“The Germans are generous in some things--only in some things--very mean in others!” she told him. “They sent no medical stores, and no blankets!” Past caves where provisions of every imaginable kind were stored, sufficient for an army, she led him to where her guards slept together with the thirty special men whom King had brought with him up the Khyber. “I have five hundred others whom I dare trust to come in here,” she said, “but they shall stay outside until I want them. A mystery is a good thing! It is good for them all to wonder what I keep in here! It is good to keep this sanctuary; it makes for power!” Pressing very close to him, she guided him down another dark tunnel until he and she stood together in the jaws of the round hole above the river, looking down into the cavern of Earth's Drink. Nobody looked up at them. The thousands were too busy working up a frenzy for the great jihad that was to come. Stacks of wood had been piled up, six-man high in the middle, and then fired. The heat came upward like a furnace blast, and the smoke was a great red cloud among the stalactites. Round and round that holocaust the thousands did their sword-dance, yelling as the devils yelled at Khinjan's birth. They needed no wine to craze them. They were drunk with fanaticism, frenzy, lust! “The women brought that wood from fifty miles away!” Yasmini shouted in his ear; for the din, mingling with the river's voice, made a volcano chord. “It is a week's supply of wood! But so they are--so they will be! They will lay waste India! They will butcher and plunder and burn! It will be what they leave of India that we shall build anew and govern, for India herself will rise to help them lay her own cities waste! It is always so! Conquests always are so! Come!” She tugged at him and led him back along the tunnel and through other tunnels to the throne room, where she made him sit at her feet again. The food had been cleared away in their absence. Instead, on the ebony table there were pens and ink and paper. She leaned back on her throne, with bare feet pressed tight against the footstool, staring, staring at the table and the pens, and then at King, as if she would compose an ultimatum to the world and send King to deliver it. “I said I will tell you,” she sad slowly. “Listen!” Chapter XIV Nothing new! Nothing new! Nowhere to hide when a reckoning's due, But right earns right, and wrong gets rue, With nothing deducted or given in lieu; And neither the War God, I, nor you Ever could make one lie come true! Vale, Ceasar! As Yasmini herself had admitted, she headed from point to point after a manner of her own. “You know where is Dar es Salaam?” she asked. “East Africa,” said King. “How far is that from here?” “Two or three thousand miles.” “And English war-ships watch the Persian Gulf and all the seas from India to Aden?” King nodded. “Have the English any ships that dive under water?”