Marching Sands

by Harold Lamb

  He wondered what success they would have. What was the city of Sungan? How had it escaped observation? How did a city happen to be in the desert, anyway?

  What was the pale sickness Brent had spoken of? Brent had died. From natural causes, of course. Gray gave little heed to Delabar’s wild surmises. But the conduct of Wu Fang Chien afforded him food for thought.

  Had the vice-governor actually known of their mission? His words might have had a double meaning. And they might not. The silk scroll meant little. Delabar had read warning into it; but was not that a result of his imagination?

  Gray turned uncomfortably on his bed and considered the matter. How could Wu Fang Chien have known they were bound for Sungan? Their mission had been carefully kept from publicity. Only Van Schaick and his three associates knew of it. Men like Van Schaick and Balch could keep their mouths shut. And Delabar was certainly cautious enough.

  Gray cursed the heat under his breath, with added measure for the dog that seemed bound to make a night of it. The chatter at the hotel door had subsided with midnight. But the guitar still struck its melancholy note, accompanied by the intermittent wail of the sorrowing dog.

  No, Gray thought sleepily, Wu Fang Chien could not have known of their mission. He had let Delabar’s nerves prey on his own—that was all. Delabar was full of this Asia stuff, especially concerning the priests

  Gray’s mind drifted away into vague visions of ancient and forgotten temples. The guitar note became the strum of temple drums, echoing over the waste of the desert. The dog’s plaint took form in the wailing of shrouded forms that moved about gigantic ruins, ruins that gave forth throngs of spirits. And the spirits took up the wail, approaching him.

  A green light flamed from the temple gate. The gongs sounded a final crash—and Gray awoke at the noise of the stick and coins falling to the floor.

  He became fully conscious instantly—from habit. And was aware of two things. He had been asleep for some time. Also, the door had been thrown open and dark forms were running into the room.

  Gray caught at his automatic that he always hung at his pillow. He missed it in the dark. One of the figures stumbled against the bed. He felt a hand brush across his face.

  Drawing up his legs swiftly, he kicked out at the man who was fumbling for him. The fellow subsided backward with a grunt, and the officer gained his feet. His sight was not yet cleared, but he perceived the blur of figures in the light from the open door.

  He wasted no time in outcry. Experience had taught him that the best way to deal with native assailants was with his fists. He bent forward from the hips, balanced himself and jabbed at the first man who ran up to him.

  His fist landed in the intruder’s face. Gray weighed over a hundred and seventy pounds, and he had the knack that comparatively few men possess of putting his weight behind his fists. Moreover, he was not easily flurried, and this coolness gave his blows added sting.

  At least four men had broken into the room. The other two hesitated when they saw their companions knocked down. But Gray did not. There was a brief rustle of feet over the floor, the sound of a heavy fist striking against flesh, and the invaders stumbled or crawled from the room.

  Gray was surprised they did not use their knives. Once they perceived that he was fully awake, they seemed to lose heart. The fight had taken only a minute, and Gray was master of the field.

  He had counted four men as they ran out. But he waited alertly by the door while Delabar, who had remained on his bed, got up and lit the lamp. Gray’s first glance told him that no Chinamen were to be seen.

  He was breathing heavily, but quite unhurt. Having the advantage of both weight and hitting power over his light adversaries, he took no pride in his prompt clearing of the room. Delabar, however, was plainly shaky.

  “What did they want?” the professor muttered, eyeing the door. “How—”

  “Look out!” warned Gray crisply.

  From the foot of his bed a head appeared. Two slant eyes fixed on him angrily. A Chinaman in the rough clothes of a coolie crawled out and stood erect.

  In one hand he held Gray’s rifle, removed from the case. With the other he was fumbling at the safety catch, with which he seemed unfamiliar.

  Gray acted swiftly. Realizing that the gun was loaded and that it would go off if the coolie thought of pulling the trigger, inasmuch as the safety catch was not set, he stepped to one side, to the head of the bed.

  Here he fell to his knees. The man with the rifle, if he had fired, would probably have shot over the American, who was feeling under the pillow.

  As it happened the coolie did not pull the trigger of the gun. A dart of flame, a crack that echoed loudly in the narrow room—and Gray, over the sights of the automatic that he had recovered and fired in one motion, saw the man stagger.

  Through the swirling smoke he saw the coolie drop the gun and run to the window.

  Gray covered the man again, but refrained from pressing the trigger. There was no need of killing the coolie. The next instant the man had flung open the shutters and dived from the window.

  Looking out, Gray saw the form of his adversary vaguely as the coolie picked himself up and vanished in the darkness.

  The street was silent. The guitar was no longer to be heard.

  Gray crossed the room and flung open the door. The hall was empty. He closed the door, readjusted the stick and string of coins and grinned at Delabar who was watching nervously.

  “That was one on me, Professor,” he admitted cheerfully. “The coolie who bobbed up under the bed must have been the one I kicked there. Fancy knocking a man to where he can grab your own gun.”

  Delabar, however, saw no humor in the situation.

  “They were coolies,” he said. “What do you suppose they came after?”

  “Money. I don’t know.” Gray replaced the shutters and blew out the light. “We’ll complain to our landlord in the morning. But I don’t guess we’ll have much satisfaction out of him. The fact that my shot didn’t bring the household running here shows pretty well that it was a put-up job.”

  * * * * *

  His prophecy proved true. The proprietor of the hotel protested that he had known nothing of the matter. Asked why he had not investigated the shot, he declared that he was afraid. Gray gave up his questioning and set about preparing to leave Honanfu.

  “The sooner we’re away from Wu Fang’s jurisdiction, the better,” he observed to Delabar. “No use in making an investigation. It would only delay us. Our baggage came this morning, and you’ve engaged the muleteers. We’ll shake Honanfu.”

  Delabar seemed as anxious as Gray to leave the town. Crowds of Chinese, attracted perhaps by rumor of what had happened in the night, followed them about the streets as Gray energetically assembled his two wagons with the stores, and the men to drive the mules.

  He made one discovery. In checking up the list of baggage, they found that one box was missing.

  “It’s the one that had the rifles and spare ammunition,” grunted Gray. “Damn!”

  He had put the rifle that had been intended for McCann with his own extra piece and ammunition in a separate box. In spite of persistent questioning, the drivers who had brought the wagons to Honanfu denied that they had seen the box.

  A telegram was sent to the railway terminal. The answer was delayed until late afternoon. No news of the box was forthcoming.

  “It’s no use,” declared Delabar moodily. “Remember, you told Wu Fang Chien that our rifles were with the luggage. Probably he has taken the box.”

  “Looks that way,” admitted Gray, who was angered at the loss. “Well, there’s no help for it. We’ll hike, before Wu Fang thinks up something else to do.”

  He gave the word to the muleteers, the wagons creaked forward. He jumped on the tail of the last one, beside Delabar, and Honanfu, with its watching crowds, faded into the dust after a turn in the road.

  From that time forth, Gray kept his rifle in his hand, or slung at his shoulder.
>
  While they sat huddled uncomfortably on some stores against the side of the jogging cart—nothing is quite so responsive to the law of gravity as a springless Chinese cart, or so uncomfortable, unless it be the rutted surface of a Chinese imperial highway—both were thinking.

  Delabar, to himself: “Why is it that an imperial road in China is not one kept in order—in the past—for the emperor, but one that can be put in order if the emperor announced his intention of passing over it? My associate, the American, who thinks only along straight lines, will never understand the round-about working of the Oriental mind. And that will work him evil.”

  Gray, aloud: “Look here, Delabar! We can safely guess now that Wu Fang would like to hinder our journey.”

  “I have already assumed that.”

  “Hm. Think it’s because the Wusun actually exist, and he wants to keep us from the Gobi?”

  Delabar was aroused from his muse.

  “A Chinese official seldom acts on his own initiative,” he responded. “Wu Fang Chien has received instructions. Yes, I think he intends to bar our passage beyond Liangchowfu. By advancing as we are from Honanfu, we are running blindly into danger.”

  Gray squinted back at the dusty road, nursing his rifle across his knees. His brown face was impassive, the skin about the eyes deeply wrinkled from exposure. The eyes themselves were narrow and hard. Delabar found it increasingly difficult to guess what went on in the mind of the taciturn American.

  “I’ve been wondering,” said Gray slowly, “wondering for a long time about a certain question. Admitting that the Wusun are there, in the Gobi, why are they kept prisoners—carefully guarded like this? It doesn’t seem logical!”

  The Syrian smiled blandly, twisting his beard with a thin hand.

  “Logic!” he cried. “Oh, the mind of the inner Asiatic is logical; but the reasons governing it, and the grounds for its deductions are quite different from the motives of European psychology.”

  “Well, I fail to see the reason why the Wusun people should be guarded for a good many hundred years.”

  “Simply this. Buddhism is the crux of the Oriental soul. Confucius and Taoism are secondary to the advent of the Gautama—to the great Nirvana. Buddhism rules inner China, Tibet, part of Turkestan, some of India, and—under guise of Shamanism—Southeastern Siberia.”

  Gray made no response. He was studying the face of Delabar—that intellectual, nervous, unstable face.

  “Buddhism has ruled Central Asia since the time of Sakuntala—the great Sakuntala,” went on the scientist. “And the laws of Buddha are ancient and very binding. The Wusun are enemies of Buddhism. They are greater enemies than the Manchus, of Northern and Eastern China. That is because the Wusun hold in reverence a symbol that is hateful to the priests of the temples.”

  “What is that?”

  Delabar hesitated.

  “The symbol is some barbarian sign. The Wusun cherish it, perhaps because, cut off from the world, they have no other faith than the faith of their forefathers.” The scientist’s high voice rang with strong conviction. “In the annals of the Han dynasty, before the birth of Christ, it is related that an army under the General Ho K’u-p’ing was sent on plea of the Buddhists to destroy the Huing-nu—the ‘green-eyed devils’, and the Wusun—the ‘Tall Ones’ of the west. The military expedition failed. But since then the Buddhists have been embittered against the Wusun—have guarded them as prisoners.”

  “Then religious fanaticism is the answer?”

  “A religious feud.”

  “Because the Wusun will not adopt Buddhism?”

  “Because they cling to the absurd sign of their faith!”

  Gray passed a gnarled hand across his chin and frowned at his rifle.

  “Sounds queer. I’d like to see that sign.”

  Delabar settled himself uneasily against the jarring of the cart.

  “It is not likely, Captain Gray,” he said, “that either of us will see it.”

  Whereupon they fell silent, each busied with his thoughts, in this manner.

  Delabar, to himself: My companion is a physical brute; how can he understand the high mysteries of Asian thought?

  Gray: Either this Syrian has a grand imagination, or he knows more than he has been telling me—the odds being the latter is correct.

  CHAPTER VI

  Mirai Khan

  Near Kia-yu-kwan, the western gate of the Great Wall, the twin pagodas of Liangchowfu rise from the plain.

  In former centuries Liangchowfu was the border town, a citadel of defense against the outer barbarians of the northern steppe and Central Asia. It is a walled city, standing squarely athwart the highway from China proper to the interior. Beyond Liangchowfu are the highlands of Central Asia.

  In exactly a month after leaving Honanfu, as Gray had promised, the wagons bearing the two Americans passed through the town gate.

  Gray, dusty and travel-stained to his waist, but alert and erect of carriage, walked before the two carts. He showed no ill effects from the hard stage of the journey they had just completed.

  Delabar lay behind the leather curtain of one of the wagons. His spirits had suffered from the past month. The monotonous road, with its ceaseless mud villages, had depressed him. The groups of natives squatting in the sun before their huts, in the never-ending search for vermin, and the throngs of staring children that sought for horse dung in the roads to use for fuel, had wrought on his sensitive nerves.

  They had not seen a white man during the journey. Gray had written to Van Schaick before they left Honanfu, but they expected no mail until they should return to Shanghai.

  “If we reach the coast again,” Delabar had said moodily.

  The better air of the hill country through which they passed had not improved his spirits, as it had Gray’s. The sight of the forest clad peaks, with their hidden pagodas, from the eaves of which the wind bells sent their tinkle down the breeze, held no interest for the scientist.

  Glimpses of brown, spectacled workmen who peered at them from the rice fields, or the vision of a tattered junk sail passing down an estuary in the purple quiet of evening, when the dull yellow of the fields and the green of the hills were blended in a soft haze, did not cause Delabar to lift his eyes.

  China, vast and changeless, had taken the two Americans to itself. And Gray knew that Delabar was afraid. He had suspected as much in Honanfu. Now he was certain. Delabar had taken to smoking incessantly, and made no attempt to exercise as Gray did. He brooded in the wagon.

  The calm of the army officer seemed to anger Delabar. Often when two men are alone for a long stretch of time, they get on each other’s nerves. But Delabar’s trouble went deeper than this. His fears had preyed on him during the month. He had taken to watching the dusty highway behind them. He slept badly.

  Yet they had not been molested. They were not watched, as far as Gray could observe. They had heard no more from Wu Fang Chien.

  The streets of Liangchowfu were crowded. It was some kind of a feast day. Gray noted that there were numbers of priests who stared at them impassively as he led the mule teams to an inn on the further side of the town, near the western wall, and persuaded the proprietor to clear the pigs and children from one of the guest chambers.

  “We were fools to come this far,” muttered Delabar, throwing himself down on a bamboo bench. “Did you notice the crowds in the streets we passed?”

  “It’s a feast, or bazaar day, I expect,” observed Gray quietly, removing his mud caked shoes and stretching his big frame on the clay bench that did duty as a bed.

  “No.” Delabar shook his head. “Gray, I tell you, we are fools. The Chinese of Liangchowfu knew we were coming. Those priests were Buddhist followers. They are here for a purpose.”

  “They seem harmless enough.”

  Delabar laughed.

  “Did you ever know a Mongol to warn you before he struck? No, my friend. We are in a nice trap here, within the walls. We are the only Europeans in the place. Every
move we make will be watched. Do you think we can get through the walls without the Chinese knowing it?”

  “No,” admitted Gray. “But we had to come here for food and a new relay of mules.”

  “We will never leave Liangchowfu—to the west. But we can still go back.”

  “We can, but we won’t.”

  Gray turned on the bed where he sat and tentatively scratched a clear space on the glazed paper that formed the one—closed—window of the room. Ventilation is unknown in China.

  He found that he could look out in the street. The inn was built around three sides of a courtyard, and their room was at the end of one wing. He saw a steady throng of passersby—pockmarked beggars, flaccid faced coolies trundling women along in wheelbarrows, an astrologer who had taken up his stand in the middle of the street with the two tame sparrows which formed his stock-in-trade, and a few swaggering, sheepskin clad Kirghiz from the steppe.

  As each individual passed the inn, Gray noticed that he shot a quick glance at it from slant eyes. An impressive palanquin came down the street. A fat porter in a silk tunic with a staff walked before the bearers. Coming abreast the astrologer, the man with the staff struck him contemptuously aside. As this happened, Gray saw the curtain of the palanquin lifted, and the outline of a face peering at the inn.

  “We seem to be the sight of the city,” he told Delabar, drawing on his shoes. “The rubberneck bus has just passed. Look here, Professor! No good in moping around here. You go out and rustle the food we need. I’ll inspect our baggage in the stable.”

  When Delabar had departed on his mission, Gray left the inn leisurely. He wandered after the scientist, glancing curiously at a crowd that had gathered in what was evidently the center square of the town, being surrounded by an array of booths.

  The crowd was too great for him to see what the attraction was, but he elbowed his way through without ceremony. Sure that something unusual must be in progress, he was surprised to see only a nondescript Chinese soldier in a jacket that had once been blue with a rusty sword belted to him. Beside the soldier was an old man with a wrinkled, brown face from which glinted a pair of keen eyes.