Hawk of the Hills

Hawk of the Hills
by Robert E. Howard
An El Borak Story

I
TO A MAN standing in the gorge below, the man clinging to the
sloping cliff would have been invisible, hidden from sight by the jutting
ledges that looked like irregular stone steps from a distance. From a
distance, also, the rugged wall looked easy to climb; but there were
heart-breaking spaces between those ledges--stretches of treacherous
shale, and steep pitches where clawing fingers and groping toes
scarcely found a grip.
One misstep, one handhold lost and the climber would have pitched
backward in a headlong, rolling fall three hundred feet to the rocky
canyon bed. But the man on the cliff was Francis Xavier Gordon, and it
was not his destiny to dash out his brains on the floor of a Himalayan
gorge.
He was reaching the end of his climb. The rim of the wall was only a
few feet above him, but the intervening space was the most dangerous
he had yet covered. He paused to shake the sweat from his eyes, drew a
deep breath through his nostrils, and once more matched eye and
muscle against the brute treachery of the gigantic barrier. Faint yells
welled up from below, vibrant with hate and edged with blood lust. He
did not look down. His upper lip lifted in a silent snarl, as a panther
might snarl at the sound of his hunters' voices. That was all. His fingers
clawed at the stone until blood oozed from under his broken nails.
Rivulets of gravel started beneath his boots and streamed down the
ledges. He was almost there--but under his toe a jutting stone began to
give way. With an explosive expansion of energy that brought a

tortured gasp from him, he lunged upward, just as his foothold tore
from the soil that had held it. For one sickening instant he felt eternity
yawn beneath him--then his upflung fingers hooked over the rim of the
crest. For an instant he hung there, suspended, while pebbles and stones
went rattling down the face of the cliff in a miniature avalanche. Then
with a powerful knotting and contracting of iron biceps, he lifted his
weight and an instant later climbed over the rim and stared down.
He could make out nothing in the gorge below, beyond the glimpse of a
tangle of thickets. The jutting ledges obstructed the view from above as
well as from below. But he knew his pursuers were ranging those
thickets down there, the men whose knives were still reeking with the
blood of his friends. He heard their voices, edged with the hysteria of
murder, dwindling westward. They were following a blind lead and a
false trail.
Gordon stood up on the rim of the gigantic wall, the one atom of visible
life among monstrous pillars and abutments of stone; they rose on all
sides, dwarfing him, brown insensible giants shouldering the sky. But
Gordon gave no thought to the somber magnificence of his
surroundings, or of his own comparative insignificance.
Scenery, however awesome, is but a background for the human drama
in its varying phases. Gordon's soul was a maelstrom of wrath, and the
distant, dwindling shout below him drove crimson waves of murder
surging through his brain. He drew from his boot the long knife he had
placed there when he began his desperate climb. Half-dried blood
stained the sharp steel, and the sight of it gave him a fierce satisfaction.
There were dead men back there in the valley into which the gorge ran,
and not all of them were Gordon's Afridi friends. Some were Orakzai,
the henchmen of the traitor Afdal Khan--the treacherous dogs who had
sat down in seeming amity with Yusef Shah, the Afridi chief, his three
headmen and his American ally, and who had turned the friendly
conference suddenly into a holocaust of murder.
Gordon's shirt was in ribbons, revealing a shallow sword cut across the
thick muscles of his breast, from which blood oozed slowly. His black
hair was plastered with sweat, the scabbards at his hips empty. He

might have been a statue on the cliffs, he stood so motionless, except
for the steady rise and fall of his arching chest as he breathed deep
through expanded nostrils. In his black eyes grew a flame like fire on
deep black water. His body grew rigid; muscles swelled in knotted
cords on his arms, and the veins of his temples stood out.
Treachery and murder! He was still bewildered, seeking a motive. His
actions until this moment had been largely instinctive, reflexes
responding to peril and the threat of destruction. The episode had been
so unexpected--so totally lacking in apparent reason. One moment a
hum of friendly conversation, men sitting cross-legged about a fire
while tea boiled