Chương Chương 16 · THE PLACE OF DEATH
is a secret chamber, known to none but the king and Gagool.
But Twala, who knew it, is dead, and I know it not, nor know I what is
in it. Yet there is a legend in the land that once, many generations
gone, a white man crossed the mountains, and was led by a woman to the
secret chamber and shown the wealth hidden in it. But before he could
take it she betrayed him, and he was driven by the king of that day
back to the mountains, and since then no man has entered the place.”
“The story is surely true, Ignosi, for on the mountains we found the
white man,” I said.
“Yes, we found him. And now I have promised you that if ye can come to
that chamber, and the stones are there—”
“The gem upon thy forehead proves that they are there,” I put in,
pointing to the great diamond I had taken from Twala’s dead brows.
“Mayhap; if they are there,” he said, “ye shall have as many as ye can
take hence—if indeed ye would leave me, my brothers.”
“First we must find the chamber,” said I.
“There is but one who can show it to thee—Gagool.”
“And if she will not?”
“Then she must die,” said Ignosi sternly. “I have saved her alive but
for this. Stay, she shall choose,” and calling to a messenger he
ordered Gagool to be brought before him.
In a few minutes she came, hurried along by two guards, whom she was
cursing as she walked.
“Leave her,” said the king to the guards.
So soon as their support was withdrawn, the withered old bundle—for she
looked more like a bundle than anything else, out of which her two
bright and wicked eyes gleamed like those of a snake—sank in a heap on
to the floor.
“What will ye with me, Ignosi?” she piped. “Ye dare not touch me. If ye
touch me I will slay you as ye sit. Beware of my magic.”
“Thy magic could not save Twala, old she-wolf, and it cannot hurt me,”
was the answer. “Listen; I will this of thee, that thou reveal to us
the chamber where are the shining stones.”
“Ha! ha!” she piped, “none know its secret but I, and I will never tell
thee. The white devils shall go hence empty-handed.”
“Thou shalt tell me. I will make thee tell me.”
“How, O king? Thou art great, but can thy power wring the truth from a
woman?”
“It is difficult, yet will I do so.”
“How, O king?”
“Nay, thus; if thou tellest not thou shalt slowly die.”
“Die!” she shrieked in terror and fury; “ye dare not touch me—man, ye
know not who I am. How old think ye am I? I knew your fathers, and your
fathers’ fathers’ fathers. When the country was young I was here; when
the country grows old I shall still be here. I cannot die unless I be
killed by chance, for none dare slay me.”
“Yet will I slay thee. See, Gagool, mother of evil, thou art so old
that thou canst no longer love thy life. What can life be to such a hag
as thou, who hast no shape, nor form, nor hair, nor teeth—hast naught,
save wickedness and evil eyes? It will be mercy to make an end of thee,
Gagool.”
“Thou fool,” shrieked the old fiend, “thou accursed fool, deemest thou
that life is sweet only to the young? It is not so, and naught thou
knowest of the heart of man to think it. To the young, indeed, death is
sometimes welcome, for the young can feel. They love and suffer, and it
wrings them to see their beloved pass to the land of shadows. But the
old feel not, they love not, and, _ha! ha!_ they laugh to see another
go out into the dark; _ha! ha!_ they laugh to see the evil that is done
under the stars. All they love is life, the warm, warm sun, and the
sweet, sweet air. They are afraid of the cold, afraid of the cold and
the dark, _ha! ha! ha!_” and the old hag writhed in ghastly merriment
on the ground.
“Cease thine evil talk and answer me,” said Ignosi angrily. “Wilt thou
show the place where the stones are, or wilt thou not? If thou wilt not
thou diest, even now,” and he seized a spear and held it over her.
“I will not show it; thou darest not kill me, darest not! He who slays
me will be accursed for ever.”
Slowly Ignosi brought down the spear till it pricked the prostrate heap
of rags.
With a wild yell Gagool sprang to her feet, then fell again and rolled
upon the floor.
“Nay, I will show thee. Only let me live, let me sit in the sun and
have a bit of meat to suck, and I will show thee.”
“It is well. I thought that I should find a way to reason with thee.
To-morrow shalt thou go with Infadoos and my white brothers to the
place, and beware how thou failest, for if thou showest it not, then
thou shalt slowly die. I have spoken.”
“I will not fail, Ignosi. I always keep my word—_ha! ha! ha!_ Once
before a woman showed the chamber to a white man, and behold! evil
befell him,” and here her wicked eyes glinted. “Her name was Gagool
also. Perchance I was that woman.”
“Thou liest,” I said, “that was ten generations gone.”
“Mayhap, mayhap; when one lives long one forgets. Perhaps it was my
mother’s mother who told me; surely her name was Gagool also. But mark,
ye will find in the place where the bright things are a bag of hide
full of stones. The man filled that bag, but he never took it away.
Evil befell him, I say, evil befell him! Perhaps it was my mother’s
mother who told me. It will be a merry journey—we can see the bodies of
those who died in the battle as we go. Their eyes will be gone by now,
and their ribs will be hollow. _Ha! ha! ha!_”
CHAPTER 16. THE PLACE OF DEATH
It was already dark on the third day after the scene described in the
previous chapter when we camped in some huts at the foot of the “Three
Witches,” as the triangle of mountains is called to which Solomon’s
Great Road runs. Our party consisted of our three selves and Foulata,
who waited on us—especially on Good—Infadoos, Gagool, who was borne
along in a litter, inside which she could be heard muttering and
cursing all day long, and a party of guards and attendants. The
mountains, or rather the three peaks of the mountain, for the mass was
evidently the result of a solitary upheaval, were, as I have said, in
the form of a triangle, of which the base was towards us, one peak
being on our right, one on our left, and one straight in front of us.
Never shall I forget the sight afforded by those three towering peaks
in the early sunlight of the following morning. High, high above us, up
into the blue air, soared their twisted snow-wreaths. Beneath the
snow-line the peaks were purple with heaths, and so were the wild moors
that ran up the slopes towards them. Straight before us the white
ribbon of Solomon’s Great Road stretched away uphill to the foot of the
centre peak, about five miles from us, and there stopped. It was its
terminus.
I had better leave the feelings of intense excitement with which we set
out on our march that morning to the imagination of those who read this
history. At last we were drawing near to the wonderful mines that had
been the cause of the miserable death of the old Portuguese Dom three
centuries ago, of my poor friend, his ill-starred descendant, and also,
as we feared, of George Curtis, Sir Henry’s brother. Were we destined,
after all that we had gone through, to fare any better? Evil befell
them, as that old fiend Gagool said; would it also befall us? Somehow,
as we were marching up that last stretch of beautiful road, I could not
help feeling a little superstitious about the matter, and so I think
did Good and Sir Henry.
For an hour and a half or more we tramped on up the heather-fringed
way, going so fast in our excitement that the bearers of Gagool’s
hammock could scarcely keep pace with us, and its occupant piped out to
us to stop.
“Walk more slowly, white men,” she said, projecting her hideous
shrivelled countenance between the grass curtains, and fixing her
gleaming eyes upon us; “why will ye run to meet the evil that shall
befall you, ye seekers after treasure?” and she laughed that horrible
laugh which always sent a cold shiver down my back, and for a while
quite took the enthusiasm out of us.
However, on we went, till we saw before us, and between ourselves and
the peak, a vast circular hole with sloping sides, three hundred feet
or more in depth, and quite half a mile round.
“Can’t you guess what this is?” I said to Sir Henry and Good, who were
staring in astonishment at the awful pit before us.
They shook their heads.
“Then it is clear that you have never seen the diamond diggings at
Kimberley. You may depend on it that this is Solomon’s Diamond Mine.
Look there,” I said, pointing to the strata of stiff blue clay which
were yet to be seen among the grass and bushes that clothed the sides
of the pit, “the formation is the same. I’ll be bound that if we went
down there we should find ‘pipes’ of soapy brecciated rock. Look, too,”
and I pointed to a series of worn flat slabs of stone that were placed
on a gentle slope below the level of a watercourse which in some past
age had been cut out of the solid rock; “if those are not tables once
used to wash the ‘stuff,’ I’m a Dutchman.”
At the edge of this vast hole, which was none other than the pit marked
on the old Dom’s map, the Great Road branched into two and circumvented
it. In many places, by the way, this surrounding road was built
entirely out of blocks of stone, apparently with the object of
supporting the edges of the pit and preventing falls of reef. Along
this path we pressed, driven by curiosity to see what were the three
towering objects which we could discern from the hither side of the
great gulf. As we drew near we perceived that they were Colossi of some
sort or another, and rightly conjectured that before us sat the three
“Silent Ones” that are held in such awe by the Kukuana people. But it
was not until we were quite close to them that we recognised the full
majesty of these “Silent Ones.”
There, upon huge pedestals of dark rock, sculptured with rude emblems
of the Phallic worship, separated from each other by a distance of
forty paces, and looking down the road which crossed some sixty miles
of plain to Loo, were three colossal seated forms—two male and one
female—each measuring about thirty feet from the crown of its head to
the pedestal.
The female form, which was nude, was of great though severe beauty, but
unfortunately the features had been injured by centuries of exposure to
the weather. Rising from either side of her head were the points of a
crescent. The two male Colossi, on the contrary, were draped, and
presented a terrifying cast of features, especially the one to our
right, which had the face of a devil. That to our left was serene in
countenance, but the calm upon it seemed dreadful. It was the calm of
that inhuman cruelty, Sir Henry remarked, which the ancients attributed
to beings potent for good, who could yet watch the sufferings of
humanity, if not without rejoicing, at least without sorrow. These
three statues form a most awe-inspiring trinity, as they sit there in
their solitude, and gaze out across the plain for ever.
Contemplating these “Silent Ones,” as the Kukuanas call them, an
intense curiosity again seized us to know whose were the hands which
had shaped them, who it was that had dug the pit and made the road.
Whilst I was gazing and wondering, suddenly it occurred to me—being
familiar with the Old Testament—that Solomon went astray after strange
gods, the names of three of whom I remembered—“Ashtoreth, the goddess
of the Zidonians, Chemosh, the god of the Moabites, and Milcom, the god
of the children of Ammon”—and I suggested to my companions that the
figures before us might represent these false and exploded divinities.
“Hum,” said Sir Henry, who is a scholar, having taken a high degree in
classics at college, “there may be something in that; Ashtoreth of the
Hebrews was the Astarte of the Phoenicians, who were the great traders
of Solomon’s time. Astarte, who afterwards became the Aphrodite of the
Greeks, was represented with horns like the half-moon, and there on the
brow of the female figure are distinct horns. Perhaps these Colossi
were designed by some Phoenician official who managed the mines. Who
can say?”[10]
[10] Compare Milton, “Paradise Lost,” Book i.:—
“With these in troop
Came Ashtoreth, whom the Phoenicians called
Astarté, Queen of Heaven, with crescent horns;
To whose bright image nightly by the moon
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.”
Before we had finished examining these extraordinary relics of remote
antiquity, Infadoos came up, and having saluted the “Silent Ones” by
lifting his spear, asked us if we intended entering the “Place of
Death” at once, or if we would wait till after we had taken food at
mid-day. If we were ready to go at once, Gagool had announced her
willingness to guide us. As it was not later than eleven o’clock—driven
to it by a burning curiosity—we announced our intention of proceeding
instantly, and I suggested that, in case we should be detained in the
cave, we should take some food with us. Accordingly Gagool’s litter was
brought up, and that lady herself assisted out of it. Meanwhile
Foulata, at my request, stored some “biltong,” or dried game-flesh,
together with a couple of gourds of water, in a reed basket with a
hinged cover. Straight in front of us, at a distance of some fifty
paces from the backs of the Colossi, rose a sheer wall of rock, eighty
feet or more in height, that gradually sloped upwards till it formed
the base of the lofty snow-wreathed peak, which soared into the air
three thousand feet above us. As soon as she was clear of her hammock,
Gagool cast one evil grin upon us, and then, leaning on a stick,
hobbled off towards the face of this wall. We followed her till we came
to a narrow portal solidly arched that looked like the opening of a
gallery of a mine.
Here Gagool was waiting for us, still with that evil grin upon her
horrid face.
“Now, white men from the Stars,” she piped; “great warriors, Incubu,
Bougwan, and Macumazahn the wise, are ye ready? Behold, I am here to do
the bidding of my lord the king, and to show you the store of bright
stones. _Ha! ha! ha!_”
“We are ready,” I said.
“Good, good! Make strong your hearts to bear what ye shall see. Comest
thou too, Infadoos, thou who didst betray thy master?”
Infadoos frowned as he answered—
“Nay, I come not; it is not for me to enter there. But thou, Gagool,
curb thy tongue, and beware how thou dealest with my lords. At thy
hands will I require them, and if a hair of them be hurt, Gagool, be’st
thou fifty times a witch, thou shalt die. Hearest thou?”
“I hear, Infadoos; I know thee, thou didst ever love big words; when
thou wast a babe I remember thou didst threaten thine own mother. That
was but the other day. But, fear not, fear not, I live only to do the
bidding of the king. I have done the bidding of many kings, Infadoos,
till in the end they did mine. _Ha! ha!_ I go to look upon their faces
once more, and Twala’s also! Come on, come on, here is the lamp,” and
she drew a large gourd full of oil, and fitted with a rush wick, from
under her fur cloak.
“Art thou coming, Foulata?” asked Good in his villainous Kitchen
Kukuana, in which he had been improving himself under that young lady’s
tuition.
“I fear, my lord,” the girl answered timidly.
“Then give me the basket.”
“Nay, my lord, whither thou goest there I go also.”
“The deuce you will!” thought I to myself; “that may be rather awkward
if we ever get out of this.”
Without further ado Gagool plunged into the passage, which was wide
enough to admit of two walking abreast, and quite dark. We followed the
sound of her voice as she piped to us to come on, in some fear and
trembling, which was not allayed by the flutter of a sudden rush of
wings.
“Hullo! what’s that?” halloed Good; “somebody hit me in the face.”
“Bats,” said I; “on you go.”
When, so far as we could judge, we had gone some fifty paces, we
perceived that the passage was growing faintly light. Another minute,
and we were in perhaps the most wonderful place that the eyes of living
man have beheld.
Let the reader picture to himself the hall of the vastest cathedral he
ever stood in, windowless indeed, but dimly lighted from above,
presumably by shafts connected with the outer air and driven in the
roof, which arched away a hundred feet above our heads, and he will get
some idea of the size of the enormous cave in which we found ourselves,
with the difference that this cathedral designed by nature was loftier
and wider than any built by man. But its stupendous size was the least
of the wonders of the place, for running in rows adown its length were
gigantic pillars of what looked like ice, but were, in reality, huge
stalactites. It is impossible for me to convey any idea of the
overpowering beauty and grandeur of these pillars of white spar, some
of which were not less than twenty feet in diameter at the base, and
sprang up in lofty and yet delicate beauty sheer to the distant roof.
Others again were in process of formation. On the rock floor there was
in these cases what looked, Sir Henry said, exactly like a broken
column in an old Grecian temple, whilst high above, depending from the
roof, the point of a huge icicle could be dimly seen.
Even as we gazed we could hear the process going on, for presently with
a tiny splash a drop of water would fall from the far-off icicle on to
the column below. On some columns the drops only fell once in two or
three minutes, and in these cases it would be an interesting
calculation to discover how long, at that rate of dripping, it would
take to form a pillar, say eighty feet by ten in diameter. That the
process, in at least one instance, was incalculably slow, the following
example will suffice to show. Cut on one of these pillars we discovered
the crude likeness of a mummy, by the head of which sat what appeared
to be the figure of an Egyptian god, doubtless the handiwork of some
old-world labourer in the mine. This work of art was executed at the
natural height at which an idle fellow, be he Phoenician workman or
British cad, is in the habit of trying to immortalise himself at the
expense of nature’s masterpieces, namely, about five feet from the
ground. Yet at the time that we saw it, which _must_ have been nearly
three thousand years after the date of the execution of the carving,
the column was only eight feet high, and was still in process of
formation, which gives a rate of growth of a foot to a thousand years,
or an inch and a fraction to a century. This we knew because, as we
were standing by it, we heard a drop of water fall.
Sometimes the stalagmites took strange forms, presumably where the
dropping of the water had not always been on the same spot. Thus, one
huge mass, which must have weighed a hundred tons or so, was in the
shape of a pulpit, beautifully fretted over outside with a design that
looked like lace. Others resembled strange beasts, and on the sides of
the cave were fanlike ivory tracings, such as the frost leaves upon a
pane.
Out of the vast main aisle there opened here and there smaller caves,
exactly, Sir Henry said, as chapels open out of great cathedrals. Some
were large, but one or two—and this is a wonderful instance of how
nature carries out her handiwork by the same unvarying laws, utterly
irrespective of size—were tiny. One little nook, for instance, was no
larger than an unusually big doll’s house, and yet it might have been a
model for the whole place, for the water dropped, tiny icicles hung,
and spar columns were forming in just the same way.
We had not, however, enough time to examine this beautiful cavern so
thoroughly as we should have liked to do, since unfortunately, Gagool
seemed to be indifferent as to stalactites, and only anxious to get her
business over. This annoyed me the more, as I was particularly anxious
to discover, if possible, by what system the light was admitted into
the cave, and whether it was by the hand of man or by that of nature
that this was done; also if the place had been used in any way in
ancient times, as seemed probable. However, we consoled ourselves with
the idea that we would investigate it thoroughly on our way back, and
followed on at the heels of our uncanny guide.
On she led us, straight to the top of the vast and silent cave, where
we found another doorway, not arched as the first was, but square at
the top, something like the doorways of Egyptian temples.
“Are ye prepared to enter the Place of Death, white men?” asked Gagool,
evidently with a view to making us feel uncomfortable.
“Lead on, Macduff,” said Good solemnly, trying to look as though he was
not at all alarmed, as indeed we all did except Foulata, who caught
Good by the arm for protection.
“This is getting rather ghastly,” said Sir Henry, peeping into the dark
passageway. “Come on, Quatermain—_seniores priores_. We mustn’t keep
the old lady waiting!” and he politely made way for me to lead the van,
for which inwardly I did not bless him.
_Tap, tap,_ went old Gagool’s stick down the passage, as she trotted
along, chuckling hideously; and still overcome by some unaccountable
presentiment of evil, I hung back.
“Come, get on, old fellow,” said Good, “or we shall lose our fair
guide.”
Thus adjured, I started down the passage, and after about twenty paces
found myself in a gloomy apartment some forty feet long, by thirty
broad, and thirty high, which in some past age evidently had been
hollowed, by hand-labour, out of the mountain. This apartment was not
nearly so well lighted as the vast stalactite ante-cave, and at the
first glance all I could discern was a massive stone table running down
its length, with a colossal white figure at its head, and life-sized
white figures all round it. Next I discovered a brown thing, seated on
the table in the centre, and in another moment my eyes grew accustomed
to the light, and I saw what all these things were, and was tailing out
of the place as hard as my legs could carry me.
I am not a nervous man in a general way, and very little troubled with
superstitions, of which I have lived to see the folly; but I am free to
own that this sight quite upset me, and had it not been that Sir Henry
caught me by the collar and held me, I do honestly believe that in
another five minutes I should have been outside the stalactite cave,
and that a promise of all the diamonds in Kimberley would not have
induced me to enter it again. But he held me tight, so I stopped
because I could not help myself. Next second, however, _his_ eyes
became accustomed to the light, and he let go of me, and began to mop
the perspiration off his forehead. As for Good, he swore feebly, while
Foulata threw her arms round his neck and shrieked.
Only Gagool chuckled loud and long.
It _was_ a ghastly sight. There at the end of the long stone table,
holding in his skeleton fingers a great white spear, sat _Death_
himself, shaped in the form of a colossal human skeleton, fifteen feet
or more in height. High above his head he held the spear, as though in
the act to strike; one bony hand rested on the stone table before him,
in the position a man assumes on rising from his seat, whilst his frame
was bent forward so that the vertebræ of the neck and the grinning,
gleaming skull projected towards us, and fixed its hollow eye-places
upon us, the jaws a little open, as though it were about to speak.
“Great heavens!” said I faintly, at last, “what can it be?”
“And what are _those things_?” asked Good, pointing to the white
company round the table.
“And what on earth is _that thing_?” said Sir Henry, pointing to the
brown creature seated on the table.
“_Hee! hee! hee!_” laughed Gagool. “To those who enter the Hall of the
Dead, evil comes. _Hee! hee! hee! ha! ha!_”
“Come, Incubu, brave in battle, come and see him thou slewest;” and the
old creature caught Curtis’ coat in her skinny fingers, and led him
away towards the table. We followed.
Presently she stopped and pointed at the brown object seated on the
table. Sir Henry looked, and started back with an exclamation; and no
wonder, for there, quite naked, the head which Curtis’ battle-axe had
shorn from the body resting on its knees, was the gaunt corpse of
Twala, the last king of the Kukuanas. Yes, there, the head perched upon
the knees, it sat in all its ugliness, the vertebræ projecting a full
inch above the level of the shrunken flesh of the neck, for all the
world like a black double of Hamilton Tighe.[11] Over the surface of
the corpse there was gathered a thin glassy film, that made its
appearance yet more appalling, for which we were, at the moment, quite
unable to account, till presently we observed that from the roof of the
chamber the water fell steadily, _drip! drop! drip!_ on to the neck of
the corpse, whence it ran down over the entire surface, and finally
escaped into the rock through a tiny hole in the table. Then I guessed
what the film was—_Twala’s body was being transformed into a
stalactite._
[11] “Now haste ye, my handmaidens, haste and see
How he sits there and glowers with his head on his knee.”
A look at the white forms seated on the stone bench which ran round
that ghastly board confirmed this view. They were human bodies indeed,
or rather they had been human; now they were _stalactites_. This was
the way in which the Kukuana people had from time immemorial preserved
their royal dead. They petrified them. What the exact system might be,
if there was any, beyond the placing of them for a long period of years
under the drip, I never discovered, but there they sat, iced over and
preserved for ever by the siliceous fluid.
Anything more awe-inspiring than the spectacle of this long line of
departed royalties (there were twenty-seven of them, the last being
Ignosi’s father), wrapped, each of them, in a shroud of ice-like spar,
through which the features could be dimly discovered, and seated round
that inhospitable board, with Death himself for a host, it is
impossible to imagine. That the practice of thus preserving their kings
must have been an ancient one is evident from the number, which,
allowing for an average reign of fifteen years, supposing that every
king who reigned was placed here—an improbable thing, as some are sure
to have perished in battle far from home—would fix the date of its
commencement at four and a quarter centuries back.
But the colossal Death, who sits at the head of the board, is far older
than that, and, unless I am much mistaken, owes his origin to the same
artist who designed the three Colossi. He is hewn out of a single
stalactite, and, looked at as a work of art, is most admirably
conceived and executed. Good, who understands such things, declared
that, so far as he could see, the anatomical design of the skeleton is
perfect down to the smallest bones.
My own idea is, that this terrific object was a freak of fancy on the
part of some old-world sculptor, and that its presence had suggested to
the Kukuanas the idea of placing their royal dead under its awful
presidency. Or perhaps it was set there to frighten away any marauders
who might have designs upon the treasure chamber beyond. I cannot say.
All I can do is to describe it as it is, and the reader must form his
own conclusion.
Such, at any rate, was the White Death and such were the White Dead!