But those two familiar words told them a good deal of what they wished to know.
“Oh,” Crespin grunted, “it’s Windsor Castle, is it? Well, we’d better make tracks for it. Come, Lucilla.” He put his hand on her arm, and they turned to go.
But the priest barred their way, in a frenzy of excitement, pouring forth a wild torrent of, to them, quite unintelligible language.
Traherne intervened, speaking again in Russian, and it served to calm the hillsman measurably, though the native throng at his elbows still muttered and gesticulated threateningly. But Yazok listened, if surlily, and presently vouchsafed in reply a few Russian words which he spoke slowly and with evident difficulty.
“His Russian is even more limited than mine,” Traherne told the others, “but I gather that the Raja has been sent for, and will come here.”
“All right,” Crespin said wearily, “then we’d better await developments,” and, lighting a cigarette, seated himself on one of the green painted stones, and began to smoke with impatient patience.
Oriental Bedlam broke loose. Almost before the Englishman had gained his hard seat Yazok rushed on him wildly, caught at his shoulders, and with wild exclamations and fierce blazing eyes, hustled him off, and then, disregarding utterly the amazed and furious Major, salaamed low and penitentially to the stone, bent again and again with humble, deprecatory gestures, and a frightened hurricane of propitiatory formulas, an inchoate sing-song of throaty, guttural words that sounded half wailing woe, half cringing prayer. And the people no longer shrank away, but pressed towards Major Crespin brandishing fists and weapons, and storming determinedly, “Oo-ae, oo-ae, gak-kok-oo-ae, gak-gak!”
Crespin’s red face turned white in his anger, his tired eyes stiffened and flashed, and quicker than told his hand lay on his revolver-case. He still smoked on imperturbably, but Yazok was nearer death than he ever had been.
“Confound you, take care what you’re doing!” Crespin warned him, snapping the words out coldly from between clenched teeth. “You’d better treat us civilly or—”
Basil Traherne broke in. “Gently, gently, Major,” he begged with a hand on Crespin’s right arm. “This is evidently some sort of sacred enclosure, and you were sitting on one of the gods.”