The Man in the Well

when the moon is full, he struggles and screams of a treasure forever lost

There were six of them in the waiting room when Sefton arrived, so he ran a cursory eye over them and went out again and hung about in the doorway of a haberdasher on the other side of the Strand.

He had not been frightened by what he saw but let there be a dignity about all things -- even applying for a job. There were two young men in duffel coats, one of them with a beard, a hard-bitten elderly character who might have been an ex-bosun from the Irrawaddy Flotilla, two one-time sahibs who looked absurdly alike in their yellowing bloodlessness and a woman who looked as if she had just crossed the Gobi on a camel. If this was the short list he was willing to bet on his chances.

He had lit his sixth cigarette by the time the last of them emerged, so he nipped it economically and crossed through the midmorning traffic and went up the narrow stairs again. A clerk took his name in and after a brief wait led him through to an inner office. A lanky, elderly man rose from behind a littered desk and held out his hand.

"Mr. Sefton?" he inquired. "Sorry if I've kept you waiting. Please sit down. You must excuse this mess -- my agent has lent me his office for these interviews."

Sefton bowed, sat, balanced his hat on his knees and waited. The other man gazed at a spot on the wall over Sefton's head, screwed up his eyes and pursed his lips.

"As phony as the papers say he is," Sefton thought, and added savagely, "silly old goat."

Minutes ticked by, traffic rumbled outside and from nearby Charing Cross an engine whistled shrilly. At last the old man broke the silence.

"There have been many other applicants, Mr. Sefton," he said softly.

"Which you short-listed down to seven -- none of whom so far have suited," Sefton answered. "I hope I will. I am very keen on joining you."

The other looked slightly nettled.

"May I ask where you gathered that information?"

"Counted heads in the waiting room when I arrived and then timed their exits from across the street. None of them stayed long." His grin robbed the statement of offense. "I think I'm your man, Professor Neave."

"That remains to be seen," Neave answered stiffly. He shuffled through a file of letters in front of him and selected one that Sefton recognized as his own. "Would you care to elaborate on this a little?"

"Sure," answered Sefton promptly. "Eight years as assistant engineer with the Sontal Gem Mining Corporation in Mogok, Upper Burma. I speak good Burmese and can get along in most of the dialects -- Shan, Chin and Karen. I know the country well and was an M. T. officer in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps during the war. I get along with people, can take and carry out orders -- " he paused very slightly " -- and I can keep my mouth shut."

"Why did you leave the Sontal Corporation, Mr. Sefton?" the professor asked.

"For the same reason as the rest of the staff," Sefton told him. "The Japs were 10 miles up the track and traveling fast. We sent the married men and their families to Rangoon before the railroad from Mandalay was cut off, and we ourselves set fire to the whole shebang and got out in the last vehicle to leave. We only got to Yeu -- that's just north of Bhame -- when our petrol gave out. We walked the rest of the way to the Chindwin, right through the dry belt. I say 'we' -- but only I made it. Dysentery, malaria and starvation did for the rest. It was a bad year and the monsoon was late."

"How long did the journey take you?"

"Just over three months. Our speed was that of the sickest man."

"And then?"

Sefton shrugged. "Nothing much more to it. I crossed into Assam by the Tiddim Track and fell in with our forces in Imphal. I was a long time in the hospital and then I joined up. I fought my war with the Fourteenth Army and finished as a major."

"What have you been doing since?"

"I put my gratuity and savings into a small engineering shop in Lancashire in the first place -- and lost the lot. Since then I've had a variety of jobs in my own line of country -- deep drilling in Brazil, and I've been up the Gulf with an oil concern among other things---"

"Are you married?"

"No -- and I haven't a soul in the world dependent upon me."

"What remuneration would you expect?"

"I don't want anything -- except to go with you."

The professor brightened visibly for a moment and then covered up. "I don't understand, Mr. Sefton," he said.

Sefton leaned forward.

"I told you I'd had a series of jobs, professor," he said earnestly. "All of them have been reasonably well paid and I left each one of them of my own accord -- often in the face of strong persuasion to stay on. Restlessness -- inability to find a niche in this postwar world -- call it what you like, but I know I'll never be able to settle down until I get it out of my system."

"Get what out of your system?"

Sefton paused and gazed out of the window for a full minute before answering. "It's hard to say," he said at length. "Put it this way. I was a reasonably settled young man with a career ahead of me with Sontal. The war finished all that. The corporation never started up again. I had seen my friends die on that trek and I'd been unable to help them. I'm not neurotic, but -- but -- " he spread his hands. "Oh, hell, I don't know -- I've just got a yen to go out there again, to see the places we walked through -- to feel the sun beating down on me and to get the stink of the jungle back into my nostrils. I want to face up to something I've been running away from all these years and to realize how little it all means in retrospect." He stopped suddenly. He had rehearsed this speech carefully but now he wondered if he had not over-dramatized it. Hell, that wouldn't have deceived a kid, he thought ruefully, and added aloud, "This must all sound very silly, professor."

But the professor smiled sympathetically, "Not at all. I think I understand. I was part of a lost generation myself in 1918. All right, Mr. Sefton -- you've been very frank with me. Let me tell you something about myself and my reason for going out there." He pushed a box of cigarettes across the table and Sefton, noting the virgin ash tray, realized that he was the first who had been thus favored and felt his confidence rise accordingly. "I take it that you know a little about me -- my one-man expeditions -- my modest reputation as an author and popular lecturer --- ?"

Sefton looked suitably shocked. "Who doesn't, professor?"

"None of the previous applicants, apparently," answered the professor with more than a touch of sourness. "One young man had heard, without particular interest, a 15-minute talk of mine on television. The woman confused me with Professor Lever, the ornithologist, while most of the others were far more interested in what I could pay them than in the journey and its objects. Still, be that as it may -- I want a man who knows Upper Burma, who is prepared to rough it, who can drive one jeep and maintain two and who, in short, is prepared to accompany me on a trip over the old Burma Road from Calcutta to as far as we can get toward the China border. A man who can relieve me of the chores of the trip while I collect material and take pictures for my next lecture tour, but who at the same time can be rather more -- er -- intellectually congenial than the average paid employee." He rose and held out his hand. "I think you might well be that man, Mr. Sefton."

In Sefton's heart was a paean of joy and relief.

• • •

He halted the jeep at the top of the last rise before Kohima. Down the winding road that led back toward Manipur he could see the second jeep snaking round the hairpin bends that multiplied the crow-flight distance tenfold. The road had all but gone back to the jungle since he had last seen it in the closing days of the war. Then it had been a tarmaced miracle of engineering that had carried four lines of heavy military traffic all round the clock. The teak-built culverts and Irish bridges had now for the most part rotted through and Sefton, breaking trail, had had to stop many times since they had crossed the Brahmaputra at Gauhati to allow the professor to catch up.

He lit a cigarette and tried for the 50th time to fight down the feverish impatience that bedeviled him. Left to himself he could have pressed on through to the dry belt in a week, but with this old fool's insistence on stopping to take photographs, plus his maddening refusal to travel in the heat of the afternoon, it looked as if the time might well be quadrupled. And now it seemed more than probable that they would be held up in Imphal. The Indian government was engaged in sporadic jungle fighting with the Naga tribes who, promised their autonomy when the British left, were demanding it in terms that bordered on small-scale warfare. Politics! Politics had stopped (continued overleaf) his getting into Upper Burma twice before. What the hell had it to do with him? All he wanted was a couple of hours in a pagoda near Yen ..."

The professor had arrived now. He pulled up triumphantly in just the very spot he should have avoided, and Sefton bellowed wrathfully.

"For God's sake -- how many times have I told you not to stop in mud?" He strode over and pushed the old man roughly out of the driver's seat and jabbed furiously at the starter. The engine roared but the wheels spun impotently. He cursed and got the tow-rope out of his own jeep and for the 20th time yanked the professor onto firm ground.

"There are certain fundamental rules for good manners, too," answered the professor tartly. "Things are getting a little out of hand, Sefton. I would remind you that although you are not drawing a salary, I am in charge of this expedition."

"You want to get across Upper Burma to the Chinese border, don't you?" snarled Sefton. "OK then, suppose you leave it to someone who knows, and do as you're damned well told."

"I'm not a child and this is not my first experience of the jungle." Neave was thoroughly angry now. "If things are to go on like this I would much prefer to take a paid driver on from Imphal and to pay your passage back to Calcutta by lorry."

Sefton recognized danger signs and temporized.

"I'm sorry, professor," he said and drew his hand wearily over his brow. "All this rather brings things back -- and I think I have a touch of fever coming on." He smiled bravely. "You were quite right to slap me down. I'll behave from now on."

The professor accepted his apology with a slight inclination of his head and turned stiffly back to his jeep.

"Once over the Chindwin, you old bum," thought Sefton as they started off again, "and you can go to blazes. I'll have to watch my step till then, though -- I don't want to be left stranded when I'm this close."

The old man's Delhi-endorsed papers took them through the check point at Imphal without question and even with an offer, which Sefton politely declined, of an escort as far as the border. They camped that night at the top of the Tiddim Track where rusting Japanese tanks made green hillocks under the creeping undergrowth which still, after 12 years, could not altogether cover the scars of that last fierce battle.

Sefton lay under his mosquito net and watched the pre-monsoon clouds gathering over the pass and blotting out the stars. They had been gathering that night he crossed. He stretched out on his camp bed and listened to the jungle night sounds and the professor's gentle snores the other side of the fire. His thoughts went back over the years.

There had been six of them at first in that crazy truck. Findlay, the Scotch manager -- tall, grim, ascetic -- who was a Sanskrit scholar and who some said was a secret convert to Buddhism; Muirson the Eurasian clerk; the two Karen coolies; and Ngu Pah, the pretty little Burmese nurse who had insisted on standing by her tiny hospital until the last moment; and himself. The Karens had deserted early and Muirson, opiumbesotted and malarial, had died at the end of the third week. That left the three of them. Three oddly assorted people on foot in the middle of the freakish dry belt after the truck had finally petered out. There was a well in the pagoda to which they had struggled before Findlay collapsed, and Ngu Pah, the lightest of them, had climbed down the rotten rope to see if any dribble remained in the sand at the bottom. But it had been bone dry. The rope had broken as she struggled back and had left her clinging to the masonry a few feet from the top and they had been hard put to it to rescue her.

It was that night that he made his decision. Findlay could obviously go no farther and Ngu Pah was showing signs of failing too. Her tiny frame had borne the brunt of that hellish journey as she had carried her full share of the water and rations and finally the heavy wash-leather bag that Findlay would entrust to nobody but her.

He knew what that bag contained because he had seen Findlay making his selection from the trays of pigeon-blood rubies before they had dynamited the strong room and set fire to the rest. They had been unable to send their usual shipments out to Rangoon for some months, so there had been a lot of stuff to choose from. That bag must have weighed seven pounds if it weighed an ounce. My God -- seven pounds of uncut rubies. She had not let the bag out of her possession for an instant after Findlay had handed it to her. She had even slung it round her neck when she climbed into the well. Sefton wondered when she had first begun to suspect his intentions. He had tried for years to justify to himself that final act of treachery. He no longer bothered now. In Sefton's world it was every man for himself. He had stolen the bag that night while she slept and Findlay raved in his delirium -- and with it he had also stolen their last half gallon of water and the pitiful remains of their rations, and he had set out on the last desperate stage to the Chindwin and safety.

She had cheated him though -- the little devil. He made the discovery the night before he crossed the border. He had opened the bag to make a careful selection of just what he could carry on his person with safety, meaning to cache the rest where, if the war went the right way, he could come back and collect it later. He remembered the feel of the rough sand and gravel that poured over his hands as he untied the thong. He had screamed and groveled in his rage out there in the jungle and then, when sanity returned, he thought about going back -- but the Japs were closing in fast and he could see the smoke from burning villages a scant five miles behind him. That's where the stuff had gone -- down the bloody well -- and that's where it was now. Obviously they couldn't have survived long. Findlay was almost a goner when he left them, and Ngu Pah couldn't have gone down the well again to recover the stones because the rope had snapped. He had often tortured himself with the possibility of the girl surviving the war and going back for them, but he had brushed that aside. Without food and water she could not have lasted another week. No -- the rubies were still there, at the bottom of the well -- of that he was convinced.

Twice he had raised the necessary money and gone out to Rangoon on the pretext of starting up in engineering, but try as he would he had been unable to get permission to go through to Upper Burma. There had been constant internecine warfare along the line of the Irrawaddy since the British had left, and both sides regarded visitors with suspicion. He had tried it without permission and had narrowly missed being shot for his pains. The third time he had attempted to go out they had refused him a visa, as had the India government when he applied for a mining license in the Shan hills. The professor's advertisement had been a heavensent final chance. He would get there this time -- by God he would.

His plan of action was made. Their road lay through Yeu -- there was no other way in. He would come down with a simulated attack of malaria there. The way to Mandalay was easy so he would persuade the professor to go on alone, promising to catch up with him in a few days. They weren't on such friendly terms that the old man would boggle much at that. He would catch up too -- but then he'd quit. He had enough ready cash to pay his way back to England -- and more than enough wit to get the stones in with him.

He grunted, flicked his cigarette out into the damp undergrowth, swatted a mosquito and dropped quietly to sleep.

They reached Yeu four days later without incident except for a few further bog downs on the professor's part. Sefton had suffered from malaria often (continued on page 64)Man in the Well(continued from page20) enough to be able to simulate the symptoms with a degree of realism that frightened the other man. He had even had the forethought to break the thermometer in the medicine chest so that his temperature would not give the lie to his agonized shaking each evening.

He had no difficulty in recognizing the turn off to the pagoda as they drove past it that last afternoon. It was a few miles east of a tiny village that had been deserted in those panic-stricken days, but which was now repopulated. There was a well there which might have saved the other two had they known about it. A yellow-robed priest sat under a spreading peepul tree at the junction of road and track with a brass begging bowl before him for the offerings of the faithful. He was the first they had seen since crossing the Chindwin and the professor was delighted in spite of his preoccupation with Sefton's fever. He leapt out of his jeep, camera ready, but the priest dropped his eyes to the ground and covered his shaven head with a fold of his robe.

"The camera is a form of evil eye," Sefton explained. "These poonghies don't like 'em. Come on -- plenty more of the idle devils where we are going. There's a whole monastery full of them in Yeu. By God, I'll be glad to get there -- I'm feeling lousy."

They put up at the monastery rest house, and the professor wandered happily about with his camera for a couple of days while Sefton realistically recuperated. The old man was mildly indignant at Sefton's suggestion that he should go on alone but the latter worked on him skillfully. The Buddhist Feast of the Tooth would just about be starting in Meikhtila -- the faithful came from all parts of Asia for this -- opportunities for photography that it would be a crime to miss. Just catch the first rafts of teak coming down the Irrawaddy with the break of the monsoon. He'd be all right here -- the monks were pretty decent to travelers. Catch him up in Mandalay in a week -- as fit as a flea again. The old man at last capitulated and with many a guilty backward glance, went on up the road.

Sefton gave him half a day for safety, and then set off back along the road they had come. He had no fear of the pagoda being occupied. They built these things on the top of practically every hill in Upper Burma, put a statue of the Buddha inside, a couple of dragonlike chhinthes outside to guard him against evil spirits, dug a well for his refreshment and thereafter avoided the place like the plague.

It was just as he had last seen it. Perhaps the purple bougainvillea over the archway that spanned the entrance to the small courtyard was a little more luxuriant, and the monsoon rains, short-lived but fierce in these parts, had washed some more of the white plaster from the pinnacled roof, but the Buddha was unaged, sitting, feet crossed beneath him, soles upward, forefinger and thumb of the right hand grasping the little finger of the other, jeweled lotus on his brow, as serenely as he had sat and watched 15 years before.

He drove on a hundred yards or so and hid the jeep in a bamboo thicket. It was not necessary -- nobody had seen him come this way, and anyhow no Burmese would dream of walking a mile or so uphill to investigate. It was the secretiveness of his nature that made him do it -- just as the beasts of the jungle are at pains to conceal their tracks even when no danger threatens. He took a coil of rope and an electric torch from the toolbox and hurried back. He was sweating now in spite of the evening cool. His heart was hammering and his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps that almost choked him.

There was a carpet of dead leaves inside the pagoda that rustled and crackled under his feet as he skirted the image and hurried round to the well at the back. The shaft dropped sheer and black and the beam of his torch hardly reached the bottom of it. He dropped a stone over the edge and heard with satisfaction a slight thud as it landed on dry sand. There probably never had been water in the damned thing at all. There were some, Findlay among them, who said that these shafts had never been intended as wells at all but were relics of some older and darker religion in which they had figured in other and more sinister roles -- human sacrifices or something.

He knotted the rope round a projecting stone cornice and paid it out into the darkness until its slackness told him it had reached the bottom; then he swung his legs over and commenced his descent. It was easy at first as the masonry was rough and offered some purchase to his feet. It had only been that which had saved Ngu Pah. Lower down, however, the sides became marble smooth and he was glad that he had the forethought to wear rope-soled espadrilles.

The ease with which he found the rubies came as an anticlimax that was almost a disappointment. He felt like a child who had been set too simple a task in a party game. He saw them in the first beam of his torch even as his feet touched the sand. They lay on a ledge in the masonry, wrapped in the rotting remains of a once-bright-blue silk scarf -- a heap of dull pebbles which even in their uncut and unpolished state threw back the light of the torch in a reddish effulgence.

He wanted to shout and to sing -- to throw them in fistfuls over his head like confetti. Instead, he sat down in the sand and lit a cigarette with trembling hands and then trained the beam of the torch on the rubies and just gazed.

It was a good 10 minutes before he was steady enough to remove his sweat-soaked shirt and scoop the rubies into it -- and a further agonizing 10 before he was satisfied with the security of the bag he made of it. He finally fastened it under his belt; then, belaying the rope twice round his waist, he commenced the hard climb up.

He had gone a good 15 feet before it happened -- his body bowed stiffly outward from the side of the well -- feet pressed firmly against the stones. He was not aware of falling. The first realization came to him as he lay flat on his back in the sand with the rope coiled loosely about him and the chunk of masonry which had missed his head by inches beside him. He started to scream then -- shrilly and horribly -- and he was still screaming and tearing at the sides of the well when the moonlight at the top of the shaft was blotted out by the head and shoulders of a man -- a man with a shave poll and a swathe of yellow cotton across his chest. He could not make out his face but he knew it was the priest from the track junction and he stopped screaming and started to babble in Burmese.

The priest answered in English with a strong Edinburgh accent.

"I knew you'd be back for them, Sefton, in the fullness of time."

Sefton tried to speak but his throat muscles refused to function. The voice went on.

"Aye, vultures always return to their carrion -- and that is what those stones are. I intended to steal them from my employers in the first place. I had already broken faith by intent. It was that knowledge that brought me to the samadhi of the Middle Way. These robes are not a disguise, Sefton -- they are my atonement."

"Mad," thought Sefton and fought down another wave of hysteria. "Find-lay!" he called shakily. "Findlay -- I came back to see if I could find any trace of you. I haven't rested, Findlay, in all these years ---"

"That I can well believe," answered Findlay. "A man cannot escape his karma. Well, you have the chance to make your peace now -- as I have."

"Findlay -- you can't do this to me -- you can't murder me---" He was babbling now.

"I have done nothing. In your greed you tied your rope to an unsafe stone. Do you not see the symbolism of it?"

"Findlay -- Findlay -- listen to me -- I know what you must have thought at the time, but I went off to find food, water, for all of us. I couldn't return, Findlay -- before God I couldn't -- I got lost and then I fell ill myself -- I wandered for weeks before I was picked up and then I'd lost my memory. You've got to believe me, Findlay -- you've got to---"

Findlay appeared not to hear him. His voice droned on dreamily, "Aye -- the divine symbolism of it all -- the sacrifice of little Ngu Pah -- three times she made that five-mile journey for water and food for me after you had stolen our reserve. She died on her return from the last one and I made shift to bury her under the bougainvillea at the gate. Did ye no sense something as you entered, or had your greed blinded you to everything except those scraps of crystalized alumina?"

"I don't want your damned rubies---"

"They're not mine -- nor yours," Findlay answered. "They've returned to the earth that formed them. Down there they can do no more harm."

"All right then -- let them stay here," Sefton sank to his knees in the sand, "but you've got to help me out, Findlay ---"

"I can neither help you nor hinder you, Sefton. That is your karma -- as this is mine." And Findlay held his hands over the opening to the shaft. Against the patch of light Sefton saw with a turning of his stomach that the fingers had degenerated into formless stubs. "Leprosy, Sefton -- a curse turned blessing because it was only that which held me back from taking the jewels out myself -- and thereby gave me my chance of atonement and peace."

"You can't leave me here -- that's murder. You're a Buddhist, you say -- Buddhists can't kill -- not even animals. Get another rope, Findlay -- get another rope!" His voice had dropped to a pleading whisper.

"I shall not kill you, Sefton," said Findlay, "not even by negation. You must make your own choice, though. If I get another rope I cannot tie it securely myself with these fingers. I must therefore get help from the village. You will have to come up empty-handed in that case -- I should insist on that and ask the villagers' assistance if you broke faith."

"The -- the other choice ---?" Sefton croaked.

"I shall drop food and water to you for as long as you need it."

Sefton screamed again. "Listen, Findlay! There's money down here -- millions! Be sensible. They've got cures for leprosy in Europe now -- and you can get a pair of artificial hands that'll do everything your own could. There's enough here and to spare for both of us. Get a rope long enough to loop round the statue and drop both ends to me -- you needn't try to tie it. Just let me come up so we can talk it over. If you don't agree to anything I say I'll go away peacefully and never come back -- I swear it---"

"If you came up and I were alone, Sefton, you'd kill me," Findlay said. "You know that is in your heart already. I couldn't prevent you -- nor would I try -- but if that happened I would be robbing you of any chance you may still have of finding peace. That would be against the course of the Middle Way. We are all involved in the destiny of others and a man may not stand by and watch another destroy himself."

Sefton broke then. He fell forward on his face and pounded on the sand with his fists and howled like an animal in torment.

The villagers hauled him up at midnight and the monks at Yeu tended him carefully until the professor, worried at his non-arrival in Mandalay, came back to look for him. Then they shipped him home to a large house set behind high walls in the quietness of the English countryside, where he has found peace -- except when the moon is full and he struggles in his canvas jacket and screams about rubies and ropes and a priest who is fed by the faithful at the roadside.