E-text prepared by David Clarke, Mary Meehan,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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CAVES OF TERROR
BY TALBOT MUNDY
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC
1924
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY TALBOT MUNDY, AND THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. The Gray Mahatma
CHAPTER II. The Palace of Yasmini
CHAPTER III. Fear is Death
CHAPTER IV. The Pool of Terrors
CHAPTER V. Far Cities
CHAPTER VI. The Fire Bathers
CHAPTER VII. Magic
CHAPTER VIII. The River of Death
CHAPTER IX. The Earthquake Elephant
CHAPTER X. A Date With Doom
CHAPTER XI. "Kill! Kill!"
CHAPTER XII. The Cave of Bones
CAVES OF TERROR
CHAPTER I
THE GRAY MAHATMA
Meldrum Strange has "a way" with him. You need all your tact to get himpast the quarreling point; but once that point is left behind thereisn't a finer business boss in the universe. He likes to put his ringeron a desk-bell and feel somebody jump in Tibet or Wei-hei-wei orHonolulu. That's Meldrum Strange.
When he sent me from San Francisco, where I was enjoying a vacation, toNew York, where he was enjoying business, I took the first train.
"You've been a long time on the way," he remarked, as I walked into hisoffice twenty minutes after the Chicago flyer reached Grand CentralStation. "Look at this!" he growled, shoving into my hand a clippingfrom a Western newspaper.
"What about it?" I asked when I had finished reading.
"While you were wasting time on the West Coast this office has beenbusy," he snorted, looking more like General Grant than ever as hepulled out a cigar and started chewing it. "We've taken this matter upwith the British Government, and we've been retained to look into it."
"You want me to go to Washington, I suppose."
"You've got to go to India at once."
"That clipping is two months old," I answered. "Why didn't you wire mewhen I was in Egypt to go on from there?"
"Look at this!" he answered, and shoved a letter across the desk.
It bore the address of a club in Simla.
Meldrum Strange, Esq.,
Mes