Rudyard Kipling - The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

'What! Fifty men?'

'No; the captain.'

The King shook in his saddle with laughter, and held up his hand. The commandant of the troop trotted up.

'Ohé, Pertab Singh-Ji, he says he would have shot thee.' Then, turning to Tarvin, smiling, 'That is my cousin.'

The burly Rajput captain grinned from ear to ear, and, to Tarvin's surprise, answered in perfect English--'That would do for irregular cavalry--to kill the subalterns, you understand--but we are drilled exclusively on English model, and I have my commission from the Queen. Now, in the German army----'

Tarvin looked at him in blank amazement.

'But you are not connected with the military,' said Pertab Singh-Ji politely. 'I have heard how you shoot, and I saw what you were doing. But you must please excuse. When a shot is fired near his Highness it is our order always to come up.'

He saluted, and withdrew to his troop.

The sun was growing unpleasantly hot, and the King and Tarvin trotted back toward the city.

'How many convicts can you lend me?' asked Tarvin, as they went,

'All my jails full, if you want them,' was the enthusiastic answer. 'By God, sahib, I never saw anything like that. I would give you anything.'

Tarvin took off his hat, and mopped his forehead, laughing.

'Very good, then. I'll ask for something that will cost you nothing.'

The Maharajah grunted doubtfully. People generally demanded of him things he was not willing to part with.

'That talk is new to me, Tarvin Sahib,' said he.

'You'll see I'm in earnest when I say I only want to look at the Naulahka. I've seen all your State diamonds and gold carriages, but I haven't seen that.'

The Maharajah trotted fifty yards without replying. Then--

'Do they speak of it where you come from?'

'Of course. All Americans know that it's the biggest thing in India. It's in all the guide-books,' said Tarvin brazenly.

'Do the books say where it is? The English people are so wise.' The Maharajah stared straight in front of him, and almost smiled.

'No; but they say you know, and I'd like to see it.'

'You must understand, Tarvin Sahib'--the Maharajah spoke meditatively that this is not a State jewel, but the State jewel--the jewel of the State. It is a holy thing. Even I do not keep it, and I cannot give you any order to see it.'

Tarvin's heart sank.

'But,' the Maharajah continued, 'if I say where it is, you can go at your own risk, without Government interfering. I have seen you are not afraid of risk, and I am a very grateful man. Perhaps the priests will show you; perhaps they will not. Or perhaps you will not find the priests at all. Oh, I forgot; it is not in that temple that I was thinking of. No; it must be in the Gye-Mukh--the Cow's Mouth. But there are no priests there, and nobody goes. Of course it is in the Cow's Mouth. I thought it was in this city,' resumed the Maharajah. He spoke as if he were talking of a dropped horse-shoe or a mislaid turban.

'Oh, of course. The Cow's Mouth,' repeated Tarvin, as if this also were in the guide-books.

Chuckling with renewed animation, the King went on--'By God, only a very brave man would go to the Gye-Mukh; such a brave man as yourself, Tarvin Sahib,' he added, giving his companion a shrewd look. 'Ho, ho! Pertab Singh-Ji would not go. No; not with all his troops that you conquered to-day.'

'Keep your praise until I've earned it, Maharajah Sahib,' said Tarvin. 'Wait until I've dammed that river.' He was silent for a while, as if digesting this newest piece of information.

'Now, you have a city like this city, I suppose?' said the Maharajah interrogatively, pointing to Rhatore.

Tarvin had overcome, in a measure, his first feeling of contempt for the State of Gokral Seetarun and the city of Rhatore. He had begun to look upon them both, as was his nature in the case of people and things with which he dwelt, with a certain kindness.

'Topaz is going to be bigger,' he explained.

'And when you are there what is your offeecial position?' asked the Maharajah.

Tarvin, without answering, drew from his breast-pocket the cable from Mrs. Mutrie, and handed it in silence to the King. Where an election was concerned even the sympathy of an opium-soaked Rajput was not indifferent to him.

'What does it mean?' asked the King, and Tarvin threw up his hands in despair.

He explained his connection with the government of his State, making the Colorado legislature appear as one of the parliaments of America. He owned up to being the Hon. Nicholas Tarvin, if the Maharajah really wanted to give him his full title.

'Such as the members of provincial councils that come here?' suggested the Maharajah, remembering the grey-headed men who visited him front time to time, charged with authority only little less than that of a viceroy. 'But still you will not write letters to that legislature about my government,' queried he suspiciously, recalling again over-curious emissaries from the British Parliament over seas, who sat their horses like sacks, and talked interminably of good government when he wished to go to bed. 'And above all,' he added slowly, as they drew near to the palace, 'you are most true friend of the Maharaj Kunwar? And your friend, the lady doctor, will make him well?'

'That,' said Tarvin, with a sudden inspiration, 'is what we are both here for!'

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This I saw when the rites were done,

And the lamps were dead and the Gods alone,

And the grey snake coiled on the altar stone--

Ere I fled from a Fear that I could not see,

And the Gods of the East made mouths at me.

—In Seeonee.

When he left the King's side, Tarvin's first impulse was to set the Foxhall colt into a gallop, and forthwith depart in search of the Naulahka. He mechanically drove his heels home, and shortened his rein under the impulse of the thought; but the colt's leap beneath him recalled him to his senses, and he restrained himself and his mount with the same motion.

His familiarity with the people's grotesque nomenclature left him unimpressed by the Cow's Mouth as a name for a spot, but he gave some wonder to the question why the thing should be in the Cow's Mouth. This was a matter to be laid before Estes.

'These heathen,' he said to himself, 'are just the sort to hide it away in a salt-lick, or bury it in a hole in the ground. Yes; a hole is about their size. They put the State diamonds in cracker-boxes tied up with boot-laces. The Naulahka is probably hanging on a tree.'

As he trotted toward the missionary's house, he looked at the hopeless landscape with new interest, for any spur of the low hills, or any roof in the jumbled city, might contain his treasure.

Estes, who had outlived many curiosities, and knew Rajputana as a prisoner knows the bricks of his cell, turned on Tarvin, in reply to the latter's direct question, a flood of information. There were mouths of all kinds in India, from the Burning Mouth in the north, where a jet of natural gas was worshipped by millions as the incarnation of a divinity, to the Devil's Mouth among some forgotten Buddhist ruins in the furthest southern corner of Madras.

There was also a Cow's Mouth some hundreds of miles away, in the courtyard of a temple at Benares, much frequented by devotees; but as far as Rajputana was concerned, there was only one Cow's Mouth, and that was to be found in a dead city.

The missionary launched into a history of wars and rapine, extending over hundreds of years, all centring round one rock-walled city in the wilderness, which had been the pride and the glory of the kings of Mewar. Tarvin listened with patience as infinite as his weariness--ancient history had no charm for the man who was making his own town--while Estes enlarged upon the past, and told stories of voluntary immolation on the pyre in subterranean palaces by thousands of Rajput women who, when the city fell before a Mohammedan, and their kin had died in the last charge of defence, cheated the conquerors of all but the empty glory of conquest. Estes had a taste for archæology, and it was a pleasure to him to speak of it to a fellow-countryman.