Title: The Land of Hidden Men
Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs
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Language:  English
Date first posted: July 2003
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Title: The Land of Hidden Men
Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs




First published under the title JUNGLE GIRL




1 The Jungle


"My Lord, I may go no farther," said the Cambodian.

The young white man turned in astonishment upon his native guide. Behind
them lay the partially cleared trail along which they had come. It was
overgrown with tall grass that concealed the tree-stumps that had been
left behind the axes of the road-builders. Before them lay a ravine, at
the near edge of which the trail ended. Beyond the ravine was the
primitive jungle untouched by man.

"Why, we haven't even started yet!" exclaimed the white man. "You cannot
turn back now. What do you suppose I hired you for?"

"I promised to take my lord to the jungle," replied the Cambodian.
"There it is. I did not promise to enter it."

Gordon King lighted a cigarette. "Let's talk this thing over, my
friend," he said. "It is yet early morning. We can get into the jungle
as far as I care to go and out again before sundown."

The Cambodian shook his head. "I will wait for you here, my lord," he
said; "but I may not enter the jungle, and if you are wise you will
not."

"Why?" demanded King.

"There are wild elephants, my lord, and tigers," replied the Cambodian,
"and panthers which hunt by day as well as by night."

"Why do you suppose we brought two rifles?" demanded the white. "At
Kompong-Thom they told me you were a good shot and a brave man. You knew
that we should have no need for rifles up to this point. No, sir, you
have lost your nerve at the last minute, and I do not believe that it is
because of tigers or wild elephants."

"There are other things deep in the jungle, my lord, that no man may
look upon and live."

"What, for example?" demanded King.

"The ghosts of my ancestors," answered the Cambodian, "the Khmers who
dwelt here in great cities ages ago. Within the dark shadows of the
jungle the ruins of their cities still stand, and down the dark aisles
of the forest pass the ancient kings and warriors and little sad-faced
queens on ghostly elephants. Fleeing always from the horrible fate that
overtook them in life, they pass for ever down the corridors of the
jungle, and with them are the millions of the ghostly dead that once
were their subjects. We might escape My Lord the Tiger and the wild
elephants, but no man may look upon the ghosts of the dead Khmers and
live."

"We shall be out before dark," insisted King.

"They are abroad both by day and by night," said the Cambodian. "It is
the curse of Siva, the Destroyer."

King shrugged his shoulders, stamped out his cigarette and picked up his
rifle. "Wait for me here, then," he said. "I shall be out before dark."

"You will never come out," said the Cambodian.

Beyond the ravine, savage, mysterious, rose the jungle, its depth
screened from view by the spectral trunks of fromagers and a tangle of
bamboo. At first the man could find no opening in that solid wall of
vegetation. In its sheath, at his side, hung a heavy knife, but already
the young day was so oppressively hot that the man did not relish the
idea of exhausting himself at the very outset of his adventure if he
could find some easier way. That it would be still hotter he knew, for
Cambodia lies but twelve degrees above the equator in the same latitude
as Nicaragua, the Sudan, and other places infamous for their heat.

Along the edge of the ravine he searched, until at last he was rewarded
by what appeared to be not by any means a trail but a far less
formidable growth of bamboo through which he saw that he might easily
force his way. Glancing back, he saw his Cambodian guide squatted upon
his heels in mournful meditation. For an instant the young man
hesitated, as though he was of a mind to try again to persuade the
Cambodian to accompany him; but, as though immediately conscious of the
futility of any such appeal, he turned again and pushed his way into the
jungle.

He had advanced but a short distance when the heavy undergrowth gave way
to a much more open forest. The spreading branches of the lofty trees
cast upon the ground a perpetual shade, which had discouraged a heavy
growth of underbrush.

How different looked the jungle from any picture that his imagination
had conjured! How mysterious, but above all, how gloomy and how
sinister! A fitting haunt, indeed, for the ghosts of weeping queens and
murdered kings. Beneath his breath King cursed his Cambodian guide. He
felt no fear, but he did feel an unutterable loneliness.

Only for a moment did he permit the gloom of the jungle to oppress him.
He glanced at his watch, opened his pocket compass, and set a course as
nearly due north as the winding avenues of the jungle permitted. He may
have realised that he was something of a fool to have entered upon such
an adventure alone; but it was doubtful that he would have admitted it
even to himself, for, indeed, what danger was there? He had, he thought,
sufficient water for the day; he was well armed and carried a compass
and a heavy knife for trail-cutting. Perhaps he was a little short on
food, but one cannot carry too heavy a load through the midday heat of a
Cambodian jungle.

Gordon King was a young American who had recently graduated in medicine.
Having an independent income, he had no need to practice his profession;
and well realising, as he did, that there are already too many poor
doctors in the world, he had decided to devote himself for a number of
years to the study of strange maladies. For the moment he had permitted
himself to be lured from his hobby by the intriguing mysteries of the
Khmer ruins of Angkor--ruins that had worked so mightily upon his
imagination that it had been impossible for him to withstand the
temptation of some independent exploration on his own account. What he
expected to discover he did not know; perhaps the ruins of a city more
mighty than Angkor Thom; perhaps a temple of greater magnificence and
grandeur than Angkor Vat; perhaps nothing more than a day's adventure.
Youth is like that.

The jungle that had at first appeared so silent seemed to awaken at the
footfall of the trespasser; scolding birds fluttered above him, and
there were monkeys now that seemed to have come from nowhere. They, too,
scolded as they hurtled through the lower terraces of the forest.

He found the going more difficult than he had imagined, for the floor of
the jungle was far from level. There were gulleys and ravines to be
crossed and fallen trees across the way, and always he must be careful
to move as nearly north as was physically possible, else he might come
out far from his Cambodian guide when he sought to return. His rifle
grew hotter and heavier; his canteen of water insisted with the
perversity of inanimate objects in sliding around in front and bumping
him on the belly. He reeked with sweat, and yet he knew that he could
not have come more than a few miles from the point where he had left his
guide. The tall grasses bothered him most, for he could not see what
they hid; and when a cobra slid from beneath his feet and glided away,
he realised more fully the menace of the grasses, which in places grew
so high that they brushed his face.

At the end of two hours King was perfectly well assured that he was a
fool to go on, but there was a certain proportion of bulldog
stubbornness in his make-up that would not permit him to turn back so
soon. He paused and drank from his canteen. The water was warm and had
an unpleasant taste. The best that might be said of it was that it was
wet. To his right and a little ahead sounded a sudden crash in the
jungle. Startled, he cocked his rifle and stood listening. Perhaps a
dead tree had fallen, he thought, or the noise might have been caused by
a wild elephant. It was not a ghostly noise at all, and yet it had a
strange effect upon his nerves, which, to his disgust, he suddenly
realised were on edge. Had he permitted the silly folk tale of the
Cambodian to so work upon his imagination that he translated into a
suggestion of impending danger every unexpected interruption of the vast
silence of the jungle?

Wiping the sweat from his face, he continued on his way, keeping as
nearly a northerly direction as was possible. The air was filled with
strange odours, among which was one more insistent than the others--a
pungent, disagreeable odour that he found strangely familiar and yet
could not immediately identify: Lazy air currents, moving sluggishly
through the jungle, occasionally brought this odour to his nostrils,
sometimes bearing but a vague suggestion of it and again with a strength
that was almost sickening; and then suddenly the odour stimulated a
memory cell that identified it. He saw himself standing on the concrete
floor of a large building, the sides of which were lined with heavily
barred cages in which lions and tigers paced nervously to and fro or
sprawled in melancholy meditation of their lost freedom; and in his
nostrils was the same odour that impinged upon them now. However, it is
one thing to contemplate tigers from the safe side of iron bars, and it
is quite another thing suddenly to realise their near presence
unrestrained by bars of any sort. It occurred to him now that he had not
previously considered tigers as anything more serious than a noun; they
had not represented a concrete reality. But that mental conception had
passed now, routed by the odour that clung in his nostrils. He was not
afraid; but realising for the first time, that he was in actual danger,
he advanced more warily, always on the alert.

Some marshy ground and several deep ravines had necessitated various
detours. It was already almost noon, the time upon which he was
determined he must turn back in order that he might reach the point
where he had left his guide before darkness fell upon the jungle.
Constantly for some tune there had lurked within his consciousness a
question as to his ability to back-track upon his trail. He had had no
experience in woodcraft, and he had already found it far more difficult
than he had imagined it would be to maintain a true course by compass;
nor had he taken the precautions to blaze his trail in any way, as he
might have done by marking the trees with the heavy trail cutter that he
carried.

Gordon King was disgusted with himself; he had found no ruins; he was
hot, tired and hungry. He realised that he had lost all interest in
ruins of any and all descriptions, and after a brief rest he turned back
towards the south. It was then, almost immediately, that he realised the
proportions of the task that lay ahead of him. For six hours he had been
plodding deep into the jungle. If he had averaged two miles an hour, he
had covered a distance of twelve miles. He did not know how fast he had
walked, but he realised that twelve miles was bad enough when he
considered that he had started out fresh and well fortified by a hearty
breakfast and that he was returning empty, tired, and footsore.

However, he still believed that he could make the distance easily before
dark if he could keep to the trail. He was well prepared physically by
years of athletic training, having been a field and track man at
college. He was glad now that he had gone in for long distance running;
he had won a marathon or two and was never appalled at the thought of
long distances to be covered on foot. That he could throw the javelin
and hurl the discus to almost championship distances seemed less helpful
to him in an emergency of the present nature than his running
experience. His only regret on this score was that during the year that
he had been out of college he had permitted himself to become soft--a
condition that had become increasingly noticeable with every mile that
he put behind him.

Within the first minute that Gordon King had been upon the back-trail
toward his guide he had discovered that it was absolutely impossible for
his untrained eyes to find any sign of the trail that he supposed he had
made coming in. The way that he thought he had come, his compass told
him, let towards the south-west; but he could find no directing spoor.

With a shake of his head, he resorted again to his compass; but due
south pointed into a dense section of jungle through which he was
positive he had not come. He wondered whether he should attempt to skirt
every obstacle, thereby making long and wide detours or continue
straight toward the south, deviating from his direct line only when
confronted by insurmountable obstacles. The latter, he felt, would be
the shortest way out of the jungle in point of distance, and he was
confident that it would bring him as close to his Cambodian guide as any
other route that he might elect to follow.

As he approached the patch of jungle that had seemed at first to bar his
way completely, he found that it was much more open than he had
suspected and that, while the trees were large and grew rather close
together, there was little or no underbrush. Glancing often at his
compass, he entered the gloomy forest. The heat, which had grown
intense, possibly aggravated the fatigue which he now realised was
rapidly attaining the proportions of a real menace. He had not
appreciated when he stepped out upon this foolish adventure how soft his
muscles had become, and as he contemplated the miles and hours of
torture that lay ahead of him, he suddenly felt very helpless and alone.

The weight of his rifle, revolver, ammunition, and water represented a
definite handicap that he knew might easily defeat his hope of escaping
from the jungle before dark. The smell of the great cats was heavy in
the air. Against this ever-present premonition of danger, however, was
the fact that he had already spent over six hours in the jungle without
having caught a glimpse of any of the dread Carnivore. He was convinced,
therefore, that he was in little danger of attack by day and that he
might have a better chance of getting out of the jungle before dark if
he discarded his weapons, which would unquestionably be useless to him
after dark.

And then again, he argued, perhaps, after all, there were no man-eaters
in the jungle, for he had heard that not all tigers were man-eaters. For
the lesser cats, the panthers and leopards, he did not entertain so
great a fear, notwithstanding the fact that he had been assured that
they were quite as dangerous as their larger cousins. The size, the
reputation and the fearful mien of My Lord the Tiger dwarfed his
estimate of the formidable nature of the others.

A large, flat stone, backed by denser foliage, suggested that he rest
for a moment while deliberating upon the wisdom of abandoning his
weapons. The canteen of water, with its depleted store of warm and
unpleasant-tasting liquid, he knew he must cling to until it had been
emptied. Before he sat down upon the stone he leaned his rifle against a
tree, and unbuckling the belt which supported his revolver and also held
his ammunition, he tossed it upon the ground at his feet. What a relief!
Instantly there left him the fear that he might not be able to get out
of the jungle before dark. Relieved of what had become a constantly
increasing burden, he felt like a new man and equal to any efforts that
the return march might demand of him. He seated himself upon the flat
rock and took a very small swallow from the contents of his canteen. He
had been sparing of his water and he was glad that he had been, for now
he was convinced that it would last him through the remainder of the
day, giving him strength and refreshment when he would most need them.

As he replaced the screw cap upon his canteen, he chanced to glance at
the rock upon which he was sitting and for the first time was struck by
the fact that it seemed incongruously out of place in the midst of this
jungle of great trees and foliage. Idly he brushed an accumulation of
leaf mould from its surface, and what he saw revealed beneath increased
his curiosity sufficiently to cause him to expose the entire surface of
the rock, disclosing in bold bas-relief the head and shoulders of a
warrior.

Here, then, was the reward for which he had struggled; but he found that
it left him a little cold. His interest in Khmer ruins seemed to have
evaporated beneath the torrid heat of the jungle. However, he still
maintained sufficient curiosity to speculate upon the presence of this
single relic of the past. His examination of the ruins of Angkor Thom
suggested that this must have been a part of some ancient edifice and if
this were true the rest must be close at hand--perhaps just behind the
screen of jungle that formed the background of this solitary fragment.

Rising, he turned and tried to peer through the foliage, separating the
leaves and branches with his hand. A few hours before his heart would
have leaped at what he glimpsed vaguely now through the leafy screen--a
vast pile of masonry through whose crumbling arches he saw stately
columns still defying the ruthless inroads of the jungle in the lonely,
hopeless battle they had been waging through the silent centuries.

And then it was that, as he stood gazing, half-fascinated by the tragic
magnificence that still clung to this crumbling monument to the
transient glories and the vanities of man, his eye was attracted by a
movement within the ruins; just a glimpse he got where a little sunlight
filtered through a fallen roof--a little patch of fawn with dark brown
stripes. In the instant that he saw it, it was gone. There had been no
sound, just a passing of something among the ruins. But Gordon King felt
the cold sweat upon his brow as hastily he gathered up his belt and
buckled it about his waist and seized his rifle. Blessed weight! He
thanked God that he had not gone on without it.

Forgotten were the ruins of the Khmers as he strode cautiously on
through the forest, constantly alert now, looking to the right and to
the left, and turning often a hasty glance behind him. Soft are the pads
of the carnivores. They give forth no sound. When the end came, if it
did come, he knew that there would be a sudden rush and then the
terrible fangs and talons. He experienced the uncanny sensation of
unseen eyes upon him. He was sure that the beast was stalking him. It
was maddening not to be able to see it again.

He found it necessary to consult his compass frequently in order to keep
to his course. His instrument was a small one, constructed like a
hunting-case watch. When the catch was released the cover flew open,
releasing the needle, which, when the cover was closed, was locked in
position, that its bearings might not be injured by sudden changes of
position.

King was on the point of checking his direction; but as he held the
compass open in his hand, he thought that he heard a slight noise behind
him. As he glanced back the toe of his boot struck a rock; and trying to
regain his equilibrium, he stumbled into a patch of tumbled sandstone
rocks, among which he sprawled heavily upon his face. Spurred by
thoughts of the sound that he had heard behind him, he scrambled quickly
to his feet; but though he searched the jungle as far as his eyes could
reach in every direction, he could discern no sign of any menacing
beast.

When he had fallen he had dropped his compass, and now that he was
satisfied that no danger lurked in his immediate vicinity, he set about
to recover the instrument. He found it quickly enough, but one glance at
it sent his heart into his boots--his compass was broken beyond
possibility of repair. It was several seconds before the full measure of
this calamity unfolded itself to his stunned consciousness.

For a moment Gordon King was appalled by the accident that had befallen
him, for he knew that it was a real catastrophe. Practically unversed in
woodcraft, he found himself in a jungle overhung by foliage so dense
that it was impossible to get his bearings from the sun, menaced by the
ever-present danger of the great cats and faced with what he felt now
was definite assurance that he would have to spend the night in these
surroundings with only a remote likelihood that he ever would be able to
find his way out in the event that he did not fall prey to the
carnivores or to thirst.

But only momentarily did he permit himself to be crushed by
contemplation of his predicament. He was well armed, and he knew that he
was resourceful and intelligent. Suddenly there came to him a
realisation of something that gave him renewed strength and hope.

Few men know until they are actually confronted by lethal danger whether
at heart they are courageous or cowardly. Never before had Gordon King
been called upon to make such an appraisal of himself. Alone in this
mysterious forest, uninfluenced by the possibilities of the acclaim or
reproaches of another, there was borne in upon his consciousness a
definite realisation of self-sufficiency. He fully realised the dangers
that confronted him; he did not relish them, but he felt no sensation of
fear.

A new feeling of confidence pervaded him as he set out again in the
direction that he had been going before he had fallen and broken his
compass. He was still alert and watchful, but he did not glance behind
him as much as he had previously. He felt that he was making good
headway, and he was sure that he was keeping a true course toward the
south. Perhaps, after all, he would get out before dark, he thought. The
condition that irritated him most was his increasing thirst, against
which he was compelled to pit every ounce of his will power that he
might conserve the small amount of water that remained in his canteen.

The route he was following was much more open than that along which he
had entered the jungle, so that he was buoyantly hopeful that he would
come out of his predicament and the jungle before night had enveloped
the gloomy haunt of the great cats; yet he realised that at best he
would win by but a small margin.

He was very tired now, a fact that was borne in upon him by the
frequency with which he stumbled, and when he fell he found that each
time it was only with increased effort that he rose again to his feet.
He was rather angry with himself for this seeming weakness. He knew that
there was only one thing that he could do to overcome it, and that thing
he could not afford to do, for the fleeting minutes of precious daylight
would not pause in their flight while he rested.

As the miles fell slowly and painfully behind him and the minutes raced
as though attempting to escape him and leave him to the mercy of the
darkness and the tigers, the hope that had been newborn in him for a
while commenced to desert him; yet he stumbled wearily on, wondering if
the jungle had no end and hoping against hope that beyond the next wall
of verdure he would break through into the clearing that would mean life
and food and water for him.

"It can't be far now," he thought, "and there must be an hour of full
daylight ahead." He was almost exhausted; a little rest would renew his
strength, he knew, and there, just ahead of him, was a large, flat rock.
He would rest for a moment upon it and renew his strength.

As he seated himself upon this hard resting-place, something upon its
surface caught his horrified gaze. It was the head and shoulders of a
warrior, cut in bold bas-relief.



2  The Delirium

There are circumstances in which even the bravest of men experience a
hopelessness of utter despair. Such was King's state of mind when he
realised that he had wandered in an aimless circle since noon and was
back again at his starting-point. Weakened by physical exhaustion and
hunger, he contemplated the future with nothing but pessimism. He had
had his chance to escape from the jungle, and he had failed. There was
no reason to believe that another day might bring greater opportunity.
Rest might recoup his strength slightly, but what he needed was food,
and on the morrow he would set forth not with a canteen full of water,
but with only a few drops with which to moisten his parched throat. He
had stumbled through plenty of mud-holes during the day, but he knew
that it would doubtless prove fatal to drink from such wells of
pollution.

As he stood there with bowed head, searching his mind for some solution
of his problem, his eyes gradually returned to focus, and as they did so
he saw on the surface of the soft ground beneath his gaze something
that, for the moment, drove thoughts of hunger and thirst and fatigue
from his mind--it was the pug of a tiger, fresh made in the soft earth.

"Why worry about to-morrow?" murmured King. "If half what that Cambodian
told me about this place at night is true, I'll be in luck if I see
another to-morrow."

He had read somewhere that tigers started to hunt late in the afternoon,
and he knew that they seldom climbed trees; but he was also aware of the
fact that leopards and panthers do and that the latter, especially, on
account of their size and inherent viciousness, were fully as much to be
dreaded as My Lord the Tiger himself. Realising that he must find some
sort of shelter as quickly as possible and recalling the ruins that he
had seen through the screen of foliage behind the rock before which he
stood, he parted the leafy screen ahead of him and forced his way
through.

Here the vegetation was less dense, as though the lesser growth of the
jungle had halted in fearful reverence before this awe-inspiring work of
man. Majestic even in its ruin was the great rectangular pile that
loomed clearly now before the eyes of the American. But not all of the
jungle had feared to encroach upon its sanctity. Great trees had taken
root upon its terraced walls, among its columns and its arches, and by
the slow and resistless pressure of their growth had forced aside the
supporting foundation and brought much of the edifice into complete
ruin.

Just before him rose a tower that seemed better to have withstood the
ravages of time than other portions of the building. It rose some sixty
feet above the ground, and near the summit was carved in heroic size the
face of a god that King suspected was Siva, the Destroyer. A few feet
above the rectangular doorway was a crumbling ledge and just above that
a smaller opening that might have been a window. Behind it all was dark,
but it carried to King's mind the suggestion of a hiding-place--a
sanctuary in the very bosom of Siva.

The face of the weather-worn tower offered sufficient foothold for an
agile climber, and the way was made easier by the corbelled construction
that supported a series of bas-reliefs rising one above another from the
ground level to the edge above the doorway. It was not, however, without
considerable difficulty that King, already almost exhausted, finally
reached the ledge, where he sat down for a moment's rest. Just above him
was the opening which he wished to investigate. As he let his thoughts
precede him in that investigation of this possible refuge, they
discovered, as thoughts are prone to do, enough unpleasant possibilities
to cast a pall of gloom over him. Doubtless it was the den of a panther.

What more secluded spot could this horrid beast discover in which to lie
up after feeding or in which to bear and rear its young?

The suggestion forced him to immediate action. He did not believe that
there was any panther there, but he could not endure the suspense of
doubt. Cocking his rifle, he arose and approached the opening, the lower
sill of which was just about level with his breast as he stood upon the
ledge above the doorway. Within all was black and silent. He listened
intently. If there were anything hiding there, he should hear it
breathe; but no sound broke the utter silence of the tomb-like vault.
Pushing his rifle ahead of him, King climbed to the sill, where he
remained in silence for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the
gloom of the interior, which was slightly relieved by light filtering in
through a crack at one side. A few feet below him was a stone floor, and
he could see dimly now that the chamber extended the full breadth and
width of the tower. In the centre of the apartment rose something, the
nature of which he could not distinguish; but he was sure that it was
inanimate.

Stepping down to the floor and advancing cautiously, his rifle ready,
King made a complete circuit of the walls. There was no panther there,
nor any signs that one ever had been there. Apparently the place had
never been entered by any creature since that day of mystery, centuries
gone, when the priests and temple girls had departed never to return.
Turning toward the object in the centre of the room, King quickly
identified it as the symbol of Siva and realised that he was doubtless
in the Holy of Holies.

Walking back to the window, he seated himself upon the sill, took a
small swallow from his scant store of water and lighted a cigarette; and
as the sudden night fell upon the jungle, he heard the crisp fall of
padded feet upon dry leaves in the courtyard of the temple beneath him.

His position, well above the floor of the jungle, imparted a feeling of
security; and the quiet enjoyment of a cigarette soothed his nerves and,
temporarily at least, allayed the gnawing pangs of hunger. He derived a
form of mild enjoyment by speculating upon the surprise and
consternation of his friends could they visualise his present situation.
Perhaps uttermost in his thoughts was Susan Anne Prentice, and he knew
that he would be in for a good scolding could she be aware of the
predicament into which his silly and ill-advised adventure had placed
him.

He recalled their parting and the motherly advice she had given him.
What a peach of a girl Susan Anne was! It seemed strange to him that she
had never married, for there were certainly enough eligible fellows
always hanging around her. He was rather glad that she had not, for he
realised that he should feel lost without the promise of her
companionship when he returned home. He had known Susan Anne as far back
as he could remember, and they had always been pals. In the city of
their birth their fathers' grounds adjoined and there was no fence
between; at the little lake where they spent their summers they were
next-door neighbours. Susan Anne had been as much a part of Gordon
King's life as had his father or his mother, for each was an only child
and they had been as close to one another as brother and sister.

He remembered telling her, the night before he had left home for this
trip, that she would doubtless be married by the time he returned. "No
chance," she had said with an odd little smile.

"I do not see why not," he had argued. "I know at least half a dozen men
who are wild about you."

"Not the right one," she had replied.

"So there is someone?"

"Perhaps."

He wondered who the fellow could be and decided that he must be an awful
chump not to appreciate the wonderful qualities of Susan Anne. In so far
as looks were concerned, she had it on all the girls of his
acquaintance, in addition whereto she had a good head on her shoulders
and was a regular fellow in every other respect. Together they had often
bemoaned the fact that she was not a man, that they might have palled
around on his wanderings together.

His reveries were blasted by a series of low, coughing roars down there
somewhere in the darkness at a little distance from the ruins. They were
followed by a crashing sound, as of a large body dashing through
underbrush. Then there was a scream and a thud, followed by low growls
and silence. King felt his scalp tingle. What tragedy of the jungle
night had been enacted in that black, mysterious void?

The sudden and rather terrifying noise and its equally abrupt cessation
but tended to impress upon the man and to accentuate the normal,
mysterious silence of the jungle. He knew that the jungle teemed with
life; yet, for the most part, it moved as silently as might the ghosts
of the priests and the temple girls with which imagination might easily
people this crumbling ruin of the temple of the Destroyer. Often from
below him and from the surrounding jungle came the suggestion of
noises--furtive, stealthy sounds that might have been the ghosts of
long-dead noises. Sometimes he could interpret these sounds as the
cracking of a twig or the rustling of leaves beneath a padded paw, but
more often there was just the sense of things below him--grim and
terrible creatures that lived by death alone.

And thus the night wore on, until at last day came. He had dozed
intermittently, sitting upon the window ledge with his back against its
ancient stone frame, his rifle across his lap. He did not feel much
refreshed, but when the full light of the day had enveloped the jungle
he clambered swiftly down the ruins to the ground and set out once again
toward the south, filled with a determination to push on regardless of
hunger and fatigue until he had escaped the hideous clutches of this
dismal forest, which now seemed to him to have assumed a malignant
personality that was endeavouring to foil his efforts and retain him for
ever for some sinister purpose of its own. He had come to hate the
jungle; he wanted to shout aloud against it the curses that were in his
heart. He was impelled to discharge his rifle against it as though it
were some creature barring his way to liberty. But he held himself in
leash, submerging everything to the desire for escape.

He found that he moved more slowly than he had upon the preceding day.
Obstacles were more difficult to surmount, and he was forced to stop
more often to rest. These delays galled him; but when he tried to push
on more rapidly he often stumbled and fell, and each time he found it
more difficult to arise. Then there dawned upon him the realisation that
he might not have sufficient strength to reach the edge of the jungle,
and for the first time unquestioned fear assailed him.

He sat down upon the ground and, leaning his back against a tree, argued
the matter out thoroughly in his own mind. At last his strength of will
overcame his fears, so that realisation of the fact that he might not
get out that day no longer induced an emotional panic.

"If not to-day, to-morrow," he thought; "if not tomorrow, then the day
after. Am I a weakling that I cannot carry on for a few days? Am I to
die of starvation in a country abounding in game?"

Physical stamina being so considerably influenced as it is by the
condition of the mind, it was with a sense of renewed power that King
arose and continued on his way, but imbued now not solely with the
desire to escape immediately from the jungle but to wrest from it
sustenance and strength that it might be forced to aid him in his escape
even though the consummation of his hope might be deferred indefinitely.
The psychological effect of this new mental attitude wrought a sudden
metamorphosis. He was no longer a hunted fugitive fleeing for his life;
he had become in fact a jungle dweller hunting for food and for water.
The increasing heat of the advancing day had necessitated inroads upon
his scant supply of the latter, yet he still had a few drops left; and
these he was determined not to use until he could no longer withstand
the tortures of thirst.

He had by now worked out a new and definite plan of procedure; he would
work constantly downhill, keeping a sharp look out for game, knowing
that eventually he must come to some of the numerous small streams that
would ultimately lead him to the Mekong, the large central river that
bisects Cambodia on its way to the China Sea; or per-chance he might hit
upon one of those streams that ran south and emptied into the Tonle-Sap.

He found it much easier going downhill, and he was glad on this account
that he had adopted his present plan. The nature of the country changed
a little, too; open spaces were more numerous. Sometimes these flats
were marshy, requiring wide detours, and usually they were covered with
elephant grass that resembled the cat tails with which he had been
familiar as a boy during his summer vacations in the country. He did not
like these spaces because they appeared too much the natural habitat of
snakes, and he recalled having read somewhere that in a single year
there had been sixteen thousand recorded deaths from snake bites in
British India alone. This recollection came to him while he was in the
centre of a large patch of elephant grass, and consequently he moved
very slowly, examining the ground ahead of him carefully at each step.
This, of course, necessitated pushing the reeds apart, a slow and
laborious procedure; but it also resulted in his moving more quietly; so
that when he emerged from the reeds a sight met his eyes that doubtless
he would not have seen had he crashed through noisily.

Directly in front of him and maybe fifty paces distant under a great
spreading banyan tree lay several wild pigs, all of them comfortably
asleep except one old boar, which seemed to be on guard. That King's
approach had not been entirely noiseless was evidenced by the fact that
the great beast was standing head-on and alert, his ears up-pricked,
looking straight at the point at which the man emerged from the elephant
grass.

For an instant man and beast stood silently eyeing one another. King saw
lying near the boar a half-grown pig, that would make better eating than
the tough old tusker. He brought his rifle to his shoulder and fired at
the sleeping pig, expecting the remainder of the herd to turn and flee
into the jungle; but he had not taken into consideration the violent
disposition of the boar. The rest of the herd, awakened with startling
suddenness by the unaccustomed report of the rifle, leaped to their
feet, stood for an instant in bewilderment, and then turned and
disappeared among the undergrowth. Not so the boar. At the crack of the
rifle he charged.

There is something rather awe-inspiring in the charge of a wild boar,
especially if one happens to be in the path of it, as King was. Perhaps
because of his unfamiliarity with the habits of wild boars, the charge
was entirely unexpected; and in the brief instant that he had in which
to defend himself, he realised that he did not know what was the most
vulnerable spot in a boar's anatomy. All that he sensed in that all too
short interval were a pair of great flashing tusks, huge jowls, two
red-rimmed wicked little eyes, and a stiffly upright tail bearing down
upon him with all the velocity and apparently quite the weight of a
steam locomotive.

There seemed to be nothing to shoot at but a face. His first shot struck
the boar squarely between the eyes and dropped him, but only for an
instant. Then he was up again and coming. Giving thanks for a magazine
rifle, King pumped three more bullets straight into that terrifying
countenance, and to the last one the great beast rolled over against
King's feet. None too sure that he had more than stunned him, the man
quickly put a bullet through the savage heart.

It had been a close call, and he trembled a little to think what his
fate might have been had he been seriously wounded and left there dying
in the jungle. Assured that the boar was dead, he went quickly to the
pig that had been killed instantly by his first shot. As his knife sank
into the flesh, he became suddenly conscious of a change within him. He
was moved by urgings that he had never sensed before. He was impelled to
bury his teeth in the raw flesh and gorge himself. He realised that this
was partially the result of gnawing hunger; but yet it seemed deeper,
something primitive and bestial that always had been a part of him but
that never before had had occasion to come to the surface. He knew in
that brief instant the feeling of the wild beast for its kill. He looked
quickly and furtively about to see if there might be any creature bold
enough to contest his possession of the fruit of his prowess. He felt
the snarling muscles of his upper lip tense and he sensed within him the
rumblings of a growl, though no sound passed his lips.

It required a determined effort of will power to refrain from eating the
flesh raw, so hungry was he; but he managed to conquer the urge and set
about building a fire, though the meal that he finally produced was
scarcely more than a compromise, the meat being charred upon the outside
and raw within. After he had eaten he felt renewed strength, but now the
tortures of thirst assailed him more poignantly than before. His canteen
was empty; and though he had passed by stagnant pools of water during
the day, he had been able to resist the temptation to drink, realising,
as he did, the germs of terrible fever that lurked in these slimy pools.

The next few days constituted a long nightmare of suffering and
disappointment. He found his path toward the Mekong barred by impassable
swamps that forced him northward over a broken terrain of ravines and
ridges that taxed his rapidly waning strength. For some time after
leaving the marshes he had seen no water, but upon the third day he came
to a pool in the bottom of a ravine. That it was the drinking-hole of
wild beasts was evidenced by the multitude of tracks in the muddy bank.
The liquid was green and thick, but not for an instant did the man
hesitate. Throwing himself upon his belly, he plunged his hands and face
into the foul mess and drank. Neither fever nor death could be worse
than the pangs of thirst.

Later that day he shot a monkey and, cooking some of the flesh, appeased
his hunger; and thus for several days he wandered, shooting an
occasional monkey for food and drinking water wherever he found it. He
was always conscious of the presence of the great cats, though only upon
one or two occasions did he catch fleeting glimpses of them; but at
night he heard them moving softly beneath some tree in which he had
found precarious sanctuary, where he crouched nursing the hope that no
leopard or panther would discover him. Occasionally he saw small herds
of wild elephants, and these he always gave a wide berth. He had long
given up all hope of escaping from the jungle, and he could not but
wonder at man's tenacity in clinging to life in the face of suffering
and hardship when he knew that at best he was but prolonging his agony
and only temporarily delaying the inevitable.

Seven days and seven nights he had spent in the jungle, and the last
night had been the worst of all. He had dozed intermittently. The jungle
had been full of noises, and he had seen strange, dim figures passing
beneath him. When the eighth morning broke, he was shivering with cold.
His chattering teeth reminded him of castanets. He looked about him for
dancers and was surprised that he saw none. Something moved through the
foliage of the jungle beneath him. It was yellowish-brown with dark
stripes. He called to it and it disappeared. Quite remarkably he ceased
to be cold, and instead his body burned as though consumed by internal
fires. The tree in which he sat swayed dizzily, and then with an effort
he pulled himself together and slipped to the ground. He found that he
was very tired and that he was forced to stop to rest every few minutes,
and sometimes he shook with cold and again he burned with heat.

It was about noon; the sun was high and the heat terrific. King lay
shivering where he had fallen at the foot of a silk-cotton tree, against
the bole of which he leaned for support. Far down a jungle aisle he saw
an elephant. It was not alone; there were other things preceding
it--things that could not be in this deserted primeval jungle. He closed
his eyes and shook his head. It was only an hallucination brought on by
a touch of fever, of that he was certain. But when he opened his eyes
again the elephant was still there, and he recognised the creatures that
preceded it as warriors clothed in brass. They were coming closer. King
crawled back into the concealing verdure of the underbrush. His head
ached terribly. There was a buzzing hum in his ears that drowned all
other sounds. The caravan passed within fifty feet of him, but he heard
no sound. There were archers and spear men--brown men with cuirasses of
burnished brass--and then came the elephant trapped in regal splendour,
and in a gorgeous howdah upon its back rode a girl. He saw her profile
first, and then as something attracted her attention she turned her face
full toward him. It was a face of exquisite and exotic beauty, but a sad
face with frightened eyes. Her trappings were more gorgeous than the
trappings of the elephant. Behind her marched other warriors, but
presently all were gone down the aisles of the jungle in spectral
silence.

"Weeping queens on misty elephants!" He had read the phrase somewhere in
a book. "Gad!" he exclaimed. "What weird tricks fever plays upon one's
brain. I could have sworn that what I saw was real."

Slowly he staggered to his feet and pushed on, whither or in what
direction he had no idea. It was a blind urge of self-preservation that
goaded him forward; to what goal, he did not know; all that he knew was
that if he remained where he was he must inevitably perish. Perhaps he
would perish anyway, but if he went on, there was a chance. Figures,
strange and familiar, passed in jumbled and fantastic procession along
the corridors of his mind. Susan Anne Prentice clothed in brass rode
upon the back of an elephant. A weeping queen with painted cheeks and
rouged lips came and knelt beside him offering him a draft of cold,
crystal-clear water from a golden goblet, but when he lifted it to his
lips the goblet became a battered canteen from which oozed a slimy green
liquid that burned his mouth and nauseated him. Then he saw soldiers in
brass who held platters containing steaming sirloin steaks and
French-fried potatoes, which changed magically to sherbert, iced tea,
and waffles with maple syrup.

"This will never do," thought King. "I am going absolutely daffy. I
wonder how long the fever lasts, or how long it takes to finish a
fellow."

He was lying upon the ground at the edge of a little clearing partially
hid by the tall grass into which he had sunk. Suddenly everything seemed
to whirl around in circles, and then the world went black and he lost
consciousness. It was very late in the afternoon when he came to; but
the fever seemed to have left him, temporarily at least, and his mind
was clear.

"This can't go on much longer," he soliloquised. "If I don't find some
place pretty soon where I can lie in safety until after the fever has
passed entirely, it will be just too bad. I wonder what it feels like to
be mauled by a tiger."

But when he attempted to rise he discovered to his horror that he had
not sufficient strength to get to his feet. He still clung to his rifle.
He had long since made up his mind that in it lay his principal hope of
salvation. Without it, he must go hungry and fall prey to the first
beast that attacked him. He knew that if he discarded it and his heavy
belt of ammunition he might stagger on a short distance and then, when
he fell again, he would be helpless.

As he lay there looking out into the little clearing, speculating upon
his fate and trying to estimate the number of hours of life that might
remain to him, he saw a strange figure enter the clearing. It was an old
man with a straggly white beard growing sparsely upon his chin and upper
lip. He wore a long, yellow cloak and a fantastic headdress, above which
he carried a red umbrella. He moved slowly, his eyes bent upon the
ground.

"Damned fever," muttered King, and shut his eyes.

He kept them closed for a minute or two, but when he opened them the old
man was still in sight, though by this time he had almost crossed the
clearing, and now there was another figure in the picture. From out of
the foliage beyond the clearing appeared a savage, snarling face--a
great, vicious, yellow-fanged face; yellowish-white and tan with broken
markings of dark brown stripes that looked almost black--a hideous head,
and yet, at the same time, a gorgeously majestic head. Slowly, silently
the great tiger emerged into the clearing, its gaunt, flat-sided body
moving sinuously, its yellow-green eyes blazing terribly at the back of
the unconscious old man.

"God, how real!" breathed King. "I could swear that I really saw them
both. Only the impossible figure of that old man with the red parasol
could convince me that they are both made of the same material as the
spectral elephant, the weeping queen, and the brass-bound soldiers."

The tiger was creeping rapidly toward the old man. His speed gradually
accelerated.

"I can't stand it," cried King, raising his rifle to his shoulder. "They
may be only an hallucination--"

There was a short coughing roar as the tiger charged, and at the same
instant King squeezed the trigger of his rifle and fainted.



3  The Hunter


Vay Thon, high priest of the temple of Siva in the city of Lodidhapura,
was the source of much anxiety on the part of the lesser priests, who
felt responsible to Siva and the King for the well-being of Vay Thon.
But how might one cope with the vagaries of a weakness so holy and, at
the same time, so erratic as that which occasionally claimed the amnesic
Vay Thon? They tried to watch over him at all times, but it is difficult
to maintain constant espionage over one so holy, whose offices or whose
meditations may not lightly be broken in upon by lesser mortals, even
though they be priests of the great god, Siva.

All was well when Vay Thon confined himself in his meditations to the
innermost sanctum of the Holy of Holies; here, in the safe-keeping of
his god, he was isolated from mankind and safe from danger. But the
meditations of Vay Thon were not always thus securely cloistered. Often
he strolled along the broad terrace beside the mighty temple, where
wrapped in utter forgetfulness of himself and of the world he walked in
silent communion with his god.

With his long, yellow cloak and his red parasol he was also a familiar
figure upon the streets of Lodidhapura. Here he was often accompanied by
lesser priests, who walked in cuirasses of polished brass, who marched
ahead and in the rear. Of all these symbols of worldly pomp and power,
Vay Thon was entirely unconscious. During those periods that he was
wrapped in the oblivion of meditation and upon the numerous occasions
when he had managed to leave the temple ground unperceived, he had
walked through the streets of the city equally unaware of all that
surrounded him. Upon three separate and distinct occasions he had been
found wandering in the jungle, and Lodivarman, the King, had threatened
to wreak dire punishment upon the lesser priests should harm ever befall
Vay Thon during one of these excursions.

It so happened that upon this very day Vay Thon had walked out of the
city and into the jungle alone. That he had been able to leave a walled
city, the gates of which were heavily guarded by veteran warriors, might
have seemed a surprising thing to the citizens of Lodidhapura; but not
so to the one familiar with the secret galleries that lay beneath the
temple and the palace, through which the ancient builders of Lodidhapura
might well have expected to flee the wrath of the downtrodden slaves who
comprised 75 per cent of the population. Though times have changed with
the passing centuries, the almost forgotten passageways remain. It was
through one of these that Vay Thon reached the jungle. He did not know
that he was in the jungle. He was as totally oblivious of his
surroundings as is one who is wrapped in deep and dreamless sleep.

The last that the lesser priests had seen of Vay Thon was when he had
entered the Holy of Holies, which houses the symbol of Siva. As they had
noticed a glassy expression in his eyes, they had known that he was
entering upon a period of meditation. Therefore, they maintained a watch
at the entrance to the chamber, but felt no concern during the passing
hours since they knew that Vay Thon was safe. What they did not know of
was the loose stone in the flooring of the chamber directly behind the
symbol of Siva, or the passageway beneath, which led to a ravine in the
jungle beyond the city wall. And so during those hours Vay Thon wandered
far into the jungle, and with him, perhaps, walked Siva, the Destroyer.

His rapt meditation, which amounted to almost total unconsciousness of
his mundane surroundings, was shattered by a noise of terrific violence
such as had never before impinged upon the ears of Vay Thon or any other
inhabitant of Lodidhapura, Awakened suddenly as from a deep sleep, the
startled priest wheeled about amazed at his surroundings, but more
amazed by the sight which greeted his eyes. Wallowing in its own gore
scarce three paces behind him lay a great tiger in its death throes; and
a little to his right, a wisp of blue smoke rose from some grasses at
the edge of the clearing.

When King regained consciousness he was vaguely aware of voices that
seemed to be floating in the air about him. The sounds were meaningless,
but they conveyed to his fevered brain an assurance of human origin. He
opened his eyes. Above him was a brown face. Supporting his head and
shoulders he felt the naked flesh of a human arm. His eyes wandered.
Standing close was a woman, naked but for a sampot drawn diaperwise
between her legs and knotted at the belt. Hiding fearfully behind her
was a naked child. The man who supported him spoke to him, but in a
language that he could not understand.

From whence had these people come, or were they but figments of his
fevered imagination like the old man with the yellow cloak and the red
parasol? Were they no more real than the spectral tiger that he had shot
at in his delirium? He closed his eyes in an effort to gain control of
his senses, but when he opened them again the man and the woman and the
child were still there. With a sigh of resignation he gave it up. His
throbbing temples were unequal to the demands of sustained thought. He
closed his eyes, and his chin dropped upon his breast.

"He is dying," said Che, looking up at the woman.

"Let us take him to our dwelling," replied Kangrey, the woman. "I will
watch over him while you lead the holy priest back to Lodidhapura."

As the man lifted King in his arms and turned to carry him away, the
American caught a glimpse of an old man in a long, yellow cloak and a
strange headdress, who carried above his head a red parasol. The
American closed his eyes against the persistent hallucination of his
fever. His head swam, and once again he lost consciousness.

King never knew how long he remained unconscious, but when he next
opened his eyes he found himself lying upon a bed of grasses in the
interior of a dark retreat which he thought, at first, was a cave.
Gradually he discerned the presence of a man, a woman, and a child. He
did not remember ever having seen them before. The child was naked, and
the man and woman were clothed only in sampots. The woman was
ministering to him, forcing a liquid between his lips.

Slowly and sluggishly his mind commenced to function, and at last he
recalled them--the creatures of the hallucination that had conjured the
image of the old man in the yellow cloak with the red parasol, and the
charging tiger that he had dreamed of shooting. Would the fever never
leave him? Was he to die thus alone in the sombre jungle tortured by
hallucinations that might terminate only with his discovery by a tiger?

But yet how real was the feeling and taste of the liquid that the woman
was forcing between his lips. He could even feel the animal warmth of
the bare arm that was supporting his head and shoulders. Could any
figment of a fever-tortured brain be as realistic as these? Repeatedly
he closed his eyes and opened them again, but always the same picture
was there before him. He raised one hand weakly and touched the woman's
shoulder and face. They seemed real. He was almost convinced that they
were when he sank again into unconsciousness.

For days Gordon King hovered between life and death. Kangrey, the woman,
ministered to him, utilising the lore of the primitive jungle dweller in
the brewing of medicinal potions from the herbs of the forest. Of equal
or perhaps greater value were certain incantations which she droned
monotonously above him.

Little Uda, the child, was much impressed with all these unusual and
remarkable occurrences. The stranger with the pale skin was the first
momentous event of his little life. The strange clothing that his
parents had removed from their helpless charge thrilled him with awe, as
did the rifle, the knife, and the revolver, which he rightfully guessed
to be weapons, though he had no more conception of the medianism of the
firearms than did his parents. Uda was indefatigable in his search for
the herbs and roots that Kangrey, his mother, required; and when Che
returned from the hunt it was always Uda who met him first with a full
and complete history of their patient's case brought down to the last
minute with infinite attention to details.

At last the fever broke. Though it left King weak and helpless in body,
his mind was clear, and he knew at last that the man and the woman and
the child were no figments of his imagination. Of course, the old man
with the yellow cloak and the red parasol had been but an hallucination
of a kind with the charging tiger; but this kindly brown woman, who was
nursing him back to health, was real; and his eyes filled as the thanks
which he could not voice welled up within his breast.

A day and a night without any return of the fever or hallucination
convinced King that the ministration of the kindly natives had rid him
of the illness that had nearly killed him, yet he was so weak that he
still had little or no hope of ultimate recovery. He had not the
strength to raise a hand to his face. It required a real physical effort
to turn his head from side to side upon the rough pallet of grasses upon
which he lay. He noticed that they never left him alone for long. Either
the woman or the child was with him during the day, and all three slept
near him upon the floor of their little den at night. In the daytime the
woman or the child brushed the flies and other insects from him with a
leafy branch and gave him food at frequent intervals. What the food was
he did not know except that it was semi-liquid, but now that his fever
had passed he was so ravenous that whatever it was they gave him he
relished it.

One day when he had been left alone with the little boy longer than
usual, the child, possibly tiring of the monotony of brushing insects
from the body of the pale one, deserted his post, leaving King alone.
King did not care, for much of his time, anyway, was spent in sleep and
he had become so accustomed to the insects that they no longer irritated
him as they formerly had. He was awakened from a sleep by the feel of a
rough hand upon his face. Opening his eyes, he saw a monkey squatting
beside him. When King opened his eyes the animal leaped nimbly away, and
then the American saw that there were several monkeys in the chamber.
They were quite the largest that he had seen in the jungle, and in his
helpless condition he knew that they might constitute a real menace to
his life. But they did not attack him, nor did they come close to him
again; and it soon became evident that their visit was prompted solely
by curiosity.

A little later he heard a scraping sound behind him in one corner of the
chamber. Having regained his strength during the past few days
sufficiently to be able to move his head and hands with comparative
ease, he turned his head to see what was going on. The sight that met
his eyes would have been highly amusing had it not been fraught with the
possibility of such unhappy results.

The monkeys had discovered his weapons and his clothing. All had
congregated at the point of interest. They were dragging the things
about and chattering excitedly. They seemed to be quarrelling about
something; and their chattering and scolding rose in volume until
finally one old fellow, who was apparently contesting possession of the
rifle with two others, leaped angrily upon them, growling and biting.
Instantly the other two relinquished their holds upon the firearm and
scurried to a far corner of the chamber; whereupon the victor seized the
weapon again and dragged it toward the doorway.

"Hey!" shouted King in the loudest voice he could muster. "Drop that;
and get out of here!"

The sound of the human voice seemed to startle the monkeys, but not
sufficiently to cause them to relinquish the purpose they had in mind.
It is true that they scampered from the chamber, but they gathered up
all of King's belongings and took them with them, even to his socks.

King shouted to the boy whom he had heard the parents address as Uda;
but when at last the little chap came, breathless and frightened, it was
too late to avert or remedy the catastrophe, even if King had been able
to explain to Uda what had happened.

The night when she returned, Kangrey found her patient very weak, but
she did not guess the cause of it since she could not know that in the
mind of the pale one was implanted the conviction that his only hope for
eventual escape from the jungle had lain in the protection that the
stolen weapons would have afforded him.

The days and nights wore slowly on as gradual convalescence brought
returning strength to the sick man. To while away the tedious hours he
sought to learn the language of his benefactors; and when, finally, they
understood his wish they entered with such spirit into its consummation
that he found himself deluged with such a variety of new words that his
mind became fogged with information. But eventually some order and
understanding came out of the chaos, so that presently he was able to
converse with Che and Kangrey and Uda. Thereafter his existence was far
less monotonous; but his slow recovery irked and worried him, for it
seemed impossible that his strength ever would return. He was so
emaciated that it was well for his peace of mind that he had no access
to any mirrors.

Yet surely though slowly, his strength was returning. From sitting up
with his back against the wall he came at length to standing upon his
feet once more; and though he was weak and tottering, it was a
beginning; and each day now he found his strength returning more
rapidly.

From talking with Che and Kangrey, King had learned the details of the
simple life they led. Che was a hunter. Some days he brought back
nothing, but as a rule he did not return without adding to the simple
larder. The flesh was usually that of a monkey or bird or one of the
small rodents that lived in the jungle. Fish he brought, too, and fruit
and vegetables and sometimes wild honey.

Che and Kangrey and Uda were equally proficient in making fires with a
primitive fire stick, which they twirled between the palms of their
hands. Kangrey possessed a single pot in which all food was cooked. It
was a brass pot, the inside of which she kept scrupulously polished,
using earth and leaves for this purpose.

Che was, indeed, a primitive hunter, armed with a spear, bow and arrows,
and a knife. When King explained to him the merits of the firearms that
had been stolen by the monkeys, Che sympathised with his guest in their
loss; but he promised to equip King with new weapons such as he himself
carried; and King expressed his gratitude to the native, though he could
not arouse within himself much enthusiasm at the prospect of facing a
long trip through this tiger-infested forest armed only with the crude
weapons of primitive man, even were he skilled in their use.

As King's strength had returned, he had tried to keep together in his
mind the happenings that had immediately preceded his illness, but he
always felt that the old man with the yellow cloak and the red parasol
and the charging tiger that had fallen to a single shot were figments of
a fever-tortured brain. He had never spoken to Che and Kangrey about the
hallucination because it seemed silly to do so; yet he found its memory
persisting in his mind as a reality rather than an hallucination, so
that at last, one evening, he determined to broach the subject,
approaching it in a roundabout way.

"Che," he said, "you have lived in the jungle a long while, have you
not?"

"Yes," replied the native. "For five years I was a slave in Lodidhapura,
but then I escaped, and all the rest of my life I have spent in the
jungle."

"Did you ever see an old man wandering in the jungle," continued King,
"an old man who wore a long yellow cloak and carried a red parasol?"

"Of course," replied Che, "and you saw him, too. It was Vay Thon, whom
you saved from the charge of My Lord the Tiger."

King looked at the native in open-mouthed astonishment. "Have you had a
touch of fever too, Che?" he asked "No," replied the native. "Che is a
strong man; he is never ill."

"No," Kangrey said proudly. "Che is a very strong man. In all the years
that I have known him, he has never been ill."

"Did you see this old man with the yellow cloak and the red parasol,
Kangrey?" asked King, sceptically.

"Of course I did. Why do you ask?" inquired the woman.

"And you saw me kill the tiger?" demanded the American.

"I did not see you kill him; but I heard a great noise, and I saw him
after he had died. There was a little round hole just behind his left
ear; and when Che cut him open to see why he died, he found a piece of
metal in his brain, the same metal that the walls of the palace of
Lodivarman are covered with."

"That is lead," said Che with an air of superiority.

"Then you mean to tell me that this old man and the tiger were real?"
demanded King.

"What do you think they were?" asked Che.

"I thought they were of the same stuff as were the other dreams that the
fever brought into my brain," replied King.

"No," said Che, "they were not dreams. They were real. And it was good
for you and for me and for Vay Thon that you killed the tiger, though
how you did it neither Vay Thon nor I can understand."

"It was certainly good for Vay Thon," said King.

"And good for you and for me," insisted Che.

"Why was it so good for us?" asked the American.

"Vay Thon is the high priest of Siva in the city of Lodidhapura. He is
very powerful. Only Lodivarman, the King, is more powerful. Vay Thon had
wandered far from the city immersed in deep thought. He did not know
where he was. He did not know how to return to Lodidhapura. Kangrey and
I are runaway slaves of Lodidhapura. Had we been discovered before this
happened, we should have been killed; but Vay Thon promised us our
freedom if I would lead him back to the city. In gratitude to you for
having saved his life he charged Kangrey and me to nurse you back to
health and to take care of you. So you see it was good for all of us
that you killed the tiger that would have killed Vay Thon."

"And you would not have nursed me back to health, Che, had Vay Thon not
exacted the promise from you?" inquired King.

"We are runaway slaves," said the native. "We fear all men, or until Vay
Thon promised us our freedom, we did fear all men; and it would have
been safer for us to let you die, since you were unknown to us and might
have carried word to the soldiers of Lodidhapura and led them to our
hiding-place."

For a time King remained in silent thought, wondering, in view of what
he had just heard, where the dividing line had lain between reality and
hallucination. "Perhaps, then," he said with a smile, "the weeping queen
on the misty elephant and the many soldiers in cuirasses of polished
brass were real too."

"You saw those?" asked Che.

"Yes," eplied King.

"When and where?" demanded the native excitedly.

"It could not have been very long before I saw the high priest and the
tiger."

"They are getting close," said Che nervously to Kangrey. "We must search
for another hiding-place."

"You forget the promise of Vay Thon," Kangrey reminded him. "We are free
now; we are no longer slaves."

"I had forgotten," said Che. "I am not yet accustomed to freedom, and
perhaps I think, too, that possibly Vay Thon may forget."

"I do not think so," said the woman. "Lodivarman might forget, but not
Vay Thon, for Vay Thon is a good man. Every one in Lodidhapura said so."

"You really believe that I saw an elephant, a queen, and soldiers?"
demanded King.

"Why not?" asked Che.

"There are such things in the jungle?" inquired the young man.

"Of course," said Kangrey.

"And this city of Lodidhapura?" demanded King. "I have never heard of
it before. Is that close beside the jungle?"

"It is in the jungle," said Che.

King shook his head. "It is strange," he said. "I wandered through the
jungle for days and never saw signs of a human being or a human
habitation."

"There are many things in the jungle which men do not always see,"
replied Che. "There are the Nagas and the Yeacks. You may be glad that
you did not see them."

"What are the Nagas and the Yeacks?" asked King.

"The Nagas are the Cobra people," replied Che. "They live in a great
palace upon a mountain and are very powerful. They have seven heads and
can change themselves into any form of creature that they desire. They
are workers of magic. It is said that Lodivarman's principal wife is the
queen of the Nagas and that she changed herself into the form of a
beautiful woman that she might rule directly over the mortals as well as
the gods. But I do not believe that, because no one, not even a Naga,
would choose to be the queen of a leper. But the Yeacks are most to be
feared because they do not live far away upon a mountain-top, but are
everywhere in the jungle."

"What are they like?" asked King.

"They are horrible Ogres who live upon human flesh," replied Che.

"Have you ever seen them?" asked King.

"Of course not," replied the native. "Only he who is about to be
devoured sees them."

Gordon King listened with polite attention to the folk tales of Che and
Kangrey, but he knew that they were only legends of a kind with the
fabulous city of Lodidhapura and its Leper King, Lodivarman. He was
somewhat at a loss to account for Vay Thon, the high priest, but he
decided finally that the old man was an eccentric hermit who had come
into the jungle to live and that to him might be attributed many of the
fabulous tales that Che and Kangrey narrated so glibly. That his two
friends were runaway slaves from the fabulous city of Lodidhapura, King
doubted, attributing their story to the desire of primitive minds to
inject a strain of romance into their otherwise monotonous lives.

As King's strength returned rapidly, he insisted more and more upon
getting out into the open. He was anxious to accompany Che upon his
hunting trips, but the native insisted that he was not yet sufficiently
strong. So the American had to content himself with remaining with
Kangrey and Uda at home, where he practised using the weapons that Che
had made for him, which consisted of a bow and arrow and a short, heavy
javelin-like spear. Thanks to the training of his college days, King was
proficient in the use of the latter; and he practised assiduously with
his bow and arrows until his marksmanship aroused the admiring applause
of even Kangrey, who considered Che the best bowman in the world, to
whose expert proficiency no other mortal might hope to attain.

The dwelling of Che and Kangrey and Uda was in an ancient Khmer ruin and
consisted of a small room which had withstood the march of the
centuries--a room that was peculiarly suited to the requirements of the
little jungle family since it had but a single entrance, a small
aperture that could be effectually blocked at night with a flat slab of
stone against the depredations of marauding cats.

Their existence was as simple and primitive as might have been that of
the first man; yet there was inherent in it an undeniable charm that
King felt in spite of the monotony and his anxiety to escape from the
jungle.

Che knew nothing but the jungle and the fabulous city of Lodidhapura. It
is difficult for us to conceive of an endless infinity of space, but Che
could imagine an endless jungle. The question of limitation did not
enter his mind and, therefore, did not confuse him. To him, the world
was a jungle. When King realised this, he knew, too, that it was
hopeless to expect Che to attempt to lead him out of a jungle that he
believed had no end.

For some time King had been making short excursions into the jungle in
search of game while he repeatedly sought to impress upon Che that he
was strong enough to accompany the native upon his hunts; but he was met
with so many excuses that he at last awoke to the fact that Che did not
want him along; and so the American determined to set out by himself
upon a prolonged and determined effort to prove his efficiency. He left
one morning after Che had departed, turning his steps in a different
direction from that taken by the native. He was determined to bring back
something to demonstrate his prowess to Che, but though he moved
silently through the jungle, keeping the sharpest look out, he saw no
sign of game of any description; and having had past experience of the
ease with which one might become lost in the jungle, he turned back at
last empty-handed.

During his long convalescence King had had an opportunity to consider
many things, and one of them had been his humiliating lack of jungle
craft. He knew, therefore, that he must mark the trail in some way if he
were to hope to return to the dwelling of Che and Kangrey. He could not
blaze the trees with his knife on a hunting excursion since the noise
would unquestionably frighten away the game, and so he invented several
other ways of marking the trail--sticking twigs in the rough bark of
trees that he passed, scraping the ground with the sharp point of his
javelin, and placing three twigs in the form of an arrow, pointing
backward along the trail over which he had come. Accordingly, he had
little difficulty to-day in back-tracking along the way to the home of
Che.

Practising jungle craft necessitated moving as noiselessly as possible,
and so it was that he came as silently as might a hunting cat to the
edge of the ruin where lay the dwelling of his friend. As King came
within sight of the familiar entrance, a scene met his eyes that froze
his blood and brought his heart into his throat. In the small clearing
that Che had made, little Uda was at play. He was digging with a sharp
stick in the leafy mould of the ground, while watching him at the edge
of the clearing crouched a great panther.

King saw the beast gradually drawing its hind feet well beneath its body
as it prepared to charge.



4  Fou-tan

Returning early from a successful hunt, Che approached the clearing. He,
too, moved silently, for thus he always moved through the jungle. Along
a forest aisle he could see the clearing before he reached it. He saw
Uda digging among the dry leaves, which made a rustling sound that would
have drowned the noise of the approach of even a less careful jungle
animal than Che. The father smiled as his eyes rested upon his
first-born, but in the same instant the smile froze to an expression of
horror as he saw a panther leap into the clearing.

Kangrey, emerging at that moment from their gloomy dwelling, saw it too,
and screamed as she rushed forward barehanded, impelled by the mother
instinct to protect its young. And then, all in the same brief instant,
Che saw a heavy javelin streak lightning-like from the jungle. He saw
the panther crumple in its charge, and as he ran forward he saw the pale
one leap into the clearing and snatch Uda into his arms.

Che, realising, as had King, the fury of a wounded panther, rushed upon
the scene with ready spear as the pale one tossed Uda to Kangrey and
turned again to face the great cat. But there was no necessity for the
vicious thrust with which Che drove his spear into the carcass of the
beast, for the panther was already dead.

For a moment they stood in silence, looking down upon the kill--four
primitive jungle people, naked but for sampots. It was King's first
experience of a thrill of the primitive hunter. He trembled a little,
but that was reaction to the fear that he had felt for the life of
little Uda.

"It is a large panther," said Che simply.

"Only a strong man could have slain it thus," said Kangrey. "Only Che
could thus have slain with a single cast so great a panther."

"It was not the spear of Che. It was the spear of the pale one that laid
low the prince of darkness," said Che.

Kangrey looked her astonishment and would not be convinced until she had
examined the spear that protruded from beneath the left shoulder of the
great cat. "This, then, is the reward that Vay Thon said would be ours
if we befriended the pale one," she declared.

Uda said nothing, but, squirming from his mother's arms, he ran to the
side of the dead panther and belaboured it with his little stick.

The next day Che invited King to accompany him upon his hunt. When after
a hard day they returned empty-handed, King was convinced that in the
search for small game a lone hunter would have greater chances for
success. In the morning, therefore, he announced that he would hunt
alone in another part of the jungle, and Che agreed with him that this
plan would be better.

Marking his trail as he had before, King hunted an unfamiliar territory.
The forest appeared more open. There was less underbrush; and he had
discovered what appeared to be a broad elephant trail, along which he
moved with far greater speed than he had ever been able to attain before
in his wanderings through this empire of trees and underbrush.

He had no luck in his hunting; and when he had about determined that it
was time to turn back, his ears caught an unfamiliar sound. What it was
he did not know. There was a peculiar metallic ring and other sounds
that might have been human voices at a distance.

"Perhaps," soliloquised King, "I am about to see the Nagas or the
Yeacks."

The sound was steadily approaching; and as he had learned enough from
his intercourse with Che and Kangrey to know that no friendly creatures
might be encountered in the jungle, he drew to one side of the elephant
trail and concealed himself behind some shrubbery.

He had not waited long when he saw the authors of the sounds
approaching. Suddenly he felt his head. It did not seem over-hot. As he
had upon other similar occasions, he closed his eyes tightly and then
opened them again, but still the vision persisted--a vision of
brown-skinned soldiers in burnished brass cuirasses over leather jerkins
that fell midway between their hips and their knees, with heavy sandals
on their feet, strange helmets on their heads, and armed with swords and
spears and bows and arrows.

They came on talking among themselves, and as they passed close to King
he discovered that they spoke the same language that he had learned from
Che and Kangrey. Evidently the men were arguing with their leader, who
wanted to go on, while the majority of his followers seemed in favour of
turning back.

"We shall have to spend the night in the jungle as it is," said one. "If
we go on much farther, we shall have to spend two nights in the jungle.
Only a fool would choose to lair with My Lord the Tiger."

They had stopped now almost opposite King, so that he could clearly
overhear all that passed between them. The man in charge appeared to be
a petty officer with little real authority, for instead of issuing
orders he argued and pleaded.

"It is well enough for you to insist upon turning back," he said, "since
if we return to the city without the apsaras you expect that I alone
shall be punished; but let me tell you that, if you force me to turn
back, the entire truth will be made known and you will share in any
punishment that may be inflicted upon me."

"If we cannot find her, we cannot find her," grumbled one of the men.
"Are we to remain in the jungle the rest of our lives searching for a
runaway apsaras?"

"I would as lief face My Lord the Tiger in the jungle for the rest of my
life," replied the petty officer, "as face Lodivarman if we return
without the girl."

"What Vama says is true," said another. "Lodivarman, the King, will not
be interested in our reason for returning empty-handed. Should we return
to the city to-morrow without the girl and Vama charged that we had
forced him to turn back, Lodivarman, if he were in ill-humour, as he
usually is, would have us all put to death; but if we remain away for
many days and then return with a story of many hardships and dangers he
will know that we did all that might be expected of brave warriors, and
thus the anger of Lodivarman might be assuaged."

"At last," commented Vama, "you are commencing to talk like intelligent
and civilised men. Come, now, and let us resume the search."

As they moved away King heard one of the men suggest that they find a
safe and comfortable camp site where they might remain for a sufficient
length of time to impress upon the King the verity of the story that
they would relate to him. He waited only until they were out of sight
before he arose from his place of concealment, for he was much concerned
with the fact that they were proceeding in the general direction of the
dwelling of Che and Kangrey. King was much mystified by what he had
seen. He knew that these soldiers were no children of a fevered brain.
They were flesh and blood warriors and for that reason a far greater
mystery than any of the creatures he had seen in his delirium, since
they could not be accounted for by any process of intelligent reasoning.
His judgment told him that there were no warriors in this uninhabited
jungle and certainly none with the archaic accoutrements and weapons
that he had seen. It might be reasonable to expect to meet such types in
an extravaganza of the stage or screen; and, doubtless, centuries ago
warriors such as these patrolled this very spot which the jungle and the
tiger and the elephant had long since reclaimed.

He recalled the stories that his guide had told him of the ghosts of the
ancient Khmers, which roamed through the sombre aisles of the forest. He
remembered the other soldiers that he had seen and the girl with the
frightened eyes that rode upon the great elephant, and the final result
was a questioning of his own sanity. Since he knew that a fever, such as
the one through which he had passed, might easily affect one's brain
either temporarily or permanently, he was troubled and not a little
frightened as he made his way in the direction of the dwelling of Che
and Kangrey. But the fact that he took a circuitous route that he might
avoid the warriors indicated that either he was quite crazy or, at
least, that he was temporising with his madness.

"'Weeping queens on misty elephants!'" he soliloquised. "'Warriors in
brass!' 'A mystery of the Orient.' Perhaps after all there are ghosts.
There has been enough evidence accumulated during historic times to
prove that the materialisation of disembodied spirits may have occurred
upon countless occasions. That I never saw a ghost is not necessarily
conclusive evidence that they do not exist. There are many strange
things in the Orient that the western mind cannot grasp. Perhaps, after
all, I have seen ghosts; but if so, they certainly were thoroughly
materialised, even to the dirt on their legs and the sweat on their
faces. I suppose I shall have to admit that they are ghosts, since I
know that no soldiers like them exist in the flesh anywhere in the
world."

As King moved silently through the jungle, he presented an even more
anachronistic figure than had the soldiers in brass; for they, at least,
personified an era of civilisation and advancement, while King, to all
outward appearances, was almost at the dawn of human evolution--a
primitive hunter, naked but for a sampot of leopard skin and rude
sandals fashioned by Kangrey because the soles of his feet, innocent of
the callouses that shod hers and Che's, had rendered him almost helpless
in the jungle without this protection. His skin was brown from exposure
to the sun, and his hair had grown thick and shaggy. That he was
smooth-shaven was the result of chance. He had always made it a habit,
since he had taken up the study of medicine and surgery, to carry a
safety razor blade with him, for what possible emergency he could not
himself have explained. It was merely an idiosyncrasy, and it had so
chanced that among several other things that the monkeys had dropped
from his pockets and scattered in the jungle the razor blade had been
recovered by little Uda along with a silver pencil and a handful of
French francs.

He moved through the jungle with all the assurance of a man who has
known no other life, so quickly does humankind adapt itself to
environment. Already his ears and his nostrils had become inured to
their surroundings to such an extent, at least, as to permit them to
identify and classify easily and quickly the more familiar sounds and
odours of the jungle. Familiarity had induced increasing self-assurance,
which had now reached a point that made him feel he might soon safely
set out in search of civilisation. However, to-day his mind was not on
this thing; it was still engaged in an endeavour to solve the puzzle of
the brass-bound warriors. But presently the baffling contemplation of
this matter was rudely interrupted by a patch of buff coat and black
stripes of which he caught a momentary, fleeting glimpse between the
boles of two trees ahead of him.

A species of unreasoning terror that had formerly seized him each time
that he had glimpsed the terrifying lord of the jungle had gradually
passed away as he had come to recognise the fact that every tiger that
he saw was not bent upon his destruction and that nine times out of ten
it would try to get out of his way. Of course, it is the tenth tiger
that one must always reckon with; but where trees are numerous and a
man's eyes and ears and nose are alert, even the tenth tiger may usually
be circumvented.

So now King did not alter his course, though he had seen the tiger
directly ahead of him. It would be time enough to think of retreat when
he found that the temper and intentions of the tiger warranted it, and,
further, it was better to keep the brute in sight than to feel that
perhaps he had circled and was creeping up behind one. It was,
therefore, because of this that King pushed on a little more rapidly;
and soon he was rewarded by another glimpse of the great carnivore and
of something else, which presented a tableau that froze his blood.

Beyond the tiger and facing it stood a girl. Her wide eyes were glassy
with terror. She stood as one in a trance, frozen to the spot, while
toward her the great cat crept. She was a slender girl, garbed as
fantastically as had been the soldiers that had passed him in the jungle
shortly before; but her gorgeous garments were soiled and torn, and even
at a distance King could see that her face and arms were scratched and
bleeding. In the instant that his eyes alighted upon her he sensed
something strangely familiar about her. It was a sudden, wholly
unaccountable impression that somewhere he had seen this girl before;
but it was only a passing impression, for his whole mind now was
occupied with her terrifying predicament.

To save her from the terrible death creeping slowly upon her seemed
beyond the realms of possibility, and yet King knew that he must make
the attempt. He recognised instantly that his only hope lay in
distracting the attention of the tiger. If he could centre the interest
of the brute upon himself, perhaps the girl might escape.

He shouted, and the tiger wheeled about. "Run!" he cried to the girl.
"Quick! Make for a tree!"

As he spoke, King was running forward. His heavy spear was ready in his
hand, but yet it was a mad chance to take. Perhaps he forgot himself and
his own danger, thinking only of the girl. The tiger glanced back at the
girl, who, obeying King's direction, had run quickly to a nearby tree
into which she was trying to scramble, badly hampered by the long skirt
that enveloped her.

For only an instant did the tiger hesitate. His short and ugly temper
was fully aroused now in the face of this rude interruption of his plan.
With a savage snarl and then the short coughing roars with which King
was all too familiar, he wheeled and sprang toward the man in long, easy
bounds. Twelve to fifteen feet he covered in a single leap. Flight was
futile. There was nothing that King could do but stand his ground and
pit his puny spear against this awful engine of destruction.

In that brief instant there was pictured upon the screen of his memory a
tree-girt athletic field. He saw young men in shirts and shorts throwing
javelins. He saw himself among them. It was his turn now. His arm went
back. He recalled how he had put every ounce of muscle, weight, and
science into that throw. He recalled the friendly congratulations that
followed it, for every one knew without waiting for the official verdict
that he had broken a world's record.

Again his arm flew back. To-day there was more at stake than a world's
record, but the man did not lose his nerve. Timed to the fraction of an
instant, backed by the last ounce of his weight and his skill and his
great strength, the spear met the tiger in mid-leap; full in the chest
it struck him. King leaped to one side and ran for a tree, his single,
frail hope lying in the possibility that the great beast might be even
momentarily disabled.

He did not waste the energy or the time even to glance behind him. If
the tiger were able to overtake him, it must be totally a matter of
indifference to King whether the great brute seized him from behind or
in front--he had led his ace and he did not have another.

No fangs or talons rent his flesh as King scrambled to the safety of the
nearest tree. It was not without a sense of considerable surprise that
he found himself safely ensconced in his leafy sanctuary, for from the
instant that the tiger had turned upon him in its venomous charge he had
counted himself already as good as dead.

Now that he had an opportunity to look about him, he saw the tiger
struggling in its death throes upon the very spot where it had
anticipated wreaking its vengeance upon the rash man-thing that had
dared to question its right to the possession of its intended prey; and
a little to the right of the dying beast the American saw the girl
crouching in the branches of a tree. Together they watched the death
throes of the great cat; and when at last the man was convinced that the
beast was dead, he leaped lightly to the ground and approached the tree
among the branches of which the girl had sought safety.

That she was still filled with terror was apparent in the strained and
frightened expression upon her face. "Go away!" she cried. "The soldiers
of Lodivarman, the King, are here; and if you harm me they will kill
you."

King smiled. "You are inconsistent," he said, "in invoking the
protection of the soldiers from whom you are trying to escape; but you
need not fear me. I shall not harm you."

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"I am a hunter who dwells in the jungle," replied King. "I am the
protector of high priests and weeping queens, or so, at least, I seem to
be."

"High priests? Weeping queens? What do you mean?"

"I have saved Vay Thon, the high priest, from My Lord the Tiger,"
replied King; "and now I have saved you."

"But I am no queen and I am not weeping," replied the girl.

"Do not disillusion me," insisted King. "I contend that you are a queen,
whether you weep or smile. I should not be surprised to learn that you
are the queen of the Nagas. Nothing would surprise me in this jungle of
anachronism, hallucination, and impossibility."

"Help me down from the tree," said the girl. "Perhaps you are mad, but
you seem quite harmless."

"Be assured, your majesty, that I shall not harm you," replied King,
"for presently I am sure there will emerge from nowhere ten thousand
elephants and a hundred thousand warriors in shining brass to succour
and defend you. Nothing seems impossible after what I have witnessed;
but come, let me touch you; let me assure myself that I am not again the
victim of a pernicious fever."

"May Siva, who protected me from My Lord the Tiger a moment ago, protect
me also from this madman!"

"Pardon me," said King. "I did not catch what you said."

"I am afraid," said the girl.

"You need not be afraid of me," King assured her; "and if you want your
soldiers I believe that I can find them for you; but if I am not
mistaken, I believe that you are more afraid of them than you are of
me."

"What do you know of that?" demanded she.

"I overheard their conversation while they halted near me," replied the
American, "and I learned that they are hunting for you to take you back
to someone from whom you escaped. Come, I will help you down. You may
trust me."

He raised his hands toward her, and after a moment's hesitation she
slipped into his arms and he lowered her to the ground.

"I must trust you," she said. "There is no other way, for I could not
remain for ever in the tree; and then, too, even though you seem mad
there is something about you that makes me feel that I am safe with
you."

As he felt her soft, lithe body momentarily in his arms, King knew that
this was no tenuous spirit of a dream. For an instant her small hand
touched his shoulder, her warm breath fanned his cheek, and her firm,
young breasts were pressed against his naked body. Then she stepped back
and surveyed him.

"What manner of man are you?" she demanded. "You are neither Khmer nor
slave. Your colour is not the colour of any man that I have ever seen,
nor are your features those of the people of my race. Perhaps you are a
reincarnation of one of those ancients of whom our legends tell us; or
perhaps you are a Naga who has taken the form of man for some dire
purpose of your own."

"Perhaps I am a Yeack," suggested King.

"No," she said quite seriously, "I am sure you are not a Yeack, for it
is reported that they are most hideous, while you, though not like any
man I have ever seen, are handsome."

"I am neither Yeack nor Naga," replied King.

"Then perhaps you are from Lodidhapura--one of the creatures of
Lodivarman."

"No," replied the man. "I have never been to Lodidhapura. I have never
seen the King, Lodivarman, and, as a matter of fact, I have always
doubted their existence."

The girl's dark eyes regarded him steadily. "I cannot believe that," she
said, "for it is unconceivable that there should be anyone in the world
who has not heard of Lodidhapura and Lodivarman."

"I come from a far country," explained King, "where there are millions
of people who never heard of the Khmers."

"Impossible!" she cried.

"But nevertheless quite true," he insisted.

"From what country do you come?" she asked.

"From America."

"I never heard of such a country."

"Then you should be able to understand that I may never have heard of
Lodidhapura," said the man.

For a moment the girl was silent, evidently pondering the logic of his
statement. "Perhaps you are right," she said finally. "It may be that
there are other cities within the jungle of which we have never heard.
But tell me--you risked your life to save mine--why did you do that?"

"What else might I have done?" he asked.

"You might have run away and saved yourself."

King smiled, but he made no reply. He was wondering if there existed any
man who could have run away and left one so beautiful and so helpless to
the mercies of My Lord the Tiger.

"You are very brave," she continued presently. "What is your name?"

"Gordon King."

"Gordon King," she repeated in a soft, caressing voice. "That is a nice
name, but it is not like any name that I have heard before."

"And what is your name?" asked King.

"I am called Fou-tan," she said, and she eyed him intently, as though
she would note if the name made any impression upon him.

King thought Fou-tan a pretty name, but it seemed banal to say so. He
was appraising her small, delicate features, her beautiful eyes and her
soft brown skin. They recalled to him the weeping queen upon the misty
elephant that he had seen in his delirium, and once again there arose
within him doubts as to his sanity. "Tell me," he said suddenly. "Did
you ever ride through the jungle on a great elephant escorted by
soldiers in brass?"

"Yes," she said.

"And you say that you are from Lodidhapura?" he continued.

"I have just come from there," she replied.

"Did you ever hear of a priest called Vay Thon?"

"He is the high priest of Siva in the city of Lodidhapura," she replied.

King shook his head in perplexity. "It is hard to know," he murmured,
"where dreams end and reality begins."

"I do not understand you," she said, her brows knit in perplexity.

"Perhaps I do not understand myself," he admitted.

"You are a strange man," said Fou-tan. "I do not know whether to fear
you or trust you. You are not like any other man I have ever known. What
do you intend to do with me?"

"Perhaps I had better take you back to the dwelling of Che and Kangrey,"
he said, "and then to-morrow Che can guide you back to Lodidhapura."

"But I do not wish to return to Lodidhapura," said the girl.

"Why not?" demanded King.

"Listen, Gordon King, and I shall tell you," said Fou-tan.



5  The Capture



"Let us sit down upon this fallen tree," said Fou-tan, "and I shall tell
you why I do not wish to return to Lodidhapura."

As they seated themselves, King became acutely conscious of the marked
physical attraction that this girl of a forgotten age exercised over
him. Every movement of her lithe body, every gesture of her graceful
arms and hands, each changing expression of her beautiful face and eyes
were provocative. She radiated magnetism. He sensed it in the reaction
of his skin, his eyes, his nostrils. It was as though ages of careful
selection had produced her for the purpose of arousing in man the desire
of possession, and yet there enveloped her a divine halo of chastity
that aroused within his breast the protective instinct that governs the
attitude of a normal man toward a woman that Fate has thrown into his
keeping. Never in his life had King been similarly attracted to any
woman.

"Why do you look at me so?" she inquired suddenly.

"Forgive me," said King simply. "Go on with your story."

"I am from Pnom Dhek," said Fou-tan, "where Beng Kher is king. Pnom Dhek
is a greater city than Lodidhapura; Beng Kher is a mightier king than
Lodivarman.

"Bharata Rahon desired me. He wished to take me to wife. I pleaded with
my father the--I pleaded with my father not to give me in marriage to
Bharata Rahon; but he told me that I did not know my own mind, that I
only thought that I did not like Bharata Rahon, that he would make me a
good husband, and that after we were married I should be happy.

"I knew that I must do something to convince my father that my mind and
soul sincerely revolted at the thought of mating with Bharata Rahon, and
so I conceived the idea of running away and going out into the jungle
that I might prove that I preferred death to the man my father had
chosen for me.

"I did not want to die. I wanted them to come and find me very quickly,
and when night came I was terrified. I climbed into a tree where I
crouched in terror. I heard My Lord the Tiger pass beneath in the
darkness of the night, and my fear was so great that I thought that I
should faint and fall into his clutches; yet when day came again I was
still convinced that I would rather lie in the arms of My Lord the Tiger
than in those of Bharata Rahon, who is a loathsome man whose very name I
detest.

"Yet I moved back in the direction of Pnom Dhek, or rather I thought
that I did, though now I am certain that I went in the opposite
direction. I hoped that searchers sent out by my father would find me,
for I did not wish to return of my own volition to Pnom Dhek.

"The day dragged on and I met no searchers, and once again I became
terrified, for I knew that I was lost in the jungle. Then I heard the
heavy tread of an elephant and the clank of arms and men's voices, and I
was filled with relief and gratitude, for I thought at last that the
searchers were about to find me.

"But when the warriors came within view, I saw that they wore the armour
of Lodivarman. I was terrified and tried to escape them, but they had
seen me and they pursued me. Easily they overtook me, and great was
their joy when they looked upon me.

"'Lodivarman will reward us handsomely,' they cried, 'when he sees that
which we have brought to him from Pnom Dhek.'

"So they placed me in the howdah upon the elephant's back and took me
through the jungle to Lodidhapura, where I was immediately taken into
the presence of Lodivarman.

"Oh, Gordon King, that was a terrible moment. I was terrified when I
found myself so close to the leper king of Lodidhapura. He is covered
with great sores, where leprosy is devouring him. That day he was ugly
and indifferent. He scarcely looked at me, but ordered that I should be
taken to the quarters of the apsarases, and so I became a dancing girl
at the court of the leper king.

"Not in a thousand years, Gordon King, could I explain to you what I
suffered each time that we came before Lodivarman to dance. Each sore
upon his repulsive body seemed to reach out to seize and contaminate me.
It was with the utmost difficulty that, half fainting, I went through
the ritual of the dance.

"I tried to hide my face from him, for I knew that I was beautiful and I
knew the fate of beautiful women in the court of Lodivarman.

"But at last, one day, I realised that he had noticed me. I saw his dead
eyes following me about. We were dancing in the great hall where he
holds his court. Lodivarman was seated upon his throne. The lead-covered
walls of the great apartment were gorgeous with paintings and with
hangings. Beneath our feet were the polished flagstones of the floor,
but they seemed softer to me than the heart of Lodivarman.

"At last the dance was done, and we were permitted to retire to our
apartments. Presently there came to me a captain of the King's
household, resplendent in his gorgeous trappings.

"'The King has looked upon you,' said he, 'and would honour you as
befits your beauty.'

"'It is sufficient honour,' I replied, 'to dance in the palace of
Lodivarman.'

"'You are about to receive a more signal manifestation of the King's
honour,' he replied.

"'I am satisfied as I am,' I said.

"'It is not for you to choose, Fou-tan,' replied the messenger. 'The
King has chosen you as his newest concubine. Rejoice, therefore, in the
knowledge that some day you may become queen.'

"I could have fainted at the very horror of the suggestion. hat could
I do? I must gain time. I thought of suicide, but I am young, nd I do
not wish to die. 'When must I come?' I asked.

"'You will be given time to prepare yourself,' replied the messenger.
'For three days the women will bathe and anoint your body, and upon the
fourth day you will be conducted to the King.'

"Four days! In four days I must find some way in which to escape the
horrid fate to which my beauty had condemned me. 'Go!' I said. 'Leave me
in peace for the four days that remain to me of even a semblance of
happiness in life.'

"The messenger, grinning, withdrew, and I threw myself upon my pallet
and burst into tears. That night the apsarases were to dance in the
moonlight in the courtyard before the temple of Siva; and though they
would have insisted that my preparation for the honour that was to be
bestowed upon me should commence at once, I begged that I might once
more, and for the last time, join with my companions in honouring Siva,
the Destroyer.

"It was a dark night. The flares that illumined the courtyard cast a
wavering light in which exaggerated shadows of the apsarases danced
grotesquely. In the dance I wore a mask, and my position was at the
extreme left of the last line of apsarases. I was close to the line of
spectators that encircled the courtyard, and in some of the movements of
the dance I came quite close enough to touch them. This was what I had
hoped for.

"All the tune that I was dancing I was perfecting in my mind the details
of a plan that had occurred to me earlier in the day. The intricate
series of postures and steps, with which I had been familiar since
childhood, required of me but little mental concentration. I went
through them mechanically, my thoughts wholly centred upon the mad
scheme that I had conceived. I knew that at one point in the dance the
attention of all the spectators would be focused upon a single apsaras,
whose position was in the centre of the first line, and when this moment
arrived I stepped quickly into the line of spectators.

"Those in my immediate vicinity noticed me, but to these I explained
that I was ill and was making my way back to the temple. A little awed
by my close presence, they let me pass unmolested, for in the estimation
of the people the persons of the apsarases are almost holy.

"Behind the last line of the audience rose a low wall that surrounds the
temple courtyard. Surmounting it at intervals rise the beautifully
carved stone figures of the seven-headed cobra--emblem of the Royal
Nagas. Deep were the shadows between them; and while all eyes were fixed
upon the leading apsaras, I clambered quickly to the top of the low
wall, where for a moment I hid in the shadow of a great Naga. Below me,
black, mysterious, terrifying, lay the dark waters of the moat, beneath
the surface of which lived the crocodiles placed there by the King to
guard the Holy of Holies. Upon the opposite side the level of the water
was but a few inches below the surface of the broad avenue that leads to
the stables where the King's elephants are kept. The avenues were
deserted, for all who dwelt within the walls of the royal enclosure were
watching the dance of the apsarases.

"To Brahma, to Vishnu, and to Siva I breathed a prayer, and then I slid
as quietly as possible down into the terrifying waters of the moat.
Quickly I struck out for the opposite side, every instant expecting to
feel the hideous jaws of a crocodile close upon me; but my prayers had
been heard, and I reached the avenue in safety.

"I was forced to climb two more walls before I could escape from the
royal enclosure and from the city. My wet and bedraggled costume was
torn, and my hands and face were scratched and bleeding before I
succeeded.

"At last I was in the jungle, confronted by danger more deadly, yet far
less horrible, than that from which I had escaped. How I survived that
night and this day I do not know. And now the end would have come but
for you, Gordon King."

As King gazed at the sensitive face and delicately moulded figure of the
girl beside him, he marvelled at the courage and strength of will,
seemingly so out of proportion to the frail temple that housed them,
that had sustained her in the conception and execution of an adventure
that might have taxed the courage and stamina of a warrior. "You are a
brave girl, Fou-tan," he said.

"The daughter of my father could not be less," she replied simply.

"You are a daughter of whom any father might be proud," said King, "but
if we are to save you for him we had better be thinking about getting to
the dwelling of Che and Kangrey before night falls."

"Who are these people?" asked Fou-tan. "Perhaps they will return me to
Lodidhapura for the reward that Lodivarman will pay."

"You need have no fear on that score," replied King. "They are honest
people, runaway slaves from Lodidhapura. They have been kind to me, and
they will be kind to you."

"And if they are not, you will protect me," said Fou-tan with a tone of
finality that evidenced the confidence which she already felt in the
dependability and integrity of her newfound friend.

As they set out in the direction of Che's dwelling, it became apparent
to King immediately that Fou-tan was tired almost to the point of
exhaustion. Will-power and nerve had sustained her so far; but now, with
the discovery of someone to whom she might transfer the responsibility
of her safety, the reaction had come; and he often found it necessary to
assist and support her over the rough places of the trail. She was small
and light, and where the going was exceptionally bad he lifted her in
his arms and carried her as he might have a child.

"You are strong, Gordon King," she said once as he carried her thus. Her
soft arms were around his neck, her lips were very close to his.

"I must need be strong," he said. But if she sensed his meaning she gave
no evidence of it. Her eyes closed wearily and her little head dropped
to his shoulder. He carried her thus for a long way, though the trail
beneath his feet was smooth and hard.

Vama and his warriors had halted in a little glade where there was
water. While two of them hunted in the forest for meat for their supper,
the others lay stretched out upon the ground in that silence which is
induced by hunger and fatigue. Presently Vama sat up alert. His ears had
caught the sound of the approach of something through the jungle.

"Kau and Tchek are returning from the hunt," whispered one of the
warriors who lay near him and who, also, had heard the noise.

"They did not go in that direction," replied Vama in a low tone. Then
signalling his warriors to silence, he ordered them to conceal
themselves from view.

The sound, already close when they had first heard it, approached
steadily; and they did not have long to wait ere a warrior, naked but
for a sampot, stepped into view, and in his arms was the runaway apsaras
whom they sought. Elated, Vama leaped from his place of concealment,
calling to his men to follow him.

At sight of them King turned to escape, but he knew that he could make
no speed while burdened with the girl. She, however, had seen the
soldiers and slipped quickly from his arms. "We are lost!" she cried.

"Run!" cried King as he snatched a handful of arrows from his quiver and
fitted one to his bow. "Stand back!" he cried to the warriors. But they
only moved steadily forward. His bow-string twanged, and one of
Lodivarman's brass-bound warriors sank to earth, an arrow through his
throat. The others hesitated. They did not dare to cast their spears or
loose their bolts for fear of injuring the girl.

Slowly King, with Fou-tan behind him, backed away into the jungle from
which he had appeared. At the last instant he sped another arrow, which
rattled harmlessly from the cuirass of Vama. Then, knowing that he could
not fire upon them from the foliage, the soldiers rushed forward, while
King continued to fall back slowly with Fou-tan, another arrow fitted to
his bow.

Kau and Tchek had made a great circle in their hunting. With their
arrows they had brought down three monkeys, and now they were returning
to camp. They had almost arrived when they heard voices and the twang of
a bow-string, and then they saw, directly ahead of them, a man and a
girl crashing through the foliage of the jungle toward them. Instantly,
by her dishevelled costume, they recognised the apsaras and guessed from
the attitude of the two that they were backing away from Vama and his
fellows.

Kau was a powerful, a courageous, and a resourceful man. Instantly he
grasped the situation and instantly he acted. Leaping forward, he threw
both his sinewy arms around Gordon King, pinning the other's arms to his
body; while Tchek, following the example of his companion, seized
Fou-tan. Almost immediately Vama and the others were upon the scene. An
instant later Gordon King was disarmed, and his wrists were bound behind
him; then the soldiers of Lodivarman dragged the captives back to their
camping place.

Vama was tremendously elated. Now he would not have to make up any lies
to appease the wrath of his king but could return to Lodidhapura in
triumph, bearing not only the apsaras for whom he had been dispatched,
but another prisoner as well.

King thought that they might make quick work of him in revenge for the
soldier he had killed, but they did not appear to hold that against him
at all. They questioned him at some length while they cooked their
supper of monkey meat over a number of tiny fires; but as what he told
them of another country far beyond their jungle was quite beyond their
grasp, they naturally believed that he lied and insisted that he came
from Pnom Dhek and that he was a runaway slave.

They were all quite content with the happy outcome of their assignment;
and so, looking forward to their return to Lodidhapura on the morrow,
they were inclined to be generous in their treatment of their prisoners,
giving them meat to eat and water to drink. Their attitude toward
Fou-tan was one of respectful awe. They knew that she was destined to
become one of the King's favourites, and it might prove ill for them,
indeed, should they offer her any hurt or affront. Since their treatment
of Gordon King, however, was not dictated by any such consideration, it
was fortunate, indeed, for him that they were in a good humour.

Regardless, however, of the respectful attention shown her, Fou-tan was
immersed in melancholy. A few moments before, she had foreseen escape
and counted return to her native city almost an accomplished fact; now,
once again, she was in the clutches of the soldiers of Lodivarman, while
simultaneously she had brought disaster and, doubtless, death to the man
who had befriended her.

"Oh, Gordon King," she said, "my heart is unstrung; my soul is filled
with terror and consumed by horror, for not only must I return to the
hideous fate from which I had escaped, but you must go to Lodidhapura to
slavery or to death."

"We are not in Lodidhapura yet," whispered King. "Perhaps we shall
escape."

The girl shook her head. "There is no hope," she said. "I shall go to
the arms of Lodivarman, and you--"

"And I?" he asked.

"Slaves fight with other slaves and with wild beasts for the
entertainment of Lodivarman and his court," she replied.

"We must escape then," said King. "Perhaps we shall die in the attempt,
but in any event death awaits me and worse than death awaits you."

"What you command I shall do, Gordon King," replied Fou-tan.

But it did not appear that there was to be much opportunity for escape
that night. After King had eaten they bound his wrists behind his back
again and also bound his ankles together securely, while two warriors
remained constantly with the girl; the others, their simple meal
completed, stripped the armour and weapons from their fallen comrade and
laid him upon a thick bed of dry wood that they had gathered. Upon him,
then, they piled a great quantity of limbs and branches, of twigs and
dry grasses; and when night fell they lighted their weird funeral pyre,
which was to answer its other dual purpose as a beast fire to protect
them from the prowling carnivores. To King it was a gruesome sight, but
neither Fou-tan nor the other Khmers seemed to be affected by it. The
men gathered much wood and placed it near at hand that the fire might be
kept burning during the night.

The flames leaped high, lighting the boles of the trees about them and
the foliage arching above. The shadows rose and fell and twisted and
writhed. Beyond the limits of the firelight was utter darkness, silence,
mystery. King felt himself in an inverted cauldron of flame in which a
human body was being consumed. .

The warriors lay about, laughing and talking. Their reminiscences were
brutal and cruel. Their jokes and stories were broad and obscene. But
there was an undercurrent of rough kindness and loyalty to one another
that they appeared to be endeavoring to conceal as though they were
ashamed of such soft emotion. They were soldiers. Transplanted to the
camps of modern Europe, given a modern uniform and a modern language,
their campfire conversation would have been the same. Soldiers do not
change. One played upon a little musical instrument that resembled a
Jew's harp. Two were gambling with what appeared to be very similar to
modern dice, and all that they said was so interlarded with strange and
terrible oaths that the American could scarcely follow the thread of
their thought. Soldiers do not change.

Vama came presently and squatted down near King and Fou-tan. "Do all the
men in this far country of which you tell me go naked?" he demanded.

"No," replied the American. "When I had become lost in the jungle I was
stricken with fever, and while I was sick the monkeys came and stole my
clothing and my weapons."

"You live alone in the jungle?" asked Vama.

King thought quickly; he thought of Che and Kangrey and their fear of
the soldiers in brass. "Yes," he said.

"Are you not afraid of My Lord the Tiger?" inquired Vama.

"I am watchful and I avoid him," replied the American.

"You do well to do so," said Vama, "for even with spear and arrows no
lone man is a match for the great beast."

"But Gordon King is," said Fou-tan proudly.

Vama smiled. "The apsaras has been in the jungle but a night and a day,"
he reminded her. "How can she know so much about this man unless, as I
suspect, he is, indeed, from Pnom Dhek?"

"He is not from Pnom Dhek," retorted Fou-tan. "And I know that he is a
match for My Lord the Tiger because this day I saw him slay the beast
with a single spear-cast."

Vama looked questioningly at King.

"It was only a matter of good fortune," said King.

"But you did it nevertheless," insisted Fou-tan.

"You killed a tiger with a single cast of your spear?" demanded Vama.

"As the beast charged him," said Fou-tan.

"That is, indeed, a marvellous feat," said Vama, with a soldier's
ungrudging admiration for the bravery or prowess of another. "Lodivarman
shall hear of this. A hunter of such spirit shall not go unrecognised in
Lodidhapura. I can also bear witness that you are no mean bowman," added
Vama, nodding toward the blazing funeral pyre. Then he arose and walked
to the spot where King's weapons had been deposited. Picking up the
spear he examined it closely. "By Siva!" he ejaculated. "The blood is
scarcely dry upon it. Such a cast! You drove it a full two feet into the
carcass of My Lord the Tiger."

"Straight through the heart," said Fou-tan.

The other soldiers had been listening to the conversation. It was
noticeable immediately that their attitude toward King changed
instantly, and thereafter they treated him with friendliness tinged by
respect. However, they did not abate their watchfulness over him, but
rather were increasingly careful to see that he was given no opportunity
to escape, nor to have his hands free for any length of time.

Early the next morning, after a meagre breakfast, Vama set out with his
detachment and his prisoners in the direction of Lodidhapura, leaving
the funeral fire still blazing as it eagerly licked at a new supply of
fuel.

The route they selected to Lodidhapura passed by chance, close to the
spot where King had slain the tiger; and here, in the partially devoured
carcass of the great beast, the soldiers of Lodivarman found concrete
substantiation of Fou-tan's story.




6 The Leper King


It was late in the afternoon when the party emerged suddenly from the
jungle at the edge of a great clearing. King voiced an involuntary
exclamation of astonishment as he saw at a distance the walls and towers
of a splendid city.

"Lodidhapura," said Fou-tan; "accursed city!" There was fear in her
voice, and she trembled as she pressed closer to the American.

While King had long since become convinced that Lodidhapura had an
actual existence of greater reality than legend or fever-wrought
hallucination, yet he had been in no way prepared for the reality. A
collection of nippa-thatched huts had comprised the extent of his mental
picture of Lodidhapura, and now, as the reality burst suddenly upon him,
he was dumbfounded.

Temples and palaces of stone reared their solid masses against the sky.
Mighty towers, elaborately carved, rose in stately grandeur high over
all. There were nippa-thatched huts as well, but these clustered close
against the city's walls and were so overshadowed by the majestic mass
of masonry beyond them that they affected the picture as slightly as
might the bushes growing at its foot determine the grandeur of a
mountain.

In the foreground were level fields in which laboured men and women,
naked mostly, but for sampots--the nippa-thatched huts were their
dwellings. They were the labourers, the descendants of slaves--Chams and
Annamese--that the ancient, warlike Khmers had brought back from many a
victory in the days when their power and their civilisation were the
greatest upon earth.

From the edge of the jungle, at the point where the party had emerged, a
broad avenue led toward one of the gates of the city, toward which Vama
was conducting them. To his right, at a distance, King could see what
appeared to be another avenue leading to another gate--an avenue which
seemed to be more heavily travelled than that upon which they had
entered. There were many people on foot, some approaching the city,
others leaving it. At a distance they looked small, but he could
distinguish them and also what appeared to be bullock carts moving
slowly among the pedestrians.

Presently, at the far end of this distant avenue, he saw the great bulks
of elephants; in a long column they entered the highway from the jungle
and approached the city. They seemed to move in an endless procession,
two abreast, hundreds of them, he thought. Never before had King seen so
many elephants.

"Look!" he cried to Fou-tan. "There must be a circus coming to town."

"The King's elephants," explained Fou-tan, unimpressed.

"Why does he have so many?" asked King.

"A king without elephants would be no king," replied the girl. "They
proclaim to all men the king's wealth and power. When he makes war, his
soldiers go into battle upon them and fight from their backs, for those
are the war elephants of Lodivarman."

"There must be hundreds of them," commented the American.

"There are thousands," said Fou-tan.

"And against whom does Lodivarman make war?"

"Against Pnom Dhek."

"Only against Pnom Dhek?" inquired King.

"Yes, only against Pnom Dhek."

"Why does he not make war elsewhere? Has he no other enemies?"

"Against whom else might he make war?" demanded Fou-tan. "There are only
Pnom Dhek and Lodidhapura in all the world."

"Well, that does rather restrict him now, doesn't it?" admitted King.

For a moment they were silent. Then the girl spoke. "Gordon King," she
said in that soft, caressing voice that the man found so agreeable, that
often he had sought for means to lure her into conversation. "Gordon
King, soon we shall see one another no more."

The American frowned. He did not like to think of that. He had tried to
put it out of his mind and to imagine that by some chance they would be
allowed to be together after they reached Lodidhapura, for he had found
Fou-tan a cheery and pleasant companion even when her hour was darkest.
Why, she was the only friend he had! Certainly they would not deny him
the right to see her. From what he had gleaned during his conversation
with Vama and the other warriors, King had become hopeful that
Lodivarman would not treat him entirely as a prisoner or an enemy, but
might give him the opportunity to serve the King as a soldier. Fou-tan
had rather encouraged this hope too, for she knew that it was not at all
improbable of realisation.

"Why do you say that?" demanded King. "Why shall we not see one another
again?"

"Would you be sad, Gordon King, if you did not see Fou-tan any more?"
she asked.

The man hesitated before he replied, as though weighing in his mind a
problem that he had never before been called upon to consider; and as he
hesitated a strange, hurt look came into the eyes of the girl.

"It is unthinkable, Fou-tan," he said at last, and the great brown eyes
of the little apsaras softened and tears rose in them. "We have been
such good friends," he added.

"Yes," she said. "We have known each other but a very short time, and
yet we seem such good friends that it is almost as though we had known
each other always."

"But why should we not see one another again?" he demanded once more.

"Lodivarman may punish me for running away, and there is only one
punishment that would satisfy his pride in such an event and that is
death; but if he forgives me, as he doubtless will, because of my youth
and my great beauty and his desire for me, then I shall be taken into
the King's palace and no more then might you see me than if I were dead.
So you see, either way, the result is the same."

"I shall see you again, Fou-tan," said the man.

She shook her head. "I like to hear you say it, even though I know that
it cannot be."

"You shall see, Fou-tan. If we both live I shall find a way to see you;
and, too, I shall find a way to take you out of the palace of the King
and back to Pnom Dhek."

She looked up at him with earnest eyes, full of confidence and
admiration. "When I hear you say it," she said, "the impossible seems
almost possible."

"Cling to the hope, Fou-tan," he told her; "and when we are separated,
know always that my every thought will be centered upon the means to
reach you and take you away."

"That will help me to cling to life until the last horrible minute,
beyond which there can be no hope and beyond which I will not go."

"What do you mean, Fou-tan?" There had been that in her voice which
frightened him.

"I can live in the palace of the King with hope until again the King
sends for me, and then--"

"And then?"

"And then--death."

"No, Fou-tan, you must not say that. You must not think it."

"What else could there be--after?" she demanded. "He is a leper!" The
utter horror in her voice and expression, as her lips formed the word,
aroused to its fullest the protective instinct of the man. He wanted to
throw an arm about her, to soothe and reassure her; but his wrists were
bound together behind him, and he could only move on dumbly at her side
toward the great, carved gate of Lodidhapura.

The sentry at the gate halted Vama and his party, though his greeting,
following his formal challenge, indicated that he was well aware of the
identity of all but King, a fact which impressed the American as
indicative of the excellent military discipline that obtained in this
remote domain of the leper king.

Summoned by the sentry, the captain of the gate came from his quarters
within the massive towers that flanked the gateway to Lodidhapura. He
was a young man, resplendent in trappings of gold and blue and yellow.
His burnished c