By the time I had slid into my sleeping bag I had decided. At first light I would move them out to Anshi, telling no one my plans. Barring the unforeseen, we could then leave Anshi before daybreak, lose ourselves in the desert, then strike south toward the oasis of Tun-huang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.
Lying on my back looking up at the stars and listening to the wind, I had another idea altogether.
What I needed was control, but not the sort of control I possessed now. The men I had were supposed to drive and guard the returning horses. From the first it had seemed like a lot of men but now it made sense….There was going to be a treasure trove of arms and ammunition too.
I had read Machiavelli and Kautilya. The answer was plain enough. I needed more men…my men.
What did that suggest? First, that they not be Han…or if Han, then local men holding no loyalty to that far-off general.
Back in Shanghai I had heard an Englishman in the Astor Bar say, “Anybody in China today who can feed an army can have one.”
Well, conditions were bad and that Englishman had been right: The Chinese alternative to famine was soldering or banditry, often nearly the same thing. Suchow itself was filled with drifters. The Mohammedan rebellion had stopped the caravans, and the town was filled with jobless, homeless men, many of them thieves or worse. I had seen them standing or sitting around, men of a dozen nationalities, for in the mountainous corridor through Kansu to Sinkiang a Han Chinese was apt to be the exception. Here one found men of all sorts and no particular loyalty.
The pockmarked Ladakhi…
Obviously, he had a reason for wishing me to take the southern route, but that could be dealt with when the time came. For now, he might prove useful.
Suddenly, I sat up in my sleeping bag and looked out through the gate to where several men huddled in a corner of a wall about fifty yards away. They were big, raw-boned men carrying old-fashioned rifles. Each had a saber slung across his back, the hilt showing above his left shoulder. The right shoulder was bare.
They talked to no one, and apparently had almost nothing to eat. I had watched them because of the way they had been looking at our horses, which I was sure they intended to steal.
Pulling on my boots and sheepskin coat, I picked up my rifle and walked over to where they lay. Two were asleep but as I approached, the three others sat up, as ready for trouble as ever men could be.
“Do you speak English?”
They merely stared at me.
“Do you want horses? Food to eat?”
They grasped the word “horses” quickly enough. One of them got up and tried me in what was probably a bastard Chinese, but I knew none of it.
Squatting on my heels I drew a rough map in the sand showing where we were. Touching the man nearest me with the drawing stick, then myself, and gesturing to show the country around, I made an X with the stick. “Suchow.”
“Suchow!” he agreed, his voice harsh and strange.
“Anshi.” I made another mark. “I give you new rifle!” I slapped the Mauser that lay across my knees. The men’s eyes widened. “I shall go here.” Drawing a line as I spoke, I indicated the Tun-huang oasis, the Kuen Lun Mountains, the crossing to Aksu.
“You”—I indicated them—“come with me. You ride”—I drew a horse—“and you eat.” Gesturing to my mouth was enough for that. “Maybe we fight.” I mimed shooting, slashing with a sword, and indicated a place for them on either side of me. When I stood up, I looked from one to the other. “You are not Chinese. What are you, then?”
One of the men, who wore a thin mustache, said, “Ngolok.” Then taking up my stick he drew a region south of Tun-huang and considerably beyond it, drew the big bend of a river, then pointed to the space inside the bend and indicated that it was their country.
Turning, I walked back to camp, and they followed. I served up what was left of our supper and when I got back into my sleeping bag they grouped themselves around me.
Looking from one to the other I realized that for better or worse I had acquired the services of five fighting men. I knew nothing then of the Ngolok, the wildest, fiercest tribe in Asia, a nomadic people who have defied for centuries all efforts to penetrate their land. Nor had I any idea how rare it was to find any of them outside their own country.
Lying in my sleeping bag, I knew what it was I would do. I’d recruit, not an army, but a force at least comparable to the one I now had, a strong force of men whose loyalty lay only with me. Moreover, my recruiting must be done at once and before anyone could circumvent my efforts. By the time those whose mission it was to watch me realized what was happening, I wanted my force doubled.
At daylight I was on my feet and the Ngoloks with me.
We mounted horses and rode into the outskirts of Suchow, and with me was the pockmarked Ladakhi, who had appeared from out of nowhere once more.
If there was nothing else I knew, I knew fighting men, and it was fighting men I sought. The first was a Mongol with a gold ring in one ear, a stocky, powerful man with broad, high cheekbones.
“You!” I pointed a finger at him. “I want to talk to you.”
He merely looked at me, then stared off down the street with an air of contempt that was beautiful to see.
“There is fighting to do, and traveling to a far land. If you are a coward, stay here.”
My pockmarked friend, called Serat, translated for me, and the Mongol got to his feet and spoke.
“He wants to know where you go.”
“Tell him that if he comes with me he will eat each day, ride a good horse, and fight, and that if he asks any more questions I do not want him.”
Serat translated and the Mongol looked at me, a hint of a smile on his lips, then spoke and, turning, went behind the building. “He will get his horse,” Serat said, looking at me curiously. Then he asked, “Where do we go?”
“Where there is fighting,” I said grimly. “If you come with me, you shall go where I go.”
“Where else?” He looked about him. “How many men do you wish?”
“Thirty…if I can find others like these.”
We found them. And we could have found a hundred…perhaps two hundred more. In Suchow that day there must have been a thousand aimless, footloose wanderers.
Brigands, some of them, and leaderless soldiers, too. No doubt many were camel drivers and truck drivers rendered jobless by the unsettled conditions, but the men I chose, I chose because they looked like fighters and because of their readiness to go. Any who quibbled or asked questions I ignored, for I wanted only those willing to commit themselves.
They were a hodgepodge of languages and nationalities, most of them in rags, all of them hungry, all of them potentially dangerous, and scarcely one who did not bear the scars of battle. Yet diverse in origin as they might be, most of them spoke enough of the argot of the caravans to make himself understood. I alone was deficient in that respect. I, and those Chinese soldiers who were in my command.
Of the original thirty-two, only five had actually been Chinese from the coastal provinces, and of these two spoke English enough to translate and to make themselves understood. Yet I now had Serat, if he proved loyal.
Serat was a doubtful quantity. Where he had come from and what he wanted were a mystery. Possibly only a job, a horse to ride, and food to eat, yet he was too glib, too ready with explanations, and a bit too concentrated on that southern route.
Certainly, it was not unexpected to find such a man in this part of China. The caravan route had made it a land of wanderers and the harsh conditions made it the home of nomads; in most places little had changed from the time of Genghis Khan or Marco Polo.
No stranger or more mysterious place lay on the face of the globe. Even Tibet was an open book by comparison. Up to a point the history of Sinkiang was a history of the Silk Road and life around the string of oases, but there had been a time, long before that, even long before the time of Christ, when vast, civilized cities had thrived there.
There was no use lying to myself. I was going south. It was good advice to avoid Ma’s now leaderless soldiers along the northern route. But it was far less the whispered suggestions of Serat than my own desire to go south, into that never-never land west of Tun-huang.
—
Liu Hung, who was second in command, was pacing about and talking excitedly when I rode back into the court with Serat. The five Ngoloks were close behind.
“We leave in one hour,” I said, and immediately moved to start organizing the camp for departure.
“We cannot, sir. No. It is too late in the day.”
“It’s not too late. I don’t care if we only make thirty li. We’re moving!”
He stopped, about to speak again, then he looked at the Ngoloks who stood around me.
“These men, what do they do?”
“They ride with us,“ I replied, “and there will be more.”
“More?”
“The news is,“ I explained, “that the route is dangerous because of Ma Chung-yin’s soldiers. The obvious solution is more men, a stronger party.” It wouldn’t do to suggest I was thinking of anything but the northern road….
COMMENTS: So now we have one adventure leading to another. We learn the young mercenary, Medrac, hired to retrieve a herd of horses from the farthest frontier of China, has actually been tricked into running guns to the Communists by a corrupt Nationalist general. Medrac’s friend in Shanghai, Haig, has sent the pilot Milligan to warn him, and Serat, the mysterious Ladakhi, is steering him toward the southern Silk Road and the City of the Blue Wall—a city that has staked its survival on secrecy, on no one ever leaving, or surviving an escape attempt. A city that certain drafts of Louis’s Samsara fragment hint might be the repository of information archived by those who have “arrived”—those who can remember their previous lives, or incarnations.
Again, because of the way the bulk of the drafts of Journey to Aksu are written, I do not believe Louis seriously considered melding Samsara and Journey to Aksu into the same story for very long…but he did toy with the idea.
The most interesting part is that, just like the autobiographical aspects included in the last version of Samsara, this story is also strangely connected to Louis’s life. Haig, Milligan, and the apartment on Avenue Edward VII are all part of the greater universe of “semi”-autobiographical L’Amour stories. Mercenary pilot “Tex” Milligan shows up in “A Friend of the General,” with “the General” using Milligan as a method of escape:
There was a charter plane at the field. You knew him, I think? Milligan? He would fly you anywhere for a price and land his plane on a pocket handkerchief if need be. Moreover, he could be trusted, and there were some in those days who could not….
Haig, and his apartment in Shanghai, make an appearance elsewhere in this book, and in the short story “Shanghai, Not Without Gestures”:
It was not just a room but a small apartment, pleasant in a way. Drifting men have a way of fixing up almost any place they stop to make it comfortable….Yet the apartment was not mine. I’d been given the use of it by a Britisher who was up-country now. His name was Haig, and he came and went a good deal with no visible means of support, and I was told that he often stayed up-country months at a time. He had been an officer in one of the Scottish regiments, I believe. I had a suspicion he was still involved in some kind of duty, although he had many weird Asiatic connections.
Again, the apartment, though not the man, is mentioned in “The Man Who Stole Shakespeare”:
When I had been in Shanghai but a few days, I rented an apartment in a narrow street off Avenue Edward VII where the rent was surprisingly low. The door at the foot of the stairs opened on the street beside a moneychanger’s stall, an inconspicuous place that one might pass a dozen times a day and never notice.
And, most interestingly, Haig is also mentioned in Education of a Wandering Man…a book that is, supposedly, nonfiction! Louis describes “the old crowd,” a type whose “ranks are thinning” but could be found “in every large seaport city.” They were men who were smugglers, dealers in information, and those who wanted to “avoid the eyes of officials.” He claimed a man named Oriental Slim, whom he met while “on the beach” in San Pedro, first put him in touch with this group:
My first contact in Shanghai came in a sailors’ joint called, if I remember correctly, The Olympic, having nothing to do with the games—although games of other kinds were played there.
It was a perhaps-accidental meeting with a Scotsman, a former British-India Army officer named Haig. He had left the service and become a Buddhist, but I always suspected he was with British Intelligence.
I am not going to get into all the questions about Louis’s actual experiences in Shanghai. Those questions are many and I wonder about them constantly (and uselessly). I will say that I have proof he was there, but at a time prior to when this story seems to be occurring…and at that time, he was there for only a few days. Did he return? It is still an open question.
Lastly, there is one final piece of the Journey to Aksu manuscript that has survived through the years, a denouement of sorts…not enough to satisfy but enough to suggest some sort of closure:
…the city behind the blue wall remains in my mind…no bit of it forgotten, and I find myself wondering how they are faring there and if through all that has happened since they have survived, they who understood the art of survival better than anyone.
There is little about Sinkiang that is Chinese, but even less than that of the city.
Perhaps the sharp reality of all my impressions derives from the state of heightened sensibility in which I undoubtedly was. Not so much from the task for which I had been retained, but what I knew would come after. Even at that moment I knew that once the danger to the city itself was removed, then they would find some means to remove me also, for fear that I in turn should become a menace.
There were people there whom I called my friends, and I flatter myself that they thought of me in the same way, yet where the city and its survival were concerned there was no friendship. The city itself came first, and it always had, and that was the price of its survival.
In the end it was a whim of mine that made the difference, a whim and a sharp sense of the reality of things even in that most unreal of all places.
It was odd that I, a newcomer to China, and in many respects an innocent, should come upon the city behind the blue wall. Haig, who knew more of China, I think, than any other foreigner, knew of the city only by rumor, and he did not quite believe in it. The story, if one could dignify the vaguest of rumors by such a name, was flimsy indeed. It had none of the qualities of legend or mystery, nothing but a whisper here and there among the marketplaces that such and such a place had once existed.
Shanghai, the Shanghai of that era, is gone, erased by a world war, a revolution, and what was supposed to be a Great Leap Forward. Haig, Milligan, “the General,” Oriental Slim, the apartment on the alley off of Avenue Edward VII, the Olympic Cafe. I can’t say it’s all fiction, not by a long shot, for Dad left this tucked between the pages of a disintegrating scrapbook:
Flimsy evidence indeed, but more than a whisper that such a place existed.
* * *
To my father, Louis L’Amour, whose world was so much wider than the West he loved.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would very much like to thank my mother who has been our cheerleader through every iteration of this project, Paul O’Dell (who worked on the earliest incarnation of this book and came up with the title for this entire program), Jeanne Brown, Angelique Pitney, Charles Van Eman, Sonndra May, Daphne Ashbrook, Jamie Wain, Jayne Rosen, Jessica Wolfson, Mara Purl, Cathy Sandrich Gelfond, Trish Mahoney, Jordan Ladd, and Paula Beyers for all their help and the sorting and transcribing of the original manu
scripts.
On the publishing end of things kudos go to the great Stu Applebaum, Gina Wachtel, Ratna Kamath, Nina Shield, Elana Seplow-Jolley, David Moench, Kate Miciak, Joe Scalora, Cynthia Lasky and her crack team, Scott Shannon, Matt Schwartz, Paolo Pepe, Scott Biel, Heidi Lilly, Ted Allen, Larry Marks, Bill Takes, Libby McGuire, and Gina Centrello.
It took every name on this list and many more to make this book a reality.
BANTAM BOOKS BY LOUIS L’AMOUR
NOVELS
Bendigo Shafter
Borden Chantry
Brionne
The Broken Gun
The Burning Hills
The Californios
Callaghen
Catlow
Chancy
The Cherokee Trail
Comstock Lode
Conagher
Crossfire Trail
Dark Canyon
Down the Long Hills
The Empty Land
Fair Blows the Wind
Fallon
The Ferguson Rifle
The First Fast Draw
Flint
Guns of the Timberlands
Hanging Woman Creek
The Haunted Mesa
Heller with a Gun
The High Graders
High Lonesome
Hondo
How the West Was Won
The Iron Marshal
The Key-Lock Man
Kid Rodelo
Kilkenny
Killoe
Kilrone
Kiowa Trail
Last of the Breed
Last Stand at Papago Wells
The Lonesome Gods
The Man Called Noon
The Man from Skibbereen
The Man from the Broken Hills
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists Page 47