The valley of eyes unseen
the mountain side they lay, and not until the snow was gone, it seemed,
should we find their bodies. Yet we kept searching still, hoping
against hope, and so intent on the task that we were lost to what was
happening behind us.
I heard Poyning raise a sharp cry. He was looking back over our tracks
towards the place where we had left the sheepskins. There, gathered in
a knot, were some half dozen tall, white-robed strangers, who stared at
the filthy and unsightly garments, then at us their possessors, plainly
in an extremity of surprise.
But if the strangers were surprised, we were startled. The appearance
of them was matter for amazement indeed. Of the whole half dozen
not one stood, I judge, less than six feet three or four inches in
height, and the impression of great stature was accentuated by the
fact that they all wore long flowing robes the hem of which swept
the fast-melting snow at their feet; but it was their faces that set
me gaping. Anybody with experience of native races knows that the
Mongolian countenance, though it may vary greatly, always preserves
certain contours and exaggerations which are unmistakable. These men
were no Mongols. Nor was their skin, though ripely tanned by sun and
wind, of the peculiar Mongol pigment. These men were a Caucasian
stock. The hair of their bare heads, too, crisp and wavy and of a rich
chestnut brown shading off into black, spoke plainly of Aryan races and
the West.
Their leader, a magnificent old man who topped even his fellows by
a few inches, was grey and austere, and he stood there with his
beautifully chiselled features turned towards us in a long stare of
inquiry. Then words passed between him and the others--apparently his
attendants--and one of the most youthful looking took a few steps in
our direction and hailed us. The words were spoken in a clear, resonant
voice, totally unlike the throttled utterance of Asia, but listen
closely as I might I couldn't place the language. We remained halted,
wondering what was going to happen next. It was impossible to tell from
the cold impassive demeanour of the strangers whether their attitude
was intended to be hostile or friendly, but I knew well enough that the
words that had been spoken were a command. The situation was getting
irksome. Our comrade lay somewhere on that hillside, perhaps dying, and
every instant we wasted here we might be throwing away his life.
'Plenty of time to converse with these statuesque heroes later,' said
Poyning, turning away. 'I'm going to look for Philipson.'
But the newcomers seemed to think otherwise. Three of them ran up
and stood between us and the mountain top, waiting for the others to
approach, which they at once did, the tall greyhead leading. They spoke
to us again in that strange tongue I couldn't place.
Then I tried my stock of languages, which, so far as regions between
the Caspian and the China Sea are concerned, is richer than most men's.
I spoke to them in Tibetan, Mongol, several brands of Chinese, Turki,
even in dialects of the Khirghiz Steppes that I had picked up some
years before, but all to no effect. I made all kinds of excursions into
sign language, but I was in such a fever of impatience that I make no
doubt my gestures became merely wild and unintelligible.
At last I could stand it no longer. 'You fools!' I blurted out in
English. 'The man's dying, and here are we gabbling like a lot of
fishwives!'
With that I broke away from them. It was a futile step. Two of them
were upon me in an instant, pinioning my arms in a grip of steel. Even
without my game ankle I shouldn't have stood an earthly chance with
those giants. I was dragged back into their midst. They spoke to us
sternly, in the same elusive tongue.
Suddenly, Poyning began to struggle in the grasp of two of the men who
had also seized him, and uttered some words that at once struck my ear
with a curiously familiar note. I stared at him, as did the strangers,
but a moment after they had released his arms and were nodding their
heads with some appearance of comprehension. They answered him,
speaking slowly and distinctly.
I listened to the halting dialogue, and the longer I listened the more
familiar the sounds became. It was something that had reached my ears
before, and that recently. Then, with a violent start, I remembered
where. This language, or something very like it, was the one I had
heard Philipson use on the balcony of Nanking, and again in the pass of
the _obo_.
'What the devil are you talking to them, Poyning?' I cried.
He turned to me with an uncommonly excited look. 'It seems that my
qualifications can be of use in the East after all,' he replied. 'I
have been speaking to these men in Greek.'
Then it dawned on me. That was why the language had seemed so strangely
familiar. I knew Greek, but not the Greek that Poyning spoke. I had
learned to pronounce my Greek in the straightforward, almost phonetic
manner of a schoolboy of the nineties. Poyning, coming later, had been
taught the pronunciation that modern pundits imagined to have been
used in the days of Pericles and Aristotle. Here was a race speaking
Greek--apparently ancient Greek--in a way that Poyning, if with
considerable difficulty, could understand. It must have been the most
triumphant vindication of an educational theory in history.
'I have told them we have comrades yet to pick up,' said Poyning, 'and
I have given parole that we will not run away. These people will help
us search.'
'But how in the name of riddles did you tumble to what they're saying?
I don't understand a word of it.'
'Nor could I for some time. It's a much more melodious version of the
language than ours, and there are words I have to guess the meaning of,
but once I got a hint what to listen for, it began to come clearer.
God knows who these people are, Mirlees. They're certainly speaking
classical Greek.'
The strangers, directed by the tall greyhead, got into extended order
with the silent precision of men accustomed to discipline, and worked
slowly up the mountain side. We were soon back into deep snow, and it
was hereabouts we made our first discovery--a melancholy one. A brown
hand was sticking out of the white pall. A moment later I was looking
at the dead bodies of our two Chinese servants, the faithful Lo Eng and
Ah Sing. They were bruised all over, but it seemed they had met their
end by suffocation under the overwhelming torrent. A space was bared on
the hillside, and the dead men laid out on it.
Poyning turned to me, his face twisted with grief. 'Philipson must be
lower down--buried, too, or we should have seen him,' he said.
He spoke something to the old greyhead, who ordered the party to turn
about. I now saw a body of men about thirty strong approaching, some
of them bearing litters. How they had come to know they were wanted
I couldn't fathom. The body of our comrade must soon come to light
now, if only by reason of the melting of the snow, which was happening
so fast that the lower slopes of the mountain already ran brisk with
runnels of water. And yet the search was a long one. From the way the
snow lay it had plainly been deflected this way and that by the varying
slant; Philipson's body had no doubt been carried far to one side.
It was a shout from one of the newcomers that announced he had been
found. I hobbled towards him, looking, yet fearing to look; but at this
moment there was a most queer and unexpected diversion. Several of the
valley men had run up and were on the spot before I could get near. I
heard a cry go up from among them. They drew back, one and all, and
_fell to their faces in the snow_.
The sight pulled me up standing, but only for a moment. In my own
excitement I didn't stop to wonder what it could mean, but pushed
eagerly to the front and knelt beside our leader. To my unutterable
joy he was alive. The face was white and drawn, the lips an ugly blue,
but I wanted only a glance to tell me the breath was still in his
body. Then, suddenly, I felt myself grasped by the shoulder. The tall
greyhead stood over me and pulled me angrily away. There was no arguing
the point. I was dragged back to a spot some distance off, whither the
whole party, with the exception of greyhead and two men I took to be
physicians, followed. Poyning had now arrived, and he too was sternly
motioned not to approach.
He faced the stranger nearest him and put an indignant query. The man
appeared to be, like all the rest, in a state of excitement barely
controllable, but he muttered something in answer to Poyning, and I
knew by Poyning's face that the hearing was good.
'Philipson will live, according to this fellow,' he said, 'but we are
forbidden to go near.'
We clasped hands in silence. Never till then had either of us realised
to the full, I fancy, what Saunders Philipson meant to us--how we
little short of worshipped the man, and what an irreparable calamity
his death would have been. For myself, I felt at the same time a sort
of vague, unreasoning jealousy against these strangers who seemed
determined to take him from us. Something similar was clearly passing
through Poyning's mind.
'These people, Mirlees,' he said to me after we had been kept standing
there a matter of five minutes, 'are behaving with a coolness that
comes perilously near to cheek. Damn it all, whose friend _is_
Philipson?'
It seemed to me that the tall greyhead, who had joined us, started
slightly at the name. He was scanning our faces with a curious
intentness. Poyning spoke to him, whereupon he took on for the first
time a faint flicker of a smile, and answered my companion with words
in which I caught a note of sympathy; then his features resumed their
stern, statuesque calm, and he reminded me of nothing so forcibly as
some beautiful Grecian marble in a gallery.
'Whatever the reason is,' I whispered, 'they seem to be vastly taken
with him. You weren't here when they found his body. Poyning, every man
jack of them plunked down on to his face!'
He gave me a queer look. 'I wonder,' he said, slowly, 'whether
Philipson knew more about this place than he ever told us? Supposing,
for instance, he had ever been here before--'
I instinctively turned my eyes towards the spot where Philipson lay.
Although we weren't allowed to approach, no attempt was made to
prevent us from looking at what was going on; and as we were barely
twenty yards away, I can vouch pretty confidently for what I saw. The
physicians had laid their case of salves and bandages on a cloth on
the wet ground, and had placed against each of Philipson's wrists a
cubical box in dark wood, about the size of a studio camera. The notion
that at once occurred to me was some form of electric battery, but
later I had reason to believe that explanation fell very far short of
the truth. A moment's reflection would have told me this now, for no
sound came from the boxes, and no application of the crude material
force we call electricity could have caused our comrade to revive as he
now did. His limbs were stirring, and I distinctly saw his lips move.
The physicians detached the boxes and replaced them in one of the
larger caskets. They were talking to Philipson now, and _he was
answering them, with perfect fluency, in the language of this valley_.
At last the physicians rose to their feet, made a profound genuflexion,
and beckoned to the bearers of a sumptuous litter, who had come up the
hillside towards them. Two other litters bore the dead bodies of Ah
Sing and Lo Eng, and a fourth I was given myself, since with an ankle
like mine I could hardly hope to complete the long tramp down into the
city on foot. Philipson's litter travelled well ahead of us, and I saw
that a bodyguard had at once formed round it.