| and
then suddenly i felt something that i can't describe. it suggested
static, although i don't know how or why it did, and it made one's
skin tingle and one's teeth and ears ache. all sound ceased instantly
--or seemed to--as every searchlight went out at the same moment and
every truck came to a standstill. it was almost as if the universe
had gone dead. a plane, that i had not even noticed circling in
the night, crashed within three hundred feet of where i lay. as
nearly as i remember, at about the instant when that happened and
when six or seven other planes were falling in all directions,
there began a white-hot glow at the place where the cache was
supposed to be hidden. |
it was next thing to impossible to watch it, it increased so
rapidly and its glare grew so prodigious. for a moment, but
only a moment, it showed the hues of decomposing metals. and
it only lasted about a minute--perhaps less. i believe i saw
human figures fleeing from it, caught in its heat and instantly
cremated; but they were gone like swift shadows, and that may
have been imagination. i can only say that when i think of it, and
close my eyes, there is a very vivid mental picture of human figures
leaping in the white-hot glare of the hell of the fundamentalists. |
|
for a minute or two, when the glare died, we were all blind. it
was as if we had stared too long at lightning. i was almost deaf,
too; i could not make sense of grim's remarks to jeff, although
he was close beside me. jeff picked up allison, not knowing he
was dead, and carried him toward mcgowan's lorry. our flashlight
was out of action; allison, of course, had dropped his, and the
one grim took from jeff was so hot that it burned him and he had
to throw it away. dorje's infernal machines had absorbed every
atom of electricity anywhere near them in the act of destroying
themselves and dorje's men.
dazed, i followed jeff, who groped his way toward mcgowan. "perhaps he'll say we planted it to make ourselves
a reputation! anyhow, the old boy broke a record as well as his
planes and dynamos. |
i'll bet you that's the first time an army
left its ammunition on the desert and advanced behind a screen of
unprotected trucks. medical training, of course, taught me that almost no
one ever knows the real reasons why people do things or refrain
from doing them; but i did believe official blue books, and it
always seemed to me that lincoln's theory, that you can fool all
of the people some of the time, conceded too much. but i think
now that people prefer to be fooled until so long after the event
that the actual truth takes on the hue of fiction. |
| and i know
that numbers of extremely competent men are so peculiarly credulous
that in the face of facts they will believe anything whatever except
the true explanation. i never met him, never even
saw him. grim did, and privately, afterwards, he and mcgowan
laughed with jeff, chullunder ghose and me about the conversation
they had with him under the stars while the army engineers waited
for a destroyed tomb to grow cool enough to be examined. |
|
but it would be very unfair to give the general's name. he failed
in nothing except imagination, and his handling of the troops that
night was patient, resolute and ingenious. he did not believe in
the existence of dorje, or his "thunderbolts"; but he played fair
and gave us every opportunity, his only mistake having been that
he risked quite a number of aeroplanes and lost them along with
their crews. not one member of the air force employed that night
survived to talk about it. every electric device within a mile
and a half of dorje's cache not only fused but was made irreparably
useless. even motor vehicles whose engines were not running at
the moment were put out of action by the exhaustion of their batteries,
which occurred with such sudden violence that the batteries were
wrecked. the only reason why the army was not wiped out was that
every round of ammunition had been left under guard on the desert
five miles away.
but the general maintained his disbelief in dorje's thunderbolts,
and in dorje also. |
there was not a trace of them after custodians
had in all probability turned the plugs on dozens, perhaps hundreds
of them, in the hope of escaping just before the critical moment
and then watching the army blown to smithereens by the explosion
of the ammunition in the men's belts. but they were probably
ignorant men incapable of estimating how much electricity so many
searchlights would develop or at what range it would become effective.
anyhow, they were caught; and the immeasurable heat--as intense,
perhaps, as that developed by a meteor in contact with the atmosphere--
that entirely consumed the brass tubes, did more than incinerate
those men within its radius. it dissolved them into gas, bones and
all. there was not a trace of them discovered.
so there was no one to be questioned after the event, and there
was no tell-tale evidence except a hot hole in the ground that
looked volcanic and that might have been caused by a meteor or
by a terrific bolt of lightning. |
| there had been a tomb there,
but now there was none.
something new in thermo-dynamics had been invented. someone had
discovered how nature converts vibration into heat and dissipates
the concentrated heat into another vibration that other
characteristics and effects.
but the general declared it was the communists and that
of some kind of smuggled in of for
use of malcontents had gone off. he accounted for
absence of by that shape of tomb might
have had the effect of . |
| . .. |
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