The Mask of Fu Manchu
by Sax Rohmer
CHAPTER FIRST
ONE NIGHT IN ISPAHAN
“Shan! Shan!”
Someone calling my name persistently. The voice was faint. I had been asleep, but dreaming hard, an evil from which ordinarily I don’t suffer. The voice fitted into my dream uncannily....
I had dreamed I was asleep in my tent in that desolate spot on the Khorassan border, not a hundred yards from the valley called the Place of the Great Magician. No expedition of Sir Lionel’s in which I had been employed had so completely got on my nerves as this one.
Persia was new territory for me. And the chief’s sense of the dramatic, his innate showmanship ( a trait which had done him endless damage in the eyes of the learned societies) had resulted in my being more or less in the dark as to the real object of our journey.
Perhaps, when names now famous are forgotten, that of Sir Lionel Barton will be remembered; he will be measured at his true stature—as the greatest Orientalist of his century. But, big, lovable, generous, I must nevertheless state quite definitely that he was next to impossible to work with.
When he made that historic discovery, when I realised what we had come for and what we had found, I experienced an attack of cold feet from which up to the moment of this queer awakening I had never wholly recovered.
It’s a poor joke to dig up a Moslem saint, even if he happens to have been really a heretic. I never remembered to have welcomed anything more than Sir Lionel’s decision to trek swiftly south-west to Ispahan....
That voice again—and yet I could not escape from my dream. I thought that only two stretches of canvas separated me from the long green box, the iron casket containing those strange fruits of our discovery.
Sir Lionel’s party was not a large one, but I felt that the Moslems were not to be relied upon. It is one thing to excavate the tombs of the Pharoahs; it is a totally different thing in the eyes of an Arab to desecrate the resting place of a true believer, or even of a near-true believer.
To Ali Mahmoud, the headman, I would have trusted my life in Mecca; but the six Egyptians, who, together with Rima, Dr. Van Berg, Sir Lionel, and myself made up the party, although staunch enough ordinarily, had occasioned me grave doubts almost from the moment we had entered Persian territory.
As for the Afghan, Amir Khan....
I threw off the coil of dreams. I opened my eyes to utter darkness. My right hand automatically reached out for the torch—and in the physical movement came recognition of my true surroundings.
Khorassan? I was not in Khorassan. Nor was I under canvas—had not been under canvas for more than a week. I was in a house in Ispahan, and someone was calling me!
I grasped the torch, pressed the button, and looked about.
A scantily furnished room, I saw, its door of unpainted teak, as were the beams supporting its ceiling. I saw a rug of very good quality upon an otherwise uncarpeted floor, a large table littered with papers, photographs, books, and other odds and ends, and, from where I lay in bed, very little else.
My dream slipped into the background. The doubtful loyalty of our Moslem Egyptian workers counted for nothing, since by now they were probably back in Egypt, having been paid off a week before.
But—the green box! the green box was in Van Berg’s room, on the floor above...and the door directly facing my bed was opening!
I reached down with my left hand. A Colt repeater hung from a nail there. Sir Lionel had taught me this trick. To place a pistol openly beside one’s bed is to arm the enemy; to put it under the pillow is simply stupid. In doubtful environment, the chief invariably used a nail or hook, whichever was practicable, between his bed and the wall.
Directing the ray of my torch upon the moving doors, I waited.
As I did so, the door was flung open fully Light shone upon tousled mahogany-coloured curls and wide-open, startled gray eyes; upon a slim, silk-clad figure! “Turn the light out, Shan—quick!” It was Rima who stood in the open doorway. I switched off the light; but in the instant of pressing the switch I glanced at my watch. The hour was 2 a.m.
CHAPTER SECOND
WAILING IN THE AIR
It was one of those situations to which at times I thought the dear old chief took a delight in exposing me. His humour inclined to the sardonic, and in electing, when we left Nineveh, to start off without a break or any leave east into Persia and right up to the Afghan border, he had seriously upset my plans.
Rima, his niece, and I were to have been married on our return to England after the Syrian job. Sir Lionel’s change of plan had scotched that scheme. There was laughter in his twinkling eyes when he had notified me of the fact that information just received demanded our immediate presence in Khorassan.
“But what about the wedding. Chief?” I remember saying.
“Well, what about it, Greville?”
“There are plenty of padres in these parts, and the engagement has been overlong. Besides, after all, Rima and I are wandering about in camp together, from spot to spot...”
“Greville,” he interrupted me, “when you marry Rima, you’re going to be married from my town house. The ceremony will take place at St. Margaret’s, and I shall give the bride away. I don’t care a hoot about the proprieties, Greville. You ought to know that by now. We’re setting out for Khorassan to-morrow morning. Rima is a brilliant photographer, and I want her to come with us. But if she prefers to go back to England—she can go.”
This was the situation in which my brilliant but erratic chief had involved me. And now, at 2 a.m., Rima, with whom I was hungrily in love, had burst into my room in that queer house in Ispahan, and already in the darkness was beside me.
I wonder, indeed I have often wondered, if my make-up is different from that of other men: definitely I am no squire of dames. But, further, I have sometimes thought that although ardour has by no means been left out of me, I have inherited from somewhere an overweight of the practical; so that at any time, and however deeply my affections might be engaged, the job would come before the woman.
So it was now; for, my arm about Rima’s slim, silky waist, her first whispered words in the darkness made me forget how desirable she was and how I longed for the end of this strange interlude, for the breaking down of that barrier unnaturally raised by my erratic chief.
“Shan!” She bent close to my ear. “There was a most awful cry from Dr. Van Berg’s room a few minutes ago!”
I jumped up, still holding her. She was trembling slightly.
“I opened my window and listened. His room is almost right over mine, and I felt certain that was where the cry had come from. But I couldn’t hear anything.”
