For thirty years he had wandered under the far stretches of brilliant skies and over the tinted dunes that had been as home to him for so long. He had pitched his dragon tent under the lee of the purple and vermilion cliffs and at the foot of God's Altar Stones, the needle pinnacles of an old continent which seemed to pierce the riotous sunset heavens. He had communed with eternal quiet and had become the intimate of the stars by night. He had come to America on an Imperial mission, and hopeless as it had seemed for years, he had pursued it long after the fall of Imperial power in China; for his heart was in the task.
His quest was the recovery of the wondrous black opal, talisman of the Ancient Tsins, pillaged by a band of smugglers from the old Palace of the early Manchus at Mukden. Under disguise he had followed the smugglers to their stronghold in Lower California. He had joined them. By assiduous cunning, he had located the great jewel. And then, almost successful, his plans to regain it had been suspected. A furious chase had led him through the wildest regions into Arizona and on up into the Painted Desert. One by one he had accounted for his quarry until one alone remained. And then that one had perished in a sand storm which had buried him and his fabulously precious burden without a trace.
The shifting face of the desert had altered with the long years of Prince Chu's search, he was an old man now. He knew the arid region as a parent knows his wilful offspring. He had witnessed the strange and various vegetation creep slowly over the dunes which he had with his own hands shoveled aside. He had seen old dunes melt and blow away, and new ones rise. Now he was bound southward across the desert to Flagstaff, thence homeward. He had found the ancient talisman of the Tsins, the remarkable black opal, the most precious stone, at least in his understanding, in the world. The silver-haired old Oriental could hardly picture the changes which had taken place in his native land. He could not fit his imagination to what he would find at the other end of his long journey; but here he was leaving peace.
With a gesture almost of reluctance, he stood erect and raised his arms in a simple obeisance before partaking of his last meal there. It was a leave-taking of reverence and almost of sadness. His glance traveled to the northwest and fixed itself on the far horizon meditatively. In the distance the hazy cliffs were slowly being obscured by an undefined cloud which seemed without dependence on the sky—a volume yellowish and murky. The dunes were stifled in dead calm. Nothing moved. Only the heat waves writhed upward as though to lick the still air in their ravenous thirst.
"It will be another hour, maybe," speculated Prince Chu. "Then the Twin Gods of Thunder Mountain will begin to sweep the desert." He had learned the legends of the desert peoples, and he had found beauty in their poetry. In his eyes smouldered a certain brilliancy—the look of a dreamer. In his sensitive lips, in his long, thin-bridged nose, spoke ages of refinement. Prince Yuen Ming Chu's family history stretched back two thousand years, even to the ancient Tsins.
After eating, he carefully rinsed and packed his fragile porcelain rice and tea bowls. Emerging from under his sun-shade, he righted one of the kiaks, and was about to repack it, when some inner sense warned him to straighten up and look back of him.
Staring at him, about forty feet away, were two individuals of the genus homo and otherwise not easily classifiable. One was taller than the other, and the shorter one seemed the most ragged of the two. Their much-traveled appearance suggested that they had been somewhere; but their lack of any equipment for a journey aroused Prince Chu's suspicion that their destination might be "just anywhere to get away from where they had been." He rightly guessed that their object was to put a considerable distance between themselves and the Hopi Reservation.
He had been long enough in the country to recognize these two specimens as a certain brand of unscrupulous white riff-raff, driven from the city slums, which was given to preying upon the Indians, in one way or another. It was evident that they were leaving the Hopi people under circumstances of haste. In one swift glance he gleaned all of this, and then continued unconcernedly with his packing.
After their astonished survey of the dragon tent, the pair limped nearer.