The Murder of the Maharajah [antikvár]

They were on their way. At the start of the first day of April, in the year of grace 1930. Under the Indian sun. Twelve people. Very different people, some from very different countries, all with very different ideas of the rules of the game. But on their way, in different fashions, to a meeting. A meeting with murder. In the tangled jungle of the hiUs on the far outskirts of the State of Bhopore a man was on his way. He was an almost nameless man and he was on his way to a man with as many names and titles as almost any other in the world. Clad only in a wisp of loincloth, he was on his way at a steady loping run to His Highness Maharajahdhiraj Raj Rajeshwar Lieutenant-Colonel Sri Sri Sri Sahib Bahadur Mahapundit Mahasurma Sir Albert Singhji, Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India, Grand Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire, Doctor of Literature (Benares), Maharajah of Bhopore. He was bringing him a gift, a rare gift. It was a gift he had found deep, deep in the jungle that was his home, this almost nameless man from an almost nameless tribe living a life that seldom came into any contact with the great world outside. It was a very simple hfe, but it had its rules. And one of those rules concerned what the man had found hidden in the deepest green of the jungle. A piece of bark. Nothing more than a piece of bark, a chunky knot that had chanced to form on the trunk of a tree, the sapura tree, that normally had only the thinnest of skins. But it was precious, this knot of bark, precious and very rare, found perhaps only once in every twenty years. It had a most curious quahty. Detached from its parent tree and kept dry it was soft and spongy, a startUng orange in colour with a faint sharp odour, somehow disturbing to smell and so staining to the touch that the hands of the running man would be coloured bright orange for days to come. But if it ever became wet it underwent a rapid process of hiirdening. Within minutes it became impenetrable as iron. And because of this any piece of it that any one of the remote jungle tribe ever found belonged as of right to His Highness the Maharajah of Bhopore, their distant overlord. 5