We crept unseen to the spur of rock which Usi had called a "Horn;" and there they made the rope fast around my chest, and I passed a handkerchief round the breech of my revolver, and slung my kinjal and toorak securely, for I had taken kindly to that native weapon, made of the long horn of a mountain-goat, laden with lead, and bound with leather. Then at the proper moment when the judges or the jury—whichever they were—had gathered in a ring to consummate their farce, from the lip of the cliff I was let down softly, and lowered so skilfully in the buttress corner of a crag, that I reached the bottom with both feet ready, and only a little skin gone from my thumbs. There I cut the rope, and fell flat among the moss, which grew to the very plinth of cliff, and wormed my way, with the slab for a screen, until I dived into the hole at its base. Here I rubbed my knees, which had received a bruise or two, and began with great caution to survey the scene. For the little pit into which I had crawled was scarcely more than a yard in depth, but protected at the top by a smaller slab of stone, which rested with a wide slope against the upright rock, as the spur of a wooden fence is reared above the ground, and splayed against the post, to steady it.
At the lip of my refuge a grey plant grew with woolly leaves, something like mullein, and although it had not got much growth yet, it afforded me precious shelter, when I raised my head to peep around; for it partly closed the three-cornered gap, between the upright and the sloping stone. It is not in my power to make a list of all that I saw, being in so quick a terror; but the things that I was able to twist my neck to were enough to make me sorry for the colour of my hair.
In the butt-end of the cliff, which I had just dropped down, I beheld a wide door of dark metal, and the gleam of it was more of bronze than iron. What the metal truly was, no man would stop to ask himself, but rather stand in wonder, and be overcome by the solid mass and magnitude, and the strength of ancient times. All the sons of Caucasus might have come together, and done their very best for a century—if nature allowed them such length of strength—but even with the Genoese smiths to help them, they could never have built such a door as that. A door I call it, though I may be wrong; others would take it for a gate perhaps. But being all in one plane and flat, and having no frame in sight, to me it was a door, and a marvellous door, beyond our power to make or even to break open. On either side of it were two long loop-holes, like the lancet-windows in our church at home, but carved in the solid rock, too narrow for even a child to squeeze his little shoulders through. And I knew that in the chambers (quarried thus by Roman steel eighteen centuries ago), waiting for their doom, were the chief whom I admired, and the lady whom I loved.
There was nothing more to be made of that; not even a sign that Sûr Imar knew what the savages outside were doing. But as I thought of him, labouring for years, girding up the slack folds of a life, from which all the gladness of the world was gone, simply for the benefit of these wretches,—genuine indignation filled me, and I longed to shoot a tribe of them. This it was, and no true courage, which enabled me to regard the whole, with a calm heart and a solid head, like the oak, which is our emblem.
CHAPTER LV AT THE BAR
How long those ragged elders carried on with their pretence of trial, is beyond my power to say. I only know that my joints began to stiffen with cramp, and to ache with crush, and my brain to hum like a factory wheel. Even the relief of descrying Usi or Jack Nickols, on the bristly brow of cliff a hundred feet over the dungeon-gate, was more than they dared to afford me now; though I tried to persuade myself once or twice that I espied the glint of metal there. Neither was there sound or sign of life within the rocky jail, so far as watchful eyes and ears could learn; while the cackle of the greybeards some fifty yards behind me resembled a drone of bagpipes enlivened by a cherry-clapper.
At last I beheld a stately woman advance from the cover of the private tent and take her seat in the chair of law, to receive the verdict of her puppets. Then some hypocritical farce ensued, as if she were shocked, and pleaded with them, and mourned to find them so inexorable. My heart burned within me, and my fingers tingled to pull trigger at some of them, such a fierce and dirty lot were they; but I said to myself, "Let Hisar come, the fellow that broke the lovebird's leg." Then as if the scene that could not be avoided was unfit for such gentle eyes, the Princess, with a bow of resignation, retired into the sable tent.
I lay close, and drew my head in, while four or five of the fighting men followed the hoary villain who had acted as chief-justice to the door of heavy metal sunk in the dark embrasure of the cliff. The old man drew forth a key as long as a toasting-fork and much bigger, and with brawny arms thrusting in both directions, and a screech as if from wounded rock, the valves of the door slid back into their bed, as the damper of a furnace slides. But one broad bar of metal spanned the opening horizontally, about five feet above the iron threshold. The Osset warriors stooped their white head-dresses under this heavy bar, and disappeared in the gloom inside. That they would not slay their prisoners there I knew, from Usi, and from Stepan's tales.