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Other men, always in pairs, followed them. Ishmael counted ten couples, and then there were none. But he was sure that the room in which they had chanted had held many more than that. The others must have gone off to other places or else were still in the chantry. But, if they were, they were silent.
He waited. The silence became a singing. The darkness settled as if it had substance and weight and a mindless, malign purpose. Once there was a clank from behind him and he jumped, along with the others. But it was the beast grating its stone claws against the steps in an effort to get onto its feet.
Namalee sniffed suddenly and put her nose to the end of a shaft and breathed deeply again. Then she said, "I thought I smelled it. It's the odor of the gods. The sacred room of worship must be very close indeed. But it might as well be a thousand miles away."
Ishmael sniffed but could detect nothing. However, he had not been brought up in the odor of sanctity and so lacked a trained nose. And if he did not soon track down the secret of unlocking the doorway to the next room, he would lack more than just a nose.
Ishmael listened but could hear nothing from the other side. He ordered that one torch be relighted. When the flame sprang out, causing him to blink with the light, he took the torch and held it so that its light fell through the length of a shaft. One by one, starting from the upper right-hand corner, he examined the interior of each shaft, searching for some difference in color of the stone, some lines, however faint, which might indicate a plate set in the hollow, or anything that was even in the slightest suspicious. But he found nothing.
As he did so, he heard a slight squeaking sound, and he whirled. Krashva
It was true. It was not turning upon a vertical pivot, as he would have expected. It was revolving on a horizontal rod, its lower part moving upward.
Ishmael prayed to all the gods that be, not forgetting Yojo, Queequeg's godlet, that no Booragangahns would happen by at this time.
Before the bottom of the wall had lifted more than a foot and a half, he was sliding forward on his chest. The others followed him, and long before the slow-moving section had turned completely over the band was in the little room on the other side.
"What caused it to move?" Namalee said.
"I do not know," Ishmael said. "But I strongly suspect that the activating mechanism is triggered by a bright light applied in a certain sequence to each of the shafts. Perhaps there is no necessary sequence, or it may be that just a certain number have to be exposed to a bright light. I do not know. But I am sure that the key is the application of torchlight to something within the shafts. Perhaps the light sets up a chemical reaction analogous to that..."
He stopped. The tongue of Zalarapamtra had no words for the scientific inventions of Monsieur Daguerre or Professor Draper. Besides, what mattered was that he had accidentally discovered the lock, however it worked.
"Zoomashmarta is with us!" Namalee said. "He knows that we have come for him through terrible dangers, and he has shown us the way as a reward for our devotion!"
"That is an explanation which ca
He sent two men into the corridor to the left to scout, and he led the others down the opposite corridor. This was a very short incline which led into a vast room carved out of a greenish rock with red stippling. Torches were everywhere, and the sweet and intoxicating perfume of the gods was heavy.
Cautiously, Ishmael stuck his head around the corner.
There were hundreds of altars cut out of the rock; in fan-shaped bowers squatted the gods, the great and the little.
Far down at the other end of the room, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards away, was the largest altar of all. On it sat the largest idol he had ever seen, though, admittedly, until then his experience with gods had been limited to the small ones of the whaling ships.
It was about two and a half feet high. It was ivory with red, black, and green streaks, and had many arms and two heads. It was Kashmangai, the great god of the Booragangahns.
A dozen robed priests were in the room. Three were genuflecting over and over before Kashmangai. The others were dusting the gods with feathery dusters or sweeping up the floor with feathery brooms.
Ishmael withdrew his head and became slightly dizzy with the movement. Even at this distance the perfume was strong enough to make him somewhat drunk.
"You'll have to identify Zoomashmarta and the lesser gods," he said to Namalee.
She looked around the corner for perhaps a minute and then said, "He and the small ones are on altars near the great one of Kashmangai."
The two scouts returned. They had traveled down the corridor to a point where it crossed another. They did not dare go further because of the sounds of many men nearby.
"This corridor could be a well-traveled one," Ishmael said. "So we'll have to act quickly."
He gave orders to each. The bowmen fitted arrows to the string and stepped out of the entrance. The others came behind them, and the entire band walked swiftly forward. They meant to get as close as possible before the priests would be aware of them. The bowmen had orders to shoot at the priests who were most distant.
His eyes widened, his mouth fell open, his skin turned gray.
Ishmael was already in the act of throwing a spear he had borrowed from an archer. The point took the man in the open mouth and drove into the back of his throat. Gurgling, the man fell with a crash against an altar, knocking over a small idol.
The bow strings thrummed; the arrows leaped ahead and plunged into the backs of the three before Zoomashmarta.
Other arrows and spears struck the remaining priests. None were able to give loud cries.
Most of the priests had died; those who still breathed were unconscious and would probably remain so until they died. Their throats were cut, and the bodies were dragged out of sight behind various altars.
Ishmael went with Namalee to the altar where the Booragangahns kept Zoomashmarta and the lesser gods prisoner. The great one was a foot and a half high and had a fat Janus head with two faces. He was sitting cross-legged with one hand on his lap and the other raised with a jagged stick which represented lightning. The lesser gods were about a foot high. All exuded the overpoweringly sweet and overwhelmingly intoxicating perfume.
Ishmael felt by then as if he had had four cups of rum unmixed with water.
"We have to get out of here quickly," he said to Namalee. "Or I'll have to be carried out of here. Aren't you affected?"
"Yes, I feel very happy and a little dizzy," she said. "But I am used to the divine perspiration and so I can stay soberer for a long time."
Ishmael wondered how the priests endured the perfume and then thought that they would be like the drunkards of the ports, the men who could drink enough to put others under the table and still stagger along the street and beg, in a clear enough voice, for money with which to buy more drink.
The little gods and Zoomashmarta were put into the bags of skin which would contain much of their perfume. Ishmael, seeing that their primary goal was accomplished, gave the order to return.
But Namalee said, "No, we must steal Kashmangai and take him back with us."
"So that the Booragangahns will then retaliate?" Ishmael said. "Do you want to establish a seesaw of slaughter?"