The Metal Monster | Page 5

is its verity assailed; upon what seem the
lesser a man may give testimony and at least gain for himself a hearing.
There is reason for this. Life is a ferment, and upon and about it, shifting and changing,
adding to or taking away, beat over legions of forces, seen and unseen, known and
unknown. And man, an atom in the ferment, clings desperately to what to him seems
stable; nor greets with joy him who hazards that what he grips may be but a broken staff,
and, so saying, fails to hold forth a sturdier one.
Earth is a ship, plowing her way through uncharted oceans of space wherein are strange
currents, hidden shoals and reefs, and where blow the unknown winds of Cosmos.
If to the voyagers, painfully plotting their course, comes one who cries that their charts
must be remade, nor can tell WHY they must be--that man is not welcome--no!

Therefore it is that men have grown chary of giving testimony upon mysteries. Yet
knowing each in his own heart the truth of that vision he has himself beheld, lo, it is that
in whose reality he most believes.
The 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.