"Good English glasses!" he murmured, as men do who have lived for some time alone. "I am uncommonly obliged to you, my dear major. I needed something to equalise the odds."
CHAPTER XIII
SHARING A SEPULCHRE
Keeping well under cover, Frank worked his way upwards through the scrub round the north-east shoulder of Sari Bair. Every now and then he stopped, as it were to "sniff the air." He smiled to himself, thinking how like his movements must be to those of a fox that knows that the hounds are out. "I can believe now," he thought, "the huntsman's theory that the enjoyment is not all on one side."
From the height to which he had now ascended he had a bird's-eye view of the pretty little village of Biyuk Anafarta, surrounded by tall and stately cypresses, lying below him in a gap in the hills to the north. He paused for a moment to admire the scene. Just above him was the head of a nullah forming a ravine on the northern face of Sari Bair, and joining as a tributary a larger nullah running westward past the village to the sea. A hundred yards up the hill a large cedar jutted out from the side of the nullah, here only a few feet deep, and towered above the prevailing scrub. Six or eight paces from the tree, near the bank of the nullah, there appeared the stone door of an ancient sepulchre, probably dating back before the Christian era. The stones were perfectly cut and squared, and solidly cemented together. The weather of twenty centuries had but lightly touched them.
At this point Frank redoubled his precautions. The vegetation grew closely about the sepulchre; this solitude was apparently never visited by men; but he could not afford to leave anything to chance. He dropped into the nullah some eighty yards below the tree, and carefully worked his way up the bed of the ravine. Arriving at the tree, he took a final look round, pulled himself up by the roots, and climbed up on the western side, having the massive trunk between him and the men who were hunting for him far away to the east.
At the first big fork the tree was hollow. Letting himself down within the hollowed trunk, he stood upon a litter of leaves, brushwood, and soft detritus, which he stooped in the semi-darkness to stir over. After a while he uncovered a hole about two feet across. Through this he wriggled, into a narrow passage not high enough to walk erect in, ending in a small square room a little higher than the passage, but still too low for the upright posture.
The air was full of the sickly odour of decay. A feeble light filtered through a number of tube-like orifices bored in the stone on one wall of the room. At the further end, reaching almost from the floor to the roof, stood two enormous earthen jars. They were filled with human bones. This little room was the interior of the sepulchre.
Frank had discovered the place by accident a day or two before. He had climbed the tree to learn, if he could, the whereabouts of his pursuers, and discovered the hollow trunk. Thinking that this would afford a secure hiding-place in case of need, though the quarters would in truth be rather cramped, he had dropped down and started to clear a space for sleeping. It was then that, in lifting a mass of brushwood, he had discovered the passage and the chamber beyond.
The discovery set his imagination at work. The building was obviously so much older than the tree that this strange connection between them must be an afterthought. Within the sepulchre he found some articles of Greek pottery which suggested an explanation. Back in the middle ages the peninsula of Gallipoli, then a Greek possession, was overrun by the conquering Ottoman Turks. Was it not possible that some Greek fugitive, fleeing before the barbarians, had lighted upon this hollow tree just as he himself had done, and cut a passage through it into the ancient and forgotten tomb? How many centuries had passed before the Byzantine fugitive, if such he was, had intruded upon the solitude of its fleshless inhabitants?