The Tiger Warrior Part 5

Then the image was gone. He sat back, letting the swords down. Soon there would be a sixth power. The power of light. Just as water had conquered fire, so light would conquer darkness, the light of the celestial jewel, the light of his own soul, the reborn emperor. The man breathed in deeply, and pulled off the swords. Ahead of him a crack of light appeared in the doorway, and shadowy forms began to file in, silently a.s.suming their places at the table. The Brotherhood was reunited. The jewel would be found. The tiger warrior would ride again.

Jack sat in his day cabin below the bridge deck of Seaquest II, his hands behind his head as he contemplated the old wooden traveling chest against the bulkhead in front of him. He had removed the wooden frame that had been used to batten down the chest during the monsoon, and had opened the third drawer down so he could see the contents. It was one of his most prized possessions, an officer's traveling chest of the eighteenth century, made of camphor wood that still exuded a faint smell of the Orient. For generations his ancestors had taken the chest to sea with them, from the merchant adventurers who had built the Howard family fortune in the early years of the East India Company to his own grandfather, who had carried it with him through the Second World War and last brought it ash.o.r.e more than forty years ago. No Howard had ever suffered s.h.i.+pwreck before the loss of the first Seaquest in the Black Sea two years before, and Jack had made the decision to install the chest when the new vessel was under construction. But the chest meant more than just good luck. It contained the clues to a quest that Jack had yearned to follow since he was a boy, when his grandfather had first shown him the contents of that drawer.

Jack felt a surge of excitement as he looked at the chest. Hanging on the wall behind it was an old East India Company musket, and below that was the sweeping steel blade of a tulwar, an Indian sword with a distinctive circular pommel and handguard. Both had been the possessions of the first Howard to live in India, the colonel of a regiment of the Bengal army at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Below the sword were two Victorian photographs, one showing a woman and a child, the other a well-dressed young man with dark features and full lips, and a twinkle in his eye. The features came from the man's Portuguese-Jewish grandmother, the wife of the Bengal army colonel. Below the picture in elegant handwriting were the words Royal Military Academy 1875, Lieutenant John Howard, Royal Engineers. It was the graduation picture of a young man br.i.m.m.i.n.g with Victorian confidence, about to set out on the greatest adventure of his life. Yet a mere four years later something would happen that would transform those eyes, and give them the unfathomable look that Jack sometimes saw in his own daughter. Finding out what happened to his great-great-grandfather had been a personal quest of Jack's for as long as he could remember.

He glanced at the open drawer. On one side was a small stack of leather-bound books and a notebook, with the same handwriting on the spines. On the other side were two box files containing a ma.s.s of papers, letters, ma.n.u.scripts, some of it material Jack had barely begun to delve into. And between were the artifacts he had just been unwrapping. He took out a small red box containing a bra.s.s pocket telescope, the ivory surround of the cylinder shrunk with age. For the thousandth time since he had been a boy he extended the telescope to its full length, only a few inches, and peered through it. And just as he always did, he tried to imagine what John Howard had seen through it on that fateful day in the jungle. Jack shut his eyes, closing his mind off from the present, then opened them again, but the view remained the same. Yet he knew he was on the cusp of it now, only a helicopter trip away from the place where the history that he had spent years trying so hard to imagine might finally come to life.

"Cool telescope." Rebecca had come quietly into the room and was standing beside Jack. He pa.s.sed it to her, and she peered through it. "That was your great-great-great-grandfather's," he said. "He brought it back from India, where he used it in a war in the jungle not far from the Roman site we're visiting tomorrow morning."

Rebecca looked at the pictures. "That's him, isn't it, and his family? I can see you in him. I can really feel his presence, holding this. Whenever we do school trips to museums, I always want to touch things. I got into a lot of trouble at the Metropolitan Museum once. They don't have to be great works of art, just little things. They seem to take me back into the past."

Jack smiled at her. "Look around this room. There are artifacts from almost every expedition I've been on. Most of them are little things, just as you say, shards of pottery, worn old coins. But they're what makes it real for me. When I sit here and write, I always have something in my hands."

"Uncle Costas says you're a magpie. He says you're really a treasure hunter." She pa.s.sed back the telescope and traced her finger over the coat of arms carved into the front of the chest, an anchor over a s.h.i.+eld with the Latin words Depressus Extollor carved underneath.

Jack laughed. "Uncle Costas had better watch what he says."

"Uncle Costas says that without him, you'd be going nowhere in a rowboat."

"And without me, Uncle Costas would be sailing a desk to nowhere in some technology park in California."

"No, he says without you, he'd be on holiday in Hawaii."

"Ever since we planned the Pacific trip, he's had Hawaii on the brain. Everything else on the way, Egypt, India, is just a distraction, and he's tolerating it only because I'm his dive buddy and I save his life occasionally."

"We've already talked about it. He says he's giving you two days, and then he's going to ask to be dropped at the nearest international airport. He needs a week before we arrive to get everything set up for the submersible testing."

"He means he needs a week to test the lounge chairs at Waikiki. He's just a beach b.u.m."

At that moment Costas bounded in, wearing a garish flowery s.h.i.+rt over baggy shorts, with wraparound sungla.s.ses pushed up his forehead. "Aloha!"

"Aloha!" Rebecca replied, grinning mischievously at Jack.

"Thought I may as well get ready," Costas said. "We may not have time to change."

"I hear you," Jack said.

Costas spied the object Jack had just finished unwrapping. "An elephant! I was getting withdrawal symptoms."

Jack pa.s.sed it over, and Costas held it up carefully to the light. "It's made of lapis lazuli," Jack said. "The same stone as that fragment you found at Berenike. It's the highest grade too, from the mines in Afghanistan. You can see the sparkle of pyrites in the layers of blue. It's been handled a lot, played with. It was among my great-great-grandfather's possessions, given to him when he was a child. He had wanted to give it to his own son, his firstborn, on his second birthday. But that never happened."

"It's beautiful," Rebecca said reverently, taking it from Costas and stroking the trunk. "Can I have it? I mean, can I borrow it and keep it in my cabin? It's kind of a shame to have it stuffed away in that old chest."

Costas wagged a finger at Rebecca. "Careful what you say about that chest. It follows him everywhere. It makes him feel like an old sea dog. Whenever he's got some downtime, he comes and sits with it."

Hiebermeyer and Aysha came in, and they all sat down on the chairs Jack had arranged in an arc around the chest. Costas peered in the open drawer and gestured at another object inside, an old revolver. "The Wild West?"

Jack gave a wry smile. "Right period, wrong continent. The period we're talking about, the 1870s, saw major international confrontations - the Franco-Prussian War which nearly destroyed Europe, the Afghan War which brought Britain head-to-head with Russia. But it was also a flashpoint for colonial conflict. Within a few years you've got Custer's Last Stand in America, the Zulu War in South Africa, and jungle rebellion in India. And in each case it's unclear which side got off best."

"Your ancestor John Howard," Aysha said, as Costas carefully lifted the revolver out of the drawer to inspect it more closely. "He was a British army officer?"

Jack nodded. "Now that we're all here, I want to tell you about him. In 1879 he was a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, recently posted out to India as a subaltern in the Queen's Own Madras Sappers and Miners. That was one of the premier regiments in the Indian army, based in Bangalore in south India but used on expeditions all around India and the frontiers. They were surveyors and builders, but they also trained as infantry, so were about the most useful troops around. Each of the ten companies had two British officers and several British NCOs, but the sappers were all Madrasis, including the native officers - the jemadars and subadars - and the native NCOs, the havildars and naiks. The Madrasis were proud men, a warrior caste. For a young British officer, service with a regiment like the Madras Sappers was about the best experience of soldiering you could have. Lieutenants commanded companies and the senior subalterns had the responsibilities a major would have today. All of the Royal Engineers officers had gone through the equivalent of a graduate degree program in engineering before coming out to India."

"India must have been a shock to the system coming from cold and drizzly England," Costas said.

Jack shook his head. "Not for Howard. He'd been schooled in England, but he was born in India in 1855 just before the Indian Mutiny, in the final years of the East India Company before the British crown took over. His father had been an indigo planter in Bihar, on the border with the Himalayas and Tibet, and his grandfather had been a colonel in the East India Company army. So India was in his blood. That helps to explain how he survived the jungle conditions of his first active deployment."

"This place we're going to," Costas said.

"After more than two decades of peace following the mutiny, India was heating up," Jack said. "There was war again in Afghanistan, for the first time in forty years. Most of the Madras Sapper officers were deployed there, but not Howard. The reason was another conflict, a tribal uprising that flared up in 1879 in the jungle of the northern Madras presidency, in the foothills of the Eastern Ghats Mountains along the G.o.davari River." Jack pointed at the map above his desk. "Ever since the mutiny, the Indian government had put down any hint of internal uprising with an iron fist. A brigade-sized expedition was dispatched to the jungle, including two companies of sappers. But these revolts were regarded as civil disturbances, so there was little military glory and no medals for officers despite the hard campaigning involved. And this revolt, called the Rampa Rebellion after the local district, dragged on for almost two years, longer than the entire Afghan campaign. Howard was there almost from beginning to end."

"It must have been pestilential, during the monsoon," Hiebermeyer said.

Jack nodded. "Rampa had all the extremes of jungle warfare, in common with the jungle campaigns of the following century, in Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam. Malaria was a huge problem. A few years later, the surgeon-major of the Madras Sappers was Ronald Ross, later Sir Ronald Ross, the man who confirmed the link between mosquitoes and malaria. But at the time of the rebellion there was limited understanding of it and the men dropped like flies. And that's where Howard's Indian background comes into play. He had some resistance to the fever, and that must have been a factor in his continued deployment. He was the only officer fit enough to do the job."

Costas pulled back the hammer and rotated the cylinder on the old revolver, a long, elegant piece which had turned a plum color where the blueing on the metal had come away. "Eighteen fifty-one Colt Navy, London make," he said. "I used to shoot one of these with an uncle of mine in Vermont who was a black powder enthusiast." He turned the pistol over and traced his fingers over the letters and numbers stamped into the wooden grips. "Army markings?"

"That's UC, Upper Canada, the letter A for the Frontenac Troop, number fifty," Jack explained. "This was one of a batch of revolvers bought from Colt's London factory to arm cavalrymen of the Canadian militia, based in Kingston on Lake Ontario. The surgeon of the Madras Sappers, Dr. Walker, had grown up in Kingston, served in the militia himself and acquired this pistol as surplus in the 1870s when the militia converted to cartridge revolvers. Walker took it to India and gave it to Howard to complement an identical Colt revolver he'd inherited from his father, who used it during the Indian Mutiny. Always best to have a pair of cap-and-ball revolvers, as they took so long to reload."

"Where's the other one?"

"Howard took it with him when he disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"One day years later in northern India he packed his bag and left, never to return. No one knows for certain where he went or what happened to him. I've been obsessed with it ever since I heard the story as a boy. I used to read Kipling, and accounts of explorers on the Silk Road, and imagine him on some great final adventure. He's always been there in my mind when I've gone off on quests of my own. Now that we're so close to the jungle, to actually being on his trail, I'd love to get to the bottom of it. But more about that later. Let's not jump the gun."

"I've found something on the rebellion," Rebecca said, holding up a notebook with Victorian marblized covers and faded ink handwriting on a label. "The Rampa Expedition 1879, by John Howard, Lieutenant, R.E."

"That's his diary," Jack said. "It's the only personal account to survive from the rebellion. Almost everything else I've reconstructed from records in the India Office collections in the British Library, from the military and judicial proceedings of the Madras government which oversaw the jungle tracts. The rebellion was overshadowed by the Afghan War, and pretty well lost to history."

Rebecca carefully opened a page, then began to read. "The difficulties of surveying really begin when the mapping is being pushed forward into an unknown country, especially if the surveyors are hampered with having to keep with troops, and their vision frequently obstructed by bad weather"

Jack nodded. "Survey was his specialty. He'd just come out of the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, two years of intensive training. There's a lot of youthful enthusiasm in the first pages of the diary. But that soon changes."

Rebecca read another section toward the end of the book. "The causes of that outbreak have been fully described; the administration was slack; our officers turned a deaf ear to the complaints of an oppressed people, and the ancient spirit which appealed to the sword at length a.s.serted itself, amongst a brave and hearty race of mountaineers. Once that spirit is roused, and we are forced into a campaign in a wild, difficult and malarious tract-no man can say how long the petty warfare will last, or what slumbering elements of disorder will be stirred up against us. All that can be predicted is that the enemy will seldom be seen, that fever will fill the regimental hospitals, and that when peace comes at last, it will be the peace of desolation. All that these hill clans require of us is that we shall protect them in the tranquil enjoyment of the few contracted and simple objects of personal liberty and comfort which const.i.tute the main sources of their happiness"

"Love the language," Costas murmured.

"That pretty well sums it up," Jack said. "Years later the Indian nationalist movement tried to make out that the rebellion was part of a general uprising against the British, but that's revisionist history at its worst. These were jungle people who basically wanted to be left alone. Most of them had never even seen a European face before. Their main contact with the outside world had been with lowland people, with corrupt Indian police constables and with traders who extorted them. There was little economic gain for the British in the jungle and they put less competent officials in charge, a lower grade of district officer who rarely bothered to inspect the tracts themselves. Then the Indian Forestry Act interfered with their traditional slash-and-burn agriculture. But the spark was some petty official in Calcutta failing to exempt the hill peoples from the abkari tax on alcohol. The jungle people lived for their toddy, the palm liquor which sustained them through the monsoon months when there was nothing else to do."

"I see what you mean," Costas murmured. "Not exactly a glorious war. A long way from the geopolitics of Afghanistan."

"But war was still war," Jack said. "Take away grand strategic purpose, and you question far more. And these officers were a long way from the closed-mind, stiff-upper-lip caricature. The Royal Engineers attracted men of high intellect and curiosity. Today they'd be scientists, civil engineers, explorers. Much of what we know about the anthropology and natural history of India comes from what these men did in their spare time. And much of their work was not spent soldiering, but in surveying and mapping, and building roads, bridges, dams, aqueducts and irrigation systems, railways, public monuments, the infrastructure of the nation today. You had to speak the language to operate effectively in India, and many of these officers were gifted linguists, empathetic with their soldiers and the people around them. You can see that in the diary. The tone may seem a little lofty to us today, but guys like Howard saw human beings in their gun sights, not primitive tribals. They were tough soldiers, unswervingly loyal to the British crown, and would kill without hesitation, but they knew they were not always on the moral high ground."

"There's a reference to a book here, on the final page of the diary with writing on it," Rebecca said. "It's all smudged black." She lifted the book and sniffed it, pulling a face. "It stinks like rotten eggs."

"Black powder residue," Jack said. "He must have had it on his hands when he wrote that. He'd have just been shooting. Look at the date. Twentieth August 1879."

"I can barely read it, but the note says, Campbell, Wild Tribes of Khondistan, page 177. Then it says, Lord help me."

Jack took one of the two leather-bound volumes from the drawer and opened it to a marked page. "This is the actual book. He had it with him when he wrote that final diary entry. In the margin of the book he's written, Captain Frye, an admirable officer, an oriental scholar of the highest rank, who occupied himself most zealously in the acquisition of the Khond language. He clearly wrote that some time earlier, perhaps when he'd first read the book before going into the jungle. But the pa.s.sage of text beside the note is circled in the same ink as that last diary entry, slightly smudged. He must have read it again that day in the jungle. Listen to this: "A curious circ.u.mstance occurred to this excellent officer when in the hills. He was informed one day of a sacrifice on the very eve of consummation; the victim was a young and handsome girl, fifteen or sixteen years old. Without a moments hesitation, he hastened with a small body of armed men to the spot indicated, and on arrival found the Khonds already a.s.sembled with their sacrificing priest, and the intended victim prepared for the first act of the tragedy. He at once demanded her surrender; the Khonds, half-mad with excitement, hesitated for a moment, but observing his little party preparing for action, they yielded the girl Seeing the wild and irritated state of the Khonds, Captain Frye very prudently judged that this was no fitting occasion to argue with them, so with his prize he retraced his steps to his old encampment."

"Human sacrifice?" Costas exclaimed, looking horrified. "India? In 1879?"

"That book was published in 1864, fifteen years before the Rampa Rebellion. The full t.i.tle is A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years Service Amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan for the Suppression of Human Sacrifice. The author, John Campbell, was an army officer charged with the task, and Frye was his a.s.sistant."

"But they failed."

Jack pursed his lips. "They succeeded. That was the public face of it, anyway. The British didn't interfere much with ritual in India, but they drew the line at human sacrifice and female infanticide. What they did was drive both practices underground. Who knew what went on in the depths of the jungle, miles from prying eyes. Even today the sacrificial ritual survives among the tribal peoples, though they use chickens instead of humans. Or so we're told."

"And in 1879?"

"The rebel leader, Chendrayya, openly executed several native policemen he'd taken captive, giving the executions the semblance of sacrifice in defiance of the British. On one occasion he used a sword, probably a tulwar like the one on the wall over there." Jack opened the book to an engraving in the frontispiece. It showed a semi-naked woman tied to a pole with a priest in front and a crowd pressing around her, brandis.h.i.+ng knives. "But there are hints that actual human sacrifice was also carried out. These involved a meriah, a man, or woman, even a child, who was bought into slavery by the sacrificing tribe, well-fed and well-treated for months in advance, then intoxicated with palm toddy and lashed to a stake."

"How did they do it?" Rebecca asked quietly.

"It's pretty unpleasant. They ripped the victim apart with their bare hands and knives. Each man took a strip of flesh home to bury in his own soil before nightfall that day as a kind of fertility offering."

Rebecca looked pale. Costas took the book. "Why did they do it? Who was the G.o.d?"

"I'm coming to that."

"And that date? Twentieth August 1879?"

"That's the lynchpin date of the rebellion, and also somehow of Howard's life. Something happened that day, something I've been trying to fathom out ever since I first saw the diary as a kid." Jack picked up the diary. "Here's what I know. On that day, a party of thirty sappers were led into an ambush by four hundred rebels, armed with bows and poison arrows and matchlock muskets, as well as some old company muskets they'd stolen from the police. The sappers fought their way back through the jungle to the river. It was one of the biggest fights of the rebellion, with dozens killed and wounded. One British official died, a civil service man responsible for this area who'd accompanied the troops. That day was big enough to hit the news, and was even reported in the London Times and The New York Times, with the name of the officer commanding the sapper party, Lieutenant Hamilton. His account of the fight was printed in the Madras Military Proceedings. Otherwise there are no eyewitness records of that day. But I'm certain something else happened." "Executions?" Costas murmured. "Sacrifice?" Jack looked at the book. "Hamilton's foray took place from a river steamer, Shamrock, which had been on its way upriver to a place where the sappers were going to hack a road into the jungle. Lieutenant Howard, my great-great-grandfather, was in overall charge, as the senior subaltern present. As well as Lieutenants Howard and Hamilton, there was another sapper officer, Robert Wauchope, recently returned from Afghanistan, an Irish-American who was a close friend of Howard's. We've already encountered Dr. Walker, the Canadian. He probably had his hands full with cases of jungle fever. I've pinpointed where Hamilton's party came out of the jungle on the riverbank, where the Shamrock must have been. It was the site of a native village. The rebels congregated there and put on a show for them. A pretty spectacular one. Howard was on the steamer. He saw something, or did something, that profoundly affected the rest of his life."

"What do you mean?"

Jack paused. "He'd been at the top of his cla.s.s at the Royal Military Academy, one of the officers flagged for great things, perhaps a future army commander like Lord Kitchener, another Royal Engineer. But after the jungle, it was as if he did everything he could to avoid active service again. He'd been detailed to join the Khyber Field Force in Afghanistan, but instead was deployed in Rampa until the end. Then he left the Madras Sappers for secondment to the Indian Public Works Department, and after that went back to England to spend ten years teaching survey and editing the journal of the School of Military Engineering. These were respectable career moves for a Royal Engineers officer, but not for the ambitious soldier he had once been. Even after he returned to India as a garrison engineer in the 1890s he pa.s.sed up on chances of campaigning. It was only at the end of his career that he was poised for active service again, on the Afghan frontier, twenty-five years after the Rampa Rebellion."

"What about devotion to his family?" Rebecca said. "Couldn't that have influenced him?"

Jack looked across at the faded photograph above the chest, showing a woman in a black dress holding a baby, her faced turned down to the child, indiscernible. He turned to Rebecca, nodding slowly. "Howard married young, straight out of the academy. They had a baby boy they adored. They lived in the military cantonment at Bangalore, headquarters of the Madras Sappers. The boy died while Howard was in the jungle several months after that day in August, struck down with convulsions one morning and buried that evening. It was weeks before Howard even knew. His wife never got over it, though they had three more children. Howard was utterly devoted to them, and told his children that he took up his job at the School of Military Engineering in England to get them away from the diseases that had killed their brother, and to be with them when they were at school."

"He put family before career," Aysha said. "Nothing wrong with that."

Jack pursed his lips. "But there was more to it than that. Even after they'd grown up and he'd returned to India, he pa.s.sed up chances. I'm convinced something happened on that day, 20 August 1879."

"Sounds like something traumatized him," Costas said.

"There's one other thing." Jack leaned over and opened the lower drawer of the chest. "You remember I mentioned an artifact I'd spoken about to Katya, when she and I saw her uncle's reference to the Haljit Singh, the Tiger Hand? The one that nearly made her faint? This was it." He took out a gleaming bra.s.s object almost the length of his forearm, and placed it carefully on the table between them. It was semi-cylindrical, and one end had been formed into the shape of a head, with protruding ears and a wide, leering mouth. "Howard brought this back from Rampa. This, the revolver, the little telescope and a few primitive arms captured from the rebels are just about the only artifacts that can be pinned to the campaign. Any guesses what this is?" Jack asked.

Hiebermeyer pushed up his gla.s.ses and leaned over, lifting it up gingerly to look underneath. "Well, it's clearly a piece of armor, for the lower forearm and hand," he a.s.serted. "In the hollow under the head there's a crossbar, and the mouth has a hole in it the size of a blade. My opinion is that this was once a gauntlet with an attached dagger or sword blade."

"Full marks," Jack said. "Not a thrusting blade, but a long, flexible blade, for sweeping cuts. It would have been awkward in unskilled hands, but with the gauntlet and the crossbar, rather than a conventional sword handle, the blade would have become like an extension of the arm. The swordsman could deliver a ma.s.sive sweeping blow, easily enough to slice bodies in half with a razor-sharp blade. They were fearsome weapons, designed to be used from horseback."

Rebecca touched the nose. "Those eyes look Chinese."

"It's called a pata, a gauntlet sword," Jack said. "This one's unique, and only a few other bra.s.s ones are known. Steel patas were used by the Marathas, the warrior-princes the British fought in southern and central India in the eighteenth century. But the British scholar who first studied patas thought they originated much earlier, among the Tatar ancestors of the Mongols in northern China. They could have come into India with the Mongol invaders, with Timur the Great in the fourteenth century, or Genghis Khan. Or one might have come much earlier by way of the Silk Route and then been copied. Most of the Indian patas of the seventeenth or eighteenth century are made of steel, and don't have this decoration, the hammered-out head. My instinct is that this one is older, much older, possibly even of ancient date."

"So what's the connection?" Costas said.

"You asked about the G.o.d, the sacrificial G.o.d in the jungle," Jack replied. "There were several, one of them a kind of earth G.o.ddess, another a G.o.d of war. But there's only one shrine we know of, and that's to Rama, the G.o.d who gave his name to the district. The legend of Prince Rama is wrapped up in Hindu mythology, but the version of Rama wors.h.i.+pped in the jungle was distinctive, possibly of very early origin. The shrine is mentioned in the records of the Rampa Rebellion because the rebel leader Chendrayya sacrificed two police constables there. It lies directly inland from the point where the Shamrock picked up Lieutenant Hamilton and his sappers after their foray in the jungle. And I believe it was where my ancestor found this pata. It was the only permanent structure in the jungle other than the huts of the villagers, and exactly where you'd expect such an unusual object to be stored, even venerated."

"And you want to go and check it out," Costas said.

"I need to see what he saw. To see if there's anything still left."

"Rama," Hiebermeyer murmured, tapping his fingers on the table. "Rama"

"What is it?" Costas said.

"Just thinking aloud."

Costas picked up the pata and stared at the face. "What is it? A G.o.d?"

Jack looked across. "It's a tiger."

"A tiger G.o.d?" Costas asked.

Jack slipped the pata over his hand, holding the crossbar. "Not tiger G.o.d," he said, turning it slowly on his arm. "It's what we always called it when I was growing up, what my grandfather told us to call it. He must have learned it from his grandfather, from John Howard. It's what made Katya nearly faint when I described it to her. Tiger warrior."

Early the next morning they stood on the bridge wing gazing out over the bows of the s.h.i.+p. Seaquest II had pa.s.sed through the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka, navigating the treacherous channel at only a couple of knots speed. They had just watched the pilot disembark and power off in his speedboat. The northern tip of Sri Lanka was now receding off the starboard stern quarter, and the captain had reduced the alert level as they entered Indian territorial waters. The Breda gun turret had been lowered out of sight below the foredeck and the security team were stowing the two general purpose machine guns, which had been mounted on either side of the bridge. Ahead of them lay the Bay of Bengal, a s.h.i.+mmering expanse of water seemingly stretching out to infinity. The sea was dead calm, and it was as if they were motionless, mired in a haze of sea and sky with no visible horizon.

Jack sensed the whiff of excitement that had first drawn western explorers - his own ancestors - into these waters. The eastern sky seemed full of allure, and with the risks that made the draw that much more beguiling. Jack had been thinking about the Romans again. Here, two thousand years ago, they would have been on the cusp of the unknown, the place where the author of the Periplus had drawn the line between what he himself had seen, and the world beyond. Ahead lay places half-imagined, which the author knew only from the goods that were brought to him - silk, lapis lazuli, exotic spices and medicaments, carried by traders across great mountains and deserts to the sea. The traders he met would have told him little, and what they did tell might have been deliberately misleading, designed to put him off searching for the sources himself Yet their tales would have needed little exaggeration. The dangers were all too real, even today. Jack remembered the final lines of the Periplus. What lies beyond this region, because of extreme storms, immense cold and impenetrable terrain, and because of some divine power of the G.o.ds, has not been explored.

Costas came up beside him, and turned to speak. "Rebecca wants to come with us, Jack. She has three weeks' more holiday from school."

"She can come to the Roman site at Arikamedu, but not to the jungle. It's bandit country out there. The place is a haven for Maoist terrorists. It's heated up since the Indian government allowed foreign mining speculators into the jungle, and the Maoists have stirred up the tribal people."

"Okay, you tell her."

"She seems to listen to you, Uncle Costas."

"She knows already." Aysha was standing on the other side of Jack. "I told her."

"Oh, thanks, Aysha." Jack's eye was suddenly caught by a spectacular image. The eastern sh.o.r.eline of India had been visible a few miles off the port bow, but was now lit up by the morning sun as it rose above the haze to the east. It was an extraordinary sight, a thin line of beach and fringing palms glowing orange, as if a channel of fire were ripping up the sh.o.r.e toward the northern horizon. Jack thought of India in 1879, the year of the jungle rebellion. It was an India of Mughal opulence and colonial civility, yet there was another India, a darker place of desperation and cruelty, of starvation, of disease that took half the children and would kill a person within a day. Two decades before the Rampa Rebellion, India had been torn apart by the mutiny of the Indian troops of the East India Company's Bengal Army, an orgy of barbarism and bloodshed. Three years before the rebellion, in 1876, a dreadful famine had settled in the south and killed millions. India seemed a place of temptation, yet a place where fickle mortality sharpened the senses, focused experience on the present. Jack remembered those last words in the diary of John Howard, written somewhere out here in the jungle beyond the line of coast that burned across the horizon. Lord help me. What had he seen?

A warm breeze wafted over them as Seaquest II picked up speed. Jack turned and went down the stairs to his cabin, leaving the door open. A few minutes later Rebecca came in flopping down on his foldout bed. "I've been reading a story you put by my bed, Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. It was published in 1888, and the book's signed John Howard, Captain, R. E."

"Go on," Jack said.

"It's about two British adventurers, former soldiers, who go north to Afghanistan in search of a fabled lost kingdom. They find it, and one of them becomes king, ruling like a G.o.d. But he accidentally cuts himself and the people see his blood and realize he's mortal, and he comes to a sticky end. I also found James Hilton's Lost Horizon, published in 1933. That's about Shangri-la, somewhere in the mountains to the northeast of India, the fabled place where people were nearly immortal."

"These are both modern legends," Hiebermeyer said, walking into the cabin with Aysha, both carrying steaming mugs of coffee. Costas followed behind.

Rebecca shook her head determinedly, and pointed at a book on the desk. The cover showed an image of an exploding volcano at sea, superimposed on an underwater photograph of a rock-cut stairway leading to a dark entranceway surrounded by mysterious symbols. Across it was the single word Atlantis. "My mother sent a copy of that to me even before I knew you. That first chapter on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Atlantis is also a modern legend, but there was a kernel of truth in it."