To my horror the fortune-teller singled me out. His voice was unexpectedly shrill.
‘I am your humble servant from Chin-Hwa,’ my new companion translated, adopting the same sing-song voice.
The German pointed at the fortune-teller and asked, ‘Surely, Doctor Watson, you aren’t going to lose the chance to know your future - and for so little expense!’
He translated the logograms -
Foretelling any single event . . . . . . . . 8 cash
Foretelling any single event with joss-stick. . . . . . .16 cash
Telling a fortune . . . . . . . . . 28 cash
Telling a fortune in detail . . . . . . . 50 cash
Telling a fortune by reading the stars . . . 50 cash
Fixing the marriage day . . . . . . . fee according to agreement
To the general satisfaction of other passengers on the platform I succumbed. I opted for ‘fate calculating’. The fortune-teller asked for the hour of my birth, the day, the month and the year (to which for some reason he added a further year). The archaeologist acted as language interpreter. He also explained the seer was writing my answers down in particular characters to express times and seasons. From the combinations of these and a careful estimate of the proportions in which the elements gold, wood, water, fire, and earth made their appearance he would make his predictions.
In return for a ‘shoe’ (a string of 50 cash) I received the following: ‘Your present lustrum is not a fortunate one; but it has nearly expired, and better days are at hand. Beware the odd months of this year: you will meet with some dangers and slight losses. Danger can be ameliorated by offerings at the Temple of Boundless Mercy. Two male phoenixes will be accorded to you. Fruit cannot thrive in the winter (he had arbitrarily decided to place my birthday in the 12th moon). Conflicting elements oppose: towards life’s close prepare for trials. Wealth is beyond your grasp; but nature has marked you out to fill a lofty place.’
Certainly the ‘Wealth is beyond your grasp’ had the ring of truth. At the last prediction, ‘nature has marked you out to fill a lofty place’, the considerable number of locals and the station-master gaping at the proceedings broke into raucous laughter and hoorays. The fortune-teller’s retainer ran around handing out visiting cards.
The train’s whistle gave a warning blast. With a wide smile exposing the fused front teeth the soothsayer took the 50 cash and waved me into my compartment, repeatedly bowing, chattering in Chinese (Mandarin with a northern rhotic accent, with a few archaic, out-of-context English words thrown in, according to my knowledgeable German fellow traveller).
As the Chinaman leaned forward to close the carriage door I caught a split-second sight of a banner through the very edge of one of his glass lenses. Curiously, there was no magnification, reduction or compensating distortion. The appearance of the logograms puzzled me. They were quite unchanged.
Chapter V
I Reach Kashgar Where I Have an Unexpected Encounter
October 24. Our caravan halted near a monument carrying inscriptions in the four official languages of the Middle Kingdom - Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan - the equivalent of the famed Egyptian Rosetta stone. I caught my first sight of the Chinese Empire’s Yellow Dragon flag, fluttering beside the monument, an azure dragon on a plain yellow field, with the red sun of the three-legged crow in the upper left corner.
I reflected on empires. In time even England’s Imperial moment will come to an end. Colonials from Asia and Africa will return to spa towns like Tunbridge Wells, archaic personages with waxed moustaches and silky parasols, lamenting long, leisurely days on well-watered lawns under the jacaranda trees, forever past.
October 28. Last night, after three nights sleeping on the ground next to the pack-animals, we arrived at an inn. There was no lighting. The tripod of the Aeroscope camera made do for a candle-stand and clothes-horse for hanging boots and clothes out of the way of the rats. Food at inns is mostly a monotonous offering of rice mixed with mutton-fat or mutton-fat mixed with rice so the meal of curry, rice and tea or ‘tanwo kuo’ - poached eggs in chicken broth - was welcome. Astoundingly, I was even offered (and purchased) a fine bottle of Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin left behind by an archaeology expedition. It came to the rickety table cooled as I had requested, in a piece of wet felt.
A traveller assuming I was an archaeologist on the way to Buddhist temple sites at Bezeklik five or six marches ahead advised me to mount an armed guard at night if the party camped in a certain horse-shoe gorge, not against human marauders but wolves. Early this week the remains of a twelve-year-old Krakhoja girl had been discovered there. She ran into the desert to reach another oasis after being betrothed against her will to a man of eighty. All that was found were blood-stained fragments of clothing and her long top-boots. The legs were still inside.
London is an arduous six weeks behind me. I turn in early. Tomorrow I reach Kashgar.
2.20am. Reminiscent of my army days on the North-West Frontier, the silence of the night is being broken by a symphony of pigs grunting, rats or mice gnawing, crickets chirping, beetles rustling in the straw. I must lie here until the sound of other humans tells me it’s time to rise for a new day.
October 29. Arrived at Kashgar. The Union flag fluttering over the tiny British Consulate-General signals the last outpost of the British Empire between India and the North Pole. Our man here, George Macartney, is our cat in residence in the Opéra bouffe we call ‘The Great Game’. He monitors and reports back every move by the Tsarist mice to his chiefs at the British Foreign Office.
Mycroft Holmes’s description does Kashgar ‘justice’. It is a small, remote, mud-walled frontier town in the great back-of-beyond, once serving as a trading post and strategically important city on the Silk Road between China, the Middle East, and Europe, but has long since fallen into decay. Two nights in this township will be sufficient. Then I shall press on.
My transport took me along narrow, filthy streets to meet Macartney at the Consulate-General, the mud puddled by the water slopped over from the pails of donkeys and water carriers. It was slow going pushing our way through the throng of people, some pedestrians, others on two-humped Bactrian camels or horses, the animals so overloaded with fodder or cotton bales that only four hoofs and a nose could be seen. The camel bells sound like the peal of church bells on the Sunday mornings of my youth which signalled the end of play in the garden and the start of the short solemn walk to the family pew in my Sunday suit.
News of my arrival in Kashgar had sped ahead of me. Macartney was waiting for me outside the building. We shook hands. He handed me a package delivered, he told me, ‘by an officer of the New Army’.
‘I’ve been guarding it with my life,’ he said.
Then as though pulling a magician’s rabbit from a hat, he pointed to the open front door and said, ‘Dr. Watson, you might like to be reunited with one of your oldest friends’.
A figure stepped out from the shadows. It was the fortune-teller who removed 50 cash from me for an entirely unlikely account of my future, the same thick, tinted eyeglasses, pock-marked face, the same fingernails of prodigious length. In my astoundment I failed to notice a marked change in the creature before me. There was no sign of the fused front teeth, nor the thumb polydactyly. Now each hand had just the one.
‘I say, Macartney,’ I protested, staring at the stranger, ‘that’s a bit strong! I don’t think I can call this fellow one of my oldest friends, far from it!’
‘Can’t you, Doubting Thomas?’ the Chinaman asked in a voice utterly familiar to me. ‘Surely I am one of your oldest friends!’