The Land Leviathan (A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel) Read Free Page B

pulled by a slip of a girl who could not have been much older than sixteen. She made good speed through the crowded, narrow streets of the city and had deposited me outside the Grasmere within twenty minutes.
    Again my donation was received with near ecstasy, and it occurred to me that I was probably being over-generous, that a little money would go a very long way for the average Chinese living in Shantung!
    The hotel was better than I had expected, with excellent service and pretty modern facilities. The rooms were pleasant and comfortable overlooking an exotic Chinese garden full of small, delicate sculptures, huge, richly coloured blooms and foliage of a score of different shades of green so that the whole thing looked like a jungle fancifully painted by some symbolist aesthete. The scents of the flowers, particularly during the morning and the evening, were overpowering. Electric fans (drawing their energy from the hotel’s own up-to-date generator) cooled the rooms, and there were screens at the windows to keep the largest of the insects at bay. I rather regretted I would only be staying a short time in the hotel.
    T he morning after my arrival, I paid a visit on the British Consul, a youngish chap connected, I gathered, to one of our best families. A little on the languid, foppish side, he gave the impression of being infinitely bored with China and all things Chinese, but his advice seemed sound and he put me in touch with a local man who made regular trading visits into the hinterland of the province and who agreed, for a sum of money, to escort me all the way to the Valley of the Morning.
    This chap was a tall, slightly stooped Chinese of early middle age, who carried himself with the utmost dignity and, while wearing plain cotton garments of the simplest sort, managed to convey the feeling (in me, at least) that he had not always been a mere merchant. I could not help but be reminded of the aristocratic merchant-adventurers of earlier European times and, indeed, it was soon revealed to me that Mr. Lu Kan-fon betrayed a singularly fine command of English and French, knew German and Spanish pretty well and could communicate adequately in Dutch. I also gathered that he had a good knowledge of Japanese. Moreover, he had read a great deal in all of these languages, and, English aside, had a far better familiarity with the literature of those countries than had I. He had been educated, he said, by a European missionary who had taught him much of what he now knew, but I found the explanation inadequate, though I was too polite, of course, to tax him on it. I suspected him of being either a dishonoured aristocrat (perhaps from Peking) or the younger son of an impoverished family. The court intrigues of the Manchus and their followers were notorious and it was quite probable that he had, at some time, played a game of politics in Peking which he had lost. However, it was none of my business if he wished to disguise his past or his origins, and I was relieved for my part to know that I would be traveling in the company of a cultured companion whose English was almost as fluent as my own (I had privately dreaded the difficulties of communicating with a guide in the wilds of China, for my knowledge of Mandarin and Cantonese has never been particularly good).
    Mr. Lu told me that his little caravan would not be leaving Weihaiwei for several days, so, accordingly, I spent the rest of the week in the city and did not waste it (as I saw it!) but assiduously enquired of anyone named Bastable, or answering Bastable’s description, who might have been there. I received no information of any obvious value, but at least felt content that I had not made the ironic mistake of going off to look for a man who could, by the laws of coincidence, be found living in the next room to mine in the hotel!
    At the end of the week I took a rickshaw to Mr. Lu’s large and rambling emporium near the centre of the Old Town, bringing with me the bare