But a strange expression had come over her face, the set, far-away look of one whose thoughts were not with her words. In after times that look came back to him.
“I want to go through it too,” she repeated.
“Very well, then—you’ve been warned.”
As they entered the grim portal the sun was just touching the horizon, but it occurred to neither of them that it might be pitch dark before they emerged. At first the slant of the rock walls caused one of these to overhang, shutting out the sky, but the rift gradually widening, they could see the brow of these stupendous cliffs, far above against the sky at a dizzy height. Unconsciously the tones of both were lowered as they conversed.
“It isn’t healthy taking too long to get through a tangi like this when there are rain storms going about,” Raynier was saying. “It makes a most effective waterway for ten, twenty, forty feet of flood. Ah, I thought so. Look.”
High over their heads, caught here and there in a crevice of the rock, was a wisp of withered grass or a few sticks. There was no mistaking how these objects had got there, and the awful magnitude of the flood which at times bellowed through this grisly rift.
“Why is the place supposed to be haunted?” said Hilda Clive. “You didn’t tell me.”
“The usual thing—a curse. There was a man killed here by the people of the neighbourhood—not an incident of very great moment in this country, you would think. But this one was a great character in the sanctity line of business—a Syyed or a Hadji, or something of the sort—and so his ghost appeared and took it out of the neighbourhood, and indeed the human race in general, by planting a rigid embargo on the place. And it was a pretty practical way of taking it out of them too, for they used this tangi as a thoroughfare—it’s scarcely a mile long, you know—whereas now they’ve got to go round the mountain instead of through it, which makes a difference of at least eight.”
“It’s an eerie place, anyhow,” said the girl, looking up a little awe-stricken at the immensity of the cliff walls. The sun had gone off the world now, and a tomb-like twilight prevailed here in the heart of the mountain. It was chilling enough to have begotten a whole volume of grim legends.
“Wonder if the old Syyed’s ghost is on hand now,” said Raynier, who was cynically and frankly sceptical in such matters. “We’ll give him the salaam anyhow.” Then, raising his voice but very slightly, he exclaimed,—