The Fortune of the Indies/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
THE DEAD CITY
ALAN woke first. It was broad daylight, and the boat was motionless. The box was not between him and Mark. It was on the other side of the boat, and beside it sat a Chinese with a knife across his lap. He turned and looked at Alan. It was Chun Lon. Alan decided that this must be part of the dream, too; he looked at Mark, sleeping still, then out at the end of the boat. It was no longer attached to the train of other craft, and the launch was not in sight. Low marshy banks stretched out on either side, broken here and there by the high graves which fill every possible bit of ground in China. A man in faded blue rags stood leaning indolently on the big bow-sweep, raised picturesquely against the sky. Alan looked within again and rubbed his eyes. Chun Lon was still there, sitting motionless, with drooping eyelids from under which he directed a a piercing gaze at the boys. But Mark was awake now, and sprang into a sitting position. Chun Lon's knife flickered dangerously near, and Mark sat still. Everything was painfully clear to him, all at once. He wondered how long they had been in their drugged sleep and what remote waterway this was where the boat drifted. He decided to assume a matter-of-fact manner with Chun Lon and try to come to terms.
"Very hungry," he said, as a beginning.
Chun Lon hooted some sort of command below, and Mark, his eyes sharply directed toward a floor-crack, saw the cook ladle a quantity of rice from the men's own rice-pot into a bowl. It arrived untampered-with, and the boys ate thankfully.
Alan addressed Mark cautiously in atrocious school-boy French, because of Chun Lon.
"Avez-vous any idée!" he inquired.
"Not much," Mark returned, gloomily.
"Pouvons-nous battez eux?" Alan hazarded, with visions of fair fight and Chinese bodies splashing one after the other into the river.
"Non," Mark said, briefly; "trop."
There were too many of them, he knew well. He could only wait and watch and hope that circumstances would show the way out of this alarming tangle.
"Where are we?" Mark demanded, turning on Chun Lon.
"Oh, piecee up-river," the Chinese answered. "Velly big wind, big tide. No can sail, no can find Shanghai. Bad joss pidgin."
The river was as calm as glass, with no whiff of breeze on it, so the statement about the headwind Mark knew to be a lie. The other information he judged to be only too true. He fancied that it would indeed be a very long time before Shanghai could be found.
"We're nowhere near Shanghai," he said. "See here, if you'll get your lazy crew out and row for the Whangpoo as hard as you can, I'll give you fifty taels."
He made this proposition as though Chun Lon were any boat lowda and hitherto unknown to him. He also spoke of "rowing for the Whangpoo" as though it were around the corner.
The fifty taels did not seem to stir Chun Lon at all. The box containing four thousand times that amount stood within reach of his hand.
"Men takee little rest-sleep," he informed the boys. "We go up-river pletty soon."
Mark wished very much that he knew what "up-river" was, in this case. He wondered if they had reached Changhow in the night, passed it, indeed,—or whether Chun Lon had merely cut the tow-rope and dropped behind the unconcious procession. Mark's knowledge of the map of China was slender; times and distances were shadowy to him. Also, he had no idea of how long they had slept. He did not know that to get through the inconveniently arranged city of Changhow, one must either be pulled in a small boat up a "haul over"—a simple lock consisting of a stone chute slathered with evil and slimy mud—or must traverse afoot or in a bobbing chair a long and devious route of stone alleyways leading through the city to the canal. But here they were, undisturbed in their original boat, and, as a matter of fact, they had not yet reached the Sien Kang River—if, indeed, Chun Lon had any intentions of reaching it. He had ideas of his own.
Mark's brain was busy with plans of violence, strategy, and persuasion, but he concluded that the best policy for the present was one of inaction and indifference. He set the rice-bowl on the floor, leaned back, and began whistling a tune. Chun Lon seemed slightly annoyed, though it was difficult to read anything in his expressionless face.
Alan turned suddenly on Mark.
"Can't you whistle anything but that?" he asked sharply,
"The Bowline Haul" stopped abruptly.
"What's the matter with you?" Mark said; "it's a perfectly good chantey, isn't it?"
"I know," Alan murmured, "but it made me think of Resthaven, all of a sudden."
Then it made Mark think of Resthaven, too; and the harbor, silvery bright between the elms through the window of his room; and of the good smell of bacon cooking; and of Jane singing loudly as she clattered downstairs to breakfast.
"'Haul on the bowlin ', the bowlin' haul . . .'"
"I wonder," Alan said, "if we'll ever see old Jane again?"
"Don't be idiotic," Mark growled. "That's like you, to moon off into the past and future. Just look right over there at the present."
Their eyes moved to where Chun Lon sat beside the fortune of the Ingrams. He was apparently a fixture. He changed not a line of his face, not an attitude of his body, for what seemed hours on end. But presently he arose, with one lithe motion, and was gone, and a dirty tatterdemalion took his place, elaborately producing a large knife which he kept firmly clasped in his grimy fist. After Chun Lon's departure there was a prodigious running about, the big sweep began creaking on its pivot, the sail was hoisted and flapped in the new wind, and the boat began to move ahead.
It was an uninteresting country. Sometimes the dull marshy land would be relieved by the far-off glimpse of a pomegranate orchard drooping with scarlet fruit, or the huddled roofs of low huts. Sometimes a solitary old woman, cutting reeds, would straighten her bent back for a moment to look at the passing boat. A line of blue hills appeared dimly on the skyline. An occasional houseboat or a brown sampan came by. The boys watched idly, hardly knowing that they watched. Once a lonely procession passed on shore—a shuffling group with flaunting paper streamers and dully thudding gongs and a wailing as of spirits in anguish. Eight men staggered beneath a great red box; paper umbrellas blazoned with symbols of honor bobbed behind, following to the ancestral tomb some local celebrity. And once a boatload of men drifted by, all yelling together, setting off long strings of firecrackers, blowing upon conchs, and banging on gongs. No reason was apparent for their behavior. It was just China—mourning, rejoicing, in its own noisy way.
Presently the boys talked more freely, confident in the ignorance of their new guard.
"There's absolutely nothing to do," Mark said. "There are too many of them for us to overpower. It wouldn't do any good to shout at one of these boats that pass; our ruffians would throttle us before we could get help."
"Probably the other boat-people are ruffians, too," Alan suggested.
"Probably," Mark agreed, gloomily. "Oh, I don't know, though. Lots of 'em are decent, honest, straight enough chaps, they say. But it wouldn't work."
"You might offer Chun Lon more money."
"That wouldn't work, either. It would take the whole treasure to buy him off, and I'm not going to sacrifice that, after all this, till the last gasp. No, there's not a thing to do but wait and see what turns up."
"What do you suppose their idea is?" Alan asked.
"Don't know," said his brother. "Get us off in some lonely place, I suppose, and either kill us, maroon us, or shut us up, while they skip off with the box. What we do depends on what they do. Good heavens, how I wish I had a revolver!"
"I suppose Mr. Tyler ought to have seen that we had one."
"How could anybody imagine a moving-picture stunt like this? It was all our fault for being such geese as to believe in that boat yarn in the first place. We might have known old Huen wouldn't rig up any such plan."
"But you don't know anything, in China," Alan objected.
"That's very true, too," Mark agreed, shaking his head.
Night had come again—twilight—blurring the forbidding, unfamiliar landscape. Small mist-wraiths coiled up from the warm face of the water and scattered at the slow splash of the yulow. This was a lonely place. Little villages had dropped behind; their lamps burned dimly far astern. Occasionally a great junk, her square sails blotting the sky, flew past with her crew singing in weird unison their wailing oar-song. Sometimes the man in the prow of the boat sent forth a tremulous, eerie cry to the wind. Herons rose now and then from the bank, flapping ponderously up from the reeds with a mournful croak.
There seemed, all at once, to be some commotion among the crew. Again came a running to and fro, a quick jabbering. Then there loomed against the pallid west the uneven grassy outline of a crumbling city-wall, fallen here and there in rounded gaps and here and there rising to its full height, black and solid. The boat was run into a reedy inlet where no current stirred. She was poled and pushed and pulled in among a tangle of rushes and marsh-grass, and came to rest.
Chun Lon's figure darkened the open end of the boys' quarters, and he beckoned with one thin finger outlined against the dusk. One of the boat-coolies shouldered the box and trotted out with it. Mark and Alan sprang up and followed then, and climbed out, stiff and uncertain, upon the bank. The boat-crew was straggling toward the city-wall, and Chun Lon walked very courteously beside the boys. Perhaps they could have escaped then, but there was the box to be considered, bobbing ahead on the shoulder of a coolie. No, this was not the time.
They entered the city through a broken bronze door above which hung a silent gong. Within the gates all was utterly still. Gaunt shapes of stone dwellings rose darkly against the lesser dark. Gradually the boys began to realize a strange thing. This was a dead city. Here no human creature lived; no eyes looked down from these blank windows. It was one of the places where the Tai-pings had wrought destruction and desolation half a century before. The flow of civilization had passed it by; no new inhabitants had come to build up its toppling walls and clear its ruined, haunted streets. Only a few wary peasants lived like animals in hollowed huts outside its walls.
Behind a mottled marble fish-pond where golden carp once sailed, and where green slime now streaked the worn stone, rose the curved roofs of a deserted mansion. Silver bells had swung from its eaves long ago, and its carved portal had been enriched with precious jade and lacquer, long since vanished. Fallen tracery and crumbling stone now clogged its grass-grown gate, and some little beast squealed in the dark as Chun Lon set his foot across the threshold. Within, lofty rooms opened duskily to left and right; many had the sky for ceiling, some still kept a hint of gilded beams and black-wood rafters. In this dim, eerie hall the boat-coolies established themselves, kindling a small fire toward which they extended thin, dirty hands. The smoke of pipes began to curl upward into the gloom above.
Mark and Alan were hurried on into a small room where a stout wooden door still swung on bronze hinges. The door closed, there was a clash of bolts, and they were alone, face to face, in total darkness.
"Well," Alan said, "I hope you're satisfied. You wanted to wait until something definite happened. It has."
"It's definite, all right," Mark said; "but at least it's something decided, something to work on, anyway."
"By the time you've worked it out," Alan grumbled, "our friends will be halfway to the ends of the earth with the box. Unless they murder us first, which is likely."
"More likely they'll merely leave us to starve. Simpler for them and more unpleasant for us."
"We might feel around and see what sort of a hole this is," Alan suggested. "There might be a way out."
"And there might not—which is more probable. No, wait till they're happily asleep over their opium before you go ramping around in here."
They stooped and touched the floor, and, finding that it was cold and rather slimy, they decided to remain standing. They stood quietly. There was a sound of water dripping somewhere; in the corner something rustled and clicked. Alan started.
"What's that?" he whispered.
"I've no idea," Mark said. "I've given up wondering about things."
"Do you remember a story," Alan said, after a pause, "where somebody was put into a pit, or somewhere in the dark, and they thought it was empty till they heard little hissings and saw eyes—and it was full of cobras?"
"It was a bully yarn," Then after an enlightening moment, Mark said. "Oh bosh, Alan! You work your imagination overtime."
But he turned his eyes, wide against the dark, and scowled uncertainly into the corner, where there now was no sound.