THE GREAT DECISION
Wrexham refilled his pipe and settled back in his chair once more. Then
he went on:
“I’ll give you first of all my reading of the things I’ve just told
you, and you can tell me whether you think I’m on the right lines.
“In the first place, what do we know for certain? That somewhere in the
west corner of the Gobi Desert, a large unknown bit of country, a man
of apparently white race has been found. Also, a hundred years ago, my
great-great-uncle says he found these unknown mountains, an old gate,
and a dead white man.
“Further, that the weapons and other things found on my man are of
old type. Then these strange people use Greek, or a form of it. As
probably you both know, there was a lot of Greek intercourse with
Central Asia about the dawn of the Christian era, and before it. There
are races in Afghanistan and the north of India with unmistakable
Greek characteristics to this day, and numerous legends of the days of
Alexander still survive all up and down the Indian border.
“Now, to my mind all these facts are capable of but one explanation--
namely, that hidden in that desert is some isolated settlement of
fair-skinned people, perhaps from the old days of Greek domination in
Central Asia. Since there is not even a legend about them in the local
countryside, it is pretty clear that they have been cut off for a good
many centuries. Possibly at some remote period they crossed the desert,
which, perhaps, was not so extensive then, before the dry area which
has buried so many towns in that part began to form. Or perhaps they
were driven out by one of the succeeding waves of invasion from China,
and fled northward until they came upon this hidden refuge.
“Whether they are all still of pure white type is not clear, though the
two individuals seen seem to be. My man certainly was. The picture of
the girl further points to at least some of them having retained all
their original racial characteristics.
“I take it both of you agree with this part of my theory?”
“I can think of nothing else that fits the facts,” said I. “What has
Forsyth got to say about it?”
“I agree entirely with Wrexham. The writing on the back of the picture
is certainly recent. I’ve done a bit of research work with old
manuscripts and so on--rather a hobby of mine one time--and I’ll take
my oath that that writing is not more than a few years old, judging by
the ink, although the type of script must go back hundreds of years.
It’s impossible that any of the present Turki or Chinese inhabitants
could or would write stuff of that sort. And how could they imagine or
invent an old Greek name like ‘Euphrosine’? Unless some daft European,
with a gift for forgery and a knowledge of old Greek script, is faking
antiques in the middle of the Gobi Desert, there’s only one reading,
and that’s the one Wrexham has given us.”
“Well, since you agree with the first part of my thesis, I shall go
on with the second,” continued Wrexham. “The first part establishes,
as far as one can, the probability of some forgotten Greek settlement
to be found beyond the northeast corner of Kashgaria. If so, it’s
more than worth looking for. But before I go on, are either of you
prepared to come with me? It’s an eighteen months’ job at the very
least, and possibly longer. But it’s worth it, I think. Think of the
old scientific blokes in Europe if we come back with an authentic
account, complete with photos, and records, and perhaps with some of
the inhabitants of an old Greek settlement probably much as it was in
the days of Alexander.
“Whether or not there’s money in it, I don’t know. You, Harry, are
probably not out for money, having enough for your wants. I am
personally, but not much. I’m rather a wanderer, and nothing would
please me more than a life of exploration. If we can pull this off, we
shall be made men in the exploring world, and can be sure of getting
sufficient financial support in future to make further expeditions.”
I’ve said that I’ve always had a taste for travel, and have spent
not a little time and money on gratifying it. And here was Wrexham
not only holding out a prospect of exploring an entirely unknown bit
of the world, but gilding the lily with what looked like very good
presumptive evidence of living survivals from past centuries. There was
nothing much to draw me home. My only close relative was my sister,
made a widow by Loos, who, with her two boys, kept the old manor-house
farm warm for me. I had settled part of my income on her, and with
that and her own little bit of money, she could keep the manor-house
home up comfortably and pay for the boys’ schooling. On chucking the
service, my idea had been to spend the summers at home and the winters
globe-trotting.
So my mind required no making up.
“Count me in,” I said to Wrexham. “Central Asia’s called me ever
since I first came East, and here you are with a whole lot of extra
attractions.”
“And you, Alec? You weren’t certain before,” said Wrexham.
Forsyth leaned across the table, took up the picture, and gazed at it
again.
“No, but you’d only told me part of the story. I’ll start to-morrow if
you like.”
“Good! I thought you would both come. Then, now I’ll go on with the
second part of my thesis as to how my great-great-uncle and I found
two men under such very similar circumstances. You admit that the
coincidence is more than strange.
“You remember that the old man came upon a small enclosed space at the
end of the valley full of bones, and among them a new corpse killed by
an arrow under the entrance gates.
“I find a man whose hands have been bound, and who has been also
wounded by what might have been an arrow. Note further that No. 1 was
found stripped, although his hands were bound. Ergo, he was stripped
before he was killed, otherwise they’d have had to undo his hands to
get his kit off.
“No. 2, on the other hand, has clothes and escapes, and what is more is
armed. You don’t tie up an armed man to shoot. Note also that my old
relative makes no mention of his fellow’s legs having been tied, and my
man’s did not seem to have been.
“Now, I thought an awful lot over these two. And this is what it
seems to me. Quite obviously men whose arms are bound are prisoners.
Execution without the gates was a very typical method in all old
countries, and common even now in the East.
“My own idea--perhaps fanciful--is, therefore, that whoever run this
place, when they want to kill off any one, they put him outside the
gates with his arms bound, and shoot him with arrows either from the
gates or from the arrow-slits. Possibly the idea of leaving his legs
free is to give the fellow a last sporting chance of getting away to
take his luck in the desert if he can bolt before he’s killed.
“Now, my fellow seems to have had a sister--a cultured person, one
would say--not the sort of sister you’d associate with a common
criminal.
“My idea is that she bribed the executioners not to shoot straight,
and that he bolted into the valley, where, by some preconceived
arrangement, he found clothes and food, and then freed his hands
against a sharp rock. He was a strongly built young fellow, and
probably would make the best fight he could, even despite his wound.
Possibly he knew that they were going to drop him stuff over the cliffs
somewhere in the valley.
“Now, in view of the sister, it seems unlikely that he was a common
criminal. A more likely solution would be either some particularly
tyrannical rulers, or possibly some kind of bitter civil war. I have
my own ideas as to how he got across the desert, which I can explain
better when we get there.
“What do you think of my solution so far?”
We had to agree that it was as logical as any interpretation we could
put upon it.
“Well, then, and this is why I’ve given it at length. If we find the
place, and if we succeed in getting in, we want to be well armed, and,
what’s more, have some one more reliable than the local Turkestani
camel men. I have Firoz still. Could you, Harry, rake up a reliable
sepoy to come?”
“I’ve got Payindah here now. Like Firoz, he’s left the army and toddles
round with me. You remember him that day near Festubert when you got
that gash across your face. Big Punjabi with green eyes.”
“By Jove, yes. Chap that had his bayonet smashed, and then killed
another fellow with the broken end?”
“Yes, that’s him. He was very excited to-night when I said I’d run
across you and was coming over to dine here. I expect he’ll come to
make his salaams to-morrow.”
“He’s just the very article. Used to be pally with Firoz, too, I
remember.
“Well, the other thing is, that we may find when we get there that the
gate and the valley are peculiarly unhealthy. Therefore, I suggest that
in making up our kit we include some kind of light strong ropes and
other climbing gear. You, Harry, I know are a good climber, and Alec
says he has done a bit of mountaineering at different times. Then, if
the gate is no go, we can hunt around and try and find some other way
in over the cliffs.”
“There’s something in that,” said Forsyth. “From your great-great-uncle’s
account, the valley did not seem exactly the sort of place you could
walk in by if the folk inside hadn’t invited you and didn’t like your
face.”
“The last thing I want to suggest is that we take along some kind of
medical kit for Alec. If we find these people are really there, they
are likely to be fair to middling mediæval, if not even more primitive,
though the girl’s picture rather rules out their being anything
approaching savages. Therefore, a perfectly good and moderately
well-equipped medicine-man might prove a most useful passport in the
country. For the same reason I’m lugging along a few oddments in the
engineering line to startle the natives with.”
“Yes,” said I, “all that seems very sound. Now, when do you propose
that we start? The passes are no good before April, and that’s four
months away.”
“Well, first of all we’ve got to fit out. I’ve got a list of kit all
worked out, but we must get down to Bombay or Calcutta where one can
get things. This place is no good.”
“Then I shall go on down to the C.P. and carry on with my shoot. Would
you care to come as well? From there we can go on to Calcutta and fit
out.”
“Yes, rather. I’ve never seen a tiger outside of a cage,” said Forsyth.
“What about you, John?”
“Yes, I’ll come along, but I won’t stop long. Directly after Christmas
I’ll push on and start getting things together, and you can meet me at
Calcutta.”
“Then that’s that, and now for bed. One thing, John. How do you account
for finding your man? I don’t mean the shooting part and the sister,
but the rest? It’s one of the most extraordinary things I ever heard.”
“I don’t attempt to account for it really. But although, as you know,
I don’t profess any particular kind of religion, I do believe that
something or some one runs the show with some very clear design. And
just as the smallest part in the biggest machine has to be made to work
on appointed lines, so, too, each one of us must have some definite
part to play, though we may not know what it’s all about while we’re
doing it. In this case I hope it doesn’t sound as if I was talking
through my hat when I say that I really do believe that for some reason
or other we’re meant to get to this country which we think exists.
“Remember that my getting there didn’t save that fellow’s life. Also,
you can’t quite account by mere telepathy for my feeling of some one
calling me. The first day, perhaps, yes. He was probably just about
dying then, and maybe his calls for help travelled in some unknown way
to me, the nearest human being.
“But--when I started off into the desert--the impression disappeared,
and did not reappear until I was on the point of turning back. Then it
suddenly reappeared stronger than ever, and the man had been dead two
days.
“I was clearly not meant to save his life, but I do think, queer as it
may sound, that I was meant to find his body.
“That, combined with the chance of my great-great-uncle finding the
country, the chance, if you call it so, of my picking up those old
papers at home before I came out, and the chance of my being able to go
up to Central Asia and of being there just at that particular moment,
to me point to the fact of our being intended to get to that hidden
country.
“Why I or either of you or all of us are wanted there, and what we are
to do when we get there, the Power that starts us off alone knows. But
I cannot help the feeling that we are meant to get there, and that we
shall get there. Then beyond that all is a blank. But the getting-there
part seems to me Sapper’s ‘three times’--simply a moral cert.”
“As for me, I don’t believe in anything particularly, and it’s all
quite beyond me,” said Forsyth. “But the prospect is pleasing enough
without worrying about the why and wherefore. I shall look forward to
trying twentieth-century medicine on second-century Greeks.”
And on that we went off to bed, after arranging to meet next morning to
fix up our journey on to Bombay.
But--unlike Wrexham and Forsyth--I do profess a belief--a very
definite, concrete one; and, when I said my prayers that night, I
prayed that we might have fortune in our undertaking, and if He
meant us to go there--which, after Wrexham’s story, I could not but
believe--that we might have grace and strength to carry out whatever He
wanted of us.
Before I went to sleep, I read one of my “bed books,” and happened upon
the verse of Psalm 23: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.”
A suitable verse for old John Wrexham’s gateway, I thought, and so went
to sleep.