CHAPTER XXXIV.

The Temple of the Crimson Butterfly

The summit of the next hill revealed to them a vast circular amphitheatre from the centre of which a path led up to the spot where, at the top of a huge mound, an enormous brazier was burning. Behind the brazier they could just make out the entrance to what appeared to be a cave and, standing before it, three figures.

Packed closely into this hollow, partly in the moonlight and partly in the shadow of the cliffs, was a multitude of crouching forms.

Battiscombe caught the professor’s arm.

“Lord!” he exclaimed, “what a mob! Did you ever see anything like it?”

“No,” said Standen, “never in my life. It puzzles me that so barren a country-side should be able to produce so many.”

The magistrate unhitched a pair of binoculars and focussed them on the temple.

“Well?” asked his companion after a long pause.

“Vera’s there,” said Battiscombe huskily, “and Samar. There’s a black chap with them with nothing much on but paint.”

Their guide halted before them.

“It is time, O _Tuan_,” he said.

Battiscombe gritted his teeth.

“The crucial moment has arrived, Standen. What d’you think about it?”

The professor smiled.

“I’m profoundly interested,” he confessed.

They began the descent.

They came presently, by way of a winding path, to a flight of steps roughly hewn from the bare rock, and ten minutes later they embarked upon the narrow passage-way that stretched between the two sections of worshippers at the shrine of the Crimson Butterfly.

The professor, walking a couple of paces behind Battiscombe, stared blandly at an ocean of dark heads and a veritable forest of spears that extended, seemingly, from either side of them to infinity.

Battiscombe, pipe in mouth, strode along with his head held high and one hand resting lightly in his jacket-pocket. He appeared delightfully at his ease, but the hidden hand was closed over a pistol-butt and his eye was ever alert for a hostile sign in his immediate neighbourhood.

It was an eerie moment.

The slightest sign of nervousness, of hesitation, would have spelt inevitable disaster. This puny band that marched to the rescue of Vera Battiscombe would have been overwhelmed and crushed out of existence by sheer weight of numbers.

Battiscombe was within twenty yards of the shrine itself when the native who spoke Malay appeared at his side and signed to him to stop.

Just above them a man was speaking in the queer, discordant dialect these people employed. The magistrate could not hope to follow the text, but kept his eyes on the speaker, endeavouring to gather from his actions and change of expression the gist of what he was saying.

“It is the high-priest,” whispered his guide.

Battiscombe nodded.

“He says that this is the night of all nights, that the prophecy has been fulfilled and there is once more a white goddess at the shrine of the Butterfly.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” muttered the magistrate between his teeth, and looked round for Dara. But the black girl was nowhere to be seen.

The priest--a fantastic figure in crimson loincloth and headpiece like a skull-cap with wings, his body smeared with broad lines of red and yellow paint--seized the white girl by a wrist and led her forward.

Battiscombe, an ugly light in his eyes, the veins standing out on his temples, made an effort to choke down his emotion. He saw his wife mauled by this bedaubed savage--a trembling, terrified Vera, clothed in a black _sarong_ spotted with gold, and with barbaric ornaments hanging at her wrists.

The gathering was on its knees now and the incantation they repeated rumbled in that vast hollow like thunder.

The murmuring ceased and, in the grim silence that followed, Battiscombe caught the guide’s eye.

“Ask him where the token is--the ornament that the goddess should be wearing.”

The man raised his arm and shouted.

The priest was about to respond when Abu-Samar sprang in front of him and levelled an accusing finger at Battiscombe.

“It is he who has stolen the ornament,” he screamed. “The white man who has come to rob the shrine of its goddess has taken the Crimson Butterfly.”

A shrieking tumult rose to the heavens, there was an ominous clash of weapons, and two walls of gesticulating humanity began to close in on them.

“This is beginning to look awkward,” whispered the professor in the magistrate’s ear. “Can’t our black friend do something?”

“I’m pumping some good sound logic into him now,” the other jerked back over his shoulder. “Tell my fellows to keep their heads and not attempt to use their rifles until I give the order.”

He planted the flat of his hand on a black chest that had come too close to be pleasant, and deliberately pushed it back.

“Tell them,” he shouted to the guide, “that Abu-Samar is a liar and the son of liars; that he came by stealth and stole Dara--the goddess--from the shrine; that the white woman they see up there is no goddess, but my wife, whom he took away from my house when she was