his gratitude. Every day they sat down to immense banquets, rich with the strangest and most sought-after delicacies. In time Derrick grew weary even of the nests of sea-swallows; he was tired of eating, and he never wished to see another meal again. Li Han, however, was in his element: for years he had cooked for others, and now others were cooking for him; he had acquired a great deal of face, and he sat among the lesser officials, growing almost as stout as a mandarin. They gave him the nick-name of Jelly-Belly Wary – Jelly-Belly for his rapidly increasing girth, and Wary for his caution in war.
Olaf, too, ate like a starving man, day after day. ‘Ay reckon you can’t never have too much to eat,’ he said greasily. ‘Ay ban so long at sea, Ay ban right sick of hard tack. Fill up against the next long voyage, Ay say: there ain’t no telling when you’ll have the next chance.’ He sighed with repletion and looked enviously at a pile of crimson prawns. ‘Ay t’ink,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that Ay could manage one more.’
Derrick watched him demolishing the heap of prawns. ‘You’ll surely burst if you go on,’ he said.
‘Well, Ay reckon that ban a hero’s death,’ replied Olaf, skewering another prawn. ‘You make a long arm, now, and sling along the fried noodles.’
Chingiz and his brothers scorned the endless feasting. They preferred horse-flesh and koumiss; but they were deeply interested in the weapons that had been captured from Shun Chi.
The tanks did not interest them: they thought them greatly inferior to horses; but they spent many hours with the machine-guns before regretfully deciding that they were no use on horseback. They were charmed with the bombs, but Sullivan would not let them have any.
‘These Mongols,’ he said, ‘are good enough at murdering one another as it is, without giving them the power to wipe out whole tribes at a time. They must forgo the advantages of modern civilisation.’
At length Hsien Lu could no longer keep them from the road. He loaded them with presents and sent them on their way with an escort large enough to guard the ransom of a king. He gave them many things, and he would have given them more if Sullivan had not pointed out that they could not cross the Gobi with seven enormous wagons. The Professor had three brass Buddhas, made in Birmingham, a cuckoo-clock and some bronzes. As he was showing them to the others he observed, ‘These four bronzes are recent forgeries; these here are also forgeries, but they were made in the Sung dynasty to represent Han bronzes. Think of that: well over a thousand years ago they were already forging antiquities when our kings could hardly read and write, and went about knocking people on the head.’
‘As for knocking people on the head, Professor,’ said Ross, who was suffering badly from indigestion, and was feeling somewhat liverish and argumentative, ‘you have shown a very pretty talent for that. And as for forging antiquities, that does not seem to me a very creditable sign of civilisation.’
‘I should say that that remark showed a very superficial reflection,’ said the Professor, who was also a little liverish, ‘if it might not be thought ill-mannered. I shall content myself with observing that the forgery of antiquities proves the existence of a widely spread appreciation of them. I would further add, sir, that I have seen Han forgeries of Chow ritual vessels, made, I repeat, at a time when we were painted blue and ran about howling like a pack of savages. Confucius takes notice of this in the seventh chapter of –’
‘But, Professor,’ interrupted Sullivan, ‘if they appreciate art so much, how do you account for these horrible brass Buddhas?’
‘Well, there I must admit that you puzzle me. The cuckoo-clock can easily be accounted for as a Western curiosity, but I confess that I am surprised by these deplorable brass objects. It is strange that even a soldier, a man of violence,’ he said, with a sideways look at Ross, ‘should be so wanting in artistic taste. It puzzles me, particularly when I look at these remaining bronzes, these three incense-burners on the right, which are certainly Han, genuine Han, beautiful things, every day of two thousand years old.’ As he contemplated the incense-burners his good humour came back, and he said, ‘With the exception of one bronze that I saw in Moscow when I was a young man, and another in a private collection in America, those are the finest I have ever seen. Quite apart from their beauty, their inscriptions are of extraordinary interest.’
‘It is odd,’ said Sullivan, who was still looking at the Buddhas, ‘because Hsien Lu is no fool. No sort of a fool at all. I noticed that when he gave them to you he said that in spite of their appearance you would find in time that they had a certain inner value.’
‘True. He was referring, no doubt, to their religious significance. But to return to these bronzes, I will stake my reputation that they are genuine. This version of the familiar extract from the Great Wisdom, for example, runs …’
The Professor would have gone on indefinitely, but he was interrupted by the arrival of the carpenter who had come to make special cases to fit the incense-burners, and while the Professor was giving his instructions the others escaped. The Professor had each of the bronzes swathed in silk before they were packed: he did the same for the Buddhas, in order not to hurt the Tu-chun’s feelings, and he had them all loaded on one particular camel, where he could keep his eye on them.
After one last gargantuan banquet which lasted all night the expedition set out. They were bloated and weary – Chang was so fat that he could hardly run – but the new and excellent horses and pack animals that Hsien Lu had given them covered the ground at a great pace, and even on the first day they travelled a long stage. A little before nightfall a galloping messenger caught them up with a letter from the war-lord to say that he had caused the Professor’s enormous stelae to be uprooted and that they would be sent down to the nearest port to be shipped off as a trifling token of his esteem.
The next evening a second messenger pursued them with several jars of ginger and medicinal rhubarb, in case they should need it on their journey. And on the day after that no less than five arrived with presents of fur-lined clothing, as the Tu-chun thought they might take cold on the high plateau. Silk, weapons, antique porcelain, ivory, wonder-working pills, felt boots, remedies against old age, tooth-ache and jaundice, small patent stoves, charcoal burners and a catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores (which Hsien Lu believed to be in verse) raced after them over the high and dusty roads of Liao-Meng, until their spare baggage animals were loaded down to the ground, and every evening they would scan the horizon apprehensively for the cloud of dust that would herald the coming of a new alarm-clock or an incredibly fragile set of Imperial egg-shell china.
They rode for day after day through Liao-Meng, and at last the fields thinned out, the vegetation grew more sparse, they passed no more trees, and finally they left the last dwelling behind them. They entered upon a vast plain, covered thinly with brown grass and extending to the rim of the horizon all round the uninterrupted bowl of the sky.
Three times, as they crossed this huge expanse, armed bands appeared in the distance: once the advance guard of their escort had a brush with the bandits, and once they passed a heap of bones, among which still blew the torn remnants of plundered bales of merchandise, fluttering in the desolate wind; but they were not seriously molested, although they were travelling through a district infested by all manner of disbanded soldiers from broken armies, brigands and embryonic war-lords trying out their hands on stray passers-by or caravans that were weakly armed and irresolute.
There came a day when, in the far distance, a low building appeared. On this flat plain it showed for miles and miles, and it seemed as strange and remarkable there as a ship in full sail. They reached it early the next morning, and the column halted. Derrick saw a broad, rough road running straight as an arrow from one edge of the world to the next, and the building stood at its side. They were on the Old Silk Road at last, a road of immeasurable antiquity, once used by innumerable caravans, but now almost deserted.
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