Caves of Terror

by Talbot Mundy

He even offered to take us through the cobra tunnel, but an acting deputy high commissioner turned on a flashlight and showed those goose-neck heads all bobbing in the dark, and that put an end to all talk of that venture, although the priest was cross-examined as to his willingness to go down there, and said he was certainly willing, and everybody voted that "deuced remarkable," but "didn't believe the beggar" nevertheless.

He showed us the "Pool of Terrors," filled with sacred alligators that he assured us were fed on goats provided by the superstitious townsfolk. He said that they were so tame that they would not attack a man, and offered to prove it by walking in. Since that entailed no risk to the committee they permitted him to do it, and he walked alone across the causeway that had given King and me such trouble a few nights before. Far from attacking him, the alligators turned their backs and swam away.

The committee waxed scornful and made numbers of jokes about King and me of a sort that a man doesn't listen to meekly is a rule. So I urged the committee to try the same trick, and they all refused. Then a rather bright notion occurred to me, and I stepped in myself, treading gingerly along the underwater causeway. And I was hardly in the water before the brutes all turned and came hurrying back—which took a little of the steam out of that committee of investigation. They became less free with their opinions.

So we all walked around the alligator pool by a passage that the priest showed us, and one by one we entered all the caves in which King and I had seen the fakirs and the victims undergoing torture.

The caves were the same, except that they were cleaner, and the ashes had all been washed away. There was nobody in them; not one soul, nor even a sign to betray that any one had been there for a thousand years.

There were the same cells surrounding the cavern in which the old fellow had sat reading from a roll of manuscript; but the cells were absolutely empty. I suggested taking flashlight photographs and fingerprint impressions of the doors and walls. But nobody had any magnesium, and the policemen said the doors might have been scrubbed in any case, so what was the use. And the priest with the lantern sneered, and the others laughed with him, so that King and I were made to look foolish once more.

Then we all went up to the temple courtyard, and descended the stairs through the hole in the floor of the cupola-covered stone platform. And there stood the lingam on its altar at the foot of the stairs, and there were the doors just as we had left them, looking as if they had been pressed into the molten stone by an enormous thumb. I thought we were going to be able to prove something of our story at last.

But not so. The priest opened the first door by kicking on it with his toe, and one by one we filed along the narrow passage in pitch darkness that was broken only by the swinging lantern carried by the man in front and the occasional flashes of an electric torch. King, one pace ahead of me, swore to himself savagely all the way, and although I did not feel as keenly as he did about it, because it meant a lot less to me what the committee might think, I surely did sympathize with him.

If we had come sooner it was beyond belief that we should not have caught those experts at their business, or at any rate in process of removing the tools of their strange trade. There must have been some mechanism connected with their golden light, for instance, but we could discover neither light nor any trace of the means of making it. Naturally the committee refused to believe that there had ever been any.

The caverns were there, just as we had seen them, only without their contents. The granite table, on which we had seen Benares, London and New York, was gone. The boxes and rolls of manuscript had vanished from the cavern in which the little ex-fat man had changed lead into gold before our eyes. The pit in the center of the cavern in which the fire-walkers had performed, still held ashes, but the ashes were cold and had either been slaked with water, or else water had been admitted into the pit from below. At any rate, the pit was flooded, and nobody wanted the job of wading into it to look for apparatus. So there may have been paraphernalia hidden under those ashes for aught that I know. It was a perfectly ridiculous investigation; its findings were not worth a moment's attention of any genuine scientist. Subsequently, newspaper editors wrote glibly of the gullibility of the human mind, with King's name and mine in full-sized letters in the middle of the article.