BEYOND THE SKYLINE

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 4, Issue 10, 1 April 1925, Page 19

BEYOND THE SKYLINE

'Ey GILBERT COLLINS

A STORY OF THE MYSTERIOUS EAST WHERE DWELL MANY THINGS UNDREAMT OF IN OUR PHILOSOPHY

'’J'O WARDS the end of March the usual demeanour of Mallory Voyes, a gentleman at large, took upon itself a strangeness. By midApril the man was manifestly abnormal, and before May had blazed itself in with sandflies and a foretaste of the great heats to come, we, his club-room associates, had resolved ourselves into a grand committee to sit on the case. “Let us return thanks, at least,” said Burleigh of the Salt, “that it ain’t opium, morphine, cocaine, or their derivatives. God forbid I should ever watch a friend of mine go down that road. So long as it’s common-or-garden cocktails, I have hopes that the lunacy will pass.” Then Latyens, our oldest inhabitant, who came up with the relief forces in 1900 and so breathed the dust of Peking,into his soul that he has never been able to tear himself away from it since, began telling us grim tales of men who had gone wrong in the past. There was Conrad Olberson, who supplemented his official wage by a quiet, genteel traffic in cyphergroups with another Power and vanished swiftly, if not ingloriously, in the direction of the Trans-Siberian; young Devine, who spent the first weeks of a hot weather in explaining to his fellow-exiles that topees were really unnecessary in these high latitudes, and was last heard of out Tatung way under the shadow of the Great Wall, waving a wooden sword and communing with the shades of the Taoist underworld, to say nothing of the infamous MacBurn with his million-dollar gold mine in Shansi that didn’t exist. Before Latyens had been at it long we were all more or less in the “There but for the grace of God go I” frame of mind; and it ended by the solemn conclave deputing me, as the man who had known Voyes best, to probe without delay into his way of life and render full, accurate report thereon. I don’t fancy he wished to dine with me at all, but he came nevertheless, and up to and including the liqueurs spoke rationally enough. Here, however, Mallory Voyes seemed to grow restless, and looked up sharply whenever my boy’s step sounded outside in the corridor. At last he rose and proposed that we should go out. “Club?” I asked. “Dull, very dull these days,” 'he said. “If I go there I shall only ” “Exactly. Theatre, then?” Voyes gave a harsh laugh.

“ ‘Lodestone Premier Farce, Five Reels,’ eh? Three years out of Los Angeles, and just reached us. Couldn’t face it, man. Last time I went to the dreary little shack you call a theatre I got into a row for wanting to smash the grinder-machine. No, let’s take the car out for a spin. If we push her along quickly enough we may even be able to persuade ourselves it’s cool.” Voyes himself drove, while I sat beside him, and the chauffeur behind us. We were heading, I saw, for a quarter of the native city. “I thought you wanted air?” I said. “You’ll find precious little down here. As for speeding up ” We had now come into an unpaved street, one flare of light from end to end, full of jostling humanity and strident noise; jangling rickshawballs vicing with the hoarse screams of footmen running at the heads of carriage-horses, and rousing a highpitched pandemonium, to which our horn sounded the deep, imperative bass. Every shop-front was radiant with rich gilt carving in wood, slung boards of golden Chinese characters, garish bunting and paper of unnumbered hues; and the whole scene must have fascinated any but a man on tenterhooks to see which of the scurrying foot-passengers his forewheels would murder first. I had soon lost my bearings in this bewildering neighbourhood, but Voyes seemed to thread the maze with ease begotten of long use ; turn after turn he took, the streets growing momentarily narrower, until at last we were forced to pull up from the simple fact that there was no longer a bare clearance for us between the houses. Here my companion dismounted, gave a sharp order to the chauffeur, and beckoned me to follow, leaving the luckless mechanic to back out of the labyrinth as best he might. The thoroughfare grew quieter as we dived deeper into it. “The original Queer Street, eh?” said Voyes, more to himself than to me. “But it’s fashionable enough. They say the highest nobles in the land have trodden this alley, and that if the inside of these courtyards could speak, there would be some rioe scandal flying about for

the vernacular pressman ! Ever been here before?” "I didn’t know there was such a locality,” I said. “What do the houses call themselves—when they’re at home?” “Nothing. They bury their secrets ; they don’t blab them.” “Are all the houses the same?” “All— that some would break Crcesus quicker than others. This is one of the second-raters we’re passing now.” We picked our way through a fleet of waiting rickshawssome of them costly private affairs, garnished with white and silver and upholstered in fine silk—and drew up under the low, square, tiled lintel of a lighted porch. “You may be interested to see what it looks like from the other side of the wall,” said Voyes, grasping my arm. “This is only a number two concern, but-—by George, business seems to be bright! Look at that!” He pointed aloft, to where the wall was hung with row after row of heavy brazen tablets, brilliantly polished and inlaid with beautifully graven characters in black lacquer. “The local divinities migrate from time to time,” he said, “but you can always see who’s here from the name-plates.” He led the way across a broad courtyard, stone-paved and wonderfully restful and cool after the dusty clamour of the streets, past low screen-walls and tiny rock-pools glinting with blue phosphorescence in the shadows, and under arches where the air was heavy with the fragrance of lilies and orchids rising out of great porcelain urns. Soon a waiting servant took us in tow and showed us into a room peeping out on to the courtyards from behind a hung lattice of fine, thread-like bamboo. The chamber was brightly lighted, and offered the most startling impugnment of the dogma that East shall never meet West that I had so far experienced. Over one wall was suspended a magnificent silk-bro-cade. Against the other rested an ottoman which, be it fashioned wheresoever it might, had manifestly arisen out of such ideals as hold sway in the Tottenham Court Road.

Voyes saw me looking from side to side, and he gave a curious laugh. “I told you this was a second-rater,” he said, “and perhaps you’ll believe it now. This is Young China in an off moment. God knows where it will lead At this instant the servant swung back the bamboo jalousie and uttered a sharp cry. Then the procession began. One by one they came up to the door, the servant gravely incanting the professional styling of each as she came ,and before I had had time to take in the dangerous loveliness of one silk-robed, jewelled, proud-featured, soft-eyed, lissom houri, lo ! she was gone, and another had glided silently and mysteriously into her place. So this was the aspect of a great Eastern capital which was engrossing the attention of Mallory Voyes. Something would emphatically have to be done. I was already beginning to wonder what, when again the queer, taunting laugh sounded in my ear. Voyes was tapping a cigarette on his case, and looking at me in a way I did not like. “Hadn’t you better come away before you get bitten?” he sneered. “It was something of the sort I was wondering about you,” I retorted. “The place seems very pretty, but I don't know that a white man ought to come here. It mightn’t do him any good.” “Depends entirely on what sort of a bottle-sucking babe he was,” said Mallory Voyes. “But I’m with you about not coming to this placethe others are so much better. Come along and see one.” We filed into the street, and perhaps fifty yards along it, diving at length into a brass-tabletted porchway which I should never have been able to distinguish from the first. Again we were taken into a brilliantly lighted! room, and again the same strange procession flitted silently past the door. It was about the third or fourth that Voyes invited to come in. The girl stared for a moment at our uncouth foreign attire, seemingly inclined to pass on, but then, as if half-recognising my companion, she entered the room and sat disdainfully opposite us at the table. Now, as if by magic, two native musicians sprang up from nowhere, one carrying a curious, small guitarlike instrument, the other a sort of semi-cylindrical violin. These men took chairs impassively at the side of. the room and began to play softly.

rjpHE girl seemed to be staring at a ' shiny blob of spilt wine in the middle of the bare, black-wood table, and to pay no heed either to us or to the accompaniment. This went on for some minutes. Then, however, she slid easily into a low, crooning melody in a minor key, soft, strange, eerieutterly remote from any other music I had ever heard, such sounds as you might fancy echoed the lazy, sensuous, world-oblivious emotions of some Oriental dream-paradise. Gradually it grew louder, sobbing and swelling out into passionate trills and turns which defied my utmost efforts to imagine how they would look reduced to the notation of the West — and full of fire, fierily and fiercely flouting the whole gamut of preconceived experience, yet still with that same mysterious, intangible, soft charm. At last, on a note bafflingly perched somewhere in midscale, blending exquisitely with a strange, -resolved harmony of the instruments, the girl stopped dead, and looked across at us with a smile half-coquettish, half-defiant. Voyes awoke as if from a deep sleep. “Pretty wonderful, ain’t it?” he said, rising and placing something on the table. “The girls know how to sing here if they are ugly. In the other pleasaunce there was no such compensation. Yet they say you can find places where the fairest women in Asia sing the sweetest songs, if you know where to look. Those are the ones that turn rich men into beggars really quick.” The third courtyard we entered was plainly a haunt of affluence. Whereas the servants in the others had been garbed in simple blue cottons, here they wore doublets of rich crimson satin, and carried themselves as favoured ministers to the weaknesses of the wealthy. The courtyard itself was bigger—how much bigger I did not know; the outlay of rock-pools and flowerlined arbours more splendidly encompassed; and a richly-clad voluptuary of the mandarin class, who was crossing the pleasaunce followed by two attendants, lent colour to Voyes’ hint that here men high in the land were wont to seek relaxation from the toils of office. We had rambled some distance into the maze when I suddenly became aware that Voyes was no longer by my side.' I called his name softly—for some reason or other I could not bring myself to shout in this still, lotus-eating paradise—and peered down the dark avenues near me, but all to no effect. It was perfectly clear what had happened Mallory Voyes, for reasons best known to himself, had given me the slip. Now I do not know what madness possessed me, but I became strangely eager to explore all this mysterious, scent-laden garden. I wandered on through the labyrinth of pathways and parquets, striving to keep to one direction, but this was impossible ; not one walk in all the bewildering network of ways was straight for three yards together, and I had soon lost my bearings, completely. I had been wandering in this way

for fully half-an-hour, when it occurred to me that the best thing I could do was to go away. I had been deputed by a certain committee, sitting in a certain club on the case of Mallory Voyes, to investigate his way of life, but so far from discovering why he came to this place or what he did there, I had lost Mallory Voyes and my own way into the bargain. The situation was absurd, irritating. I would go away at once. ' I had actually made up my mind to throw dignity to the winds and yell for a servant, when I caught a sound of voices barely half-a-dozen yards to my left. I peered into the blackness in that direction, but could see nothing. Then I understood the reason. I had blundered against a thick screen of vines climbing over quickset bamboo —or so it seemed to the touch—and the sound was coming from behind this. I found my way round the obstacle, tip-toed up to a rectangle of subdued light, and peeped through the chinks of the hung lattice doorway. The picture within made me catch my breath. Here was no gaudy compromise between the decorative arts of East and W est, but something wholly Oriental, wholly costly, and immeasurably beautiful. Reclining on a couch of rich nacre-inlay, draped with fine silks of pale milk-blue, was a girl who appeared, recumbent as she was, to be far above the wonted height of Eastern women. Diaphanous draperies the colour of yellow Imperial palace tiling hung loosely from her splendid limbs; every finger of the small, slender hands flashed diamonds, while I could see that the ivory fan which she was indolently waving to and fro was studded with big rubies. There was only one discord in the picture. Beside this languid splendour of silk and gems, on a low stool, sat a man in European clothes, and though his back was turned towards me I knew that the man was Mallory Voyes. The pair were talking together softly in a tongue which I could not understand. This surprised me. Voyes had, like myself, an easy, workable smattering of the vernacular, but there, so far as I had ever been able to discover, his linguistic attainments stopped. This language I was now listening to was not English, and it was certainly not Chinese. It was no time for false delicacy. Even had it been I should have paid no heed. The man had offered me a gross slight, and it stung. I pushed the hanging screen roughly aside, and invited Mallory Voyes by name to accompany me to the open air and discuss things. The woman looked up with an expression of disdainful surprise. Voyes sprang to his feet, swung round, and angrily shouted something at me, pointing to the door as he did so. Yet here was the queer part about it. The language he used to me seemed to be the same as I had heard him using to the strange woman—an unknown tongue. Another queer thing was the look on Mallory Voyes’s face. It was utterly changed. His forehead was crimson with a deep flush of wrath, and against the crimson showed a

big white scar over the right eye, which I never remembered to have seen before. Nor was the look in his eyes pleasant to behold, and, taking one thing with another,. I am prepared to swear that Mallory Voyes did not recognise me. A T this point I left. Luckily, an attendant had been attracted by the sound, and with his help I found my way out into the narrow dusty lane. Seemingly there was more in the case of Mallory Voyes than I, or a certain committee sitting in a certain club, had suspected. Two or three days later, after vainly searching for him in the meantime, I came upon Voyes at the Cosmopole Hotel. He was sitting alone in the corner of the lounge, sipping liqueur brandy and making pencil notes on odd scraps of paper. As I sat down at the opposite side of the small table he looked up with a not unfriendly nod, though it was clear that he did little more than realise who I was. The reason of this was the strawcoloured fluid in the glass before him. Voyes was not drunk appearance proved that. It was the look of a man who had been steadily, quietly, thoroughly steeping himself in alcohol for a matter of forty-eight hours without once transgressing the limit which any police court in the world would fix. For some minutes he continued very methodically to write figures and work addition on the soiled, dogeared scraps of paper. He then turned solemnly, and spoke to me with extreme deliberation. "You will excuse my calculations,” he said. “I am going away for a vacation, a short rest, and do you know very absurd, of course — I really don’t know how much money I possess. Isn’t it a preposterous situation “Don’t know that a man is expected to know,” I said drily. “Why not ask your banker?” “Eh? Oh, of course, ask the bank. They ought to know, oughtn’t they? Buter, d’you know, I could never bring myself to trust these people. After all, if I do the calculation myself, it’s sure to be right, isn’t it? Then I shall know exactly how much money I’ve got. Nothing like going into these things yourself, you know, if you want to be sure’’ I looked him straight in the eyes for a moment, but he seemed hardly to be conscious of my presence. “See here, Voyes,” I said, “I don’t know whether you’re drunk or dotty, but you’re talking most unconscionable nonsense. I came to pick a bone with you. What in thunder do you mean by treating me in that fashion the other night?” “The other night! Which other night ?” “Great Scott, man, don’t pretend you don’t know! The night we went in your car down to the pleasure quarter.” “Eh? Oh, yes, we went together, didn’t we, to see the sights ? I say, what a rip you are, Bentley! I wouldn’t have fancied you going in for that neighbourhood. But what a: a you think of it? Most interestUIU LUlliK. Ui ILi LVXUDL ifucicai" ing, they say!”

“They say! I should imagine you ought to know, for it wasn’t your first visit there —by a long chalk. What on earth did you mean by leaving me the way you did, and then pretending you didn’t know me?”., . “I? Absurd, man. You’re joking, surely!” I then recounted to Mallory Voyes, briefly and acidly as I could, what had actually happened, and a dawning of comprehension stole into his solemn, sodden features. “By Jove,” he exclaimed, “you ought to be careful, really! It isn’t safe to insult people like that. You must have butted in on to a complete stranger!” “What ? You mean to say it was not you I spoke to in the room with the inlay ottoman and blue silk hangings ?” “I don’t sec how it very well could have been,” he said. “When you left me I concluded you wanted to be alone and had given me the slip. So I came away. Yes, came away—ha!before I got into mischief.” I stole a glance at him now, looking particularly above the right eye. The face was deadly pale, however, and even granting that the scar existed, I might very well have failed to see it. 'T'HAT night I reported progress ' to the committee, and by the time I had reached the singinggarden episode, opinion was pretty much one way. “Of course,” said Burleigh, drinking, “it’s pretty clear what happened there. Do you know any Russian, Bentley?” “Moujik, vodka, and one other,” I said with a grin. “Precisely. You blow in on some voluptuary from the North who happens to be like Voyes in the face. The twain are talking together there are plenty of girls in the Quarter who know Russian, having originated up Vladivostock way. Seems to me it’s as clear as mud. What do you say, Latyens?” The latter had been sitting silent, staring from one to another of us as we spoke, and I could not help noticing that his lean, brown features grew graver as we others seemed to take a lighter and lighter view of the case of Mallory Voyes. “I think,” he said, “that Bentley and I will call upon our friend and see that his change of air is taken forthwith. Personally, I don’t like the sound of the evidence at all. Gentlemen, this committee is diss( Ived.” In ten minutes we were at Voyes’s house. The servant who met us at the gates of the outer courtyard seemed strangely nervous, and when we had at length reached Voyes’s living-room, his boy came out with a sheer pallor under his yellow skin. “Where’s your master?” said Latyens shortly. “He’s gone away,” said the boy, with trembling lip. “Where to?” “Master he no say where go. He say no come back four, five days, he think. I much frighten.” “Eh, you rascal? What are you frightened about?” “Master he no take luggage thing.

He go all very quick fashion.” “Oh! Is that all?” The boy seemed afraid to go on. He stood resting one foot on the other, the picture of obsequious terror, and not until Laytens took him by the shoulders and shook him roughly could he be persuaded to continue. “Master—ah I much ’fraid, I do —Master speak not know how fashion tell. Wang Su know Chinese speak, how Inglees speak, all same one piece. This time Master speak some very much talk I no have hear.” Latyens gave me a significant glance. “Pretty queer, eh?” he said grimly. “Boy, two rickshaws at once.” MOMENT later we were being whirled off towards the Quarter. There was no need for me to show Latyens the way; he knew that Quarter, as he knew every other haunt, native and foreign, high and low, in all the vast, teeming, honeycombed city. He had not spent nineteen active winters and tropic summers within its great walls for nothing. . They were vague at first, extremely vague, at the singing-garden. Latyens attributed this to the fact that they had been paid to be so. Wherefore he cash —-a liberal wad of notes —and rolled them carelessly between his fingers. Then the information began to come. It was true, said the proprietor, that an Englishman had honoured his poor establishment recently. Often? Yes, often. No, there were no other distinguished English who came often. Others sometimes came once, but only this one frequently honoured him. Was there a lady? Plow not? The Englishman did not come to admire the gardens, though there were some who considered his poor, miserable gardens fine. What was her name? Ta Nai, though she called herself Dyonala, and now the other girls called her so, too. That was, no doubt, a name which the distinguished Englishman had given her. No, she was not here now. She had gone away. With the Englishman? Truly it would be impolite to deny that this was the truth. Where? Who knew? She had said that they would go to such and such a place, but had not the Englishman begged him not to divulge this? Here Latyens made more obtrusive play with his wad of notes, and the proprietor rubbed his hands deprecatingly, as who should say, that even as there is honour among men of business, so shall there none the less be business found among men of honour. We were racing back to our own quarter of the great city, mutually yelling plans across the myriad strident sounds and vast hubbub of voices. So dense was the traffic that our rickshaws could only thread through it in single file. “His house first, I suppose?” I yelled. “Yes,” shouted Jack Latyens over his shoulder, “or rather his garage. If he’s gone that way, God help the search-party

r jpO our considerable relief, we found the car untouched as when we had been there an hour before. Nor had Voyes been seen since his sudden departure earlier in the day. Despite the terror-stricken remonstrances of Voyes's boy, Latyens carefully removed the magneto-brush and slipped it into his cigar-case. We .hen made for the Westward-Point-ing-Gate Railway Station, whence trains run northward with folk who wish to go there, and after much patient sifting of conflicting evidence, we succeeded in isolating from the mass of tidings of such a couple as we sought. They had left by the night goods—which will also carrypassengers for a considerationand must even now be half-way towards the Pass. T HE sun had barely peeped over "*■ the rim of the vast yellow plain when we set out in pursuit. Behind us, in the back cushions, lay Latyens’ chauffeur and mechanic, fast asleep, they having worked through the night overhauling the car against a start at dawn. In the lockers under them was food for four days, and in our tank and footboard-cans we had petrol for at least forty-eight hours—for Latyens seemed to expect the chase might be a long one. “I figure it out this way,” said Latyens, taking a cigarette from my case. “The night goods takes them into the Pass and drops them there till morning. Then they join another train, or their own again; you know how problematic the services are hereabouts. Well, allowing for this, and our own chance of punctures or broken springs or spills over the geological formations, it’s about an even-money proposition which of us blows into Kalgan first.” “And after that?” “God knows. Personally I am banking on nothing. But it’s the least we can do for a man we know.” On and on we drove, Latyens pushing forward as fast as he dared —though in truth that was slow enough—over the primitive road on to which we had now come. I had often admired his car as a roughrider, but never so much as to-day! No ordinary vehicle would have stood the terrific jolting for half-an-hour, and the engine which could plough unchoked through such pillars of dust-cloud as we flung up along every inch of the route was a thing to be worshipped from afar. On either side of us stretched the broad, parched, rock-strewn plain, but even now, we would feel that we were pulling up a gradient —a first faint promise of the black, forbidding hills ahead. Then spurs ran out into the plain, crowned with towers which had stood there to guard the pass since centuries before Caesar flung his legions into Britain; then reaches of the Wall itself reared themselves above the mountains, like the arched, notched back of a monstrous caterpillar, and finally,

having won our way up into the very jaws of the pass, we drew in under the great Nankow Gate and through the Wall. I never want to motor again over such a track as we followed from here to the ancient unknown city of Kalgan, last outpost of railways and civilisation. Nor do I particularly desire to repeat the experience of being hauled from here to the crest of the plateau by grunting, harnessgalled ponies. Many times during the arid, blistering, dust-choked ascent did we curse our folly in essaying to motor over a country in all its pristine innocence of roads, and many times did we curse immemorial China from its black mountain peaks down to the Yellow Sea. We were none the less hot on the trail. fJpHE railway folk of Kalgan had been greatly intrigued to behold us. Marvellous coincidence, they cried, that we should come when only that morning another distinguished Englishman had arrived by train and ridden away to the north. No, he was not alone. A girl accompanied him. Who ? That indeed they had not ventured to ask, for the Englishman was strange and fearful in his manner, and the girl, though they knew her not, was manifestly a princess of the blood. They themselves were but poor men, and it was not for them to pry into the affairs of distinguished strangers. This, however, they could say with certainty, the Englishman had not hired horses but bought them, paying with good coin for the mounts. Then he and the nobly-born girl had ridden away to the gate, and through it, and northward. It was this last piece of intelligence which constrained us to hire double relays of ponies for our ascent on to the plateau, and it is likely that of the few civilised vehicles which have ever made the long, rackety, break-neck, climb up steep, boulder-strewn tracks and the dry beds of torrents, ours accomplished it the quickest by hours. Not that we had leisure or desire, however, to consult watches or take notes, and once we were within easy slope of the crest Latyens paid off the pony men, made a swift overhaul to be sure that we had not scattered our engine piecemeal up the mountain side like the trail of a paper-chase, and we forged ahead on our own mixture. All went swimmingly now for many miles. We were still in a region that had felt the tilling hand of man, and, though there was no road in any Western sense of the term, the track was flat and reasonably hard. Then the damnable thing happened. Latyens turned to me with a wry expression, and cursed China more bitterly than he had cursed it before. “D’you hear it?” he asked. “No,” I said, “whatever ‘it’ may be.”

“Where’s your ear, man?” he demanded. “She’s been wheezing like a workhouse consumptive for miles. Soon she’ll begin missing, then she’ll beg to be excused for good. It’s this hell-begotten dust; no human machine could come through it.” At this very moment the engine gave a few jolty indignant honks and stopped dead. Latyens jerked his lever into neutral and sprang out with a snarl. “Hope it’s no worse than plugs,” he growled, “that’s all.” But it was worse, far worse, and for two hours we laboured and wrestled with the choked engine under a sun which, though now we were some thousands of feet above sealevel, stung and bit into our bare hands and made the metal almost too hot to touch. Once, when we were nearing the end, came a sudden blast of dry, scorching wind, fiendishly inopportune, and sent a scour of dust devils into our new-cleaned works, so that we must patiently commence again from the beginning. T DO not consider that either Lat- ' yens or I was normal when we resumed the headlong chase. Be your pith-helmet never so thick, you cannot toil for half a day in that pitiless sun without it finding you out. A stray ray on a bent and exposed neck —-that is enough to start the damage, and the rest follows easily. More than once Latyens drew my attention to pleasant, well-watered hamlets lying away to east and west of us, but I knew perfectly well that these did not exist —nothing but a single wire alongside the blinding white track, and the miserable, widescattered Mongolian huts of wood and felt. For we were now on the steppe, and should soon have crossed the fringe of the great desert, where not even night dews moisten the bitter, salt sand, and nothing human can live. We had plunged deep into a country which could no longer be flattered even with the name of steppe, when Latyens stopped the car and turned his dust-grimed, goggled face towards me. “You see how it is, Bentley,” he said, quietly. “You see precisely how it is. The hoof-prints leave the track here. Our fugitives are at this moment heading plumb into the middle of a waste which may lead somewhere, but if so,' I don’t know where. Neither does anybody else of our colour, for the simple reason that no white man has ever been here. So long as we stick to the road we’re safe.” “Safe not to find people who have left it,” I retorted. “Quite so,” he snapped. “I could almost have thought that out for myself at a pinch. Well, are you game? If the bus breaks up when we’re well into the mess we may not come out alive.” “On the other hand, we may. Seems to me our friends are not going to break country without something in view.” Latyens waved his arm towards the north-west, where the desert rolled away to the horizon in a vast, forbidding level, devoid of any signs of animal life or even vegetation beyond here and there a patch

of dull, dun, sun-bitten scrub. “Doesn’t look hopeful,” he grunted. “This jaunt never looked hopeful to me from the start,” I said. “What do you make the time?” Latyens consulted his watch, and shook it with a curse. “Dust,” he said. I looked at mine and found it to be in a like state of ruin. “Anyhow,” I said, “it can t be much past three. Bar accidents, we can go on till six and still get back to the road before dark. If nothing turns up then ” “We may as well write him off the strength of our mess,” said Latyens. “It’s a pity, though, because the man had his points.” T DO not know how long this mad, jolting, lurching, dust-blinded career of ours continued, because I had curiously lost my sense of time, and the skyline was swimming about in a way I could not explain. Latyens stuck doggedly to his wheel, but there was a nasty, dry, highpitched crack in his voice on the rare occasions when he spoke, and I did not know which of us, in the event of the car breaking down, would take it worse. The road and the single telegraph wire had long faded into the heatblaze behind us. At last I saw something on the horizon, something low and black. I did not mention it to Latyens at first, because I had seen things already on the journey which were very probably not there, and I knew that we were in a country given to the phenomenon commonly called mirage. I wanted confirmation. Then Latyens also saw the low, black object, and as we drew near a flock of screaming, bluebacked. eagles flew up from it and wheeled about overhead, uttering angry, revolting cries. Then we could distinguish what the object was. It was a dead horse, already picked to the bone in his choicest parts. Latyens drove past without a word. “Don’t you sec?” I cried. He gave a funny, short laugh. “I did,” he said, “but I’m looking for something else. It’ll be footprints to look for now.” It may have been an hour or a day after this that we sighted Mallory Voyes, and gave chase. It was not a difficult chase or a long one, for the man did not seem to notice us, let alone try to escape. He was walking round and round in a wide circle, bareheaded, shading his eyes with both hands and staring at the horizon. Personally, I did not consider that there was anything on the horizon to see. I could see nothing myself. Latyens told me afterwards, I remember, that for a moment he. had caught sight of a female figure on horseback, magnified to many times life-size, hurrying away from us over the skyline to the north-west. Possibly this also was in the nature of a mirage. Then we took Mallory Voyes back with us in the car. It was not a pleasant journey, for Voyes was not at all willing to come, and had to be hplrl rlnwn in his spat all thp wav—-

by myself and the two Chinese. The strength he possessed was surprising —after all he had gone through—and the three of us could barely keep him from springing up and hurling himself out of the car. And all the way he explainedin a maddening monotone—how harsh it was of us to maintain him by force. He would never be able to find it now, he said, because only she knew the way, and she had gone on. She was not a woman; she was a devil. He knew that from the way she had turned in the saddle when his horse fell, and laughed, and broken into a gallop, and left him, and vanished in the desert. Then Mallory Voyes began to laugh, and I pray God that no one near and dear to me may ever listen to a sound like it. No, the journey was not, on the whole, a pleasant one. COME months afterwards, finding myself in the Treaty Port of Shanghai, I took occasion to visit a hospital for those afflicted with nervous disorders. My object was twofold to call on the superintendent, Ronald Ferguson, who had been a student with me at Bart’s in the old days, and to inquire after my former friend, Mallory Voyes. I seldom saw Ferguson nowadays —for which the thirty-six hours’ train journey between our two spheres of influence was mainly responsiblebut we corresponded fairly regularly; and his name was often under my eye in the learned Press, for Ferguson, in addition to treating the . nervously disordered, had found time since he came out East to plunge deeper into orientology than most. His face when he greeted me was unusually grave. “Hullo! Anything wrong I asked, already half-fearing to hear what he would say. “Wrong, indeed!” he replied. “Poor Voyes died this morning.” I staggered back as if he had struck me. It was hideously unexpected, for the last report about Voyes had predicted that he was well on the way towards complete recovery. “Died! What of?” Ferguson seemed strangely uncomfortable. “It’s—it’s extremely difficult to say,” he answered at length. “You see, when a man with nervous trouble dies—well, anyhow, it will go down in his papers as inflammation of the brain.” I must have swayed about rather then, for Ferguson caught me by the shoulder and shook me roughly. “Hold up, man!” he cried. “You weren’t related to him by any chance?” "No; —good God, Ferguson, it’s a horrible thing for a man to die like that! —it’s too damned cruel 1” “Cruel enough and queer enough,”

he said quietly. “Come with me, and you shall see the room he occupied. Then you’ll understand what I mean by queer.” We passed along a corridor and into a small room, the floor of which gave curiously beneath the feet. There was no furniture except a mattress and two soft hassocks, and I shuddered to see that the walls were padded to the roof. It was to this padding that Ferguson at once drew my attention. One panel of it was entirely covered with writing. I stared at it in utter perplexity, for I could make nothing of it. I knew the Chinese script, but this was not Chinese—nor, most emphatically, was it any language of Europe. “What is it?” I gasped. Ferguson ran his fingers over the long pencilled lines. “It is a passage in the ancient writings of Mongolia,” he said. “Fve dabbled in these matters a good deal, as you know, and in a little while I was able not only to decipher the writing, but also to recognise the story. “It’s a very old tale. It describes how the Princess Dyonalawhom, by the way, the Chinese call Ta Nai became enamoured of a stranger at her father’s court —a tall, fairfaced, red-bearded stranger who had come from a distant land beyond the sea; and how, fearing the wrath of her imperial parent, who was none other than the great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan, she fled secretly with her lover to found a new kingdom in a fertile land which, according to ancient legends, lay beyond the Gobi Desert. They rode away together into the wilderness, but were never seen or heard of again.” “But this,” I said, pointing to the inscription—“who did it?” Ferguson looked me steadily in the eyes. “There was only one man here,” he said. “But it’s absurd monstrous! Voyes knew little enough Chinese, let alone languages of the outlying races. He couldn’t possibly have written this 1” “There was nobody else in the cell,” reiterated Ferguson firmly. One thing only remained now. I wished to look my last on a man who had shared the joys and sorrows of exile with me for so many years. Mallory Voyes was lying on a plain, low table in a small, bare room, his body shrouded in a white sheet, with only the cold, pale face exposed. The eyes were closed and expressionless, but there was an air of beautiful calm and rest on the fine, clean-cut features. What struck me most was the wonderful transparency of the skin —it was like the skin of a young child, pure and without blemish. For any least vestige of a scar on the forehead, I looked in vain.