10
O softly tread, said Christabel.
S. T. Coleridge: Christabel
BUT they weren’t needed after all.
When we set out again the thin moon had drifted higher, clear of the island trees, and by her faint light we negotiated the bridge once more, and made our way up into the pavilion. The painted door swung out silently, and Charles wedged it open with a stone. Torchlight speared ahead of us into the black gap as we stepped delicately inside and started down the spiral stair.
The paintings slid past us, spectral in the moving light. Domes and minarets, cypresses like spear-heads, gazelles, hawks, Arabian stallions, fruit-trees and singing-birds … and at the bottom a door.
Shut, of course. It looked massive and impassable in that frail light, but to my surprise, when Charles put a hand to it and pulled cautiously, it came easily, and with the same well oiled silence as the one above. I saw then that the latch was gone, and where the original lock had been was a splintered panel of wood. Part of the palace’s history, no doubt, that smashed lock … The door had been secured again in more recent times – and by a stout hasp and staple and a padlock – but a lock is only as strong as its moorings, and these, like the rest of the palace appointments, were rotten. The padlock was still in place, and locked, but on one side the hasp had been pulled away from the crumbling jamb, and hung there with one socket still holding the useless screw, the other empty.
This, then, was how the dogs had got through. It seemed probable that they had broken the lock themselves, and tonight, since otherwise it would surely have been mended again. And the damage was obviously recent, for splinters and sawdust showed on the floor, and when Charles shone the torch down I caught the gleam of the fallen screw.
‘Luck,’ he said softly.
‘Good for the Gabriel Hounds,’ I breathed.
He smiled, and beckoned. I soft-shoed after him through the door.
It was very dark, a great arched passage with ribbed and vaulted ceiling where the torchlight seemed little more than an impertinent gleam. We were at the end of a sort of underground T-junction, under a vault made by crossed arches. Our door closed one end of the top shaft of the T. A few yards along from us on the left, an open archway led off into blackness, some sort of passageway down which came a draught of air. Straight ahead, and closing the top bar of the T, was another door. Like the main gate of the palace, this door was of bronze, its panels elaborately worked and its surface – in spite of age and damage – retaining the silky beauty of hand-hammered metal. To either side of it were ornate iron brackets which must once have held torches, and beneath these we saw recesses in the wall, man-high like sentry boxes. The archway itself was carved, and held traces of peeling paint.
‘Must be the Prince’s door,’ I whispered. ‘You were right, it’s the low road to the Seraglio. See if it’s locked.’
But he shook his head and sent the light shifting from the door towards the passageway on the left.
‘Line of retreat first,’ he said softly. ‘This way to the postern, what do you bet? Shall we go see?’
The tunnel was long and curved, not quite level, and very dark. Our progress was slow. As far as I could see the walls were of rough stone – no paintings here – and at intervals bore rusty iron brackets for lights. The floor was rough, too, big slabs of paving with a border of crude cobbles, all worn, filthy, and treacherous with holes. Once a scuffle in the blackness made me stop and clutch at Charles’s arm, but the rat or whatever it was made off without my seeing it. The passage bent to the left, turned uphill a little, and met another at right angles.
We paused at the junction. Our passage was the main stem of another T, this time with a bigger passage crossing the head of it. Charles put the torch out, and we stood for a moment listening. The air was fresher here, and it was an easy guess that this corridor was open to the upper air. Then from somewhere away to the right I heard, faintly, the snuffle and whine of the hounds.
Charles flashed the light that way momentarily, to show the rough floor of the tunnel mounting in wide and very shallow steps. ‘That probably goes up to the gate you saw in the midan, which means, unless I’m wrong—’ He turned the beam to the left, and almost immediately it seemed to focus on something lying in the middle of the sloping way. A scattered trail of droppings, horse or mule. ‘I’m not wrong,’ he said. ‘This way.’
A minute or two later we were looking out through the grove of trees at the edge of the Adonis gorge.
The postern gate was built into the solid rock, recessed deeply into it, and below the level of the plateau behind the palace. A steep ramp cut from the rock led down to it through the grove, and the roots of the sycamores, level with the lintel, reached bare and twisted like mangroves half across the top of the doorway. A buttress protected it on the landward side, and weeds and creepers grew profusely among the tree roots and overhung the cutting from above. Anyone approaching from the plateau would have seen merely a buttress jutting out into the grove, and beyond this the drop to the Adonis gorge. The ramp was just wide enough for a laden beast, and the gate was a heavy, studded affair in excellent repair, both locked and barred.
‘You see?’ said my cousin. ‘Just big enough to take a mule or horse – an emergency door – and the long passage leading under the Seraglio and up to the midan. Well this’ll save me a climb, praise be to Allah. Nice of them to leave the key in the lock, wasn’t it? Come back in – no, don’t shoot the bolts again, I think we’ll leave it unlocked.’ Inside the shut gate again he glanced at his watch. ‘After two. They can’t stay up all night surely?’
‘If anyone’s still awake, it’ll only be Aunt Harriet.’
‘Yes,’ said my cousin. ‘Well …’
He was looking at the ground, fiddling with the button of the flashlight. As it came on again, I caught his expression. This was abstracted, even bleak. He glanced up suddenly. ‘Shall we go back now?’
‘Back? To the Prince’s door? That’ll be locked, too, I expect.’ There must have been something in the ancient secrecies of the place that were making themselves felt; I found myself almost speaking with relief, and I saw him give me another quick glance.
‘Possibly, though I doubt if they’d have the place sealed up internally, so to speak. Christy—’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you want to go on?’
‘On?’ We had reached the first T-fork and turned into the home run. ‘Back here, you mean? Where else can we go?’
‘I mean on to the Prince’s door. Would you rather just go back to the Seraglio?’
‘Would you?’
‘No, not now. But if you’d rather get out from under and leave it to me—’
‘Do me a favour, will you? I’m not afraid of John Lethman, even if you are.’
He started to say something, apparently thought better of it, then grinned and said merely: ‘En avant, mes braves.’ We went on.
And the Prince’s door wasn’t locked. It opened silently, and beyond it was a long, vaulted corridor, pitch black and very still and quite empty. Charles paused. The torchlight seemed almost to be lost in the blackness ahead of us. I thought he hesitated a moment, then he went forward. I followed.
The corridor, like the spiral stair, had once been richly decorated, but though it was swept and reasonably clean underfoot it was in bad repair, and the painted landscapes on the walls were faded and peeling, and even in the torchlight could be seen to be very dirty. The floor was of marble, overlaid with some drab and tattered matting, on which our footsteps made no sound. The air was still and dead and smelled of dust.
To either side, at intervals, were doorways of the kind familiar to me from my wanderings in the palace, most of them gaps of darkness where broken doors hung open on emptiness or confusion. Charles shone the light into the first of these, which seemed to contain nothing but large earthenware jars.
‘Nothing there but forty thieves,’ he commented.
‘What did you expect??
??
‘Heaven knows … And here’s Aladdin’s cave. Half a minute, let’s look.’
At first I couldn’t see what had caught his attention. The room seemed to contain much the same jumble as the ‘junk-room’ in the Seraglio; furniture, ornaments, cobwebs – the same dreary and neglected clutter of years. On a rickety chest of drawers was a pile of books, rather less dusty than the rest.
The torchlight probed along the pile, and after it went Charles’s fastidious fingers. He turned the thickest volume spine upwards. ‘I thought so.’
‘What is it?’
‘Chambers’s Dictionary.’
It had fallen open in his hand. I peered at it in the torchlight. ‘So useful. Did you know what a cusk was? It says it’s a torsk or a burbot. What d’you know? Crosswords, Charles.’
‘As you say.’ He shut the book on a puff of dust, and picked up another.
This was smaller than the dictionary, but had a more important look, with thick leather covers which, under their fine greying of dust, seemed to be elaborately tooled. He handled this gently, and when he blew the dust off I caught the gleam of gilding.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a copy of the Koran, and a rather gorgeous copy at that. Take a look.’
The paper was thick and felt expensive, and the Arabic script, beautiful in itself, was enhanced by the ornate designs which headed the Suras, or chapters. It was certainly not the kind of book I would have imagined anyone would throw out into a dusty room to be forgotten.
He laid it down without comment, and the light was sent straying further over the debris. It halted suddenly.
‘See what I see?’
At first, among the grey anonymous rubbish, all I could distinguish was the shape of a battered violin, something that might have been a pair of roller skates, and a tangle of leather thongs and buckles and tassels which resolved itself eventually into a couple of bridles. Behind these and half hidden by them were two dusty objects that looked like ornaments. China dogs.
Even so, I stared at them for a good five seconds, I suppose, before I got there.
‘Charles! Not your Gabriel Hounds?’
‘Indeed and indeed.’ He knelt down in the dust beside the tangle of leather. ‘Hold the torch, will you?’
I watched him as he carefully lifted the bridles aside and the one of the china ornaments in his hands. I noticed with some wonder how gently, reverently almost, he handled the thing. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, and began to wipe the dust away.
Slowly, under the gentle ministrations of the handkerchief, the thing emerged. It was a creature which might have been a dog or lion, about six inches high, made in vivid yellow porcelain with a glowing glaze. It was sitting on its haunches with one paw down, and the other poised delicately on a fretted ball. The head was turned over one shoulder, at gaze, ears back, wide mouth grinning as dogs grin. It had a thick, waving mane, and its plumed tail curled over its back. Its air was one of gay watchfulness, a kind of playful ferocity. Its mate on the floor, her bright coat fogged with dust, had a plume-tailed pup under her paw instead of a ball.
‘Well, my God, who’d have thought it?’ said Charles softly. ‘What do you think of them?’
‘Heavens, don’t ask me, I’m not up in these things. Are they really meant to be dogs?’
‘They’re what are known as Dogs of Fo, or Buddhist lions. Nobody seems sure exactly what kind of creatures they were.’
‘Who was Fo?’
‘The Buddha himself. These are the only creatures in the Buddhist mythology that are allowed to kill, and then only in the Lord Buddha’s defence. They’re officially the guardians of his temple.’ He turned the glowing creature over in his hands. The wrinkled pansy-face grinned like a Pekinese over the pretty ball.
‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘I’ve a feeling I do remember them. But why do you suppose they’ve been shoved out here? I mean, I’d have thought—’
‘Yes,’ said Charles. He set the dog down again on the floor, straightened up abruptly, and took the torch out of my hand. I got the impression he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. ‘Shall we get on with the programme?’
Without waiting for an answer, and without another glance at the contents of the room, he led the way quickly back into the corridor.
Here was silence and darkness, and the still smell of unused, dusty air. The trees of the faded, painted landscape slid past, punctuated by the dark cave-mouths of empty rooms. Then ahead of us the corridor curved slightly to the left, and on the outside of the curve the torch picked out another doorway, the same arched shape as the rest, but very different. Here was no empty cave, no sagging and rotten timber. The arch was blocked with a door of oak, brand new and solid as a ship, and it was not only shut fast, but locked with a new brass padlock.
The light paused on this for a moment, then moved on to the next door. Here again a new lock winked.
I said under my breath: ‘The real treasure chambers, huh?’
My cousin didn’t answer. The light slowly raked up the door to the barred ventilator above it, and down again, to fix on what stood beside it. He walked over to look, and I followed him.
Between the two doors, stacked against the wall, were a dozen or so cans, the size of small petrol cans, bright yellow with some sort of design on them. As the torchlight caught them I saw on the nearest, in bold black lettering: FINEST COOKING OIL Ideal for Frying. Mayonnaise, Salads. And below this, something else. I stopped.
The light came back to me swiftly. ‘What is it?’
‘On the tins,’ I said, blinking in the beam, which swept down from my face again to the pile by the door. ‘I just noticed – I can’t remember where I saw it before. Oh, yes, now I’ve got it! It’s nothing, Charles, only that design on the cans in red, the running dog.’
‘Yes? What about it?’
‘Nothing, I suppose. It’s not important. Just that I’ve seen it before.’
‘Where?’ I looked at him in surprise. He sounded interested, even sharp.
‘Sunday afternoon, up at the village Hamid took me to. I told you, didn’t I? The sunflower field with the little sign on the tree-trunk, the red dog that I thought looked like a saluki.’
‘This is the same?’
‘I think so.’
We stooped closer, and now under the drawing of the running dog I could see in smaller black lettering: Hunting Dog Brand. Best quality, beware immitations.
‘Sal’q,’ said my cousin, half to himself. The torchlight was full on the tin. He looked absorbed.
‘What?’
‘That’s what “Hunting Dog” is, did you know? The word “saluki” is the Arabic seluqi or slughi and means “hound”. I imagine the Nahr el-Sal’q is some sort of corruption meaning ‘Hound River’. Local produce, in other words. This is the same as you saw in the field?’
‘Exactly the same.’ I straightened up. ‘Local produce it will be – sunflower oil, I suppose, and what I saw was a marker for the field. I think I read somewhere that the peasants use markers like that for their crops – I suppose it’s sense, when a lot of them can’t read. Heavens, this must be about ten years’ supply! What on earth do you suppose they use it all for?’
He lifted one of the cans and put it down again, ‘Empty,’ he said shortly, and turned away.
I looked at him curiously. ‘Why so interested?’
‘Not here,’ he said, ‘not now. Let’s finish this, shall we? And we’d better stop talking.’
When we rounded the curve of the corridor, going warily, we saw some thirty yards ahead of us a stairway, a wide sweep leading up to a landing and another elaborate arch. The door was standing open, back to the wall, but in its place, a heavy curtain hung across the arch. And at one edge of the curtain a line of light showed. We stopped still, listening. Even our own breathing sounded loud to me in the dead air. But nothing moved; no sound came from beyond the curtain.
Carefully shielding the torch with his fingers, so that onl
y a rosy crack of light showed to dance like a fire-fly towards the curtain, Charles mounted the stairs and inched his way forward across the landing to the doorway. He paused beside the curtain, with me at his elbow. The torch was out now, the only light the streak at the curtain’s edge.
Still no sound. But now I could smell the curiously pungent scent of Great-Aunt Harriet’s tobacco. This must be the Prince’s Divan. She might be very near us. She must have been reading, and have fallen asleep over her book. I couldn’t hear her breathing I thought but then the room was so vast, and if she had drawn the bedcurtains before she slept …
My cousin put out a stealthy hand and drew the edge of the curtain back a couple of inches. He laid an eye to the crack, and I stooped to look.
It was certainly the Prince’s bedchamber. And this was actually the curtain at the back of Great-Aunt Harriet’s bed.
There was very little light in the room; the streak at the curtain’s edge had only seemed bright in comparison with the outer darkness where we stood. The lamp stood on the table, its flame turned low, the smallest slug of light. But knowing the room, I could see fairly clearly. It was exactly as last night; the red lacquer chair, the unwashed dishes on the table, the hypochondriac clutter on the dressing-chest, the dish on the floor with DOG now half-hidden with milk for the cat, and on the bed …
For one breathless moment I thought Great-Aunt Harriet was there too, within a yard of us, sitting where she had sat last night in her welter of shawls and silks; then I saw the room was empty. The dark corner at the bedhead held only the tumble of blankets, and the red of her discarded jacket and the fleecy pile of the shawl.
A moment later it hit me again, the cold wave of sickness and the shiver over the flesh, as the cat lifted its head and eyed us from the tumbled bed. Charles saw it at the same moment as I did, and as I backed sharply away he let the curtain fall and came with me. His arms went round me.