Marching Sands

by Harold Lamb

  The Kirghiz glanced at him keenly and shook his head.

  “I have heard the name,” he responded. “It was spoken by my father. But Sungan I have never seen.”

  “It is a city a week’s ride beyond Ansichow,” persisted Gray, “in the Desert of Gobi.”

  “That is in the sands,” Mirai Khan reflected. “No game is found there, Excellency. Why should a man go to such a place?”

  “Have you been there?”

  “Does a horse go into a quicksand?”

  “Have you known others who went there?”

  “Aye, it may be.”

  “What had they to say of the desert?”

  “It is an evil place.”

  The Kirghiz nodded sleepily. Having eaten heavily, he was ready for his blanket.

  “Why did they call it an evil place?”

  “How should I know—who have not been there?” Mirai Khan yawned and stretched his stocky arms and legs, as a dog stretches. “It is because of the pale sickness, they say.”

  Gray looked up quickly from his inspection of the fire. He had heard that phrase before. Delabar had used it.

  “What is the pale sickness?” he asked patiently. Mirai Khan ceased yawning.

  “Out in the sands, in the liu sha, hangs the pale sickness. It is in the air. It is an evil sickness. It leaves its mark on those who go too near. I have heard of men who went too far into the liu sha and did not return.”

  “Why?”

  “It is forbidden.”

  “By the priests of the prophet?”

  “Not so. Why should they deal with an evil thing? Is it not the law of the Koran that a man may not touch what is unclean? The rat priests of China, who worship the bronze god, have warned us from the region. I have heard the caravan merchants say that men are brought from China and placed out in the sands, the liu sha.”

  Gray frowned. Mirai Khan spoke frankly, and without intent to deceive him. But he spoke in the manner of his kind—in parables.

  “Three times, Mirai Khan,” he said, “you have said liu sha. What does that mean?”

  The Kirghiz lifted some sand in his scarred hand, sifting it through his fingers to the ground.

  “This is it,” he explained. “We call it in my tongue the kara kum—dark sands. Yet the liu sha are not the sand you find elsewhere. They are the marching sands.”

  Gray smiled. He was progressing, in his search for information, from one riddle to another.

  “You mean the dust that moves with the wind,” he hazarded.

  Mirai Khan made a decisive, guttural denial. “Not so. It is the will of Allah that moves the sands. Once there was a city that sinned—”

  “And a holy mullah.” Gray recalled the legend Delabar had related on the steamer. “He alone escaped the dust that fell from the sky. It was long ago. So that is your liu sha?”

  The hunter’s slant eyes widened in astonishment. “By the beard of my father! Are you a reader of the Koran, to know such things as this? Aye, it is so. The liu sha came because of a sin, and without doubt that is why the place is still inhabited of a plague. The Chinese priests bring men there—men who are already in the shadow of death.”

  “Then, Mirai Khan, there must be a city or an encampment, if many men live there.”

  “I have not seen it. Nor have those who talked to me.”

  “But you have not been there?”

  “How should I—seeing that the place is inhabited of a sin? No Mohammedan will go there.”

  “What manner of sickness is this—the pale plague?”

  “I know not. But for many miles, aye, the space of a week’s ride, no men will bring their yurts for fear of it.”

  Gray gave it up with a shrug. The Kirghiz was speaking riddles, twisted recollections of legends, and tales doubtless exaggerated. While Mirai Khan snored away comfortably, the American went over what he had said in his mind.

  The night had grown cold, and he threw the last of the wood on the fire, tucking his blanket about his feet. Their camp was utterly silent, except for the occasional splutter of the flames.

  Mirai Khan had said positively that he had seen no city in the Gobi where Gray was bound, nor heard of one. The American knew that if buildings existed on the immense plain of the Gobi, they would be visible for miles around. Even if the comrades of Mirai Khan had kept away from the place that they considered unhealthy, they would have sighted the buildings at one time or another.

  Yet Brent had declared that he saw the summits of towers. Imagination, perhaps. Although missionaries were not as a rule inclined to fancies.

  Here was one contradiction. Then there were the liu sha. Mere legend, doubtless. Central Asia was rife with tales of former greatness.

  But one thing was clear. The Chinese priests came to this spot in the desert. And the legend of the plague might be framed to keep the Mohammedans away from the place. Since the late rebellion Mohammedan and Chinese had frequently taken up arms against each other—they had never been on friendly terms. Evidently the Buddhists, for some reason, took pains to keep this part of the desert to themselves

  They even guarded it against intrusion—as Brent had discovered.

  And Brent had died of sickness. What was the pale sickness? Were men inflicted with it brought to the Gobi—the dreariest stretch of land on the surface of the earth?

  Gray nodded sleepily. The riddles presented no answer. He determined that he would learn the truth for himself. Wearied with his exertions, he was soon asleep. Silence held the camp, the brooding silence of great spaces, the threshold of infinity that opens before the wanderer in the Gobi. The wind stirred the sand into tiny spirals that leaped and danced, like dust wraiths across the gully, powdering the blankets of the sleeping men and the rough coats of the mules.

  Along the summit of the ridge a shadow passed across the stars. It hesitated to leeward of the embers of the fire, and the jackal crept on. The crescent moon moved slowly overhead, throwing a hazy half-light on the surface of the sand, and picking out the bleached bones of an antelope.

  Night had claimed the Mongolian steppe.

  CHAPTER X

  The Mem-Sahib Speaks

  It was nearly a week later, on the border of the Gobi, that Gray and Mirai Khan sighted the caravan. The day was rainy. During a space when the rain thinned, the Kirghiz pointed out a group of yurts surrounded by camels and ponies a mile away.

  Gray scanned the encampment through his glasses, and made out that the caravan numbered a good many men, and that the yurts were being put up for the night. The rain began again, and cut off his view.

  It was then late afternoon. Both men were tired. They had pushed ahead steadily from Liangchowfu, killing what they needed in the way of game, and occasionally buying goat’s milk or dried fruit from a wayside shepherd. The few villages they met, they avoided. Gray had not forgotten Wu Fang Chien, or the fears of Delabar.

  “They are Kirghiz yurts,” said Mirai Khan when the American described what he had seen. “And it is a caravan on the march, or we would have seen sheep. Many tribes use our yurts. They are taken down and put up in the time it takes a man to smoke a pipe. But these people are not Kirghiz. My kinsmen have not wealth to own so many camels.”

  “What do you think they are?”

  “Chinese merchants, Excellency, or perhaps Turkestan traders from Kashgar.”

  Mirai Khan’s respect for his companion had increased with the last few days. Gray’s accurate shooting inspired his admiration, and the fortitude of the man surprised him.

  On his part, Gray trusted the Kirghiz. If Mirai Khan had meant to rob him, he had enjoyed plenty of chances to do so. But the Kirghiz’s code would not permit him to steal from one who was sharing his bread and salt.

  “If they are Chinese,” meditated the American, “it will not be wise to ride up to their camp. What say you, Mirai Khan?”

  The Kirghiz puffed tranquilly at his noisome pipe.

  “This. It is the hour of sunset prayer. When that is
ended you and I will dismount, Excellency, and stalk the encampment. By the favor of God we will then learn if these people are Chinese or Turkomans. If the last, we shall sleep in a dry aul, which is well, for my bones like not the damp.”

  Whereupon Mirai Khan removed his pipe and kneeled in the sand, facing toward the west, where was the holy city of his faith. So poverty-stricken was he that he did not even own a prayer carpet. Gray watched, after tethering the three animals.

  “Remember,” he said sternly when Mirai Khan had finished the prayer, “there must be no stealing of beasts from the camp, whatever it may be.”

  The Kirghiz’s weakness for horseflesh was well known to him. The hunter agreed readily and they set out under cover of the rain. By the time they were half way to the caravan, the sudden twilight of the Gobi concealed them.

  Guided by the occasional whinny of a horse, or the harsh bawl of a camel, Mirai Khan crept forward, sniffing the air like a dog. Several lights appeared out of the mist, and Gray took the lead.

  He could make out figures that passed through the lighted entrances of the dome-shaped felt shelters. Drawing to one side he gained the camels that rested in a circle, apparently without a watcher.

  Mirai Khan had been lost to view in the gloom and Gray walked slowly forward among the camels, trying to gain a clear glimpse of the men of the caravan. The few that he saw were undoubtedly servants, but their dress was unfamiliar.

  Gray could almost make out the interior of one of the yurts, lighted by candles, with silk hangings and an array of cushions on the floor. He rose to his full height, to obtain a better view, and paused as he saw one of the figures look toward him.

  The camels were moving uneasily. Gray could have sworn he heard a muffled exclamation near him. He turned his head, and a form uprose from the ground and gripped him.

  Gray wrenched himself free from the man and struck out. The newcomer slipped under his arm and caught him about the knees. Other forms sprang from among the camels and lean arms twined around the American.

  “Look out, Mirai Khan!” he cried in Chinese. “These are enemies.”

  A powerful white man who can handle his fists is a match for a round half dozen Mongolians, unarmed—if he has a clear footing and can see where to hit. Gray was held by at least four men; his rifle slung to one shoulder by a sling hampered him. He was cast to earth at once.

  His face was ground into the sand, and his arms drawn behind his back. He heard his adversaries chattering in a strange tongue. Cold metal touched his wrists. He felt the click of a metal catch and realized that handcuffs had been snapped on him.

  He wondered vaguely how handcuffs came to be in a Central Asian caravan, as he was pulled roughly to his feet. In the dark he could not make out the men who held him. But they advanced toward one of the tents—the same he had been trying to see into.

  Gray, perforce, made no further resistance. He was fully occupied in spitting sand from his mouth and trying to shake it from his eyes.

  So it happened that when he stood in the lighted yurt, he was nearly blind with the dust and the sudden glare. He heard excited native gutturals, and then

  “Why, it’s a white man.”

  It was a woman’s voice, and it spoke English. Moreover, the voice was clear, even musical. It reflected genuine surprise, a tinge of pity—inspired perhaps by his damaged appearance—and no little bewilderment.

  “Yes, chota missy,” echoed a man near him, “but this, in the dark, we knew it not. And he cried out in another tongue.”

  Gray reflected that his warning to Mirai Khan had been ill-timed. His eyes still smarted with the sand. It was not possible for him to use his hands to clear them, because of the handcuffs that bound his wrists behind his back. Not for the world would Gray have asked for assistance in his plight.

  He winked rapidly, and presently was able to see the others in the tent clearly. The men who had brought him hither he made out to be slender, dark skinned fellows. By their clean dress, and small, ornamented turbans draped over the right shoulder he guessed them to be Indian natives—most probably Sikhs. This surprised him, for he had been prepared to face Dungans or Turkomans.

  A portable stove gave out a comfortable warmth, beside a take-down table. The rough felt covering of the yurt was concealed behind hangings of striped silk. Gray stared; he little expected to find such an interior in the nomad shelter.

  The table was covered with a clean cloth. Behind it hung a canvas curtain, evidently meant to divide one corner from the rest of the tent, perhaps for sleeping purposes. In front of the partition, behind the table, was a comfortable steamer chair. And in the chair, watching him from wide, gray eyes was a young woman.

  He had not seen a white woman for months. But his first glance told him that the girl in the chair was more than ordinarily pretty—that she would be considered so even in Washington or Paris. She was neatly dressed in light tan walking skirt and white waist, a shawl over her slender shoulders.

  She was considering him silently, chin on hand, a slight frown wrinkling her smooth brow. The bronze hair was dressed low against the neck in a manner that Gray liked to see—at a distance, for he was shy in the presence of women.

  The eyes that looked into his were clear, and seemed inclined to be friendly. Just now, they were dubious. The small nose tilted up from a mouth parted over even teeth. She was deeply sunburned, even to throat and arms. Ordinarily, women take great pains to protect their skin from exposure to the sun.

  There was the stamp of pride in the brown face, and the head poised erect on strong young shoulders. Gray knew horses. And this woman reminded him of a thoroughbred. Later, he was to find that his estimate of her pride was accurate; for the present, he was hardly in the mood to make other and stronger deductions concerning the girl.

  He flushed, hoping that it did not show under the sand.

  “Right,” he admitted with a rueful smile. “Beneath the mud and dirt, I happen to be an Aryan.”

  “An Englishman?” she asked quickly, almost skeptically, “Or American?”

  “American,” he admitted. “My name is Robert Gray.”

  Her glance flickered curiously at this. He was not too miserable to wonder who she was. What was a white woman doing in this stretch of the Gobi? A white woman who was master, or rather mistress of a large caravan, and seemed quite at home in her surroundings?

  He wondered why he had flushed. And why he felt so uncomfortable under her quiet gaze. To his utter surprise the frown cleared from her brow, and her lips parted in a quick smile that crept into her eyes. Then she was serious again. But he found that his pulses were throbbing in wrist and throat.

  “Where did you find this feringh, Ram Singh?” she asked curiously.

  “Among the camels, mem-sahib,” promptly answered the man who had spoken before. “His servant was making off the while with our horses.”

  Gray looked around. At the rear of the group, arms pinioned to his sides and his bearded face bearing marks of a struggle, was Mirai Khan. The Kirghiz wore a sheepish expression and avoided his eye.

  “The servant,” explained Ram Singh in stern disapproval, “had untethered two of the ponies. One he had mounted when we seized him. Said I not the plain was rife with horse thieves?”

  Gray glared at Mirai Khan.

  “Did I not warn you,” he asked angrily, “that there was to be no stealing of animals?”

  The Kirghiz twisted uneasily in his bonds.

  “Aye, Excellency. But the ponies seemed unguarded and you had need of one to ride. If these accursed Sikhs had not been watching for horse lifters, we would have gone free.”

  The officer swore under his breath, beginning to realize what an unenviable position Mirai Khan had placed him in. Robbing a caravan was no light offense in this country. And the horses had belonged to the woman!

  Gray silently thrust his manacled hands further out of sight, wishing himself anywhere but here. Covered with the grime of a week’s hike across the plain, with
a stubby beard on his chin, eyes bleared with sand, and his hat lost, he must look the part of a horse lifter—and Mirai Khan’s appearance did not conduce to confidence.

  “Is this true?” the girl asked. Again the elfin spirit of amusement seemed to dance in the gray eyes.

  “Every word of it,” he said frankly. Searching for words to explain, his shyness gripped him. “That is, Mirai Khan was undoubtedly taking your ponies, but I didn’t know what he was up to—”

  He broke off, mentally cursing his awkwardness. It is not easy to converse equably with a self-possessed young lady, owner of a damaging pair of cool, gray eyes. Especially when one is battered and bound by suspicious and efficient servants.

  “Why didn’t you come direct to the yurt,” she observed tentatively.

  “Because I thought you might be—a Chinaman.”

  “A Chinaman!” The small head perched inquisitively aslant. “But I’m not, Captain Gray. Why should I be? Why should you dislike the Chinese?”

  Two things in her speech interested Gray. She seemed to be an Englishwoman. And she had given him his army rank, although he himself had not mentioned it. Most certainly there could be nothing in his appearance to suggest the service.

  “I have reason to dislike one Chinaman,” returned Gray. “So I was obliged to take precautions,” he blundered, and then strove to remedy his mistake. “If I had known you were the owner of the yurt, I would have come straight here.”

  Too late, he realized that he had made his blunder worse. The girl’s brows went up, also her nose—just a trifle.

  “Why should you be so cautious, Mr. Gray?” The civilian title was accented firmly. Yet a minute ago she had addressed him as “captain.” “Surely”—this was plainly ironical—“the Chinese are harmless?”

  Gray thought grimly of Liangchowfu.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “they are—inquisitive.” The girl glanced at him. Surely she did not take this as a personal dig? Gray did not understand women. “Miss”—he hesitated—“Mem-sahib”—she stared—“you see, I’ve gone beyond the limits mentioned in my passport.” He was unwilling, placed in such circumstances, to tell the whole truth of his mission and rank. So he compromised. Which proved to be a mistake. “And the governor fellow of Liangchowfu is anxious to head me off.”