The Bronze Bell

by Louis Joseph Vance

"Maro! Let him run, my king! The way is not far for such as he. Have no fear lest he tire!"

But Amber set his teeth and wrought with the reins until his mount comprehended the fact that he had met a master, and, moderating his first furious burst of speed, settled down into a league-devouring stride, crest low, limbs gathering and stretching with the elegant precision of clockwork. His rider, regaining his poise, found time to look about him and began to enjoy, for all his cares, this wild race through the blue-white night.

Behind them, carbine on saddle-bow, the sowar thundered in pursuit, at an interval of about a hundred yards—often greater, when the stallions would have it so and spent their temper in brief, brisk contests for the leadership. On Amber's left the woman rode as one to the saddle born, her face turned eagerly to the open road, smiling a little with excitement beneath the tissue of thin veiling which the speed-bred breeze moulded cunningly to the contour of her flawless features. The fire in her blood shone lambent in the eyes that now and again met Amber's. More than once he heard her laugh low, with a lilt of happiness.

For himself he was drunk with the spirit of adventure. Bred of the moonlit sky and the far shy stars, of the flooding moonlight breaking crisply against impenetrable shadows like surf against black rocks, of the tune of hoofs, of the singing wind and sighing waters, a wild and reckless humor possessed him, ran molten in his veins, swam in his brain like fumes of wine.

As the tale of miles increased, the valley opened out, and presently they swung to the west from the northerly track, branching off into a rougher way through a wilder countryside. Rugged hilltops marched beside them, looming stark black against the silvered purple of the sky. They met no one, their road winding through a land whose grandeur was enhanced by its positive desolation—a land tenanted only by a million devils of loneliness with naught to do save to fling back mocking echoes of the road-song of the flying hoofs….

Toward the close of the second hour the valleys began to widen, the hills to be less lofty and precipitous. The horses swung up gentler ascents, down slopes less sharp. The road ran for a time along the bank of a broad and placid river, then crossed it by a massive arch of masonry as old as history. They circled finally a great, round, grassless hillside, and pulled rein in the notch of a gigantic V formed by two long, prow-like spurs running out upon a plain whose sole, vague boundary was the vast arc of the horizon.

Before them loomed dead Kathiapur, an island of stone girdled by the shallow silver river. Like the rugged pedestal of some mammoth column, its cliffs rose sheer threescore feet from the water's edge to the foot of the outermost of its triple walls. From the notch in the hills a great stone causeway climbed with a long and easy grade to the level of the first great gate, spanning the chasm over the river by means of a crazy wooden bridge.

Above the broken rim of the three-fold walls the moon's unearthly splendor made visible a vast confusion of crumbling cornices, blank walls, turrets, domes, and towers, the gnarled limbs of dead trees, the luxuriant dark foliage of banian and pepal, palm and acacia. But nothing moved and there was not a light to be seen. These things with the silence told the tale of death. With the cessation of the ringing hoofbeats the stillness had closed down upon the riders like a spell to break the which were to invite the wrath of the undying gods themselves. Other than the silken breathing of the horses, an occasional muffled thud or the jingle of a bridle-chain as one pawed the earth or tossed his head, they heard no sound. The unending hum of a living city was not there. Sister of Babylon, Nineveh and Tyre, kin to Chitor and that proud city of the plains that Jai Singh abandoned when he built him his City of Victory, Kathiapur is as Tadmor—dead. The shell remains; the soul has flown.

A gasp from the woman and an oath from the sowar startled Amber out of somber apprehensions into which he had been plunged by contemplation of this impregnable fortress of desolation. Gone was his lust for peril, gone his high, heedless joy of adventure, gone the intoxication which had been his who had drunk deep of the cup of Romance; there remained only the knowledge that he, alone and single-handed, was to pit his wits against the invisible and mighty forces that lurked in hiding within those walls, to seem to submit to their designs and so find his way to the woman of his love, tear her from the grasp of the unseen, and with her escape…

Naraini had, indeed, no need to cry aloud or clutch his hand in order to apprise him that the Eye was vigilant. He himself had seen it break forth, a lurid star of emerald light suspended high above the dark heart of the city—high in the air where the moment gone there had been nothing; so powerful that it shaded with sickly pallor the face of the woman, who clung shuddering to Amber; so unpresaged its appearance and so malign its augury that it shook even the skepticism of him whose reason had been nourished by the materialism of the Occident.