Jimgrim, Moses, and Mrs. Aintree E-Book

Talbot Mundy

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The story tells of the discovery of a set of thirty-two golden plaques depicting the organizers and rituals of the occult group, whose member was the biblical Moses. Moses is actually depicted on one of the plates, and his portrait, most notably depicted not by an Egyptian artist, with his miserable skill, but a talented Indian hand.

Leseprobe

Contents

Chapter I. “We can reconstruct the whole of human history.”

Chapter II. “Moses Miles.”

Chapter III. “A P.O.P. original charter member.”

Chapter IV. “His name was Gulad.”

Chapter V. “Oh you Promis’ Lan’!”

Chapter VI. “No form of abstinence. No fasts. No saints’ days.”

Chapter VII. “Murdered at seven fifteen.”

Chapter VIII. “He likes notes of rather large denominations.”

Chapter IX. “And if they all offers me a li’l sweet’nin’, Cap’n?”

Chapter X. “Res egaliter omnibus!”

Chapter XI. “Man, the plate’s gone!”

Chapter XII. “Feller, you were right just now!”

Chapter XIII. “Lake Tahoe don’t give up her dead.”

CHAPTER I. “We can reconstruct the whole of human history.”

WELL, you know how the firm of Grim, Ramsden, & Ross had its beginnings. We have had to use all our wits to save ourselves from being used by one government against another; rivals for political power have tried to employ us for their own ends and have succeeded more than once. You’d need the brains of an arch-angel and Satan combined to see through all the proposals that get brought to us. But there’s reasonable money in it, and it’s good fun; we’ve cracked a hard-boiled egg or two, and spilled some beans.

Strange gave Grim sole charge of the near-East end, purchased Narayan Singh’s discharge from the army, and left the two of them in Cairo, planting Jeremy in London. Strange and I went to the States, where, with the aid of his old office staff, we hammered through the organizing and incorporation; and while we were in the middle of all that, the first “view forward” came over the wires from Grim. Strange was in Washington.

MEET JOHN BRICE NEW YORK S. S. OLYMPIC. O.K. FOLLOW UP. GRIM.

I boarded the Olympic along with the pilot away outside Sandy Hook. It was early morning, but Brice was pacing the deck with a companion, and I observed them both for several minutes after a steward had told me who they were.

Brice was short, with a close-clipped gray beard, wiry, dried out, and resolute-looking. He stepped forward gamely with a decided limp, and made way for other people apparently unconsciously. I guessed his age between fifty and fifty-five.

His companion was about two inches taller, angular, and lean, a Scot whichever way you viewed him; a fellow with one of those noses that warn you not to waste persuasion on him, he’ll decide for himself. He had heavy, sandy-colored eyebrows, broad shoulders, and a sort of side-swing that went with them. He wore a heathercolored Highland tam-o’-shanter and a small leather bag slung over his shoulder by a strap. The steward told me his name was Allison, and that he had shared Brice’s stateroom on the voyage.

I introduced myself, and Brice chose one of those leather-upholstered corners in the smoking-room, and curled himself up cross-legged, staring at me frankly and fairly. He made no effort to disguise the fact that he was making an inventory of my pros and cons. His companion, seated next to him, did the same, perhaps not quite so sympathetically.

“We met Grim in Cairo,” Brice began at last. “Allison and I are Egyptologists; we’ve been nineteen years in Egypt on behalf of the British Museum. The Egyptian law as regards antiquities is strict, and no kind of excavating is allowed without a permit, which is only granted to representatives of such institutions as the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and so on. All discoveries have to be reported, and nothing may be removed from the spot without permission in writing.

“Allison and I have specialized in the period during which the Israelites were in Egypt, with particular reference to Moses. Very little is known about Moses, historically speaking. In the biblical account not even the name is given of the Egyptian princess who is said to have discovered him among the reeds. It was our purpose, if possible, to throw light on all that period, establishing as many facts as might be–”

“And exploding a number of absur-r-d traditions,” put in Allison. “We’ve disproved more than ye’d imagine possible.”

“We have established the fact definitely that Moses did exist,” Brice continued. “Whether or not one man wrote the Decalogue; whether or not one individual led that horde of Israelites and established the ten commandments and the law, we have proved that Moses did exist. He lived at a time that corresponds roughly with that of the Israelitish colony in Egypt. Our proofs, however, are missing.”

“Do you expect to find them in New York?” I asked. “You’ll find Moses’ family is not extinct.”

“Our quest has nothing to do with Jews,” Brice answered.

“The most astonishing thing about the Jewish race is their indifference to the monuments of their own past. Allison and I discovered a temple in which Moses undoubtedly studied that ‘learning of the Egyptians’ with which he is credited. There, we found the symbols and insignia that he used in the performance of the secret rites. Those have been stolen, and it might occur to you that Jews would be the logical people on whom suspicion should rest. But Jews have nothing whatever to do with it.

“We kept our discovery secret. It was so important, and the finds themselves were of such intrinsic value that it seemed wisest to close up everything until we could confer with the proper authorities regarding the disposal of what could be easily removed.

“One of our staff was an Abyssinian, an individual named Gulad, who had been educated in America. He had served us faithfully for nine or ten years, and you know the proverb, ‘If a comrade in arms is what you need, buy a Nubian slave; if you want to grow rich, buy an Abyssinian.’ That fellow Gulad was the finest steward of resources that we ever had. Nothing escaped his notice. Nobody–not even a desert Bedouin–could steal from him, and he was sufficiently educated to appreciate the importance of antiquities, aside from the mere price they might bring in the open market.

“We had entered the temple through a hole in one corner of the wall after tunneling through sand for more than a hundred yards, shoring up the tunnel with timber as we went. Most of the important finds were in a great stone chest weighing several tons, almost the exact counterpart of the so-called sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, only having a lid that fits tightly in place. The chest in the Great Pyramid has no lid.

“Whatever had been found outside the stone chest we placed inside it except for one small item. Then, with the aid of Gulad and ten men, we lifted the lid back, cemented up the breach we had made in the temple wall, pulled down about a dozen cross-pieces of timber from the roof of our tunnel, so as to let the sand fall in and close the passage against thieves, and came away, leaving Gulad on the spot in charge.”

“You understand,” put in Allison, “we never mistrusted Gulad for a minute.”

“Never for a minute,” Brice agreed. “He was as enthusiastic as ourselves. He used to sit and talk with us in the evenings, displaying an intricate knowledge of Bible history. He had theories of his own on a number of things that have puzzled antiquarians. He could read hieroglyphics. We used to give him worn and broken inscriptions to decipher, and he had a fair average of success with them.”

“Aye, we were well taken in,” said Allison. “We might ha’ known it’s not in the nature of an honest black man to be receiving letters from all quarters of the globe.”

Brice laughed.

“It never occurred to us to ask what his voluminous correspondence was about. Now and then we’d see him writing until long after midnight in his tent by candle-light.”

“We’d see his shadow on the side of the tent, ye understand,” put in Allison. “We respected his privacy exactly as if he were a white man like ourselves.”

“Well,” Brice continued, “we left Gulad in charge, and took the train for Cairo. That meant a day on camel-back before we reached the railway, and a day and a night in the train. When we reached Cairo Galbraith, the official we had to see, was away; and we had to wait three days for him.

“When Galbraith returned–he arrived at midnight, and we kept him up all that night talking, though he was tired out–he thought our news so important that he made up his mind to return with us and have our find uncovered in his presence. That meant more delay. One way and another, it was eleven days after our departure before we arrived with Galbraith at sunset, tired and hungry on the scene of our excavations. The camp had completely disappeared! There did not remain one trace of it!”

“Nothing to eat! Nowhere to go!” said Allison.

“No lanterns or candles–nothing but a box or two of matches –no servants, except the two Arabs who had come with us to look after the camels we rode–no firearms–not a word of explanation. Nothing but Egyptian darkness, and the black mouth of a tunnel leading underground! We slept in the tunnel that night.”

“Speak for yourself!” remarked Allison dryly.

“When morning came there was a little dim light down the tunnel, for it points due eastward, and for a short while the rising sun penetrates almost to the end. We saw then that the tunnel was not as we had left it. The overhead beams had been replaced, the loose sand carried out, and then three beams had been removed again to let sand once more block the tunnel. In other words, somebody had paid a visit to our find.

“It was three more days before we could get together another gang and dig through to our temple. The digging took another whole day, and then we saw that whoever had paid the visit in our absence hadn’t taken the trouble to reset the masonry. The hole yawned as wide as if we’d never blocked it up, and nearly all the stones were pushed inside the building.”

“I examined the cement at once,” said Allison. “The masonry had been broken down before our backs were turned. That put outside conspir-racy out of the question. There was only one man who knew enough and had intelligence enough to dig straight to the spot and use crow-bars before the cement was dry. It was Gulad’s doing.”

“Be that as it may,” said Brice, “we proceeded to examine the temple. It’s a wonderful temple–”

“Per-r-fect!” exclaimed Allison. “The pattern and inspiration of the chastity of later Greek. design! But we’ll not bore ye with technicalities. Proceed.”

“Nothing in the main hall had been touched,” said Brice. “We entered the smaller priests’ chamber at the rear, in which we had discovered the great stone chest; and I told you how we had replaced the lid. That lid weighed a ton. It was set leaning against a wall. The stone chest was empty. Absolutely empty!”

“Man, ye’d have wept!” said Allison. “There were portraits done on gold of thirty-two initiates of the mystery, with their names inscribed; and beneath each portrait was writing of a kind never before unearthed in an Egyptian temple. Do ye know Sanskrit? Look at this. This is the single item we took with us that convinced Galbraith he’d better come back with us.”

Allison undid his leather satchel and unwrapped from tissue paper a rectangular gold plate, about nine inches by six and more than a quarter of an inch in thickness. Its weight was prodigious. One side was entirely covered with writing etched into the soft metal. Allison laid that side downward on the table, and bade me consider the obverse.

“Don’t touch! That’s Moses!” he said, sitting back to enjoy the expression of my face.

The gold had been cut away smoothly to leave a portrait of a man in high relief. My previous mental picture of Moses had been taken from the cover of a school atlas. I imagined a man with whiskers like those of the man of Liskeard in the limerick, breaking in his fury two stone tablets by the light of lightning, and kicking over a golden calf, while crowds of Israelites prostrated themselves in terror before him.

The picture I had in mind of him was gigantic–six or seven times as big as other men–clothed in a thing like a purple bathrobe and with his toes sticking out from sandals that suggested seven-league boots.

This man had Jewish features subtly modified to pass Egyptian scrutiny. The beard was trimmed and curled like those of the statues of Pharaoh, and the headdress was the linen one of ancient Egypt, including the jeweled brow-band shaped like a snake.

Yet it hadn’t been done by an Egyptian artist. You could easily recognize the touch of an Indian hand, betrayed by the skill with which the folds of cloth were handled and a kind of alive, compassionate humanity that the Egyptians never tried to picture–having none.

It was a face that you could stare at by the hour–attracting –fascinating–nothing repellent about it–amazing. It expressed not only humor, but the whole great cycle of the virtues, including wisdom. Not wisdom as the Egyptians represented it, static and cold. Wisdom that was so entirely wise that it could sympathize, and laugh with instead of at. I’ve never seen anywhere a face like that one, done in gold in Pharaoh’s day.

“Can ye read Sanskrit?” demanded Allison. “That first line below the picture reads–

Moses, son of Amram, an Initiate inducted to these Mysteries at the appointed time.

“The lines below that and on the reverse are the words of a hymn rather closely resembling the Rig Veda, but with significant changes that suggest parts of the first chapter of Genesis. It’s conclusive proof that all known religion had its origin in India, as the Indians have always maintained. It proves that the man Moses was a living fact, and ergo that there’s at least some truth in the legends attached to his name.

“Man!” he exclaimed excitedly. “D’ye realize that that Sanskrit may be Moses’ actual handwriting? That he may have done it himself with a sharp tool after the Indian whoever he was had finished the likeness! D’ye appreciate what that means? If we can get back the thirty-one others that Gulad the Abyssinian stole we can reconstruct the whole of human history!”

Well, there we were, steaming through the Narrows into New York harbor with a yellow quarantine flag at the masthead, staring at a portrait of Moses, who crossed the Red Sea without half as much mechanism to assist him and no steam at all. We were possibly handling a piece of gold that Moses actually touched.

“It’s wonderful,” I said. “I hope you succeed in catching Gulad and recovering the things he stole. But I don’t believe this is a case that our firm would care to handle. You should try the regular detective agencies.”

“Wait while we tell you the rest of it!” Brice answered. “It’ll be hours yet before the port authorities let us land.”

CHAPTER II. “Moses Miles.”

PASSENGERS began invading the smoking-room, but nobody interfered with us.

“It wasn’t too late to preserve the temple,” Brice resumed.

“Galbraith sent for a police guard, after we had once more blocked up the entrance, and the three of us returned to Cairo to see what could be done.”

“There are two ways of getting anywhere in Egypt–the railway and the Nile. They’re both easy to police,” said Allison. “If we had acted when we fir-r-st discovered the theft, the police might have–”

“I’ve had dealings with Gyppy policemen,” I interrupted.

“The size of the bribe is the only question. How did Grim get wind of this?”

“The heads of departments did their best,” said Brice. “But all the subordinates are Gyppies, and the Gyppies haven’t learned anything in forty years. The police didn’t lose the trail, because they never as much as pretended to pick it up. They said it was a mystery, and shrugged their shoulders.”

“And meanwhile,” said Allison, “we had to submit to sar-r-castic r-remar-r-ks from men who never found more than imitation scarabs in second-century tombs, if ye know what that means.”

“At last we had a talk with the High Commissioner,” Brice resumed. “It was he who suggested our seeing Grim about it.”

“Ye’ve a genius in that man Grim,” said Allison. “We found Mr. Grim’s quarters in Cairo occupied by a Sikh named Narayan Singh, who said he was Grim’s confidential assistant. He asked us for the story, and–you know how they bring you coffee in Egypt at the least excuse? Well, almost before I’d started a servant brought in coffee. He didn’t seem to know any English; when I asked him in English for some cold water he didn’t understand me. But instead of leaving the room after serving coffee the man squatted on the mat by the door and went into a sort of day-dream.

“When I’d finished telling the story to Narayan Singh, the servant collected the coffee cups and left the room. I asked if that was another of Grim’s confidential assistants.

“‘Why, no,’ the Sikh answered. ‘That is Jimgrim sahib himself!’

“He came in presently in European clothes and apologized, explaining that we had caught him unawares, and that for the sake of practice he habitually stood and faced even little, unimportant emergencies. As he wisely remarked, big events are only little ones projected on a larger scale.”

“Mon, the mon’s a genius!” said Allison.

“Fortunately for us he knows the Near East like a book,” Brice continued. “He analyzed what we had given him and boiled it down to the essential fad that Gulad is an Abyssinian, who was educated in the U.S.A. He found other Abyssinians in Cairo, and discovered that most of them regarded Gulad as a religious heretic, or backslider or something. Following that trail, Grim took a quick trip to Jerusalem, where there is an Abyssinian church. He was gone four days and returned with a light in his eye. Those Abyssinians had told Grim all they knew about him.”

“That’s the beauty of rel ee gion,” explained Allison. “Ye’ve always a thousand corel ee gionists getting ready to expose ye at the proper time.”

“Well, it seems that after Gulad’s return from the United States he became a minor official of that Abyssinian church in Jerusalem. However, the seniors were jealous of him. He had studied Mormonism in the U.S.A., with particular reference to its success along business lines; and he pointed out that the colored people in the U.S.A. would prove a fertile field for propaganda of the sort he had in mind. But they turned him down; and the more he argued, of course, the more points he provided them on which to denounce him as a heretic.”

“Ye see,” explained Allison, “all novelty is heresy, new ways of getting rich included.”

“At any rate, they turned him out of the church,” said Brice, “and between that time and the day when he joined us he made various unsuccessful efforts to become a religious leader.

“Your friend Grim’s reasoning was marvelous. He said to me that he considered one point obvious. ‘If this fellow Gulad were a petty grafter, he would have stolen from you long ago. But he didn’t steal. He has had charge of your petty cash for years, and actually saved you lots of money. If he were a petty grafter he might try to sell a goose that should lay golden eggs. Being a patient schemer, he’ll set that goose to laying eggs instead. He’ll play for power. You remember the plates of gold that the Mormons are said to have?’ That was all Grim said to me for several days.”

“But ye’ll recall no doubt that I said things to ye,” said Allison.

“Ye’ll remember my mentioning a per-r-fect catalogue o’ new religious movements started by some chiel possessing a relic.”

Brice ignored the interruption.

“Grim discovered in Jerusalem that Gulad’s heresy, for which the Abyssinian elders excommunicated him, hinged on his interpretation of the law of Moses. That’s important in the circumstances, Gulad has in his possession thirty-one gold plates covered with ancient writing, each of them bearing a portrait of a contemporary of Moses, and found in a temple in which Moses officiated. Even if he can’t read Sanskrit, which is a practical certainty, he can show them to ignorant people and interpret them to suit his plans.”

“And it becomes in consequence a verra reasonable theory,” said Allison, “that Gulad entered our service because he knew we were sear-r-ching for evidence of Moses’ actual existence. He persisted for about nine years. Ye can’t restrain a measur-r-e of admir-r-ation for the r-rascal’s deliber-r-ate per-r-tinacity.”

“I still don’t see where Grim, Ramsden, and Ross enter into it,” I said.

“Grim saw at once. You’ll see presently,” said Brice. “Just listen. Grim pursued his inquiries day and night, not overlooking the important point that Gulad was educated in the U.S.A. He made another flying trip to Jerusalem, and this time I went with him.

“There was an American woman in Jerusalem, about whom nobody knew much. She was posing as a woman of wealth and making a clever display with what small private means she had. You know how a certain sort of enthusiast worships the very stones of Jerusalem? Well, she was that kind. But she seemed to want to own Jerusalem.

“Grim and I called on her after making a few inquiries. The U.S. consul knew more than he cared to tell, for in answer to Grim’s questions he merely pursed his lips and shook his head. One or two Americans declared she was a rank impostor, but that was very likely personal pique. She was apparently more of a social climber than a politician. Impostor hardly seemed the right word.

“She was living in a pretty good house outside the city walls that she had coaxed from the Administration at a low rent. She had a way of worshiping a handsome British officer that some of them couldn’t easily resist.

“Forty, I should say she is–forty-two–somewhere around that age. A big, handsome woman with unusual blue eyes and fine teeth. She had quite a household–four or five men and women from the States –nonentities, who did her bidding meekly. They seemed to consider her almost as important as she thought herself, and it was from a very mild, hen-pecked-looking man of sixty that Grim learned an important point while we waited in the sitting room. She kept us waiting. She is the kind of person who does that.

“When she came down at last Grim had pumped the henpecked person dry, and after a few of the usual banalities about the weather and the Zionists Grim mentioned the name of a mutual acquaintance in Cairo. The personage being rather important she claimed to know him better than she really did, which suited Grim’s purpose exactly. In that apparently purposeless way of his he touched on the subject of her home town somewhere in West Virginia and said untruthfully that the mutual acquaintance had told him that she was the leader of quite an important sect there. According to Grim, this mutual acquaintance had said that in West Virginia, Isobel Aintree was a name to conjure with. It was the hen-pecked person who had said that really.

“She was visibly disturbed, but walked straight into the trap. He had touched her vanity. She couldn’t resist showing off. She had never mentioned this sect of hers to anybody in Jerusalem, but once she was under way Grim wouldn’t let her stop. He pretended to find it the most interesting subject in the world, and under his fire of questions she admitted rather vaguely that her teaching was based on the Law of Moses.

“She came down finally under his persistent questioning to the bald fact that her sect has twenty-seven white adherents, and several hundred colored, none of whom were with her in Jerusalem. She said she felt that her mission in life was to benefit the colored people and she had hopes that the sect would grow. That brought up the subject of Gulad.