Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (3 page)

A stifling hot blast from the mouth of the Delhi Gate nearly ends my resolution of entering the City of Dreadful Night at this hour. It is a compound of all evil savours, animal and vegetable, that a walled city can brew in a day and a night. The temperature within the motionless groves of plantain and orange-trees outside the city walls seems chilly by comparison. Heaven help all sick persons and young children within the city tonight! The high house-walls are still radiating heat savagely, and from obscure side gullies fetid breezes eddy that ought to poison a buffalo. But the buffaloes do not heed. A drove of them are parading the vacant main street; stopping now and then to lay their ponderous muzzles against the closed shutters of a grain-dealer's shop, and to blow thereon like grampuses.

Then silence follows – the silence that is full of the night noises of a great city. A stringed instrument of some kind is just, and only just audible. High over head some one throws open a window, and the rattle of the woodwork echoes down the empty street. On one of the roofs a hookah is in full blast; and the men are talking softly as the pipe gutters. A little farther on the noise of conversation is more distinct. A slit of light shows itself between the sliding shutters of a shop. Inside, a stubble-bearded, weary-eyed trader is balancing his account-books among the bales of cotton prints that surround him. Three sheeted figures bear him company, and throw in a remark from time to time. First he makes an entry, then a remark; then passes the back of his hand across his streaming forehead. The heat in the built-in street is fearful. Inside the shops it must be almost unendurable. But the work goes on steadily; entry, guttural growl, and uplifted hand-stroke succeeding each other with the precision of clock-work.

A policeman – turbanless and fast asleep – lies across the road on the way to the Mosque of Wazir Khan. A bar ofmoonlight falls across the forehead and eyes of the sleeper, but he never stirs. It is close upon midnight, and the heat seems to be increasing. The open square in front of the Mosque is crowded with corpses; and a man must pick his way carefully for fear of treading on them. The moonlight stripes the Mosque's high front of coloured enamel work in broad diagonal bands; and each separate dreaming pigeon in the niches and corners of the masonry throws a squab little shadow. Sheeted ghosts rise up wearily from their pallets, and flit into the dark depths of the building. Is it possible to climb to the top of the great Minars, and thence to look down on the city? At all events the attempt is worth making, and the chances are that the door of the staircase will be unlocked. Unlocked it is; but a deeply sleeping janitor lies across the threshold, face turned to the Moon. A rat dashes out of his turban at the sound of approaching footsteps. The man grunts, opens his eyes for a minute, turns round, and goes to sleep again. All the heat of a decade of fierce Indian summers is stored in the pitch-black, polished walls of the corkscrew staircase. Halfway up there is something alive, warm, and feathery; and it snores. Driven from step to step as it catches the sound of my advance, it flutters to the top and reveals itself as a yellow-eyed, angry kite. Dozens of kites are asleep on this and the other Minars, and on the domes below. There is the shadow of a cool, or at least a less sultry breeze at this height; and, refreshed thereby, turn to look on the City of Dreadful Night.

Doré might have drawn it! Zola could describe it – this spectacle of sleeping thousands in the moonlight and in the shadow of the Moon. The roof-tops are crammed with men, women, and children; and the air is full of undistinguishable noises. They are restless in the City of Dreadful Night; and small wonder. The marvel is that they can even breathe. If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they are almost as uneasy as a daylight crowd; but the tumult is subdued. Everywhere, in the strong light, you can watch the sleepers turning to and fro; shifting their beds and again resettlingthem. In the pitlike courtyards of the houses there is the same movement.

The pitiless Moon shows it all. Shows, too, the plains outside the city, and here and there a hand's-breadth of the Ravee without the walls. Shows lastly, a splash of glittering silver on a housetop almost directly below the mosque Minar. Some poor soul has risen to throw a jar of water over his fevered body; the tinkle of the falling water strikes faintly on the ear. Two or three other men, in far-off corners of the City of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the water flashes like heliographic signals. A small cloud passes over the face of the Moon, and the city and its inhabitants – clear drawn in black and white before – fade into masses of black and deeper black. Still the unrestful noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat, and of a people seeking in vain for rest. It is only the lower-class women who sleep on the house-tops. What must the torment be in the latticed zenanas, where a few lamps are still twinkling? There are footfalls in the court below. It is the
Muezzin –
faithful minister; but he ought to have been here an hour ago to tell the Faithful that prayer is better than sleep – the sleep that will not come to the city.

The
Muezzin
fumbles for a moment with the door of one of the Minars, disappears awhile, and a bull-like roar – a magnificent bass thunder – tells that he has reached the top of the Minar. They must hear the cry to the banks of the shrunken Ravee itself! Even across the courtyard it is almost overpowering. The cloud drifts by and shows him outlined in black against the sky, hands laid upon his ears, and broad chest heaving with the play of his lungs – ‘Allah ho Akbar'; then a pause while another
Muezzin
somewhere in the direction of the Golden Temple takes up the call – ‘Allah ho Akbar.' Again and again; four times in all; and from the bedsteads a dozen men have risen up already. – ‘I bear witness that there is no God but God.' What a splendid cry it is, the proclamation of the creed that brings men out of their beds by scores at midnight! Once again he thunders through the same phrase, shaking with the vehemence of his own voice; and then, far and near, the night air rings with ‘Mahomed is theProphet of God.' It is as though he were flinging his defiance to the far-off horizon, where the summer lightning plays and leaps like a bared sword. Every
Muezzin
in the city is in full cry, and some men on the roof-tops are beginning to kneel. A long pause precedes the last cry, ‘La ilaha Illallah,' and the silence closes up on it, as the ram on the head of a cotton-bale.

The
Muezzin
stumbles down the dark stairway grumbling in his beard. He passes the arch of the entrance and disappears. Then the stifling silence settles down over the City of Dreadful Night. The kites on the Minar sleep again, snoring more loudly, the hot breeze comes up in puffs and lazy eddies, and the Moon slides down towards the horizon. Seated with both elbows on the parapet of the tower, one can watch and wonder over that heat-tortured hive till the dawn. ‘How do they live down there? What do they think of? When will they awake?' More tinkling of sluiced water-pots; faint jarring of wooden bedsteads moved into or out of the shadows; uncouth music of stringed instruments softened by distance into a plaintive wail, and one low grumble of far-off thunder. In the courtyard of the mosque the janitor, who lay across the threshold of the Minar when I came up, starts wildly in his sleep, throws his hands above his head, mutters something, and falls back again. Lulled by the snoring of the kites – they snore like over-gorged humans – I drop off into an uneasy doze, conscious that three o'clock has struck, and that there is a slight – a very slight – coolness in the atmosphere. The city is absolutely quiet now, but for some vagrant dog's love-song. Nothing save dead heavy sleep.

Several weeks of darkness pass after this. For the Moon has gone out. The very dogs are still, and I watch for the first light of the dawn before making my way homeward. Again the noise of shuffling feet. The morning call is about to begin, and my night watch is over. ‘Allah ho Akbar! Allah ho Akbar!' The east grows grey, and presently saffron; the dawn wind comes up as though the
Muezzin
had summoned it; and, as one man, the City of Dreadful Night rises from its bed and turns its face towards the dawning day. With return of life comes return of sound. First a low whisper, then a deep bass hum; for it mustbe remembered that the entire city is on the house-tops. My eyelids weighed down with the arrears of long deferred sleep, I escape from the Minar through the courtyard and out into the square beyond, where the sleepers have risen, stowed away the bedsteads, and are discussing the morning hookah. The minute's freshness of the air has gone, and it is as hot as at first.

‘Will the Sahib, out of his kindness, make room?' What is it? Something borne on men's shoulders comes by in the half-light, and I stand back. A woman's corpse going down to the burning-ghat, and a bystander says, ‘She died at midnight from the heat.' So the city was of Death as well as Night after all.

AN INDIAN GHOST IN ENGLAND

The following story is appropriate just now, apart from the fact of the ghost's land of birth, in the first place, because the event narrated occurred just before the last General Election, and, in the second, because Christmas approaches, when, ghosts, like oysters, are in season.

A lonely horseman – what better, or more hackeneyed, opening for a tale of blood and horror, could there be? Yet in this case the loneliness of the horseman was as undeniable as it was, for him, uncomfortable – a lonely horseman, then, was making the best of his way – and between the best and the worst of it there was very little difference: it was all so uncommonly bad – from Chester to Tarporley. Persons who know that part of England will at once acknowledge that a better line of country might be chosen for a long ride on a misty, dripping afternoon in February; and our lonely horseman, just returned from India, found affairs anything but pleasant. After splashing mile after mile along straight, unhedged roads, between stretches of sodden heather and gloomy pine-woods, past ponds and reed beds, patches of gorse, and wildernesses of alder, without meeting a single soul since he rode out of the withered, leafless landscape of the salt district, – where the sheep are as black as ink and the. grass they eat gritty with soot from the salt-mine fires, – when at last the road divided and on one side of the signboard he read ‘Tarporley 6 miles', and on the other ‘Budworth
¹
/
₂
mile', he not unnaturally glanced longingly up the Budworth road. Through the gathering dusk he could see the twinkling lights in the village windows, could hear the cheery shouts of boys at play, and, better than all, the red glow of a fire in whatwas evidently the Inn of the village. This decided him, and he turned his horse's head towards ‘The George'. A dinner, a fire, a bottle of wine; and after these, in true novel style, our lonely horseman sits musing alone. Perhaps the chill of his ride made him dismal; perhaps he regretted having failed to carry out his intention of dining at Tarporley. He was restless, any way, and often got up and looked out of the window.

It was a chill, cold night, with the rain-sodden mists lying white and thick over mere and glebe. A wind, rising fitfully, fills the old house with uneasy sounds, and ever and again brings the rain with a pattering rush upon the window.

The handmaid of the Inn looks in before going to bed, ‘just to see if you wanted anything, sir.' Finding he does not, she wishes him good-night, and retires hesitatingly to the door, then turns; ‘I would no sit up tonight, master. 'Taint good to keep awake o' nights now. Maybe ye'ld sleep and hear naught of it.'‘Naught of what?'‘Eh? 'tis more than I can tell and maybe ye'ld say 'tis the wind.' The door closes abruptly and she is gone.

‘I wonder', muses our cavalier, ‘what the deuce the woman is thinking there will be to hear!' Somehow he feels attracted to the window again, and after walking once or twice across the room stands and looks out into the dark.

The rain has ceased, and something like moonlight showed faintly through the racing clouds. The wind wailed mournfully across the silent village, swinging the signboard of the Inn till it groaned like an uneasy spirit of the dead in the churchyard opposite. Beyond, the square outline of the mill rises black, but vague, above the long expanse of mere with its fringe of reeds. As the wind reaches them the alders by the mill shudder together. They almost seem to be stopping to whisper something to each other and to the willows beneath, whose weeping branches toss their weird arms down to the black water's edge. The long ripples on the mere plash mournfully under the bank, and there is a wash and rustle among the reeds; and they, too, seem to be bending all together and to be whispering: ‘It is coming! Listen.' Far out in the dark water the giant pike splashes suddenly to the bottom; and the eerie voice ofsome wild water-bird wails into the distance, as though it fled on swift wings from the haunted place. Then the wind itself seems to stoop and listen, with hushed breath – and far over the seep of the mere, where that ruined cottage stands, a mere speck at the edge of the waste of shimmering water, there rises fitfully through the drifting mist a long, low, melancholy echo. Not altogether unfamiliar it sounds to the listener's ear, and carries his mind, by some connection of ideas, straight back to lonely jungle nights in India. He throws open the window and looks out. The echo swells and dies into the distance round the furthest water's edge where the road winds into the village. ‘It is coming!' Then the wind shudders and leaps from among the reeds and passes on, hurrying over the grass fields in their winding sheet of mist, to the open moor, to the pine-woods, anywhere away from that ruined cottage by the mere, from the churchyard with the withered yew tree at its gate.

Once, so the landlady had told our traveller as he alighted at the door, that yew had been a splendid tree, and used to toss its dense green branches in the wind like other trees; but years ago, they said, a curse had come upon it. It drooped and shrunk; and when the boughs were bare of leaves, a black and mouldering rope became apparent hanging, straight as though a heavy body hung from it, from the biggest branch. ‘Murder will out,' the villagers said, and though an old man did aver that he had himself as a small boy fixed a swing up there and thought this might be the rope, his neighbours would have none of it. Old Cowp, they said, who used to ill-use his daughter and lived in the cottage, now a ruin, by the mere, could tell more about that rope and the use it was put to than most of us would like to hear. But Old Cowp and his daughter had long ago disappeared, none knew why or whither, suddenly, and no one took his cottage; and when the yew tree withered and the rope was seen, a moral certainty grew in the village that Cowp had done the deed of horror, and his cottage acquired an evil name and fell into a ruin. None visited it even by day. So with the yew tree. Children used to play merrily in its branches by day, and the wind sung in it cheerily by night; but for years, so they say, the wind has swept by and stirredneither twig nor rope, and the children in the evening pass it quickly. For the last month or more, too, the ‘Devil's Dog' had been heard in the village almost every night, coming from Old Cowp's cottage and yelling as it rushed past the yew tree into the churchyard where it would try, and try, to dig a grave. So all the neighbours were agreed that Old Cowp was dead, and his wicked spirit had come back to haunt the scene of his former wickedness and try to dig a grave for his victim's bones in the churchyard.