Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 2 (1925-08).djvu/25

fully because they used poisoned arrows and lay in wait for strangers. And one would begin to hear tales of Kosar by the campfires somewhere around Ghal, and the tales would become quite definite in the bazars of Talt. There you would hear of the raja of Kosar, of his falling-down palaces and his half-starved guard, of his two mangy elephants and the exaggerated penury of the whole tiny kingdom—save for the jewels he wore on occasions of state. And they were worth more than the whole of his realm. They were rubies, and the largest was as big as a man's closed fist, and the next were as large as a man's thumb, and there were rubies of all sizes from thence on down to small, glittering red stones no bigger than a grain of sand. Very precious were the rubies, and very carefully guarded. It was death to come within ten paces of the raja when he wore them, and no one save only the raja and the ranee, his queen, knew where they were hid.

It was in Talt that a certain man came to believe that they actually existed. He was a white man and had fled from the seacoast because he had killed a man over a gambling game and feared the law of his nation. He was in Talt, living with a dancing girl who was very proud to belong to a white man, and in consequence gave him all her earnings. He lived in her house because she loved him, and he felt safe from the laws of his nation, and had no worry over the means of living so long as her love continued. At ease, then, he spent much time in the bazars learning to pass as a native of the country he lived in, in case he needed disguise for farther flight. And in the bazars he heard tales of Kosar, and of the rubies, and from the dancing girl he learned many other strange things. In particular, he learned the language which is spoken in Kosar and Barowak and the states between them. It is a cursed language (so the man with the bright eyes told me) which wise men take care to have no knowledge of. But the white man was not wise.

He had much knowledge of sorts it is not well for a white man to have, however, and he had a plan which made him desire to have more. He knew, for example, of the secret cult of Khayandra, the god of the elephant's trunk, which is knowledge that only princes and ranees may possess. The god Khayandra is one of the two gods of birth and causes male children to be born, while Visayana causes females. The knowledge of this secret is confined to princes, of course, because otherwise their people might worship successfully and there would be only men-children born in their domains and no women to bear yet other men.

The secrets of this cult seemed to promise much to the white man, a hundred hundred centuries ago, and so he began to make his preparations. To rid himself of the dancing girl he resorted to a drug, and sold her to a merchant on his way to China. She had loved him, and for months she had kept him in her house because of her love, but he needed to be rid of her before he could go on to Jolun, and Halak, and through the mountains to Kosar.

He journeyed in that direction for a matter of weeks with the mark of Khayandra on his forehead, and that mark is something like a worm, and something like an elephant's trunk, and two of them joined together make a perfect circle.

He came to the city, then, and saw its walls falling, and men nearly naked in the streets from poverty, and children fighting with dogs for bits of food. Kosar was decayed from her ancient splendor, and vultures perched upon her ruined ramparts, and grass grew in many abandoned streets, and the palace of the raja was