by June Thomson
In a ‘tingle of fear’, as he himself describes it, he set off for the Reichenbach Falls but, despite his deep concern, he had the presence of mind to round up anyone in the village who might be of use in an emergency or to ask Herr Steiler to do so on his behalf. It is not known who they were. Watson does not mention them at all while Holmes refers to them only as Watson’s ‘following’, a term which suggests a degree of contempt for their efforts. Presumably they were local men, possibly guides, who had knowledge of the terrain and some experience of mountain rescue.
Watson says nothing of his own feelings during the two-hour trek back to the falls, allowing his emotions to appear only after he and the others had arrived at the scene and he saw for himself the evidence which seemed to prove beyond doubt that Holmes was dead: no sign of Holmes himself, only his footprints leading up to the edge of the falls but not returning; the churned up mud, torn brambles and ferns at the edge of the ravine, indicating where the final struggle had taken place, and, lying nearby, Holmes’ abandoned alpenstock, silver cigarette case and, last of all, his farewell letter. The sight of these objects, Watson reports, turned him ‘cold and sick’ and, ‘dazed with horror’ at the tragedy, he could do nothing except stand there, fighting to control his feelings.
And what was Holmes doing while Watson went through this agony of emotions? He was – and these are his own words – lying in ‘most perfect comfort’ on the ledge above, listening to Watson frantically shouting his name and observing with apparent amused detachment, like Jove from his Olympian throne, the ‘sympathetic and inefficient’ manner in which his old friend and his companions went about the painful task of examining the evidence of his own death.
It was by then almost certainly growing dusk and the search for the bodies was probably postponed to the following day. Holmes’ body was, of course, not found. Neither was Moriarty’s. A. Carson Simpson’s theory that Moriarty had used one of his own inventions, an Atomic Accelerator, to blow himself into oblivion need not be taken too seriously. It is more likely that Colonel Moran returned later to the scene and, retrieving Moriarty’s corpse from the ravine, buried it secretly somewhere in the vicinity. His bones may still be lying in their unmarked grave out there on the mountainside, perhaps within sound of the Reichenbach Falls, its raging torrent still appearing to echo, as it had seemed to Holmes, the voice of Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, screaming out in terror as he plunged to his death into the abyss below. It might even be possible, using modern archaeological equipment, such as ground radar, to discover the burial place and to retrieve Moriarty’s remains. His skull alone would be of immense interest to forensic pathologists. From it, they would be able to estimate the size of his phenomenal brain.
Once Watson and his colleagues had left, Colonel Moran soon made his presence known to Holmes, emerging from his hiding-place above the ravine from where he, too, had watched and listened to all that had been taking place below him. Some commentators have asked why he chose not to use his celebrated airgun to kill Holmes, a more sure and deadly weapon than the less certain method of hurling rocks at him from above. Holmes was, after all, an easy target as he lay stretched out on the ledge. Moran may, of course, not have had the gun with him. Or in such a steep and rocky setting, the angle of fire might have been impossible. Alternatively, the light may have been too poor.
Night was certainly falling, as Holmes himself reports, and in the gathering darkness he could not make out even Moran’s features clearly, although he must have been familiar with his appearance. He describes seeing only a man’s figure and a ‘grim face’ peering down at him. It was only later he realised his attacker had been Moriarty’s Chief of Staff.
Although his way was barred upwards, the departure of Watson and his ‘following’ had left the path below empty and Holmes was able to scramble down the rock face, itself a difficult feat, and to land, cut and bleeding but alive, ‘by the blessing of God’, he adds, a rare example of Holmes openly expressing any religious convictions. Once safely on the path, he immediately took to his heels and made off across the mountains under cover of darkness.
Watson’s own departure for England was probably delayed. There was evidently an official inquiry, for he mentions ‘an examination by experts’ of the scene of the tragedy, possibly by the Swiss police, which almost certainly involved the search for the bodies already referred to. Whether or not an inquest was held either in Switzerland or in England or in both countries is not clear. English coroners are not obliged by law to hold an inquest on a British citizen who has died abroad unless they feel justice would be served by doing so. Certainly a trial was held, probably at the Old Bailey, of those members of Moriarty’s gang whom the police had rounded up and against whom Holmes’ evidence, contained in the blue envelope which he had asked Watson in his farewell letter to pass on to Inspector Patterson, was vital in bringing about their conviction.* Accounts of the trial were featured in the newspapers but, oddly enough, considering his international reputation, Holmes’ death was not widely reported. Only three accounts were published, one in the Journal de Genève, and a Reuter’s report which appeared in the press on 7th May, both condensed, and finally three letters from Colonel Moriarty, defending his late brother’s name, which were printed some time after the events at the Reichenbach Falls.
But this was later. To return to the time immediately following Holmes’ and Moriarty’s last encounter on 4th May 1891, there was nothing Watson could do once the official inquiries in Switzerland were completed but to return to England and try to pick up the threads of his old life. It was not easy. Writing about these events two years later, Watson was still feeling an acute sense of loss which he describes as a void in his life.
One of the ways in which he tried to fill that enormous gap was by writing and publishing over the next three years accounts of all Holmes’ cases with which he had been associated between October 1881, the suggested date of the Resident Patient inquiry, and the Naval Treaty investigation of July 1889, a period of nearly eight years. Up to that time, he had published only two accounts, A Study in Scarlet in December 1887 and The Sign of Four in February 1890. Readers are referred to the chronologies in Chapters Six and Ten, in which the dates of all these first publications are tabulated. These chronicles were to establish Watson’s reputation as an author both in this country and in the United States, for some of them were published in the American magazines Harper’s Weekly, Collier’s Weekly and McClure’s. They were later to be published in volume form as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1892 and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in 1894. However, any pleasure Watson might have felt at having at last achieved literary success must have been overshadowed by the death of Holmes, the main protagonist in these accounts. Fame must have tasted very bitter indeed.
Although Watson may have already written down some of these narratives, it was nevertheless an immense undertaking, covering twenty-three cases in all, which included ‘The Adventure of the Gloria Scott’ and ‘The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual’, two inquiries belonging to the period when Holmes was living in Montague Street, accounts of which he had narrated to Watson. Altogether these chronicles amount to about 150,000 words or the equivalent of over two full-length novels each averaging 70,000 words, a task which would daunt many full-time authors, which Watson, of course, was not. He was a busy GP with limited leisure, and even that could be interrupted by emergency calls which might take him away from home for hours at a time.
Quite apart from the physical labour involved in writing these accounts, Watson also had to deal with the mass of notes on the cases which he had accumulated over the years. It is small wonder, therefore, that he made mistakes over dates or other facts or that he failed on occasions to read through the proofs with sufficient care. Nor is it surprising that he postponed the publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear until much later, the Baskerville case to 1901–2 and the Valley of Fear to 1914–5 when they appeared in serial form. He simply h
ad not the time to write up accounts of these long and complicated investigations.
Watson cannot have needed the money. By then, he was a well-established GP with a flourishing practice. His needs were more emotional than financial. The act of writing and publishing these accounts not only helped to occupy his mind and his time but served also to keep green his memory of Holmes. They were Watson’s memorial to his old friend.
Watson intended not to publish any more accounts after ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’, which first appeared in print between October and November 1893. He was dissatisfied with the series, feeling it was ‘incoherent’ and ‘entirely inadequate’, an attitude which may have stemmed from Holmes’ criticisms of his two earlier attempts as an author as well as from his own natural modesty. He certainly had no intention of making public any account of Holmes’ last and fatal encounter with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Those events were still too close to his heart. His hand was forced, however, by Colonel James Moriarty, the Professor’s younger brother, who wrote the three letters to the newspapers already referred to in which he defended his late brother’s reputation. The last of these letters was such a distortion of the facts that Watson, always a stickler for the truth, felt obliged to put the record straight by publishing a correct version of the events. This account, under the title of ‘The Final Problem’, was published in December 1893, over two and a half years after Holmes’ supposed death and only a month after the publication of ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’, the last intended account, appeared in print.
In undertaking the task of writing and publishing these accounts, Watson may have been assuaging another loss, that of his wife Mary, who died between April 1891 and March 1894; the exact date is unknown. It was not in Watson’s character to describe his personal life in detail, much less to express openly his private grief, and the only comment he makes is in a passing remark in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’, in which he refers to his ‘sad bereavement’, a conventional phrase which barely hints at the enormous sense of loss her death must have caused him.
They had been married for only about three years and, although there were no children, theirs had been a happy and successful relationship. A warm-hearted and loving wife, Mary Watson had supported her husband during the difficult months in Paddington when he had struggled to build up the run-down practice. She had actively encouraged his friendship with Holmes, where another woman might have objected. She had tolerated without complaint the long hours of loneliness which any GP’s wife has to endure as well as the occasions when Watson spent some of his limited leisure time, which might have been spent with her, in Holmes’ company. Watson’s grief at her death must have been overwhelming.
The cause of her death is not known. She was still a young woman, only thirty years old in 1891, and one suggestion that she died in childbirth, a common cause of death in women of childbearing age in Victorian times, is plausible, although there is no evidence in the canon to support it. Another theory, that she was already suffering from tuberculosis, which was why Watson was so concerned to return to the Englishcher Hof to tend the Englishwoman dying of the same illness, and that Mrs Watson herself later died of the disease, is less supportable. In that period, tuberculosis was serious and potentially fatal. With no vaccines to prevent it and no antibiotics to cure it, the only treatment was rest and fresh air. And yet at the time Watson left with Holmes for the Continent, Mrs Watson was absent from home on a visit, an unlikely event if she was already a TB patient. Watson would not have allowed it, nor would he have been as eager to accompany Holmes abroad had he known his wife was already suffering from consumption which, as a doctor, he would almost certainly have diagnosed.
Theories about the date of her death are as hypothetical as those regarding its cause. However, if she died in 1891, not long after Holmes’ apparent death, this second loss coming so soon after the first might have acted as a double spur to Watson to undertake the task of writing up these twenty-three cases in order to fill the long empty evenings he would have spent alone as a widower. As Holmes was later to remark, ‘Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson.’
Holmes’ movements over the next three years can be established in broad outline from the account he subsequently gave to Watson, although many gaps remain in his narrative, some of which can only be filled by supposition.
Having eluded Colonel Moran and made off across the mountains perhaps for either Iseltwald or Grindelwald, both of which were about ten miles away, the distance he states he covered, he then travelled to Florence, where he arrived a week later. The time spent on the journey suggests he may have walked part of the way.
His destination was Tibet, although he is not specific about the exact route he took nor his method of travel. It must, however, have been a long and difficult journey necessitating a sea voyage to India, where he may have landed at Bombay, the port at which Watson had disembarked eleven years earlier in 1888 at the start of his military adventures in Afghanistan.
Before setting out on this journey, Holmes either wrote or telegraphed to his brother Mycroft, informing him of his survival and asking for money to be forwarded to him to pay for his travelling expenses, which must have been quite heavy. Mycroft also took it upon himself to retain Holmes’ lodgings in Baker Street without his brother’s knowledge. It is not known what prompted Mycroft to make this decision. He may have guessed that Holmes might eventually want to return or Holmes himself may have hinted as much in his letters. Nor is it known what excuse Mycroft gave to Mrs Hudson for keeping on his brother’s rooms. Like Watson, Mrs Hudson believed Holmes was dead. As the Baker Street apartment must have been full of Holmes’ possessions, including all his books and papers accumulated over the years, Mycroft may have told her that he preferred to leave them where they were rather than go to the trouble and expense of packing them up and putting them into storage. As long as the rent was paid regularly, Mrs Hudson would have had no reason to object to this arrangement.
Tibet was a difficult country for a foreigner to visit. Quite apart from its mountainous terrain, the Tibetans had closed their frontiers to outsiders, due largely to fear of the Russian and British empires along its borders. In the past missionaries, mostly Catholics, had managed to make their way to Lhasa, the capital, and later explorers had made the same attempt, among them an Englishwoman, Annie Royle Taylor, who, travelling in disguise, almost succeeded in reaching Lhasa before being discovered and expelled.
By assuming Norwegian nationality and the name Sigerson, Holmes would have avoided the hostility the Tibetans felt towards the English. His choice of nationality may have been prompted by the success of the Swede, Sven Hedin, who had already gained a reputation as a Far East explorer in 1885. Later Hedin was to travel extensively in Tibet and in 1905–6 published a detailed map of the country.
Holmes may have chosen Tibet because of its remoteness, its virtual inaccessibility and the fact that it was largely unexplored. It was, in short, a challenge. It was also a Buddhist country and, as we have seen, Buddhism was one of his interests. Reports of ‘Sigerson’s’ travels in Tibet filtered through to the newspapers, probably via Mycroft, with whom Holmes remained in touch.
A. Carson Simpson, an expert on Tibet and author of Sherlock Holmes’ Wanderjahre, has traced the probable route Holmes took. He has suggested that, having fitted out an expedition at Darjeeling, Holmes then trekked north, probably by pony, across the Teesta river through Kalimpong and Sikkim before beginning the steep climb through the Himalayas towards the Tibetan frontier, crossing by the Jelep La Pass. From there, he followed the mountain tracks to Lhasa, a distance of more than 210 miles. Or perhaps, like Alexandra David Neel, a Frenchwoman who visited Lhasa in 1923, the first white woman ever to enter the city, he crossed by the Sepo Pass and saw, like her, ‘the immensity of the trans-Himalayan tableland’ of Tibet stretching out before him, with its distant view of snow-capped peaks.
Holmes spent two years in Tibet, travel
ling about the country under the name of Sigerson and visiting Lhasa, where he spent two days with the head Lama (incidentally spelt incorrectly by Watson as ‘Llama’ in his original account). Sherlockian scholars disagree about who exactly Holmes meant by the term ‘the head Lama’. It was probably not the Dalai Lama himself, who lived in seclusion, but either the Ta’shi Lama, in charge of spiritual affairs, or the Regent, who was also abbot of the Ten-gye-ling monastery in Lhasa, one of Tibet’s most important religious centres.
A. Carson Simpson, who supports the Regent theory, has further suggested that Holmes was commissioned by him to investigate the stories concerning the Abominable Snowman, enquiries which took Holmes to the slopes of Everest, thus making him the first European ever to set foot on the highest mountain in the world. It is a fascinating theory. Unfortunately, there is no evidence in the canon to support it.
From Tibet Holmes journeyed on to Persia (modern Iran), a Muslim country and another potentially dangerous area. Like the Tibetans, the Persians regarded the English and the Russians with hostility, due to the political and economic rivalries between these two nations which had turned Persia into a semi-colonial state. As a consequence, anti-British and Russian riots had broken out.
Such potential danger need not have troubled Holmes, for it is quite possible that for this part of his journey he adopted not only a new name and a new nationality, as he had done in Tibet, but also a new religion and appearance, passing himself off as either an Algerian or Moroccan Muslim. Such a disguise would have presented no problems for Holmes, an expert in changing his appearance. His dark eyes and hair as well as his lean features and hawk-like nose, which Watson several times compares to a Red Indian’s, already gave him a cast of features not unlike an Arab’s, a similarity which would have been enhanced by the deep tan he had acquired through exposure to the sun and wind during his travels in Tibet. Language would not have been a problem either. Both Algeria and Morocco were under French rule at that time and Holmes spoke French like a native. Nor would he have had any difficulty in conforming to Muslim religious practices. He had studied Buddhism and he may also have researched into Muhammadanism. Suitable clothing in the way of a burnous and an Arab head-dress would have been easily obtained in a local bazaar. As a French-speaking Algerian or Moroccan Muslim, Holmes could therefore have travelled quite freely through Persia and Saudi Arabia, even stopping off briefly at Mecca, a city sacred to Muslims as the birthplace of Muhammad and therefore forbidden to infidels, although he was prudent not to stay there long. He was later to tell Watson that he merely ‘looked in’ at Mecca.