Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [83]
As traveling 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 northwestward 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 southwest to northeast, 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 northwest. 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 civilizations 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