CHAPTER XII
Odd places and peoples lie—for the most part unsuspected by the rest of the world—tucked away solitary and secure in the uncharted wilds beyond the Himalayas: tiny isolated kingdoms, each knowing naught but itself, and unknown of all others, strongholds of primitive peoples and of old primitive ways, elaborately customed, impregnably individual—wonderful, incalculable domains to which few white travelers journey, from whose sullen bourne none return.
The Himalayas are cut and gashed by a thousand fissures and natural passes, and between those loopholes in the great mountain range lie many a hidden principality, cupped in mountains and rocks as impenetrably as the lair of some skilful outlaw often is safe from the utmost vigilance of the police of the American Northwest.
Such was the Kingdom of Rukh: its prince keeping his state, his people keeping their ways, exactly as they did long before the days of Genghis Khan, speaking their own guttural language, worshiping their own gods, obeying their prince in all ways and their priests in some—for their prince was more to them, more loved, more feared, tenfold more obeyed than all their small man-made heaven of gods. Who were they? What were they? Whence had they come? What was their place in the great interknit mosaic of mankind? None can say. To trace them quite definitely to any outside kinship were hopeless. Yet most of their faces were somewhat Mongolian, with here and there one more of Aryan type—always in some tribesman of power and place.
It was an absolute monarchy, if ever earthly sway and power were absolute—if the word “absolute” itself has any justification of veracity.
The Raja of Rukh ruled with an unquestioned despotism no Western monarch dreams of, and of which but few in the past ever have dreamed, and none ever has attained.
So often is Asian princeship thus that it would call for no remark in telling of Rukh, were it not for one odd fact. Of all the natives of little Rukh, this almost omnipotent ruler was the sole one who had smirched his birthright, and sinned against the more-than-religion of the race. For the Raja had traveled, he had broken strange, unconsecrated breads, eaten strange, polluted meats. He had lived in Europe, and now in the fortress-home to which he had come back to his own he in his own person mingled—superficially at least—ways of Europe with the ways of his fathers. At this his people had wondered a little, but not one had doubted or questioned, unless indeed Toluk Yap, the high priest, doubted now and then. And not even Toluk Yap ever had questioned. For the Raja was god in Rukh, and the gods but satellites of his power and rank.
Too, all that he occasionally did, ate, or wore that might have hinted to you or to me of Pall Mall or the Champs Elysées, seemed to his enslaved, docile people but an eccentricity of his individuality. It might have stood to them for defilement, his occasional aping of European ways, and have disgruntled and lashed them to cut-throat fury and open rebellion, had they sensed it for what it was. But that they could ill do, since they did not know or suspect that there was a Europe. He had been away, and he had come back to them; that was all they knew; and that he had come back was all they cared.
He had brought back with him one grotesque curio at which they gaped for a time, and then ignored with stolid disgust as far as they could: a white ape of a man—if it was a man—who, little heed as they paid it, gave them their first unformed film of idea that somewhere beyond the mountains that bounded and ended their world there were places on the earth that were bleached—where trees and reptiles, rocks and sky, if trees, reptiles and stones and sky there were, all were bleached white by the torture and misfortune of existing so far from Rukh, as the tawn of the leopard was sometimes bleached by the lash of the high Himalayan cold.
Such prolonged absence as this Asian prince had allowed himself well might have cost him his throne. Scarcely a monarch of Europe—with cables and cinemas to remind them—would dare to leave his people so long, and it seems a far rasher thing for a prince to risk whose kingship and throne lay on the more quickly shifting sands where every prime minister is a would-be supplanter, almost every half-brother a usurper at core. But Rukh had known whom to trust and entrust, and had known when to go, and when to come back.
Unknown to the geographers of the Occident, unsuspected in Whitehall and Westminster, the Kingdom of Rukh lay snug in the mountains as it has, perhaps, since Adam was young. And its despot’s rule was absolute. The King could do no wrong. For the Royal House stood by the people, and the people stood by the Royal House in the Kingdom of Rukh.
A grim and dun-colored place it was, a region of gaunt and almost treeless mountains, all of them bleak, barren and gray of tone except where the clear atmosphere lent them some tint of its hot blue. Clinging fiercely to the fierce mountain wall, a mile or more away from the temple precincts, was a vast barbaric palace, its long stretches of glum unbroken masonry crowned and relieved by endless arcades and turrets; not two alike, yet all in key and consonance—a fortress-palace telling of centuries of human labor, of long generations of wealth and lordship. How many brown hands had lifted it up stone by stone, how many brown muscle-knotted backs had bent and strained at its making, is beyond compute. Millions of peasants must have been born to its hewing and heaving and making, and have died at it. Here in its desert of rocks, its forest of mountains, it spoke of suzerainty irresistible and unresisted as nothing in the West, and little in the East, does, a suzerainty so enormous, impossible ever in Europe, almost unprecedented in Asia, that it well-nigh told a human power the one thing that human power never is: omnipotent.
In almost the one level place in the principality was builded the temple, and housed the gods. This level place was small, a scant platform of earth wedged between two masses of rock. In the rock on the East the cave-temple had been roughly hewn. The thick, ungainly pillars, rudely carved, paint centuries old still showing faintly here and there, served to divide the cave roughly into three parts. Between the pillars in the middle section was a seated stone figure, a six-armed goddess, forbidding, ferocious of aspect, colored face, arms and rough indicated robes a dark and sinister green. On a low slab of altar before her feet newly severed heads of six or seven goats still reeked from the priestly knife, blood still warm clotting about them, and one—the last knifed—still twitched and shivered in symbol of recent pain. Untidy and moldering wreaths and handfuls of flowers decorated the temple’s honeycombed walls, and lay on its spattered floor. Blood dripped on marigolds, and bats flew cautiously here and there. How flowers had been come by in this desolate place of gaunt, bare rock, it were hard to guess. But the floral offerings were there. And there were gardens in Rukh, almost miracles of one man’s compulsion and his people’s persistence. The Raja had his gardens in the keeps of his palace, the priests and a petted woman or two had theirs contrived in some split in the mountains of rock, places of verdure and bloom as artificial as the hanging gardens of Babylon, and much more surprising. And the Raja had his runners. What the Raja of Rukh would, he commanded; what he commanded was fulfilled.
The open space before the open temple formed between the two rock-masses a rudely paved forecourt to the temple. It was bordered by a sparse company of smaller idols, weather-proof, it’s to be hoped, and probably too comparatively insignificant to be housed with the six-armed monstrosity in the blood-spattered, bat-infested cave. Three round-headed stone posts stood near the outer lesser gods, and were painted green—whether in an economy of paint left over from the great Green Goddess, or in the wearing of her livery, were idle guesswork for a Westerner.
Mountain paths wound off behind the rock, and through the low, listless shrubs that grew impassively beside them, long narrow paths winding in every direction, that the overlord’s runners might hasten the quicker and surer wherever he willed.
There were few words in Rukh as a rule. The people worked too hard to talk overmuch. Their temple rites were nearly their only social gatherings; and the temple rites watched and done, they were wont to disperse almost in silence, lumbering stolidly back to labor, food or sleep.
But to-day the worshipers were lingering excitedly in the courtyard, watching wide-eyed something up in the air, a great gray and silver bird of prey, a strange fish-like bird with amazing markings of blue and red on its silver belly—only the ordinary identification of such birds, but neither Arabic nor Roman numerals were common sights in Rukh—a horrible monster bird of prey whose like they never had seen or heard tell of, never had dreamed of when nightmares tossed their hard-earned sleep; and it was swooping down on them with a hideous cracking whizz.
“Oo-ae!” a native cried.
“Oo-ae!” another sobbed.
“Oo-ae! Oo-ae!” they all cried then in mingled gutturals of dismay and despair.
It was a pathetically hideous group of unkempt, squat, frightened hillsmen, high-cheeked, rather Mongol in type, strong-limbed, stupid of face (not Mongol in that), adding nothing of color to the dark drab place, for their rough, almost unmade garments were somber and dark. A man of higher stature and better garments stood amongst them, his skin was lighter, his features more of Aryan type, his eye-sockets wider, more open, an embroidered fur cap on his head, a marigold stuck in its beads. He had some evident authority over them—Yazok the temple priest—for when one turned to flee:
“Na-yam!” ordered the priest, and the man did not go. A braver raised his weapon—they most of them were armed—and again Yazok commanded “Na-yam!” and the fellow let his lifted arm and the weapon he held fall to his side.
On and down swooped the monster bird. The priest watched it, silent and motionless, but with a tense look of acrid dislike on his face, and a glance of patient contempt now and then to the huddled, shivering group which drew closer and closer together, pressing farther away to the edge of the place, closer and closer to him, ejaculating, “Oo-ae! Oo-ae!”
The bird had lit.
It had finished its flight just back of the temple. One terrible talon—or was it the tip of its great wing?—projected threateningly over the mass of rocks at the west. The aeroplane that had risen from Dehra Dun so surely and lightly, while the band had played “Good-by, I’m going to leave you now,” had made a forced landing on the inhospitable slope of unknown Rukh, a landing so imperatively forced that almost it might be termed a crash.