As Amber moved forward small, alert ghosts rose from the undergrowth and scurried silently thence: a circumstance which made him very unhappy. Even a brilliant chorus of sharp barks from an adjacent street failed to convince him that he had merely disturbed a pack of jackals, after all, and not the disconsolate brooding wraiths of those who had died and been buried in the imposing ruined tombs, what time Kathiapur boasted ten thousand swords and elephants by the herd.
The way was difficult and Amber tired. After a while, having seen nothing but the jackals, an owl or two, several thousand bats and a crawling thing which had lurched along in the shadow of a wall some distance away, giving an admirable imitation of a badly wounded man pulling himself over the ground, and making strange gutteral noises—Amber concluded to wait for the guide Naraini had promised him. He turned aside and seated himself upon the edge of a broken sandstone tomb. The silence was appalling and for relief he took refuge in cheap irreverence. "Home," he observed aloud, "never was like this."
A heart-rending sigh from the tomb behind him was followed by a rattle of dislodged rubbish. Amber found himself unexpectedly in the middle of the street and, without stopping to debate the method of his getting there with such unprecedented rapidity, looked back hopefully to the tomb. At the same moment a black-shrouded figure swept out of it and moved a few paces down the street, then paused and beckoned him with a gaunt arm. "I wish," said Amber earnestly, "I had that gun."
The figure was apparently that of a native swathed in black from his head to his heels and seemed the more strikingly peculiar in view of the fact that, as far as Amber could determine, he had neither eyes nor features although his head was without any sort of covering. He gulped over the proposition for an instant, then stepped forward.
"Evidently my appointed cicerone," he considered. "Unquestionably this ghost-dance is excellently stage-managed…. Though, of course, I had to pick out that particular tomb."
He followed in the wake of the figure, which sped on with a singular motion, something between a walk and a glide, conscious that his equanimity had been restored rather than shaken by the incident. "You wouldn't think," he reflected, "that a man like Salig Singh would lend himself to anything so childish. Still, I'm not through with it yet." He conceived a scheme to steal up behind his guide and strip him of his masquerade, but though he mended his pace he got no nearer, and eventually abandoned it on the consideration that it was probably most inadvisable. After all, he had to remember that he was there for a purpose, and a very serious one, and that properly to further that purpose he must comport himself with dignity, submissively, accepting, at least with a show of ease, each new development of the affair along its prearranged lines. And so he held on in pursuit of the black shadow, passing forsaken temples and lordly pleasure-houses, all marble tracery and fretwork, standing apart in what had once been noble gardens, sunken tanks all weed-grown and rank with slime, humbler dooryards and cots on whose hearthstones the fires for centuries had been cold—his destination evidently the temple of the unspeakable Eye.
As they drew nearer the leading shadow forsook the shade of the walls which he had seemed to favour, sweeping hastily across a plaza white with moonglare and without pause on into the black, gaping hole beyond the marble arch.
Here for the first time Amber hung back, stopping a score of feet from the door, his nerves a-jangle. He did not falter in his purpose; he was going to enter the inky portal, but … would he ever leave it? And the world was still sweet to him. His quick, darting gaze registered a dozen impressions in as many seconds: of the silver splendour spilled so lavishly upon the soulless corpse of the city, of the high, bright sky, of dead black shadows sharp-edged against the radiance, of the fleet flitting spectre that was really a flying-fox….
Afar a hyena laughed with a sardonic intonation wholly uncalled-for—it was blood-curdling, besides. And down the street a melancholy air breathed gently, sighing like a soul astray.
"This won't do," he told himself; "it can't be worse inside than out here."