"Yes, it is. All these northern border tribes are of the best type of Mohammedan, and respect women. No, I am not afraid."

"You did not seem so just now, at any rate. But it is not only of that sort of danger I was thinking. A gloomy hole like this might conceal all kinds of hidden peril. It might be the den of a panther, or a wolf, or even a snake. For instance, look at this. Keep behind me, though."

He led the way--it was only a few steps--to the scene of his own narrow escape. There yawned the cleft, black and hideous.

"Keep back," he said, extending an arm instinctively, as though to bar a nearer advance, and in doing so his hand accidentally closed upon hers.

He did not let it remain there, but it seemed as though a magnetic touch were conveyed from frame to frame, and there came a softness into his tone which accorded well with the protecting, shielding att.i.tude.

"Is it very deep?" asked Vivien, holding her candle over the brim, and peering down into the blackness.

"Well, judging by the sound, it takes a stone a good while to get to the bottom. I should have been there myself long before this but for Bhallu Khan here. In fact, I was placidly walking into it when he laid violent hands on me."

"Really? How horrible! Let's leave it now, and go outside. The idea of such a thing oppresses one in here."

She turned away. Her voice was unshaken. Beyond just a faint quickening in her tone, she might have been listening to some mere abstract risk run by somebody she had never seen or heard of before, and Campian could not see her face.

"Just take one more look around before you go outside," he said. "The idea of those hidden valuables being here won't wash. Both floor and walls are of solid rock. There is no possibility of burying anything."

"Hardly, I should think," she answered, after a few moments' critical survey of the interior. "But, this is not an artificial cavern, surely?"

"No. I have seen others rather like it, though none quite of its size.

But if you follow out the formation of the place, it is all on the same slant. The creva.s.se, to be sure, is at something of a different angle, but that is nothing to go by here, where the whole side of a mountain is seamed and criss-crossed with the most irregular network of fissures."

"What if the things are at the bottom of that cleft?" said Vivien.

At the bottom of it! This was a new idea. Was it a new light? But he replied:

"Then they will remain there till the crack of doom. The hole is of immense depth--Bhallu Khan and I sounded it from every point--and is sure to contain noxious gas at a certain distance below the surface. Do you mind if I ask you a favour?--oh nothing very great!" seeing her start. "It is not to talk about this, or speculate before others as to the possibility of such a thing existing."

"Why, of course, if you wish it! But--do you believe in it, then?"

"Perhaps partly. But it may be that I have something to go upon. When I have more I will tell you more--but--I am forgetting--how on earth can it interest you?"

"But it will interest me very much--and--" "you know it," she was going to add, but subst.i.tuted: "life is prosaic enough for a romantic search of this sort to add new interest to it. How is it I did not know you were here?"

"Here--on this spot, or in this country?"

"On this spot, I mean. The other is easily understood. We have been living out of the way so long, and I see so few people. And you have only recently arrived?"

"Yes. As to being in here, I had no pony to leave outside. I have been climbing the mountains after markhor, hence a tolerably disreputable old Khaki suit, and a battered and general air of not having been to bed all night."

"Did you have any success?"

"No. I got in one shot, but missed it of course, just as I was saying when up at your place the other day. However, what I really wanted to do was to come in quietly here and explore."

"So did I. Where is my syce, I wonder? There is my pony," looking around, for they had regained the entrance of the cave. "Ah! I see him. He is at his prayers. Your man has joined him."

"Yes. Old Bhallu Khan is a whale at piety. I should think he stood a first-cla.s.s chance of the seventh heaven."

"These people are very devout," said Vivien, looking towards the two Mohammedans, who, with their shoes off, and their chuddas spread on the ground as praying carpets, were prostrating their foreheads to the earth, and otherwise following out the prescribed formula--facing towards the holy city. "I sometimes wonder if it is all on the surface."

"I don't know why it should be. We make a good deal of show, too, though in a different way; but I doubt if we are any better than they.

In fact, it is more than possible we are actually worse. But John Bull has a fine, hearty, overgrown, schoolboy contempt for anything he can't understand, and to him the bowings and prostrations enjoined by the Moslem form of worship is sheer nonsense. For my part, I am not sure it is not even too refined for him."

"Perhaps. I have often thought that to these people we must seem something worse than Pagans. I hardly wonder at their fanatical hatred of us."

"Neither do I, the more so that our att.i.tude towards them is for the most part well exemplified in the remark made to me by a fine wooden specimen of John Bull the other day coming down the Red Sea. Two or three of these travelling traders had got up on the forecastle, and were praying towards Mecca. 'Ever see such humbug in your life?' says this chump. I said I had, and far greater humbug; in fact, couldn't see any humbug in the present performance at all. Oh, but it was all on the surface! How did he know that? I asked him. Oh, because they would lie and cheat and so forth. But so would nine-tenths of the English commercially engaged, I answered. Whereat he snorted, and moved off.

He thought I was a fool. I knew he was one."

"Very much so," a.s.sented Vivien. "I detest that wooden-headedness which no amount of moving about the world will ever teach to think. And now that those two good people are through with their devotions, it is time I got home again. Oh, Meran Buksh, _ghora lao_!"

The syce sprang to execute this order, and in a minute Vivien's pony was before her, ready to mount.

"Why this is the first time you have ever put me on a horse," she said, as Campian seemed to be arranging her skirt with minute care, "and how well you did it."

"Thanks," he said. "There. I hope you will not have too hot a ride home. Good-bye."

"Good-bye. You will be coming up to see us again soon, I suppose, or we shall be going to see Mrs Upward. You are going to make some stay, are you not?"

He replied in the affirmative, and, looking at her as she sat there with easy grace, he felt that never had his self-possession been in greater peril. Cool and fresh and sweet in her light blouse and riding-skirt-- her glance full and serene meeting his--the flush of health mantling beneath the soft skin, she was a picture in her dark, brilliant attractiveness, framed against the background of savage rocks and ragged junipers.

"Good-bye," was all he said.

A pressure of the hand, and she turned her pony and rode away at a walk, the syce following.

Campian watched her out of sight. Then he did a curious thing--at any rate for a man of mature age and judgment. He returned to the cave and picked up a small rough stone, quite an ordinary stone it was, but while they had stood talking Vivien had been rolling this stone absently to and fro beneath the sole of her boot. Now he picked it up, and, glancing at it for a moment, put it in his pocket. But he seemed to change his mind, for, pulling it forth again, he hurled it away far over the rocks.

Then he started out in the direction of Upward's camp, old Bhallu Khan, carrying the rifle, following close at his heels.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

INTROSPECT.

"You're late, child. Had a long ride?" said Colonel Jermyn, who was already at breakfast when Vivien entered.

"Not very. The mountain paths here are so rough, you have to keep almost entirely to a walk. And I met Mr Campian, so we stopped and chatted a little."

"Did you? Where?"

"Somewhere on the side of the mountain. I don't know the localities here yet," replied Vivien, with perfect ease. She had been about to say, "at the markhor cave," but remembering Campian's hint, refrained.

"He had been out after markhor, with that nice-looking old forester of Mr Upward's, and was on his way back."

"Did he get any shots?"

"One, and missed it. He was quite unconcerned about it though, and didn't go out of his way to invent half a hundred excuses for having missed it."