Chapter III: Wrexham’s Story

We relit our pipes and settled back in our chairs, and Wrexham began:

“As I told you, when I got near Hami last year, I pulled out the old diary and read it again, especially the part I’ve just read to you two fellows.

“I won’t go into details of how I found the tiny village, which, from certain entries in the diary, I am sure must have been my great-great-uncle’s starting-point. I found the place, and there I decided to stop a bit. I can’t tell you why I should want to stop in a tiny little hole like that with nothing to see, not even any old ruins in the neighbourhood; but somehow my old relative’s story had taken hold of me, and I wanted to reconstruct it on the spot.

“You know how traditions linger in the East, more especially in those parts of it that are as yet untouched by the railway. Well, I made a few discreet questions, and sure enough there was a yarn of a white man who years before had gone out into the desert seeking old cities, and had come to grief owing to losing his way. The story was not too coherent, needless to say: sometimes he found a ruined city, sometimes he and all his people had died, and one particular version went on to the effect that he had found much gold, and got safely back, but was carried away by the spirits who watched over the treasure, and who were very wroth at its having been touched. It was a lot of trouble to get out the story--you know how difficult it is to get ignorant people like that to talk to strangers.

“But it was clear enough that some wandering white man had been there ages before, and, further, the local people seemed pretty afraid of wandering into the desert. I did not let on about the old man having had anything to do with me. It’s not a good thing to talk about bad luck being in the family, and certainly the old man did not hit it lucky that trip.

“I hung about prospecting and smelling out the ground, which, by the way, is very little known directly you get off the main route. Northeast you come slap on to the desert practically at once.

“The maps of it are quite useless, compiled from hearsay of wandering Indian or Chinese merchants, I think. I had the most up-to-date ones I could get from the Survey of India. Got hold of old Jones, who was our mapping expert in Palestine; you remember him, Harry.

“He sent me the best he had before I went off, but he wrote to the effect that I would be wise not to rely too much on anything north of the Hami-Urumchi road, barring the triangulated peaks.

“If you look at that atlas on the table there you will see that there is a big stretch of nothingness northeast of Kashgaria labelled Gobi Desert. It _is_ part of the Gobi. For over three hundred miles in every direction it’s got not a single name on it, not even a track. Northward there are two lakes shown with fifty miles of river leading nowhere; and, although I’ve not been there, I’m prepared to make a modest bet that they’re not within one hundred miles of their proper location, even if they do exist. North again of that is Chinese Mongolia, almost unknown even now, and very vaguely mapped.

“So that between known Kashgaria and Mongolia there’s a piece of country much bigger than England, almost unmapped, without even a known road in it. The southern edges of it are known to be desert; of the rest we know just nothing. And the northern side may be--as shown--some three hundred miles from the southern, or, on the other hand, it’s just as likely to be five hundred or six hundred miles away.

“You could hide a country almost as big as Wales in it and never know of its existence, even if it were full of high snow mountains. So you see, although my old namesake’s story may be the result of a fever-stricken imagination, it’s no ways impossible.

“Well, somehow, that country drew me more and more, but I saw that to try and explore it would require a good deal of preparation, and I had no idea of taking it on by myself if I could get another fellow or two to come along. So I decided to come back to India, and see if I could get hold of some one with globe-trotting tastes. I had you two in my mind’s eye, and then I found Forsyth, and later on heard that you’d gone home, Harry.

“I stayed on up there a while just to get a bit more local knowledge, and the last week I came across that coin, and the finding of that is what I call ‘twice’ in my deduction series.

“Some miles from the village there’s a bit of a rise where the sand-dunes on the desert’s edge are rather big. One in particular is noticeably high: it’s by a deserted building of sorts, quite a modern outfit, been abandoned perhaps twenty or fifty, at most a hundred, years. It bears northeast, and must be more or less the direction my great-great-uncle started from. I took rather a fancy to the place, and rode out there two or three times to study the country. A few extra feet elevation make a lot of difference in the desert.

“My men were accustomed to my going out there, and as a rule I took one or other to hold my horse while I did a bit of map-work, to try and get something more or less accurate.

“One particular day, the air being very clear--we’d had rain twice in the week, an uncommon phenomenon at that time of year--I thought I’d go and make a final visit to have a last check of the map.

“I rode out by myself that day on my old Kara Tagh mare. She was very quiet, and if you knee-haltered her loosely would stay for hours without trying to stray. I climbed up the high dune, and sat looking out over the desert, thinking about my old relative’s tragic journey. It was warm in the sun, and I had not slept well the previous night--an uncommon thing for me, as you know.”

I have seen Wrexham sleep quietly in the most noisy, disturbing places, when circumstances prevented him doing any work, and he had a little sleep to make up, or thought a reserve would be handy the next night or two. He is a most extraordinarily imperturbable person.

“It may be that I dozed for a few minutes and probably dreamt a bit. You see, I’d been reading my old great-great-uncle’s diary during the night when I couldn’t sleep. But I seemed awake all right. Well, presently a most extraordinary feeling came over me, of some one trying to attract my attention, some one very anxious that I should hear him.

“I really can’t explain what it was, but it got stronger and stronger. It was as though some one out in the desert was calling and calling to me, although, mind you, there was no sound.

“I sat staring out over the dazzling sand, and then, despite the peculiar sensation, I suppose I really did sleep, for the next thing that happened was that I _saw_ a man in the desert, plodding through the sand. How far he was from me I could not say, but the impression was exactly the one you get looking at a fellow through a very high-power telescope. You can see him apparently only a few feet away, and yet you _know_--although you can make out the buttons on his coat and almost see the colour of his eyes--that he’s really quite a long way off.

“You remember that Hun sniper you showed me through a signal telescope one day in France, Harry: seemed as if he was six feet away instead of nearly a hundred yards? Well, that was the impression.

“This fellow was plodding drearily through the sand, dragging his feet as though dead beat. His face was grey and haggard, and his lips black and swollen, and his eyes all red. I didn’t see his clothes clearly at all, and have no recollection of what they were like, although, I remember the absolutely done-in appearance of his whole figure.

“As I watched him staggering on, he fell, and lay still a minute. Then he pulled himself up on one arm--he gave me the impression, by the way, of having only one arm--and looked my way, and his lips seemed to be working. Then again I got that inexplicable sensation of some one trying to make me hear over great spaces.

“I suppose I woke up then, for suddenly the man disappeared, and there was only the bare empty desert before me once more. But stronger than ever was the sensation of some one far off calling and calling in a silent voice.

“Well, I sat there a bit, and sometimes the feeling was stronger and sometimes fainter, but always there, rather like when you’re listening to a distant sound across a valley, and sometimes the wind almost sweeps it away, and then suddenly there it is again clear and sharp.

“Well, eventually I went back to camp.

“I’m not a fanciful bloke, and I don’t believe in spooks or all this spiritualistic tosh, most of which is faked. But I am ready to admit that there are lots of things we don’t understand, things like telepathy and so on; and do what I could, I could not get rid of the feeling that some one was calling to me out in the desert.

“Although I tried to put it down to the aftermath of a vivid dream, I could not rid myself of it; and further, something seemed to keep on reminding me that I hadn’t really been to sleep, and the reasonable part of me that insisted on the dream theory couldn’t say that I had either.

“Eventually I decided that I would do something--for me--quite mad. I would push out a little into the desert. I had _chagals_[1] and things to take enough water for myself and a couple of men for four days, and the camels could do without any for that time. That meant about thirty miles out and back.

“So I told Sadiq, my head camel fellow, and another man that I wanted to look at the desert a bit, and left old Firoz--you remember him in my company in France: he’s with me now as sort of orderly since he left the army--to look after the camp.

“We went out two days in the direction I figured out that my old relative must have taken.

“By the way, the most extraordinary thing was that the moment I gave my orders to Sadiq, the feeling of some one wanting me suddenly vanished.

“We found nothing either day, absolute dead desert. The third morning, while the men were roping up things for our return, the feeling suddenly came on again. Only this time, for some unaccountable reason, it seemed as if the thing or person were close at hand. It worried me a lot. I couldn’t go on, of course; we had only enough water to see us back.

“There was a particularly high dune about six hundred or seven hundred yards from the camp, and finally I said to myself that I’d go up and have a last look from the top with my glasses. I told the men to finish loading up and then wait for me.

“The feeling was very strong as I trudged over the sand, and then, just as I got to the top, it absolutely disappeared again. It never came back either.

“But as I looked down from the top I knew why the feeling had left me. There, in the dip of the sand below me on the far side, lay a man, curled up as though asleep. I knew then that I had not been asleep that first day.

“I ran down the dune to his side hoping that he was only asleep, though somehow at heart I doubted it. Then, as I bent over him, I knew he was not sleeping, or rather that he had gone to sleep for good and all.

“There was nothing much in that; one had seen plenty of dead men before. Besides, it was the ’flu-time still in those parts, and I had picked up people dying or dead along the roadside more than once. But the point was that this was not the roadside, and it puzzled me as to what the man could have been doing in this out-of-the-way corner miles and miles away from any road, even what Central Asia calls a road.

“I examined him closely, and then I sat down and thought quick and hard. Remember that at that time I had been reading the old diary rather a lot, and this man was a shock to me apart from the way I had located him.

“He was gaunt and haggard, and by the look of him had suffered from hunger and thirst before he pegged out; in fact, I rather thought he had died of thirst.

“But that was nothing much; it was first his colour, for as I lifted his arm the loose sleeve slipped back, and the arm was nearly as white as mine. I don’t think he can have been dead more than a couple of days at most. And his type of features was quite unlike the average man in those parts, far too straight and regular. However, fair-skinned people are common enough in North Asia, though not as a rule quite as fair as this man.

“But the next thing I noted was that his wrists were all chafed, as though his hands had been bound recently. Remember I had been reading that diary. I looked at them very carefully for fear I might be imagining things, and the marks were more noticeable on the other arm than on the one I first touched.

“I pulled his clothes open to see if there were any marks or papers, and then I got the shock of my life. Around the shoulder was a blood-clotted bandage that had slipped to one side, and below it showed an open wound in the muscles just below the joint. There was a similar wound at the back.

“It was the sort of wound a sharp shell-splinter makes, or, if you like, the sort of wound that would be made by a steel-shod arrow that had passed right through the top of the arm, and then perhaps been pulled through or broken off.”

Wrexham paused and refilled his pipe. I think he was waiting for us to say something, but we both were silent. I’ve known Wrexham pretty intimately for some years, and he does not invent things, nor does it intrigue him to pull people’s legs with fairy stories. He is, moreover, a most matter-of-fact person, rather sceptical as a rule, and not inclined to believe anything that he cannot see himself. His reports in the field, albeit painfully written and laboriously compiled, used to be masterpieces of accurate information.

Seeing neither of us ventured any remark, he went on:

“Then I started hunting through his kit. His clothes were rather unfamiliar in type: there was a short skin outer garment, much like the _poshtin_[2] common to most of the cold parts of Asia, though the embroidery on it was of unfamiliar pattern. Under that he wore a sort of short pleated smock of very fine cloth though worn, a fawn-coloured linen it seemed to be; and around the throat, and at the skirt edges, it was embroidered, again in the same unfamiliar pattern in green.

“He had long drawers of the same material as the smock, gartered in below the knees with thin strips of fineish green leather, and on his feet twisted leather sandals of a pattern quite new to me, not unlike Kashmiri _chaplis_, but with far more intricate plaiting.

“Round his waist was a twisted leather girdle, from which hung a short knife and a leather wallet. I opened the wallet and found some coins--you’ve seen one of them, and as you can imagine they, too, set me thinking--and there was something more besides that I’ll show you presently. There was nothing else of note. But while searching him I came to the conclusion that, if he hadn’t died of thirst, he might have died from sepsis from his wound. I had to bend pretty close, you see.

“Well, I did some pretty quick thinking. The coincidence between this fellow and what old John Wrexham wrote was too marked not simply to stick out. I felt sure then that the old man wrote cold, sober truth. Now for many reasons I didn’t want my men to see this body. They might start thinking too much and making up yarns that would queer my pitch if I managed to start an expedition. I can tell you, the sight of this man made me absolutely resolved to set out across the desert as soon as I could fix up a show that would give some chance of success.

“So I straightened him out and left him, but, before doing this, I cut the straps of his wallet and pushed it and the short knife into the big haversack I was carrying.

“Then I went back to the top of the sand-dune and got out my mapping stuff--not that I had any intention of doing much: I was too busy wondering about it all and trying to evolve theories, but I didn’t want my men to notice anything unusual. I expect, if they looked up at me at all, they thought I was carrying on in the usual way with my map spread out all businesslike.

“That night, when the men had dossed down, I sat up studying the contents of the wallet, and the next day made up my mind to come back to India as fast as I could travel and set about finding one of you two and going north again.”

“‘Once is nothing, twice is coincidence,’” quoted Forsyth. “You’ve got hold of the queerest kind of story, but as yet I see no light, save that it seems to substantiate your ancient uncle’s yarn. But why in hell you should find a man in practically the same circumstances as he did one hundred years ago has me cold. If I didn’t know you, I should say you were pulling our legs.”

“Then you can just imagine how much I wondered that night and many after. The coincidence was too absurdly striking, too close to be real, it seemed; and yet there it was, hard, undeniable fact. But before I go on I’ll show you what I call ‘three times,’ the ‘moral cert.’”

He reached over for the box on the table, opened it, and pulled out just such a leather wallet as he had described, and then a short knife of unusual shape, which he laid beside it under the light.

“Ever seen a knife like that?” he asked.

I shook my head. It was unusual in shape, short, rather broad-bladed with curved hand-guard, obviously a stabbing dagger, but of what nationality I could not say. But what held my eye more than its shape was the faint filigree of silvery metal lines hammered or welded into the bluish steel of the blade. They seemed to form letters of a kind, though not easily decipherable.

Forsyth picked it up and examined it. “I have, but”--he looked at us both--“they were in a museum, and labelled ‘Scandinavian--old,’ and they didn’t have this filigree stuff.”

“I thought you’d say something like that,” said Wrexham. “I looked up a book on old weapons as soon as I got back to India. Now for exhibit No. 2, as the policeman calls it.”

He opened the wallet and took out a flat object wrapped in folds of soft cloth, which he unrolled.

“I don’t think you’ve ever seen things like that in any museum,” he said as he laid the object down.

We both bent over it and simultaneously exclaimed.

It was a little portrait of a girl, painted on what seemed to be a sort of matt-stone or very hard plaster. The colours were fresh and vivid, and the art was of a high standard. But the face held us more then than the fashion of its depicting.

It was a girl looking slightly downward, as though at something she was holding in her hands. Masses of heavy brown hair with a glint of gold, eyes of deepest blue with a violet tinge screened with long lashes, under finely pencilled dark-brown eyebrows, and a skin of rose and ivory with faint blue transparent shadows down the graceful curve where the neck entered the filmy garment that swathed the outlined shoulders.

“I’d cross a good many deserts to meet a girl like that at the far side,” said Forsyth, as he laid down the picture. “Do you mean to say that that was in the wallet?”

“It was,” said Wrexham; “but you’ve not seen all there is to see.”

He turned over the picture, and pointed to some words written on the back, in unmistakable Greek, a clear-cut delicate writing, in vivid black.

“Tell me what that means, either of you?”

We bent over it again. Some of the letters differed slightly from the usual type of classic Greek, but the meaning was quite clear, though the word-endings were unusual.

The long Canadian was the first to speak.

“It’s Greek of a semi-classical type, I should say. I’ve seen stuff not unlike it before, though there are unusual points about it. It runs: ‘God keep my brother safe where’er he go. Euphrosine.’ You agree with that, Lake?”

“Absolutely. It’s perfectly easy to read, though the terminations are neither modern nor quite classical.”

I turned to Wrexham.

“Read us the riddle, John. I think you’ve found the ‘three times,’ the ‘moral cert,’ though God knows what it all means.”