“Having nothing much to do, I read them through on board ship, and after that I read them fairly often, until I know bits, I think, by heart.
“A lot of them are mere scrappy notes about his journeys, rough drawings of places and types, and it’s only after he struck east from Urumchi that the real interest comes into the diary. Pass me over that box, will you?”
Forsyth reached the box across to Wrexham, who undid it, and took out a small shabby leather-covered notebook.
“I’m going to read you something,” he said, “that will tell you why I went north. As I said before, once is nothing, twice is a coincidence, three times is a moral cert. This is the ‘once’; part of the ‘twice’ you’ve both seen in the shape of that coin; the ‘three times’ I’ve got here, and will show you presently.”
He put the box on the table by him, opened the notebook—stained yellowish paper and crabbed writing in faded brown ink—and began to read aloud.
He read for a quarter of an hour, and at the end of that time both Forsyth and I had let our pipes go out, and were hanging on his words.
CHAPTER II
OLD JOHN WREXHAM’S DIARY
20th Jany. 1822
I wonder if any one who read these lines would ever believe that I, John Wrexham, am writing naught but the sober truth. When I think over the events of the last month, it seems to me as if it were all a wild dream fantasy. And yet....
Islam Akhun’s story of a king and his army engulfed in the sands and of the buried cities set me wandering, and lo! the city seems to be there after all these hundreds of years, and I, John Wrexham, am the first to have seen its gates. Or, stay, after what I saw in the valley, perhaps it were more true to say the first living man, for others less fortunate than myself would seem to have reached the entrance to the Gates, to find them only the Gates of Death.