, some of us may get through to daylight. Let us try to reassemble where we find the first practicable stopping-place. If the Jannati Shahr men are waiting for us, there, don't be taken alive. Remember!
"Now, give me your hand, each one, and—down the shaft with you!"
Simonds went first, boldly, without a quiver of fear. Silently and with set jaw, he shook hands with the Master, clutched a distended wine-bag in both arms, and quickly leaped.
His body vanished, instantly, from sight. Steam and darkness swallowed it. Far below, a dull splash told of his disappearance.
Lebon followed, after having given his torture-twisted hand to his beloved lieutenant, as well as to the Master.
"Notre Père qui êtes aux cieux!" he stammered, as the pit received him.
Then went Wallace, Ferrara, and Emilio. Of these three, only the last showed anything resembling the white feather. Emilio's face was waxen, with staring eyes reflecting unspeakable horror, as he took the leap into the River of Night. But he went mutely, with no outcry.
Bristol, sheathed in imperturbable British aplomb, remarked:
"Well, so long, boys! This is jolly beastly, eh? But we'll meet on that beautiful shore!"
Then he, too, jumped into the black.
Leclair, inappropriately enough, leaped with a shout of: "Vive la
France!"
Now only Bohannan, "Captain Alden," and the Master were left.
"You're next, Major!" the Master ordered, pointing at the inexorable black mouth of the pit, whence rose the thin, wraith-spirals of vapor.
"I'm ready!" exclaimed the major. "Sure, what's better than a hot bath after the heavy exercise we've been having?" His voice rose buoyantly over the drumming roar of the mysterious, underground torrent. "Ready, sir! But if you'll only give me one wee sup of good liquor, sir, I'll die like an Irishman and a gentleman—of fortune!"
"No, liquor, Major," the Master answered, shaking his head. "Can't you see for yourself all the wine-sacks are cut?"
"Cut, is it? Well, well, so they are!" The major blinked redly. Obviously his confused mind had not grasped the situation. "Well, sure, that's a pity, now." And he fell to gnawing that tawny mustache of his.
"Come Major, you're next!" the Master bade him. "Take your wine-skin and jump!"
Clarity of mind for a moment returned to Bohannan. Gallantly he shook hands with the Master, saluted "Captain Alden," and picked up his wine-sack.
"It's a fine whirl we've had," he affirmed, with one of his old-time smiles, his teeth gleaming by the light of the silver lamp in the Master's hand. "No man could ask a better."
I'd rather have seen what I've seen, and done what I've done, and now jump to Hell and gone, than be safe and sound this minute on Broadway.
"Please overlook any little irregularities of conduct, sir My brain, you know, and—well, good-bye!"
Calmly he picked up his sack and without more ado jumped into the void.
"Now," said the Master, when "Captain Alden" and he remained alone.
"Now—you and I!"
"Yes," the woman answered. "You and I, at last!"
The Master set down his lamp on the floor all wet with condensed vapor and wine. He loosened the buckles of her mask, took the mask off and tossed it into the pit.
"Finis, for that!" said he, and smiled strangely. "You aren't going to be handicapped by any mask, in whatever struggle lies ahead of us. If you get through to the world, and to life again, you get through as a woman.
"If not, you die as one. But the disguise is done with, and gone. You understand me!"
"Yes. I understand," she answered, and stood peering up at him. Not even the white welts and ridges cut in her flesh by the long wearing of the mask could make her face anything but very beautiful. Her wonderful eyes mirrored far more, as they looked into this strange man's, than would be easy to write down in words.
"I understand," she repeated. "If this is death, I couldn't have dreamed or hoped for a better one. In that, at least, we can be eternally together—you and I!"
Silence fell, save for the shuddering roar of the black river, that rose with vapors from the dark pit. Man and woman, they searched out each other's souls with their gaze.
Then all at once the Master took her hand, and brought it to his heart and held it there. The lamp-shine, obliquely striking upward from the floor, cast deep shadows over their faces; and these shadows seemed symbolic of the shadows of death closing about them at this hour of self-revelation.
"Listen," said the Master, in a wholly other voice from any that had ever come from his lips. "I am going to tell you something. At a moment like this, a man speaks only the exact truth. This is the exact truth.
"In all the years of my life and in all my wanderings up and down this world, I have never seen a woman—till now—whom I felt that I could love. I have lived like an anchorite, celled in absolute isolation from womankind. Incredible as it may seem to you, I have never even kissed a woman, with a kiss of love. But—I am going to kiss you, now."
He took her face in both his hands, drew it up for a moment, gazed at it with a fixity of passion that seemed to burn. The woman's eyes drooped shut. Her lips yearned to his. Then his stern arms in-drew her to his breast, and for a moment she remained there, silently.
All at once he put her from him.
"Now, go!" he commanded. "I shall follow, close. And wait for me—if there is any waiting!"
He picked up one of the two remaining wine-sacks, and put it into her hands.
"Cling to this, through everything!" he commanded. "Cling, as you love life. Cling, as you share my hope for what may be, if life is granted us! And—the mercy-bullet, if it comes to that!
"Now—good-bye!"
She smiled silently and was gone.
The Master, now all alone, stood waiting yet a moment. His face was bloodless. His lower lip was mangled, where his teeth had nearly met, through it.
Already, a confused murmur of sound was developing, from the black opening of the passage that had led the Legionaries down to this crypt of the wine-sacks and the pit.
He smiled, oddly.
"Many a corpse has been flung down this oubliette," said he. "I hate to go, without emptying my pistol into a few more of the Moslem swine, and dropping them down here to join my people. But—I must!"
He bent, gathered together the silver lamps left by his men, and threw them all into the abyss. Blackness, absolute, blotted the reeking chamber from his sight.
The faintest possible aura of light began to loom from the mouth of the passage. More distinctly, now, the murmur of Arab voices was becoming audible.
The Master leaped.
Far below, at the bottom of the pit, as the Arabs burst into the wine-vault, sounded a final impact of some heavy body striking swift water that swept it instantly away.
Then silence filled the black, rock-hewn chamber in the labyrinthine depths of Jannati Shahr.