turning apprehensively, he followed them all the same. For against his rising sense of horror, another sense contended, a sense of fascinated awe. Men were about to die today as he would have to die some day or other. And indistinctly, inarticulately, he wanted to learn about death from them.
After some minutes, the streets began to be alive and full again. Everyone was hurrying in the same direction, laughing and excited, in holiday mood. And now they could hear the full throaty roar of the unseen crowd ahead, shouting Kill, Kill, Kill, with delirious joy.
At last they came to the execution ground. It was a square outside the city wall, with fields and little canals stretching out beyond it, and a small, squat temple with some stone huts nearby, about half a mile away on a muddy road. The sides of the square were crammed with people, standing, craning their necks, shouting, talking and laughing light-heartedly, as at any spectacle. Hawkers were calling out their goods in drawn-out chanting voices, more and more people were pushing and jostling their way to the front, and children were climbing the plane trees and clambering up the stone walls, fighting and shoving each other to get a better view.
Near the front of the crowd was a tall European wearing a green hat with a feather in it. 'There's Henschel!' Jones exclaimed. He shouted and waved to his friend while the people near them gaped and giggled at the foreign devils with their weird foreign voices. The tall figure turned, stared, and then waved back, taking off his hat, shouting unintelligibly over the tumult of the crowd. He seemed to be beckoning them forward, but it would be impossible to push their way through.
'Perhaps it's all over?' Denton asked hopefully.
But then the crowd in front of them began to part and they saw some Manchu bannermen roughly shouldering people aside to make an alley for them, beating them with their rifle butts if they were slow to move. The bannermen gestured the three Europeans to follow them and they walked as honoured guests through the wondering, murmuring crowd to where Jones' friend was standing.
'The captain here is a friend of mine,' Henschel said after shaking their hands with a formal little bow. He was very fair and sunburned, speaking in a voice that was nearly accentless, except that he clipped off every word before he started the next. 'They have caught some bandits who rob our mule trains and kill the escorts and so on. So he has asked me along to see justice done. Come and sit beside me.'
A batch of prisoners was being assembled for execution. They stood in a wretched cluster, each with a placard fixed to a pole that was tied to his back, on which his crimes were written in large characters. The soldiers were unfastening the placards and throwing them nonchalantly down in a heap on the ground, then ripping off the men's shirts. Some distance away, where the executioner was waiting, a man was setting up a wooden tripod. It took Denton some seconds to realise that he was a photographer. The man ducked under the black velvet cloth mantling the tripod, then marshalled the docile prisoners fussily in front of it, just like the annual Sunday School outing at Enfield.
'I must show you some of my pictures,' Mason was saying. 'Taken in Shanghai.' As if to compete with Henschel he brushed the ends of his ginger moustache up with his knuckle.
The captain wanted the bandits' crimes to be shown on the photo-graph, so the poles had to be collected and dealt out to the prisoners again. The placards wavered unsteadily above their heads. But now they had to be moved back several feet, the photographer pushing them again like a nervous schoolteacher. They shuffled obediently, their dull, lacklustre eyes fixed on the shiny lens. Denton could just make out some of the characters on the placards. Murder, Piracy, Abduction, and many others he couldn't read. But their shivering bodies looked so thin and weak - how could they possibly have robbed and murdered?
'Really these people are impossible,' Henschel laughed again. 'They are supposed to have started over an hour ago.'
At last the photographer was satisfied. He ducked under his cloth, peered out again, motioned the two men at each end closer in, then ducked under the cloth once more, holding his hand up beside the camera. Sheep-like, the prisoners stood still, blinking at the photo-grapher's raised hand.
'Watch the birdie!' Jones called out lightly.
The photographer pressed the bulb. The prisoners stood patiently, slack and shivering. How can they possibly be going to kill them, Denton wondered, after taking their pictures like on a Sunday School treat? But his swiftly thudding heart told him they would do it quite simply, without a moment's reflection on the monstrous irony of it all. After all, this is China, he told himself, as if that somehow lessened the horror of it.
At last the photographer emerged from his cloth, smiling contentedly and waving at the prisoners with a gesture that might have meant goodbye or thank you.
A low, excited mutter rose from the crowd as the guards began leading the first prisoner towards the executioner. The prisoner was limping and dragging his foot. One of the guards pushed him, not roughly, but as if to help him along, doing him a service. But the push, no more than a nudge really, was enough to make him stumble. He fell in front of the executioner, his face on the bare earth and with his hands tied behind his back he couldn't raise himself. A little titter ran through the crowd. Then the same guard helped him to his knees, in the same almost courteous manner. He knelt there dumbly, his head lowered as if he dared not raise his eyes to look at the executioner. Like a man kneeling in prayer before his god, it seemed to Denton, except that his hands weren't clasped in front, but bound behind him.
Henschel turned to Denton and spoke quietly into his ear. 'If they have not paid enough squeeze, he uses a blunter sword.' The sunburned skin round his eyes crinkled as he smiled, as if he thought it terribly amusing.
Denton turned away.
A man pulled the prisoner's head forward by his queue while the two soldiers heaved his bound arms backward. How pale his neck was at the exposed nape, where the sun never reached! The crowd hushed with that tense stillness he remembered from his first hour in Shanghai. Denton saw, or thought he saw the quick shadowy pulse of the man's blood at the side of his neck. The executioner hadn't lifted his sword yet, there were still seconds to go, seconds to live through. Beyond the kneeling victim he could see the waiting prisoners. Like him, they were looking on. Even they couldn't wrench their eyes away.
Now the executioner was ready. He raised his sword slowly higher and higher till it seemed to hang down his back from his clasped hands. Denton's heart pounded violently. His teeth were clenched. He felt his nails digging into his sweating palms and yet he could do nothing to loosen them. One, two, three seconds he counted, his body taut, unbearably taut, his teeth gritted, willing the man to strike and simultaneously wildly praying that some miracle would prevent him. Then the executioner's body seemed to relax faintly, a scarcely noticeable loosening of his muscles, and Denton thought for a brief, dizzy moment that the miracle really had happened. But no, it was only that he was looking at the photographer, who had now turned his camera towards the kneeling victim. The man pulling on his queue and the two soldiers holding his arms back had all turned like the executioner to face the camera, and even the victim himself was twisting his head slightly to stare up at the photographer's hand as it was slowly raised from behind the black cloth. The four faces, expressionless, staring, like amateur actors posing in a Band of Hope tableau such as he'd often seen with Emily on St George's Day, hung there in the silence; then, as the photographer's hand steadied, Denton saw the executioner's body grow tense again, the curved blade of the sword, which had wavered a little in his grip, grow firm and still. I'm going to be sick, he thought frantically, the blood pounding in his ears, the choking horror surging up his throat. He saw for an eternal moment the victim screwing up his eyes and wincing, the shadowy pulse throbbing in his half-turned neck; then the sword slashed down with a little whirr through the air and with a clean chopping sound sliced the head right off. It happened so quickly that for a fraction of a second the head still seemed to be there after the blade had passed through the neck; then it parted as the man holding the queue staggered back.
Denton wanted to scream, to run away, to escape this obscene ritual, but he couldn't move. The very thing he dreaded seeing held him to his seat. He waited for the next victim. He waited like the rest, breathless to see how he would die, whether he would plead or scream. His eyes were fastened to the man by invisible chains as the soldiers heaved and