The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

ROBERT SILVERBERG Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar

WHAT HAPPENED TO Smithers out there in the Great Indian Desert may seem a trifle hard to believe, but much that happens in Her Imperial Majesty’s subcontinent is a trifle hard to believe, and yet one disbelieves it at one’s peril. Unfortunately, there is nobody to tell the tale but me, for it all happened many years ago, and Yule has retired from the Service and is living, so I hear, in Palermo, hard at work on his translation of Marco Polo, and Brewster, the only witness to the tragic events in the desert, is too far gone in senility now to be of any use to anyone, and Smithers — ah, poor Smithers—

But let me begin. We start in Calcutta and the year is 1858, with the memory of the dread and terrible Mutiny still overhanging our dreams, distant though those bloody events were from our administrative capital here. That great engineer and brilliant scholar Henry Yule — Lieutenant-Colonel Yule, as he was then, later to be Sir Henry — having lately returned from Allahabad, where he was in charge of strengthening and augmenting our defences against the rebels, has now been made Secretary of the Public Works Department, with particular responsibility for designing what one day will be the vast railroad system that will link every part of India. I hold the title of Deputy Consulting Engineer for Railways. Our young friend Brewster is my right-hand man, a splendid draughtsman and planner. And as my story opens Brewster has come to us, looking oddly flushed, with the news that Smithers, our intense, romantic, excitable Smithers, whom we have sent off on a surveying mission to Jodhpur and Bikaner and other sites in the remote West, has returned and is on his way to us at this very moment with an extraordinary tale to tell.

“Is he now?” Yule said, without much sign of animation. Yule is a Scot, stern and outwardly dour and somewhat fierce-looking, though I am in a position to know that behind that grim bearded visage lies a lively mind keenly alert to the romance of exploration. “Did he find a railroad already in place out there, I wonder? Some little project of an enterprising Rajput prince?”

“Here he comes now,” said Brewster. “You will hear it all from the man himself.” And an instant later Smithers was among us.

Smithers was fair-haired and very pink-skinned, with gleaming blue eyes that blazed out from his face like sapphires. Though he was somewhat below middle height, he was deep-chested and wide-shouldered, and so forceful was his physical presence that he could and did easily dominate a room of much taller men. Certainly he dominated his friend Brewster, who had known him since childhood. They had been to university together and they had entered the service of the East India Company together, taking appointment with the Bengal Engineers and making themselves useful in the Public Works Department, specialising in the building of bridges and canals. I could best describe the lanky, dark-complected Brewster as timid and cautious, one who was designed by Nature as a follower of stronger men, and Smithers, who in his heart of hearts looked upon himself as part of a grand English tradition of adventurous exploration that went back through Burton and Rawlinson and Layard to Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, was the man to whom he had attached himself.

“Well, Smithers?” Yule asked. “What news from Bikaner?”

“Not from Bikaner, sir,” said Smithers, “but from the desert beyond. The Thar, sir! The Thar!” His blazing blue eyes were wilder than ever and his face was rough and reddened from his weeks in the sun.

Yule looked startled. “You went into the Thar?” A reconnaissance of the vast bleak desert that lies beyond the cities of Rajputana had not been part of Smithers’ immediate task.

“Only a short way, sir. But what I learned — what I have heard—!”

Yule, who can be impatient and irritable, made a swift circular beckoning gesture, as though to say, “Aye, out with it, man!” But Smithers needed no encouragement. Already a story was tumbling from him: how in the desert city of Bikaner he had fallen in with an itinerant Portuguese merchant newly returned from a venture into the Great Indian Desert — the Thar, as the natives call it, that immense waterless void a hundred and fifty miles in breadth that stretches north-eastward for some four hundred miles from the swampy Rann of Cutch. Breathlessly Smithers retold the tale the Portuguese had told him: an unknown valley far out in the Thar, the sound of strange voices floating on the air, sometimes calling alluringly, sometimes wailing or sobbing, voices that could only be the voices of spirits or demons, for there was no one to be seen for miles around; the eerie music of invisible musicians, gongs and drums and bells, echoing against the sands; and above all a distinct sensation as of summoning, the awareness of some powerful force pulling one onward, deeper into that valley.

The Portuguese had resisted that force, said Smithers, for he was a hard-nosed trader and was able to keep his mind on business; but from villagers at an oasis town the man had picked up fragmentary anecdotes of an entire ancient city hidden away in that valley, a lost civilisation, a land of ghosts, in fact, from which that potent summons came, and into whose mysterious realm many a traveller had vanished, never to return.

I saw what I took to be the unmistakable glint of scepticism in Yule’s eyes. He has never been a man to suffer foolishness gladly; and from the knotting of his bristling brows I interpreted his response to Smithers’ wild fable as annoyance. But I was wrong.

“Singing spirits, eh?” Yule said. “Gongs and drums and bells? Let me read you something, and see if it sounds familiar.”

He drew from his desk a sheaf of manuscript pages that were, we already knew, his translation of The Book of Ser Marco Polo — the earliest draft of it, rather, for Yule was destined to spend two decades on this magnum opus before giving the world the first edition in 1870, nor did he stop revising and expanding it even then. But even here in 1858 he had done a substantial amount of the work.

“Marco is in the Gobi,” said Yule, “in the vicinity of the desert town of Lop, and he writes, ‘The length of this desert is so great that ’tis said it would take a year and more to ride from one end of it to the other. Beasts there are none, for there is nought for them to eat. But there is a marvellous thing related of this desert, which is that when travellers are on the move by night, and one of them chances to lag behind or to fall asleep or the like, when he tries to gain his company again he will hear spirits talking, and will suppose them to be his comrades. Sometimes the spirits will call him by name; and thus shall a traveller ofttimes be led astray so that he never finds his party. And in this way many have perished.’”

“It is much like what the Portuguese told me,” said Smithers.

Yule nodded. “I will go on. ‘Sometimes the stray travellers will hear as it were the tramp and hum of a great cavalcade of people away from the real line of road, and taking this to be their own company they will follow the sound; and when day breaks they find that a cheat has been put upon them and that they are in an ill plight. Even in the daytime one hears those spirits talking. And sometimes you shall hear the sound of a variety of musical instruments, and still more commonly the sound of drums.’”

Smithers said, and his face grew even redder, “How I long to hear those drums!”

“Of course you do,” said Yule, and brought out the whisky and soda, and passed around the cigars, and I knew that look in Yule’s formidable glittering eyes had not been one of scepticism at all, but of complete and utter captivation.

He went on to tell us that such tales as Marco Polo’s were common in medieval travel literature, and, rummaging among his papers, he read us a citation from Pliny of phantoms that appear and vanish in the deserts of Africa, and one from a Chinese named Hiuen Tsang six centuries before Marco that spoke of troops with waving banners marching in the Gobi, vanishing and reappearing and vanishing again, and many another tale of goblins and ghouls and ghostly dancers and musicians in the parched places of the world. “Of course,” said Yule, “it is possible to explain some of this music and song merely as the noises made by shifting sands affected by desert winds and extreme heat, and the banners and armies as illusions that the minds of men travelling under such stressful conditions are likely to generate.” He stared for a moment into his glass; he took a reflective puff of his cigar. “And then, of course, there is always the possibility that these tales have a rational origin — that somewhere in one of these deserts there does indeed lurk a hidden land that would seem wondrously strange to us, if only we could find it. The great age of discovery, gentlemen, is not yet over.”

“I request leave, sir, to look into the Thar beyond Bikaner and see what might be found there,” Smithers said.

It was a daring request. Smithers was our best surveyor, and the entire subcontinent needed measuring for the system of railways that we intended to create in its immense expanse, and nobody was planning to run track through the desert beyond Bikaner, for there was nothing there. Plenty of urgent work awaited Smithers between Delhi and Jodhpur, between Calcutta and Bombay, and elsewhere.

But Yule rose with that glitter of excitement in his eyes again and began pulling maps from a portfolio under his desk and spreading them out, the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map and a smaller one of the Frontier, pointing to this place and that one in the Thar and asking if one of them might have been the one of which that Portuguese had spoken, and we knew that Smithers’ request had been granted.

What I did not expect was that Brewster would be allowed to accompany him. Plainly it was a dangerous expedition and Smithers ought not to have been permitted to undertake it alone, but I would have thought that a subaltern or two and half a dozen native trackers would be the appropriate complement. Indeed Brewster was a strong and healthy young man who would readily be able to handle the rigours of the Thar, but an abundance of work awaited him right here in Calcutta and it struck me as remarkably extravagant for Yule to be willing to risk not one but two of our best engineers on such a fantastic endeavour at this critical time in the development of the nascent Indian railway system.

But I had failed to reckon with two traits of Yule’s character. One was his insatiable scholarly curiosity, which had drawn him to the close study not only of Marco Polo’s huge book but of the texts of many another early traveller whose names meant nothing to me: Ibn Batuta, for example, and Friar Jordanus, and Odoric of Pordenone. We were living at a time when the remaining unknown places of the world were opening before us, and the discovery — or rediscovery — of strange and marvellous regions of Asia held great fascination for him. Though he himself could not leave his high responsibilities in Calcutta, Smithers would serve as his surrogate in the far-off Thar.

Then, too, I had overlooked Yule’s profound complexity of spirit. As I have already noted, he is not at all the grim, stolid, monolithic administrator that he appears to a casual observer to be. I have spoken of his irritability and impatience; I should mention also his bursts of temper, followed by spells of black depression and almost absolute silence, and also the — well, eccentricity that has led him, a man who happens to be colourblind, to dress in the most outlandish garb and think it utterly normal. (I have in mind his brilliant claret-coloured trousers, which he always insisted were silver-grey.) He is complicated; he is very much his own man. So if he had taken it into his mind to send our highly valued Smithers off to look for lost cities in the Thar, nothing would stop him.

And when he asked Smithers what sort of complement he thought he would need, Smithers replied, “Why, Brewster and I can probably deal with everything all by ourselves, sir. We don’t want a great silly crowd of bearers and trackers, you know, to distract us as we try to cope with those musical spectres in the desert.”

Quickly I looked at Brewster and saw that he was as amazed as I was to find himself requisitioned for the expedition. But he made a quick recovery and managed a grin of boyish eagerness, as if he could think of nothing more jolly than to go trekking off into a pathless haunted desert with his hero Smithers. And Yule showed no reaction at all to Smithers’ request: once again he demonstrated his approval simply through silence.

Of course, getting to the Thar would be no easy matter. It lies at the opposite side of the subcontinent from Calcutta, far off in the north-west, beyond Lucknow, beyond Agra, beyond Delhi. And, as I have said, all of this was taking place at a time before we had built the Indian railway system. Smithers had just made the round trip from Calcutta to Bikaner and back, fifteen hundred miles or more, by an arduous journey down the Grand Trunk Road, India’s backbone before the railways existed. I have no idea how he travelled — by horse, by camel, by bullock-cart, by affiliating himself with merchant caravans, by any such means he could. And now he — and Brewster — would have to do it all over again. The journey would take months.

I should mention that Smithers had been engaged for the past year and a half to the Adjutant’s daughter, Helena, a young woman as notable for her beauty as for her sweetness of temperament, and the wedding was due to take place in just another dozen weeks or so. I wondered how Smithers would be able to prevail on her for a postponement; but prevail he did, either through his own force of personality or the innately accommodating nature that is so typical of women, and the wedding was postponed. We held a grand farewell party for Smithers and Brewster at Fort William, where nothing was asked and nothing was volunteered about the reason for their departure, and in the small hours of the night we stood by the bank of the river with brandy-glasses in hand, singing the grand old songs of our native country so far away, and then in the morning they set out to find whatever it was that they were destined to find in the Great Indian Desert.

The weeks passed, and turned into months.

Helena, the Adjutant’s lovely daughter, came to us now and again to ask whether there had been any word from her wandering fiancé. Of course I could see that she was yearning to get him back from the Thar and take him off to England for a lifetime of pink-faced fair-haired children, tea, cool fresh air, and clean linens. “I love him so,” she would say.

The poor girl! The poor girl!

I knew that Smithers was India through and through, and that if she ever did get him back from the Thar there would be another quest after that, and another, and another.

I knew too that there had been an engagement before she had met Smithers, a Major invalided home from Lahore after some sort of dreary scandal involving drinking and gambling, about which I had wanted to hear no details. She was twenty-six, already. The time for making those pink-faced babies was running short.

The months went by, and Smithers and Brewster did not return from the Thar. Yule began to grow furious. His health was not good — the air of India had never been right for him, and Bengal can be a monotonous and depressing place, oppressively dank and humid much of the year — and he could see retirement from the Service not very far in his future; but he desperately wanted to know about that valley in the Thar before he left. And, for all that desperate curiosity of his, work was work and there was a railroad line to build and Smithers and Brewster were needed here, not drifting around in some sandy wasteland far away.

Yule’s health gave way quite seriously in the spring of 1859 and he took himself home to Scotland for a rest. His older brother George, who had not been out of India for thirty years, went with him. They were gone three months. Since the voyage out and the voyage back took a month each, that left them only a month at home, but he returned greatly invigorated, only to be much distressed and angered by the news that Smithers and Brewster were still unaccounted for.

From time to time the Adjutant’s daughter came to inquire about her fiancé. Of course I had no news for her.

“I love him so!” she cried.

The poor girl.

Then one day there was a stir in town, as there often is when a caravan from some distant place arrives, and shortly thereafter Brewster presented himself at my office at the Public Works Department. Not Brewster and Smithers: just Brewster.

I scarcely recognised him. He was decked out not in his usual khakis but in some bizarre native garb, very colourful and strange, flowing robes of rose, magenta, turquoise blue, but that was not the least of the change. The Brewster I had seen off, the year before, had been dark-haired and youthful, perhaps thirty-two years old at most. The man I saw before me now looked forty-five or even fifty. There were prominent streaks of grey in his thick black hair, and the underlying bony structure of his cheeks and chin seemed to have shifted about to some degree, and there was a network of fine lines radiating outward from the corners of his eyes that no man of thirty-two should have had. His posture had changed, too: I remembered him as upright and straight-backed, but he had begun to stoop a little, as tall men sometimes do with the years, and his shoulders seemed rounded and hunched in a way I did not recall. My first thought, which in retrospect shows an amazing lack of insight, was merely that the journey must have been a very taxing one.

“Welcome, old friend,” I said. And then I said, carefully, “And Smithers—?”

Brewster gave me a weary stare. “He is still there.”

“Ah,” I said. And again: “Ah.”

Brewster’s reply could have meant anything: that Smithers had found something so fascinating that he needed more time for research, that he had fallen under the sway of some native cult and was wandering naked and ash-smeared along the ghats of Benares, or that he had perished on the journey and lay buried somewhere in the desert. But I asked no questions.

“Let me send for Yule,” I said. “He will want to hear your story.”

There had been a change in Yule’s appearance, too, since Brewster’s departure. He too had grown bowed and stooped and grey, but in his case that was no surprise, for he was nearly forty and his health had never been strong. But it was impossible not to notice Yule’s reaction at the great alteration Brewster had undergone. Indeed, Brewster now looked older than Yule himself.

“Well,” said Yule, and waited.

And Brewster began to tell his tale.

They had set forth in the grandest of moods, Brewster said. Smithers was almost always exuberant and enthusiastic, and it had ever been Brewster’s way, although he was of a different basic temperament, readily to fall in with his friend’s customarily jubilant frame of mind. It had been their plan to go with the Spring Caravan heading for Aurangabad, but in India everything happens either after time or before time, and in this case the caravan departed before time, so they were on their own. Smithers found horses for them and off they went, westward along the Grand Trunk Road, that great long river-like highway, going back to the sixteenth century and probably to some prehistoric precursor, that carries all traffic through the heart of India.

It is a comfortable road. I have travelled it myself. It is perfectly straight and capably constructed. Trees planted on both sides of it give welcome shade the whole way. The wide, well-made middle road is for the quick traffic, the sahibs on their horses, and the like. It was on that road that the British armies moved swiftly out of Bengal to conquer the north Indian plain. To the left and right are the rougher roadbeds where the heavy carts with creaking wooden wheels go groaning along, the ones that bear the cotton and grain, the timber, the hides, the produce. And then there is the foot traffic, the hordes and hordes of moneylenders and holy men and native surgeons and pilgrims and peddlers, swarms of them in their thousands going about the daily business of India.

As travelling sahibs, of course, Smithers and Brewster encountered no problems. There are caravanserais at regular intervals to provide food and lodging, and police stations set close together so that order is maintained. When their horses gave out they rented others, and later they hired passage for themselves in bullock-carts until they could find horses once again, and after that they rode on camels for a time. From Durgapur to Benares they went, from Kanpur and Aligarh to Delhi, and there, although the Grand Trunk Road continues on north-westward to Lahore and Peshawar to its terminus, they turned to secondary roads that brought them down via Bikaner to the edge of the desert.

The Thar, then! The vast unwelcoming Thar!

Brewster described it for us: the deep, loose, fine-grained sands, the hillocks that the winds have shaped, running from south-west to north-east, the dunes that rise two hundred feet or more above the dusty plain, the ugly gravel plains. As one might expect, there are no real rivers there, unless you count the Indus, which flows mostly to the west of it, and the Luri, which runs through its southern reaches. The Ghaggar comes down into it from the north but loses itself in the desert sands. There are some salt lakes and a few widely spaced freshwater springs. The vegetation, such as it is, is mostly thorny scrub, and some acacia and tamarisk trees.

Why anyone would plant a city in such a desolate place as the Thar is beyond my comprehension, but men will found cities anywhere, it seems. Most likely they chose sites along the eastern fringe of the desert, which is relatively habitable, because that great forbidding waste just beyond would protect them against invasion from the north-west. So along that fringe one finds the princely states of Rajasthan, and such royal capitals as Jodhpur, Jaipur, and Bikaner; and it was the walled city of Bikaner, famous for its carpets and blankets, that became expedition headquarters for Smithers and Brewster.

Brewster, who was something of a linguist, went among the people to ask about haunted valleys and invisible drum-players and the like. He did not quite use those terms, but his persistent questioning did get some useful answers, after a while. One old fakir thought that the place they sought might lie between Pakpattan and Mubarakpur. Smithers and Brewster bought some camels and laid in provisions and headed out to see. They did not find any lost civilisations between Pakpattan and Mubarakpur. But Smithers was confident that they would find something somewhere, and they went north and then west and then curved south again, tacking to and fro across a pathless sea of sand, making an intricate zigzagging tour through territory so forlorn, Brewster told us, that you felt like weeping when you saw it. And after a week or two, he said, as they plodded on between nowhere and nowhere and were close to thinking themselves altogether and eternally lost, the sound of strange singing came to them on the red-hot wind from the west.

“Do you hear it?” Smithers asked.

“I hear it, yes,” said Brewster.

He told us that it was like no singing he had ever heard: delicate, eerie, a high-pitched chant that might have been made up of individual words, but words so slurred and blurred that they carried no meaning at all. Then, too, apart from the chanting they heard spoken words, a low incomprehensible whispering in the air, the urgent chattering conversation of invisible beings, and the tinkling of what might have been camel-bells in the distance, and the occasional tapping of drumbeats.

“There are our ghosts,” Smithers said.

It was a word he liked to use, said Brewster. Like most of us Brewster had read a few ghost stories, and to him the word “ghosts” summoned up the creaking floorboards of a haunted house, shrouded white figures gliding silently through darkness, fluttering robes moving of their own bodiless accord, strangely transparent coaches travelling swiftly down a midnight road, and other such images quite remote from the chanting and drumming of desert folk in gaudy garb, with jingling anklets and necklaces, under a hot fierce sun. But the sounds of the Thar came from some invisible source, and to Smithers they were sounds made by ghosts.

Everything was as the Portuguese merchant had said it would be, even unto the mysterious summoning force that emanated from some location to the west. The Portuguese had fought against that pull and had won his struggle, but Smithers and Brewster had no wish to do the same, and they rode onward, wrapping their faces against the burning wind and the scouring gusts of airborne sand. The sounds grew more distinct. It seemed to them both that the voices they heard were those of revellers, laughing and singing in the marketplace of a populous city; but there could be no cities here, in this abysmal trackless wilderness of sand and thin tufts of grass and empty sky. There was nothing here whatsoever.

And then they entered a narrow canyon that showed a shadowy slit at its farther end. They went toward it — there was scarcely any choice, now, so strong was the pull — and passed through it, and, suddenly, without any sense of transition, they were out of the desert and in some new and altogether unexpected realm. It was more than an oasis; it was like an entire faery kingdom. Before them stretched groves of palms and lemon trees along gently flowing canals, and beyond those gardens were rows of angular, many-windowed buildings rising rank upon rank above a swiftly flowing river that descended out of low, softly rounded green hills in the west. Brewster and Smithers stared at each other in amazement and wonder. When they looked back they no longer could see the desert, for a thick grey film, a kind of solid vapour, stretched like an impenetrable band across the mouth of the canyon.

“A moment later,” said Brewster, “we found ourselves surrounded by the inhabitants of this place. They rose up out of nowhere, like phantoms indeed, a great colourful horde of them, and danced a welcome about us in circles, singing and waving their arms aloft and crying out in what we could only interpret as tones of gladness.”

The people of the hidden valley, Brewster told us, were a tall, handsome folk, plainly of the Caucasian race, dark-eyed but light-skinned, with sharp cheekbones and long narrow noses. They seemed rather like Persians in appearance, he thought. They dressed in loose robes of the most vibrant colours, greens, reds, brilliant yellows, the men wearing red or gold pointed skullcaps or beautiful soft-hued turbans striped with bright bands of lemon, pink, yellow or white, and the women in voluminous mantles, filmy clouds of crepe, shawls shot through with gold brocade, and the like. Below their cascading robes both sexes wore white trousers of a ballooning sort, and an abundance of silver anklets. Their feet were bare. Of course throughout India one sees all manner of flamboyant exotic garb, varying somewhat from region to region but all of it colourful and almost magical in its beauty, and the way these people looked was not fundamentally different from the look of the dwellers in this district of Hindustan or that one, and yet there was a difference, a certain quaint touch of antique glamour, an element of the fantastic, that left the two travellers thinking that they had drifted not into some unknown valley but into the thousand-year-old pages of the Thousand Nights and a Night.

At no time did they feel as though they were in danger. Perhaps these people might be ghosts of some sort, but goblins, ghouls, demons, no. They were too amiable for that. The welcoming party, never ceasing its prancing and chanting, conducted them into the town, the buildings of which were of wattled mud plastered in white and over-painted with elaborate patterns of the same brilliant hues as the clothing. From there on it was all rather like entering into an unusually vivid dream. They were shown to a kind of caravanserai where they were able to rest and bathe. Their camels, which were the object of great curiosity, were taken away to be given provender and water, and they themselves were supplied with clothing of the native sort to replace the tattered garments in which they had crossed the desert.

“They fed us generously,” said Brewster, “with an array of curried meats, and some fruits and vegetables, and a drink much like yoghurt, made of the fermented milk of I know not what creature.”

The flavour of the food was unfamiliar, rich with spices, particularly black pepper, but wholly lacking in the fiery red capsicums that we associate with the cuisine of the land. Of course the capsicum is not native to India — the Portuguese, I think, brought it here from the New World centuries ago — and perhaps it was impossible to obtain them here in the Thar; but their absence from the food was something that Brewster found especially notable.

He and Smithers were the centre of all attention, day after day, as if they were the first to make their way into the valley from the outside world in many years, as most probably they were. Village notables came to them daily, men with flowing white beards and glorious turbans, one of them of particularly majestic bearing who was surely the rajah of the city, and pelted them with an endless flow of questions, none of which, of course, either man could understand. English was unknown here, and when Brewster and Smithers tried Hindustani or Rajasthani or such smatterings of Urdu and Sindhi that they knew, no connection was made. Gradually it dawned on Brewster, who was, as I have said, quite a good linguist, that they were speaking a primitive form of Hindi, something like the Marwari dialect that they speak in and around Bikaner, but as different from it as the English of Chaucer is from that of Queen Victoria’s times. He did indeed manage to pick out a few words correctly, and achieved some few moments of successful communication with the valley folk, each time touching off a great gleeful volley of the local kind of applause, which involved stamping of the feet and jingling of the anklets.

In the succeeding weeks Smithers and Brewster became, to some degree, part of the life of the village. They were allowed to wander upriver by themselves, and found garden plots there where spices and vegetables were growing. They saw the workshops where cloth was laboriously woven and cut by women sitting cross-legged. They saw the dyers’ tanks, great stone-walled pools of scarlet and mauve and azure and crimson. They saw the fields where livestock grazed.

It was a closed community, utterly self-sufficient, sealed away from the forbidding desert that surrounded it and completely able to meet all its own needs, while outside the valley the world of kings and emperors and railroads and steam engines and guns and newspapers ticked on and on, mattering less than nothing to these oblivious people — these ghosts, as Smithers persisted in calling them.

And yet there was leakage: those sounds of gongs and drums and singing, drifting through that foggy barrier and into the wasteland beyond, and occasionally summoning some outsider to the valley. That was odd. Brewster had no explanation for it. I suppose no one ever shall.

Before long the irrepressible Smithers’ innate exuberance came to the fore. He was full of ideas for transforming the lives of these people. He wanted to teach them how to build aqueducts, steam engines, pumps, looms. He urged Brewster, who even now could manage only a few broken sentences in their language, to describe these things to the rajah and his court. Brewster was not convinced that these folk needed aqueducts or pumps or any of the other things Smithers yearned to bestow on them, but he did his best, which was not nearly good enough. Smithers, impatient, began to try to learn their language himself. One of the women of the village — a girl, rather, a striking keen-eyed girl of about twenty, half a head taller than Smithers — seemed to have volunteered to be his tutor. Brewster often saw them together, pantomiming words, acting out little charades, laughing, gesturing. He might perhaps be learning something, Brewster thought.

But Brewster knew that they could not stay there long enough to build aqueducts. Fascinating though the place was, the time had come, he thought, to begin the journey back into the modern world. And so he said, one morning, to Smithers.

At that point in his narrative Brewster fell silent. He seemed entirely played out. “So you would call it truly a lost civilisation?” Yule asked, when Brewster had said nothing for what might have been several minutes. “Cut off in the desert for hundreds of years or even more from all contact with the rest of India?”

“I would call it that, yes,” said Brewster.

“And when the time came for you to leave, Smithers chose to remain?”

“Yes,” said Brewster, showing some signs of uneasiness at the question. “That is exactly what happened.”

He did not offer details, but merely said that after some weeks he felt that it was incumbent upon them to return to Calcutta and make their report, and, when Smithers insisted on remaining to conduct further studies, of the type that so many venturesome men of our nation have carried out in Africa and Asia and the Americas, Brewster, finding it impossible to shake his resolve, at last reluctantly resolved to leave without him. The valley people seemed distressed at the thought of his departure, and indeed made it so difficult for him to locate the camels that he thought they might intend to restrain him from going; but eventually he found them, and — this part was very difficult too — went back out of the canyon, blundering around in one direction and another in that thick band of vapour before finding the one and only exit into the desert. Getting back to Bikaner from there was another great challenge, and only by some lucky guesswork was he able to retrace his earlier path. And after a lengthy and evidently toilsome journey back across the subcontinent, a journey that he did not choose to describe, but which I thought must have been so exhausting that it had put that strange appearance of premature age upon him, here he was among us once more in Yule’s office.

Yule said, when he was done, “And would you be able to find that place again, if you had to? If I were to ask you to go back there now to get Smithers?”

Brewster seemed stunned by the request.

He winced and blinked, like one stepping out of a dark room into Calcutta sunlight. I could see signs of a struggle going on within him. Yule’s question had caught him completely by surprise; and plainly he was searching for the strength to refuse any repetition of the ordeal he had just been through. But the indomitable Yule was waiting grimly for a reply, and finally, in a barely audible voice, Brewster said, “Yes, I think that I could. I think so, sir. But is it necessary that I do?”

“It is,” said Yule. “We can hardly do without him. It was wrong of you to come away with him still there. You must go back and fetch him.”

Brewster considered that. He bowed his head. I think I may have heard a sob. He looked ragged and pale and tired. He was silent a great while, and it seemed to me that he was thinking about something that he did not care to discuss with us.

Yule, waiting once again for a reply, appeared terribly tired himself, as though he wanted nothing more than a year’s rest in some gentler clime. But the great strength of the man was still evident, bearing down on poor Brewster with full force.

After a long, an interminable silence, whatever resistance Brewster had managed to muster seemed to snap. I saw him quiver as it happened. He said quietly, huskily, “Yes, I suppose I must.” And planning for the return trip began forthwith.

I was with Brewster the next day when Helena came to inquire about her errant fiancé. Brewster told her that Smithers was making great discoveries, that his discovery of this lost land would assure him eternal fame in the annals of exploration. He has remained behind for a while to complete his notes and sketches, Brewster said. I noticed that he did not meet the Adjutant’s daughter’s eager gaze as he spoke; in truth, he looked past her shoulder as though she were a creature too bright to behold.

This time there was no grand farewell party. Brewster simply slipped away alone to the Grand Trunk Road. He had insisted that no one should accompany him, and he did so with such unBrewsterlike firmness that even Yule was taken aback, and yielded, though to me it seemed like madness to let the man make that trip by himself.

And so Brewster departed once more for that valley in the Thar. Soon Yule left us again also — he had another breakdown of his health, and went on recreational leave to Java — and, since we were now in the full throes of planning the Indian railway system and our staff was already undermanned, my own responsibilities multiplied manifold. In 1857 we had had only 200 miles of track in operation in all of India. Our task was to increase that a hundredfold, not only for greater ease in our own military operations, but also to provide India with a modern system of mass transportation that would further the economic development of that huge and still largely primitive land. As the months went along and my work engulfed me, I confess that I forgot all about Brewster and Smithers.

Yule returned from Java, looking much older. Before long he would resign from the Service to return to England, and then, as his wife’s health weakened also, on to the more benevolent clime of Italy, where he would complete and publish his famous translations of Marco Polo and other medieval travellers in Asia. In his remaining time in Calcutta he said nothing about Brewster and Smithers either; I think they had fallen completely out of his mind, which had no room for the irresponsible Smitherses and feckless Brewsters of the world.

One day in 1861 or early 1862 I was hard at work, preparing a report for the Governor-General on the progress of the Bombay — Calcutta line, when an old man in faded robes was shown into my office. He was thin and very tall, with rounded shoulders and a bent, bowed posture, and his long, narrow face was deeply lined, so that his eyes looked out at me from a bewildering webwork of crevices. He was trembling as though palsied, though more likely it was just the tremor of age. Under his arm he carried a rectangular box of some considerable size, fastened with an ornate clasp of native design. Because his skin was so dark and he was wearing those loose robes I mistook him for a native himself at first, but then I began to think he might be a deeply tanned Englishman, and when he spoke his accent left no doubt of that.

“You don’t recognise me, do you?” he asked.

I stared. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I do.” I was annoyed by the interruption. “Are you sure that the business you have is with the Public Works Department?”

“I am, in fact, an employee of the Public Works Department. Or was, at least.”

His face was still unrecognisable to me. But the voice—

“Brewster?”

“Brewster, yes. Back at last.”

“But this is impossible! You’re — what, thirty-five years old? You look to be—”

“Sixty? Seventy?”

“I would have to say so, yes.”

He studied me implacably.

“I am Brewster,” he said. “I will be thirty-seven come January.”

“This is impossible,” I said, though aware of the foolishness of my words as soon as I spoke them. “For a man to have aged so quickly—”

“Impossible, yes, that’s the word. But I am Brewster.”

He set that box down on my desk, heedless of the clutter of blueprints and maps on which he was placing it. And he said, “You may recall that Lieutenant-Colonel Yule ordered me to return to a certain valley in the Thar and bring Major Smithers out of it. I have done so. It was not an easy journey, but I have accomplished it, and I have returned. And I have brought Smithers with me.”

I peered expectantly at him, thinking that he would wave his age-withered arm and Smithers would come striding in from the hall. But no: instead he worked at the clasp of that big wooden box with those trembling fingers of his for what seemed like half an hour, and opened it at last, and lifted the lid and gestured to me to peer in.

Inside lay a bleached skull, sitting atop a jumble of other bones, looking like relics exhumed from some tumulus of antiquity. They were resting on a bed of sand.

“This is Smithers,” he said.

For a moment I could find nothing whatsoever to say. Then I blurted, “How did he die?”

“He died of extreme age,” Brewster said.

And he told me how, after expending many weeks and months crossing India and bashing around in the Thar, he had finally heard the ghostly singers and the distant drums and gongs again, and they had led him to the hidden valley. There he found Smithers, fluent now in the local lingo and busy with all manner of public-works projects in a full-scale attempt to bring the inhabitants of the valley into the nineteenth century overnight.

He was married, Brewster said, to that lovely long-legged native princess who had been teaching him the language.

“Married?” I repeated foolishly, thinking of mournful Helena, the Adjutant’s beautiful daughter, faithful to him yet, still waiting hopefully for his return.

“I suppose it was a marriage,” said Brewster. “They were man and wife, at any rate, whatever words had been said over them. And seemed very happy together. I spoke to him about returning to his assignment here. As you might suspect, he wasn’t eager to do so. I spoke more firmly to him about it.” I tried to imagine the diffident Brewster speaking firmly to his strong-willed friend about anything. I couldn’t. “I appealed to his sense of duty. I appealed to him as an Englishman. I spoke of the Queen.”

“And did he yield?”

“After a while, yes,” Brewster said, in a strange tone of voice that made me wonder whether Brewster might have made him yield at gunpoint. I could not bring myself to ask. “But he insisted that we bring his — wife — out of the valley with us. And so we did. And here they are.”

He indicated the box, the skull, the bones beneath, the bed of sand.

“Hardly had we passed through the barrier but they began to shrivel and age,” he said. “The woman died first. She became a hideous crone in a matter of hours. Then Smithers went.”

“But how — how?”

Brewster shrugged. “Time moves at a different rate within the valley. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it. The people in there may be living six or eight hundred years ago, or even more. Time is suspended. But when one emerges — well, do you see me? How I look? The suspended years descend on one like an avalanche, once one leaves. I spent a few weeks in that village the first time. I came back here looking ten or twenty years older. This time I was there for some months. Look at me. Smithers had been under the valley’s spell for, what, two or three years?”

“And the woman for her entire life.”

“Yes. When they came out, he must have been a hundred years old, by the way we reckon time. And she, perhaps a thousand.”

How could I believe him? I am an engineer, a builder of railroads and bridges. I give no credence to tales of ghosts and ghouls and invisible spectres whose voices are heard on the desert air, nor do I believe that time runs at different rates in different parts of our world. And yet — yet — the skull, the bones, the withered, trembling old man of not quite thirty-seven who stood before me speaking with Brewster’s voice—

I understood now that Brewster had been aware of what going back into that terrible valley to fetch Smithers would do to him. It would rob him of most or all of the remaining years of his life. He had known, but Yule had ordered him to go, and, yes, he had gone. The poor man. The poor doomed man.

To cover my confusion I reached into the box. “And what is this?” I asked, picking up a pinch of something fine and white that I took for desert sand, lying beneath the little heap of bones like a cushion. “A souvenir of the Thar?”

“In a manner of speaking. That’s all that remains of her. She crumbled to dust right in front of me. Shrivelled and died and went absolutely to dust, all in a moment.”

Shuddering, I brushed it free of my fingers, back into the box.

I was silent for a while.

The room was spinning about me. I had spent all my days in a world in which three and three make six, six and six make twelve, but I was no longer sure that I lived in such a world any longer.

Then I said, “Take what’s left of Smithers to the chaplain, and see what he wants to do about a burial.”

He nodded, the good obedient Brewster of old. “And what shall I do with this?” he asked, pointing to the sandy deposit in the box.

“Scatter it in the road,” I said. “Or spill it into the river, whatever you wish. She was Smithers’ undoing. We owe her no courtesies.”

And then I thought of Helena, sweet, patient Helena. She had never understood the first thing about him, had she? And yet she had loved him. Poor, sweet Helena.

She must be protected now, I thought. The world is very strange, and too harsh, sometimes, and we must protect women like Helena from its mysteries. At least, from such mysteries as this one — not the mystery of that hidden valley, I mean, though that is mysterious enough, but the mysteries of the heart.

I drew a deep breath. “And — with regard to the Adjutant’s daughter, Brewster—”

“Yes?”

“She will want to know how he died, I suppose. Tell her he died bravely, while in the midst of his greatest adventure in Her Majesty’s Service. But you ought not, I think, to tell her very much more than that. Do you understand me? He died bravely. That should suffice, Brewster. That should suffice.”