“What will happen to her if we ever do reach the upper world?” said
Desmond suddenly.
Alan looked soberly at the quaint little purple creature who had so
grown into their lives, who had been so useful to them, who had become
almost a friend. They treated her as they would some great, faithful
hound who was devoted to them alone. She was like a dumb animal in her
unwavering loyalty to them, and indeed would have laid down her very
life for her friends.
“She’ll have no easy time, poor thing,” said Alan, “but I’ll use every
scrap of my energy to prevent an Earl’s Court Exhibition for her.”
Again Jez-Riah sighed and a tear rolled down her cheek.
“What ails thee?” asked Alan in her own language.
“I am sad and sorrowful, O Ar-lane,” she replied. “The memory of a
prophecy has come to me. I shall see the stars of Heaven—the Sun in the
Sky—but with pain alone will such sights come to me.”
“We’ll keep pain from you,” said Alan kindly. “If you are to see the
stars, then that means we shall all find a way out from here.”
The boys set to work to try and find Korah’s remains and an outlet to
the world above. Many times they slept, and their last waking thought
was—“Shall we find a way out to-morrow?” They counted the skeletons and
piled them reverently in one corner. They counted the remains of
twenty-two women, forty-nine men and about thirty children, some of whom
appeared to be but newly born.
They gathered the precious stones, and placed perhaps a gallon
measureful in a basket Jez-Riah had plaited out of the roots of the
mautzer—her fingers were busy the whole time they were exploring the
cavern and its contents.
She had made a covering for the censer, and that had been put carefully
aside. The furniture and tenting was all valueless. It fell to pieces at
a touch and only small scraps of tinder-like material remained to prove
the glories of the silken coverings that had been buried with the
Israelites of old. Harness made of leather, and trappings bound with
gold lay on the ground mixed up with the bones of the animals they had
adorned; chariot wheels lay among the wreckage, and the whole scene was
one of utter desolation and carnage.
“Do you know of a way out?” asked Alan of Jez-Riah over and over again,
and always she answered “I have brought you in safety to the tomb of
Korah, O my friends. Further the way is hidden from me. Now I trust to
you.”
There was no apparent outlet from the cavern, and the boys hunted for
any written record that might have been left behind by Korah or his
company. “I want a proof of our statements,” said Alan. “When we get to
the upper world we shall be looked upon as madmen if we are unable to
substantiate our story.”
But Jez-Riah would say, “Give up hunting for records of my forefathers,
I beg you, and turn your energies to find a way to the sun—”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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