In the Dwellings of the Wilderness

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IN THE DWELLINGS OF THE WILDERNESS

In the Dwellings | of the Wilderness | BY | C. BRYSON TAYLOR | There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy." | Hamlet I. v. | WITH DECORATIONS IN COLOUR | NEW YORK | HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY | 1904

Copyright, ,

Chapter 1

In the Dwellings of the Wilderness

CHAPTER I

Deane came out of his tent, lighting a particularly unclean briar, and strolled over to where Merritt lay flat on his back, his hands behind his head, staring out over the desert into the painted sunset sky. Off to the right were the excavations, gaping like raw wounds in the monotone of brown desert sand; huge mounds of out-flung earth, monstrous and grotesque, deep pits and chasms with sloping ridges and embankments; in the great mound called by the Arabs the Mound of the Lost City, which overtopped and dominated all the rest, wide trenches, long and deep, cutting far into the hidden heart of it, by which men had ascended from and descended to what lay below. To the left were the small army of labourers, camped behind one of the smaller untapped mounds, intent upon their meagre supper of parched corn. The bluish smoke of a fire rose from behind a jutting breastwork of earth where Ibraheem, the overseer, was making the thick, fragrant coffee of his land. Already the loneliness of coming night was upon the earth; al the sun had dipped below the desert's rim, and the fierce colour of the sky was fading. Away to the east, behind the camps, far to the edge of the world, the shadow of darkness was racing with swift, silent strides.

Deane sat down beside Merritt's prostrate figure. He was tall, and deep-chested, and thin-flanked, with a certain gravity about him which made him appear older than his years. His eyes were brown and quiet, his hair a brownish red, remarkably stiff and wiry; about his mouth were faint lines of humour. Merritt, short and thin and tough as whit-leather, grey of hair and keen of face, moved a hand from beneath his head, tilted back the hat that hid his face, and looked up at Deane.

"Where's Holloway?" he inquired.

"He took his camera early this afternoon and said he was going to get some views of what we've uncovered of the North Temple," Deane replied. "Seems to me we ought to find more tablets in there somewhere—well-preserved ones. This place is modern compared with some of the sites of other cities we've come across."

He eyed the excavations with interest, eager to probe the depths of their ancient mystery. Also he wished that Holloway would return. Holloway was young and ardently imaginative, and one could talk to him about the spell of fascination which this mighty grave held for one, the thoughts of greatness risen and passed away and lost which it conjured up. One could not easily talk to Merritt thus, be cause Merritt was an old hand at the business, eminently practical and hard as rocks, and matter-of-fact to his finger-ends, apt to confuse sentiment with sentimentality and consequently despise it.

The sun sank below the horizon and swiftly the world grew dark. From the men's camp came a mournful chant, subdued, and heard as from far away, and the measured thump of a drum. At intervals a donkey raised his voice, after the manner of a saw-shrieking its way through wood. With the darkness came the stars, leaping into the black arch of heaven, great and of a number beyond all counting; the night-wind turned the heat of the day to sudden coolness, sweeping softly among the ruins. The mounds of earth, softened in outline by the darkness, loomed vast and shadowlike, melting into the sombre mystery of the night. Mingled with the chant of the natives and the occasional hee-haw of the donkeys was the fretful bleating of goats, destined for the masters' food. Around the jutting earthwork a faint gleam of light shone from the overseer's fire. Over all the night brooded, swallowing sound and motion in its immensity.

"Those brutes would work like cattle all day and sing like bullfrogs all night," Merritt said suddenly. He heaved himself on an elbow and shouted for Ibraheem. Soon this one came stalking from his fire, a blot against the night.

"Why are the men so noisy to-night?" Merritt wished to know.

"Ney pray for well-luck, saar," Ibraheem said, answering Merritt's Arabic with proud English, fluent and execrable, and an accent all his own. "Nis defunct citee is not good to be disturbed. Lord-God, He curse it in way back sometimes, and ne men are grief-ful and fearing of—um—ghos'. Ghos', yaas. Vurry ignorunt men."

"Oh, that's it, is it?" Merritt, losing interest, settled again to the ground. "Well, tell them they need not be afraid of ghosts. The last one died of old age a good thousand years ago."

"Vurry good, saar!" Ibraheem said, conceiving this the most correct and English response to make. Merritt and his men were the first Americans he had met, otherwise he would have said "All right." He fell back into the shadows; and by degrees the chant died to a whimper and a whine, and ceased.

"We'll get to the east wing of the palace to-morrow, don't you think?" Deane inquired.

Merritt stretched comfortably on the warm ground and cast his hat aside.

"I should think so." His voice became slow, hushed to accord with the quiet of the night. "The palace where those old people lived and died two thousand years ago. Fancy what this place must have looked like then, the centre and heart of a civilisation that throbbed with pulses as keen as ours. Tell you what, Deane, it gives me a queer feeling at the roots of my hair every time I come to a closed door or open a buried tomb. 'Think of it, old man; take it home to you and live on it! Yours is the first foot to cross that threshold, the first hand to pick up tablet or jar or potsherd since those old folks left it.' That's what I say to myself every time. They died, or were killed off somehow, and they left their city behind them, deserted." Merritt's voice grew slower, with long pauses between his sentences. He seemed not talking to Deane at all. "Then the courtyards began to fill with dust and sand, just a thin layer at first, you know, with all the colours good and bright, and the walls standing. Then weeds began to grow between the stones, and the gardens went to jungle and the layer of dust deepened. By and by a wall fell … out here in the loneliness, a dead city left to its fate… Wild beasts made the halls their lair, and monkeys chattered in this very palace we are going to see to-morrow, and lizards slept on the steps in the sun… And more walls fell, and the sand crept up around them, and there was never a voice to break the stillness, nor a sound except the dropping of a stone. Then by degrees the face of the world changed, and the earth, like an ocean wave, rose until the city was covered, and there were only misshapen mounds to show that life had been there. And the city was dead and buried, waiting for us, just us three from the other end of the world, to lay it open to the light once more."

Abruptly his voice ceased. In the darkness neither could see the other's face. Deane sat and listened silently, immeasurably surprised. Merritt the hardheaded, Merritt the practical, who would sneer at sentimentality, to rhapsodise thus? Deane knew that it is precisely the man most reserved and self-contained, who, when he speaks at all, will go to greater lengths even than the habitually confiding, and lay bare the deep, shy heart of him to its very roots. Deane also knew that when this rare mood fastens on such an one it is to be marvelled at and its tale held sacred; for always it will mark some crisis in the man's life, the outward sign of a stress which perhaps none but himself may know. And because Deane's every nerve thrilled in response to the suggestion in Merritt's words, and because that might be said in darkness, between men, which daylight would show up pitilessly and render commonplace and futilely inane, Deane said slowly, staring up at the great stars that blazed above them:

"I didn't know you felt like that about it too."

Merritt countered with quick eagerness.

"Do you? Can you put yourself back in that old vanished life when you come upon the broken corpse of it here, and reverence it? Can you build these ruined walls again, and see, instead of mounds and trenches, a city with tower-capped walls, and groves of trees, and gardens, teeming with human life whose very ashes have dissolved? That's what I do, every time. It began when I was a little shaver, back home. They wanted to make an engineer of me, but I said I'd rather dig up things that other people had built than spend my time building things for other people to dig up. It sort of took a grip on me—and it never let go."

Deane nodded sympathetically in the darkness.

"I know what you mean, all right. But—well, I had no idea that you felt—er—this way about it."

Merritt laughed.

"I don't know what made it all ooze out to-night," he confessed. "But I've been thinking about it a lot. It '11 be a big thing, Deane. It will mean a good deal to all of us, if we can put it through."

"Why shouldn't we put it through?" Deane questioned.

Merritt sat up and felt himself for matches.

"I don't know!" he answered somewhat dubiously. "No reason, I suppose. But somehow, all along, I haven't been able to see us getting to the end of it. I can plan out to a certain point with a reasonable certainty, barring accidents and the will of God, that things will fall out as I intended. But beyond that point, in a way it is as though I had an inkling that it was the unexpected which would happen. Of course, it is merely nonsense. By the way, hasn't Holloway got back yet?"

"I presume so," Deane answered. "His boy left those rolls of films he in on bringing, in the sun yesterday, and they've melted. I told him films would be a good deal of a nuisance in a climate like this."

"He'll come out all right, I guess," Merritt said easily. "It's his first trip, and he's green, but he's a forehanded youngster, and he surely knows how to get good pictures."

The two fell into silence, conscious subtly of a new sympathy between them. Each had penetrated the other's shell, had touched the hidden spring of a feeling which both shared; and without more words it became a bond between them. They smoked quietly, at peace with themselves, with each other, with all the world.

A black figure grew out of the night and came over to them, with the faint glow of a cigarette stabbing a hole in the darkness.

"Apparatus all right?" Deane asked. "Get any views this afternoon?"

"Yes," Holloway answered. "I've been prowling. This place is great. Awfully lonesome sort of feeling it gives a fellow, though, to look into the holes we've dug and think what the old chaps would say if they could see us." Deane and Merritt, unseen, grinned in sympathy. "That brute of a boy got all my films sunstruck—four dozen rolls. I didn't expect to use them much, but I hate to have 'em go, on principle. I believe I'll turn in. Good-night, everybody."

"'Night!" they chorused solemnly.

Holloway disappeared. Soon Deane followed him, and Merritt was left sitting alone in the night, with his hard, weather-worn face and his dream-woven fancies.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

Before dawn the men had breakfast, and began work when there was light enough to see their tools. Holloway, trailing his tripod behind him, and followed by a boy with a case of plates, went from spot to spot, taking views. He was a cheery youth, lithe and active, with amazingly light hair, a pair of humourous blue eyes, a square-jawed face burned to a consistent and apoplectic scarlet, and hands much stained by chemicals.

Merritt, his helmet jammed well over his eyes, climbed up and down the trenches tirelessly, a wad of crumpled plans in hand. He was in all places at once, keen, clear-eyed, practical, overseeing and directing, called upon for help and advice in all directions. The mood of the night had come and gone; again he was as the world knew him. The labourers swarmed over and around the mounds like busy ants. At one side of a hill of earth and rubbish a file ascended the steep steps of trampled earth which ran down into the trenches, unending, ceaseless, bearing baskets of dirt. At the other side, down more steps, a file descended with empty baskets; from the bottom came the thud of pick and spade and the hoarse shouts of the foremen of the gangs. Above them was the clear morning sky, not yet heated to molten brass; around them the desert, vast and soundless; beneath them the fragments of an olden world, whose story was lost in the dimness of bygone ages.

Ibraheem climbed agilely to the top of the trench which had been opened farthest into the mound, spied Deane making cabalistic signs in a notebook, using one knee as desk, and hurried over.

"Saar," he announced, swelling with importance and the pride of his discovery, "the mens find a wall, unruinated, with a door and a writing upon it. Where are Mister Merritt?"

"By the temple wall, with Mr. Holloway," Deane answered. "Go call him quick."

Ibraheem went, at a dignified dog-trot; and Deane stuffed his notes into a pocket and ran down the trench to where the workmen, chattering shrilly, were gathered around a mass of débris. It was not the first find of the expedition, but each fresh discovery sent the same tingle of excitement through the entire outfit. For there is nothing more stirring than to stand at the threshold of a long-dead world, on the verge of entering, knowing that the next blow of the pick, the next step forward, may reveal either lost secrets of dead peoples which will shed fresh light through the grey mists of ages—or nothing; may turn a new page in the sealed Book of the Things that Were, or disclose a blank. Even the basket-men swarmed to look, craning over the shoulders of the pickmen.

The trench was close on a hundred and fifty feet wide, bounded on either side by towering walls of earth. That it revealed a section of the ancient palace was to be inferred from the fragments of brick pavement, the bases of a line of broken pillars deep bedded in the ground. In the side of the trench where the men were gathered, a fragment of wall, rising nearly ten feet in height, with a walled-up doorway, was visible. Merritt, arriving breathless, took command, restraining too ardent impatience on the part of the workmen. Carefully the earth was removed and the find laid bare.

"Looks like a tomb," said Holloway, leaving his camera and coming up. "Bricks, laid in bitumen, as usual. Hi! look out, you fellows! careful with your tools, there! There's an inscription over the door that you don't want to injure. Deane, bring your wisdom to bear on this."

"Scrape away the dirt, one of you," Merritt ordered; and a half-naked labourer sprang on the shoulders of a comrade and cleared away the clogging earth. Deane caught a sudden glimpse of Merritt's face and was reminded sharply of his outbreak of the night before. It was quite white with excitement, though his hands were steady, and his voice was cool. Then Deane, instantly alive with eagerness at sight of the carven words, took a careful copy of them in his notebook and hied himself away to decipher their meaning. Holloway placed his tripod in position, found the focus, and took an exposure of the wall and the low blocked-up doorway with its mysterious sign above. He was hot with excitement, as always upon such occasions, and begged strenuously that the door be instantly broken down.

"We have a couple of hours yet before it's too hot to work," Merritt observed. He pushed his helmet back and consulted his watch. "We'll make a beginning anyhow and keep it up as long as we can. From the appearance of the place, and the plan of what we've unearthed, I should say that this tomb, or whatever it was, must have been several feet below what was then the level of the ground. Got it already, Deane?"

Deane strolled up to the doorway, his pipe clenched between his teeth, his hat on the back of his head, and studied the inscription intently. Then he compared it with the copy he had made, and with various pages of his notebook. From time to time he mumbled unintelligibly. At last he turned upon them.

"I thought it was a tomb," he observed with satisfaction. "If I'm not mistaken, with this short time to go over it, the inscription says something like this: 'Whoso cometh, now or hereafter'—hereafter?—yes, that's right—'wake not the soul that sleeps within.'"

"He must have wanted to sleep sound, whoever he was," Holloway observed with flippancy. "Can't we make a beginning? If the old man's still here, I'd like to collect him before it gets too dark."

Soon a force of men was at work, a swarm of ants prying around the edges of the walled-up door, where, above, the ancient message gave its warning. From this inscription Deane found himself unaccountably unable to keep his eyes. He and Holloway discussed it in low tones, to the accompaniment of the thud of falling pick and spade. Holloway wavered between the seductive idea of buried treasure, whose owner had perhaps sought to guard it with a theatrical warning, and the bejewelled mummy of the king he wished to collect. Deane hoped there would be tablets to decipher; Merritt said nothing. When Holloway questioned, wishing his theories on the subject, Merritt answered shortly:

"I'm not expecting anything in these countries any more. It's the unexpected that turns up and floors you, no matter what you think you'll get."

"You're right about these countries!" quoth Holloway with sudden enthusiasm. "They don't follow the rules and regulations of Home. After all, I suppose there's no reason why queer things shouldn't happen in queer lands. You don't understand 'em—you can't understand 'em—but, my aunt! don't they catch you right where you live sometimes! There's something about these Eastern lands that goes beyond the depth of a Westerner. It's in the very air of the place, and it's got into the people. I've knocked around some in India and Egypt and all that, but I know precious little more about them, except on the surface, than when I began. There's something that gets away from you; you can't get close enough to it to analyse it; you know it's there, but you can't give it a name. Even the little simple things seem somehow different. I've stood for hours outside a Buddhist temple, just listening to a woman praying that prayer of theirs—Om mani padme Hum! until I could almost fancy I was a Buddhist myself, praying with her. There's mystery all through it to me, and always will be. You see things and know them to exist, as well as you know anything, and can't account for them. And—well, once or twice I haven't seen things, but I knew they were there all the same. I think it must be what's behind all this—the past back of it, that makes it so deuced queer. Why, when I was in Darjeeling2"

But his audience melted away, and Holloway, his spirits nowise dampened by the curtailment of his reminiscences, went and helped the workmen dig, and sang their weird labour chants with them, with the harsh rattling chorus of pick and spade in them, and succeeded in infusing the men with his own overflowing enthusiasm, so that the work went on by strides.

The sun climbed higher, and the heat became great. Some of the men showed signs of exhaustion.

"We'll have to knock off for a while," Merritt said with reluctance. "It's ten o'clock already. Deane, better keep your hat on if you're going up. It's hot enough in the sun to give you a stroke in ten minutes."

Deane sat on the stump of a broken column and fanned his flushed face with his grey campaign hat.

"I've got a nasty headache on already," he admitted. "Hi! Ibraheem! Go to my tent, will you, and get the blue bottle out of my medicine chest. The blue bottle, remember; it's the only blue bottle there. Put a spoonful in a cup of water and bring it here."

Ibraheem departed.

"Better try something a bit stronger," Merritt suggested.

Deane demurred.

"No; it's nothing but the beginning of a headache. Bromo will cure it quicker than anything."

Ibraheem returned shortly with the cup. Deane drank his dose, put on his hat, and went off among the workmen to watch the progress.

When a halt was called, the rubbish had been cleared away considerably, and some of the smaller bricks that blocked the entrance were out. Each man came up and peered solemnly through the gap, expressing disappointment when he saw nothing but blackness. Holloway created a mild sensation by declaring with his wonted vigour that he saw a pin-point of light within. He was greatly chaffed, but stuck to his point manfully, even though he admitted that it "looked queer," and he could not at all account for it.

The men came filing up from the trenches to stretch themselves in the shade of the mounds. Holloway, being young and of indomitable enthusiasms, took him off to develop his negatives, refusing to rest. Deane spread a mosquito net carefully over himself to keep off marauding flies, and went to sleep in the lee of the nearest mound. Merritt, pipe in mouth, sat where he and Deane had talked the night before, and stared out over the plain with sombre, thoughtful eyes.

As the burning day wore on, the ribald chatter of the natives ceased. They slept serenely while the shade lasted, making the most of their time of rest. When the sun, striding across the brazen sky, touched them where they lay, they woke, rose, moved in a body to fresh shelter, and slept again. Also the white men moved, in unison with them; Deane, half-awake, feverish with sleep, stumbling in his mosquito net. Where he fell he lay and slept again, breathing heavily, with restless turnings. In his dreams was a vast procession of brown-legged creatures who trailed endlessly up and down, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, who, each as it passed him, emptied a hod of dry brown earth upon him so that its weight pressed him down, and always down, into the earth, and shouted in his ears: "Whoso cometh, now or hereafter, let him not wake the soul that sleeps within!" Each voice grew louder and more menacing, though he could not understand why the brown creatures should threaten him; and as he tried to escape, they piled more earth upon him; so that, as he smothered to death, he woke with a gasp to find Holloway's hands heavy on his shoulders, and Holloway's voice crying:

"Get up, man! Oh, get up, I tell you! They've got the door down, and we're going in while the light lasts."

Deane jumped to his feet, his head still aswim, casting aside the mosquito net; and together they raced down the trench to where a crowd had gathered about a four-foot opening, yawning black. Nearest the entrance was Merritt, his face always pale with excitement, a shovel in his hands. He was as a detective who has found a clue to a tangled mystery—a miner who sees long-hoped-for signs of gold. Above his head the strange message blazoned forth its warning, the East guarding her secrets, even in death, from the eyes of the all-seeking West. To him it was never the routine of work, but the unfolding of a page whereon dead hands had traced the history of a vanished world. Over his shoulder he beckoned Deane and Holloway to him, stooping the while to peer into the low entrance. Before this was a mass of rubbish, with the bricks which had been removed.

"Look in there!" he exclaimed. His words snapped like a whip-lash. His eyes were keen and eager. "Does either of you see a—a light?"

Instantly they craned closer. Deane said:

"A what?"—and glanced at Merritt apprehensively; Holloway ejaculated:

"A—light!" in incredulous italics.

But then Holloway, gazing within, clutched Deane beside him, and said shrilly:

"It is! By George, it is! Didn't I say I saw a gleam when the first break was made, and didn't you rot me for it? But, oh, my Lord! how could a light get in there, fifty feet below the ground!"

"A reflection of outside light on something burnished within," Deane suggested at random.

Merritt lighted his lantern.

"We'll have time to take a look," he said, quietly enough. "It's in a first-class state of preservation—the first chamber we've found not crushed in and filled with rubbish. Come along, you two, but bring your lamps."

He picked his way through the débris, and lifted one leg over the stone which formed the threshold, flinging the light of his lantern ahead. Deane and Holloway followed close upon his heels. The three stood within the tomb. Earth and stone had done what might be done to hold the secret given to their keeping, but man had conquered. The grave of the past was giving up its dead.

Before them was a short passage, not high enough for them to stand erect, slanting sharply downward, and turning to the right a rod ahead. The angle of the wall hid what lay beyond. By the light of the three lamps, which cast itself into the blackness, it could be seen that walls and roofs were of great blocks of stone, roughly hammer-dressed.

"I expected to find it caved in," came Holloway's voice from the background. "Think of the pressure on top."

"Yes; but this was deep underground in the beginning. The intermediate layer of earth must have helped support the mass which gradually formed above. Besides, it would take a2"

It was then that Deane, somewhat in the lead, turned the corner of the passage, and gave back upon them with a gasp and an oath, cutting Merritt's speech in two.

"There's something queer about this!" he muttered.

The turn of the passage led on a level a couple of yards farther. Here it was blocked by another entrance, likewise walled up. On a square stone beside this door stood a lamp of clay from which came, not a flame, but a pale radiance as from some material highly phosphorescent within, dim and feeble as though all but burned out. It was as though some living hand had placed it there but a little while before, behind those sealed-up walls, far down below the ground; a small atom of life, set in the midst of universal death, that smote them with an instant's shock as of something supernatural, not of earth.

Merritt said—"Good God! look at that!" below his breath, and halted, as one in presence of some power which had risen suddenly from the opened grave to mock at men. Confronting them thus, it was uncanny—a sentient thing with an individuality of its own. Deane, staring at it in fascination, said:

"It can't have been burning here these thousand years, ever since that outer door was bricked up—why, it's impossible. It's absurd. There must be some other way of entering. Someone must have been here before us."

They drew together, all three, and looked at it with wonder and with awe. The suggestion of it held them silent; the unexpectedness of it left them blank. Holloway, peering among the shadows, said abruptly:

"Turn your lanterns away a minute. Or shade them so the light won't fall ahead. So! Now!" His voice fairly shook with eagerness. "Look over the top of this door. There's an inscription—see? right over it—in big letters—and that lamp is placed precisely where it will throw light on it. That's why it is here—so that no one could possibly come to this door without seeing those letters. And when the light was brighter they must have been plain as print. Read 'em, Deane, quick."

Deane read, recognizing the word as one he had seen at times before. It was a single word:

"Forbidden."

But as they moved forward to look at it, the pale radiance, shining for untold years in that silent place, brightened in the wave of air they swept on with them, burned bravely an instant, and went quietly into nothingness. At once the clutch of death, held a thousand years at bay by its faint spark of life, settled heavily on the place. Merritt gave an exclamation of bitter disappointment.

"This must be where the old king lies," Holloway observed. "Shall we try it now? See here; these stones aren't one-fifth as heavy as those outside. I—by George! Here's one I can move. It might as well be dark as daylight, because we'll have to work with lanterns anyhow. I'll call up Ibraheem."

Ibraheem came, with two men and weapons of attack. The passage was too narrow to admit of more than two working at once; as it was, they were cramped for room and gasped for breath.