Without a word she obeyed, and now the Gularzai were already within the mouth of the tangi, Murad Afzul leading. What followed was weirdly startling. The whole of the grim and gloomy chasm roared with the most appalling sounds, mingled with shriekings and wailings. To and fro—tossed along those gigantic cliff walls the echoes bellowed, giving forth strange mouthings, and then, over all, from the dim inner recesses of the cavernous rift spake an awful voice.
“O unbelievers, violators of my sanctuary, retire, or ye die—die even as those three now lying here, whom none may find until the ending of the world. He who makes one step forward, that moment he dies. In the name of the Great, the Terrible One.”
The suddenness of it, the awful appalling din, the sombre repute of the place, and the consciousness that they were knowingly venturing on sacrilege, had an effect upon the intruders which was akin to panic. They stopped short, reining in their horses cruelly, lest they should accidentally make that one step forward, and their fierce shaggy visages seemed petrified with the terror that was in them. But Murad Afzul’s horse at that moment, wildly plunging, half stumbled on a round stone, and the jerk of the bit, and the savage sting of the hide whip, instinctively administered, caused it to take a bound forward. Then it stopped dead still, and its rider half stood up in his stirrups with a quick jerk, then, throwing up his arms, toppled heavily, and with a crash, on to the stones.
One terrified glance at the set face and glazing eyes, and the whole half-dozen venturesome ones turned and stampeded wildly from the terrible spot, muttering citations from the Koran to avert further evil. What could be clearer? Their leader had made a forbidden step forward and—and he had died, even as the ghost of the holy one whose sanctuary it was, had threatened. He had died, stricken by the powers of the air at the bidding of the Syyed.
Raynier, his nerves all athrill with this passing of the crisis, withdrew his rifle, feeling something of savage satisfaction and pride in his successful shot. But it did not at once occur to him that the wild and deafening din of the reverberations had so completely drowned the report of his piece that no shadow of a suspicion lay upon the minds of the now discomfited pursuers that their leader had met his death by mortal agency, or by any other than that of the powers of the unseen. It was left to Hilda to suggest, and the idea was a reassuring one, because it meant that no further pursuit would be undertaken. Her he found struggling with the bridles of the scared and refractory horses, and at the same time convulsively laughing.
“It was so comical,” she explained. “Fancy our being able to turn that echo to such account. It was clever of you to hit upon that idea.” Then gravely, “Do you remember what I said that night, Herbert, the second time we were in here together? ‘Something warns me there will come a day when our knowledge of this place will make all the difference between life and death.’ Well, has it made that difference?”
“I should rather think so. But what puzzles me is how on earth you knew we were anywhere near the place. We entered it now, mind you, by the end furthest from the camp, and we never went outside that on either of those occasions.”
“I knew it by that split rock and the little one beside it, rising up out of the nullah down there. I noticed them opposite this entrance the first time we were here.”
“Wonderful! Do you know, Hilda, Haslam says there’s something uncanny about you, and I begin to believe there is.”