“If we’re seen going in or coming out, we’ll be straightway whipped to death. Not only I—both of us. No doubt he has spies everywhere——”
“I spoke of that, but she doesn’t believe it. She says it couldn’t cross his mind that anyone would dare come near such a terrible spot. Anyway, the moon has almost waned away and there won’t be much light to spy by.”
“One of his soothsayers could find out——”
“She doesn’t think their magic will work against what’s good.”
The chill stayed in my flesh and blood and the marrow of my bones, but I drove my brain to pay heed to a memory seeking entrance like a shaft of sunlight probing its way through clouds. In a moment I had captured it and saw its bearing on the present pass. The hardy men of the Great Pamir dared not take Iskander’s path across the face of the cliff as tall as a mountain. If the same ledge overhung a ravine of ordinary depth, they would have essayed it bravely. But the fall from either one was down to death. Perceiving this, I had won a splendid prize.
“Tell Miranda that I’ll come with pleasure.”
3
The truth was, I went in great terror. I had gained the river edge where it flowed through the public precincts, then walked up its grassy bank in the light of the withered moon. Before long I came to a little fence, two feet high and made of frail bamboo, marking the forbidden ground. I stopped, my body drenched with sweat, and must shut my jaw to keep my teeth from knocking. But I could remember stopping at Iskander’s bridge, gazing down into the pit, and walking on. I stepped over the fence in one stride and again walked on. The wide stream hunched up and rushed past me with increasing speed and gathering sound. But my terror had passed from me as though by the breaking of an evil spell, and only an eerie sense of things not of this earth made my skin creep.
No doubt Miranda had chosen this meeting place because it was one of the most lonely in the world. She had chosen this hour in the late ebb of night because it was the least employed except by dreamers, spirits good and evil, and night birds and beasts. But I felt there were other causes in the first case, and I now discovered one, strangely warming my heart, in the second case. Tonight’s moon rose late. She had returned to the shape she bore when she was young and beautiful and promising great things—a deep-drawn bow with long pointed ends—but now she faced her western burial ground instead of her glorious birthplace, and almost all her promises had failed, and she had turned into a witch with a weird lamp. Yet because I needed her pale beams to guide my steps, Miranda had arranged for me to have them. Our appointment was the hour that she hung high. Pouring straight down, some of the beams fell into the deep, narrow chasm where I walked.
I walked a footpath beside the raging waters. Since the Khan came by a secluded lane over and down the ridge, it must have been worn by deer and other folk of the woods. Yet they too must traverse it in pricked-eared wonder, their wild hearts clamoring from intimations forbidden to me and to even the great Khan. I half saw, half divined, a scene of unworldly beauty. Its accompaniment was the river’s roar as Miranda’s singing had accompanied the beauty of her face and flowing hands. The walls of the canyon steeped as the river’s tumult grew. Their dark cedars stood one and one instead of close and thick as in the upper world; perhaps only a few of the most valiant could take root among the crags. Perhaps here was a great kingdom enchanted into this small space. Maybe it was a scene from a Land of Faery transported here by the arts of the Khan’s magicians.
No, it was only a natural wonder that a traveler in a wild and lonely land had chanced on and reported to the Khan. The romantic scene about me was but part of it, and likely a small part. The place where the Khan vanished and stayed long, the most holy on all the earth in his subject’s sight, was still ahead of me; and I surmised it to be the birthplace of the stream at the head of the canyon. When very he had laid eyes on it, had he decreed it the secret shrine of a great pleasure ground, where would stand his summer palace?
Below my musings I had kept loose track of my steps. When I had taken about three hundred, the moon gave me a glimpse of Miranda on the deer path. When I came near she smiled and, leaning toward me, spoke in my ear—else I could not have heard her above the multitoned thunder of the waters.
“Let’s go to the source,” she said. “I’ll lead the way.”
So we walked on. When there was no room to walk between the stream and the canyon walls, the path wound upward, seeking ledges and projections on the face of the cliff and clinging there like a living thing—but it had been made by living things, deer and suchlike who had business up the canyon and had found their way there. So their fawns could follow them, they had picked unerringly the safest route, for not even the wide-homed stags could survive a fall into the rock-bound cataracts, and only the highborn otters, to whom had been given dominion over wild, white floods, dared plunge and play. Thus Miranda and I, young, strong, good walkers, and with nerves steadied from many adventures, could follow in their steps.
When the path dipped to the water’s edge, I caught her hand and stopped her and spoke in her ear.
“Perhaps we’re the only people alive who’ve ever walked this path.”
“No, there are others who believe that God is greater than the Khan and who came here to affirm it. There are those whose souls are as haughty as his and came here at their command. And there must be those who had to come because of eager eyes and itching feet.”
“What did they find?”
“I think all of them found grace.”
I thought she might say “strength” instead of “grace.” I could not think through her meaning but I knew she spoke the truth. She was very pale and her eyes were big and soft and many intimations were being given her.
“Will I find it?”
“Yes, a little, unless you’re a demon, not a man.”
“How could I be a demon?”
“It’s very easy to become one, I think—although most who do are not recognized by real people and perhaps often not by themselves. All you’d have to do would be to get rid of your soul. I don’t mean to sell it. You hear of that, but I’ve thought it over, and who is there to buy it? Not the Devil. What would he do with it? I think you only have to stop wanting it and it dies.”
Spray from the surges flinging in my face stung like snow crystals. “This water is ice-cold,” I said, not in the least uneasy over changing the subject.
“Yet it doesn’t freeze in the bitterest winters. I suppose it’s too violent for frost to get hold of it. Did you know it chills the river for more than a mile below its mouth?”
“No.”
“The old gibbaleen told me.”
In the slow-swirling pools under the cascades it appeared milky-white, making me think of some of the glacier streams in the High Pamir. And now the air became intensely cold and only our exercise kept us warm. There was no longer any vegetation close to the brim.
We went on, farther and higher, and both of us became greatly afraid. But we had drawn so close that each of us recognized the other’s fear as the same, and it was one that Nature put into us, for our protection, not terror from a false god. Its main cause was the roar of the river between the rock walls in concatenation with a continuous explosion not far ahead. The path narrowed and steepened.
We followed it still and it led us to the canyon rim. The sound, though enormous, was not so terrible now that we had escaped from its reverberations on the rock walls; and we advanced through a cedar wood, walking hand in hand. And then we came to the birthplace of the river.
At least, this was its borning into the upper world, lit by the sun, moon, and stars, although it had had a dark fetal life in the womb of the mountain. We stood near the mouth of a cave whose breath was deathly cold. From its upper jaw hung a row of dragon teeth, long and sharp, and the lower was set with what looked like broken, blunt snags, but they shimmered in the weak moonlight, and I did not believe that they were limestone stalactites and stalagmites; nor did the portal itself look like stone. In a moment I guessed the truth. It was a cave of ice.