“Oh, yes,” I said.
“However, all that was changed, and changed under the strangest circumstances. We were sitting, Gallon and I, on the piazza of the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo—you know the Galle Face?”
“No, I do not,” I said very positively.
“Very good. Well, I was sitting on the piazza watching a snake charmer who was seated, with a boa, immediately in front of me.
“Poor Gallon was actually within two feet of the hideous reptile. All of a sudden the beast whirled itself into a coil, its eyes fastened with hideous malignity on poor Gallon, and with its head erect it emitted the most awful hiss I have heard proceed from the mouth of any living snake.”
Here Yarner paused and took a long, hissing drink of whiskey and soda: and then as the malignity died out of his face—
“I should explain,” he went on, very quietly, “that Gallon was not one of our original party. We had come down to Colombo from Mongolia, going by the Pekin Hankow and the Nippon Yushen Keisha.”
“That, I suppose, is the best way?” I said.
“Yes. And oddly enough but for the accident of Gallon joining us, we should have gone by the Amoy, Cochin, Singapore route, which was our first plan. In fact, but for Gallon we should hardly have got through China at all. The Boxer insurrection had taken place only fourteen years before our visit, so you can imagine the awful state of the country.
“Our meeting with Gallon was thus absolutely providential. Looking back on it, I think it perhaps saved our lives. We were in Mongolia (this, you understand, was before we reached China), and had spent the night at a small Yak about four versts from Kharbin, when all of a sudden, just outside the miserable hut that we were in, we heard a perfect fusillade of shots followed immediately afterwards by one of the most blood-curdling and terrifying screams I have ever imagined—”