Jimgrim by Talbot Mundy

Author:Talbot Mundy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
Published: 2012-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

"What has our babu done to them, I wonder?"

Once, when I was younger, I used to believe the official reports of events. 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.

That general was a case in point. 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

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