were not moments into which eight centuries were gathered.
They looked at him with a remote pity in their eyes.
'Five absolutely perfect specimens of the nine precious stones,' began the jeweller; 'the ruby, emerald, sapphire, diamond, opal, cat's-eye, turquoise, amethyst, and----'
'Topaz?' asked Tarvin, with the air of a proprietor.
'No; black diamond--black as night.'
'But how do you know all these things--how do you get on to them?' asked Tarvin curiously.
'Like everything else in a native state--common talk, but difficult to prove. Nobody can as much as guess where that necklace is.'
'Probably under the foundations of some temple in the city,' said the yellow-coated man.
Tarvin, in spite of the careful guard he was keeping over himself, could not help kindling at this. He saw himself digging the city up.
'Where is this city?' inquired he.
They pointed across the sun-glare, and showed him a rock girt by a triple line of wall. It was exactly like one of the many ruined cities that Tarvin had passed in the bullock-cart. A rock of a dull and angry red surmounted that rock. Up to the foot of the rock ran the yellow sands of the actual desert--the desert that supports neither tree nor shrub, only the wild ass, and somewhere in its heart, men say, the wild camel.
Tarvin stared through the palpitating haze of heat, and saw that there was neither life nor motion about the city. It was a little after noonday, and his Majesty's subjects were asleep. This solid block of loneliness, then, was the visible end of his journey--the Jericho he had come from Topaz to attack.
And he reflected, 'Now, if a man should come from New York in a bullock-cart to whistle around the Sauguache Range, I wonder what sort of fool I'd call him!'
He rose and stretched his dusty limbs. 'What time does it get cool enough to take in the town?' he asked.
'Do what to the town? Better be careful. You might find yourself in difficulties with the Resident,' warned his friendly adviser.
Tarvin could not understand why a stroll through the deadest town he had ever seen should be forbidden. But he held his peace, inasmuch as he was in a strange country, where nothing, save a certain desire for command on the part of the women, was as he had known it. He would take in the town thoroughly. Otherwise he began to fear that its monumental sloth--there was still no sign of life upon the walled rock--would swallow him up, or turn him into a languid Calcutta drummer.
Something must be done at once before his wits were numbed. He inquired the way to the telegraph-office, half doubting, even though he saw the wires, the existence of a telegraph in Rhatore.
'By the way,' one of the men called after him, 'it's worth remembering that any telegram you send here is handed all round the court and shown to the King.'
Tarvin thanked him, and thought this was worth remembering, as he trudged on through the sand toward a desecrated Mohammedan mosque near the road to the city which was doing duty as a telegraph-office.
A trooper of the State was lying fast asleep on the threshold, his horse picketed to a long bamboo lance driven into the ground. Other sign of life there was none, save a few doves cooing sleepily in the darkness under the arch.
Tarvin gazed about him dispiritedly for the blue and white sign of the Western Union, or its analogue in this queer land. He saw that the telegraph wires disappeared through a hole in the dome of the mosque. There were two or three low wooden doors under the archway. He opened one at random, and stepped upon a warm, hairy body, which sprang up with a grunt. Tarvin had hardly time to draw back before a young buffalo calf rushed out. Undisturbed, he opened another door, disclosing a flight of steps eighteen inches wide. Up these he travelled with difficulty, hoping to catch the sound of the ticker. But the building was as silent as the tomb it had once been. He opened another door, and stumbled into a room, the domed ceiling of which was inlaid with fretted tracery in barbaric colours, picked out with myriads of tiny fragments of mirror. The flood of colour and the glare of the snow-white floor made him blink after the pitchy darkness of the staircase. Still, the place was a undoubtedly a telegraph-office, for an antiquated instrument was clamped upon a cheap dressing table. The sunlight streamed through the gash in the dome which had been made to admit the telegraph wires, and which had not been repaired.
Tarvin stood in the sunlight and stared about him. He took off the soft, wide-brimmed Western hat, which he was finding too warm for this climate, and mopped his forehead. As he stood in the sunlight, straight, clean-limbed, and strong, one who lurked in this mysterious spot with designs upon him would have decided that he did not look a wholesome person to attack. He pulled at the long thin moustache which drooped at the corners of his mouth in a curve shaped by the habit of tugging at it in thought, and muttered picturesque remarks in a tongue to which these walls had never echoed. What chance was there of communicating with the United States of America from this abyss of oblivion? Even the 'damn' that came back to him from the depths of the dome sounded foreign and inexpressive.
A sheeted figure lay on the floor. 'It takes a dead man to run this place!' exclaimed Tarvin, discovering the body. 'Hallo, you! Get up there!'
The figure rose to its feet with grunts, cast away its covering, and disclosed a very sleepy native in a complete suit of dove-coloured satin.
'Ho!' cried he.
'Yes,' returned Tarvin imperturbably.
'You want to see me?'
'No; I want to send a telegram, if there's any electric fluid in this old tomb.'
'Sir,' said the native affably, 'you have come to right shop. I am telegraph operator and postmaster-general of this State.'
He seated himself in the decayed chair, opened a drawer of the table, and began to search for something.
'What you looking for, young man? Lost your connection with Calcutta?'
'Most gentlemen bring their own forms,' he said, with a distant note of reproach in his bland manner. 'But here is form. Have you got pencil?'
'Oh, see here, don't let me strain this office. Hadn't you better go and lie down again? I'll tap the message off myself. What's your signal for Calcutta?'
'You, sir, not understanding this instrument.'
'Don't I? You ought to see me milk the wires at election time.'
'This instrument require most judeecious handling, sir. You write message. I send. That is proper division of labour. Ha! ha!'
Tarvin wrote his message, which ran thus:--
'Getting there. Remember Three C.'s--
TARVIN.'
It was addressed to Mrs. Mutrie at the address she had given him in Denver.
'Rush it!' he said, as he handed it back over the table to the smiling image.
'All right; no fear. I am here for that,' returned the native, understanding in general terms from the cabalistic word that his customer was in haste.
'Will the thing ever get there?' drawled Tarvin, as he leaned over the table and met the gaze of the satin-clothed being with an air of good comradeship, which invited him to let him into the fraud, if there was one.
'Oh yes; to-morrow. Denver is in the United States America,' said the native, looking up at Tarvin with childish glee in the sense of knowledge.
'Shake!' exclaimed Tarvin, offering him a hairy fist. 'You've been well brought up.'
He stayed half an hour fraternising with the man on the foundation of this common ground of knowledge, and saw him work the message off on his instrument, his heart going out on that first click all the way home. In the midst of the conversation the native suddenly dived into the cluttered drawer of the dressing-table, and drew forth a telegram covered with dust, which he offered to Tarvin's scrutiny.