"You fool!"
Vitriol was in her voice—but he heard her only in a detached way, for he saw, swimming in the moonlight behind the wall, a sedan-chair, and in it the pale oval of a face. It was in the midst of mules and packs and several mounted men. Hsien Sgam was there, in the saddle, between two muleteers. Kerth, Kee Meng and Hsiao had drawn rein in the gateway, thus separating Sarojini Nanjee from her caravan.
This, a quick negative, snapped and printed upon Trent's brain.
From him the woman's eyes moved around the group—past Kerth, past the muleteers and the sedan-chair—to Hsien Sgam.
"You did this!" Her words stung with venom, and her eyes traveled back swiftly to Trent. "Perhaps he fooled you into betraying me—but ask him why he wanted you to believe Chavigny alive and see, then, if you want him as your ally!"
A moment of tenseness followed—a moment that seemed to lengthen into a dead interval of time. The very world ached with dumbness, ached and waited. Hsien Sgam, who sat stooped upon his pony, was the first to speak.
"Major Trent, you wish to know who murdered your friend. Sarojini Nanjee did it. But not with her own hand...." His words were like smooth pellets emerging from vats of molten metal. "I loved her," the Mongol declared; "loved her ... and I went to Gaya, to your house, when I learned of her interest in you.... And there I made a fatal mistake—"
His words were buried as a muffled detonation ruptured the quiet. An abrupt shock quivered the ground. Eyes swerved to the source of sound. For an infinitesimal moment the very universe seemed to hang in dreadful suspense; then came two violent throbs, like the blows of a seismic hammer. A terrific roar was born out of the womb of inter-stellar silence—a roar that smote the eardrums of those who heard, that pressed ponderously against the heart and whipped the blood into throat and nostrils and eyes.
From the towering mass of Lhakang-gompa rose a quick glare that stabbed up, sank, and with it the roofs and walls of the monastery.... Smoke belched upon the sky. The earth shook. The very stars seemed dim with dread, and a wraith of nebulous black veiled the face of the moon. It was as though the gigantic machinery of a planet had been suddenly crippled.
The hush that followed seemed to pluck from Trent's lungs the power to breathe. He thought the ground still heaved, that the rumbling was still pouring about his ears.... He was a pigmy in the midst of some cosmic disorder.... His pony snorted and trembled violently. For a space of seconds no one spoke; no one dared. All looked toward the cloud that was settling, doom-black, over what had been Lhakang-gompa, over the seamed and broken heart of Shingtse-lunpo!... And then came a soft, repressed voice—a herald of earth recalling them to its dominion after some awful furlough.