Supping With Panthers by Tom Holland Read Free Book Online Page B

as though I had been out for only ten minutes, yet my sleep had been so dreamless and profound that I knew myself to be quite refreshed. I would not wake the others yet, I thought. It was still only the afternoon, after all. Then I opened my eyes to find that I was staring into the pale, full gleam of the moon.
    It was chillingly beautiful, and for a moment the scene fairly took my breath away. The great Himalayan peaks ahead of me, and the valleys far below, mantled in shadows and shades of rich blue; the faint wisps of cloud below us, like the breath of some mountain deity; and over all, flooding it, the silver light of that burning moon. I felt myself to be in a world which had no place for man, which had endured and would endure for all time – cold, and beautiful, and terrible. I felt what an Englishman in India must so often feel – how far from home I was, how remote from everything I understood. I looked about me. I thought of the mortal danger we were in, and wondered if this strange place was to be my grave, whether my bones would lie here lost and unknown, far from Wiltshire and my dear, dear wife, crumbling gradually to dust beneath the roof of the world.
    But a soldier cannot dwell on such maudlin thoughts for long. We were in deadly peril, that was true enough, but we would not escape it by sitting on our hands. I woke Cuff and Eliot, and once they had risen we continued on our way. For an hour we saw nothing worthy of comment. The path continued to flatten out, and the rocks began to give way to scrub. Soon we were walking through jungle again, and the vegetation overhead had grown so thick that not even the moonlight could penetrate it. ‘This is very strange,’ Eliot said, squatting down to inspect a vast flower. ‘There shouldn’t be flora of this kind at such an altitude.’
    I smiled faintly. ‘Don’t look so disturbed,’ I replied. ‘Would you rather we had nothing to conceal our approach?’
    And then, just as I said this, I saw the glimmer of something pale through the trees. I made my way up to it. It was a giant pillar, long shattered and overgrown now with creepers, but of a beautiful workmanship and decorated down the sides with a stone necklace of skulls.
    Eliot inspected it. “The sign of Kali,’ he whispered. I nodded. I drew out my gun.
    We went as stealthily as we could now. Very soon we began to pass more pillars, some flat on the ground and almost completely overgrown, others still massively erect. All had the same necklace-like decoration of skulls. The trees began to fall away and above the pillars I saw a lintel start to rise, bone-white beneath the darkness of the creepers and weeds. It was decorated in the florid Hindoo style, with the stonework twisting like the coils of a snake, and as I stared at one of the loops so it began to move, and I saw that it was indeed the body of a cobra, coiled and heavy, the guardian spirit of this death-like place. I watched it slip away into the darkness; then I walked forwards and began to feel marble under my feet; ahead, I could see the stone lit silver by the moon, and when at length I left the shadows of the trees I saw all around me great courtyards and walls, still standing despite the jungle’s tightening grip. Who had built this palace, I wondered – and who abandoned it? I was no expert, but it seemed to me that it was centuries old. I crossed the main courtyard. Columns stretched away from me in rows, and supported further columns on their roof. I guessed that they formed the palace’s heart.
    As I drew nearer to them I realised that they had been sculpted in the form of women – shameless and sensual, as so often seems to be the case, regrettably, with the ancient statuary of India. I will pass over their appearance, save to mention that they were quite naked and impossibly lewd. But it was their faces, oddly, which disturbed me the most. They had been carved with extraordinary skill, for they wore expressions of the utmost