The valley of eyes unseen

'So,' he hissed, his long arm thrown out towards us, 'it is thus you requite our hospitality, men of the outer world! Thus do you flout the will of our rulers, thinking that by a childish deceit your impious deed shall remain hidden! Blind fools, because you have chosen a time after darkness fell, do you fondly imagine you have not been seen by our eyes from your going to your coming back? Have you not learned that we of the valley see far, needing no light of sun or moon to see by? Have you not understood that the commands of the Nine, who graved upon the stranger's tomb their behest that his body remain inviolate, are commands to be disobeyed only on pain of death--and worse than death? You have understood, strangers, yet you have disobeyed!' The wrath of the old man was so terrible to behold and feel, his words came out in such a scorching torrent, that I literally bowed my head, as if under a sudden tempest. I had no answer to make, no plea, and would have had none even if I hadn't been scared out of my wits by the old man's threats--which I am not ashamed to confess I was. If anything had been lacking to tell me our number was up, the fact that Kalliboas had, for the first time in my knowledge of him, named the Nine Shadows specifically, would have done so: no longer was there need to hide from us the hand of that dread body. We shouldn't live to spread the knowledge. But if I was cowed, Poyning seemed not in the least disposed to be. He rushed up to the old man, his fists clenched, his face pale as death, and for a moment I thought he was going to hurl himself upon him; but he checked, and poured out a torrent of words no whit less furious than those we had just heard. It was the cry of a creature at bay, seeing death ahead but very fully determined to make a fight for it. 'Hospitality!' he cried, swinging round and pointing towards the south. 'In ancient time it was a sacred duty to your people: _there_ is how you practise it to-day! Truly, you have improved upon the old custom of your race! A stranger came into the valley, as it has been written, seeking rest from the weariness of his travel. You gave him rest--the rest from which there is no awakening. But it happens that after many years the stranger's son has come into this valley, seeking him. To the stranger's son you lie, without seeming to lie. No man, say you, was near the stranger when he died--truly said, for you of your great wisdom can slay without poison or steel. But it may be that the son shall see the body of his father and learn the manner of his death--therefore you hide your crime. Indeed you are a righteous people, that the discovery of murder is so repellent to you! Justly you shun contact with the outer world and its misdeeds--' 'Silence!' thundered Kalliboas. 'Silence, or it were better for you never to have been born! Here shall you remain, not setting foot over the threshold, while it is decided what shall become of you. Strive not to flee--as well strive to escape from the bowels of yonder mountains! You have defied the Nine, and the Nine shall settle your fate!' With that he was gone, leaving on my mind, at least, a very distinct impression that the end would not be long coming. Poyning threw himself on to a couch, where he sat a long while in silence, his head buried in his hands. When he looked up, all the fury of passion was gone out of his face, and a deep-lined sorrow had taken its place. 'It's my doing, Mirlees!' he groaned. 'I have dragged you into this. Forgive me!' 'There's nothing for me to forgive you about,' I said. 'I came into the business with my eyes wide open. Had I known as much as I do now, I should have joined you more readily still.' 'It's decent of you to say that,' he replied, 'even if it isn't all true. But there's a good deal you don't know. Nor could I tell you before, for it was a matter I talked about to nobody--it concerned my father's honour.' 'That _is_ a point I'm still in the dark upon,' I observed. Poyning sat twisting and untwisting his hands. 'It's an old story,' he said at last, 'and till now it has been a mysterious one even to me. You remember, back in China--my God, it seems ages ago!--I told you and Philipson I'd an ambition to explore these wildernesses. Neither of you pressed me for my exact motive, and I should not have told you if you had. But I had a very particular reason indeed.' He paused, with a twitching of the lips, but after a while seemed to regain his grip, and continued in a steady voice. 'My father was an officer in the Indian Army, a good soldier, I believe, but never popular in his regiment. Men were inclined to look askance at him because of his strange, moody, mystic temperament. These traits became more pronounced in him after my mother's death, which occurred when I was born. He had always been deeply interested in oriental religions, and knew more of such matters than it is usually thought good for a European to know. There were even whispers--no doubt the sort of silly gossip which will gather round a man of his type--that he dabbled in eastern sorceries and devil-worship. All this tended more and more to make him a lonely man. Then came his mysterious disappearance. He was stationed on the frontier at the time, and had obtained six months' leave to go up country--as he gave out, to investigate certain obscure native traditions with a view to writing an account of them. My father crossed the frontier from Kashmir, having no other European with him, and from that point all trace of him was lost. Time went on, his leave expired, but my father never returned to his regiment. In the case of any other man his disappearance might have been explained by some climbing accident or encounter with wild beasts, but my father's reputation being what it was, stories began to be whispered about him. His name fell under a cloud. It was commonly believed that he still lived, and had buried himself among a native tribe in the wilderness where they practised the devilish cults in which he was known to have been interested. 'I was at school in England, and could do little towards clearing my father's name. Only on the rare occasions when officers who had known him were on leave could I make any inquiries at all, but one man, a Major Fetherston, with whom my father had been more intimate than with anybody else in India, showed me a letter he had received from him just before his departure for the interior. This gave me a new clew. My father's last letter to me had mentioned that he was going up country to investigate native traditions, but in this letter to Major Fetherston he actually specified the tradition. In former trips over the border, he said, he had come across a curious story, to the effect that somewhere far eastward of the mountains lay a large valley inhabited by ghosts, who lived in temples of white stone and possessed the power of transforming themselves into great birds. The tradition seemed so strange and unusual, wrote my father, that he was going to try and get more information about it. Major Fetherston gave me that letter. His manner was very kind, but it was clear enough to me that he shared the common view that Major Poyning had committed what, in the case of a private soldier, would be called desertion. 'The years passed. Never another hint of my father's fate reached me, but I resolved that when I grew up I would find out the truth about him, and that until his name was cleared, I would mention my father to nobody. Then, how to get to the East? Most of my small patrimony had been swallowed up in my education. Also, even if I could get to India it would be difficult to prosecute the search there without giving out that I was the son of a man disgraced. At last, however, I got into touch with an old scholar who was going to China to collect materials for a book on eastern history. This seemed my chance. I had read over and over again my father's letter to Major Fetherston, with the help of maps, and it seemed to me, since this valley of ghosts was supposed to be far _east_ of the mountains, that my father must have penetrated into Tibet, and that country could be approached quite as well from the China side as from India. So I closed with the old historian. I was to serve him as secretary for a year, by the end of which time I had no doubt I should have found something to support me until the opportunity came to go inland and follow my quest at closer quarters. We sailed together to Shanghai, but there, on the day after landing, he died very suddenly, leaving me on the rocks. How I hawked my learning in vain round the Treaty Ports you already know. The night I met Saunders Philipson I was at the end of my tether and desperate; I had expended my last dollars on a bend with two officers off a river steamer, fully intending to go to the British Consul next morning and present myself as a beachcomber in want of a passage home. Philipson's commission in Shanghai I naturally jumped at, and then, when I heard that he was going up country to investigate a legend apparently identical with what I had been brooding over for years, believe me, Mirlees, I very nearly collapsed. I fancy that one fact has done more to establish my faith in a Providence than all the chapels I ever attended at school and the 'Varsity.' He stopped, with an air so grave you would never have believed this was the same casual young exquisite we had picked up at Nanking. If the adventure had done nothing more for Stephen Poyning, it had deepened his draught considerably. 'Then,' he resumed at length, 'when we reached this place and found there _had_ been a previous explorer, and a European at that, I felt I was near the end of my quest. I see now quite clearly that Kalliboas recognised me almost at once from my likeness to my father. It was no more than a vague suspicion at first, of course, but once I realised that he was deliberately putting obstacles in the way of our visiting the stranger's tomb, my suspicions began to take shape. Since then I have worked with one end: to unravel that secret. My first attempt was a failure, as I told you to-night. No doubt Kalliboas was aware of it, and no doubt the cold-blooded old fiend laughed to himself to think the locked door and the plaster casing would always prevent me from learning the truth. But he had reckoned without my ally.' 'You mean--' 'The Princess Helene. God knows what I've done to earn it, Mirlees, but Helene loves me a good deal more than she respects Kalliboas.' 'But how did you come to see her? I take it that is where you've been prowling these nights?' Poyning looked uncomfortable. 'It's a queer thing for any sane man to tell,' he said, 'a very queer thing, but this is my version of it. On the second night after my accident, Helene came to me in a dream so vivid--well, it seemed too vivid to be merely that. She stood beside my bed and spoke to me, telling me again very positively that in another day I should walk. When she went away, I seemed to follow her, and hear her speak of herself as the Princess Helene. Then the vision, or whatever it was, faded away, and when I woke in the morning, I was well enough convinced it was no more than a common dream. But then, by the accident of talking to you, I discovered I knew her name and you did not. That set me thinking. Could there be, I wondered, more in it than I had supposed? I determined to put it to the test. The road I went with her in the dream had remained quite clear in my mind, and I followed it to the point where the vision faded. I was amazed to find everything fit in exactly, even down to the wall we had stood under together. I climbed that wall, Mirlees, and I found Helene--certainly