Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

by Tim Symonds

  October 19. I am now the sole European in a small party camped the night by a large smugglers’ caravan of some forty transports laden with coral. The caravan is heading in the opposite direction to us, back, towards Irkeshtam and the Russian border. Coral is highly dutiable. We watched as the ponies were forced to swallow the coral. Once through the customs the donkeymen will delve through the ponies’ droppings to regain the smuggled lumps and beads.

  October 21. Our Kirghiz horses are superbly sure-footed. Even on ice they keep their feet. They climb over boulders like mountain goats, or go unhesitatingly down steep paths cut like staircases. In this part of the world the distance from one point to another on the outward journey may be quite different from a return journey over exactly the same path. I came across this interesting fact on hiring mules and coolies for a diversion from an overnight encampment to an isolated fort. The charge levied for the one mile outward journey was tripled for the return journey on exactly the same track. With a patronising look the Chinaman explained the outward journey was downhill and therefore easy, but the same journey back was up a steep gradient and not at all easy. On level ground the distance of one statute mile equals just short of 3 ‘li’. By contrast, up very steep roads the same statute mile is called 15 li, and charged accordingly. A stretch down a river like the Yangtze might cost 90 li one way and the return journey up-stream a third more.

  Late this afternoon our small and disparate band of travellers reached the end of a long valley. Leeches are plentiful on the lower slopes. Anticipating the arrival of monied ‘feranghis’ the local people readied several calico tents for us in the long, wet grass. They were armed with repeating rifles to defend their paying guests. We were supplied with various kinds of game hunted with falcons, mainly beautiful little red-legged partridges which run across the hillsides, and a large bird like Scotland’s capercailzie. The fare provided welcome relief from days of scraggy chickens or boiled mutton without salt, or the tins of sausages and soups brought from London.

  October 23. At sun-up I joined a train crossing rough territory for about 50 miles in the right direction. A short way into the journey it pulled into a small station to replenish water and coal. Word got out among the two or three Europeans aboard that we would be there long enough to stretch our legs.

  I stepped on to the platform and before long a most amusing sight presented itself. Coming at a lick down the dusty road towards the station entrance was a wheelbarrow covered with yellow silk, pushed by a panting porter and preceded at a trot by several coolies waving yellow banners. Leaning out of the wheelbarrow at a dangerous angle was an old man adorned with the longest white beard imaginable, so long it was in danger of catching the legs of the banner-bearers and upending them.

  The soothsayer’s flamboyant clothing was a curious mix of Manchu and Han attire, the flowing sleeves displaying the depredations of moths and their caterpillars which had eaten out some considerable patches. His head was shaved except for the long pigtail known as a queue. The eyeglasses clamped on the Chinaman’s pock-marked face were the thickest I have ever seen, slices of smoky quartz crystal polished until translucent. They completely enclosed his eyes, like Victorian railway glasses worn in open carriages to protect the eye from funnel smoke and sparks.

  Two further coolies at the unusual transport’s sides held up a red woollen cloth umbrella in a cylindrical shape, like the half of a drum. A retainer brought up the rear, carrying his master’s water-tobacco pouch, a small hat and a clothes bag.

  The porter brought the wheelbarrow and its cargo on to the platform at a run and dropped it thankfully, sweating heavily. Out stepped the theatrical fortune-teller. The banners were held up in a semi-circle behind him by the attendants. Around his waist was a silken belt with dragon and tiger hooks of a white stone from which were suspended a watch, a fan, an ornamental purse and a small knife. I was astonished to see he was afflicted with the hereditary condition known as thumb polydactyly, both hands having full duplication of the thumb including the first metacarpal. Many inhabitants, whether Manchu or native Chinese, have a deformation of some sort, a goitre, a strange squint, an unsightly dinge in the forehead, even one side of the face completely different from the other. His smile displayed another hereditary affliction: four or five of his teeth ran together in one piece, like a bone.

  The spectacles made it difficult to place from which part of China his ancestry originated. The predominant Han have flat faces and noses. People originating in the north are often heavier and taller with broader shoulders, lighter skin, smaller eyes and more pointed noses than the people south of the Huai River–Qin Mountains line.

  At my side, delighted with this display, was a fellow European, the same German archaeologist. He had good knowledge of Mandarin, and more to the point, Chinese logograms.

  To my horror the fortune-teller singled me out. His voice was unexpectedly shrill.

  ‘I am your humble servant from Chin-Hwa,’ my new companion translated, adopting the same sing-song voice.

  The German pointed at the fortune-teller and asked, ‘Surely, Doctor Watson, you aren’t going to lose the chance to know your future - and for so little expense!’

  He translated the logograms -

  Foretelling any single event . . . . . . . . 8 cash

  Foretelling any single event with joss-stick. . . . . . .16 cash

  Telling a fortune . . . . . . . . . 28 cash

  Telling a fortune in detail . . . . . . . 50 cash

  Telling a fortune by reading the stars . . . 50 cash

  Fixing the marriage day . . . . . . . fee according to agreement

  To the general satisfaction of other passengers on the platform I succumbed. I opted for ‘fate calculating’. The fortune-teller asked for the hour of my birth, the day, the month and the year (to which for some reason he added a further year). The archaeologist acted as language interpreter. He also explained the seer was writing my answers down in particular characters to express times and seasons. From the combinations of these and a careful estimate of the proportions in which the elements gold, wood, water, fire, and earth made their appearance he would make his predictions.

  In return for a ‘shoe’ (a string of 50 cash) I received the following: ‘Your present lustrum is not a fortunate one; but it has nearly expired, and better days are at hand. Beware the odd months of this year: you will meet with some dangers and slight losses. Danger can be ameliorated by offerings at the Temple of Boundless Mercy. Two male phoenixes will be accorded to you. Fruit cannot thrive in the winter (he had arbitrarily decided to place my birthday in the 12th moon). Conflicting elements oppose: towards life’s close prepare for trials. Wealth is beyond your grasp; but nature has marked you out to fill a lofty place.’

  Certainly the ‘Wealth is beyond your grasp’ had the ring of truth. At the last prediction, ‘nature has marked you out to fill a lofty place’, the considerable number of locals and the station-master gaping at the proceedings broke into raucous laughter and hoorays. The fortune-teller’s retainer ran around handing out visiting cards.

  The train’s whistle gave a warning blast. With a wide smile exposing the fused front teeth the soothsayer took the 50 cash and waved me into my compartment, repeatedly bowing, chattering in Chinese (Mandarin with a northern rhotic accent, with a few archaic, out-of-context English words thrown in, according to my knowledgeable German fellow traveller).

  As the Chinaman leaned forward to close the carriage door I caught a split-second sight of a banner through the very edge of one of his glass lenses. Curiously, there was no magnification, reduction or compensating distortion. The appearance of the logograms puzzled me. They were quite unchanged.

  Chapter V

  I Reach Kashgar Where I Have an Unexpected Encounter

  October 24. Our caravan halted near a monument carrying inscriptions in the four official languages of the Middle Kingd
om - Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan - the equivalent of the famed Egyptian Rosetta stone. I caught my first sight of the Chinese Empire’s Yellow Dragon flag, fluttering beside the monument, an azure dragon on a plain yellow field, with the red sun of the three-legged crow in the upper left corner.

  I reflected on empires. In time even England’s Imperial moment will come to an end. Colonials from Asia and Africa will return to spa towns like Tunbridge Wells, archaic personages with waxed moustaches and silky parasols, lamenting long, leisurely days on well-watered lawns under the jacaranda trees, forever past.

  October 28. Last night, after three nights sleeping on the ground next to the pack-animals, we arrived at an inn. There was no lighting. The tripod of the Aeroscope camera made do for a candle-stand and clothes-horse for hanging boots and clothes out of the way of the rats. Food at inns is mostly a monotonous offering of rice mixed with mutton-fat or mutton-fat mixed with rice so the meal of curry, rice and tea or ‘tanwo kuo’ - poached eggs in chicken broth - was welcome. Astoundingly, I was even offered (and purchased) a fine bottle of Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin left behind by an archaeology expedition. It came to the rickety table cooled as I had requested, in a piece of wet felt.

  A traveller assuming I was an archaeologist on the way to Buddhist temple sites at Bezeklik five or six marches ahead advised me to mount an armed guard at night if the party camped in a certain horse-shoe gorge, not against human marauders but wolves. Early this week the remains of a twelve-year-old Krakhoja girl had been discovered there. She ran into the desert to reach another oasis after being betrothed against her will to a man of eighty. All that was found were blood-stained fragments of clothing and her long top-boots. The legs were still inside.

  London is an arduous six weeks behind me. I turn in early. Tomorrow I reach Kashgar.

  2.20am. Reminiscent of my army days on the North-West Frontier, the silence of the night is being broken by a symphony of pigs grunting, rats or mice gnawing, crickets chirping, beetles rustling in the straw. I must lie here until the sound of other humans tells me it’s time to rise for a new day.

  October 29. Arrived at Kashgar. The Union flag fluttering over the tiny British Consulate-General signals the last outpost of the British Empire between India and the North Pole. Our man here, George Macartney, is our cat in residence in the Opéra bouffe we call ‘The Great Game’. He monitors and reports back every move by the Tsarist mice to his chiefs at the British Foreign Office.

  Mycroft Holmes’s description does Kashgar ‘justice’. It is a small, remote, mud-walled frontier town in the great back-of-beyond, once serving as a trading post and strategically important city on the Silk Road between China, the Middle East, and Europe, but has long since fallen into decay. Two nights in this township will be sufficient. Then I shall press on.

  My transport took me along narrow, filthy streets to meet Macartney at the Consulate-General, the mud puddled by the water slopped over from the pails of donkeys and water carriers. It was slow going pushing our way through the throng of people, some pedestrians, others on two-humped Bactrian camels or horses, the animals so overloaded with fodder or cotton bales that only four hoofs and a nose could be seen. The camel bells sound like the peal of church bells on the Sunday mornings of my youth which signalled the end of play in the garden and the start of the short solemn walk to the family pew in my Sunday suit.

  News of my arrival in Kashgar had sped ahead of me. Macartney was waiting for me outside the building. We shook hands. He handed me a package delivered, he told me, ‘by an officer of the New Army’.

  ‘I’ve been guarding it with my life,’ he said.

  Then as though pulling a magician’s rabbit from a hat, he pointed to the open front door and said, ‘Dr. Watson, you might like to be reunited with one of your oldest friends’.

  A figure stepped out from the shadows. It was the fortune-teller who removed 50 cash from me for an entirely unlikely account of my future, the same thick, tinted eyeglasses, pock-marked face, the same fingernails of prodigious length. In my astoundment I failed to notice a marked change in the creature before me. There was no sign of the fused front teeth, nor the thumb polydactyly. Now each hand had just the one.

  ‘I say, Macartney,’ I protested, staring at the stranger, ‘that’s a bit strong! I don’t think I can call this fellow one of my oldest friends, far from it!’

  ‘Can’t you, Doubting Thomas?’ the Chinaman asked in a voice utterly familiar to me. ‘Surely I am one of your oldest friends!’

  The voice was that of Sherlock Holmes. The glasses came off, revealing the familiar, deepset grey eyes of my old comrade-in-arms.

  Chuckling at my initial dismay, Holmes switched back to the high-pitched voice of the soothsayer who had so skilfully relieved me of my money: ‘So you will be beware the odd months of this year, won’t you! You will meet with some dangers and slight losses, though in the fullness of time two male phoenixes will be accorded to you’.

  ***

  Within minutes Holmes and I were seated over a cup of tea.

  ‘How did you discover I was on my way to Kashgar?’ I asked.

  ‘I would like to say I snuffed the air like a bloodhound and caught a whiff as you stood aboard the ferry from Dover to Ostend but the fact is one afternoon in July I had an unexpected visitor. A man you may recognise if I describe his dress.’

  Over puffs of his favourite briar pipe he continued, ‘He wore a long silk coat embroidered front and back with a white crane.’

  ‘A long silk coat...with a white crane?’ I parroted.

  Holmes nodded.

  ‘There’s only one man I know who fits that description,’ I replied. ‘A Chinese General by the name of Yuán!’

  ‘The very same. I was putting out some lemongrass oil in a box with an old dark comb to encourage my overcrowded bees to abscond from their hive when there he was, on my verandah. As though he had popped up from beneath the soil. He started with, ‘Sir Sherlock, I’ve come to you for advice. I heard from Grand Duke ______ how you saved him in the _________ scandal. I also know of you because your famed Scotland Yard calls you Europe’s most supremely skilful investigator’ - to which I responded, ‘Well then, it’s true even Scotland Yard gets things right once in a while’. I said, ‘I beg you to enter my humble abode where you can draw up a chair and favour me with the details’.

  ‘It is no ordinary case,’ the man emphasized as we entered the house. ‘No cases which come to me are ordinary,’ I assured him. Then the General told me he was exercised by worrying rumours swirling around the Forbidden City.’

  ‘And those rumours, Holmes?’ I asked with keen interest.

  ‘An impending assassination.’

  ‘Directed at?’

  ‘Either the Empress Dowager Cixi or the Kuang-hsü Emperor, he couldn’t be sure which. He asked if I would travel to the Forbidden City to investigate. He feared the murder of either could trigger a civil war and a speedy intervention by a foreign power. Given the parlous state of his Army any such excuse for invasion should be eliminated with all possible urgency. He had no need to fear England’s intervention. Edward Grey had given his word that we had no intention of expanding our Indian Territories though even Sir Edward was far from convinced Berlin, St. Petersburg or Paris - Tokyo even - would be so restrained.’

  ‘From your presence here in Kashgar, Holmes, I deduce you accepted the offer?’

  ‘With two stipulations,’ he replied.

  ‘The first?’

  ‘I should have six weeks to learn Mandarin.’

  ‘And the second?’

  The deep-set grey eyes turned on me.

  ‘That my old comrade-in-arms should be offered his own remit such that we should come together in Peking. Dr. Watson is, I told the General, the man I trust more than any other on earth. I suggested your medical skills from the Hindu
Kush and Afghanistan could be of value to his army. Within minutes he came up with a plan. He would commission you to help establish the first Imperial Army Medical company. He warned it would expose you to great danger. Would that be acceptable? I said you have the pluck of a hundred bulldogs. He pointed out the travel to a score of isolated garrisons would be arduous for a man half your age. At that I stretched the truth a little and said you were among the fittest men in England. ‘Done!’ he said.

  In turn the General suggested I could visit China officially as an expert advisor on reforms of China’s criminal justice system. He told how courts achieve verdicts by torture, how the accused is made to kneel on red-hot irons, how they wind and twist his arms around a pole while being beaten with a five-foot long bamboo club or a half-inch thick snakeskin whip, or he suffers the excruciating pain of the thumb-screw. If the accused foolishly persists in declaring his innocence, they just increase the torture. The General said the Imperial High Court understands this way of dispensing justice is no longer viable. More to the point, the barbarity of the practice has become another likely excuse for outside Powers to invade.’

  I spluttered, ‘But how on earth did you... I mean, meeting up at that railway stop!’

  ‘I knew you would encounter heavy going. I calculated I had time to take Mandarin lessons and continue them aboard a fast ship to India. On disembarking I caught the mail train to Rawalpindi, then a bumpy ride by cart through your old Army stamping grounds to Srinagar, and on to Gilgit, Hunza and Sarikol, and finally on the backs of coolies over mountain tracks too bad even for ponies.’