All the lesser rams had made off along a ledge so narrow it looked like a seam in the rock, dipping to what mountain men called a saddle and leading to a shelf projecting from the face of a cliff. Leisurely the five elders made the crossing. Iskander remained as still as the stone itself.
I worked my way over dangerous slide rock to the slippery grass. Now I crouched within two hundred paces of my quarry, at which range a broadhead arrow may kill clean. The shot would be an extremely difficult one, worthy of Coeur-de-Lion in the mountain breeze, yet I was amazed at the beast’s boldness. Suddenly I conceived of the explanation. The savage huntsmen of his acquaintance had weak bows that could not cast that far. Indeed I had never seen them attempt a shot at more than half the distance. Perhaps Iskander would scorn to fly from a tall form with an evil smell twenty bounds distant. He would wait until the humming hornets fell only a little short. That was his pride before his liege-men and his ewes. . . .
I decided to close within a hundred and fifty paces, then try the shot. The breeze was more cold than strong; with a full draw and a hard aim and a clean loose I had a fair chance to win. But when I had got that far, and the moment came to play the chance for all it was worth, I could not bear not to pass it by.
Whatever its first cause—perhaps superstitious fear of the gods—it was one of the most worthy actions of my life. Gaining these heights had been an inspiring experience and its glow was on me still. I was seeing Iskander not only as king of the rams, but as more than as a protagonist of the Pamir, even as a proof of the magnificence and mystery of life itself, and hence its hope. I did not want to win the great prize by taking advantage of his ignorance of the strength of my weapon. I would keep to my original intention—to follow him where other hunters had never ventured, or to give up the quest.
The issue was as clean-cut as though by Fate’s contrivance. The retreat of Iskander’s flock, where presently he would withdraw out of my arrow range, was a cul-de-sac. There was no possibility of his climbing up the sheer cliffs rimming the shelf; as before when men drove him from his pasture, he would wait there until they went away. And I could engage him by one operation only—following him along the ledge and across the saddle to his citadel.
I advanced a few more steps. Iskander sprang down, shook his rump, and trotted after his flock. At the very end of the grass slope he stopped, nibbled a moment, glanced back at me, and leaped nimbly onto the ledge. But now he began to progress with portentous care.
Following slowly, I felt a great deal of inner tumult. While hating the thought of turning back, I did not know how great a risk I was willing to run. The flock was in plain sight on the shelf beyond the saddle. Their king joined them, and all gazed in my direction. It was a strange thing that they would seek a retreat from which there was no outlet; I could account for it only by its serving them before. It might indicate that even wolves and leopards eschewed the passage, or that the rams could hold it against them.
I gained the ridge and my gaze made the journey that my feet must soon make, if I were to win. My eyes bulged at the narrow way along the face of the precipice, overhanging the profound gulf. Then I felt them thrill to a magnificent discovery.
The Kaffir tribesmen had said that the gulf was as deep as Gehenna’s. As I gazed down, the expression struck me as only too apt—the cliff fell away fathom after dizzy fathom until my head reeled, then leaped down in a series of steeps to a dimly descried glen where maybe demons dwelt. To fall off the ledge would mean to drop sheer, perhaps turning over slowly in the air for several seconds, each as long as a term in Purgatory; then striking the steeps, to bounce, leap, and careen into the glen three cables’ lengths below. But it was the depth of the void, rather than the narrowness of the bridge, that had blanched the faces of the mountaineers and had made them turn back.
I firmly believed that if this same ledge had overhung an ordinary ravine, they would have essayed to cross it without crippling terror. Yet a sixty-foot fall on rock will kill almost as surely as one of sixteen hundred.
So my adversary was still myself. My feet would be equal to the passage if my soul kept faith with its high birth by valor and resolve, both proofs of implacable pride.
I considered depositing here every ounce of impedimenta—all my arrows except three, my pouch containing keys and a little sand glass and a few other belongings useful or beloved, even my dagger. Why not all my clothes except my sandals? But thinking of the figure I would cut in the eyes of my quarry made me grin, and I decided to go as I was. Up and down and across mountains, Iskander went as he was. I was not a naked anchorite looking for visions in the wilderness, but a Venetian gentleman on a superb adventure.
For the first hundred feet, I kept my eyes stoutly on the footing. But this was a false stoutness. As the ledge narrowed ahead of me, deeper and deeper in my mind’s eye yawned the chasm. It was at my side and a little behind where the Devil walks. Its unseen presence made my eyes ache and my thoughts muddle and my belly sicken. Already I yearned to grope with my hands at the treacherous shale. I was going to fall. . . .
Then I stopped, looked up at the sky, thought upon the marvel of my being here, alone for the moment in the Great Pamir, then without hanging on, slowly swept my gaze downward into the void.
I saw the multicolored rocks of the opposite side of the chasm, not nearly as steep and high, but to look down the precipice to the series of cliffs below, ending at last in the dark glen, required that I lean my shoulders a little outward and bend my head. With my sweat cold upon me, but my eyes narrow and hard and perhaps a turning-down of my lip corners in almost a sneer, I did so. I gazed into the Pit. It differed only in externals from those set in the path of millions of my fellow men. The evil spells cast by its demons are greatly weakened by the power of the human eye.
At that moment, I won the victory.
It did not matter as much as before whether I laid Iskander low and took his horns. But King Fate had decreed—or his pet monkey Chance had prayed—that the adventure would end fittingly, in a beautiful sweep of event. I had passed the most perilous span of the ledge and was approaching the saddle. Still more than a hundred paces distant, Iskander had become restless. He moved back and forth in front of his flock and tossed his crowned head. Presently he stopped, gave me a long, unflinching look, and then uttered a deep-toned bleat that carried far in the airy silence. Resolutely he started back.
I could not doubt that he had perceived my almost completed crossing of the moat guarding his citadel, and had come out to do battle.
I flipped an arrow over my shoulder onto my bow. Iskander walked briskly, then broke into an easy run. I stood with my right leg braced behind me, my left bent in front, and put my shoulder into the draw. I could not wait until he crossed the saddle into point-blank range. That would bring him onto the face of the precipice, from where he would plummet to ruin on the rocks below. My movements were timed to loose the shaft when he was about sixty paces distant, coming into the rise of the saddle. To strike the base of the burly neck would not be a difficult shot on the good wide ground. But whatever the adversities of the time and place, I dared not miss.