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Updated: May 1, 2025
I shall wait for you in Khinjan, whither my messenger shall show the way. Please let him keep his rifle. Trust him, and Rewa Gunga and my thirty whom you brought with you. The messenger's name is Darya Khan. "Your servant, "Ysamini." He passed the note to Courtenay, who read it and passed it back. "Are you the messenger who is to show this sahib the road to Khinjan?" he asked. "Aye!"
"I saw the Sleeper and his bride before she knew of either! It was I who let her into Khinjan! It was I who told the men she is the 'Heart of the Hills' come to life! She tricked me! But this is no hour for bearing grudges. She has a plan and I am minded to help." King lay still and looked up at him, sure that treachery was the ultimate end of any plan the mullah Muhammad Anim had.
He would have given one eye for it, but none would trade with him! He knew of it, but never saw it." "I am more favored. I have it. It is hers, is it not?" Does not she know the secret?" "She knows all that any man knows and more!" "Was she seen to slay a man in the teeth of written law?" asked King, and Ismail stared so hard at him that he laughed. "I was in Khinjan once before, my friend!
"He killed an officer who said the curry had pig's fat in it. That made him free of Khinjan but of not many other places! I have promised him a swim in Earth's Drink when he ever forgets his art!" King ate, because a man can not talk and eat at once. It was true that he was hungry, that hunger is a piquant sauce, and that artist was an adjective too mild to apply to the cook.
But the mist closed up and then the crystal was clear again. It was Yasmini's voice that spoke, King looked up into her eyes, and they made him shudder, for he had never seen eyes like them. Her hands still clasped his own, burning hot. She was more terrible than Khinjan. "I never saw that before," she said. "It is because you are here! We shall see it all now! We shall know it all!
She trusts him, so we've got to, and you've got to take him up the Khyber with you. What she orders, he'll do, or you may take it from me she would never have left him behind. As long as she is on our side you will be pretty safe in trusting Rewa Gunga. And she has got to be on our side. Got to be! She's the only key we've got to Khinjan, and hell is brewing there this minute!
With his heart in his mouth he parted the curtains with both hands, startled by the sharp jangle of metal rings on a rod. So he stood, with arms outstretched, staring staring staring with eyes skilled swiftly to take in details, but with a brain that tried to explain formed a hundred wild suggestions and then reeled. He was face to face with the unexplainable the riddle of Khinjan Caves.
That was all, but the fire in the mullah's eyes showed that he thought it was enough. He did not doubt that once he should have his extra four thousand in the caves Khinjan would be his; and he said so. "Khinjan is mine!" he growled. "India is mine!" And King did not answer him. He did not believe Yasmini would be fool enough to trust herself in any bargain with Muhammad Anim.
"Yet, to enter Khinjan Caves you had to slay a man, hakim or no!" "He was an unbeliever," King answered modestly, and the other nodded again with friendly understanding. "What about the man yonder, then?" the Pathan asked. "What will you have of him?" "Look! See! Tell me truly what his name is!"
A roar of laughter greeted that thrust. Many men who had not laughed at the mullah's first discomfiture, joined in now. Muhammad Anim sat and fidgeted, meeting nobody's eye and answering nothing. He shall meditate in his cave a while, and perhaps he shall be beaten, lest he dare offend again. He can no more escape from Khinjan Caves than the women who are prisoners here. He may therefore live!"
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