The Island Where Time Stands Still (47 page)

But, whether it was Foo, or some other Communist agent, who had carried off Josephine made little difference. Apparently the threat issued in San Francisco to kill her still stood, and it looked now as if two or more agents had been put on to hunt her down independently. If so, and one of them in Tung-kwan had killed Shih-niang in mistake for her, she
could count herself lucky that the other had kidnapped her instead of stabbing her to death in her bed. It seemed probable that the man who had got hold of her had spared her temporarily only so that she might be taken before some higher authority, and questioned about matters connected with the House of Lin before she was dispatched. In any case, if there was still a chance of saving her, every moment counted; so immediate action must be taken.

While Tû-lai changed into Chinese riding clothes he sent orders that every caravan guard available should be mustered; then he and Gregory anxiously debated in which direction they should set off. Gregory thought it improbable that Josephine was being taken down to Tung-kwan as, if so, he should have passed her on the road the day before. A further factor was that the nearest Communist headquarters were in Yen-an, so it seemed more likely that she had been taken there.

In the great courtyard they found twenty-two strong pony riders assembled. From Tû-lai's enquiries about Josephine's disappearance they had already guessed what was in the wind; so when he appeared they greeted him with excited shouts. As Gregory rode up into the lead beside Tû-lai, he glanced at his watch and saw that it was half past three; then they cantered out of the gates like mediaeval nobles leaving a castle to go to war, with their wild retainers waving their weapons, uttering fierce cries and thundering along behind them.

The city of Yen-an was only a few miles away, and on crossing the next rise they could see its ancient mud walls in the distance. A quarter of an hour's hard riding brought them to a large open space in its centre, one side of which was occupied by a caravanserai very similar to the one in Tung-kwan. Having led his cavalcade into its spacious courtyard, Tû-lai gave orders to dismount and tie up the ponies. Then he called the men round him, gave them their instructions, and told them that they were to report back there in an hour.

As they dispersed he led Gregory through the building to a garden at its back. Like the inn at Tung-kwan it had a score of tables and sitting down at one of them he ordered hot wine to be brought. Turning to Gregory as the servant left them, he said:

‘A drink will serve to pass the time. There is nothing we can do ourselves, and my men will make far better detectives than we should. All of them know our bird by sight; so if he is in the town they will soon ferret him out, and the warders at the prison are great gossips. Through them we'll learn if Josephine is in the women's cells—or if she has already been done in by these Communist swine.'

The hour of waiting seemed a long one, but at last it was over and they went out to the courtyard to hear the men's reports. The information they had gathered was reassuring but very puzzling.

Josephine was not in the prison, neither had any young woman remotely resembling her been brought in during the past forty hours. On the other hand there was ample evidence that the Communist agent they sought had been in the town the previous day.

The first report of his appearance was at the inn itself early in the morning. He had arrived on foot and in a very groggy condition. His story was that he had met with an accident and injured the back of his head. When his wound had been attended to and he had eaten a light meal he had wanted to leave again at once, but he was still so shaky that he had been persuaded to lie down for a few hours. Later he had asked the address of an honest merchant and gone out. On his return he had bought two riding ponies and hired two mounted men to accompany him. Then, at about two o'clock in the afternoon, they had set off, leaving the city by its north gate.

The merchant had been questioned, and said that he had bought from a man a short string of not very large, but well-matched, pearls for twenty-four thousand J.M.P. dollars, which, although only a little over thirty English pounds by the rate of exchange, was a sum with considerable purchasing
power in those remote regions. As far as had been discovered the only other transactions entered into by the man while in Yen-an were the purchase of blankets, a haversack, a water-bottle and a heavy bludgeon; and he had neither visited the Communist headquarters nor made contact with any of his uniformed colleagues.

To make anything tangible of this account was most difficult. The wound on the back of the head sounded as if the man had been attacked from behind, rather than had a fall: but, if so, by whom? It was, of course, possible that Josephine had seized an opportunity when his back was turned to her to strike him down, although such an act of resolution by a young girl who had led an exceptionally sheltered life seemed highly unlikely. And if she had, what then? Presumably he had lain unconscious for several hours, while she had made off with the ponies. But, if so, why had she not returned to the House of Lin?

Tû-lai suggested that as soon as the man had her clear of the house, he had set about killing her, and fear had lent her the strength to inflict the injury on him in her death struggle; but that did not explain why he had arrived in Yen-an on foot. Gregory favoured the idea that they had been set upon by robbers who, having beaten up the man, had made off with the girl and the ponies to their own village; but that did not explain why, on his arrival in Yen-an, he had not gone straight to the Communist headquarters for help to trace and recapture her, instead of to the inn. Why, too, he should have
hired
two companions, bought a spare mount, and ridden off towards the north defied their wildest speculation.

To their next move there was only one pointer. As the Communist had carried Josephine off he must know what had happened to her; therefore if they gave chase and could overtake him they should be able to squeeze the truth out of him. Before departing, in order to cover their respective theories, Tû-lai dispatched four men back the way they had come to search the defiles on either side of the road for Josephine's body, and a further six to the nearest villages
round about to inquire of the headmen regarding the activities of robbers, and threaten with his dire displeasure any one of them who later might be proved to have had knowledge of Josephine's whereabouts without disclosing it. Soon after five o'clock, with the remaining twelve men of their escort shouting lustily once more, they galloped in a cloud of dust out of the north gate of Yen-an.

The track again led alongside a river; but now it was the little Yen-ho, a smaller tributary of the great Hwang-ho than that along the valley of which ran the greater part of the road from Tung-kwan. In long shallow stretches, broken here and there by foaming rapids, it meandered from its source in the north-west. The nearest township on it was An-sai, which lay something over twenty miles away.

As their ponies were still fresh they got there at half past seven, and in the afterglow of a marvellous sunset at once set about making their enquiries. Within ten minutes they learned that on the previous day the man they were after and his two companions had reached there about half past four, then, after halting for a meal, had pushed on up the valley. As the pursued had a lead of some twenty-six hours, the only hope of catching them up lay in riding for most of the night; so, having watered the ponies, they again took the road.

An hour and a half later the river had dwindled to a brook and they were within a few miles of its source. It was now fully dark and on rounding a sudden bend in the track Gregory would have ridden on, had not Tû-lai called on him to halt. Having known the region since boyhood the young Chinaman was aware that the road forked there. One of its branches ran west of north to the township of Tsing-pien, which lay about forty miles away, just inside the Great Wall; the other took a more westerly course through the township of Poa-an, then led up to Chwan-tsing, another town just inside the Great Wall, but thirty miles or more further off.

As it was impossible to tell which road their quarry had taken, it was decided that with Chou for guide, and five
of the men, Gregory should head for Tsing-pien, while Tû-lai and the other six headed for Chwan-tsing. It was further agreed that on reaching their destinations, whichever of them had lost the track should turn along inside the Great Wall to rejoin the other, or one of the men who would be left behind with a message for him.

Soon after they parted the moon came up; so the going became easier, but by one in the morning it was well down in the sky. By then, since leaving Yen-an Gregory's party had covered over fifty miles, and tough as the ponies were, their flagging during the last hour was a clear indication that they should not be pressed much further.

It was now bitterly cold and they were not carrying camp equipment with them; so he kept the ponies going at a walk while looking about for some shelter for himself and his men. Two miles further on they came to a cliff face with two shallow caves in it. They offered scant comfort but would at least keep the frost off; which, as there was no brushwood about to make a fire, was a big consideration. Having tethered their ponies, the seven of them huddled up for warmth in the deepest of the caves, and got such uneasy sleep as they could until dawn.

An hour's ride in the morning brought them to a monastery, where they were able to get a hot meal; but inquiries there proved disappointing, as the men they were after had not stopped at it. By one o'clock they were within sight of Tsing-pien, but Gregory now had little hope of getting news of their quarry in the town, as they had questioned several groups of travellers going south, and people in the few hamlets through which they had passed, without result. His pessimism was justified. After another meal Chou and his men ranged the bazaars for the best part of two hours, but no one they questioned had seen a man answering the description of the one they sought.

Their reports could only mean that the fox had either gone to earth or taken the road followed by Tû-lai up to Chwan-tsing; so it was now for Gregory to get there as soon as possible. The town was between fifty and sixty miles
away to the west, and as the ponies had already covered over ninety miles in less than twenty-four hours they needed at least a day's rest before they could again be put to any further strain.

In consequence, with Chou as his adviser, Gregory bought six fresh ponies, and arranged that one of the men should stay behind to take those they had ridden so hard, back to Yen-an by easy stages. They also bought blankets and provisions, and at five o'clock in the evening cantered out of Tsing-pien, intent on covering as much ground as they could before halting for the night.

From Tsing-pien they had already seen the Great Wall of China in the distance, and now their way lay alongside it. As the course it followed had been based on tactical considerations, it ran for the most part along a series of crests, undulating like a gargantuan stone serpent along them and, where they broke, dipping sharply into valleys at a new angle to rise to others.

By far the greater part of it still stood intact, rising on average twenty feet from the ground, and broad enough on top for two cars to be driven abreast along it, between its double edge of castellated battlements. As they trotted along for mile after mile, always within rifle shot of it, its immensity was brought home to Gregory. When his journey, equivalent to a hard day's ride, was done, he would still have seen only one-thirtieth part of it.

Begun over two hundred years before the birth of Christ, completed by the Han dynasty and, for most of its length, splendidly reinforced with stone by the Ming Emperors, it was the greatest human endeavour ever undertaken by man. The magnificent bridge spanning Sydney harbour, the skyscrapers of New York, and even the Great Pyramid were childish efforts by comparison. Across hill and dale it ran for one and a half thousand miles; in its structure were embodied fifteen thousand watch-towers and twenty-five thousand forts. To the south of it a vast fertile land had nurtured the greatest genuine civilisation of all time; to the north of it there still lay only limitless wastes of sand and a
few scattered oases, sparsely populated by nomad tribes of barbarians.

After the sun had set they rode on again by the light of the moon; but by ten o'clock they were so utterly weary that they had to call a halt, and doss down for the night in one of the watch-towers that still had its roof intact. During their evening ride the had covered nearly half the distance to Chwan-tsing; so they reached the town just before midday the following day.

At the principal inn of the place Gregory found Tû-lai waiting for them. As his party had had the longest side of the triangle to cover, and had not been able to change their ponies, they had got in only that morning. He was almost dropping with fatigue; but the hope that Gregory would arrive had kept him from going to bed, as he was positively bursting with news. Josephine had again appeared upon the scene and was only a few hours ahead of them.

Over a cup of hot wine Gregory listened enthralled to Tû-lai's story. On the first night they had pushed on as far as Poa-an, arrived there in the small hours of the morning. When they knocked up the inn, the servant who let them in had cursed loudly, as it was the second night in succession that he had been roused from his sleep to admit latecomers. A good tip quickly consoled him and induced him to reply readily to questions. His description of the previous night's travellers left no doubt that they were the Communist and his two companions. They had arrived a little after midnight and left soon after dawn.

It had been out of the question for Tû-lai to go further that night, but by taking two hours less sleep than his quarry he had reduced their lead by that much; and when he left Poa-an next morning they were exactly twenty-four hours ahead of him.

However, the day had proved a bitter disappointment. He had hoped to reach Chwan-tsing by the late afternoon, but his ponies, still jaded from the sixty-five miles they had done the preceding day, were no longer capable of such an effort. Within two hours of the start spells of trotting
had to be abandoned, and during the afternoon, in spite of giving them frequent rests, he and his men had to dismount and lead them. In consequence, on reaching a small monastery about five o'clock, although they had covered only some forty miles of the fifty five he had hoped to do, he had decided that they must take a long rest there.