For answer he slipped the golden circlet over his hand. The girl, with a swift smile, turned and went into the tent. And, being a man, he could not know it was for the express purpose of crying.
CHAPTER X
CARAVAN
Ahead, above a sea of indigo poppies, rose the walls of Tali-fang. Blue poppies rippled eastward and north to the foot of blue mountains (the seamed, craggy wastes that bulwarked Tibet); rippled westward and south until they melted into the blue haze of uncertain distance. Thus the city, with its dun-colored walls, swam in the poppies like an island against whose battlemented shore blue waves surged and tossed.
The cavalcade that rode through the veritable tunnel under the ramparts was hardly one to arouse suspicion in the mind of the blear-eyed Yunnanese soldier who drowsed in the damp dismal shadow of this gateway that was almost as ancient as China itself and under which at least one fifth of the opium that finds its way mysteriously to the Coast, and thence over the rim of the earth, had passed. To him it was merely a string of burdened, tired-looking mules, four half-naked savages—yehjen, as the Chinese call the hill-folk of Upper Burma—and two swarthy, turbaned men that he could not immediately classify and was too indolent, too saturated with drugs, to conjecture about.
Tali-fang was small and sprawling. Flies swarmed over it, as over a corpse, and the odor of it was very like that of the dead. Misty-eyed, morbific beings—neither Trent nor Dana Charteris could call them human—lounged in the doorways of filthy houses: Mossos, Loutses, Chinese and Tibetans. City, inhabitants, all, seemed as old and iniquitous as sin itself.
After numerous inquiries they were directed to the yamen of the Tchentai, or military chief—a house with upcurling eaves, surrounded by a wall. A soldier informed them that his Excellency Fong Wa, the Tchentai, was at present indisposed, but if they would go to the inn he would send for them at the proper time.
The caravanserai was a mean, stinking place. If there was a khan-keeper he was nowhere in evidence. The hovel was deserted. Late in the afternoon two Mussulman soldiers appeared and told Trent that the Tchentai would receive him, and with Masein in tow (he left Dana Charteris, a slim, boyish figure, hair bound under a turban, sitting in a dejected heap in the courtyard) he followed them to the yamen of Fong Wa.
The mandarin was waiting in a court where orange-trees and pomegranates dappled the ground with shadow. From the manner in which he greeted Trent the latter suspected that the Chinaman knew he was white. His green eyes—vicious, cunning eyes—looked out from beneath puffed lids. As he talked a flat-breasted slattern attended him with a pipe and poppy treacle.