The Old Man of the Mountain

by Herbert Strang

"Quite impossible! To begin with, there isn't enough of it; then, we have no tools. It is tantalising in the extreme."

"There's this to be said. Even if we did break through, it would only be to find ourselves in the midst of our enemies. It would mean the Eye for both of us."

"I have been wondering lately whether that wouldn't after all be better than to stay here much longer. Forrester, the Old Man has beaten me at last. If he sends for me again, I'm afraid I shall ignominiously cave in. It was one thing to pity those poor Chinamen when we had no real personal knowledge of what they were suffering. It is quite another to share it, to feel the steady sapping of one's vigour, the horrible blankness that comes over one's mind. I know for the first time in my life what it is to writhe in the clutches of Giant Despair."

In his many blank moments, Forrester reflected in utter desolation of spirit on their desperate case. Ill and miserable as he himself felt, he dwelt, not on his own condition, but on the appalling change that was creeping over the once buoyant-hearted companion of his imprisonment. The cheeriness was gone. It was an effort now to Beresford to talk. The sickly hue induced by the greenish light had become on his countenance a ghastly pallor. His limbs shook, his gait was slow and stumbling, his once upright frame was beginning to stoop like that of an old man. On his days off duty he lay like a log, sleeping, or simply existing in apathy and listlessness. Was he to drift thus on a slow tide towards death?

One night, Forrester was wearily laying the pole in its resting-place, when he heard a sudden click near by, such as might be caused by the fall of some hard substance on the floor. He looked down, but there was nothing on the smooth rock to account for the sound. In a moment it was followed by a second click, apparently a little nearer, and from the direction of the cleft in the wall. His curiosity thoroughly aroused, Forrester stooped and glanced in. The light in the cleft was dim, but after peering for a few seconds, he caught sight of a small object at a distance of perhaps ten or twelve feet away. He had not noticed it when looking into the cleft before, but that might merely have been because he was not expecting to see anything, nor indeed making a keen examination. But it seemed that the object must have moved; otherwise the click was scarcely explicable; and Forrester was sufficiently interested to wish to get hold of it. It was far beyond reach; the cleft was too narrow to admit his head and shoulders; but he could edge one of the shorter bamboo rods sideways into the hole, and then worry the object forward until he could grasp it.

This was the work of less than a minute. To his intense mortification, the thing, when it came to hand, turned out to be nothing but a bone.

He was on the point of throwing it back, when the idea struck him that the discovery might give a momentary fillip to Beresford's flagging spirits. So he slipped the bone into his pocket, and returned to the outer cavern.

Next morning he accompanied Beresford, as he sometimes did, to the entrance of the transmuting chamber, and watched him commence his daily task. He had forgotten the incident of the night. But when the place was irradiated with the brilliant rays, he chanced to put his hand into his pocket, felt the bone, and drew it out, thinking now so little of it as to purpose casting it into the open pit. But as he turned it over in his hand, he caught sight of some thin white scratches upon it, at first sight irregular and fortuitous, but, at a second glance, forming, as it seemed to him, the initials of his name, R.F.

Puzzled, and a little excited, he looked at it more carefully. It was not an old bone; a fragment of tendon, still supple, adhered to it. Examining it end-wise, he saw that the interior was filled with a fine substance that might be desiccated marrow. He shook it; some of the powdery contents fell to the floor. He knocked it against his boot, and almost shouted with amazement: for at his feet lay a tiny spill of paper, apparently rice paper, very tightly wound.