That is how it stood with them, as the new aeroplane imperceptibly rose from the flat beyond the parade-ground, into the velvet-blue, and flew towards the Himalayas.
CHAPTER XII
Odd places and peoples lie—for the most part unsuspected by the rest of the world—tucked away solitary and secure in the uncharted wilds beyond the Himalayas: tiny isolated kingdoms, each knowing naught but itself, and unknown of all others, strongholds of primitive peoples and of old primitive ways, elaborately customed, impregnably individual—wonderful, incalculable domains to which few white travelers journey, from whose sullen bourne none return.
The Himalayas are cut and gashed by a thousand fissures and natural passes, and between those loopholes in the great mountain range lie many a hidden principality, cupped in mountains and rocks as impenetrably as the lair of some skilful outlaw often is safe from the utmost vigilance of the police of the American Northwest.
Such was the Kingdom of Rukh: its prince keeping his state, his people keeping their ways, exactly as they did long before the days of Genghis Khan, speaking their own guttural language, worshiping their own gods, obeying their prince in all ways and their priests in some—for their prince was more to them, more loved, more feared, tenfold more obeyed than all their small man-made heaven of gods. Who were they? What were they? Whence had they come? What was their place in the great interknit mosaic of mankind? None can say. To trace them quite definitely to any outside kinship were hopeless. Yet most of their faces were somewhat Mongolian, with here and there one more of Aryan type—always in some tribesman of power and place.
It was an absolute monarchy, if ever earthly sway and power were absolute—if the word “absolute” itself has any justification of veracity.
The Raja of Rukh ruled with an unquestioned despotism no Western monarch dreams of, and of which but few in the past ever have dreamed, and none ever has attained.
So often is Asian princeship thus that it would call for no remark in telling of Rukh, were it not for one odd fact. Of all the natives of little Rukh, this almost omnipotent ruler was the sole one who had smirched his birthright, and sinned against the more-than-religion of the race. For the Raja had traveled, he had broken strange, unconsecrated breads, eaten strange, polluted meats. He had lived in Europe, and now in the fortress-home to which he had come back to his own he in his own person mingled—superficially at least—ways of Europe with the ways of his fathers. At this his people had wondered a little, but not one had doubted or questioned, unless indeed Toluk Yap, the high priest, doubted now and then. And not even Toluk Yap ever had questioned. For the Raja was god in Rukh, and the gods but satellites of his power and rank.
Too, all that he occasionally did, ate, or wore that might have hinted to you or to me of Pall Mall or the Champs Elysées, seemed to his enslaved, docile people but an eccentricity of his individuality. It might have stood to them for defilement, his occasional aping of European ways, and have disgruntled and lashed them to cut-throat fury and open rebellion, had they sensed it for what it was. But that they could ill do, since they did not know or suspect that there was a Europe. He had been away, and he had come back to them; that was all they knew; and that he had come back was all they cared.
He had brought back with him one grotesque curio at which they gaped for a time, and then ignored with stolid disgust as far as they could: a white ape of a man—if it was a man—who, little heed as they paid it, gave them their first unformed film of idea that somewhere beyond the mountains that bounded and ended their world there were places on the earth that were bleached—where trees and reptiles, rocks and sky, if trees, reptiles and stones and sky there were, all were bleached white by the torture and misfortune of existing so far from Rukh, as the tawn of the leopard was sometimes bleached by the lash of the high Himalayan cold.