spot where I had encamped was of a singular beauty; so beautiful that it caught the throat and set an ache within the breast — until from it a tranquillity distilled that was like healing mist.
Since early March I had been wandering. It was now mid-July. And for the first time since my pilgrimage had begun I drank — not of forgetfulness, for that could never be — but of anodyne for a sorrow which had held fast upon me since my return from the Carolines a year before.
No need to dwell here upon that — it has been written. Nor shall I recite the reasons for my restlessness — for these are known to those who have read that history of mine. Nor is there cause to set forth at length the steps by which I had arrived at this vale of peace.
Sufficient is to tell that in New York one night, reading over what is perhaps the most sensational of my books — “The Poppies and Primulas of Southern Tibet,” the result of my travels of 1910–1911, I determined to return to that quiet, forbidden land. There, if anywhere, might I find something akin to forgetting.
There was a certain flower which I long had wished to study in its mutations from the singular forms appearing on the southern slopes of the Elburz — Persia’s mountainous chain that extends from Azerbaijan in the west to Khorasan in the east; from thence I would follow its modified types in the Hindu–Kush ranges and its migrations along the southern scarps of the Trans–Himalayas — the unexplored upheaval, higher than the Himalayas themselves, more deeply cut with precipice and gorge, which Sven Hedin had touched and named on his journey to Lhasa.
Having accomplished this, I planned to push across the passes to the Manasarowar Lakes, where, legend has it, the strange, luminous purple lotuses grow.
An ambitious project, undeniably fraught with danger; but it is written that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and until inspiration or message how to rejoin those whom I had loved so dearly came to me, nothing less, I felt, could dull my heartache.
And, frankly, feeling that no such inspiration or message could come, I did not much care as to the end.
In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes, more than this, a companion and counselor and interpreter as well.
He was a Chinese; his name Chiu–Ming. His first thirty years had been spent at the great Lamasery of Palkhor–Choinde at Gyantse, west of Lhasa. Why he had gone from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never asked. It was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had found him. He recommended himself to me as the best cook within ten thousand miles of Pekin.
For almost three months we had journeyed; Chiu–Ming and I and the two ponies that carried my impedimenta.
We had traversed mountain roads which had echoed to the marching feet of the hosts of Darius, to the hordes of the Satraps. The highways of the Achaemenids — yes, and which before them had trembled to the tramplings of the myriads of the godlike Dravidian conquerors.
We had slipped over ancient Iranian trails; over paths which the warriors of conquering Alexander had traversed; dust of bones of Macedons, of Greeks, of Romans, beat about us; ashes of the flaming ambitions of the Sassanidae whimpered beneath our feet — the feet of an American botanist, a Chinaman, two Tibetan ponies. We had crept through clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of the Ephthalites, the White Huns who had sapped the strength of these same proud Sassanids until at last both fell before the Turks.
Over the highways and byways of Persia’s glory, Persia’s shame and Persia’s death we four — two men, two beasts — had passed. For a fortnight we had met no human soul, seen no sign of human habitation.
Game had been plentiful — green things Chiu–Ming might lack for his cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the Hindu–Kush with the Trans–Himalayas.
That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into this valley of enchantment, and here, though it had been so early, I had pitched my tent, determining to go no farther till the morrow.
It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic cup filled with tranquillity. A spirit brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable — like the untroubled calm which rests, the Burmese believe, over every place which has guarded the Buddha, sleeping.
At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds — the snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow.
And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies in wide, unbroken fields, luminous as the morning skies of mid-June; they rippled mile after mile over the path we had followed, over the still untrodden path which we must take. They nodded, they leaned toward each other, they seemed to whisper — then to lift their heads and look up like crowding swarms of little azure fays, half impudently, wholly trustfully, into the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard over them. And when the little breeze walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of unseen, hastening Presences.
Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies stretched to the gray feet of the mountain. Between their southern edge and the clustering summits a row of faded brown, low hills knelt — like brown-robed, withered and weary old men, backs bent, faces hidden between outstretched arms, palms to the earth and brows touching earth within them — in the East’s immemorial attitude of worship.
I half expected them to rise — and as I watched a man appeared on one of the bowed, rocky shoulders, abruptly, with the ever-startling suddenness which in the strange light of these latitudes objects spring into vision. As he stood scanning my camp there arose beside him a laden pony, and at its head a Tibetan peasant. The first figure waved its hand; came striding down the hill.
As he approached I took stock of him. A young giant, three good inches over six feet, a vigorous head with unruly clustering black hair; a clean-cut, clean-shaven American face.
“I’m Dick Drake,” he said, holding out his hand. “Richard Keen Drake, recently with Uncle’s engineers in France.”
“My name is Goodwin.” I took his hand, shook it warmly. “Dr. Walter T. Goodwin.”
“Goodwin the botanist —? Then I know you!” he exclaimed. “Know all about you, that is. My father admired your work greatly. You knew him — Professor Alvin Drake.”
I nodded. So he was Alvin Drake’s son. Alvin, I knew, had died about a year before I had started on this journey. But what was his son doing in this wilderness?
“Wondering where I came from?” he answered my unspoken question. “Short story. War ended. Felt an irresistible desire for something different. Couldn’t think of anything more different from Tibet — always wanted to go there anyway. Went. Decided to strike over toward Turkestan. And here I am.”
I felt at once a strong liking for this young giant. No doubt, subconsciously, I had been feeling the need of companionship with my own kind. I even wondered, as I led the way into my little camp, whether he would care to join fortunes with me in my journeyings.
His father’s work I knew well, and although this stalwart lad was unlike what one would have expected Alvin Drake — a trifle dried, precise, wholly abstracted with his experiments — to beget, still, I reflected, heredity like the Lord sometimes works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.
It was almost with awe that he listened to me instruct Chiu–Ming as to just how I wanted supper prepared, and his gaze dwelt fondly upon the Chinese busy among his pots and pans.
We talked a little, desultorily, as the meal was prepared — fragments of traveler’s news and gossip, as is the habit of journeyers who come upon each other in the silent places. Ever the speculation grew in his face as he made away with Chiu–Ming’s artful concoctions.
Drake