The Camp of the Snake

Front matter

THE CAMP OF THE SNAKE

By HAROLD LAMB

Author of "Mister Three" "The Devil's Bungalow" etc.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL

ONE dusty morning I found a piece of paper on my desk in the offices of Pan American Motors, on Woodward Avenue, Detroit. It was a yellow paper about as big as my hand and what it said was this:

When convenient, Mr. Hacket would like to see Mr. Smith in his office.

Hacket was about third assistant sales manager of Pan Am., and I was general utility man, with a reputation for getting into trouble. It turned out that Hacket had something worse than trouble on his mind, and that was an idea.

"Ever been in India, Smith?" he asked.

I told him I didn't think so, and he looked as if I was trying to tell him something that was not so. Said my card—application card, filed with the personnel department on entering Pan Am. Motors—had stated distinctly that I had lived there for three years.

"That must be A. L. Smith," I explained, after thinking it over. "He's been laid up for two months with double pneumonia. My name is Alexander McDonald Smith."

This only bothered Hacket for a minute. After all, the idea was not his, and he saw no reason to worry about it. So he explained things in the rapid fire manner of a young fellow who thinks it's business-like to be swift.

The Pan Am. directors had asked our chiefs why we were not selling more cars to the Orient. We had a few sales and a lot of inquiries from Japan, but India was a blank. Someone had dug up figures to prove that there were so many thousand cars in India and practically none of American make. The climate there in a good part of the country was an all-year affair, like southern California; the oil supply was plenteous and convenient, and so forth. Our competitors, for some reason, were not trying to sell cars there.

You remember how the business part of the U. S. of A., shortly after the war, figured out to launch a government merchant marine in all the seven seas, whichever they may be, and to corner the trade of South America, and drill for oil in Alaska and so forth. Well, Pan American Motors was making more money then than it knew what to do with, and starting plants in Canada and England. With trade in general booming and buzzing, nobody thought of the bumps. Nobody ever does.

So Motors was going to send a representative to India, and Hacket picked me, as hereinbefore related, to find out—transportation and ten dollars a day paid—if there was a market for our cars, and if not, why not. He added that I could catch the Soo limited out of Chicago the next day and connect with the Canadian Pacific transcontinental at a place called Moose Jaw.

"Which India," I asked, "do you mean?"

No, I was not trying to be funny. There is a good deal of Scotch in me under the skin—old, sure-enough stuff, inherited— and I wanted to be certain where I was going before starting. The map of the world has a Dutch East Indies and a West Indies, besides an Indo-China, and men like Hacket have been known to overlook bigger things than that. Sure enough, he pawed over his papers and finally went off to ask about it. When he came back he said it was British India. So I listened to another bunch of instructions and went oft to clear out my desk, and wait for letters of introduction and tickets. Nobody asked if I wanted to go.

As a matter of fact I did, badly. Any other place would have done as well. It was a dusty morning and the office windows were opened wide for the first time that summer. The jangle of the street cars down Woodward was as bad as the clatter of the typewriters, and I had not set foot off pavement for eight months.

Lord, how a fellow gets to hate the streets, when a straw bonnet and a park and open windows are the only things he can see of a change in the season!

If I had known what sort of a camp I was bound for, a couple of months hence, I'd have yelped out loud. I didn't imagine such a thing and you couldn't if you tried. Think of a few tents bunched over a snow-fed river, three thousand feet below. Trees bigger than the California sequoias, and mountains crowding all around that would make the Rockies look like slag heaps. Fishing for what you want, and big game shooting—well, for stags, bear and such-like.

Man, I've sampled a good many kinds of camps, from the week-end auto parking kind to the government A. E. F. brand, and I want to say right now that this camp was in a class by itself.

Sometimes, when the alarm clock does its stunt and I wake up from dreaming about that place, I'm in a fever to pick up again and start off to it. And then come the chills, when I think of all that happened and of the hours when I cursed A. L. Smith for not going instead of me.

AS I said, Pan American Motors started out to sell the world, and before been in Calcutta a week I thanked my stars I was not a salesman. We had as much chance of selling cars in India as I would have of underscoring an opera.

Outside a shipping cost with a duty tacked on that came to about half the selling price of a car, there were only two reasons why Pan American Motors would never flourish in India. Natives—coolies they call 'em—and bullock carts were sit- ting around waiting for a chance to haul loads at about a quarter the cents-per-mile a truck would roll up.

"You might investigate Kashmir, Mr. Smith," someone suggested. "A splendid country, you know, just being opened up. It is in the Hills, and I imagine the climate would be a welcome change from this."

Two weeks later I found out that the advice about Kashmir was a merry jest. An Englishman may not see one of our jokes, but he can slip one over and look as serious as an umpire behind the plate in a world's series. I'll tell you about this Kashmir thing when we come to it.

Anything looked better to me than Calcutta, where the climate was borrowed from hell. I wrote a preliminary report, mailed it, and jumped a train for Delhi, pronounced Dilly, to see what their capital looked like. But it was hotter than Calcutta, and that was worse than New Orleans in September.

There were some tourists in Delhi, but no sightseeing busses, and not even a tin lizzie at the station. After one ride around the city and down their main street, which has a name like a sneeze and a grunt and means Silver Street, I went back to my room at the hotel and stayed there. Probably it was the heat—I'd been out in the streets of Calcutta regularly from nine to five—but I began to have a queer feeling about this India. Maybe it was caused by the mob of natives, not blacks, but brown men. There must have been a million or so crowded into a place no bigger than Yonkers. And the place had nearly a million smells, all different.

Even in my room the electric fan was not an electric fan. It was a kind of super fly-swatter, worked by a rope, and somewheres I suppose a brown man in a cotton shirt was pulling the rope. Through the screens of the upstairs veranda that was outside my window I could see the domes of a couple of real palaces and a bunch of ruins.

It made me feel as if I'd arrived in a city that was a couple of thousand years behind the times. All the leading citizens seemed to be dead. At least the ruins they left were the only sights of the place.

WHEN I started to sit down and write another letter to the bunch in the office my brain ceased to act all at once. A man was calling something below the veranda, and when he kept on shouting, I went out to see what was doing.

About a dozen natives were squatting down just below me, and a boy began bowing and pointing to an old man who held a strip of white cloth over his knees.

"Sahib," said the boy, "here is a wonder. Will the sahib please to watch?"

The old man held out his bare arms and draped the cloth over his wrists. When he lifted it I saw a green shoot in the ground under the place where his hands had been. Then he put back the cloth, and everyone looked at me. The second time he pulled back his arms there was a big twig with green leaves where the shoot had been.

"That's old stuff," I told the boy.

"Yes, sahib," he came back at me, seriously, "it is older than we remember. Please to watch."

The sleight-of-hand man stood up, and jerked off the cloth, and pointed to a two foot shrub with some kind of fruit on it. A minute ago that shrub had been a twig. The boy pulled off the fruit and tossed it up. It was a mango K right enough. But I had seen the mango trick before.

The way it works is this: the hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye artist has a small bush with a stem sharpened to a point wrapped up in his apron or sleeve, and when the innocent bystander is busy looking at the twig, he slips it under the cloth. Then he sticks the point in the ground, shakes out the branches a bit and his stuff is done.

"Throw up the bush," I grinned at the boy.

"As the sahib wishes." To my surprise he gave the thing a yank and then began to pull. The shrub came up, all right, but it brought with it an honest clump of roots and a wad of earth. The old conjurer looked up at me and his eyes glinted. I tossed them a handful of coppers; it was worth that much, and they began to fight among themselves for the money. All but the boy.

"If the sahib will walk in the Sher Bagh garden this night he will see a greater wonder," he promised.

When I tried to get the letter started again my brain was just as much a blank as before. I kept seeing the Hindu boy and the old conjurer and the mango bush. Especially the bush.

Of course the old man could have had the shrub tucked away in his jumper somewhere, and he could have slipped it under the cloth if he was very clever. And possibly he might have brought along a bush with roots hanging on it, and dug a hole with his hands in the soft, black earth.

He must have done that, because there was no other way to explain the trick. But somehow the explanation did not satisfy me. The roots had come out of the ground as if they had been planted there.

That evening a slicked-up army officer in the dining-room told me where the Sher Bagh was.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST TOUCH

IT WAS a sort of public garden opening off the hotel, with a mosque at the other end. The trees were thick overhead except in the center where there was an opening over a narrow well. Later I learned there was one of those big tanks alongside the mosque wall, where it was hidden by some bushes.

A lantern was over the entrance, and as I came up a boy and a girl walked out. They looked about old enough to be just out of high-school, but the English always look young, and the girl might have been nineteen. She glanced at me once and went on talking, probably thinking an American tourist was nothing but a necessary flaw in the landscape.

She was worth looking at twice, and then some. Her wide, white hat hid her eyes, but she carried her chin up. I don't know what a Greek profile is; still I'll lay odds she had one. She could have stepped into line at the "Follies," and the other girls would have taken time out to give her the double-O.

"Captain Dixon will take you out after barasang," she was saying to the boy, "if you'll be an angel and come."

"Rats!" he mumbled. "You know perfectly well the lower Chitral region is all shot out. The only thing really worth while is the high hill game."

They might as well have been talking about psychic research, for all the meaning I got out of that. Not that I stopped to listen; I was watching the girl and wondering how a dress made out of such flimsy stuff seemed to be tailored to fit her. Before they were out of hearing I gathered that he was her brother and broke, having backed the wrong horse at the racetrack, that afternoon. Also that he'd had several shots of the whisky and soda variety. She was urging him to go somewhere with her, and he was kicking about it. That was how I guessed she was his sister.

I scratched a match to start up my pipe, and tried to find a cool spot in the park. The heat was like a veil wrapped over my head, and the place was rank with some kind of flower, acacias, as I saw the next day. There weren't any benches, and I sat down on the stone edge of the well.

The conjuror and the boy were not to be seen, and I wondered how the girl of the white hat looked cool, and what barasang was. And then a voice overhead whispered at me, "Do not be frightened, sahib. Atcha, sahib2"

The stars were blotted out as I looked up, and a human body dropped past me, splashing a dozen feet below, in the well. The light was bad and the thing happened quickly, but I thought it was the boy of the mango trick. At least the voice sounded like his. He had flashed down a foot from my eyes and had hit the narrow mouth of the well without scraping any of the stones.

It takes more than that to make me jump. I scratched a match and shaded it, to look down. The water was quivering and the scum on its top had been split apart. The sides, about four feet apart, were solid rock, without a handhold anywhere.

A few bubbles broke at the surface and then quit coming. The skin on my back began to prickle a bit, when I noticed a snake wiggling around in the scum and thought that the Hindu kid would have a pleasant surprise when he came up. He didn't come. I lit another match from the first, and it burned out. After a third one I knew that anything down in that well would stay down, and half started to slide in after the kid, figuring that he had bumped his head on a rock.

The snake and another thing helped to keep me where I was. Something tugged at my coat, pulling me back. When I got to my feet and swept an arm around in the darkness under the trees, nothing more happened. For a while I listened at the well without hearing anything.

When a diver comes up after a two minute stay under water he makes a noise like a fat man breathing after a hundred yard dash. I was certain the boy had not taken the air again. The trick began to look serious, and I was half angry, half worried about him. Someone else was in the garden, the gent or lady who had laid a restraining hand on me, and was acting like an unlawful-abiding citizen.

Without striking any more matches I walked back to the hotel veranda and called to the first white man visible. It was the young bird who had been ragging the girl.

"One of the village lads," I said, "has committed suicide in the well, and I am the party who saw him last. Either I've been seeing spooks or we'd better hustle up a pulmotor and a rope."

He looked me over and laughed. "It's a dashed good trick, isn't it? Didn't the old budmash come around for some baksheesh?"

"No," I told him. "And no bran-mash either. Suppose the drinks are on me, eh?"

The thin face of the English boy split in a grin and he explained that it was remarkable, very, that the conjuror had not pursued me to the hotel for a tip; baksheesh, they called it. It was a regular stunt of theirs, and this was how they worked it.

The Hindu child climbed the tree near which I'd been sitting and jumped from a branch, out into the well. He was an experienced diver, and knew how to swim through an under-water-conduit that led to the temple tank, not far away.

Well, we had that drink on the porch, and a couple more, each one different, Arnold Duggendale Carnie doing the suggesting while I did the paying. He told me his name and what horse was sure to win in the race the next day—they only had one, but it was a steeplechase and lasted until tea time. Told me he'd been in the saddle of one of the ponies last week and broken a foreleg—of the horse.

Carnie had alert black eyes and a pleasant laugh and did not seem the type for a jockey. I liked him at sight, thinking of his sister, and he invited me to come and shoot mountain sheep with him where it was not so damnably hot.

When I started to undress that night I found that several items were missing from my ensemble. A wallet, with letters from the Pan Am. people, with my passport, letters of- identification, and a few time-tables. Luckily my traveler's checks were safe, as I kept them scattered, with the big ones in my hip pocket.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III

A WARNING

WHEN my business was attended to in Delhi I wrote that report and mailed it and tried to guess what to do next. The hotel clerks never got beyond the idea I was a tourist and kept telling me to go see the Tag-me-Hal, but when they said it was a tomb I let 'em know I was not selling hearses. After that they let me alone, especially when I reminded them they had not got back my wallet.

Of course I had looked through the Sher Bagh place the next morning, and of course I did not find my stuff. The hotel people sent a man out to look, too, and he found as much as I did. Then he asked me if I wanted to lodge a complaint against the Hindus.

I was fairly certain that the conjurer bird had lifted my wallet under the tree, probably expecting that I carried a fat roll after my display of pennies the afternoon before. Not having recognized either of the natives that evening there was not evidence enough to stir up the police. Somebody had ended the evening richer by my passport and letters that identified me. That was all.

Then I remembered the tip about Kashmir and bought a ticket for it, thinking that it might be a city with some get-up-and-go about it, being a new development. And then it became clear that I'd been treated rough by the English hombre in Calcutta, because Kashmir turned out to be a country several thousand years older than India itself. Also a place where there was not anything but mountains. When the people in the hotel spoke of going to the Hills they meant Kashmir.

But let it be here understood that it was far from being dead. In fact Alec Smith, automobile prospector, never entered into a livelier spot.

My introduction to Kashmir began in the train, which was made up of those trick English cars like all-compartment Pullmans witth doors opening on the side of the car, and two couches along either wall for the inmates to sleep on.

When I'd stripped off my coat and shoved my bags down to the foot of the couch and changed to a dry shirt I watched the dust and wooden tenements of Delhi slide past and felt better.

"I would strongly advise you to put the valises at the other end," remarked the man who was on the couch opposite. "The train thieves are very expert."

He was a short fellow, middle aged, and he wore an old suit. Nothing unusual about him except his eyes, which were deep-set and brilliant. The book he had been reading was full of printing that looked like shorthand—circles and curliques and dots instead of letters; it might have been Sanscrit or Arabic or anything else, but he turned the leaves as if it was a best seller.

Letting the bags stay where they were I told him that I'd made the acquaintance of the native sons already and wanted very much to see them again. I'd bought a six shooter in the Delhi bazaar and meant to use it if another Hindu came after my roll.

My companion's name was Moorcroft, Dr. Paul Moorcroft, and he seemed to be interested in the fate of my wallet, and asked me to describe the boy and the conjurer, and the various things that were stolen. All he said, however, was that it was unusual for professional magicians to try to rob a white man near the hotel, for it spoiled their graft.

"The train thieves are quite a different fraternity, quite," he assured me. "I've known them to slip into the carriages stripped to a loin cloth, with their bodies greased. If you grasp them they slide away like eels, and if the train is stopped for the guard to investigate, they are off into the jungle at once."

"They'd stop for a bullet under the ribs," I pointed out. "And that's all they'd get from me."

He looked at me as if I was a new specimen of carnivorous animal, and turned back to his book, remarking that the native thugs were real professionals, able to lift a money belt from a sleeping passenger. I grinned at him and took out a little volume of Stevenson that always travels with me.

After we'd eaten for the last time, and the lights were touched up I slipped the revolver from my pocket to the back of the sofa and lay down; the money, being in my hip pocket, was under me, with the gun, and I was not worrying about any native turning me over without waking up.

It was about as cool in the compartment as the steam room of a Turkish bath, but it was better than Delhi, and I dozed off while Moorcroft was still turning over the pages of his book. Being a light sleeper, I wakened every time the door rattled or my companion scratched a match.

By and by it was quieter and I was dreaming of jumping into a well full of snakes, when something switched my mind back to consciousness. For a minute or so I lay without opening my eyes, beginning to think instead of dream. It seemed as if more air was coming in than usual, although the train was barely moving.

I opened my eyes a crack and shut them promptly. Moorcroft was no longer in my range of vision, but a man was standing in the center of the compartment, and this man was a native wearing two strips of cloth, one over his head and the other around his hips. His skin was shining, either from sweat or grease and he held a very slender, curved knife in his hand.

In past years sundry surgeons have removed most of the bones from my nose, and part of my jaw is sterling silver where they had to take a splice in it because of sudden collision with some lead. I can look a gun in the eye and take a share in a toe and heel mix-up without worrying any, but a knife sets my skin to creeping. Evidently the native was in the compartment to rob and meant to have something for his trouble. It would not do to let him know I was awake, and only a fool would charge into a knife. A straight-from-the-shoulder wallop will knock out most natives, because they never learn the why and wherefore of a fist. But you can't hit out when you're lying on your back with your eyes shut.

Still pretending I was wrapped in slumber, and wondering all the time what had happened to Moorcroft, I rolled over on my right side, facing the wall and snored a couple of times to reassure the brown devil. With my back to him I was facing the wall, and had edged off the six-shooter. He could not see it.

Presently I rolled on my back again, with my eyes wide open. The gun, in my right hand, covered the concave space under his ribs. He had drawn closer and the knife was about three feet from my ear.

It was a fifty-fifty proposition and it looked as if both of us would bump off if either moved a finger. Did I say my hands were cold? So were my feet. Then Moorcroft spoke, saying something to the native that meant nothing to me. Without looking away from the thief's eyes I was aware of the doctor sitting up at the end of his couch with a finger marking the place in the book where he'd left off reading.

What he said in Hindustani he never explained, but the native stepped back and shoved the knife in his girdle.

"Put the revolver aside, Mr. Smith," my companion remarked to me. "It would never do to shoot this chap, you know."

"Then make him lie down and hold his hands up behind his back," I countered.

Moorcroft gabbled something, and our visitor dropped to his knees and proceeded to bump his forehead against the floor at the Englishman's feet, as if Moorcroft was a tin god.

Then he glided toward the door and was half through before I managed to grab his arm. He grinned at me good-naturedly and his bare arm slipped through my fingers like a fish's fin. It felt as if it had been oiled. When I reached the door and looked out along the running board he was gone.

The train was only crawling, and a thick mesh of forest lined the right of way like a wall. A wild pig, startled by the light and the noise, plunged away, crushing down bamboo shoots and lush grass in its path.

"Young man," observed Moorcroft, "you've had your warning."

Going back to my bunk I got out my pipe. "Let's hear it."

"That pahari could have knifed you, before or after you foolishly displayed a weapon."

"Was he a thief?"

"Most men are." Moorcroft's yellow face seemed to grow sharper as he looked at me. "We Anglo-Saxons pride ourselves on our respectability, and yet for generations we've been rambling around the world breaking open graves and carting away shrines out of Asia to sell, or set up in some dismal museum in London or Chicago. Yes, that pahari is a thief and the son of a thug. I once patched up his sire after a tiger clawed his ribs loose, and the hill people never forget a service."

His big eyes glowed queerly and his lips sneered. "I was in Pekin when the Allies broke in to loot after the Boxer show, and I saw Cossacks and British marines ripping, down ancestral tablets of gold, tablets that the Chinese believe are the incarnate spirits of their ancestors. Yet in London or New York if a man robs a grave we call him a ghoul."

"You win, Doctor," I told him. But I didn't swallow all the dose he gave me. Who would? The whole thing looked queer—the pahari bird coming into the compartment like that, and then going through a daily dozen head-bobbing. And it turned out later that my hunch was a good one. "Is there any more to the lesson?"

Moorcroft began to talk like a professor. I wished later I had paid more attention to what he said.

The main point of it was that he was warning me not to meddle with anything that turned up under my nose in India. When they wanted to, the Hindus could arm themselves with weapons that left white men no chance at all. Moorcroft named over poisons that could kill a man daily for a couple of years, and stimulants like bhang and hasheesh that could make a native give one whoop and run out and slaughter any Europeans who happened along, and feel blissful doing it.

"Must have some kick, that drink," I told him.

He went on to say magic, the real variety, was practiced by Hindus and such-like.

"I've seen their snake charmers and mango growers," I agreed, "and our vaudeville artists put it all over them. You can't tell me there are any real magicians."

Those shining eyes of his fastened on me, and he smiled. He'd seen a conjurer throw one end of a rope up into the air and the rope stay upright. And a boy climb up the rope and vanish, and a tiger come down by and by. Said it was a stunt they didn't do now except for visiting kings and a few others.