“No, we haven’t. I gave the lot to Aryenis, who’s taken rather a fancy to the new drug. I think she’s saving it up for Christmas or something. Besides tea’s filth, though I have smoked it in a pipe upon occasions.”
While I was undressing, I told him what Paulos had said about his people having been driven across the desert by the slant-eyed folk in the dim ages.
“Ye gods!” said Forsyth, sitting up. “The green-eyed Wusuns, of course! What a mug I was not to think of that at first.”
“Who the blazes are the green-eyed Wusuns?” said I, getting into bed.
“Real, original, white-skinned Nordic folk, same family as the Danes and Norsemen, and all the crowd that made up the true white races of Europe in the early centuries. They were here in the first century B.C., when the Chinese were scrapping with them. You read about it in the old Chinese books. Only they disappeared, and most people think they either got pushed westward or wiped out. This lot evidently got washed up here somehow or other, and have been cut off by the desert ever since.
“‘Wusun’ was their Tartar name, and it means ‘the tall ones’; and, barring that they were tall and white and had ‘green’ eyes, which, of course, includes grey and blue and all the shades in between, we know nothing of them. But here they are, white, Aryan speech, fair hair, grey, green, and blue eyes, and tall, as we’ve noticed. What a find!”
“And that explains Aryenis and the various village women we’ve seen. I thought they didn’t look like the kind of Greeks I’ve met.”
“My dear man, the Wusuns are your first cousins, same as the Saxons, and the Danes, and the Normans, who were practically pure Nordic. The present Greek date from a long time before that.”
I had some difficulty in getting to sleep with Forsyth raving about his lost Nordics and Wusuns. It was all very interesting, but I was far more interested in wondering who Aryenis’s fairy prince was, and hoping he would fall over the cliff or get eaten by dragons or something. No, I didn’t really, since Aryenis might want him. I almost came round to a more charitable frame of mind, and hoped he would be a proper kind of fairy prince and not a make-believe. But I fell asleep, feeling very sore about the blighter. Then I got chased by a dragon that got mixed up with a fairy prince, and Aryenis came in in the middle and said he wasn’t a real one, and where were the wiggly marks? Then I fell down a precipice myself, and was unconscious: came to in the middle of an earthquake, and opened my eyes to find Payindah shaking me because it was time to get up.