“Oo-ae! Oo-ae!” they all cried then in mingled gutturals of dismay and despair.
It was a pathetically hideous group of unkempt, squat, frightened hillsmen, high-cheeked, rather Mongol in type, strong-limbed, stupid of face (not Mongol in that), adding nothing of color to the dark drab place, for their rough, almost unmade garments were somber and dark. A man of higher stature and better garments stood amongst them, his skin was lighter, his features more of Aryan type, his eye-sockets wider, more open, an embroidered fur cap on his head, a marigold stuck in its beads. He had some evident authority over them—Yazok the temple priest—for when one turned to flee:
“Na-yam!” ordered the priest, and the man did not go. A braver raised his weapon—they most of them were armed—and again Yazok commanded “Na-yam!” and the fellow let his lifted arm and the weapon he held fall to his side.
On and down swooped the monster bird. The priest watched it, silent and motionless, but with a tense look of acrid dislike on his face, and a glance of patient contempt now and then to the huddled, shivering group which drew closer and closer together, pressing farther away to the edge of the place, closer and closer to him, ejaculating, “Oo-ae! Oo-ae!”
The bird had lit.
It had finished its flight just back of the temple. One terrible talon—or was it the tip of its great wing?—projected threateningly over the mass of rocks at the west. The aeroplane that had risen from Dehra Dun so surely and lightly, while the band had played “Good-by, I’m going to leave you now,” had made a forced landing on the inhospitable slope of unknown Rukh, a landing so imperatively forced that almost it might be termed a crash.
CHAPTER XIII
Lucilla Crespin came into sight first, but Traherne was first on the ground. Crespin climbing down rather awkwardly hesitated a moment at a difficult point, his foothold not too wide or secure, the available foothold below an uncomfortable distance to a man of his weight. India does not treat us all alike, we who invade her, not even our soldier-men. Punjabi soldiering had not kept Antony Crespin fit. Lucilla had known it for years; observant, clear-eyed, badly sensitive where those who were hers were concerned, she had watched the sag and the bloat come and gain almost day by day. But as she stood and looked at him now, it struck her anew, and more sharply than it had done before, sickened her even more than it had done in those two bitter hours of her fresh wifehood’s disillusion when she had realized shudderingly the twin rotten fissures in a husband’s being.
Women and wine! Both had branded and slackened him. She wondered which had spoiled and twisted him most. She knew which had tortured her the more. The “pegs” he had sipped and drained too often, too early, too late, and too strong, had disgusted and “turned” her clean, wholesome flesh the more. But the women had tortured her far more cruelly than his cups had. They had “turned” her soul and poisoned her heart. The drinking she held a weakness—contemptible but not unpitiable—innate, inherited, uncontrollable perhaps, but the infidelities that had affronted her pride, bowed her head, curdled the milk in her young mother-breasts, she held a personal meanness and unforgivable crime, a hideous responsibility that lay forever at his door. It is so that women judge—forgiving, condoning every masculine folly and sin that is no direct reflection and slight to her.
This was not the man she had married—that almost obese, flush-faced Crespin standing irresolutely there a little above her. No. But it was what had been he, and it was the human being to whom she was indissolubly bound. The fetter cut into her being. But she kept her pact—now as ever.