Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

Chapter V I Reach Kashgar Where I Have an Unexpected Encounter

October 24. Our caravan halted near a monument carrying inscriptions in the four official languages of the Middle Kingdom - Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan - the equivalent of the famed Egyptian Rosetta stone. I caught my first sight of the Chinese Empire’s Yellow Dragon flag, fluttering beside the monument, an azure dragon on a plain yellow field, with the red sun of the three-legged crow in the upper left corner.

I reflected on empires. In time even England’s Imperial moment will come to an end. Colonials from Asia and Africa will return to spa towns like Tunbridge Wells, archaic personages with waxed moustaches and silky parasols, lamenting long, leisurely days on well-watered lawns under the jacaranda trees, forever past.

October 28. Last night, after three nights sleeping on the ground next to the pack-animals, we arrived at an inn. There was no lighting. The tripod of the Aeroscope camera made do for a candle-stand and clothes-horse for hanging boots and clothes out of the way of the rats. Food at inns is mostly a monotonous offering of rice mixed with mutton-fat or mutton-fat mixed with rice so the meal of curry, rice and tea or ‘tanwo kuo’ - poached eggs in chicken broth - was welcome. Astoundingly, I was even offered (and purchased) a fine bottle of Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin left behind by an archaeology expedition. It came to the rickety table cooled as I had requested, in a piece of wet felt.

A traveller assuming I was an archaeologist on the way to Buddhist temple sites at Bezeklik five or six marches ahead advised me to mount an armed guard at night if the party camped in a certain horse-shoe gorge, not against human marauders but wolves. Early this week the remains of a twelve-year-old Krakhoja girl had been discovered there. She ran into the desert to reach another oasis after being betrothed against her will to a man of eighty. All that was found were blood-stained fragments of clothing and her long top-boots. The legs were still inside.

London is an arduous six weeks behind me. I turn in early. Tomorrow I reach Kashgar.

2.20am. Reminiscent of my army days on the North-West Frontier, the silence of the night is being broken by a symphony of pigs grunting, rats or mice gnawing, crickets chirping, beetles rustling in the straw. I must lie here until the sound of other humans tells me it’s time to rise for a new day.

October 29. Arrived at Kashgar. The Union flag fluttering over the tiny British Consulate-General signals the last outpost of the British Empire between India and the North Pole. Our man here, George Macartney, is our cat in residence in the Opéra bouffe we call ‘The Great Game’. He monitors and reports back every move by the Tsarist mice to his chiefs at the British Foreign Office.

Mycroft Holmes’s description does Kashgar ‘justice’. It is a small, remote, mud-walled frontier town in the great back-of-beyond, once serving as a trading post and strategically important city on the Silk Road between China, the Middle East, and Europe, but has long since fallen into decay. Two nights in this township will be sufficient. Then I shall press on.

My transport took me along narrow, filthy streets to meet Macartney at the Consulate-General, the mud puddled by the water slopped over from the pails of donkeys and water carriers. It was slow going pushing our way through the throng of people, some pedestrians, others on two-humped Bactrian camels or horses, the animals so overloaded with fodder or cotton bales that only four hoofs and a nose could be seen. The camel bells sound like the peal of church bells on the Sunday mornings of my youth which signalled the end of play in the garden and the start of the short solemn walk to the family pew in my Sunday suit.

News of my arrival in Kashgar had sped ahead of me. Macartney was waiting for me outside the building. We shook hands. He handed me a package delivered, he told me, ‘by an officer of the New Army’.

‘I’ve been guarding it with my life,’ he said.

Then as though pulling a magician’s rabbit from a hat, he pointed to the open front door and said, ‘Dr. Watson, you might like to be reunited with one of your oldest friends’.

A figure stepped out from the shadows. It was the fortune-teller who removed 50 cash from me for an entirely unlikely account of my future, the same thick, tinted eyeglasses, pock-marked face, the same fingernails of prodigious length. In my astoundment I failed to notice a marked change in the creature before me. There was no sign of the fused front teeth, nor the thumb polydactyly. Now each hand had just the one.

‘I say, Macartney,’ I protested, staring at the stranger, ‘that’s a bit strong! I don’t think I can call this fellow one of my oldest friends, far from it!’

‘Can’t you, Doubting Thomas?’ the Chinaman asked in a voice utterly familiar to me. ‘Surely I am one of your oldest friends!’

The voice was that of Sherlock Holmes. The glasses came off, revealing the familiar, deepset grey eyes of my old comrade-in-arms.

Chuckling at my initial dismay, Holmes switched back to the high-pitched voice of the soothsayer who had so skilfully relieved me of my money: ‘So you will be beware the odd months of this year, won’t you! You will meet with some dangers and slight losses, though in the fullness of time two male phoenixes will be accorded to you’.

Within minutes Holmes and I were seated over a cup of tea.

‘How did you discover I was on my way to Kashgar?’ I asked.

‘I would like to say I snuffed the air like a bloodhound and caught a whiff as you stood aboard the ferry from Dover to Ostend but the fact is one afternoon in July I had an unexpected visitor. A man you may recognise if I describe his dress.’

Over puffs of his favourite briar pipe he continued, ‘He wore a long silk coat embroidered front and back with a white crane.’

‘A long silk coat...with a white crane?’ I parroted.

Holmes nodded.

‘There’s only one man I know who fits that description,’ I replied. ‘A Chinese General by the name of Yuán!’

‘The very same. I was putting out some lemongrass oil in a box with an old dark comb to encourage my overcrowded bees to abscond from their hive when there he was, on my verandah. As though he had popped up from beneath the soil. He started with, ‘Sir Sherlock, I’ve come to you for advice. I heard from Grand Duke ______ how you saved him in the _________ scandal. I also know of you because your famed Scotland Yard calls you Europe’s most supremely skilful investigator’ - to which I responded, ‘Well then, it’s true even Scotland Yard gets things right once in a while’. I said, ‘I beg you to enter my humble abode where you can draw up a chair and favour me with the details’.

‘It is no ordinary case,’ the man emphasized as we entered the house. ‘No cases which come to me are ordinary,’ I assured him. Then the General told me he was exercised by worrying rumours swirling around the Forbidden City.’

‘And those rumours, Holmes?’ I asked with keen interest.

‘An impending assassination.’

‘Directed at?’

‘Either the Empress Dowager Cixi or the Kuang-hsü Emperor, he couldn’t be sure which. He asked if I would travel to the Forbidden City to investigate. He feared the murder of either could trigger a civil war and a speedy intervention by a foreign power. Given the parlous state of his Army any such excuse for invasion should be eliminated with all possible urgency. He had no need to fear England’s intervention. Edward Grey had given his word that we had no intention of expanding our Indian Territories though even Sir Edward was far from convinced Berlin, St. Petersburg or Paris - Tokyo even - would be so restrained.’

‘From your presence here in Kashgar, Holmes, I deduce you accepted the offer?’

‘With two stipulations,’ he replied.

‘The first?’

‘I should have six weeks to learn Mandarin.’

‘And the second?’

The deep-set grey eyes turned on me.

‘That my old comrade-in-arms should be offered his own remit such that we should come together in Peking. Dr. Watson is, I told the General, the man I trust more than any other on earth. I suggested your medical skills from the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan could be of value to his army. Within minutes he came up with a plan. He would commission you to help establish the first Imperial Army Medical company. He warned it would expose you to great danger. Would that be acceptable? I said you have the pluck of a hundred bulldogs. He pointed out the travel to a score of isolated garrisons would be arduous for a man half your age. At that I stretched the truth a little and said you were among the fittest men in England. ‘Done!’ he said.

In turn the General suggested I could visit China officially as an expert advisor on reforms of China’s criminal justice system. He told how courts achieve verdicts by torture, how the accused is made to kneel on red-hot irons, how they wind and twist his arms around a pole while being beaten with a five-foot long bamboo club or a half-inch thick snakeskin whip, or he suffers the excruciating pain of the thumb-screw. If the accused foolishly persists in declaring his innocence, they just increase the torture. The General said the Imperial High Court understands this way of dispensing justice is no longer viable. More to the point, the barbarity of the practice has become another likely excuse for outside Powers to invade.’

I spluttered, ‘But how on earth did you... I mean, meeting up at that railway stop!’

‘I knew you would encounter heavy going. I calculated I had time to take Mandarin lessons and continue them aboard a fast ship to India. On disembarking I caught the mail train to Rawalpindi, then a bumpy ride by cart through your old Army stamping grounds to Srinagar, and on to Gilgit, Hunza and Sarikol, and finally on the backs of coolies over mountain tracks too bad even for ponies.’

‘But why the disguise?’ I asked. ‘It was a formidable performance even by your standards!’

I knew from long experience Holmes was a master of the false appearance. ‘A good many of the criminal classes begin to know me,’ he told me early in our friendship, ‘especially since you took to publishing some of my cases. I can only go on the war-path under some simple disguise.’

Disguising a face with make-up for the theatre or other in-door setting is far from difficult. It was Holmes’s mastery in ordinary daylight which marked him out as exceptional. As he remarked, ‘Off the stage you can’t get by with a celluloid nose or a tie-on beard.’ It was amazing to see how with a little paste he could alter the shape of the nose and the whole character of his face. His real genius lay not solely in the use of wigs and make-up but in supporting that skill with a suitable manner and voice. At least twice he fooled me (a medical doctor) with his workhouse cough, playing an impoverished old man.

He could probably impersonate a minister of the Church of England better than most genuine ministers except that under English Law it was a criminal offence. Dressing as a minister of a cult different from the official religion of the State, such as his amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman, was not.

‘But knowing how to find me,’ I continued. ‘How...?’

‘Cathay is not like Africa,’ came my comrade’s response. ‘Henry Morton Stanley was directed village by village to his encounter with Dr. Livingstone at Lake Tanganyika. But here in these turbulent and suspicious regions no local would supply an outsider with information, even though it was clear to me everyone in the whole of the northern region, including St. Petersburg’s and Berlin’s spies, knew exactly where you were and precisely what you’re up to. If I had not assumed the disguise of a Chinese fortune-teller I would have found it impossible to track you down. The locals would deliberately attempt to mislead me, such is their contempt for us long-noses. When I disguised myself and told them I planned to charge you 50 taels to tell you ‘your present lustrum is not a fortunate one but it has nearly expired and better days are at hand’, they split their sides laughing at my little joke. ‘Go to that railway station, he’ll soon be there,’ they said.’

He stood up.

‘From what you tell me, both our missions are urgent. Yours requires another three or four weeks. Mine calls for me to get to the Forbidden City as fast as I can. We can join up there. By then I shall have got my feet firmly under the table.’

I went to my room and opened the package. It contained my orders from Yuán. From Kashgar I was to head towards the Yili Garrison in Xinjiang Province, keeping an eye open for bandits. After that, I was to work my way to the Manchu military garrison camps at Ningguta in the Hurka River valley where I would meet up with the General and Staff officers. Ningguta was once guarded by the six grandsons of Möngke Temür. These memories mattered, it seemed. At least to the ruling Manchu.

At lunchtime I walked to Mohammedan City, the old part of Kashgar, the location of the Chinese Civil Administration. With General Yuán’s letter of introduction I obtained the permits needed to continue my journey.

Later that evening I went to Holmes’s room. He had finished packing. His hand reached into a cavernous pocket of the Poshteen Long Coat to retrieve several wooden disks which he placed in a pile on a table.

He jabbed at the disks.

‘Take a close look, Watson,’ he said, as jubilant as Little Jack Horner pulling out a plum.

The discs were beautifully crafted from alder, smooth and lacquered, the largest about 6 inches in diameter. Engraved around its circumference were the letters A to Z. The other disks were in descending order of size. Instead of letters, double-digit numerals were cut into their outside edges, from 01 and 02 up to 99 and a double-zero.

‘What are they for?’ I enquired.

Holmes took the largest disk and began slotting the others one on top of the other, up to the smallest disk etched with the final run of numbers.

‘A machine to produce an unbreakable cipher,’ came the gleeful reply.

His index finger began to spin the disks.

‘I’ve not been wasting my time on my bee-farm, I can assure you, my friend. Early this year the Mexican Army - for a substantial fee, please note - asked me to develop a mechanical coding machine which even the most brilliant mathematician would be unable to break, not even one with all the resources of their much-feared neighbour, ‘the Giant to the North’.’

He pointed.

‘This is it.’

He had ensured complete secrecy by commissioning different engravers unknown to each other.

‘There are only two complete wheels in the world right now, this one and the other I have lodged with my brother Mycroft.’

He looked up, his eyes aglow with satisfaction.

‘I challenge anyone alive to break the ciphered messages we concoct using this device.’

‘It’s certainly a beautiful object, Holmes,’ I said warily, ‘but how does it work?’

‘It uses numbers to represent one letter.’

‘But haven’t such ciphers have been around for thousands of years?’

‘They have - but in seconds I can set this for over 450,000 unique key codes.’

He pushed the assembled device towards me.

‘Those rotating disks convert any letter of the alphabet on the lowest disk into double-digit numbers on the upper discs, based on an agreed key. Once I let Mycroft know the key, any sequence of numbers in the message will quickly point to ordinary letters of the alphabet on his wheel. It’s completely impossible without this exact machine and whichever key we choose each time for anyone to decipher a message.’

Holmes left Kashgar before I awoke, taking the direct road to Peking. I would begin a zig-zag route to the Capital via the garrisons. We would meet up in about a month’s time. At the heart of the Forbidden City.

‘By then,’ I told him, ‘human blood-hound that you are, I expect you to have sniffed out any so-called plot against the Kuang-hsü Emperor or Cixi.’

Over breakfast, Macartney briefed me on my journey ahead.

‘The whole of the north of China is a power vacuum. Marauding bands of up to 250 Chinese and Mongol brigands roam far and wide, sometimes stopping for a few hours, other times only for a few minutes to avoid attack by the authorities. In many cases the brigands are enlisted soldiers who desert with their arms and ammunition after being left without food or pay for many months.’

‘And what if I’m captured?’ I asked.

‘The food won’t be good. They won’t kill you, you’re worth much too much alive. The going rate to ransom a European is 150 rifles, 50 automatic pistols, 4 machine-guns and 1000 British pounds. Americans cost more.’

I asked Macartney why he chose to stay in the back of beyond. He laughed. ‘Needs must,’ he replied. ‘You get used to it. It isn’t so bad. The town wasn’t always so derided. My wife and I spend our evenings reading about its past. There has been a rich history of over 2,000 years. It’s China’s version of Timbuktu. Art, the sciences, music and literature flourished. Hundreds of world-renowned Uyghur scholars emerged. Thousands of valuable books were written.’