“Wanted to see what was on the far side of the clearing by the gates. Shout for food; I must go and wash first. I feel like a cemetery at present.”
He put down his rifle, and now, by the light of the lanterns, I saw that he had what looked like a thin bundle of sticks.
“What have you got there?” I asked.
“Show you after dinner,” was all he vouchsafed, as he made for the stream with a towel and a piece of soap.
During dinner he expanded. Nothing had happened during his watch, but the moment it got dark he left Payindah in position, and crept off in the gloom across the clearing. He has no nerves has Wrexham. I should have wanted very good reasons to take me out among that tangle of smelly bones. The first thing he had made for was the corpse we had seen. With the darkness the vultures had left it.
“I crawled up to him first. I was right this afternoon when I said he wasn’t new. He wasn’t by a long chalk. But in the faint light I could see that he had had no clothes, and also that his hands were tied. I expected that, because I’ve got a great respect for my great-great-uncle’s accuracy after all we’ve found. What I was looking for was the arrow, which was a messy job to get away. But I did it, and it’s there. There were two in this bloke as a matter of fact, but one was broken. I suppose he pitched on it as he fell.
“I did a circular tour after that, and found nothing much except bones, or what you might call ‘nearly’ bones. Once I caught my hand in something that I thought was string, and then realized that it was hair, long hair. They’re not only man’s bones there, unless some of them wear long hair like Baluchis or Sikhs, which I should think unlikely. I also picked up another arrow or two.
“It was practically pitch-dark now, but I headed for the gateway. I crawled up to it d——d quietly, and got right up against the central door. They’re real gates, all right. I pushed my knife its whole length into the crack between the two bits of the centre one.
“I glued my ear to the cracks, and listened for quite a long time, but nothing stirred inside, so far as I could hear.
“I tried the little doors after that, but they seemed to slide in the rock and fitted jolly tightly. They’re real, all right, too.