“Don’t worry.”
In fact, everything went well. The fake fakirs, hidden in the shadows of the curtains, were able to observe the session. The high dignitaries came in first, taking up positions in two groups 20 meters from Nana-Sirkar’s throne, and the ambassadors were introduced. Magnificently dressed, streaming with precious stones, the Maharajahs’ ambassadors stopped at a respectful distance from Nana-Sirkar’s throne. The red coat of the British chargé d’affaires soon joined them. Each ambassador, after bowing to the impassive rajah, took a scroll of paper from his pocket and read a long and pompous speech. On the steps of the rajah’s throne, his 40 wives, skillfully disposed to cast a shadow over his person, agitated fans of peacock feathers with gilded shafts two meters long.
“Not bad, not bad,” murmured Mandibul. “I think the rajah of Kifir is destined to astonish the world for a long time yet by his obstinacy in remaining on this Earth.”
When the speeches were concluded, Jaghirdar Rundjet seemed to consult briefly with the august whitebeard, and then descended the steps of the throne to reply to the ambassadors.
Half an hour later, the assembly broke up, with countless genuflections before the rajah. The flood of great lords flowed through the porticoes, and the august widows went back into their apartments with the jaghirdar and our friends.
“That’s that for another three months!” murmured Rundjet, stowing the stuffed rajah into the secret cupboard. “Now, let’s get back to the white elephant—so you’re going to steal it tonight!”
“This very night,” said Farandoul, “without delay—for we can’t let ourselves be forestalled by others. Perhaps you don’t know that the white elephant you bought had been previously purchased by the Emperor of Burma, and re-stolen from the Burmese one night, probably by the seller, the Siamese pirate-chief.”
“I understand! It’s 4 p.m.—we can’t do anything before nightfall. Let’s wait patiently, and…” The jaghirdar broke off, cocking his ear towards a noise that had just burst out in the palace. “What’s that?” he said. “There’s shouting in the palace…running…”
He was about to go out to investigate when an officer, anticipating his summons, entered the room precipitately.
“Jaghirdar!” said the breathless officer. “A terrible occurrence has just disturbed the festival! The pagoda of Chittaram….”
“Oh!” said Farandoul, abruptly getting to his feet, having understood the last few words.
“The white elephant?” said the jaghirdar.
“The white elephant has been stolen!”
“Run!” cried the jaghirdar. “Gather all the troops; send cavalry units in every direction; search all the mountain gorges; comb all the roads—it’s necessary that the thieves be subjected to an exemplary punishment. Go!”
“Stolen again!” cried Farandoul. “This fake musician, this pirate, is a very clever man! Seeing that the machination that should have ended in our being flayed had been aborted, he suspected that we’d go to Chittaram this very night, and he’s forestalled us. He’s definitely a very clever man. It’s a pleasure to do battle with him. He’s triumphed for the moment, but be patient—we’ll catch up. We must leave you, jaghirdar, and launch ourselves on his track. I’ve promised His Majesty the King of Siam to bring back his elephant; I’ll throw in the thief for free, I swear it! It’s the two of us, false musician—you against me, pirate! One thing bothers me, though—where the Devil have I seen his face before?”
“Wait for the initial reports from my street patrols,” the jaghirdar said. “That way, you’ll set out on the right track. Besides, you can’t leave the palace before nightfall.”
The initial reports were not long delayed. Soon, it was established beyond a doubt that the thieves had taken a north-easterly direction. Their passage had been signaled in a little village on the road to Lucknow, but on departure from there, their trail had been lost in the dense jungle.
“I suspected as much!” exclaimed Farandoul. “They’re heading straight for the Himalayas; they’re going to China. Well, that’s where we’ll catch up with them. Let’s go get our elephants and shed our fakirs’ rags. En route!”
The jaghirdar and Nana-Sirkar’s widows got up to bid farewell to the mariners. Farandoul and Mandibul were showered with testimonies of friendship; attempts were made to retain them with offers of good positions in the court or the army; then, on their polite but firm refusals, they were made to swear again on Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva that they would never reveal to the world the causes of the rajah of Kifir’s longevity.
All the mariners swore. All of them have kept their oaths, for even today, at X***, the rajah’s 40 widows are alive in complete tranquility. Old Nana-Sirkar, who will soon be a centenarian, has not changed; every three months the jaghirdar takes him out of the secret cupboard and shows him to the court.
IV.
To follow a trail through dense jungle is not an easy thing to do. The thieves of the white elephant, launching headlong into that tiger-infested wilderness, knew that they would be impossible to find. In any case, Farandoul was not entertaining any hope of catching the up in the jungle. All that he asked was not to miss the slightest clue, and not to go astray in the mountain roads. The enormous chain of the Himalayas, looming up like a defensive wall between India and China, offers few openings to pass from one of these countries to the other. They had to make sure to take the same pass as the elephant-thieves, so as to come down into the same province behind them.
When they reached the initial ranges of the Himalayas, the mariners’ elephants could do no more. In addition to fatigue, the route presented many dangers. It had been necessary to endure the assault of a pack of famished tigers, and the poor elephants had not come through it without incurring serious wounds. The pirates, moving straight ahead, had gained an advantage of three days over the mariners; it was only with a great deal of difficulty that Farandoul extracted a few items of information from a few savages, denizens of the ancient crags that were their ancestral home.
The white elephant, led by a troop of men on horseback, had taken the pass of Bala-tchats, which led into Tibet. Our mariners could not dream of going into the mountains with their elephants, so they quickly decided to abandon them and proceed on foot.
What a march! The pirates, knowing that they were pursued, had thrown themselves into chaos of rocks and precipices through which the narrow pass wound. The mariners, always well-received, overtook them, and found at the exit from the pass that they had lost the track.
Farandoul was in no doubt that the pirates would try to sell their white elephant, either to the High Lama in his palace at Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, or at one of the fabulously rich Lamaseries on the large island on Yamdrok Tso, the “vast turquoise lake.” Abandoning direct pursuit, therefore, impracticable in the mountains, he descended into Tibet to take up a position on the bank of the Tsangpo, the Tibetan name of the Brahmaputra, where the roads to the lake and the city forked. He was dealing with a strong opponent, though. The pirates had sent scouts in advance; seeing their enemies in a good position to seize them as they went past, they renounced all hope of selling the elephant to the Dalai Lama and undertook a forced march into China proper.
The mariners camped on the river bank studied the little-known country. They found a custom institutionalized there that astonished them greatly. This was the occasion on which that discovery took place:
Not far from their encampment stood a large village with which they existed on good terms. One day, a brilliant cavalcade came out of the village and headed for the sailors’ camp. At its head was a superb young woman riding beside an old chief whose hair was as white as the summit of Gauri Sankar, the highest peak in the country. Farandoul and Mandibul greeted them with exquisite politeness, and asked them what they wanted. They had a great deal of trouble understanding; the Siamese interpreter knew very little of the language. Finally, they caught on.
The old chief had come on behalf of his daughter to ask
for the hands in marriage of Farandoul, Mandibul, the 15 seamen and the Siamese interpreter himself!
“What, all of us? Just for her?”
The old chief made an affirmative nod of the head; then, seeing the foreigners’ astonishment, he told them that—by contrast with that of the Turks, in which the men possess an indefinite number of wives—the women of Tibet could have several husbands, and that, in consequence, his daughter, taken with the fine appearance of the foreigners, wanted to marry all of them.
Farandoul told the old chief that the request was exceedingly flattering, but that he did not think he ought to accept the proposal. He offered his apologies on everyone’s behalf to the young lady, who frowned and seemed very annoyed.
Without saying a word, the old chief and his troop left the camp. Trabadec ran after them and promised, in low Breton—which, by virtue of its affinities with Sanskrit, the Tibetans understood—to return the following year to offer his hand and his heart.
“Alone?” the young woman asked.
Trabadec understood her well enough; the Tibetan brunette, humiliated, turned her back on him. Another lost opportunity for poor Trabadec!
Several days after that original marriage proposal, Farandoul, having seen no sign of the pirates, began to fear that they had changed their plans. Mandibul and four men sent forth as scouts combed all the roads for a week without discovering any trace of them. On their return, Farandoul did not hesitate; he broke camp and headed directly into the Katzi to go into the Chinese provinces by the Mimiats, between the chains of Baigau-Kharat and the mountains of Khangai.
There, again, terrible difficulties cropped up. By virtue of the absolute lack of forage, the horses bought in Tibet all perished and, after a month of fatigue, having withstood several attacks by bands of Sipan89—redoubtable Tibetan bandits—the mariners arrived on foot in the Chinese province of Szechuan, or the Four Valleys.
It was a matter of making progress as rapidly as possible, for the interpreter, in his conversations with the Chinese encountered en route, told him that the white elephant had passed that way a fortnight before, bound for Chengdu, the capital of the province.
What should they do? In that distant corner of the immensity called China, the horse was unknown; the Chinese could scarcely remember having once seen a few mandarins mounted on the little horses of the South—and yet it was necessary to forge ahead and make up the ground made by the elephant. To go forward on foot was impracticable; they risked losing the track entirely.
Fortunately, as our friends were searching for some means of transport, Farandoul noticed a strange vehicle advancing along a sufficiently well-maintained road. It was a wheelbarrow, and a wheelbarrow with a sail!90 The imaginative Chinese mind had come up with this means of locomotion. It was more than bizarre, it was baroque—but it worked.
The wheelbarrow moves on a single centrally-placed wheel; the traveler on one side of it and places his luggage on the other to form a counterweight. A little mast at the front supports a large sail, which inflates as the breeze blows and triples the speed; as an initial condition, however, it requires a breeze. Fortunately for the wheelbarrows, the breeze blows almost constantly on the high plateau where there are no horses, sometimes too violently.
The wheelbarrow that our friends were admiring carried a young upper-class Chinese girl, gracefully seated, with her fan in her hand and her legs stretched out on the board. The driver, carried away by the wind, was running breathlessly. As with couriers in India or Japan, families of sail-barrow coachmen have developed extraordinary lung capacity; they can run for six hours without stopping for a second and resume, after a short rest, for a further six hours.
Farandoul hired the services of 25 sail-barrows at a fee of 40 centimes a day, without haggling. On the promise of a big tip at the end of their service, the brave Chinamen promised devotion and rapidity. Each of the mariners installed himself in his own in the proper manner, with an equivalent weight of baggage on the other side and loaded weapons within arm’s reach in case of trouble. The seven supplementary wheelbarrows followed as reserves. A nice breeze picked up immediately, and the drivers hoisted the sails, to the great joy of the mariners, who had not been under sail for a long time. Hurrah! The wind filled the sails and the 25 wheelbarrows set off with the rapidity of arrows.
Farandoul and Mandibul went side-by-side at the head of the convoy, studying the landscape with their telescopes in hand and discussing to the route to follow. Until dusk they sailed with the wind behind them at the same velocity. The next day was just as good, but on the third day the wind had changed direction; it was necessary to veer north-north-east and tack, as at sea, for part of the day.
Navigating on land in sail-barrows was not unpleasant; there were more jolts than on a liquid surface, but one ought to be spared—so, at least, our mariners thought—the awful surprises of true navigation. They averaged 25 leagues a day. The mariners, familiar with the use of sails, lent considerable aid to the maneuvering. Not an inch of canvas was wasted; they flew rather than marched, and once the vehicle was in full flow, the driver often found a means to sit down for a few moments on the shafts.
The journey continued for a week, sometimes with the wind behind and sometimes tacking. They arrived thus within sight of Chengdu; the interpreter asked about the road ahead in an inn before entering the city. It was as well for our friends that he did, because he learned that the mandarin of the city, doubtless alerted by the thieves of the white elephant, was not well-disposed to the travelers; his intention was to let them enter the city and then retain the under some pretext or other.
As for the elephant, it had continued on its way. Where had it gone? Had it taken the northern route to Peking, passing through the provinces of Kansu, or Salutary Fear, and Shansi, the Western Mountains? Had it descended southwards to reach Canton via Yunan, or Cloudy South, and Kwangsi, the Extended West? Or, finally, had it headed for Nanking through the central provinces? A problem! A precaution taken by the mandarin of Chengdu furnished the solution. On circling round the city in search of some indication, our friends saw that all the roads were open save the one to Nanking, which a platoon of Chinese soldiers had the ridiculous pretension of guarding. That was the one it was necessary to follow.
The Chinese guards took up their arms and waved their shields in an intimidating manner as the mariners approached; the latter continued to advance. The anxious guards sounded gongs with no greater success. Then, judging the defense sufficient, the officer sounded the retreat, and the road was open.
Within three days the mariners reached the Yangtze-Kiang, the famous Blue River—the Chinese Mississippi, which describes a course through the Celestial Empire of 4,200 kilometers. The wind, blowing as a strong breeze, lifted up the sail-barrows; a few hours after sighting the river, the wind became a squall and the barrows literally took off without the aid of the drivers, who were dragged along involuntarily.
They could have hauled in the sails and waited for the storm to end, but Farandoul wanted to take advantage of the strong wind in order to gain a dozen leagues. Soon, the thunder and the rain joined in the party. From their dwellings, the inhabitants of riverside villages watched with alarm as 25 wheelbarrows passed like lightning along the storm-swept road.
It was even worse when they arrived on a bare plateau where no obstacle arrested the furious gusts of the tempest. In spite of the mariners’ skill, there was a collision between three wheelbarrows. The sails split; one wheel was broken. A fourth wheelbarrow, trying to change course in order to avoid a further collision, presented its flank to the squall and was instantly thrown into the river, running 60 feet below the road. They stopped to help the accident victims. It was poor Tournesol who took the forced bath; it was only with great difficulty that he and his driver regained the bank. As for the wheelbarrow and its luggage, the river had swallowed them
Apart from this minor accident the journey was smooth; they had covered 35 leagues and reached the province of Kweich
ow—a poetic name which means Distinguished District. To avoid the possibility of dangerous accidents in the dark they made an early stop at an inn in the vicinity of Chungking. The white elephant, concealed by its thieves by a coat of red paint, had stayed in exactly the same place ten days before. They were on the right road!
The tempest had ended when they got under way the next day, but a brisk breeze promised further rapid navigation. The region being rather populous, Farandoul decided to avoid all the cities and large towns they encountered. It was a wise precaution, for a certain agitation was noticeable in the countryside; in the villages, people gathered around the travelers without manifesting much astonishment, which seemed to indicate that the arrival of Europeans had been anticipated. Two days from Chungking, bad news awaited our friends.
Doubtless won over by the pirates, the governor of the province and the powerful Mandarin of the Fifth Cardinal Point of China, the center—also known as the general of the central provinces—had mobilized militias to bar the route of “the barbarians,” the word barbarians evidently referring to our friends.
Proclamations pinned up even in the smallest villages described, with a great wealth of detail, the bearded men of the Occident, their costumes and their weapons. In spite of the flagrant hostility of the locals, however, they were able to advance for a further week without coming up against any real obstacles. They encountered several bands of militiamen, acting under the orders of a few aged officers recalled to military service, but these brave soldiers pretended not to recognize “the barbarians” in order not to have to oppose their passage.
The wheelbarrow-drivers, on the promise of a large supplementary payment, consented to continue their service until horses were found for the entire troop. There was a moment of hesitation, however, in Sukiu, the first town in the province of Hupeh, when they learned that the Chinese army was occupying a narrow pass two league further on, between the Blue River and the Tapaling Mountains.
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 45