The Bronze Bell

by Louis Joseph Vance

After some three-quarters of an hour of hard climbing he came to the wooden bridge, and halted, surveying it with mistrust. Doubtless in the olden time a substantial but movable structure, strong enough to sustain a troop of warriors but light enough to be easily drawn up, had extended across the chasm, rendering the city impregnable from capture by assault. If so, it had long since been replaced by an airy and well-ventilated latticework of boards and timbers, none of which seemed to the wary eye any too sound. Amber selected the most solid-looking of the lot and gingerly advanced a pace or two along it. With a soft crackling a portion of the timber crumbled to dust beneath his feet. He retreated hastily to the causeway, and swore, and noticed that the Eye was watching him with malevolent interest, and swore some more. Entirely on impulse he heaved a bit of rock, possibly twenty pounds in weight, to the middle of the structure. There followed a splintering crash and the contraption dissolved like a magic-lantern effect, leaving a solitary beam about a foot in width and six or eight inches thick, spanning a flight of twenty and a drop of sixty feet. The river received the rubbish with several successive splashes, distinctly disconcerting, and Amber sat down on a boulder to think it over.

"Clever invention," he mused; "one'd think that, after taking all this trouble to get me here, they'd changed their minds about wanting me. I've a notion to change mine." He looked up at the cusped and battlemented gateway opposite him, shifted his regard to the Eye, and shook his fist vindictively at the latter. "If ever I get hold of the chap that invented you…!" An ingenious imagination failing to suggest any form of torture commensurate with the crime, he relapsed into gloomy meditation.

There seemed to be no possibility of turning back at that stage, however. Kuttarpur was rather far away, and, moreover, he doubted if he would be permitted to return. Having come thus far, he must go on. Moreover, Sophia Farrell was on the other side of that Swordwide Bridge, and such being the case, cross it he would though he were to find the next world at its end. Finally he considered that he was presently to undergo an Ordeal of some unknown nature, probably extremely unpleasant, and that this matter of the vanishing bridge must have been arranged in order to put him in a properly subdued and tractable frame of mind.

He got up and tested the remaining girder with circumspection and incredulity; but it seemed firm enough, solidly embedded in the stonework of the causeway and immovable at the city end. So he straddled it and, averting his eyes from the scenery beneath him, hitched ingloriously across, collecting splinters and a very distinct impression that, as a vocation, knight-errantry was not without its drawbacks.

When again he stood on his feet he was in the shadow of the outer gateway, the curtain of the second wall confronting him. The stillness remained unbroken but the moonlight illuminated with startling distinctness the frescoes, half obliterated by time, and they were monstrous, revolting and obscene, from a Western point of view. A bastion of the third wall hid the Eye, however; he was grateful for that.

Casting about, he discovered the second gateway at some distance to the left, and started toward it, forcing a way through a tangle of scrubby undergrowth, weeds, and thorny acacia, but had taken few steps ere a heavy splash in the river below brought him up standing, with a thumping heart. After an irresolute moment he turned back to see for himself, and found his apprehension only too well grounded; the Swordwide Bridge was gone, displaced by an agency which had been prompt to seek cover—though he confessed himself unable to suggest where that cover had been found. There was no one visible on the causeway, and nobody skulked in the shadows of the bastions of the main gate. Furthermore it seemed hardly possible that in so scant a space of time human hands could have worked that heavy beam out of its sockets. And if the hands had been human (of course any other hypothesis were ridiculous) what had become of their owners?

He gave it up, considering that it were futile to badger his wits for the how and the wherefore. The important fact remained that he was a prisoner in dead Kathiapur, his retreat cut off, and—Here he made a second discovery, infinitely more shocking: his pistol was gone.

Amber remembered distinctly examining the weapon in Dulla Dad's boat, since when he had found no occasion to think of it. Now either it had jolted out of his pocket in that wild ride from Kuttarpur, or else Naraini had managed deftly to abstract it while in his arms by the summer palace, or when, later, she had shrunk against him in real or affected terror of the Eye. Of the two explanations his reason favoured the second. But he made no audible comment, though his thoughts were as black as his brow and as grimly fashioned as the set of his jaw.

Turning back at length he made his way to the second gateway and from it to the third, under the lewdly sculptured arch of which he stopped and gasped, forgetting himself as for the first time Kathiapur the Fallen was revealed to him in all the awful beauty of its naked desolation.

A wide and stately avenue stretched away from the portals, between rows of dwellings, palaces of marble and stone, tombs and mausoleums, with meaner houses of sun-dried brick and rubble, roofless all and disintegrating in the slow, terrible process of the years. Here a wall had caved in, there an arch had fallen out. The thoroughfare was strewn with fallen lintels, broken marble screens, blocks of red sandstone, bricks, and in between them the fig and pipal nourished with the bebel-thorn, the ak, the mimosa, the insidious convolvulus twining everywhere. At the far end of the street a yawning black arch rose in the white, beautiful façade of a marble temple on whose uppermost pinnacle the Eye hovered, staring horridly.