The village consisted of a hundred huts arranged in concentric circles. Each held a family ranging from two to eight members. Their fields lay north of the village on the slopes leading up to the precipices. The stock consisted of goats, pigs, and dwarf antelopes. Their alcoholic drink was a sort of mead made from the honey of wild bees. A few specimens of these ventured near the village, and Holmes secured some for study. They were about an inch long, striped black and white, and were armed with a long venom-ejecting barb. Holmes declared that they were of a new species, and he saw no reason not to classify them as Apis holmesi.
Once a week a party set out to the hills to collect honey. Its members were always clad in leather clothing and gloves and wore veils over their hats. Holmes asked permission to accompany them, explaining that he was wise in the ways of bees. To his disappointment, they refused him. A further inquiry by him resulted in the information that there was a negotiable, though difficult, pass through the precipices. It was used only for emergency purposes because of the vast number of bees that filled the narrow pass. Holmes obtained his data by questioning a child. Apparently, the adults had not thought to tell their young to keep silent about this means of exit.
“The bee-warding equipment is kept locked up in their temple,” Holmes said. “And that makes it impossible to obtain it for an escape attempt.”
The temple was the great hut in the village’s centre. We were not allowed to enter it or even to approach it within fifty feet. Through some discreet inquiries, and unashamed eavesdropping, Holmes discovered that the high priestess-and-queen lived within the temple. We had never seen her nor were we likely to do so. She had been born in the temple and was to reside there until she died. Just why she was so restricted Holmes could not determine. His theory was that she was a sort of hostage to the gods.
“Perhaps, Watson, she is confined because of a superstition that arose after the catastrophe which their myths say deluged this land and the great civilisation it harboured. The fishermen tell me that they often see on the bottom of this lake the sunken ruins of the stone houses in which their ancestors lived. A curse was laid upon the land, they say, and they hint that only by keeping the high priestess-cum-queen inviolate, unseen by profane eyes, untouched by anyone after pubescence, can the wrath of the gods be averted. They are cagey in what they say, so I have had to surmise certain aspects of their religion.”
“That’s terrible!” I said.
“The deluge?”
“No, that a woman should be denied freedom and love.”
“She has a name, but I have never overheard it. They refer to her as The Beautiful One.”
“Is there nothing we can do for her?” I said.
“I do not know that she wants to be helped. You must not allow your well-known gallantry to endanger us. But to satisfy a legitimate scientific interest, if anthropology is a science, we could perhaps attempt a look inside the temple. Its roof has a large circular hole in its center. If we could get near the top of the high tree about twenty yards from it, we could look down into the building.”
“With the whole village watching us?” I said. “No, Holmes, it is impossible to get up the tree unobserved during the day. And if we did so during the night, we could see nothing because of the darkness. In any event, it would probably mean instantaneous death even to make the attempt.”
“There are torches lit in the building at night,” he said. “Come, Watson, if you have no taste for this arboreal adventure, I shall go it alone.”
And that was why, despite my deep misgivings, we climbed that towering tree on a cloudy night. After Von Bork and Reich had fallen asleep and our guards, had dozed off and the village was silent except for a chanting in the temple, we crept out of our hut. Holmes had hidden a rope the day before, but even with this it was no easy task. We were not youths of twenty, agile as monkeys and as fearless aloft. Holmes threw the weighted end of the rope over the lowest branch, which was twenty feet up, and tied the two ends together.
Then, grasping the rope with both hands, and bracing his feet against the trunk, he half-walked, almost perpendicular to the trunk, up the tree. On reaching the branch, he rested for a long time while he gasped for breath so loudly that I feared he would wake up the nearest villagers. When he was quite recovered, he called down to me to make the ascent. Since I was heavier and several years older, and lacked his feline muscles, having more the physique of a bear, I experienced great difficulty in getting up. I wrapped my legs around the rope — no walking at a ninety-degree angle to the tree for me — and painfully and gaspingly hauled myself up. But I persisted — after all, I am British — and Holmes pulled me up at the final stage of what I was beginning to fear was my final journey.
After resting, we made a somewhat easier ascent via the branches to a position about ten feet below the top of the tree. From there we could look almost directly down through the hole in the middle of the roof. The torches within enabled us to see its interior quite clearly.
Both of us gasped when we saw the woman standing in the centre of the building by a stone altar. She was a beautiful woman, surely one of the daintiest things that ever graced this planet. She had long golden hair and eyes that looked dark from where we sat but which, we later found out, were a deep grey. She was wearing nothing except a necklace of some stones that sparkled as she moved. Though I was fascinated, I also felt something of shame, as if I were a peeping tom. I had to remind myself that the women wore nothing above the waist in their everyday attire and that when they swam in the lake they wore nothing at all. So we were doing nothing immoral by this spying. Despite this reasoning, my face (and other things) felt inflamed.13
She stood there, doing nothing for a long time, which I expected would make Holmes impatient. He did not stir or make any comment, so I suppose that this time he did not mind a lack of action. The priestesses chanted and the priests walked around in a circle making signs with their hands and their fingers. Then a bound he-goat was brought in and placed on the altar, and, after some more mumbo-jumbo, the woman cut its throat. The blood was caught in a golden bowl and passed around in a sort of communion, the woman drinking first.
“A most unsanitary arrangement,” I murmured to Holmes.
“These people are, nevertheless, somewhat cleaner than your average Londoner,” Holmes replied. “And much more cleanly than your Scots peasant.”
I was about to take umbrage at this, since I am of Scots descent on my mother’s side. Holmes knew both this and my sensitivity about it. He had been making too many remarks of this nature recently, and though I attributed them to irritability arising from nicotine withdrawal, I was, to use an American phrase, getting fed up with them. I was about to remonstrate when my heart leaped into my throat and choked me.
A hand had come from above and clamped down upon my shoulder. I knew that it wasn’t Holmes’ because I could see both of his hands.
Ten
Holmes almost fell off the branch but was saved by another hand, which grasped him by the collar of his shirt. A familiar voice said, “Silence!”
“Greystoke!” I gasped. And then, remembering that, after all, he was a duke, I said, “Your pardon. I mean, Your Grace.”
“What are you doing up here, you baboon!” Holmes said.
I was shocked at this, though I knew that Holmes spoke thus only because he must have been thoroughly frightened. To address a high British nobleman in this manner was not his custom.
“Tut, tut, Holmes,” I said.
“Tut, tut yourself,” he replied. “He’s not paying me a fee! He’s no client of mine. Besides, I doubt that he is entitled to his title!”