Such prolonged absence as this Asian prince had allowed himself well might have cost him his throne. Scarcely a monarch of Europe—with cables and cinemas to remind them—would dare to leave his people so long, and it seems a far rasher thing for a prince to risk whose kingship and throne lay on the more quickly shifting sands where every prime minister is a would-be supplanter, almost every half-brother a usurper at core. But Rukh had known whom to trust and entrust, and had known when to go, and when to come back.
Unknown to the geographers of the Occident, unsuspected in Whitehall and Westminster, the Kingdom of Rukh lay snug in the mountains as it has, perhaps, since Adam was young. And its despot’s rule was absolute. The King could do no wrong. For the Royal House stood by the people, and the people stood by the Royal House in the Kingdom of Rukh.
A grim and dun-colored place it was, a region of gaunt and almost treeless mountains, all of them bleak, barren and gray of tone except where the clear atmosphere lent them some tint of its hot blue. Clinging fiercely to the fierce mountain wall, a mile or more away from the temple precincts, was a vast barbaric palace, its long stretches of glum unbroken masonry crowned and relieved by endless arcades and turrets; not two alike, yet all in key and consonance—a fortress-palace telling of centuries of human labor, of long generations of wealth and lordship. How many brown hands had lifted it up stone by stone, how many brown muscle-knotted backs had bent and strained at its making, is beyond compute. Millions of peasants must have been born to its hewing and heaving and making, and have died at it. Here in its desert of rocks, its forest of mountains, it spoke of suzerainty irresistible and unresisted as nothing in the West, and little in the East, does, a suzerainty so enormous, impossible ever in Europe, almost unprecedented in Asia, that it well-nigh told a human power the one thing that human power never is: omnipotent.
In almost the one level place in the principality was builded the temple, and housed the gods. This level place was small, a scant platform of earth wedged between two masses of rock. In the rock on the East the cave-temple had been roughly hewn. The thick, ungainly pillars, rudely carved, paint centuries old still showing faintly here and there, served to divide the cave roughly into three parts. Between the pillars in the middle section was a seated stone figure, a six-armed goddess, forbidding, ferocious of aspect, colored face, arms and rough indicated robes a dark and sinister green. On a low slab of altar before her feet newly severed heads of six or seven goats still reeked from the priestly knife, blood still warm clotting about them, and one—the last knifed—still twitched and shivered in symbol of recent pain. Untidy and moldering wreaths and handfuls of flowers decorated the temple’s honeycombed walls, and lay on its spattered floor. Blood dripped on marigolds, and bats flew cautiously here and there. How flowers had been come by in this desolate place of gaunt, bare rock, it were hard to guess. But the floral offerings were there. And there were gardens in Rukh, almost miracles of one man’s compulsion and his people’s persistence. The Raja had his gardens in the keeps of his palace, the priests and a petted woman or two had theirs contrived in some split in the mountains of rock, places of verdure and bloom as artificial as the hanging gardens of Babylon, and much more surprising. And the Raja had his runners. What the Raja of Rukh would, he commanded; what he commanded was fulfilled.
The open space before the open temple formed between the two rock-masses a rudely paved forecourt to the temple. It was bordered by a sparse company of smaller idols, weather-proof, it’s to be hoped, and probably too comparatively insignificant to be housed with the six-armed monstrosity in the blood-spattered, bat-infested cave. Three round-headed stone posts stood near the outer lesser gods, and were painted green—whether in an economy of paint left over from the great Green Goddess, or in the wearing of her livery, were idle guesswork for a Westerner.
Mountain paths wound off behind the rock, and through the low, listless shrubs that grew impassively beside them, long narrow paths winding in every direction, that the overlord’s runners might hasten the quicker and surer wherever he willed.
There were few words in Rukh as a rule. The people worked too hard to talk overmuch. Their temple rites were nearly their only social gatherings; and the temple rites watched and done, they were wont to disperse almost in silence, lumbering stolidly back to labor, food or sleep.
But to-day the worshipers were lingering excitedly in the courtyard, watching wide-eyed something up in the air, a great gray and silver bird of prey, a strange fish-like bird with amazing markings of blue and red on its silver belly—only the ordinary identification of such birds, but neither Arabic nor Roman numerals were common sights in Rukh—a horrible monster bird of prey whose like they never had seen or heard tell of, never had dreamed of when nightmares tossed their hard-earned sleep; and it was swooping down on them with a hideous cracking whizz.
“Oo-ae!” a native cried.
“Oo-ae!” another sobbed.