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Updated: June 1, 2025
"You know we've sent men to Khinjan who are said to have entered the Caves. Not one of 'em has ever returned." King frowned. "She claims she can enter the Caves and come out again at pleasure. She has offered to do it, and I have accepted."
"How many such hast thou ever seen?" he asked. "None!" answered King, and the guide cackled at him, like a hen that has laid an egg. "There be many strange things in Khinjan, but few strangers!" he remarked; and then, as if that were enough for any man to say on any occasion, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the cavern. It was the last King ever saw of him.
He used the word with the deference some men can combine with effrontery, so that very tenderness has barbs. "You might have had that thing back if you had sent a messenger for it at any time. A word by a servant would have been enough. "You could never have reached Khinjan then!" she retorted. Her eyes flashed again, but his did not waver. "Princess," he said, "why speak of what you don't know?"
It is marked "Street of the Dwellings" on the secret army maps, and it has been burned so often by Khinjan rioters, as well as by expeditions out of India, that a man who goes on a long journey never expects to find it the same on his return. It was lined on either hand with motley dwellings, out of which a motlier crowd of people swarmed to stare at King and his men.
In a minute King and his brother stood unseen, unheard in the shadow by a patch of silver moonlight. Athelstan sat down on the mule's pack. "Well?" said the younger. "Tell me. I shall have to hurry. You see I'm in charge back there. They saw me come out, but I hope to teach 'em a lesson going back." Athelstan nodded. "Good!" he said. "I've a roving commission. I'm ordered to enter Khinjan Caves."
He suspected she would be annoyed if he deprived her of the fun of telling him, so that by being silent he played both her game and his own. "Why did I order your death in the first place?" The answer to that was obvious, but she answered it for him. "Because, since the sirkar insisted that one man must come with me to Khinjan, I preferred a fool, who could be lost on the way.
The mare grew frantic and the Rangar summoned six men to hold her. Suddenly, right over the top of Khinjan's upper rim, where only the eagles ever perched, there burst a column of water, immeasurable, huge, that for a moment blotted out the sun. It rose sheer upward, curved on itself, and fell in a million-ton deluge on to Khinjan and into Khinjan valley, hissing and roaring and thundering.
So they marched without talking over the hideous boulder-strewn range that separates Khinjan from the Khyber, sleeping fitfully whenever King called a halt, and eating almost nothing at all, for only a few of them had thought of bringing food. They reached the Khyber famished and were fed at Ali Masjid Fort, after King had given a certain password and had whispered to the officer commanding.
But the mullah was gone, and so was all the money the women had brought, together with his medicines and things from Khinjan.
Of the "Heart of the Hills" that awoke in the womb of the "Hills," and that listened and watched. "Now, is she the 'Heart of the Hills'?" King wondered. The rumors men had heard and told again in India, about the "Heart of the Hills" in Khinjan seemed to have foundation.
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