The Sirdar's Oath: A Tale of the North-West Frontier

“Close here. But before you venture you had better think over the penalty. The belief is that whoever enters it meets his death in some shape or form before the end of the next moon.”

“That’s creepy, at any rate. But is the idea borne out by fact?”

“They say it is, without exception. You would not get any of the people here to set foot in it on any consideration whatever.”

“Then none of them ever set foot in it?”

“I should rather think not.”

“Then how do they know what would happen if they did?”

“They know what has happened – at least, they say so. This is the place.”

They had been riding over a nearly level plain, sparsely grown with stunted vegetation, and shut in by hills, stony and desolate, breaking up here and there into a network of chasms. Under one of these and at the further edge of the plain was pitched their camp, and from where they now halted they could distinguish the smoke of the fires rising straight upward on the still air, could make out the glimmer of a white tent or two. Right in front of them reared a mountain side, steep and lofty, rising in terraced slopes – and, cleaving this there yawned the entrance of a gigantic rift.

“I’m not surprised they should weave all sorts of superstitions about such a place as this,” said Hilda Clive, as she gazed up, with admiration not unmixed with awe, at the sheer of the stupendous rock portals, so regular in their smooth immensity as almost to preclude the possibility of being the work of Nature unaided.

“Well, now, I’ve warned you what the penalty is,” went on the other. “Do you still want to go in?”

“Why, you are so solemn over it, Mr Raynier, that anyone would think you believed in it yourself.”

“They could hardly think that, could they, seeing that I’ve been through it already.”

“Been through it? Have you really? How long ago?”

“From end to end. A couple of days after we came up here.”

“But did you know the tradition?”

“Yes. Haslam told me. I questioned Mehrab Khan about it, and he is a firm believer in it. In fact, all the people are. That’s the reason I sent him on to the camp now. I didn’t want him to know what we were going to do, if only that there’s nothing to be gained by jumping with both feet upon other people’s prejudices, especially natives’. And these might look upon it as a desecration.”

“Has Mr Haslam been through it himself?”

Raynier whistled, then laughed.

“Haslam! Why, he’d about as soon go into it as Mehrab Khan.”

“Really, Mr Raynier, I couldn’t have believed you people out here were so superstitious. You are as bad as the natives themselves. I suppose you get it from them.”

“‘You’? Count me out, please. Didn’t I just say I’d been through the place? I’m doomed anyhow, you see,” he added banteringly, “but there’s no reason why you should be. So now we’ll get back to camp.”

“No. I want to go through it too.”

“Quite sure you won’t feel uncomfortable about it afterwards?” he said. “You might, you know.”

But a strange expression had come over her face, the set, far-away look of one whose thoughts were not with her words. In after times that look came back to him.

“I want to go through it too,” she repeated.

“Very well, then – you’ve been warned.”

As they entered the grim portal the sun was just touching the horizon, but it occurred to neither of them that it might be pitch dark before they emerged. At first the slant of the rock walls caused one of these to overhang, shutting out the sky, but the rift gradually widening, they could see the brow of these stupendous cliffs, far above against the sky at a dizzy height. Unconsciously the tones of both were lowered as they conversed.

“It isn’t healthy taking too long to get through a tangi like this when there are rain storms going about,” Raynier was saying. “It makes a most effective waterway for ten, twenty, forty feet of flood. Ah, I thought so. Look.”

High over their heads, caught here and there in a crevice of the rock, was a wisp of withered grass or a few sticks. There was no mistaking how these objects had got there, and the awful magnitude of the flood which at times bellowed through this grisly rift.

“Why is the place supposed to be haunted?” said Hilda Clive. “You didn’t tell me.”

“The usual thing – a curse. There was a man killed here by the people of the neighbourhood – not an incident of very great moment in this country, you would think. But this one was a great character in the sanctity line of business – a Syyed or a Hadji, or something of the sort – and so his ghost appeared and took it out of the neighbourhood, and indeed the human race in general, by planting a rigid embargo on the place. And it was a pretty practical way of taking it out of them too, for they used this tangi as a thoroughfare – it’s scarcely a mile long, you know – whereas now they’ve got to go round the mountain instead of through it, which makes a difference of at least eight.”

“It’s an eerie place, anyhow,” said the girl, looking up a little awe-stricken at the immensity of the cliff walls. The sun had gone off the world now, and a tomb-like twilight prevailed here in the heart of the mountain. It was chilling enough to have begotten a whole volume of grim legends.

“Wonder if the old Syyed’s ghost is on hand now,” said Raynier, who was cynically and frankly sceptical in such matters. “We’ll give him the salaam anyhow.” Then, raising his voice but very slightly, he exclaimed, —

“Salaam, Syyed!”

What was this? The whole of the immense vault was roaring and bellowing with sound. In waves it rolled, now running along the ground at their feet, now tossed on high as though escaping into outer air. “Salaam, salaam, salaam!” it replied in every conceivable tone and key, then roared along the cliffs again as in a peal of thunder, the whole accompanied by a mighty rattling. The noise was simply appalling.

Raynier, the sceptical, was more than startled. Not to put too line a point on it, he was just a little bit scared, though no manifestation of it escaped him. The horses of both, too, were backing and snorting, evincing a degree of terror not at all calculated to soothe the nerves of their riders. The suddenness of it all, the booming of the spectral voices here in the grisly depths, was rather startling.

He looked at his companion somewhat apprehensively, expecting to see her pale and shaking, perhaps hysterical. To his surprise she was laughing. His first thought even then was that this was a form of hysteria.

“Don’t you see?” she said.

“Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” boomed the vault around. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” shrieked and wailed the heights above. And then Raynier felt secretly more than a little ashamed of himself – for he did see.

As they were talking they had rounded a sudden bend in the defile, and the salute he had jocosely directed to the dead Syyed – if such a person had ever existed in fact – had been caught up by a most astounding echo, which, for no apparent reason, was given forth precisely at that spot. Still, it was not a little curious that they should have entered within its scope simultaneously with the utterance of the half-mocking words, which, mingling with the rattle of the horses’ hoofs upon the loose stones of the tangi, had produced the horrible din.

Now it was she who said in a whisper, —

“We had better not talk out loud or these horses will go quite mad. It is all I can do to stay on mine as it is.”

In fact the animals were in the wildest stage of snorting, trembling fear, and could hardly be persuaded to proceed at all. Their shying and plunging created a rattle which the echo reproduced and magnified as before. At length they quieted down.

“We may be through the sphere of the echo,” said Raynier, tentatively raising his voice a little. And the result showed that they were.

“How is it the same thing did not happen when you came through here before?” said Hilda Clive, as soon as it became safe to converse again.

“Easily explained. I left my horse at the entrance and walked. I always wear very silent boots, and I had nobody to talk to. Look, we are through now, but we sha’n’t have much time to admire the view on the other side because it’s rather late, and we ought to get back to camp.”

A tower of light now rose in front of them, light only in comparison to the gloom of the tangi. It was the exit at the other end, similar in every particular to the entrance.

They stood looking out over a wild wide valley shut in by the same eternal hills. From far beneath among the gloomy rifts and sparse vegetation arose the long-drawn howl of a wolf.

“What a wilderness!” exclaimed the girl. “Do you know, it’s splendid. I’m so glad I came.”

She had turned her eyes full upon his face. What wonderful eyes they were, he thought – and they were fascinating too. How on earth had he been so long in making the discovery? He thought, too, how she had been the one whose nerves had remained entirely unshaken during that very startling surprise – how she it was – not he – who had at once seen through its perfectly natural solution, and he felt small accordingly. But his admiration for her had strangely increased.