“There it is,” he said, “the ticket. There’s a lifeboat certificate, too. It might help.
“I know about a ship,” he added. “It left Newport News to go through Panama and was shorthanded. I am sure they’ll need some men, and they won’t be too particular. It’s a hungry ship, but it’s a living and it will take you where you want to go. Most of the ships of that line call at Japan first.
“I can’t help you there; maybe your own sense will guide you. But there’s an old man in Shanghai, he’s all crippled up. Tortured, to make him talk. He never did, and they left him for dead. He’s in Shanghai most of the time now, deals in arms for the warlords or anybody who’s buying. He will know you, and he will be able to help. If you can get into western China…Well, leave it to him. You could save us, put everything right.”
“How will I find him?”
“He’ll find you. His runners meet all the ships, anyway. He won’t be able to come to you himself, as he should. The man has difficulty moving, but he’ll know….I’ll send a cable.
“If you reach Rangoon, go to the Shwedagon Pagoda at dawn or sunset. There are usually some people there to hear the temple bells….Don’t miss it.”
The restaurant was almost deserted, for the hour was late. When the waitress refilled our cups, he said, “I’ve never been able to settle down. Some of the others have, but I’ve left too much behind. There are too many memories.
“When I was in Los Angeles I saw a girl….I knew her, but I did not. When she started to go into an apartment house she stopped suddenly and turned to face me.
“ ‘You must go away,’ she said. ‘I waited, but you’ve come too late. I am married now, and happily. There’s nothing to be done.’ She went into the building and I stood there, looking after her. She had known me, all right, but all I remembered was that I’d known her before, and I didn’t know where or when.”
He turned suddenly and looked at me. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” I admitted. “I’ve been passing as twenty-two.”
He swallowed some coffee. “Seventeen…You’re about due. You say you saw Adapa?”
“I was very young.”
“But he knew you? Well, he would. He would know, or Nabu. The first time I arrived I was in Jenbeskala, and Nabu was there. In those days they spoke one language or a dialect of it from the Aral Sea to the Indian Ocean, we were all Munda-Dravids of one kind or another, and I’d come to the town just before the attack.
“We had no chance. They came riding in off the desert and into the town before we could close the gates. I was a warrior, but long since I’d learned there was no sense in dying for a lost cause, so I ran.
“I knew nothing about the town, you understand, and when I ran into this long stone-walled passage I thought I’d had it, yet something made me run on, even though there was nothing but a thirty-foot stone wall at the end….Only there was.
“A section of the wall drew my attention, a large boulder, worked into the mortared stone, solid, and yet…I pressed myself into a man-sized divot in the rock. It was hardly big enough to conceal me but something, desperation or some form of knowledge, moved me. The rock moved behind me, rotated on a heavily greased column. I whirled as it moved to close. I was in a long room. There was a table at one end and a man was working there.
“ ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘I will be free shortly.’ And there I stood with a bloody sword in my hand, gasping for breath with blood and sweat running off me, and he never turned a hair. That was my first meeting with Nabu.”
Sleeth rambled on, talking of things of which I knew nothing, yet I did not wish him to stop and I found my mind waiting anxiously for each word, even while another part of me was filled with questions.
I had told him the old Gypsy’s name was Adapa, but nobody had told me that, so how could I have known?
“What happened then? When you met Nabu?”
“He continued to write, then sat back in his chair. ‘You came right to this place and it is a hidden place,’ he said. ‘How did you manage it?’
“ ‘They will find me,’ I said. ‘I am one of the last of the defenders. They were close behind.’
“ ‘They will not find you. In fact, they have already gone on.’ He smiled at me. ‘They think they just imagined that you dodged into that dead-end passage. They will be looking for loot now, not you.’
“ ‘Suppose they come here?’
“ ‘They cannot.’ He gestured around. ‘We are inside a rock. Unless they knew, as you did, they could never find the place.’
“ ‘I? I knew nothing.’
“ ‘In this life, no. But there have been other lives for you before this, and there will be others after. It is well you came when you did.’ He looked at me. ‘I am Nabu.’
“The Wise One.” Sleeth looked at me as he said it. “I knew who he was but did not know how I knew. In the next few days he told me a lot, let me see what was happening and what I was a part of. Not over two hundred people know what we are…are what we are.”
Outside in the street a taxi went by. The door opened and a man came in, shaking the water from his slicker before hanging it up. He was an old man, unshaven, and he looked tired. He sat at the counter a few stools away and ordered pie and coffee.
The cup holding my coffee was thick and heavy. It had to be, in such a place as this. So it was with us. We had to be durable.
“Would it be better if we never knew?” I asked the question of Sleeth, and he shrugged. “For me it is simple. I must know. I am like Ivan Karamazov, who did not want millions, but an answer to his questions.”
“These men? Do they know each other?”
“Men and women. Yes, of course. One may be taller or shorter, but the type remains the same, and the sex, of course. Besides, there’s something…a subtle thing, but something we all recognize. You’ll see it, eventually.
“There have always been places we could meet if there was need, and our own libraries where we could bring ourselves up to date if the hiatus was too long. All that’s hard to reach now. Inaccessible because of politics or war or natural barriers.
“I wasn’t one of the first. In fact, I arrived late. I wasn’t like Adapa, Nabu, you, or some of the others.” He looked at me. “You were the first, I think. You and Adapa.”
“I don’t know. All this, it’s very strange. I am talking without even…I mean, I really don’t know anything about this.”
“No dreams? No day-dreams? No sudden recollections?”
“Well…maybe.” I told him about my dream or day-dream, of the boat coming to the landing, and the old man waiting for me. “It was Adapa.”
“Think of that!” He looked at me. “You did not make it, you know. We’d all been waiting, hoping for your arrival before the invaders came. We hoped you could make the rulers realize what was happening to them, and if that failed, perhaps keep everything from being destroyed. We realize so little so late; we spend most of our lives catching up…we can’t move fast enough to stay ahead of all the events around us.”
“You said I did not make it?”
“You never got away from the riverfront. The street ran along one side of the state granary…a high brick wall. There was another on the other side, and they were waiting for you. If you’d been a young man—”
“What happened to Adapa?”
“Him, too. You see, the idea of a fifth column is not new. They had agents within the walls of Hari-Yupuya months before, and somehow they knew you were coming to stop the fighting, so you were killed.”
“The city was destroyed?”
“Not only the city…everything. The people fled to the countryside or the jungle, and civilization dropped from them like a worn mantle. Fifty years later it was as though it had never been. Worse yet, one of our first libraries was lost. If there was ever a way to see how all this started we’ll have to remember it, if we can. History, you know, it’s chaos. So much is destroyed.”
It was
strange. I sat with a man I had seen first only a day or two before, and we talked of places of which I knew nothing and events I could not understand. And yet…and yet I did.
It was as if we talked of an old story we both knew, only somehow the feeling was sharper, more intense. There was a sense of loss, of loneliness, something that I could not account for.
We sat there together and drank another cup of coffee. “You’re ready,” Sleeth said quietly. “It isn’t good to arrive when you’re too young. A kid just can’t cope, and he talks too much.”
I stared into my empty cup. It was time to be moving on, yet I was reluctant to go, for there was so much to learn, and I had only the faintest grasp of what was happening.
The old Gypsy, and now this man.
“Adapa spread the word, that once you arrived again we could reorganize. We must have new centers, some farther west, in some safe place…if there is any place that is safe.”
He got up suddenly and shook my hand. “I never expected this. Not to meet you, not like this, anyway. You get that ship now, and go to the old man in Shanghai. He’ll put you on the right track, help you to reconstruct….But it will come fast for you, and you’ll remember more than any of us.”
We started toward the door. In the street he turned suddenly. “Something I have always wondered…how it all began. I mean there at the very first. It must have taken some doing.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well…well, anyway, the best of luck to you.” He put his hands in his pockets and went away down the street. I looked after him, then turned toward the waterfront. A big Dollar Liner was coming up the channel from the sea. It had come from Asia, where I would soon be going.
COMMENTS: Though very much a mixture of fact and fiction, these two chapters contain a lot of legitimate details about Dad’s life. There were Gypsies that came to Jamestown, North Dakota, in the years that he lived there. My grandfather, Dr. L. C. Lamoore, did, reportedly, sell them some farm equipment and my dad often told the story of the Gypsy women taking the gold coins out of their petticoats. Louis had an adopted brother, Jack, who was just about his age, although I don’t believe that Jack was around when Louis was five. The description of the Jamestown property is pretty accurate also.
The same situation holds true for the chapter set in San Pedro. Louis was “on the beach” (meaning out of work and waiting for a ship) there for many months. True or not, he has told other stories of Sleeth; you can read one of them, called “It’s Your Move,” in either Yondering, The Revised Edition or The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour, Volume 4. And Dad did hang out at the Seamen’s Church Institute and did ship out under similar and somewhat mysterious circumstances for the Far East.
This last draft also contains a wonderful metaphor for Louis’s life: a child and a young man discovering the fertile imagination that will eventually allow him to blossom into a prolific fiction writer. Those “past lives” could be seen as the lives he would live in stories. When the writing is going well, a writer often feels like a channel or a medium for a flow of information that is coming, so it seems, from somewhere else. Another life? The spirit world? The collective unconscious? You are creating other lives and other times, and sometimes it feels like you are drawing on other realities to do so. I have had that experience occasionally, and my father had trained himself to live in it for hours a day.
Louis rarely mentions writers like Talbot Mundy or James Hilton as significant influences on his work, but in this book we see material that is a good deal more mysterious and spiritual than he is typically known for. In this particular case, it may be that Jack London’s Before Adam had some influence. Though he probably first encountered it earlier in his life, I also remember Dad reading it to my sister and me at the breakfast table in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
It’s also pretty obvious that Louis’s experiences in, and study of, Asia had a profound effect on his creative life. Of course, his earliest successes both creatively and financially were in writing about merchant seamen and adventurers in Asia. Later, he occasionally even attempted stories like “May There Be a Road” and “Beyond the Great Snow Mountains” and The Golden Tapestry (included in this book) with Asian or Eurasian protagonists. In these versions of Samsara, we not only have a character marching eastward with Alexander the Great, but we have reincarnation, secret societies, and occult information hidden in “Central Asia.” I’m thinking that Mundy and Hilton and maybe a few others I haven’t yet discovered were more influential than I thought!
Now, just like our young/old protagonist, we are off to the Orient and a mysterious city that lies beyond the Jade Gate.
* * *
JOURNEY TO AKSU
* * *
The Beginning of an Adventure Novel
COMMENTS: Journey to Aksu is mostly set in western China in an area called Xinjiang or, in the westernized spelling of the time, Sinkiang. Sinkiang is to the north of Tibet at the base of the mountains that support the Tibetan plateau, wedged between modern China, Siberia, and Mongolia.
Though Louis worked on these drafts intermittently between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, the story is set in the mid-1930s. It was a time when much of China was ruled by local warlords, only some of whom cooperated with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government. At the time, Sinkiang was, along with certain areas of central Africa and Antarctica, one of the most isolated areas on earth. Its isolation, however, did not keep it free from the sort of chaos found in the rest of China; political intrigue and warfare were common throughout the decade. The population of Sinkiang, especially in that time period, were mostly Turkic, rather than the Han people Westerners more typically think of as “Chinese.”
* * *
There is a canyon in the Altyn Tagh, far west of Sukhain-nor, from which, in a thousand years, no man has ever returned alive.
This story is told in the marketplace of Suchow, east of the Jade Gate, and it is whispered among the camel drivers of Kashgar, far to the west, beyond the great desert of the Taklamakan.
Yet it is but one of many such tales, for this is a land that breeds legend and the story you hear tomorrow in Tashkent or Hami may be the story that was told in the same cities, and with the same inflections, at any time since the first camels slogged westward, their goods bound from far Cathay to Egypt, Rome, or Byzantium.
The massive, ice-sheeted range of the Altyn Tagh and the mysterious Kuen Lun forms a vast rampart dividing the province of Sinkiang from the fortress land of Bodh, known to Westerners as Tibet. Yet that gigantic wall, seemingly impassable, is penetrated here and there by canyons and passes that allow access to the farthest reaches of the mountains and the lands beyond. Some of these passes lead from Sinkiang to Tibet…but who can say, who dares to even guess, where others may lead?
To the north, along the Tien Shan mountains and the far edge of the great basin, the camel and truck caravans bound west from the Jade Gate now travel the route that leads from Hami to Turfan and Aksu.
It was not always so. Two thousand years ago the silk route lay to the south along the foothills of the Altyn Tagh and the Kuen Lun. But with the passing of time the bed of the Tarim River found a new course. The great lake of Lop Nor vanished, creeks and springs dried up, and the southern route was all but abandoned.
Still, in the wastes of the Taklamakan, one of the earth’s most formidable deserts, there remain ancient walls and towers, the ghosts of forgotten cities. Sometimes seen, sometimes buried by drifting sands, their ancient walls are blackened by time, polished and hollowed by abrasive winds. Others sink in salt-rimmed marshes, lost in forests of dying reeds.
In the heat-waved distance mirages shimmer and mirror fabulous towers and lush gardens where shadowy figures move along cloistered halls and among sparkling fountains…phantoms in the sky, images of another world. And sometimes the men who look too long wander into the sand and are seen no more, nor are heard from again.
Whispered in the bazaars and on the street
corners of towns bordering the great basin are stories of djinns and hidden gold, of dragons and ghost caravans that move by night, almost soundless and almost unseen.
Any man who has traveled these lonely wastes, who has camped at night under the black loom of the Altyn Tagh, with the vastness of the Taklamakan stretching away to the north, will but agree that he has heard or seen the shadows of these caravans.
At night when the camels are resting and the dung-fires lend their thin smoke to the desert’s emptiness, there will sometimes come sounds from the distance. And then suddenly, the talk will still, the camel drivers will avert their eyes, the dogs will whine and bury their heads in the blankets of their masters…and out beyond the firelight, out where it is dark and yet not quite dark, there will be a ghostly movement, a soft shuffling of feet, a jingle of accouterments, the muttering of camels and the far-off cough of a man: A caravan is passing.
Nothing is said of the caravan, nor is anything said when morning comes….Only, there are no tracks. The thick trail dust is unmarred, undisturbed. What manner of men and camels are these, who leave no tracks behind? Who pass, almost soundlessly, in the night?
The foothills and boulder-strewn slopes of the Kuen Lun are said to be haunted by a species of devils who, as the water left the springs and the riverbeds grew dry, withdrew into the deeper fastness of the mountains, emerging only at times to prowl the desert. Sometimes if one looks quickly around, one may see the flicker of their shadows as they dodge back among the boulders. Sometimes, on the brightest day, one may see a shadow where nothing stands.
—
Far west of the Sukhain-nor there is a narrow canyon that opens upon a boulder-strewn slope, and this canyon is crossed by a stone wall that is very high and of a pale blue color. In the center of this wall there is a massive and very ancient wooden gate, but the trail that leads to this gate has been grass-grown these many years, for now that caravans no longer come and the rivers have died, the trail is no longer used, the gate no longer opened, not even for a walking man.
Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists Page 44