"No, I didn't know," he snapped. "I'm not a native. I haven't got any damned superstitions. Perhaps you'd like to have a shot at it."
Barclay made no answer. The smile passed from his lips. He sat his horse motionlessly, staring at the faintly swaying native bridge in front of him. The Englishman, unconscious of his own success, stumped off angrily towards a fresh point of vantage.
Presently Barclay crossed to the farther side of the river, turning his horse from the path, rode through the long grasses to the temple, and here, within a few feet of the carved gateway, he dismounted, and, tossing the reins over the battered post which was all that marked the old Path of Auspiciousness, he strolled through into the Manderpam. The place was empty. Its usual inhabitant had vanished. Barclay stood a moment, looking about him with the detached, unfeeling interest of a tourist. The attitude was deliberate, as were all his actions. He was setting the gulf of race and tradition between himself and this austerely sensuous beauty. He held himself an alien, walking idly, but with loud steps over the grass-grown stones, humming to himself, and beating time with his crop against his riding-boots. But the silence, heavy with old dreams and drowsy, bygone meditations, the stately avenue of roofless pillars, daunted him. He came to a halt in the entrance to the antarila and stared round furtively, peering into the purple-tinted shadows, listening as to a sound which troubled and escaped him. A little red-cheeked bulbul fluttered from its nest high overhead on the summit of the crumbling walls, and he watched its flight through the oblique bars of alternate light and shadow with a curious anxiety. It was as though he sought to rivet his attention on something trivial, so that he should not have to face whatever lay beneath the surface. The bulbul came to rest in some hidden rock among the deep-cut, fantastic reliefs of the frieze, and the soft, tender beating of its wings, like the last throb of a dying pulse, passed under the weight of a brooding, deathlike silence. Barclay turned and went noisily into the antarila. But here his footsteps rang with a different and startling resonance. They echoed among the broad, stunted pillars and died sullenly in a gloom which shrouded the place in unfathomable dimensions. Barclay, raising his hand instinctively, touched the roof, but its dank solidity could not remove the impression of a monstrous nightfall, of a sky black and unlit, stretching up into infinity. On either hand, his knowledge might have told him, were thick walls, but they too carried no conviction, and the darkness went on and on in narrow, endless passages leading down into the bowels of an unholy mystery. The faint gleam of light in front of him, the soft gold of the courtyard behind, were like ghosts, painted luminously on the solid blackness, themselves bringing no light, no relief.
Barclay stopped, and, with his insolent deliberation, lit a cigarette, afterwards holding the match overhead. He saw that his hand shook and the tiny flame quivered an instant and went out as though a secret breath had blown against it. Barclay cursed and bit his teeth together as the echo gibed at him from its invisible lurking-place, and then went on, hushing his footsteps so that they should not follow him. In the Holy of Holies there was neither light nor darkness, but a haze which at once hid and revealed all things. It was like a pall shrouding the sun, or a gauzy, luminous veil of sunshine thrown over nightfall. It came filtering down from the great sun-window which, high overhead in the slender sikhara, looked out eastwards whence at daybreak Laksmi, surrounded with the golden-haired divas of morning, rises up to meet Vishnu, who watches for her. It fell softly on the gigantic, monstrous effigy of Vishnu himself, cross-legged on his altar, in either hand a writhing serpent, his black eyes fixed in cruel, aloof contemplation on an existence which knew neither joy nor sorrow, neither humanity nor its desires and prayers. As in the old days when men and women had passed worshipping through his temple, so now that the worshippers were still and the courtyard empty and his altar bare of offerings, he remained indifferent and omnipotent. Men, generations, and religions pass, the temple crumbles. But so long as death remains, so long are the gods immortal. The knowledge of its immortality was graven into the image's mocking mouth, into the sightless, all-seeing eyes.
Barclay stood with one foot on the altar steps, and stared up into the frigid face and blew rings of smoke into the wide, cruel nostrils. There was more than a sightseer's insolent disregard in the action. It was a sneer and a defiance. He spat on the altar-step. But when a hand striking invisibly out of the darkness sent him staggering to the wall he screamed like a child whose nerve has snapped suddenly under a long, agonizing tension. His mouth was open, changing the character of his whole face. The cigarette had fallen and lay like a tiny burning eye on the stone flags. Vahana, the Sadhu, ground his heel upon it. Whether he had been kneeling in the shadow or whether he had crept after the interloper could not be told. Gaunt and naked, the bones of his chest and ribs starting out under the straining flesh, the wild grey hair tossed back from his face, he sprang up before the idol, protecting it with outstretched arms whose long, attenuated lines flung the shadow of a huge cross on the wall beyond.
Neither man spoke. Barclay bent down and picked up his helmet, which had been knocked off, and, obeying the Fakir's imperative gesture, went out of the Holy of Holies through the priests' place into the columned, sun-lit outer court. There he laughed.
"You're a pretty custodian," he said loudly in English. "Enough to frighten a harmless globe-trotter out of his five senses. What sort of tip do you expect after that? Or does one pay extra for the thrill?"
There was no answer. Vahana went past him and squatted down in his accustomed place by the gateway. The fierce outburst was over, and he seemed to have forgotten Barclay's presence. The latter stood beside him, propping his shoulders against the lintel, and searched fumblingly for his cigarette case.
"I suppose it's allowed here, eh? You should put up a notice, 'No smoking.' Oh, I forgot—a vow of eternal silence is your speciality, isn't it? You needn't keep it up with me. I shan't tell." He laughed again. "You old humbug! I could tell a tale if I chose. What about that evening I caught you sneaking out of Gaya? Been having a compensating orgy, no doubt."
The Fakir shot a rapid upward glance which Barclay caught with a grunt of satisfaction.