“Oof!” murmured Mandibul. “You must be in need of rest!”
“On the contrary, my dear friend—my minaret was too cramped, even after the loss of the four queens, and I feel the need to travel the continents to restore my circulation. Let’s see, where are we? Six leagues from Cairo. Bravo! Asia’s not far away—let’s go to Asia!”
Niam-Niam, on hearing these words, pulled an expressive face.
“I understand,” said Farandoul. “You’d prefer to remain in Africa. Very well! Stay here, my lad. Since you’re a bachelor, I suggest you marry Miss Flora and make her happy!”
And while Niam-Niam and the descendant of the Klaknavors, mounted on a dromedary—a gift from Mandibul—disappeared southwards, our friends headed for Alexandria with the intention of taking passage on the first steamboat bound for any port in marvelous ASIA.
PART FOUR: ASIA
THE SEARCH FOR THE WHITE ELEPHANT
I.
Farandoul, Mandibul and the mariners, whom we left on the African sands, are now occupying first-class cabins on the Punjab, a comfortable English mail-boat bound for Indo-China. They intend to disembark in Bangkok, the capital of the kingdom of Siam. Having decided to explore the depths of old Asia, the Mother of the World, our friends had been wondering which part of the immense continent to head for first. An issue of the Times, scanned absent-mindedly by Farandoul, had furnished the answer.
The first page displayed the following article:
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF THE KING OF SIAM’S
WHITE ELEPHANT84
A strange event recently occurred in the kingdom of Siam, and put every mind in turmoil. The king of Siam’s white elephant, the supreme incarnation of Buddha, has disappeared! In spite of the palace’s walls and ditches, the guards and Amazons charged with its defense and the talapoins incessantly busy in the temple, mysterious malefactors succeeded, one night last month, in removing the immense idol, along with the amulets, jewelry and precious stones with which it was overloaded. It was necessary for them to avoid all surveillance, narcotize the vigilance of the priests, get out of the temple and cross the three enclosing walls of the palace with their prey.
The dismayed palace wanted to conceal the incident from the population, but the news soon spread through Bangkok and throughout the realm. The disturbance at court is immense; everyone is in fear of the overexcited population. The ministers are anxious, and even the Amazon corps is in a ferment.
His Excellency Nao-Ching, the mandarin of the police, rendered desperate by the lack of success of his researches, has announced that a large reward is promised to whoever recovers the elephant, with a free pardon for any repentant criminal who provides any useful information. In consequence, the official Bangkok gazette has published a royal decree promising a reward of 20 million ticals—60 million francs or 2.4 million pounds sterling—to whoever returns the white elephant to Bangkok Palace.
The reward is large, but we have to say that, in our opinion, searches will encounter many difficulties in the mysterious Asiatic world, if any even materialize.
Special correspondent, Bangkok.
After reading this, Farandoul plunged into profound reflection for more than a quarter of an hour. Then, suddenly getting to his feet, he summoned Mandibul and the 15 sailors.
“If you want to know to which countries we’re going to take our intelligence and our activity,” he said, “I’ll tell you. We’re going to Bangkok, capital of Siam. To do what? To recover the white elephant, the sacred animal, a national symbol, mysteriously stolen. Sixty millions reward, which will suit ruined men like ourselves very well.”
“If we succeed,” observed Tournesol.
“What do you mean, if we succeed? I don’t recognize you any longer, Tournesol. Are you going into a decline, my friend? Fear not—we’ll succeed! We can consider the 60 millions as already in the bag, so we’ll spend our last resources on a first class passage to Bangkok! Forward march!”
“Forward march!” cried Tournesol, galvanized. “We’ll bring back two sacred elephants instead of one, damn it!”
This is why, without further ado, our friends headed for Suez to take the first steamboat bound for the seas of Indo-China.
After a few weeks of calm sailing, the speedy Punjab deposited them, penniless, in Bangkok. The Siamese capital was an extraordinary accumulation of sparkling pagodas, crenellated towers, spires and fantastically carved domes emerging from the midst of lush and verdant vegetation.
As soon as he set foot on Siamese territory, Farandoul saw that the extraordinary agitation caused by the disappearance of the white elephant was far from having calmed down. Everything in Bangkok seemed out of sorts; the thousand canals that circulated through the city seemed bleak and desolate; the barges lay idle in the Sun; every manifestation of commerce had disappeared; the pagodas resounded with lamentations; male and female talapoins, the priests and priestesses responsible for religious matters, were striking their breasts, their despair pushed to the extent that they neglected to collect the offerings of the faithful. Muted rumors were running through the crowds accumulated on the steps of the temples and before the altars of the gods; other, more ominous, rumors were circulating among the Siamese gathered around the palaces of the first and second kings.
Farandoul’s first concern was to go to the palace of His Excellency Nao-Ching, mandarin of the police. In the offices, this strange minister was not in evidence; they were received by slaves, guards and harem servants, but the minister was hard to find. Finally, Farandoul discovered him in the process of taking a bath in a shady spot. At the interpreter’s first words in explanation of the purpose of the visit, the minister leapt out of the water.
“Recover the white elephant!” he cried. “But…that’s impossible! It can’t be done….”
“Why can’t it be done?” Farandoul reported. “On the contrary, it certainly can be done, and I shall undertake to do it. You can consider it returned to the palace.”
“Have you some indication of its whereabouts, then?”
“None—on the contrary, I came to ask you for some information.”
“An impossible enterprise!” mumbled the minister. “Extraordinary difficulties, grave perils.”
“That’s my business. The information?”
“But first, who are you? You understand that…my responsibility…the gravity of the situation…respect for religion…”
Farandoul handed his card to the minister. Our hero’s renown had reached as far as Siam; His Excellency Nao-Ching started in astonishment, and his olive-colored cheeks went pale. In the meantime, he continued his embarrassed circumlocutions. Farandoul thought he could distinguish a certain reluctance in the discourse. Seemingly, our hero’s intervention was an inconvenience to the plans of mandarin of the police.
I imagine that our arrival has annoyed him, Farandoul thought. He wants to recover the elephant himself and get his hands on the 60 millions! Abandoning all hope of getting anything out of the minister, he coldly took his leave of him. Mandibul and the sailors were waiting outside.
“We’ll go to see the king” said Farandoul. “To the palace!”
Obtaining an audience was not easy. The mariners were met at the palace by a contingent of Amazon guards. The sentries crossed their bayonets; it was necessary to negotiate with the officer on duty and await the arrival of a superior patrol. The stupefied sailors looked around at the Amazons, dressed in short trousers, jackets and red kepis; the female warriors gravely mounted guard. One platoon was performing exercises with bayonets under the orders of a lieutenant with a martial air, while another squad was maneuvering two light field-pieces under the monumental arch of the main gateway.
The advertised patrol being slow to arrive, the seamen, without respect for regal majesty, begin talking about offering themselves the distraction of carrying off the Amazon guards; it took all of Farandoul’s authority to maintain discipline.
Finally, the patrol appeared. The shouts of sent
ries scattered about the walls made the entire company of guards take up their arms. Drums were beaten by the agile fingers of robust young women in uniform. There were Siamese versions of “Arms at the ready!” and “Present arms!” and the Amazons’ colonel advanced, followed by her general staff and a few mandarins.
The colonel presented Farandoul to the mandarins; the mandarins promised an audience for the following month. That did not satisfy our hero; he insisted. The mandarins sent him to superior mandarins, who presented him to others even more elevated. Farandoul and the interpreter, guarded by an escort of a dozen Amazons, spent six hours in the palace running from mandarin to mandarin, to no avail. They were always rebuffed, on the grounds of formal rules of etiquette. Farandoul detected an evident ill-will within the mandarins’ politely tortuous phrases. The whole society was against him. Some of them even seemed to have been forewarned; the minister of the police, the jealous Nao-Ching, must have taken the initiative.
Night had fallen; the doors of the palace were already closing. Farandoul postponed the renewal of his attempts until the next day and headed for the exit. Mandibul and his men were waiting patiently under the monumental gateway. To distract themselves, the mariners were jesting with the Amazons in sign language.
Mandibul had gone into the guard-room, where the officers, understanding that they were dealing with a man of similar ilk, were surrounding him with the most flattering attentions. They were chatting about armaments, fortifications and the art of war. The patrol having concluded, the weary colonel had come back to relax in pleasant conversation, via in interpreter. Informed by Farandoul of the negative result of his attempts, she offered to get the friends out of difficulty and introduce them to the emperor’s presence herself, as her eminent position permitted her to do. Farandoul welcomed this unexpected favor joyfully; a quarter of an hour later, the mariners went into the palace in military formation following the colonel.
The palace, silent by day, suddenly seemed to become animated at nightfall. Sounds of music came from all directions; swarms of slaves and servants circulated beneath the colonnades. The colonel led our friends into a large central courtyard surrounded by porticoes and brilliantly lit by torches and lanterns, reflected in the murmuring waters of fountains.
“Wait here for the king to pass,” the colonel said. “I’ll go pay my respects to him and let him know.”
The relaxed mariners waited patiently for three quarters of an hour under the magical colonnade, occasionally reached by waves of strange music and warm breaths of perfume. Tournesol and few natives of the hot regions of the south felt a certain dizziness creeping into their heads. Farandoul waited, cool and calm.
Suddenly, a man appeared, who started in surprise at the sight of the marines. By the vast red morocco wallet in which the minister kept his pipe, his betel and his papers, Farandoul recognized His Excellency Nao-Ching, the minister of the police.
Meanwhile, Nao-Ching, suppressing his emotion, approached the mariners and said, negligently: “Are you waiting for His Majesty?”
“Yes,” replied Farandoul.
“Well, go in there. His Majesty will come to join you.” And the minister of the police pointed along the gallery to a large door ornamented with delicate ivory sculptures enriched with gold and dotted with precious stones.
“Thank you, Excellency.” Having said this, Farandoul made a sign to his sailors and they all filed to the relevant door. At the first step they took behind the door, Farandoul and Mandibul recognize the intoxicating perfumes that had reached them at intervals in the courtyard.
“Oh! Oh!” said Mandibul.
Everything that they had already seen within the palace was negligible compared with the magnificence of the hall they were going through; plates of gold, mother-of-pearl and malachite sparkled on all sides. A superb staircase occupied the back of the room and appeared to lead to other apartments more marvelous still. The mariners slowly went up the steps of the staircase; at the top of the stairs Farandoul lifted up a door-curtain woven from gold thread, and released an exclamation of astonishment.
Mandibul and the sailors, pressing hard on their leader’s heels, put their heads through the golden filaments and, like him, remained nailed to the spot in amazement.
The walls of the immense hall, open to the sky, that they had glimpsed through the curtain were streaming with gold, pearls and light. In the middle of this incredible splendor, several hundred women, more sparkling still, were devoting themselves to the pleasures of relaxation, languidly lying on cushions or dancing to the strains of harps and Siamese guitars.
Our friends did not have the time to see any more; an immense tumult suddenly erupted, and rolled like thunder through the halls from top to bottom. Twenty gongs resonated alarmingly under frantic blows; in the other parts of the palace, other gongs replied to them, and two cannon-shots sounded from the direction of the Amazons’ guard-post. Precipitate footsteps and the clinking of weapons were audible in all the courtyards; voices were asking questions; the Amazons’ clarions sounded the alarm, while the rolls of their drums added a sinister note to the terrible tocsin of the gongs.
In the hall, all the frenzied women were screaming at the tops of their voices, the majority of them without even knowing the cause of the urgent alarm, and slaves with hairless faces were trying vainly to restore order. A few of these slaves, armed with curved swords, had thrown themselves in front of the sailors, gesticulating wildly. Confronted by the mariners’ steady gaze, however, their audacity had not pushed them so far as to use their weapons.
“All this fuss is for us, then?” murmured Mandibul, in Farandoul’s ear.
“I think so,” the latter replied. “We must have strayed into the harem.”
He turned around to interrogate the interpreter who had followed them. The young Siamese was writhing on the ground, his arms extended, moaning desperately.
“Well?” said Farandoul, bringing him to his feet. “What’s going on?”
“The king’s wives! The king’s wives!” murmured the interpreter. “We’re dead! We’ve entered the apartments…an unforgivable crime! It’s all over! We’ll perish under torture….”
“Perish under torture!” cried Mandibul. “Stop there! For an error…for what, after all, have we done? We’ve simply mistaken the door…that’s no reason….”
“Tortures! Death!” sobbed the interpreter.
Outside, the tumult was still increasing. The courtyards were full of people; they had come into the room below and were preparing to climb the staircase.
Farandoul, leaning over, perceived a man in the room who was covered in gems, whom the interpreter identified as the king, with a crowd of guards and high dignitaries behind him. Nao-ching was among them, his face lit up with an infernal smile.
The king, raising his voice, gave orders to the slaves up above.
“What did he say?” asked Farandoul.
“That we’re to be taken alive and put in chains,” stammered the interpreter.
“Just a moment!” said Farandoul. “We shan’t allow ourselves to be taken.”
The mariners, acting swiftly, heaped up a few items of furniture in front of the door. Each of them had his revolver in his hand, which made no small contribution to augmenting the ladies’ terror.
“Reassure them,” Farandoul instructed the interpreter, “while we disarm the slaves.”
The long curved swords had been thrown on the floor, and the beardless slaves prostrated themselves in front of the sailors. The ladies, still rather anxious, were moderating their screams.
“Now we can have a chat with his Majesty,” Farandoul said. “Let’s open the conference.”
At the sight of the attitudes struck by the mariners, the king and the high dignitaries had evacuated the hall and had taken up positions in the courtyard, in the midst of a multitude of guards and Amazons, armed to the teeth. They were shouting and gesticulating; the most agitated of all was, undoubtedly, the minister of the police, who
frequently drew his hand across his throat in a significant gesture.
When Farandoul appeared at a window with a few men, the Siamese down below released immense explanations of horror, and the striking of the gongs redoubled its fervor. Farandoul wait for relative quiet to be established and dragged the terror-stricken interpreter forcibly to the window.
“Explain our error to His Majesty, present our apologies and put all the blame on the minister of the police. Go on—quickly!”
The unfortunate Siamese began, with a stutter. The king did not condescend to reply himself, and gave the floor to Nao-Ching, the mandarin of the police. The dialogue lasted nearly two hours, in the midst of the greatest tumult. In the end, the interpreter let himself fall into Mandibul’s arms.
“Well?” demanded the latter.
“Well, this is all that I could obtain: His Majesty does not want to put us to death right away, but he demands that we surrender ourselves to be judged according to his laws.”
“Ah! Many thanks for the favor. Delighted! Let’s see, now—explain to the king the purpose of our visit. Tell him that we came here with the intention of devoting ourselves to the search for the white elephant.”
The interpreter obeyed.
His words were greeted by a redoubling of the shouting in the courtyard. The mandarin Nao-Ching had a scornful smile, and merely replied with these words: “Your crime must be punished.”
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” cried Farandoul. “Let them come and get us! We’ve entered the apartments of the king’s wives—well, let’s stay here! It’s a nice place; we’ll defend it to the end!”
Beneath the colonnade, the king and his high dignitaries held council; the guards and the Amazons organized a sort of camp for the night. Farandoul made a tour of inspection of the sacred apartments and observed that they gave out on two sides into internal courtyards; they were totally isolated from the other buildings of the palace and reasonably defensible. He perceived guard-posts skillfully blocking all the exits from the courtyards. Without losing any time, he posted a few mariners as lookouts and came back with the others to the central hall.
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 40