Routledge was so happy that he did not care for utterance. Noreen drank the chill breeze in silence for a long time. Once she placed her hand upon the sleeve of the great frieze coat.... Thus they sailed down the variegated and populous coast of China—a different breath from every big and little harbor. Noreen caught them all and was glad, divining far at sea the places she had tarried, but Routledge was Asia and countless continents to her. One night when only the pilot and the ship-lights and themselves were burning, the thought came to embrace—but they refrained.
Presently they were down to Singapore; then across to Calcutta, where the Ganges opens her mighty throats to the sea; then up by devious travels—to catch the breath of the Hills after the Heats. Morning and nightfall, Routledge looked down into Noreen’s eyes and found his world. Night-winds of India soothed them, though apart. And they had their thoughts of the day’s travel together.
At length, up over the crest of the world in their wanderings, they looked, from the amethyst Himalayas, down upon that strange dead civilization of China, a vista for eagles. Tight in the heart of it was the Leper Valley.
This is reached by one of the lost trails of the world. A few gallant explorers have picked the way, but failed to publish since the people would think such a report a fiction, and their reputations for veracity be broken. Traders pass the rim of the gap regularly, but do not know it.
Routledge had learned it from a Sannyasi. The way is tortuous and a bit perilous, so he arranged for Noreen and himself to follow a party of traders. Among these men was a Boy. There was cleanness in his gray eye, and you could not think of taint and look at his cheeks so ruddy under the tan. The Boy searched Noreen’s face with the guilelessness of a child and the valor of a man. When he rode beside her, the air that she breathed was new.
Of course the saddle was torture to her, a cumulative torture with the hours, but it was only physical, and night bore down with the sleep of healing, from the twilight of evening to the twilight of dawn. The journey melted into a strange composite of cool mountain winds; brief, warm showers which released the fragrance of the valleys; humans in dim doors and upon the highways, held, as they passed, in tableaux of freezing horror—suffering, sunlight, sleep. And always ancient China unfolded greater vistas of hills, fields, huts, and glowering yellow faces; and always the Boy walked beside and served—a ragged chaperon.
Routledge would smile on his way and note the large relation. The traders, too, were respectful—brave men whom the Open had kept mainly pure. There is a curse upon a white man in Asia, if he relaxes.
Once the Boy said: “Don’t be afraid, lady. This is the sleepiest part of China. Any way, I would take care of you.”
Routledge bent over from his mount and patted the Boy’s shoulder.
They parted by the wayside with a smile—the Boy and Noreen. She proffered him her purse, but he answered: