HARILEK
HARILEK
_A Romance_
BY
“GANPAT”
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1923
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO
ARYENIS
SOMETIMES DELICIOUSLY
SAPIENTISSIMA
SOMETIMES ADORABLY
BABETTE
THE STORY-TELLER’S INVITATION
I’ll tell you a tale of a far-off land,
Cliff-girt o’er the yellow desert sand,
And crowned with peaks of snow;
Of forests of pine and a garden gay,
Of shirts of mail in a steel-capped fray,
And shafts from the six-foot bow.
Of soldier-men and of maidens fair--
Of a fairy princess with red-gold hair
In a stronghold of wizards cruel;
Of a fight or two of an old-world kind--
Magazine-rifle and spear combined,
And death in a hand-locked duel.
Of men and women like me and you,
Of love old-fashioned yet ever new,
Brave eyes in a valley of fear;
Of the cold grey steel and the long warm kiss,
With a proper ending of honeymoon bliss--
Won’t you gather round me and hear?
“GANPAT”
FOREWORD
In giving this story to the world I must frankly confess that I do
not know whether it is a remarkable record of actual adventure, or a
fantastic romance from the pen of some one gifted with a particularly
vivid imagination.
Harry Lake and I last parted in 1920 near Sorarogha in Waziristan, on
the Indian frontier--I bound for home on leave, he in charge of the
picketing troops, whose business it was to ensure the reasonably safe
passage of wearied soldiery like me through the knife-edged hills,
where the Mahsud snipers made night noisy and day sometimes dangerous.
I have known him on and off for many years. Stationed together before
the war, our paths led apart in 1914--he to France with his regiment,
I to East Africa with mine--to meet again in a London hospital in late
1915. With him once more in India in 1917, I then lost sight of him for
over two years, till January, 1920, brought us together in a rather
noisy brawl in Mahsud Waziristan, where the tribesmen were taking
exception to our military promenade up their pet valley.
I know his people slightly, more particularly his sister, Ethel
Wheeler, to whom he refers in his story, but she does not often favour
me with letters. It was somewhat of a surprise, therefore, when in
October last year, while a student at the Staff College, Quetta, an
English mail brought me a bulky parcel and a letter from her, enclosing
one from Lake, in which was the following passage:
I don’t know if you are still doing anything in the author line,
but if you are you might amuse yourself editing this record which I
have made up from my diary. You are always keen on out-of-the-way
places, and in sending this off, on the very shadowy chance of it
ever reaching home, it occurred to me that you might like to see
it, so I am telling Ethel to pass it on to you. If you care to get
it published, you are welcome, the more so since I think the world
could do with such a record of simple adventure as an antidote to the
kind of stuff appearing when I left civilization.
I opened the parcel that night and dipped into the stained pages. There
was a good deal of work on hand, but I’m afraid it got left over, for
it was past four in the morning before I turned the last pages with a
rather dazed brain, but a firm determination to edit the story. The
kind assistance of Miss Douie--sister of a fellow-student--enabled me
to get it typed in the little spare time snatched--mostly very late
at night--from a strenuous course of instruction; while the local
knowledge of Central Asia of Major Blacker--another fellow-student--was
of the greatest help in following Lake’s rather hieroglyphic record of
his journey to Sakaeland.
Whether red-gold-haired Aryenis and her grave-eyed father, stalwart
Henga and his Sake bowmen, Philos and his pretty wife and blue-eyed
baby, crippled Paulos, the fiendish Shamans and the murderous brown
Sakae are real living people, I cannot pretend to say, any more than
I can tell whether pine-fringed Aornos, the snow-peaks of Saghar Mor,
or the gloomy Shaman citadel, with its red-hot trapdoor, exist outside
Lake’s brain. All I can say is that he has never told me anything but
the truth all the years I have known him. Payindah I remember well,
while Wrexham I met several times in 1917, and both are very accurately
described.
If the story is true, then I cannot say how the letters and the
manuscript reached us, save that, from the vernacular inscriptions
on the original wrapping which Ethel Wheeler sent me, it has clearly
been passed from hand to hand by Indian merchants on the Chinese trade
route. Perhaps Lake and his friends found the missing camels, and built
up a sufficient store of water at stages across the desert to enable
one or two determined men to make a flying journey out and back to hand
over their letters to some Indian trader. But he has given no details
as to how he proposed to get their letters home.
If Lake’s record is genuine, then I envy him intensely, and hope that
it will be many, many years before any explorer, even of the type of
genial Sir Aurel Stein, penetrates to Sakaeland, for it and its people
seem to me far too pleasing for one to wish them spoilt by the contact
of twentieth-century civilization.
If, on the other hand, it is merely an invention of Lake’s to while
away monotonous evenings during his explorations in unknown Central
Asia, where he certainly is, then I hope that his readers will find it
as interesting and realistic as I and others here have done.
“GANPAT”
STAFF COLLEGE
QUETTA, BALUCHISTAN
_1st January, 1923_
CONTENTS
FOREWORD ix
I. I MEET WREXHAM AND FORSYTH 3
II. OLD JOHN WREXHAM’S DIARY 13
III. WREXHAM’S STORY 22
IV. THE GREAT DECISION 33
V. THE JUMPING-OFF LINE 40
VI. THE DESERT 50
VII. THE DISTANT HILLS 64
VIII. THE GATE 76
IX. A LADY JOINS US 90
X. BELOW THE CLIFFS 110
XI. THE CAVES 124
XII. ARYENIS’S PEOPLE 137
XIII. WE JOIN WITH KYRLOS 147
XIV. WE VISIT THE BORDER 157
XV. WE SPEAK WITH AN ENVOY AND RIDE TO AORNOS 170
XVI. ARYENIS AND I VISIT PAULOS 190
XVII. ARYENIS’S HOME-COMING 205
XVIII. A SHAMAN RAID 220
XIX. PAULOS DOES SOME THOUGHT-READING 234
XX. I MAKE A BET WITH ARYENIS 251
XXI. I AM GIVEN A FOLLOWING 262
XXII. THE ASTARA DEFILE 273
XXIII. I PRETEND TO UNDERSTAND ARYENIS 286
XXIV. I WIN MY BET 300
XXV. SHAMANTOWN 310
XXVI. THE GATE AGAIN 322
XXVII. ARYENIS AND I FIND SOME THINGS THAT MATTER 331
HARILEK
HARILEK
CHAPTER I
I MEET WREXHAM AND FORSYTH
Most of the big things in life hinge on very small beginnings. I wonder
if the people who pose as pure materialists ever reflect on that
fact when they hold forth on their complete and absolute certainty
that there is no guiding hand in men’s affairs or in the conception,
creation, and control of that most wonderfully intricate piece of
machinery, the universe.
Missing a train, accepting an invitation, having a dance cut, all may
prove the turning-point in a life if you take the trouble to trace
things back to their beginnings.
Take my own case, as I sit writing here with a glimpse of the twin
snow-peaks of Saghar Mor through my open window, rose-red in the
last light of the setting sun, above a level haze of lilac. Here am
I with all I ever sought of life, all and far more. And yet, but
for a chance visit to the Karachi Gymkhana Club some two years ago,
I should probably to-day be smoking a pipe in my old Sussex manor
farmhouse, after a day in the stubble, leading a quiet uneventful life,
content--in a way--but having savoured only a fraction of what life
really holds.
A gymkhana club bar does not sound the ideal starting-point for a
life’s romance, for a complete change in all that life may mean, and
yet it so happened to me, as doubtless it has happened before and may
happen again to others.
I’ve been thinking for some time of writing down the events of the
last two years, partly because they sometimes seem so unreal that the
only way to bring home their concreteness--if I may coin a word--is
to put them down in cold, hard black-and-white, partly because I think
they may serve to show others that romance is not yet dead, and that
adventure is still to be found for those who will but pluck up heart
and seek.
What is that passage of Kipling’s about Truth being an undressed lady
at the bottom of a well, and that if you meet her--well, as a gentleman
there are only two things to do, one to look away, the other to give
her a print dress? So I, being, I hope, a gentleman, choose the latter.
To begin at the very beginning, I must revert to the bar at the
gymkhana club which I have mentioned, and, before beginning my tale, I
suppose I had better introduce myself as I was when the story started,
late in 1920.
My name is Lake, and Harry Lake is what most people call me. My
father--God rest his soul--was the owner of a small place in Sussex,
which he used to farm and shoot in the intervals of travelling, and
which he expected me to take over when he died.
But farming--even with a certain backing of cash--did not appeal to me,
and I drifted into the army. Then, much to the annoyance of my father,
who wanted me to soldier at home since I would go into the service,
I transferred to an Indian regiment. Travel always appealed to me,
especially in the less well-known parts of the globe, and India seemed
a convenient kicking-off place. One got long leave, which the army at
home does not legislate for; and blessed with a little money, I was
able to indulge my hobby to the full.
Central Asia became my playground, and, whenever I could get leave, I
sped up to Kashmir and thence up one or other of the valleys into the
great sleepy spaces that lie behind, the desiccated bone-dry spaces of
Ladakh, or among the snow-clad mountains that fringe the north of Lalla
Rookh’s country.
Then came the war, and, after frantic panics that I was going to be out
of it all, tearful wires to pals at Simla, despairing appeals to every
general I had ever met, I found myself in France, and entered upon a
series of panics for fear I shouldn’t get away again.
After longer or shorter periods of mud, boredom, and fright, with a
spell of hospital inserted, my regiment went on to that benighted back
front, East Africa, a spot for which I conceived the most intense
loathing, and was glad to find myself back once more in India in late
1917. A spell of dépôt work, and off again to Palestine and later to
Cyprus, where, though life was uneventful, I amused myself brushing up
the Greek I had learnt travelling during the holidays with my father. I
am pretty good at languages, and had kept up my Greek, so that by the
time I left Cyprus I spoke it as fluently as ever again.
In 1919 my father’s death led me home to settle up the estate, and then
out again, with the firm intention of leaving the army within the year.
A bout of frontier scrapping in the 1920 Waziristan show was my last
effort, and then I really made up my mind to go straight away. I was
blessed with ample independent means--ample enough for me anyway; most
of my regimental pals were dead, and so in 1920 I sent in my papers.
I had shot most things to be found about Northern India, but had never
secured a tiger, and so made up my mind for a visit to the Central
Provinces before going home. I wandered down to Karachi _en route_
south to spend a few days there, and that’s where this story really
begins.
The first night there I did what one always does in the East--I went
down to the club bar to pass the time of day with any old acquaintances
that might be there. I had known Karachi fair to middling well in the
old pre-war days, and I thought I was pretty sure to find friends, but,
as a matter of fact, the club was rather deserted.
So I lit a cheroot and sat down, feeling rather lonesome, as one does
in a place where one has spent many cheery evenings with a crowd of
good fellows, most of whom have gone west. I was thinking about going
across to the Sind Club when a man entered the bar. I looked twice to
make quite sure, and then walked over to him.
“Long time since we shared a flask in the Jordan Valley, John,” said I,
tapping him on the shoulder.
He spun round.
“Hulloa, Harry! D----d glad to see you, old bird! What on earth are you
doing here? I saw your push only last week, and they said you’d chucked
it and gone home. Family acres and all that sort of thing.”
“First part’s true; for the rest, you see me here, large as life, very
much at a loose end, and contemplating trying for a tiger in the C.P.
before I go home. They tell me England hasn’t quite recovered from the
war yet, and when it isn’t coal-striking it’s doing something equally
unpleasant, so I thought I’d give it a miss for a few months.”
“Funny thing running into you here; I was just writing to your home
address. I’ve been up on a globe trot Kashgar way. I’m demobbed now,
too. Good thing to be one’s own master once more.”
Being on his own was a thing that would appeal to John Wrexham,
independent by nature. An engineer by trade, swept up in the vortex
of the war as an Indian Army reserve officer, I first met him in a
particularly offensive trench Givenchy way. I met him frequently
after that, always cheery, always busy, beloved of every battalion
commander, to whose needs he ministered in the capacity of subaltern of
a sapper-and-miner field company.
A brave soul, too, John, of the most heroic, despite his inclination
to stoutness. He amassed some very pretty ribbons before the war was
out, and a reputation among those who knew him worth more than all the
ribbons in the world.
Later I picked him up again in Palestine, commanding a field company
this time, in the most professional manner. I remember well our first
encounter in Palestine, where I ran into him superintending a working
party under close fire. It was such a typical picture of John. Sucking
a pipe, methodical, cheerful, and utterly devoid of fear, his helmet
on one side of his rather bullet head, his shrewd grey eyes taking in
everything, quick and caustic comments for those who weren’t putting
their backs into it, a woman’s touch and a woman’s kindly word for any
one who had “taken it,” red knees over blue puttees, ruddy face with
the chin puckered over a long white gash picked up in an argument with
a Hun near Festubert--very much a man all over is John Wrexham.
“What were you writing about, John? It’s not like you.”
John’s inability to put pen to paper except under direct necessity was
as well known as his practical efficiency at every point of his trade,
or as his personal courage. In Palestine he was the despair of his
C.R.E., a ponderous soul, and a lover of paper.
“Wanted to find out what you were doing. I’ve got a stunt on, and I
want company. I’ve got one fellow coming along, but I want another, and
I thought you might be at a loose end. Come under the fan and I’ll show
you something.”
When we had installed ourselves under the electric fan in two
armchairs, he pulled out his pipe, filled it methodically, lit it, and
then proceeded. One never hurries John when he has something to say.
It’s always worth waiting for.
“Did you ever trek into Kashgar, Harry?” he asked at last.
“No, I never got as far as that. Why?”
“I was up that way last year, and found one or two things rather
interesting.”
“What were you doing? I didn’t know you were keen on Central Asia.”
“I am to a certain extent. I had a great-great-uncle who was a bit
of a rolling stone. He wandered a bit in those parts, and he left a
diary, written rather like I write, but you could follow it in parts.
I’ll show it you later on. There’s some quaint stuff in it. But it
interested me, and last year when I was demobbed after the Armistice, I
toddled up there to have a look-see. I was not keen on going back to
my old job in Bengal, and, as I’d saved a bit of cash, I thought I’d
take a holiday, which I hadn’t really done since I left school. So I
trekked off to Kashgar and then east.”
He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a worn pocketbook, and extracted
something which he passed across.
“Ever see anything like this?” he queried.
I examined the object closely. A silver coin, new-looking, but rough at
the edges. On one side was a mass of Greek lettering. On the obverse
was a man’s head, rather clear-cut.
I turned it over again. The names on the coin were unfamiliar, and the
head was unlike any coin I knew.
“What country is it, John? It’s Greek, though the lettering is quaint,
but whose is the head? It’s not from Greece. Is it one of the funny
little new States that the Peace Conference of the war to end war has
started to ensure war going on?”
Wrexham looked at me despondently.
“You handle a pen quickly, Harry, but you’re slow sometimes at
deductions. Yes, it’s Greek; but it’s a long time since any one wrote
Greek quite like that, and I think that the country it came from never
heard of the Great War of 1914-18.”
“Antique, is it?” I looked at it again. “It looks fairly new-make. Is
it a copy? Central Asia’s full of old Greek relics, I know. Have they
started an antique mint in Kashgar in the hope of a tourist boom after
the war? Where did you come by it?”
“Well, it’s a long story, but, if you’re doing nothing to-night, come
over to my hotel and dine and I’ll tell you. By itself the coin isn’t
much, but I’ve got two other exhibits which fit in. What is it ‘Sapper’
says? ‘Once is nothing, twice is coincidence, three times is a moral
certainty.’ I think I’ve got a moral cert.”
And not another word would he say on the matter then, shifting the
conversation to France and Palestine, old scraps, old friends, all the
miscellany of memories that make up the wandering soldier’s life.
I slipped home and changed, and then to his hotel, where I found him
awaiting me in the lounge with a tall, clean-shaven, fair-haired,
blue-eyed man who seemed to carry a smack of the sea about him, though
somehow I did not set him down as a sailor.
“You’ve not met Forsyth, have you, Harry?” said Wrexham. “This is Lake,
Alec; you’ve heard me speak of him often enough.”
As we shook hands while Wrexham busied himself attracting a servant
for short drinks, I took stock of Forsyth. Taller than me by at least
three inches--and I stand five feet ten in my socks--and broad with it,
he looked the epitome of fitness. His skin was clear and smooth as a
girl’s, yet tanned to a ruddy brick colour that spoke of days of open
air, clean fresh winds, and hot sunshine.
I couldn’t quite place him, but somehow he conveyed an idea of big open
spaces, and all the breadth of clean mental outlook that sometimes goes
therewith.
Wrexham handed us out sherries, and marshalled us into a cool corner.
“Three wanderers well met, I think. Here’s to us.” He turned to me.
“Forsyth knows, perhaps, more Greek than you, Harry. He describes
himself as a doctor, and tags weird letters after his name. But his
real amusement in life is studying ethnology and anthropology and
things like that.”
“I’ve always been keen on ethnology, especially that of Eastern Europe,
as a hobby; and after finishing my medical studies, I spent some months
pottering about Greece on my own. It’s a fascinating mixture of people
down in the Balkan Peninsula to any one keen on studying different
races. Also, I was one of those freaks with a leaning to Greek, even at
school, before I came over to England.”
“One of our Empire liaison links from Canada,” continued Wrexham,
“ex-R.N.A.S., sometimes amateur of ethnology, specially Greek; anything
more, Alec?”
“You forget the ex-R.A.F., which landed me in this country to renew
the threads of your acquaintanceship from Palestine days.”
“True, O king, a somewhat murky past. But now, like me, you’ve cut
adrift once more.”
“And here I am to listen to a cock-and-bull story of yours tied up with
old or new coins and a ragged diary, with which baits you propose to
lug me many hundred miles into the back of beyond, instead of going
back and looking for a decent job to earn an honest living. You have a
persuasive manner, John. I suppose Lake is another babe in your hands?”
“He will be, I hope, before we’ve done with him. However, what about
food? Then we can go up to my quarters and get down to the real stuff.
Finished your drinks?”
He marshalled us into the dining-room, and once again the conversation
slid west and north in the old grooves of war, till we finally
adjourned to his room, and stretched ourselves on long chairs in the
verandah. When his servant had deposited sodas, glasses, and whiskey
and departed, Wrexham went to a metal despatch-case, and produced from
it a small wooden box carefully tied up, which he placed mysteriously
on the table.
Then, filling his ancient pipe, he spread himself in a long chair and
commenced.
“First of all, I’m going to tell you about my trip beyond Yarkand last
year. When you’ve swallowed that, I’ll show you a thing or two.
“After my company left Palestine in January, ’19, and came back to
India, I got myself demobbed and pondered what I should do. Home lacked
attraction, I’d been away so long. There was I with a certain amount of
dibs, no calls, my own master, up in Pindi at the end of the Kashmir
road with the hot weather coming on, and all the earth in front of me.
“I’ve always wanted to travel up that way, and this seemed the absolute
chance. If I went home or back to my old job in Bengal, I might not get
another opportunity for years; my old firm in Bengal were good, but
sticky in the matter of leave. So I packed my kit, dumped what I didn’t
want, motored to Srinagar, and took the road for Yarkand.
“I stuck to the main road practically all the way, steady, easy
marches. And as I went I read everything I could find on the country.
Most of my kit was books, I think, but by the time I hit Yarkand I had
a working knowledge of Kashgaria at other people’s expense.
“I moved fairly light, but I lugged the books along and also a few
survey instruments. You remember that in Palestine I used to play about
with survey toys.
“I stopped a bit at Yarkand to study local conditions, and work up the
smattering of Turki that I’d been assimilating on the road up with the
aid of a prehistoric textbook.
“From there I pushed on to Aksu, and hence towards Hami, always keeping
to the main road. There’s nothing to talk about during that part of
the show. But when I got Hami-way, I put aside the printed books and
restudied my great-great-uncle’s diary.”
He stopped and pulled meditatively at his pipe.
“What was the great-great-uncle doing up there, John?” I asked.
“He was a bit of a rolling stone, rather like me, I fancy. He started
with a commission in the East India Company’s army, got tired of it,
went north, and joined the Sikh army. Then he dropped that and took
to wandering. Went up into Kashmir. Thence he conceived the idea of
following the old trade route into China. His library apparently
consisted of Marco Polo.
“Three years later he turned up again in Ferozepur, where my
great-grandfather, his brother, was commanding a regiment, and
announced his intention of fitting out and going off again to Central
Asia. But before he could start again he went out with cholera.
However, before he died he gave my great-grandfather a diary and a
bundle of old papers, and said that, if ever any other member of the
family got the wanderlust, the papers were to be given to him.
“My great-grandfather, who was married, had no particular desire to
travel, and, I fancy, after reading through the stuff, he locked it
up and dismissed the whole lot as a traveller’s yarn, due to overmuch
Marco Polo combined with fever.
“My grandfather and my father were stay-at-homes, and I’m the first of
the family to come back here. I brought with me the old papers and the
diary that was with them more as idle curiosities--happened to notice
them when I was on leave before coming back from France to Mespot in
1916.
“Having nothing much to do, I read them through on board ship, and
after that I read them fairly often, until I know bits, I think, by
heart.
“A lot of them are mere scrappy notes about his journeys, rough
drawings of places and types, and it’s only after he struck east from
Urumchi that the real interest comes into the diary. Pass me over that
box, will you?”
Forsyth reached the box across to Wrexham, who undid it, and took out a
small shabby leather-covered notebook.
“I’m going to read you something,” he said, “that will tell you why I
went north. As I said before, once is nothing, twice is a coincidence,
three times is a moral cert. This is the ‘once’; part of the ‘twice’
you’ve both seen in the shape of that coin; the ‘three times’ I’ve got
here, and will show you presently.”
He put the box on the table by him, opened the notebook--stained
yellowish paper and crabbed writing in faded brown ink--and began to
read aloud.
He read for a quarter of an hour, and at the end of that time both
Forsyth and I had let our pipes go out, and were hanging on his words.