Tales of Adventurers (24 page)

The dead nobility of Fomin’s profile suddenly twitched into life. He replied with a proverb, speaking perfect Persian. The use of that aristocratic language seemed for a moment to relieve
him of party discipline.

“Falsehood with good intentions is preferable to truth with controversy.”

“You believe that?” Gwynn asked indignantly.

“What I believe does not matter. That is what they may tell me.”

“And yet you obey!”

“For the sake of mankind, I obey.”

“Oh hell!” said Gwynn, giving it up. “We haven’t a sane motive for going on between us. Very well, let us go on! Fomin, if I promise not to tell a soul of your
co-operation with the enemy, will you give me your word that you won’t try to sabotage this expedition?”

Fomin struggled with his conscience, and then shook Gwynn’s hand with extreme proletarian heartiness.

“It is wrong,” he said, “and I know it. But we Russians – ah, we are far too ready to be friends. Come now, a bottle! I have a bottle in my tent. We drink a bottle to the
shining light.”

“I think we’d better keep it till we get there,” said Gwynn mildly. “Shall we start now?”

There was water enough for two full marches and the intervening day. They trudged over the salt on a compass course, walking alongside the three ponies laden with food, water, Fomin’s
instruments and a long strip of matting rolled around its bamboo poles. At midnight they rested and mixed some of Fomin’s bottle with their water. Then at first light, they forced the pace
for a couple of hours, and camped.

The hill, their objective, was now in full view – a crouching black bulk that blotted out the sunrise. It performed no spectacle for them. It was a dead lump of minerals on a dead
plain.

They waited, impatiently accepting the uneasy sleepiness of the heat, and knowing that the bodies of men and horses, in spite of idleness, were ticking away their water with the regularity of a
clock. In the afternoon, earlier than was prudent, they started across the desert in order to have some light for the examination of the hill. The short daylight march exhausted men and horses, and
the carefully calculated ration of water had to be increased.

On the western side the rocks were mercilessly hot, and would have been hard climbing even if bearable to the naked palm. Fomin took a pony and rode round the hill. On his return to camp an hour
later, the pony died. Yet they admitted that his ruthless speed was justified. He had found a gully on the northern side up which they could climb in the shade, with a fair chance of reaching the
top in daylight.

The height was only twenty feet more above the plain than the five hundred and sixty that the long-dead surveyors had allowed. Even so, the effort to all but the tireless Mahene was very great.
There was nothing to see on the top or upper slopes but an outcrop of gneiss and signs of slight volcanic activity in the Tertiary period. Worse still, there was no sign whatever that flocks or any
living thing had ever crossed the featureless plain of salt to the east of the hill, where the track of the shepherd’s regular migration should be.

The second hill, the other possibility, was some forty miles to the southeast. The surveyors, who could only have glimpsed its cone from the main range in the clear air of morning or evening,
had put it too low and too near. It was far more than the hillock shown, with a question mark, on the map.

Gwynn trained his glasses on its fast-fading image. Then he lay down and steadied his elbows, and remained motionless for a full minute.

“Tell me what you see,” he said, handing the glasses to Fomin.

“A star through a gap,” Fomin pronounced, and added more hesitantly, “but – but it has size, and it is too faint.”

“Let Mahene try.”

From toe to lens, Mahene’s recumbent body pointed at the hill with the concentrated purpose of a black gun barrel. Then he rolled over on his back, kicked, and with an acrobat’s
arching of the spine sprang upright.

“That’s it! That’s it, Mr. Gwynn! That’s what we’re after!”

“It might as well be in the moon,” Gwynn answered.

His voice was angry, and he checked himself. A casual curiosity, just enough for what should have been a casual and uneventful trip – that had been his motive. And now that he found he
couldn’t reach it, he had to see that the damned phenomenon was really there, and as inexplicable to a geologist as it had been to half-naked nomads.

“We know there is water beyond,” said Fomin.

“We hope,” Gwynn corrected him sharply.

“There’s nothing much left to carry, Mr. Gwynn,” Mahene suggested. “You both ride, and I’ll run. I can do it. You’ll see I can. How long would it take us
then?”

“Six hours or so – if the ponies can stand it. But what afterwards? Only our feet and about two quarts apiece.”

“For a Russian soldier that is enough,” said Fomin superbly.

Gwynn didn’t ask exactly what it was enough for. The recklessness of his two companions appalled, but fascinated him. He contented himself with pointing out that if they rode northeast
towards the mountains, they had at least a better chance of water and life. The speck of light upon that distant hill, whose outline had now vanished, made his argument seem empty even to
himself.

An hour after midnight they started. The two remaining ponies were still thirsty and in doubtful condition. One carried Fomin, their food and a little grain; the other, Gwynn and two nearly
empty waterskins that hung down from the saddle like the slack udders of an old goat. The speed that Gwynn had estimated was impossible. In five hours they covered only twenty miles.

Then the sun rose, and soon afterwards Fomin’s pony stumbled and laid out upon the desert, relieved and accepting, the head it could no longer raise.

“Shoot him,” said Fomin.

“Nothing to shoot him with.”

“My pistol – isn’t it in your pack or his? Why not?”

“How the hell do I know why not?” Gwynn replied irritably. “I hate the things. I suppose I’d rather give my own life than take someone else’s.”

Mahene unroped a cooking pot. He took out his knife and laid the pot by the horse’s throat.

“Pity to waste it, Mr. Gwynn,” he apologized.

The blood spurted into the pot and over Mahene’s arms.

“Tomorrow I shall wish I had,” Gwynn said, “but I can’t yet.”

The pot was offered to Fomin. He made an effort to drink. It was his logical, material duty to drink, but he could not.

Mahene slowly sipped half a pint, and smacked his lips and grinned.

“No need, John,” said Gwynn. “You didn’t like it, but you’re the only one of us with any sense.”

“Mr. Gwynn, I want to live about twice as much as the rest of you. And that’s the truth,” Mahene answered.

There was a little more water now for the last pony, and its effect was instant. He had accepted an end to weariness, but now he shied away from the blood and from Mahene, and gave trouble in
the reloading.

They went on. There was no other hope but a march straight through the heat of the morning. They went on steadily. Mahene’s even pace kept them from falling into the exhausted spurts and
sudden halts of the dying caravan.

At midday the character of the desert changed. The salt crystals no longer waited and winked from their flat gray world. There was a scattering of black dust on the surface which gradually
thickened. Soon they came to pimples and corrugations, of infinite relief to the eyes, where the wind had piled dust against the roots of vegetation that had lived for a few weeks in spring.

Gwynn scraped with his foot one of these tiny mounds, and found a dead tuft of coarse grass and a sheep dropping. He called to his companions to look. It was plain that they were crossing the
route of those shepherds who, once in a generation, had found green growth and wandered by the western side of the hill, whose curious report had brought three men and a staggering pony into this
desolation.

They were more cheerful for the sign of humanity. As if they themselves had been present, they chattered wildly of the vanished green and the shallow rain pools, until pain insisted that parched
tongues must be kept covered. In their imaginations, as mile after mile they weakened, this journey became a walk to the world’s end, to riches, to an infinite source of proletarian power.
Though two of them, at least, knew that whatever they discovered would be only a geological curiosity, worth no more than a picture postcard, they could not admit, in self-protection, that such
suffering was only for such an end.

The shade of the outlying rocks promised sanity as well as rest – freedom at last from the overwhelming temptation to lie down and drink. The rocks, the blessed rocks, were a far more
compelling objective than the hill itself. That was a mere forbidding cone. There was no trace of the phenomenon of the night. On and on they dragged their feet over the dust until there was reason
at last for a man to look where he was going.

The sun was still so high that there was no patch of shade large enough for them all. They drank, and then lay down, each at the foot of his own rock or in the curve of his own gully, clinging
to the darkened strip that was soothing as a woman, and no wider. The pony did not look as if he were likely to rise again.

There was so little time. The last brackish quart from the skin had gone to the pony. The men had each a full water bottle left. That allowed them the evening, and only the evening, in which to
climb the hill, to look eastwards from the top and to spot the migration track and its well or wells which might, with luck, lead them back alive to the mountains. It was the hope of water rather
than the secret of the hill which persuaded them at last to their feet.

The climb was steep but of no difficulty. They traversed the lower slopes and turned onto the northern face. There in the comparative coolness they rested, and breathed deeply of air that seemed
to wash their lungs. They allowed themselves a cup of water apiece. It acted on their spirits as if it had been alcohol, and reminded them that for all their weariness they were still fit men.
Fomin and Gwynn began to exchange their professional impressions of the hill. It had undoubtedly been formed by some volcanic upheaval in geologically recent times. The lava flow had been slight.
There was no sign of any mineral of commercial value except zinc. The ore suggested that it was rich even for Persia.

After climbing some four hundred feet, they were stopped by a low, precipitous ridge which had once been the lip of a crater. Mahene settled himself on a ledge halfway up, and from his shoulders
Gwynn reached the top. He looked down into a rough bowl, two hundred yards across. He remained quite still. Detail, every detail, was clear, so what he saw could not be a mirage. And it was
credible. A warm spring in such a place was in accordance with the laws of nature. Sulphurous, of course, it would be. Perhaps undrinkable. He fought down his ecstasy lest the resulting
disappointment should be unbearable. And all the time he was conscious of Mahene’s grip on his ankle.

“Anything wrong, Mr. Gwynn?”

“No. No. Nothing wrong. There’s water. Or I think I see it.”

He pulled himself up and firmly turned his back on the deceptive paradise. He anchored one hand with sudden strength, and stretched down the other to haul up Fomin and Mahene.

Below them was a shallow crater, craggy, riven, terraced, and resembling an immensely magnified rock garden. On the eastern slope was a rough pool of water, obviously artificial. Little dug
channels, choked and disused, led the water across the floor of the crater. Along the ditches and in flat damp patches grew a tangle of cultivated plants that had gone wild. Wheat, corn and some
kind of cabbage competed for the soil; their supply of light and water was unbounded.

Mahene rushed for the pool in great dancing strides, and plunged in. Fomin knew as well as Gwynn what to expect. With a show of unconcern, he asked:

“How – how does it taste?”

“Commissar,” shouted Mahene, “it’s a change from your old saddlebags. I wouldn’t say better than that.”

They joined Mahene in the water. Its touch was heaven to their dried skins. Its flavor was no worse than that of a spa water, and its effect was unlikely to be more than inconvenient. With the
crater for a base to which, in emergency, they could return, they were free at last of time, and could find the vital homeward well at leisure.

Mahene cut a load of green stuff, and took down the three full water bottles for the pony. While he was away, Gwynn and Fomin searched for the unknown builder of the pool and channels. That he
was dead or had long since departed was certain. They found his dwelling, a cool hollow in the crater wall. There was nothing in it but his bed of cornstalks, crude pots of cut lava and some
packets of seeds, printed in Russian. Scratched on the wall were Russian characters, like the scrawling of child or cave man.

“Here – lived – Pyotr – the – monk – to – the – glory – of – God,” Fomin translated. “And a list of years beginning at
1920. And the word
Glory
written up everywhere again and again.”

“He hadn’t even any fire,” Gwynn said. “He must have lived on raw grain and vegetables.”

“Why not?” Fomin asked, with a touch of indignant sympathy for the unknown. “He was a hermit.”

A hermit. He certainly was. To Gwynn a hermit was a historical curiosity. Fomin, however, seemed to find such fanaticism wholly natural and contemporary.

“His choice was wrong,” he said. “But it was truly Russian.”

He looked proudly over the crater, as if it were his duty to annex it for some spiritual union that was not altogether the Union of Soviets.

Mahene returned at sunset with food and the primus stove. He reported that the pony was eating, and that it would certainly recover if they could find an easy route for it up to the water.

They started for that glowing western face which they and the shepherds had seen across the desert. A path, with steps roughly cut in the rock, led upwards out of the crater, then curved to the
west and down. It ended abruptly in a much trampled space at the top of a cliff. They knew that they must be directly above the shining light.