HOW WE CAME TO THE VALLEY OF GREAT BIRDS
'Put it to yourselves as rational men,' he said. 'The Tibetan Sbrang
Chikya, who died on this spot, had strayed from his caravan, and he
must have strayed a long way, since we are far west of any caravan
route that I know of. Why he came in this direction, which was the
least likely to lead to safety, I do not know, but it is probable that
the mountains remained wrapped in cloud and he lost his bearings, only
to pick them up again when he got down into the valley and saw the
sun. You will remember he describes the valley quite definitely as
west of this spot. But we must assume from the fact that he had left
the caravan presumably without preparation of any sort that he had
little food with him, and how far could a man travel like that in these
mountains? Certainly not much farther than we are from the nearest
caravan route at this moment. Therefore I say the valley of great birds
cannot be much beyond this point. Is not that sound logic?'
There was no denying it was.
'Then let us get on at once and find the valley.'
'Before the snow clears?'
'If we wait for that we may be merely waiting for a fresh fall. We must
make a dash for it. The sooner we are off these heights the better.
Never fear, I will find you a track!'
We paid off the bearers and parted company with them for ever. If I
wanted proof that Philipson really believed we were near the end of the
trail, the way he dismissed those hillmen would have convinced me: he
not only gave them more than the stipulated wage, but all the surplus
gear which, in his view, we should no longer require. They then filed
off down the pass, heading north-east. We ourselves divided the rest of
the baggage into five packs, and struck due west by Philipson's compass.
And now we came to a stretch of our journey beside which the worst
that had gone before was mere pastime. Strive as I may, I cannot get
clear in my mind the events of the next few days. I wouldn't even be
sure how many days we travelled, for it is all a blurry nightmare to
me, with nothing remaining distinct but a ghastly memory of constantly
increasing cold and misery and exhaustion. What few facts rise up
vaguely out of the confusion I have tried to re-assemble and set down
in order, but I will stake nothing on them. It may be we didn't travel
far as distance would be measured on the flat. There was no flat in
that country to measure the distance on. All was sheer cliff or
tremendous wall-sided ravine. The greater part of the time we seemed to
be crawling along a mere thread of projecting ledge and looking down
into awful abysses of rock and snow; and most perilous of all were the
rare places where our route looked to be easier. We halted before one
such, which I should have said was a moderately passable snow-paved
surface of rock, but after some hesitation Philipson shook his head
and turned aside. We climbed a rugged scarp to the left, from which we
could overlook the way we should have taken, and coming at length to a
ledge broad enough to stand the five of us, Philipson stopped, picked
up a fragment of rock, and heaved it over the cliff side. The stone
clattered hoarsely down, then disappeared in the fluid powdery snow,
which closed silently in over it so that you wouldn't have known the
surface had been disturbed.
'It is well that I did not let you go on,' muttered Philipson. 'That
means deep snow--an enormous drift in a ravine. Not one of us would
have come out of it alive.'
He led on, picking a way with extreme care and, as it seemed to me, a
perfectly uncanny instinct for safety, but at the best our advance was
no more than a laborious crawl. Though the snow had evaporated off the
more exposed faces of the mountain, the treacherous, swallowing drifts
were everywhere, and there was a fantastic suggestion about it all of
crossing a flooded country by shallows. Time and again we halted while
Philipson, mistrusting even his own intuition, hurled great stones
into the crevasses to estimate whether they were "fordable" or not.
Our last fire had been at the pass of the _obo_, and there, from the
temperature of our boiling water, we calculated the elevation to be a
little over eighteen thousand feet; and I am certain that from that
point, though there were some deceptive drops, we worked in the long
run considerably higher. Height-sickness and the consequent fever
were now a normal state for us all, and though we benefited by the
sedatives that Philipson dispensed, we remained in a sort of chronic
delirium. So rare was the atmosphere that even the exertion of our
creeping advance brought on a terrible breathlessness and distress;
blood trickled continually from our noses and ears, and we had to call
a halt at least once about every fifteen minutes. These rests we took
standing. Philipson would let nobody lie down till night fell; then two
men remained awake at a time, to rouse the others before they had slept
too long. We dared not allow any man to lie still for more than an hour
at a stretch, or thereabouts, for as I have said we had no watches,
for fear he shouldn't wake at all; and I am convinced Philipson would
have had us push on night and day but for the sheer impossibility of
negotiating those dizzy slants and ledges in the dark.
At last, weary beyond imagination, but with a tremendous thrill of
renewed hope, we came into a long gully in the mountains. It ran
between two vertical walls of rock, and though it descended sharply for
a considerable way ahead, we could see nothing beyond it but a blaze
of golden sky where the sun was setting. By common consent we halted
in silence, and stared, and stared. I have never been nearer tears in
my life. I seemed to lose my grip. Here, it looked, the mountains came
to an end. There was a valley ahead, or at least a depression; if we
had not found the object of our quest, we were to find relief from the
frightful cold and exhaustion and height-fever of the last few days.
'It appears,' said Philipson, in a queer, hollow voice, 'that we are
going to see our goal before long. Keep well in behind me.'
He advanced cautiously, sounding the gully with the butt of his rifle
as he went. Now in the far distance we could see peaks again, but they
were right across in the eye of the sun; it became increasingly plain
there was lower ground between us and them. Philipson would halt from
time to time, and stare before him fixedly. Then we saw him drop the
rifle and tear out his field glasses from their case. He swayed where
he stood. A moment later he had turned a dead-white face to me and
handed me the binoculars without a word. I took them mechanically and
raised them to my eyes. Now it was I who staggered. The sun was by
this time sunk half below the distant peaks, and its dazzle had faded.
There, moving across the gold-washed sky, were several black specks,
far away, but having through the glasses all the appearance of enormous
birds.
Poyning had snatched the binoculars out of my hands and was looking for
himself. It was the last thing he did that day. His strength, which he
had forced to uphold him by an effort of will for which I should never
have given him credit when he entered our lives at Nanking, now broke
down utterly; he fell in a heap, unconscious, and though we managed to
bring him to with the last drain of brandy we possessed, he was unable
to move hand or foot. He lay in the snow crying like a child. It wasn't
emotion--just his nerve-control completely gone.
Philipson looked at him and at me. 'It is a pity,' he said. 'We must
push on for the hour of dusk that is left--it may mean a couple of
thousand feet downwards. I cannot let him sleep here.'
Then without another word Saunders Philipson picked up Stephen Poyning
and carried him in his arms. Lo Eng and I shared his pack in addition
to our own loads. It was in vain for me to offer to take a turn with
Poyning. Philipson grunted angrily.
'Keep your breath for breathing, Mirlees,' he snapped. 'It is as much
as the three of you can do to move as it is. We must get on the fastest
we can.'
I picked up his rifle and took the lead myself, feeling the way as he
had done. At the end of the gully we had plainly come to the end of the
heights, and there, deep down before us, we could see a blur of light.
It was gloriously easier going now. The mountain side was steep, but
of a fairly good surface, and we made capital headway. The relief was
unspeakable, and came with startling quickness as we worked down off
that frightful roof of the world into the denser air below. We filled
our lungs with it again and again, and I felt it intoxicate me like
wine. Saunders Philipson carried his burden for fully an hour and a
half, and only stopped then, I am convinced, because dark had fallen.
We pitched camp and put Poyning to bed, then turned in ourselves. There
was no danger in sleep now. We lay down in our sheepskins and slept
till the sun was high in the heavens of a glorious day.
And now we experienced for the first time the full thrill of our
discovery. We were at the gates of an unknown land, a valley in this
tremendous upheaved region of Asia which had remained hidden from
the rest of the world all down through the ages. From where we stood
outside our tent we could see the whole depression in a wonderful
bird's eye view; above us, stupendous peaks towering into the sky,
snow-clad and dazzling and looking not a musket-shot away; below, a
long even expanse of snow running straight down to the line where snow
left off and green vegetation began; farther down still, the cup of
the valley, ringed round completely by mountain slopes like the one we
stood on, a smiling green hollow, with a large lake in the middle of it
and evident signs of human habitation. We could see through the glasses
that the buildings of the city were uniformly white, but we were as yet
too far away to descry anything more definite about them.
Poyning was vastly the better for his long sleep, and as eager to
push on as I was, and though Philipson maintained outwardly the
business-like air of reserve that had never entirely left him, I could
see he was in a tremendous exultation. As he might well be. To have
brought us safely over that journey from Nanking to the spot where we
now stood was a feat bordering on the miraculous, and if there was
another man on this earth that could have done it, I had not heard of
that man.
'Breakfast first,' he said, smiling. 'None of us can afford to take
liberties with himself after what we have been through. Then we will go
down and explore, but we will load the rifles first. After all, we know
little of these people. Who can predict what kind of welcome they will
give us?'
After-events showed that we couldn't. Little did we dream how we were
to be received by the folk of the valley, or even how we were to get
over the last lap of our tremendous journey.
We made a meal of yak beef--the leathery stuff seemed much tastier
now--packed up the two tents, and set out. Philipson's plan was that
we should stalk the strange people very circumspectly, so that if they
seemed hostile, we could at least beat a retreat up the mountain side
as Sbrang Chikya had done; in which case it would be well not to have
scrapped our gear. The stuff was a boon to us, later on, but by no
means in the way we had expected.
We had been marching down the steep slant for about an hour when
Philipson halted and looked from one side to the other with an air of
considerable uneasiness. We asked him what was awry.
He continued halted and looking, and then: '_That!_' he cried,
stretching an arm out over the great expanse of snow.
At first I could see no reason for alarm, but after a minute or two I
became aware that something was happening to the snow. A broad patch
at about a hundred yards to our left moved. It slid downward for a
few feet, then halted; and I remember having at the moment a sort of
fantastic impression that the snow was gifted with sense and stopped
because we were looking at it. I had had many fancies, wilder even than
that, during the past few days, and I make no doubt the others had too.
But what Philipson now saw alarming in a little shifting snow, I hardly
understood. It looked harmless enough to me.
'I have noticed that once or twice since we started this morning,' he
said, 'and I do not like it. There has been an unusually heavy fall--no
doubt it came with the blizzard the other night. The mountains are
top-heavy. There it is again!'
This time it looked more pronounced, and a lot less innocent. Almost up
to where we stood the snow began to slide slowly and gently downward,
a few feet at a time, then halting, but always resuming its curious
motion at shorter intervals. Looking all round us, we saw that the
slide was becoming more and more general; as far as the eye could
reach, the great white mantle was sliding and stopping, sliding and
stopping, rucking up here and there over a rise in the ground, with an
effect like a gentle swell of the sea. Then at last my fuddled wits
began to grasp what was really happening. There were millions of tons
of snow on that vast mountain side. The layers next the earth were
melting, causing the great mass to lose its grip. It would all slide
soon. There would be an avalanche.
'Quick!' cried Philipson. 'If we have something to keep us afloat we
may have a chance--otherwise none. Take off your packs!'
We opened out the two rolled tents and folded them flat, into a sort
of raft about five feet square, ribbing this with the tent-poles and
rifles laid crosswise on the under side and lashing the whole tightly
with guy ropes. There was barely time to complete the work before the
rush was upon us, swirling round us thigh-deep for all the world like
the urge of a strong current sweeping in over flat sands. We flung
ourselves on to the raft, which immediately started to ride down on the
shifting snow. For perhaps a minute the motion was pleasantly gentle.
Philipson took advantage of this breather to allot us positions: he
himself sat forward, holding the stoutest of the tent-poles, which
he had kept out, in his hands like a paddle; Poyning and I were just
behind him, gripping the ropes with one hand and Philipson's sheepskin
with the other; while the two Chinese servants squatted behind us,
their orders being to hang on like leeches themselves and catch any man
who might be jolted out of his seat and swept backwards.
It was a good move, turning our gear into this queer, toboggan-like
contraption: without it, we should have sunk into the rapidly
deepening, down-sliding mass, and been smothered in an instant. As
it was, our raft for a time rode the avalanche to admiration, being
too broad to sink in, and checked by the rib-like poles and ropes
that went under it from adding the speed of sliding to the pace
already given it by the moving snow. Soon, however, matters changed
considerably for the worse. The avalanche was gaining force and volume,
but with a decrease in the slant of the mountain side the resistance
was increasing, so that there became more and more evident a tendency
for the surface snow to roll on over that deeper down. Three times
we were struck by a heavy wave from behind and well nigh "pooped."
More than once, grazing it by inches, we shot past a sharp snag of
upstanding rock, against which the snow was breaking and spouting into
the air in a high cascade.
It couldn't last. I imagine the avalanche had now reached a slope
of the mountain not normally covered at all, and as the deep surge
shallowed out, its surface broke, like rapids of a river. The gentle
rustle of the snow when it started to move had now risen to a hoarse
roar, like the roar of the sea but with a strange muffled note in it
more terrible than the crash and boom of surf. Philipson stuck doggedly
to his steering pole, but there was no steering our crazy craft in that
awful race. Jolt after jolt shook us, and at each one I saw Poyning and
Philipson swing to and from me, as if we were on elastic. The ribs were
clearly fetched adrift; there was no longer anything to stop the raft
doubling up and being submerged. At last, with a fearful jerk, we were
shot clean into the air. The shock of pitching threw me backwards, but
I felt nobody behind me. Ah Sing and Lo Eng were gone.
'She will smash up now,' yelled Philipson over his shoulder. 'When it
comes, keep your limbs stretched out stiff!'
The crash came almost as he spoke. The raft heaved up, then plunged,
and I found myself whirled down in a tremendous roaring, suffocating
mass of snow, with nothing in my hand but a fretted rope's end. I
spread-eagled myself and stiffened my arms and legs, and I imagine it
was to that I owed my life; for though I was often submerged to the
point of stifling, I remained near the surface for the most part, and
could get a deep breath now and again when some sudden upheaval of the
snow-torrent threw me to the top. Once my heel struck something hard,
and the leg became numb and dead from that instant on. Had I been
rolling in a ball it might have been my head, in which case I should
certainly not be putting this record on paper now.
I felt myself sink suddenly deeper. The snow rushed over me, I was
madly fighting for breath, with a bewildered sense of plunging into the
very bowels of the sea, at frightful speed. Then came a blinding flash
of light in front of my eyes....
I must have lain unconscious for an hour, for that's the time Poyning
said it took him to find me. He had been much luckier. When the raft
broke up the main portion of it remained, apparently, under his body
and kept him riding afloat for fully a minute after the rest of us had
disappeared. Philipson he lost sight of just after me, but he himself
had been supported by the canvas to the end, until, with a blow that
winded him but did nothing worse, he was brought up sharp in a hollow
far down the mountain side.
The place where I lay was about two feet deep, but the snow was fast
sagging and melting. I must have rolled here after the avalanche had
knocked the senses out of me. I lay on my back in the soggy snow while
Poyning opened my sheepskin and felt me all over for broken bones.
Wherever his fingers pressed I ached and throbbed; the ankle I had
struck in my descent was hurting abominably, and for some minutes I
thought I should never rise from my back again. Poyning took off the
boot and gaiter and wrapped round a rough-and-ready cold compress made
out of a handkerchief and a handful of snow, which was a wonderful
relief; and after a bit, with his help and using as a crutch the rifle
he had picked up from the wreck of the raft, I found I could stand and
just hobble.
The change from higher up the mountain was little short of astounding.
In those few minutes we had passed from the arctic zone to the
temperate, and farther down still there appeared to be yet greater
transitions. Even here the air was oppressively hot to the lips after
the icy heights we had crossed. The point we stood on was plainly a
grassy slope well below the snow line, where the descending avalanche,
thinning over some miles of snowless ground, had petered out by sheer
force of distance. It was well nigh impossible, looking at this regular
scarp, to realise the tremendous ruggedness and cold and rarified air
of the mountain above, though the snow-clad pinnacles which ringed
round the valley still looked deceptively near. Below us stretched the
valley, broad, fertile, watered by the intensely blue lake plumb in
the middle, and to judge by the warmth where we stood far above it, at
least sub-tropical in climate. The white-walled city on the fringes of
the lake was now much more distinct, and beyond this we saw, rising out
of the grassy plain, several of the gigantic birds we had sighted from
the gully last night.
Our first concern was to find what had happened to Philipson and the
Chinese servants. From where we stood we scanned the slope in all
directions, but could see no sign of any one of them. We then began
a methodical search, binding together our two cast sheepskins and
standing them up sheaf-wise for a landmark on the hillside, and working
slowly up and down the slant at about thirty yards apart. I've said
the mountain here was regular, which it was in the main, though there
were any number of shallow basins in which an army of men could have
concealed themselves by lying flat; but as we searched dip after dip
and drew blank, lower and lower fell my hopes. Our comrades must have
sunk into deep snow as soon as they fell off the raft, and even had
they escaped death by battering in the avalanche, they must have met
it quickly by suffocation. Somewhere under that great white cloak on
the mountain side they lay, and not until the snow was gone, it seemed,
should we find their bodies. Yet we kept searching still, hoping
against hope, and so intent on the task that we were lost to what was
happening behind us.
I heard Poyning raise a sharp cry. He was looking back over our tracks
towards the place where we had left the sheepskins. There, gathered in
a knot, were some half dozen tall, white-robed strangers, who stared at
the filthy and unsightly garments, then at us their possessors, plainly
in an extremity of surprise.
But if the strangers were surprised, we were startled. The appearance
of them was matter for amazement indeed. Of the whole half dozen
not one stood, I judge, less than six feet three or four inches in
height, and the impression of great stature was accentuated by the
fact that they all wore long flowing robes the hem of which swept
the fast-melting snow at their feet; but it was their faces that set
me gaping. Anybody with experience of native races knows that the
Mongolian countenance, though it may vary greatly, always preserves
certain contours and exaggerations which are unmistakable. These men
were no Mongols. Nor was their skin, though ripely tanned by sun and
wind, of the peculiar Mongol pigment. These men were a Caucasian
stock. The hair of their bare heads, too, crisp and wavy and of a rich
chestnut brown shading off into black, spoke plainly of Aryan races and
the West.
Their leader, a magnificent old man who topped even his fellows by
a few inches, was grey and austere, and he stood there with his
beautifully chiselled features turned towards us in a long stare of
inquiry. Then words passed between him and the others--apparently his
attendants--and one of the most youthful looking took a few steps in
our direction and hailed us. The words were spoken in a clear, resonant
voice, totally unlike the throttled utterance of Asia, but listen
closely as I might I couldn't place the language. We remained halted,
wondering what was going to happen next. It was impossible to tell from
the cold impassive demeanour of the strangers whether their attitude
was intended to be hostile or friendly, but I knew well enough that the
words that had been spoken were a command. The situation was getting
irksome. Our comrade lay somewhere on that hillside, perhaps dying, and
every instant we wasted here we might be throwing away his life.
'Plenty of time to converse with these statuesque heroes later,' said
Poyning, turning away. 'I'm going to look for Philipson.'
But the newcomers seemed to think otherwise. Three of them ran up
and stood between us and the mountain top, waiting for the others to
approach, which they at once did, the tall greyhead leading. They spoke
to us again in that strange tongue I couldn't place.
Then I tried my stock of languages, which, so far as regions between
the Caspian and the China Sea are concerned, is richer than most men's.
I spoke to them in Tibetan, Mongol, several brands of Chinese, Turki,
even in dialects of the Khirghiz Steppes that I had picked up some
years before, but all to no effect. I made all kinds of excursions into
sign language, but I was in such a fever of impatience that I make no
doubt my gestures became merely wild and unintelligible.
At last I could stand it no longer. 'You fools!' I blurted out in
English. 'The man's dying, and here are we gabbling like a lot of
fishwives!'
With that I broke away from them. It was a futile step. Two of them
were upon me in an instant, pinioning my arms in a grip of steel. Even
without my game ankle I shouldn't have stood an earthly chance with
those giants. I was dragged back into their midst. They spoke to us
sternly, in the same elusive tongue.
Suddenly, Poyning began to struggle in the grasp of two of the men who
had also seized him, and uttered some words that at once struck my ear
with a curiously familiar note. I stared at him, as did the strangers,
but a moment after they had released his arms and were nodding their
heads with some appearance of comprehension. They answered him,
speaking slowly and distinctly.
I listened to the halting dialogue, and the longer I listened the more
familiar the sounds became. It was something that had reached my ears
before, and that recently. Then, with a violent start, I remembered
where. This language, or something very like it, was the one I had
heard Philipson use on the balcony of Nanking, and again in the pass of
the _obo_.
'What the devil are you talking to them, Poyning?' I cried.
He turned to me with an uncommonly excited look. 'It seems that my
qualifications can be of use in the East after all,' he replied. 'I
have been speaking to these men in Greek.'
Then it dawned on me. That was why the language had seemed so strangely
familiar. I knew Greek, but not the Greek that Poyning spoke. I had
learned to pronounce my Greek in the straightforward, almost phonetic
manner of a schoolboy of the nineties. Poyning, coming later, had been
taught the pronunciation that modern pundits imagined to have been
used in the days of Pericles and Aristotle. Here was a race speaking
Greek--apparently ancient Greek--in a way that Poyning, if with
considerable difficulty, could understand. It must have been the most
triumphant vindication of an educational theory in history.
'I have told them we have comrades yet to pick up,' said Poyning, 'and
I have given parole that we will not run away. These people will help
us search.'
'But how in the name of riddles did you tumble to what they're saying?
I don't understand a word of it.'
'Nor could I for some time. It's a much more melodious version of the
language than ours, and there are words I have to guess the meaning of,
but once I got a hint what to listen for, it began to come clearer.
God knows who these people are, Mirlees. They're certainly speaking
classical Greek.'
The strangers, directed by the tall greyhead, got into extended order
with the silent precision of men accustomed to discipline, and worked
slowly up the mountain side. We were soon back into deep snow, and it
was hereabouts we made our first discovery--a melancholy one. A brown
hand was sticking out of the white pall. A moment later I was looking
at the dead bodies of our two Chinese servants, the faithful Lo Eng and
Ah Sing. They were bruised all over, but it seemed they had met their
end by suffocation under the overwhelming torrent. A space was bared on
the hillside, and the dead men laid out on it.
Poyning turned to me, his face twisted with grief. 'Philipson must be
lower down--buried, too, or we should have seen him,' he said.
He spoke something to the old greyhead, who ordered the party to turn
about. I now saw a body of men about thirty strong approaching, some
of them bearing litters. How they had come to know they were wanted
I couldn't fathom. The body of our comrade must soon come to light
now, if only by reason of the melting of the snow, which was happening
so fast that the lower slopes of the mountain already ran brisk with
runnels of water. And yet the search was a long one. From the way the
snow lay it had plainly been deflected this way and that by the varying
slant; Philipson's body had no doubt been carried far to one side.
It was a shout from one of the newcomers that announced he had been
found. I hobbled towards him, looking, yet fearing to look; but at this
moment there was a most queer and unexpected diversion. Several of the
valley men had run up and were on the spot before I could get near. I
heard a cry go up from among them. They drew back, one and all, and
_fell to their faces in the snow_.
The sight pulled me up standing, but only for a moment. In my own
excitement I didn't stop to wonder what it could mean, but pushed
eagerly to the front and knelt beside our leader. To my unutterable
joy he was alive. The face was white and drawn, the lips an ugly blue,
but I wanted only a glance to tell me the breath was still in his
body. Then, suddenly, I felt myself grasped by the shoulder. The tall
greyhead stood over me and pulled me angrily away. There was no arguing
the point. I was dragged back to a spot some distance off, whither the
whole party, with the exception of greyhead and two men I took to be
physicians, followed. Poyning had now arrived, and he too was sternly
motioned not to approach.
He faced the stranger nearest him and put an indignant query. The man
appeared to be, like all the rest, in a state of excitement barely
controllable, but he muttered something in answer to Poyning, and I
knew by Poyning's face that the hearing was good.
'Philipson will live, according to this fellow,' he said, 'but we are
forbidden to go near.'
We clasped hands in silence. Never till then had either of us realised
to the full, I fancy, what Saunders Philipson meant to us--how we
little short of worshipped the man, and what an irreparable calamity
his death would have been. For myself, I felt at the same time a sort
of vague, unreasoning jealousy against these strangers who seemed
determined to take him from us. Something similar was clearly passing
through Poyning's mind.
'These people, Mirlees,' he said to me after we had been kept standing
there a matter of five minutes, 'are behaving with a coolness that
comes perilously near to cheek. Damn it all, whose friend _is_
Philipson?'
It seemed to me that the tall greyhead, who had joined us, started
slightly at the name. He was scanning our faces with a curious
intentness. Poyning spoke to him, whereupon he took on for the first
time a faint flicker of a smile, and answered my companion with words
in which I caught a note of sympathy; then his features resumed their
stern, statuesque calm, and he reminded me of nothing so forcibly as
some beautiful Grecian marble in a gallery.
'Whatever the reason is,' I whispered, 'they seem to be vastly taken
with him. You weren't here when they found his body. Poyning, every man
jack of them plunked down on to his face!'
He gave me a queer look. 'I wonder,' he said, slowly, 'whether
Philipson knew more about this place than he ever told us? Supposing,
for instance, he had ever been here before--'
I instinctively turned my eyes towards the spot where Philipson lay.
Although we weren't allowed to approach, no attempt was made to
prevent us from looking at what was going on; and as we were barely
twenty yards away, I can vouch pretty confidently for what I saw. The
physicians had laid their case of salves and bandages on a cloth on
the wet ground, and had placed against each of Philipson's wrists a
cubical box in dark wood, about the size of a studio camera. The notion
that at once occurred to me was some form of electric battery, but
later I had reason to believe that explanation fell very far short of
the truth. A moment's reflection would have told me this now, for no
sound came from the boxes, and no application of the crude material
force we call electricity could have caused our comrade to revive as he
now did. His limbs were stirring, and I distinctly saw his lips move.
The physicians detached the boxes and replaced them in one of the
larger caskets. They were talking to Philipson now, and _he was
answering them, with perfect fluency, in the language of this valley_.
At last the physicians rose to their feet, made a profound genuflexion,
and beckoned to the bearers of a sumptuous litter, who had come up the
hillside towards them. Two other litters bore the dead bodies of Ah
Sing and Lo Eng, and a fourth I was given myself, since with an ankle
like mine I could hardly hope to complete the long tramp down into the
city on foot. Philipson's litter travelled well ahead of us, and I saw
that a bodyguard had at once formed round it.
As we neared the city, I realised more and more that my first
impression of it had erred greatly on the side of undervaluation. If it
seemed imposing from a distance, now it was of a magnificence hardly
to be conceived. Every building was of pure white marble, which must
have been plentiful in the surrounding mountains, and of a severe
beauty and grandeur that simply took my breath away. You had no need
to ask yourself where this architecture had come from. It was Greek,
magnificently and marvellously Greek. Long, broad avenues of marble
delicately cambered, and fringed with pollarded cypresses of a variety
I'd never seen before, ran between the lines of buildings rectangularly
as in the newest Yankee city, but broken here and there by gardens
of sub-tropical plants. Carved work in a perfection of outline
abounded everywhere, in ram's-horn and fruit-basket capitals of the
columns, in gleaming white statuary by the wayside, in marble friezes
and caryatides of the buildings. You would have called this city a
magnified and transfigured vision of Athens in the golden age, yet here
and there were places where the architects had seemingly experimented
with foreign styles. More than once my eye caught a glimpse of winged
figures in bas-relief and the florid honeysuckle decoration, and those
impulses, if my memory serves me, came out of ancient Assyria.
We were soon into a part of the city that was thickly populated, and it
was plain our coming had thrown the people into an intense excitement.
We too had a bodyguard now; nobody was let come near, yet despite
the distance and the mask-like reserve that seemed to be the common
attribute of the whole people, we knew we were being scanned with a
mighty, repressed curiosity. We could see this also: whatever about our
comrade caused him to be saluted with reverence by the scouts on the
mountain, that emotion was shared by the populace down here, among
whom word of us seemed to have spread like blown fire in a brushwood.
Philipson's litter was about fifty yards ahead. As it passed, the city
folk one and all prostrated themselves, and the spectacle of these
people lowering their heads to earth before a stranger from the outer
world was, to say no more of it, a striking one. The crowd, indeed,
would have been imposing in any situation, for they were about as
splendid a collection of human beings as I ever beheld, or could dream
of. The long flowing robe, great stature, and clean-cut beauty of
feature seemed to be universal; and so close the adherence to type that
it struck me at once a newcomer's prime difficulty among this people
would be the distinguishing one face from another. "Doubles," thought
I, must be plentiful, and I found afterwards that this was indeed so.
The valley couldn't have been more than a few thousand feet above sea
level, for down here the air seemed to us, after our mountaineering,
of a tropic heat. We were forced to discard our heavy clothes one by
one, and these loathsome, travel-polluted rags the attendants solemnly
carried for us. We must have cut a boorish and grotesque figure among
these clean, graceful giants of the valley, but never a smile met us
over our ridiculous appearance; if we had aroused a burning curiosity,
little showed itself on the faces of these people but a grave, silent
dignity amounting almost to awe.
We passed on, as if in some fantastic sleep-walking. One day gone,
we had been fighting for bare life in regions of terrible cold and
appalling desert solitude; now we were plunged into the midst of what
was plainly one of the highest civilisations this world has seen. Time
and again I tapped my knee sharply with the rifle that lay beside me
on the litter, to make sure it wasn't all a delirious mirage of the
mountains, but the vision, if vision it was, wouldn't disperse.
Poyning walked with wide-open eyes, muttering continually to himself.
'It can't be real, you know,' I heard him say. 'We shall wake in a
minute--in the snow. The gods are laughing at us. They've dropped us in
a dream valley, peopled with phantom Olympians!'
'How in the name of mystery do these people come to be buried here?' I
said. 'Why has the world never heard of them?'
Poyning pulled his wits together with an effort. 'That's as deep a
riddle to me,' he replied. 'But from what I remember of those ghastly
heights--supposing we _have_ left them--I should say the world hasn't
had much chance to look into the matter.'
I followed his gaze round the vast amphitheatre of mountains, which
towered into the sky on every side of the valley. I am no geologist,
and never harboured any kindness whatever for the layman who holds
forth on sciences outside his ken. For that reason I offer no
explanation as to how this broad, deep depression originally came to
exist in the heart of the greatest upheaved region on our planet. I
will be content to record soberly and barely what my own eyes saw: that
the valley was completely mountain-locked, and apparently couldn't
have been approached from any point with much less than the tremendous
difficulty and hardship we ourselves had experienced in getting here.
Then, in one breath, the pair of us raised a cry.
Away to the west, a flock of the gigantic birds were flying. And now,
from this point in the centre of the valley, we were near enough to
realise fully the stupendous proportions of those creatures. Not only
were they bigger by far than any bird now extant in the outer world:
they must have eclipsed even the greatest of the winged reptiles that
have come down to us fossilised in the Jurassic lime-stones. Poyning
had halted, grasping the edge of the litter and staring spellbound. One
of the attendants jogged him gently by the elbow, and pointed ahead,
but Poyning shook the man off, sweeping the western sky with his arm
and uttering something in the language of the valley. I saw the ghost
of a smile on the attendant's face, and heard him answer.
Poyning stumbled on, biting his lips.
'What does he say?' I cried. 'Have they a name for the things?'
'Yes,' said Stephen Poyning, 'and a very simple one. They are not birds
at all. They are men.'