Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 2 (1925-08).djvu/26

growing up with weeds save for the small part that was still inhabited.

The white man reached Kosar on a day when the raja showed himself to his people, and saw twenty horsemen upon stunted spindling steeds driving away the people from a street that was lined with once magnificent palaces that had belonged to the nobles when Kosar was a mighty kingdom. And then there came possibly a hundred soldiers, ragged and unkempt, struggling to make a show with faded finery. And then two elephants, mangy and uncared for, with the raja on the second. All else in the city and the kingdom was poor and mean and faded, even the howdah of the raja's mount, but the jewels gleamed the more brightly for the tawdriness of their surroundings.

They glittered like blood, they sparkled like flames, they were a blaze of sheer magnificence upon a small, weary, dark-skinned man who extracted some weak, vain satisfaction from the looks his people cast upon those rubies. There were no guards near the raja, because it was death to come within ten paces when he wore the jewels of state. And it was possibly due to the lack of guards that a child, barely toddling, escaped from its mother and advanced with curious steps toward the ponderous bulk of the slow-moving elephant. The raja saw it coming near. It was ten paces, seven, five, from his sacred personage.

He nodded negligently, and a spearman darted into the circle that was about the jewels. The scream of the mother was very terrible. . . .

The man with the disheveled hair, who was telling me this story in the Jardin de Paris, in Rangoon, stopped suddenly. He looked across to another table where a man I knew was taking a seat. A waiter was coming with a glass in which was the counterpart of the drink I had discarded. It is one part limes and one part gin and one part grenadine, with ice and carbonated water, and it is very satisfying.

"He—he is going to drink the red drink!" cried the man with the disheveled hair, in distress. "And the red drink is the color of rubies!"

The man I knew caught my eye, and I beckoned him to come over. His name was Gresham, and he was officially a superintendent of constabulary under the Siamese government, but he was as British as it was possible for a man to be, and I know that he made his reports in duplicate, one copy of which went to his legation.

"Gresham," I said coaxingly, "won't you join us and have a drink? My friend here is telling me about Kosar."

Gresham slipped into a seat and nodded brightly.

"I know Kosar," he said unexpectedly. "Had to go up there and argue with the raja. Beastly tumbledown place. The raja was spearing people that came within a certain sacred limit of his person. Silly stunt. Had some amazin' rubies, though. You've been there?"

He was talking to the man with the disheveled hair, but that person was looking fearfully at the waiter who had followed Gresham with his drink. I explained gently to Gresham, and he sent the drink away. He began to look very thoughtful, suddenly.

"You say you've been to Kosar?" he repeated slowly.

I interrupted, and told him that I was hearing the oldest story in the world, which was a matter of some consequence to a man of my profession. Other things could wait.

The man with the disheveled hair had lost the thread of his story by this time, however, and I had to prompt him to get him back on the track.