The Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK ®. Achmed Abdullah
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and ignorance that stewed and oozed beneath the colorful surface. He knew it all, from the Rajput gentleman’s stately widow who gives herself to the burning pyre in spite of British laws to the meanest half-caste money-lender who devils the souls of sporting subalterns amid the flowering peepul-trees of Fort William barracks; and so he yawned his way from the moment when the big P. and O. liner nosed kittenishly through the sucking sand-banks of the Hoogly to the Hotel Semiramis.
There he had a lengthy and whispered conversation with a deputy commissioner recently returned from Rajputana, who bowed low and spoke softly in spite of the fact that Thorneycroft was his junior by twenty years and seemed to have no especial diplomatic rank or emoluments.
All the next morning he yawned away the hours that creep to the sweating west, took a late train for the north, and continued his bored progress through twelve hundred miles of varied scenery.
He had no eye for the checker-board landscape of neat Bengal, nor for the purple and orange tints of the Indian sky that changed the far hills into glowing heaps of topaz, the scorched ridges into carved masses of amethyst and rose-red. Rajputana, gold and heliotrope, sad with the dead centuries, the dead glory, interested him not.
His thoughts were far in the north, near the border, where Rajput and Afghan wait for a renewal of the old, bitter fight for supremacy when Britain shall have departed; and still, waking and sleeping, he could feel—he could feel with—the silent whirring of immense wings—“like the wings of a tortured soul trying to escape the cage of the dust-created body,” he put it with a lyric soaring that clashed incongruously with his usual horsy slang.
The whirring of wings!
And there was some accent in it of secret dread, of terrible, secret melancholy, deeper than his soul could perceive, his brain could classify. The terror of a mighty struggle was behind it: a mighty struggle awfully remote from individual existence and individual ambition and life, individual death even. It partook of India itself: the land, the ancient races, the very gods.
The farther north he traveled the more strongly grew the shapeless, voiceless impression. At times, suddenly, a light flashed down the hidden tunnels of his inner consciousness, and made visible for one fleeting second something which he seemed too slow o comprehend.
A whisper came to him from beyond the rationally knowable.
* * * *
And so, two days later, he dropped from the train at a small up-land station that consisted of a chaotic whirlwind of stabbing sand, seven red-necked vultures squatting on a low wall and making unseemly noises, a tumble-down Vishnative shrine, and a fat, patent leather-slippered babu, who bowed before Charlie Thorneycroft even lower than the deputy commissioner had done, called him Protector of the Pitiful, and otherwise did him great honor.
“All right, all right!” came Thorneycroft’s impatient rejoinder. “I see that you got my cable. Is the bullock-cart ready?”
“Yes, heaven-born!” And the babu pointed at the tonga, the bullock-cart, that came ghostlike out of the whirling sandstorm.
“Good enough.” He swung himself up. “Ready. Chuck the bedding and the ice in the back. Let her go!” he said to the driver, who had his jaws bandaged after the manner of desertmen, and the tonga started off, dipping and plunging across the ridges like a small boat in a short sea.
The babu squatted by Thorneycroft’s side, talking softly, and again the Englishman yawned. But this time there was a slight affectation in his yawn, and affectation, too, as of one weaving close to the loom of lies, in his words:
“Yes, yes. I fancy it is the old story. Some jealous wildcat of a hill woman—”
“No, heaven-born!” cut in the babu. He winked his heavy-lidden eyes slowly as if to tell the other that he was “on.” “This time it is different. This time there is no woman’s jealousy brewing unclean abominations behind the curtains of the zenana. This time it is—”
“Priestcraft?”
“You have said it, sahib!” came the babu’s reply in a flat, frightened whisper.
“All right!” Thorneycroft gave a short, unpleasant laugh. “Let’s go to Deolibad first and call on my friend Youssef Ali.” And a few words of direction to the driver, who grunted a reply, jerked the heads of the trotting animals away from the north and toward the northwest, and plied their fat sides with the knotted end of his whip.
All night they drove. They rested near a shallow river. But they did not tarry long. They watered the team, rubbed them down with sand, and were off again.
It was a long, hot drive. The silence, the insolent nakedness of the land, the great, burning sun lay on Thorneycroft’s soul like a heavy burden. Time and again he was conscious of the whirring of wings, and with each league it seemed to lay closer to the ears of his inner self. It seemed born somewhere in the heart of the purple, silver-nicked gloom that draped the hills of Rajputana.
The babu, too, was conscious of it. His teeth clicked. His body trembled, and he looked at the Englishman, who looked back at him.
Neither spoke. Something utterly overwhelming enfolded them. For the whirring was at once of enchanting peace and sweetness, and of a mournful, tragic, sobbing strength that was like the death of a soul.
Once the babu put it into words:
“Like the death of a soul—”
“Shut up!” Thorneycroft whispered, and then silence again but for the pattering hoofs of the bullocks.
There were few signs of life. At times a gecko slipped away through the scrub with a green, metallic glisten. Once in a while a kite poised high in the parched, blue sky. Another time they overtook a gigantic cotton-wain drawn by twenty bullocks about the size of Newfoundland dogs.
Then, late one night, they reached Deolibad. They passed through the tall southern gate, studded with sharp elephant-spikes, paid off their driver, walked through the mazes of the perfume-sellers’ bazaar, and stopped in front of an old house.
Three times Thorneycroft knocked at the age-gangrened, cedarwood door, sharp, staccato, with a long pause between the second and third knocks, and then again three times in rapid succession.
It was as if the ramshackle old house were listening in its sleep, then slowly awakening. Came the scratch of a match, a thin, light ray drifting through the cracks in the shutters, a shuffling of slippered feet, and the door opened.
A man stood there, old, immensely tall, immensely fat, an Afghan judging from his black silk robe and his oiled locks, holding a candle in his right.
He peered at the two figures in front of him. Then he broke into high-pitched laughter and gurgling words of greeting.
“Thorneycroft! Thorneycroft, by the Prophet! Young heart of my old heart!”
And in his excitement he dropped the candle clattering to the ground and hugged the Englishman to his breast. The latter returned the embrace; but, as the Afghan was about to renew his flowery salutations, cut them short with:
“I need your help, Youssef Ali.”
“Anything, anything, child! I will give you any help you ask. I will grant you anything except sorrow. Ahi! These are like the old days, when you, with your mother’s milk not yet dry on your lips, rode by my side to throw the dragnet of the British Raj’s law around the lying priests of this stinking land. Heathen priests of Shiva and Vishnu, worshiping a monkey and a flower! Aughrrr!” He spat.
Thorneycroft laughed.
“Still the old, intolerant Youssef, aren’t you? All right. But I don’t need much. Simply this—and that—” He crossed the threshold side by side with the Afghan and followed by the babu. He said a few words, adding: “I hear that you are a much-married man, besides being an amateur of tuwaifs, of dancing-girls. So I’m sure you will be able to help me out. I could have gone to the bazaar and bought the stuff. But there are leaky tongues there—”
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