“These walls will not forget her,” said the Lama. There was an agony within him, as his voice betrayed.
He led the way along a corridor, opening doors of rooms where the chela’s companions had slept, making no comment. Those other rooms were more ornate than the chela’s and vaguely, indefinably less beautiful;—there was more furniture—less character—but tidiness and cleanliness beyond belief.
The monastery was honeycombed into a limestone mountain’s heart. It was enormous. There was possibly accommodation for a thousand people, with perfect ventilation and no dampness, although how that was contrived did not appear. Nor was there any sign of its inhabitants, nor any sound, except the shuffling of Ommony’s loose shoes and the solid thump of the Lama’s bare feet as he strode with bowed head and the skirts of his long robe swinging.
They descended a long, hewn stairway presently and emerged, through a door a foot thick that was carved on both sides with dragons, into the open air. The rush and roar of water pouring into hollow caverns greeted them. They were now on that side of the monastery that Ommony had first seen, with the terraced amphitheater below them, but it was too dark to peer into its depths. The stars blinked down above a rim of mountains. “There will be a full moon,” said the Lama, a propos, apparently, of nothing.
He led down into the dark amphitheater, by paths and steps that linked the circling terraces, and turned, midway, into a tunnel whose dark opening was like an ink-blot in the shadow of rocks and trees. Ten yards along the tunnel Ommony heard him fumbling with a lock; a door swung almost silently; the Lama took him by the hand and pulled him forward, closing the door but not locking it. Then, in such utter darkness that all the senses were almost swallowed by it and Diana whimpered, the Lama led, pauseless, holding Ommony’s hand as if it were a child’s. The old man’s grip was like a swordsman’s, as if his vanished youth, reborn for the moment, were burning him up. The strange thrill that was consuming him communicated itself to Ommony through the linked hands.
At the end of an immeasurable distance—(there was no sense of time or space in that impenetrable darkness)—they emerged into gloom under an oval patch of starlit sky, on a ledge, an incalculable distance down the inside of a limestone pit—somber, irregularly circular, enormous. The Lama sat down on a mat that somebody had placed for him—signed—and Ommony sat down beside him, on the same mat.
“Let the dog not wander away. Bid her lie here,” he said, in a normal voice.
As Ommony’s eyes grew gradually used to the gloom he discerned that they were very near the bottom of the pit, whose almost perpendicular flanks rose so high that the stars appeared like bright dots on a dark-blue dome that rested on the summit. His own breathing seemed abominably noisy in the silence.
In front of where they sat there was a sheer drop, but the bottom did not seem to be more than fifty feet below; and somewhere in the midst of the almost circular space into which he gazed there was an object, bulky, of no ascertainable shape, and apparently raised on a platform of rock so as to be almost on a level with the ledge on which they sat. Diana lay still, sniffing, one ear raised; there were humans not far away.
Presently there was a sound below—apparently a footstep, and Diana growled at it. A lantern appeared, but it was impossible to tell whether the individual who carried it was man or woman. There were several more footsteps, and one word in a clear voice—instantly recognizable—the chela’s. There began to be a prodigious phantom movement in the gloom. Something—a great black cloth apparently—was pulled by many hands and the shape of the object in the center changed. The lantern-light was reflected in a sea-green pin-point that spread and increased as the moonlight spreads on water, but much more fiery, and full of weird movement. The lantern suddenly went out, but the peculiar green glow had made such an impression that with his eyes shut, Ommony could still see evolving, glowing green.