At lunchtime I walked to Mohammedan City, the old part of Kashgar, the location of the Chinese Civil Administration. With General Yuán’s letter of introduction I obtained the permits needed to continue my journey.
Later that evening I went to Holmes’s room. He had finished packing. His hand reached into a cavernous pocket of the Poshteen Long Coat to retrieve several wooden disks which he placed in a pile on a table.
He jabbed at the disks.
‘Take a close look, Watson,’ he said, as jubilant as Little Jack Horner pulling out a plum.
The discs were beautifully crafted from alder, smooth and lacquered, the largest about 6 inches in diameter. Engraved around its circumference were the letters A to Z. The other disks were in descending order of size. Instead of letters, double-digit numerals were cut into their outside edges, from 01 and 02 up to 99 and a double-zero.
‘What are they for?’ I enquired.
Holmes took the largest disk and began slotting the others one on top of the other, up to the smallest disk etched with the final run of numbers.
‘A machine to produce an unbreakable cipher,’ came the gleeful reply.
His index finger began to spin the disks.
‘I’ve not been wasting my time on my bee-farm, I can assure you, my friend. Early this year the Mexican Army - for a substantial fee, please note - asked me to develop a mechanical coding machine which even the most brilliant mathematician would be unable to break, not even one with all the resources of their much-feared neighbour, ‘the Giant to the North’.’
He pointed.
‘This is it.’
He had ensured complete secrecy by commissioning different engravers unknown to each other.
‘There are only two complete wheels in the world right now, this one and the other I have lodged with my brother Mycroft.’
He looked up, his eyes aglow with satisfaction.
‘I challenge anyone alive to break the ciphered messages we concoct using this device.’
‘It’s certainly a beautiful object, Holmes,’ I said warily, ‘but how does it work?’
‘It uses numbers to represent one letter.’
‘But haven’t such ciphers have been around for thousands of years?’
‘They have - but in seconds I can set this for over 450,000 unique key codes.’
He pushed the assembled device towards me.
‘Those rotating disks convert any letter of the alphabet on the lowest disk into double-digit numbers on the upper discs, based on an agreed key. Once I let Mycroft know the key, any sequence of numbers in the message will quickly point to ordinary letters of the alphabet on his wheel. It’s completely impossible without this exact machine and whichever key we choose each time for anyone to decipher a message.’
Holmes left Kashgar before I awoke, taking the direct road to Peking. I would begin a zig-zag route to the Capital via the garrisons. We would meet up in about a month’s time. At the heart of the Forbidden City.
‘By then,’ I told him, ‘human blood-hound that you are, I expect you to have sniffed out any so-called plot against the Kuang-hsü Emperor or Cixi.’
Over breakfast, Macartney briefed me on my journey ahead.
‘The whole of the north of China is a power vacuum. Marauding bands of up to 250 Chinese and Mongol brigands roam far and wide, sometimes stopping for a few hours, other times only for a few minutes to avoid attack by the authorities. In many cases the brigands are enlisted soldiers who desert with their arms and ammunition after being left without food or pay for many months.’
‘And what if I’m captured?’ I asked.
‘The food won’t be good. They won’t kill you, you’re worth much too much alive. The going rate to ransom a European is 150 rifles, 50 automatic pistols, 4 machine-guns and 1000 British pounds. Americans cost more.’
I asked Macartney why he chose to stay in the back of beyond. He laughed. ‘Needs must,’ he replied. ‘You get used to it. It isn’t so bad. The town wasn’t always so derided. My wife and I spend our evenings reading about its past. There has been a rich history of over 2,000 years. It’s China’s version of Timbuktu. Art, the sciences, music and literature flourished. Hundreds of world-renowned Uyghur scholars emerged. Thousands of valuable books were written.’
Chapter VI
I Leave Kashgar
November 6. Kashgar is now well behind me. A stream we are following disappears and reappears, part of its course being below the ground. The weather is turning. The mules and horses are finding the long uphill gradients at these heights very trying. I spent last night at a settlement even more forsaken than Kashgar. I couldn’t even discover its name. At one time it was a gateway to the Silk Road, then travellers switched to another route and the town was abandoned. The small garrison is all that’s left of human habitation, guarding against any unlikely sudden attack from the western barbarians. A two-handed pole weapon would be better than the weapons they possess.
We camped in a lonely spot by a small river. The mafoo (syce) tells me we are being watched. One of the hired donkeys carries 900 taels of silver, a worthwhile amount to commandeer. Two mounted men came over the crest of the hill, looked down at us, and, when we sent a boy to investigate, disappeared again.
I have taken to carrying my Webley-Pryse revolver under my jacket. I regret not employing a half-dozen armed convoy-bodyguards for this 24 mile stretch. I plan to take the donkeyman’s advice and strike camp in the dark to gain a mile or two on any miscreant before day-break.
Something Holmes said has left me deflated. I keep wondering why General Yuán didn’t tell me he had first gone to meet Holmes on the bee-farm. It seems despite Sir Edward Grey’s assurances I was an after-thought after all.
November 8. For a week I have been thrown together with a party of other travellers. We passed through wild mountainous country covered with dense scrub and bamboo, uninhabited except for a few visiting wood-cutters. The only fuel is yak-dung purchased from a nomad encampment. All the cooking has to be done in the open and everything tastes of the smoke from the abominable stuff.
Last night we pitched tents in a sheltered spot at 13,900 feet, some 1700 feet below a knife-edge pass. A penetrating cold wind blew non-stop. The traffic over the pass is mostly carried on by coolies bearing long bamboo baskets on their backs, at the hire of traders in pelts, pine seeds, ginseng and horses from the northeast. A passing mafoo on a shaggy pony sold me a Mongolian cap, a huge thing of red flannel, wadded and trimmed with fur, with ear-flaps which can be tied under the chin. The cap has already proved of great value.
I have covered 519 miles in thirty-six stages since Kashgar. The sooner I reach some kind of place with four walls and a roof and a good fire for warmth and cooking, the better. In my Afghan days we had a saying, ‘the best bivouac is not equal to the worst billet’. Things are not helped by my latest donkeyman’s fondness for short cuts worn down by the feet and the rains of centuries, bridle paths which defy my compass bearings and more often than not result in unnecessary and intensely arduous hours of travel.
We are passed by British-Indian merchants constantly on the move from the Province of Xinjiang over the Himalaya and back, their horse caravans laden in the one direction with Indian spices and Manchester cotton prints, and in the other with Turkestan merchandise such as gold, jade, khotan carpets, Kirghiz felts, and above all a narcotic extracted from the hemp plant Cannabis sativa, known locally as Nasha but to Europeans as Hashish. For a few pence a time, the smugglers provide any master with a near-perfect communication system across these vast and difficult regions. The traders are as eager as I to avoid interception by bandits or opportunistic Chinese authorities.