Marching Sands
"Chiefly our wits," he admitted. "And perhaps the tie the Wusun may feel for us as a kindred race."
"Splendid!" She clapped her hands. "I think you're a first-rate attorney."
Gray recalled the majestic face of Bassalor Danek, and the anger of the Wusun at the entrance of Wu Fang Chien.
"They made some kind of a covenant, didn't they, with the Chinese Emperor?"
"Timur said it was an agreement by which the Wusun were to keep their city inviolate, and not to leave its boundaries. Even the invading sands have not dislodged them. Timur described them as numerous as the trees of the Thian Shan, the Celestial Mountains, at first. Now only a few survive. The Chinese have posted lepers around them."
Gray nodded. Slowly the history of the Wusun was piecing itself out. A race descended from invaders from Europe before the dawn of history, they had allied themselves with the might of Genghis Khan and earned the enmity of the Chinese. Since then, with the slow persistence of the Chinese, they had been confined and diminished in number.
"You remember the legend of Prester John—in the middle ages," continued the girl eagerly. "Marco Polo tells about a powerful prince in mid-Asia who was a Christian. I have been thinking about it. Isn't the word Kerait the Mongol for
236
