you.”
“Very well,” I said, “I’ll go and have a word with him. You come with me, and tell me what he says.”
Excusing myself from the table and assuring my companions who were all ears that I would be back presently, hopefully bearing information that might shed some light on the riddle of the tomb, I went down to meet the unknown visitor.
As I drew near, the figure half turned so that I could make out something of the general appearance, and I was astonished to see before me the wizened features of a man so old and fragile that it seemed sheer folly for him to be abroad at this hour, or indeed at any hour of day or night. He was clad only in two lengths of old woven fabric, the one tied at the waist and draped so as to form pantaloons, the other worn as a shawl over the head and shoulders. From under the cope peeped deep-set eyes clouded by cataract, which turned independently of each other, above a peculiarly aquiline nose and hollow cheeks, and mouth reduced to a concave slit for want of teeth. Yet for all its sallow, louche appearance and parchment-thin fragility, this ancient phiz gave out a ferocious energy and plain rectitude that struck me to the very quick, causing me to recoil in mid-stride.
Leaning on a black cane staff, the old man convulsively shook and stiffened, becoming at once erect and remarkably increased in stature, simulating the action of a dancer in the martial performance of baris. I stood in awe. Then raising his free arm and hand before him, palm up-turned in a gesture of candid disavowal, he fixed me with one eye, and his entire frame shook with the force of his utterance. He spoke several low guttural phrases in a lilting, rhythmical manner, and in a tongue that was to me totally unintelligible.
When he had finished, I turned to the young man who had come with me from the restaurant and demanded to know what had been said. But he merely hung his head and gazed at his feet, as if exhorting them to stay put. I was nonplussed. The eye—it was hard to define which—rested on me ever more fixedly, and a silence both fraught with uncertainty and interminable ensued.
I decided to speak, if only to break the spell of apprehension. “Bapak” I began, and I addressed the apparition in the few limited words of Malay at my command—“Bapak, I thank you for bringing back to me my binoculars.”
But my expression elicited not the slightest response. Either the old man was not conversant with Malay, or my rendering of it was so execrable as to be perfectly meaningless. In all fairness to me, it turned out that my first assumption was correct.
The silence was beginning to pall. “Look!” I said to the waiter fellow, “tell me, did you or did you not understand what the old man said?”
“Very difficult,” came the hesitant reply: “he not speak good Bahasa Bali. He speak more like kawi old language. And he not understand Bahasa Indonesia.”
This was very confusing. I could appreciate that the old man might be unfamiliar with Bahasa Indonesia or the Malay tongue, since many of the older generation had received no formal education, and having no need of any lingua franca, habitually and invariably conversed in Balinese.
“But did you understand anything that he said?” I was mildly exasperated. “Please try and give me some idea.”
The boy shuffled uncomfortably, and without looking at me said “He say he find your—what you call?—tjorong in the place where—where you not can go. He say please you not go again there. That all.”
“Please will you tell him I am very sorry. I did not mean to go somewhere I should not go. But why should I not go there? What is wrong?”
He translated my words into the fluent tones of the high Balinese tongue. I had been around long enough to become familiar with the style if not the meaning; and it seemed to me that he spoke with an unnatural degree of deference. The man simply nodded as if to signify his understanding, but made no further reply. Then fixing us both with a penetrating eye, he muttered a customary civility, before inclining forward his hooded head in the slightest semblance of a bow; whereupon he resumed his stoop and appeared to shrink in a twinkling to his former size; and making no further sign or sound, he stumped through the gate and down the steps, and disappeared into the night.
To say I was flummoxed by this interview would be little less than accurate. Even allowing that we might have conversed in a common tongue, there had been no exchange of information or opinion, nor yet of simple courtesy; no quarter given or received. One fact alone had plainly emerged, that, for reasons which were at best abstruse and would at worst remain obscure, our presence in that dark and unfrequented corner was considered an intrusion. But why? And by whom? My curiosity was by now aroused to a feverish intensity, and would not be suppressed.
During my brief confrontation with the unbidden visitor, I had detected no note of hostility or perceived affront: only a resolute stance not to invite discussion or reveal the least clue as to his origin or motive. Yet why bother to retrieve my binoculars at all, let alone restore them to their rightful owner, thereby declaring the existence of one’s hand if not its contents? Furthermore, the exercise of tracking me down indicated the likelihood of our having been under constant surveillance from the moment we set foot in the cave. It was this latter reflection that really shook me and came to occupy my wakeful thoughts as well as dreams in the days that followed.
“But did the old man not say where he had come from?” I questioned the servant as we remounted the steps.
“No, he not say nothing. I never see him before.”
So that was that. The mystery compounded, and no inkling of a solution within grasp, my desire to return to the cave and burial chamber, in the face of all obstacles and objections, and regardless of the consequences, now knew no bounds and would not be denied. I became suddenly aware that I was still holding the vital piece of evidence that pointed to the existence of some unknown and inaccessible sphere, looming on the horizon as a separate continuum. I took my glasses from their case. To my amazement they were bone-dry. Then I remembered having stuffed them in my pocket at the moment it started to rain. They must have slipped out subsequently in the cavern, most probably on my being overtaken and spun about by the flash flood. So had the water receded soon after, leaving the glasses high and dry—well, figuratively speaking? Having been immersed, they could not have dried out so quickly.
With such imponderables racing through my mind, I found myself back at the table. Thanking the waiter for his valuable services as escort and interpreter, and bestowing on him a small reward, I resumed my seat. Hermione and Hector regarded me quizzically.
“Well,” said Hermione, “what’s new? Don’t tell us you’ve discovered an unknown species out there, while we’ve been bored to death, listening to Fats Waller and drinking champagne!”
“In point of fact, you’re not so far off the mark,” I replied. “While Fats and fizz may not be an acceptable substitute for the satisfaction of scientific discovery, I see I’ve managed to return in the nick of time to save you from a certain fate, since there’s still a drop left in the bottle!”
“Perhaps I was thinking more in terms of a suicide pact, my dear,” Hermione beamed at me. We all laughed, though it did not seem so terribly funny.
“Right!” said Hector: “my shout. Let’s do ourselves in once and for all, and let’s do it properly! Pol Roger, wasn’t it?”
“Should do the trick,” I concurred. And then I told them about my meeting with the gaffer from the back of beyond, not that there was a great deal of substance to relate, other than the bare details of his dress and demeanour, and the fact that he spoke in an ancient tongue.
“So he was altogether decidedly fay,” broke in Hermione. “I remember your words when we were swimming in the river. You said something about leading us to the realm of Faerie.” She paused for an instant, regarding me intently, a doubtful smile flickering at the edge of her eyes. “Without knowing it, perhaps you did!”
It was odd. Damned odd! There was no denying it. There was no plausible explanation for my utterance, and I could assign no name to whatever it was that had provoked it. At the time it had seemed a perfectly innocent, if somewhat peculiar remark. I supposed that,