The valley of eyes unseen
bold, penetrating type of intellect which we are in the habit of
calling genius--that I had felt during my previous encounter with him.
Surely towards these his last days his brain had given way, and this
screed I was now perusing was the reflection not of his observations
and experience but of the disordered fancies of an unbalanced mind?
I came to the end of the manuscript and laid it down with a great
wave of pity for the dead man. As I did so, once more there caught my
eye the box of uncut diamonds, their brilliancy darting irrepressibly
through the crust of impurities that overlaid them. At least the writer
had vouchsafed some solid support for his statements, though he had
appealed to me not to regard the gems as such, or even to require proof
beyond his own written words.
Of the circumstances under which this amazing record is now laid before
the world I have written later. Of the truth and sanity, or otherwise,
of Mirlees' assertions, it shall be left to the reader to judge.
Here, then, follows the narrative of Ronald Mirlees, exactly
transcribed from his own manuscript which I received from the dead
man's lawyers more than thirteen years ago.
CHAPTER I
THE AFFAIR OF THE OPIUM HELL
My name is Ronald Mirlees, or Ran Mirlees as I have usually signed
myself under those contributions to the learned press of the East by
which I have chiefly picked up a living, and through which I am known
to a good deal wider circle of readers than ever I possessed friends.
I was born thirty-six years ago, son of a schoolmaster, on the fringes
of Paisley, in Scotland. After completing my schooling in that town
and my course at the University of Edinburgh, where I took the degree
of Master of Arts, I came to the East, a region of the globe which had
deeply fascinated me from boyhood up.
Arrived here, I at once plunged into the study of eastern languages
and history and religion which I had begun at Home, earning my bread
the while by odd jobs of journalism--though not always the brand of
journalism I should have chosen if I hadn't been starving when I did
it. Those early days were about the most desperately thin period of
a life which has never run to fat. Later on my name got to be better
known, and my pen better paid, and I might in time have aspired to a
sedate competence if I had been able to purvey the kind of orientology
the public expects. Unfortunately, I wasn't. That sort of orientology
I found to be too full of elementary error, too much given to vague
and shallow report compiled in the study with the help of other men's
books, to commend itself to me. I soon saw that such things as native
life and the native point of view couldn't be soundly written about by
any man who had not gone _fantee_ himself, for the information gets
very distorted even when it comes through the medium of servants and
hired teachers and the tame type of native who prides himself on his
foreign friends. The art of living "native" was about the first I set
myself to learn when I came to the country, and ever afterwards, when
I wanted facts, I dived into the raw mass of yellow humanity to get
those facts direct, and I passed them on exactly as they had come to
me. It was good orientology, but bad policy for a penniless journalist
largely dependent on the favour of his fellow scholars to get work at
all. I became an "outsider," a blackleg, in more or less perpetual bad
odour. It was annoying, naturally, for the accepted authorities to
have certain of their pet mis-statements, which had been handed down
from generation to generation after being blindly cribbed in the first
place from the writings of some sinologue long dead, abruptly exploded
by that one real, first-hand, naked fact I had collected from the
folk of the Far East in person. The wider my knowledge and experience
grew, the more of these venerable bearded errors I found it necessary
to kill off, and my popularity in learned circles steadily dwindled.
The culminating point came when I published my best known and least
conciliatory work under the title of _Treasure of Asia_. Every scholar
in the land, and a host of people who couldn't by any stretch of the
word be called scholars, attacked this hapless book virulently, yet
even within the past year facts have come to light which go far to
confirm those I had written.
The book brought me fame, or at least notoriety, but little else.
Certainly not money. Indeed, to the best of my belief, I lost
substantially over it. I never could give business correspondence the
applied study it no doubt deserves, and I'm afraid my publisher's
letters remained for the most part on my mantelpiece, half skimmed
through, wholly undigested, eventually to become spills. I have an
uncertain recollection of his telling me once that to produce _Treasure
of Asia_ the way I wanted it produced would mean selling the book
at a loss. Perhaps that's what happened. I cared little, for at the
beginning of our dealings I was, strangely enough, well off, as the
result of a risky but highly profitable investigation I had carried out
some months before. The proceeds of that adventure took wings and flew.
Soon I found myself drifting again towards the impecuniousness that has
been my normal condition through life. Also, I was getting restless,
short of patience, dissatisfied with the one bed I was sleeping in
night after night. Arrangements to publish _Treasure of Asia_ had
confined me a good deal to the European quarter of Shanghai, a city
for which I never harboured any great love, and I felt once more the
stirrings that have so often driven me up country to the wild interior.
I wanted to see life raw and naked again, to wrestle another fall with
those yet unprobed mysteries of the East that have always held such a
profound, half-grim fascination for me. My wife had died several years
before, and with her passed out the one tie that could have reconciled
me to fixture in one humdrum existence; since her death, indeed,
I'd been a planet with a zigzag orbit, halted only by shortage of
funds--and not always that.
I come now to my last adventure, beside which whatever I had met before
in the way of queer experience--and my life has embraced some very
queer experience--seems tameness itself: an adventure surely stranger
and wilder than ever fell to the lot of another man living or dead.
Let me say at the starting out that this narrative which follows is
literally true from beginning to end. It may, if ever it sees the light
of day, be disbelieved; it may even be laughed down as the vapourings
of a lunatic. That will not detract one jot from its truth. If I have
dwelt at length on my previous record, it is only for the purpose of
making my real position clear, and letting any reader of this narrative
see that if I have been regarded in the past as no true authority on
oriental matters, that was not because of my failure to write facts
about the East, but of my resolute refusal to perpetuate accepted
errors. Let this suffice for the present. Later on the time must
come when wider knowledge and exacter exploration will vindicate my
assertions up to the hilt.
* * * * *
It was a hot, moist, stifling evening of May. A dun haze lay heavy over
the river, where native junks and sampans and steam tugs were churning
the oily water into an evil-smelling froth the colour of coffee. Seldom
had the city of Shanghai so revolted me, and as I strolled along the
crowded Bund I reflected that I would give a king's ransom--if I
had it--to get out into open country or open sea and away from this
strident, feverish, dollar-grubbing prison on Whangpu River.
My footsteps led me to the side of Soochow Creek, across the bridge
and northward and eastward, beyond banks and wharves and godowns, into
a locality I remembered from having visited before, though I don't
suppose I could have mapped it with any pretension to accuracy. Nor
did I pay great heed to my direction, for I was weary, washed out
with boredom and the sickening, stewy heat, and walked slowly and
aimlessly. In time I found myself penetrating deeper and deeper into
a dense warren of native dives, cranky houses bulging out over the
grimy, narrow, snaking, flagged lanes and leaning one upon another
this way or that, like a row of soused revellers arm in arm. I must
have wandered some way through this maze, for it was now twilight, a
twilight still further deepened by the beetling houses and shop signs
in Chinese character which often hung so thick as to blot out entirely
the twisting riband of sky overhead. Then I came to that blind alley
which, though I little dreamed it then, was to prove the threshold of
the biggest and queerest adventure of my life.
Though hazy on a point of geography, I knew something of this
neighbourhood, with its opium-dens and gambling hells, and I
hesitated some minutes before advancing. That narrow cut seemed to
leave the wholesome world all behind it. There might be interesting
matters ahead, I felt, but there would very possibly be more danger
than interest, particularly for a man in European clothes. Almost
unthinkingly I ran my hand over the hip of my pongees. It seemed a
downright fatality. I wasn't in the habit of carrying firearms in a
city the size of Shanghai--unless I had some definite objective which
I knew to be risky. To-night I had nothing, yet some vague impulse or
other had caused me to slip a revolver into my pocket before coming out
from the hotel. That shooting-iron was at least as good an argument
as I could have on my side if I happened to get into an overheated
discussion, and it decided me to go forward.
The end of the alley was completely blocked by a double folding
door, with boss-shaped brass lock of native pattern. On this portal
I knocked. There was no reply. Then I tried the "opium-den" rat-tat,
a bit of special knowledge I had often found effective in the past.
Still the door remained close shut; but for certain muffled sounds of
revelry beyond it I should have concluded there was nobody to answer
my summons. At last, however, one half of the door came a few inches
ajar, and a puckered yellow face showed in the chink. Here, too,
there seemed an odd hint of the fatalistic. I'd never been to this
den before, yet I recognised the doorkeeper at once--perhaps from
some former visit to a dive of similar kind. The doorkeeper likewise
recognised me, and after some hesitation allowed me to enter.
There was a small porch behind the door, plunged in pitch dark, through
which we passed into the den itself. It was of the usual pattern
for places of the sort, but a good deal larger, and had also about
it palpable signs of foreign influence. The walls were lined with
squalid-looking couches, where natives in all degrees of robustness or
decrepitude reclined drowsily over their opium pipes, but the nave of
the dim-lit hall was dotted here and there with ramshackle tables and
chairs after the fashion of a European drinking hell, and at one end
was, apparently, a low stage, now screened off by a silk curtain across
which yellow dragons were chasing wisps of conventional whorled cloud.
Manifestly this half-breed den was wont to cater not so much for the
unsophisticated native as for the sea-going, semi-Europeanised type,
and for that queer underworld of foreigners of the beach-combing class.
Hence the dramatic stage and the grotesquely incongruous restaurant
tables, and the "fire-water" which I saw--and smelt even above the
sickly reek of opium--to be on sale in the place.
I sat down at one of the tables nearest the back of the hall, while a
boy brought me tea and melon-pips. He had proposed fire-water first,