'Tell me,' I breathed, 'where is Nayland Smith?'
The Chinese surgeon looked puzzled.
'Nayland Smith?' he echoed. 'I know no one of that name. '
'He's here... in el-Kharga! '
'El-Kharga?' He stopped and patted me on the shoulder. 'I understand. Do not think about this. I will see that you are looked after.'
4
A little, wrinkled Asiatic, who either was deaf and dumb or who had had orders to remain silent, brought me a bowl of steaming soup and a glass of some kind of light Burgundy. It was a vegetable soup, but excel- lent, as was the wine.
And presently I found myself alone again.
I listened intently, trying to detect some sound which should enable me to place the location of this extraordinary green and gold room in which I found myself. Any attempt to escape was out of the question. I was too weak to stir from the divan.
Apart from a vague humming in my aching head, no sound whatever could I hear.
Was I in the house of the Sheikh Ismail? Or had I been smuggled away to some other place in the oasis? An irresistible drowsiness began to creep over me. Once, I aroused with a start which set my heart beating madly.
I thought I had heard a steamer's siren! Of course (I mused) I had been dreaming again. A sudden, acute anger and resentment stirred me. I was thinking of my companions. I groaned because of my great weakness.... I dozed.
Good heavens! What was that?
My heart beating wildly, I tried to sit up. Surely a motor horn! I lay there sweating from the shock of the effort.
I closed my weary eyes....
Divining, rather than knowing, that the door behind me had opened, I kept my lids lowered--but watched.
A faint perfume--which I later deter- mined was rather an aura than a physical fact --reached me. I knew it. This was the herald of another of those troubled visions--visions of the goddess Kali incarnated.
She stood beside me.
The mythical robes--perhaps never more than figments of delirium--were not there. She wore a golden Chinese dress not unlike a pyjama suit and little gold slippers. The suit was silk of so fine a texture that as she stood between me and the light I could detect the lines of her ivory body as though she floated in a mist of sunrise.
A soft hand touched my forehead.
I raised weary lids and looked up into jade-green eyes.
She smiled and dropped into the chair.
So it was Madame Ingomar that I had to thank for my escape!
'Yes,' she answered softly in her strange bell-like voice. 'I saved your life at great peril to my own.'
But I had not spoken!
Her hand caressed my brow.
'I can tell what you are thinking,' she said. 'I have been listening to your thoughts for so long. When you are strong again, it will not be so--but now it is.'
Her voice and her touch were soothing--magnetic. I found my brain utterly incapable of resentment. This woman, kin of the super- devil, Fu Manchu, my enemy, enemy of all I counted worth while--petted me as a mother pets her child!
And a coldness grew in my heart--yet I remained powerless to resist the spell-- because I realized that if she willed me not to hate, but to love her, I should obey... I could not refuse!
I dragged my gaze away from hers. Irre- sistible urges were reaching me from those wonderful eyes, which had the brightness of polished gems.
She stooped and slipped her arms under my head.
'You have been very ill', she whispered. Her lips were almost touching me. 'But I have nursed you because I am sorry. You are so young and life is good. I want you to live and love and be happy....'
I struggled like a bird hypnotised by a snake. I told myself that her silver voice rang false as the note of a cracked bell; that her eyes were hideous in their unfathomable evil; that her red lips would give poisoned kisses; that her slenderness was not that of a willow but of a poised serpent. And then, as a worshipper calls on his gods, I called on Rima, conjuring up a vision of the sweet, grave eyes.
'The little Irish girl is charming,' said that bell voice. 'No one shall harm her. If it will make you happy, you shall have her.... And you must not be angry, or get excited. You may talk to me for a few minutes and then you must sleep....'
5
My next awakening was a troubled one. The strange room looked the same. But she had gone. How long?...
I had lost all track of time.
What had I imagined and what was real?
Had I asked her, or only dreamed that I had asked her, of the fate of my friends? I thought I had done so and that she had told me they were alive, but had refused to fell me more.
Alive--and, I could only suppose, prisoners! She had assured me, unemotionally, one arm pillowing my head and those magnetic fingers soothing my hot brow, that it was blind folly to oppose her. She wielded a power greater than that of any potentate living. Her strange soul was wrapped up in world politics. Russia, that great land 'stolen by fools,' was ripe for her purpose....
The present rulers? Pooh! Her specialists (calmly she spoke of them and I supposed her to mean professional assassins) would clear away such petty obstacles. Russia awaited a ruler. The ruler had arisen. And, backed by a New Russia, which then would be part and parcel of Asia--'my Asia'....
China, after many generations, was to be united again. Japan, in the Far East, Turkey, in the Near East, must be forced into submis- sion. Already the train was laid. Kemal stood in her way. Swazi Pasha, his secret adviser, must be removed....
'But I am so lonely, Shan. Your name is sweet to me, because it is like my own Chinese. Sometimes I know I am only a woman, and that all I see before me ends in nothing if it brings me only power and no love.'
Now I was alone.
This was a superwoman into whose hands I had fallen! And what blindness had been upon me during our earlier if brief association to close my eyes to the fact that she had conceived a sudden, characteristically Oriental infatuation?
Perhaps a natural modesty. I had never been a woman's man and counted myself negligible when female favours were being distributed. Or, possibly, my preoccupation with Rima. Certainly, from the first moment I had met her, I had not so much as noticed any other woman's existence or bothered myself to wonder if any other woman had noticed mine.
Yet, as I recalled again and again, Madame Ingomar had chosen me to show her over the excavation and had sought me out many times. Yes, I had been blind....
Now, too late, I saw.
Beyond any dispute, she sprang from generations of autocrats; power was in her blood. She had selected me, for no reason that I could imagine; and I had read in those strange green eyes, as clearly as though she had spoken, that if I rejected her I must die! I knew, also, intuitively, that she had experienced love. Judged by Western standards, she was young. But judged by any standard she was old in knowledge. However I chose, my triumph would be a short one.
So musing, and weak as a half-drowned cat. I lay staring around my gold and green prison.
The door behind me opened and the Chinese doctor came in.
'Good morning, Mr. Greville.'
I glanced at the heavy curtains. No trace of light showed through them.
