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Page 95
By now we are running down the passage, and this is what the light
from the lamp shows us. The door of the rock is closing down slowly;
it is not three feet from the floor. Near it struggle Foulata and
Gagool. The red blood of the former runs to her knee, but still the
brave girl holds the old witch, who fights like a wild cat. Ah! she is
free! Foulata falls, and Gagool throws herself on the ground, to twist
like a snake through the crack of the closing stone. She is under--ah!
god! too late! too late! The stone nips her, and she yells in agony.
Down, down it comes, all the thirty tons of it, slowly pressing her
old body against the rock below. Shriek upon shriek, such as we have
never heard, then a long sickening /crunch/, and the door was shut
just as, rushing down the passage, we hurled ourselves against it.
It was all done in four seconds.
Then we turned to Foulata. The poor girl was stabbed in the body, and
I saw that she could not live long.
"Ah! Bougwan, I die!" gasped the beautiful creature. "She crept out--
Gagool; I did not see her, I was faint--and the door began to fall;
then she came back, and was looking up the path--I saw her come in
through the slowly falling door, and caught her and held her, and she
stabbed me, and /I die/, Bougwan!"
"Poor girl! poor girl!" Good cried in his distress; and then, as he
could do nothing else, he fell to kissing her.
"Bougwan," she said, after a pause, "is Macumazahn there? It grows so
dark, I cannot see."
"Here I am, Foulata."
"Macumazahn, be my tongue for a moment, I pray thee, for Bougwan
cannot understand me, and before I go into the darkness I would speak
to him a word."
"Say on, Foulata, I will render it."
"Say to my lord, Bougwan, that--I love him, and that I am glad to die
because I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as I am, for
the sun may not mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black.
"Say that, since I saw him, at times I have felt as though there were
a bird in my bosom, which would one day fly hence and sing elsewhere.
Even now, though I cannot lift my hand, and my brain grows cold, I do
not feel as though my heart were dying; it is so full of love that it
could live ten thousand years, and yet be young. Say that if I live
again, mayhap I shall see him in the Stars, and that--I will search
them all, though perchance there I should still be black and he would
--still be white. Say--nay, Macumazahn, say no more, save that I love
--Oh, hold me closer, Bougwan, I cannot feel thine arms--/oh! oh!/"
"She is dead--she is dead!" muttered Good, rising in grief, the tears
running down his honest face.
"You need not let that trouble you, old fellow," said Sir Henry.
"Eh!" exclaimed Good; "what do you mean?"
"I mean that you will soon be in a position to join her. /Man, don't
you see that we are buried alive?/"
Until Sir Henry uttered these words I do not think that the full
horror of what had happened had come home to us, preoccupied as we
were with the sight of poor Foulata's end. But now we understood. The
ponderous mass of rock had closed, probably for ever, for the only
brain which knew its secret was crushed to powder beneath its weight.
This was a door that none could hope to force with anything short of
dynamite in large quantities. And we were on the wrong side!
For a few minutes we stood horrified, there over the corpse of
Foulata. All the manhood seemed to have gone out of us. The first
shock of this idea of the slow and miserable end that awaited us was
overpowering. We saw it all now; that fiend Gagool had planned this
snare for us from the first.
It would have been just the jest that her evil mind would have
rejoiced in, the idea of the three white men, whom, for some reason of
her own, she had always hated, slowly perishing of thirst and hunger
in the company of the treasure they had coveted. Now I saw the point
of that sneer of hers about eating and drinking the diamonds. Probably
somebody had tried to serve the poor old Dom in the same way, when he
abandoned the skin full of jewels.
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