The valley of eyes unseen
knelt beside it and began tugging at the power-box with my hands. I
could make no impression either upon the box or the slender connecting
rods that protruded from it. Time was short. The irresistible sleep
might come upon me at any instant. I found a fragment of rock about as
big as my clenched fist and set about breaking the box open with that.
Standing at the head of the folded wings I raised that stone and hurled
it down on to the wings with all the strength left in me. The next
instant I was hurled down myself, while something spread itself above
me, darkening the sky, and then was gone. _The wings had sprung up and
flown away._
I lay on my back, gasping. Of all the uncanny shocks ever meted out to
a human being, I question whether any could have been more startling
than that one of mine on those lonely mountain slopes. For an instant
I was veritably inclined to believe those wings embodied not only
a mysterious force, but a sentient mind and will, and that finding
themselves attacked they had sprung up to attack me. It was a fantastic
notion, yet at the time and in the circumstances I imagine anybody
might have been excused for harbouring it. What had really happened, of
course, was simple enough. In trying to wrench open that box with my
hands I had unwittingly pressed it down on to the brushwood; the jar
of the stone forced it down still farther, thus causing the levers to
turn and setting the power in action, and the wings, obeying the law of
their construction, had immediately unfolded and started to flap.
At first I thought the apparatus must come to earth for want of
guidance, but there I had greatly under-estimated the cunning of the
builder. So perfectly poised were the wings that they preserved their
equilibrium from the start, automatically, and all the difference the
absence of my weight seemed to make to them was that they rose far
more swiftly and easily. They had lain on the pyre of scrub pointed
due west, which direction they kept, and I wasn't long realising
those wings would come to earth only when the power in them was
exhausted. How long that would take I had no notion, but when they
finally disappeared into the sunset they appeared to me to be working
as strongly as ever. Somewhere, no doubt, far out on those trackless
mountain wildernesses, buried in blown dust and driven snow, there
lies the wreck of certainly the most amazing and ingenious device ever
perfected by the brain of man.
I was staring blankly after my lost pinions when I became aware that
a party of natives were spying me from behind a big boulder at some
distance away. I called to them, but they seemed a good deal readier
to run away than come near; it was pretty obvious they had witnessed
my dealings with the automaton and set me down for a wizard of the
mountain conjuring up familiar devils. Like Saunders Philipson, I knew
something of this breed and how to treat them; and without taking any
further notice of them I turned away and lit my fire and sat warming
myself and counting over one or two pieces of my rough silver. It had
the desired effect: they gradually gained heart and drew near. I told
them I was a traveller who had strayed from my party, and that being
without food and seeing the great bird perching on the mountain I
had attacked it with a stone, but that it had escaped from me. They
listened politely if awesomely to my tale but obviously didn't believe
it, and without Philipson's very serviceable rough silver I don't
imagine I should have got much help from those natives. As it was, they
helped me down to their wretched hill-village, and thence, after I had
rested several days, set me on my way back towards civilisation. The
journey, which took three or four weeks on foot, was totally devoid
of incident, and I pass it over in silence; but before leaving this
phase of my adventure I will record one thing which may be of interest
as indicating, however roughly, the geographical position of the lost
city of Hellas. Since my return to the outer world I have made many
calculations of the distance I covered in making my escape. The result
is pretty amazing, but I have checked and re-checked my reckonings--the
journey there as against the journey back--and if the figures err, it
is probably on the side of under-statement. During the eighteen hours
of my flight from Hellas to the point on the mountain side where the
party of natives found me, I must have travelled not less than _nine
hundred English miles._
I hurry on to the end, for I know that little time is left to me to
complete this record. At Chungking the boatman, En Chin, handed over
the launch on production of Philipson's seal, and believed readily
enough that I was the sole survivor of our party--a tale to which my
extremely weather-beaten appearance must have lent support. From En
Chin I learned that only two days after we left for Kiai a Tibetan had
come to him inquiring our whereabouts. En Chin had had his instructions
from Philipson, however, and observed them; said we had gone on up the
main stream, destination unknown; and he thought the man had then left
in that direction, for he saw or heard no more of him.
I spent a day overhauling the launch, engaged a native to help me
run her, and went to bed in En Chin's house by the waterside. That
night I dreamed of Hellas, long and confusedly. The city was in vast
turmoil, out of which emerged at last the face of Saunders Philipson,
sombre and foreboding--I almost felt in my dream that he was striving
to warn me against something. I woke with a start, full of a strange
but very urgent impulse to get gone. I rose, roused En Chin and my
native boatman, threw some provisions into the launch and ran her down
from the yard into the river. I had made most of my other preparations
overnight, and within five minutes we were dropping down stream,
drifting, for there was little petrol to be got so far inland and I
wanted all I had for the rapids below. It lacked still an hour or two
till dawn, but suddenly, a little while after we had left, we both
noticed a queer light in the sky behind us. I didn't know the cause of
it then. Some weeks later I learned that En Chin's house had caught
fire and been destroyed, with many other native houses, barely an hour
after our departure. It may have been accidental, but I don't think so.
Arrived at last in Shanghai, I settled down in my old hotel, living
very quietly--but not for want of funds; setting aside Philipson's bank
balance, which was substantial, that little bundle I had kept by me all
the way back from Hellas would, I knew, see me through to the end of my
days in a good deal greater affluence than I wanted. I heard no mention
anywhere of the affair that had immediately preceded our flight from
Shanghai, and it seemed that so far as the police were concerned, that
episode had been let drop. I soon got to know, however, that in other
quarters it was neither forgotten nor forgiven.
Three days after I arrived, a shot was fired at me from the window of
an empty house in the suburbs. The police investigated that matter,
but they never knew who fired the shot. I knew without investigation.
A week later, returning to my hotel after dark, I was very cleverly
lariated and three-parts strangled by two natives, one of them I fancy
a Tibetan, working from a dark doorway; and two days after that, as I
walked in broad daylight down a crowded street in the Chinese city, a
knife whizzed past my ear and buried itself an inch deep in a pillar of
hard wood.
From that time onward attempts on my life were frequent.
I drew more and more into seclusion, keeping to my rooms at the hotel
for days together, yet even here I wasn't safe. One day, when lunch was
brought up to me--I never used the public rooms for meals--I noticed
as I shook some cayenne pepper from the caster that the stuff was
curiously light in tint. Now since my return I had often dreamed of
Hellas both by night and day, and before long it became too obvious
to escape remark that shortly after these dreams I was invariably in
danger from my enemies. Coincidence, or some subtle warning conveyed to
me from that mysterious land beyond the snows--I've no time to discuss
the point now; but the fact remains that on the night before I detected
that curious pallor about the cayenne pepper, I had dreamed of Hellas
very vividly indeed. I called up the manager, and had the stuff
analysed. The chemist reported a rare and very deadly alkaloid, the
name of which I have forgotten. The manager of the hotel was greatly
distressed. He investigated the business thoroughly, but without
discovering any hint as to how the poison could have been introduced
into my private pepper-caster. The chef and all the servants had
been with him a long time, bore excellent characters, and denied all
knowledge of the attempted poisoning. The manager at last offered me a
solatium to say nothing of the affair. I refused his money, of course,
and wouldn't even let him sack the cook, but that night, alone over a
briar, I thought out the whole position.
By midnight I had come to a pretty far-reaching decision--no less than
to write a full and accurate account of my visit to the lost land of
Hellas. My reason for doing this was simply that I was unwilling my
secret should die with me. That I must die before long, I was fully
convinced. My enemies had made it quite clear to me by this time that
they would only be satisfied with my death. I might--though this is
doubtful--prolong the hunt by fleeing from China, but that I declined
to do. The great Yellow Land which has been the subject of my life-work
has been my home for many years now. I have few friends in it, but none
at all outside, and there is at this moment, I believe, no relative of
mine left living. I would stay where I was, and pray that time might be
left me to complete the record.
I write these final words as fast as pen will travel over paper, for I
know the end is near.
I began to write, working night and day whenever my brain was clear
enough to think and remember. It was not so always. I think it was on
the night I finished my chapter describing our descent into the valley
of great birds that the first attack came upon me. I have no time here
to describe the visitation, nor is there need, for it was a recurrence,
three-fold intensified, of that paralysing oppression of spirit I had
known during my imprisonment in Hellas. I knew what it meant. I was
paying the penalty of my broken oath, to a people more terrible by far
than any secret organisation of natives in the outer world. Almost have
I expected to see materialise, in this room where I write, the tall,
stern, accusing finger of some wise one from the Hall of Wandering
Souls, but that horror at least has been spared me. As before, the
onsets have steadily increased in fury, but as before they have been
intermittent; and it is during the dwindling intervals of peace that I
have rushed on with this narrative, to which I now write _finis_ as the
crowning work of my life....
May God have mercy upon my soul.
EPILOGUE
So ends, in a hand markedly hurried and scrawled in comparison with the
earlier portions of the manuscript, the narrative which was brought
into my room on that bitter Peking morning so long ago: a narrative
which, leaving out of consideration the ingenious but confessedly
fictitious compositions of the professional romancers, struck me and
strikes me still as the most remarkable record of human experience ever
set down in black and white. I have already written, in my preface to
the manuscript, that the reader must judge for himself of its truth
or falsity; but I may perhaps fittingly add a few lines as to my own