Conder called the men together. He explained his plan. Under the fading light of day, they moved as quickly as possible to the nearest abandoned village and made camp there. Campfires were lit inside the stone huts. No sentries walked the perimeter. The moon was dark. Conder passed the time converting a handful of .303 cartridges into passable blasting caps.
The pygmies did not keep him waiting long.
They were fifty yards from the camp when Conder fired the first flare from his Very pistol. The white star shell arced through the night, revealing hundreds of dark, slithering figures belly-crawling up the slope toward the village. Two things happened very quickly. First, the pygmies, to a man, looked up at their first sight of a burning magnesium shell, and their irises slammed shut to keep out the retina-scalding light. And second, Captain Conder gave the order, “Volley fire! Fire!”
Twenty-eight rifles roared in unison from behind the standing stones that surrounded the ruined village. Save for the single-shot rifles carried by the Cossack, the Tibetans, and the Uyghur, every man in the expedition was equipped with an eight-shot, bolt-action Lee-Metford rifle. The pygmies took the first volley in stunned surprise. They took the second volley in utter disbelief, having never seen rifles that could be reloaded so dizzyingly fast. As Conder ordered the third volley, the spell broke. Dozens scrambled to their feet to knock their dart-throwers. The swarm of .303 rounds punched fist-sized holes and left limbs dangling from shreds of meat. Dozens fell. Some managed to blindly hurl their darts into the night. They were answered by a fourth withering volley.
A moan rose from the mass of black figures struggling to their feet. A sound of disappointment, as from the mouth of a spoiled child who has found his parents’ largesse wanting. This was not fair. A stronger voice cried out among the pygmies, and they surged up the slope. Conder reloaded and fired his Very pistol as he roared the command, “Rapid fire! Fire at will!”
For the next three minutes the pygmies died. Perhaps they did love death more than the trespassers loved life, but after enduring two minutes of sustained fire, the pygmies’ love of death proved to be not entirely unconditional. The last minute before Conder called “Cease fire!” they shot the pygmies in the back as they fled. There was no pursuit in the dark.
Come daybreak, the men saw the full measure of their work. So could the vultures, which began to gather. Had anyone bothered to count, they would have found eight hundred and sixty-four spent shell casings scattered at their feet. Instead they walked among the wounded, finishing them with bayonets. No member of the expedition had suffered anything more serious than fingers singed on their rifles’ red-hot barrels. Even Qasim looked less hopeless.
Conder, Khan, and Thapa counted the dead and settled on a conservative figure of one hundred and seventy killed.
“They’ve had enough,” Malik Khan observed.
“I’ll be the one to decide when they’ve had enough,” Conder snapped. “Have the men pack up and fall in. We’re going to beard them in their den.”
The expedition was moving by 8am. Tracking the retreating pygmies was easy. Circling carrion birds marked where their wounded had succumbed or were too weak to move. Any still holding a guttering spark of life were bayoneted.
Two days later, the trail led to an almost invisible ravine. A quirk of the desolate landscape hid a narrow passage in what appeared to be a solid cliff. The expedition moved through in small groups, lest they be attacked from atop the high walls, but no one moved to oppose them until they reached the village.
They heard the cacophony from miles away. It came from another stone village, this one not abandoned. Hundreds of figures churned between the huts and standing stones, dancing, shouting, and flailing. They beat all manner of instruments constructed from the bones and flesh of men. Conder ordered Gurkha Naik Rai to deploy his bagpipes again. The effect of “Cock o’ the North” on the mob was like kicking an anthill.
They poured out of the village, down the slope, and across a half mile of open field. Conder looked at the force arrayed before them through his binoculars — he saw old men, invalids, women, and children. The women carrying infants were in the vanguard, howling like devils.
“Thank you, Naik Rai,” Conder called to the piper. “We have their attention. Please rejoin the rest of the ranks. Volley fire present at five hundred yards!”
The horde did not move particularly fast. They were under the guns for almost ten minutes, though the pace of the fire was slower. None got any closer than twenty yards, but none broke and ran. No one bothered to count the dead this time.
“By the most merciful, how could they throw their lives away like that?”
“To make us spend our bullets, Malik. Do a count. Let’s see what we have left.”
It came to just over forty rounds per man.
“The news is good, Captain,” Havildar Thapa announced upon completing the inventory. “We are unlikely to run out of enemy before we get a chance to wet our kukris.”
“Yes, but before you swallow that bone, you’ll want to measure your anus,” Khan scoffed at Thapa’s bravado. “Forty rounds per man is just enough for one more fight.”
“Yes, but they don’t know the state of our magazine,” Conder said. “So we push on, Malik. We push on.”
“Just as well. Old age is a time of wretchedness anyway,” Khan sighed.
Crossing the field of dead and dying, none felt any enthusiasm for dispatching the wounded. No one stopped to retrieve the squalling infants freezing on the cold ground, either.
Once past the village, they saw the fortress. It squatted, a massive, round, windowless dome surrounded, like the villages, by a concentric circle of rough granite menhirs. These were like the titan blocks of Stonehenge, dwarfing the gravestone-sized menhirs that ringed the villages.
“You see, Malik? Would God have spared that crate of Russian dynamite if He didn’t intend us to level that redoubt?”
Malik Khan did not appreciate Conder’s sacrilegious bluster.
As the expedition drew closer, the scale of the structure became apparent. It was the size of a cathedral, like the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and it was no fortress. There were no battlements from which to fight, no towers or windows to watch from, no murder-holes from which to shoot their poison darts. It was a dark gray dome, built from granite blocks the size of those that formed Cheops’ Pyramid. A single low, arched doorway lurked at the base of the dome. No one rushed out to attack.
“Announce us, Naik Rai,” Conder called to his piper. “Try ‘The British Grenadiers’ this time.”
The Gurkha’s performance produced no reaction.
“They seem less interested in using up our ammunition,” Khan observed.
“Then we go in after them.”
The two Tibetans, Qasim, and two of the Kashmiri Sepoys were posted at the entrance to ensure a line of retreat and to guard the expedition’s horses. They fueled and lit a trio of kerosene lamps, and Conder, his revolver and cutlass in hand, led twenty-three men into the stygian vault.
The narrow corridors turned and twisted in an unpleasantly biological manner, as if the great dome were a mummified corpse rather than a stone labyrinth. The walls inside were painted with frescoes, wet paints applied to wet plaster, preserved by the dry and the cold, and shielded from the sun and the wind. The scenes depicted in the brilliant pigments were nonsensical madness. Leviathan spiders, whose webs spanned valleys, devoured horned men, who in turn burned the spiders’ webs and crushed their egg sacs. Black ships, like triremes or galleys, rowed through the sky, landing to disgorge bloated pale horrors that herded the horned men aboard their ships, disappearing into the sky with them. Oceans and islands were depicted, despite the Kulun Shan being perhaps the most inland spot on Earth. Reptilian horrors wheeled through the painted skies, and great cities guarded foul pits that led deep into the Earth. There was more to see, but then the pygmies began to attack.