Marching Sands Read online

  MARCHING SANDS

  By Harold A. Lamb

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Lamb, Harold, 1892-1962.

  Marching Sands

  Publication History

  “Marching Sands” by Harold Lamb

  Copyright 1919 Frank A. Munsey Company.

  From The Argosy, (serialized)

  October 25, November 1, November 8, November 15, 1919.

  Reproduced from an edition published in 1930

  by Jacobson Publishing Company, Inc., New York

  Copyright 1920 by D. Appleton and Company;

  Copyright 1919 by Frank A. Munsey Company

  Copyright @ 1974 by Hyperion Press, Inc.

  Hyperion reprint edition 1974

  Library of Congress Catalogue Number 73-13258

  ISBN 0-88355-113-6 (cloth ed.)

  ISBN 0-88355-142-X (paper ed.)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  HAROLD LAMB By L. Sprague de Camp

  I.—The Lost People

  II.—Legends

  III.—Delabar Discourses

  IV.—Warning

  V.—Intruders

  VI.—Mirai Khan

  VII.—The Door Is Guarded

  VIII.—Delabar Leaves

  IX.—The Liu Sha

  X.—The Mem-Sahib Speaks

  XI.—Sir Lionel

  XII.—A Message From the Centuries

  XIII.—The Desert

  XIV.—Traces In the Sand

  XV.—A Last Camp

  XVI.—Gray Carries On

  XVII.—The Yellow Robe

  XVIII.—Bassalor Danek

  XIX.—Concerning A City

  XX.—The Talisman

  XXI.—Mary Makes A Request

  XXII.—The Answer

  XXIII.—The Challenge

  XXIV.—A Stage Is Set

  XXV.—Rifle Against Arrow

  XXVI.—The Bronze Circlet

  HAROLD LAMB

  By L. Sprague de Camp

  The time between the two world wars was the golden age of the pulp magazines. There were dozens: war stories, sea stories, flying stories, westerns, and so on.

  Among these pulps a few, such as Blue Book and Adventure Magazine, were recognized as aristocrats. While the stories in all pulps varied widely in quality, these leading magazines maintained a consistently high standard. If short on characterization, social consciousness, and sex, the stories were long on action, humor, suspense, and plain entertainment. The disappearance of the pulps, during and after the Second World War, and their replacement by the paperbacked novel brought about a drastic shrinkage in the market for the American short story.

  In the 1920s, Harold Lamb was one of the most talented, prolific, and consistent contributors to Adventure Magazine. Born in Alpine, New Jersey, in 1892, Harold Albert Lamb graduated from Columbia University in 1916. In the First World or Kaiserian War he served in the American Army as an infantryman.

  After the war, recently married, Lamb soon settled down to a full-time writing career. In the 1920s, he contributed a huge volume of tales of historical adventure to Adventure and other magazines. All concerned the milieu that Lamb made particularly his own: the conflict between East and West, between Europe and Asia. He told of the bloody incursions of Turks and Mongols into Europe and of Crusaders and Cossacks into Asia.

  About forty loosely linked novelettes in Adventure narrated the adventures of several Cossack heroes in the early seventeenth century, in the times of Boris Godunov in Russia and Akbar in India. A few of these stories have been reprinted by Doubleday in recent years. They are tales of wild adventure, full of swordplay, plots, treachery, startling surprises, mayhem, and massacre, laid in the most exotic setting that one can imagine and still stay in a known historical period on this planet. Lamb influenced other writers of adventure fiction, notably Robert E. Howard, creator of the mighty prehistoric barbarian hero, Conan.

  Making his home in California, Lamb also traveled in the Orient, although details of his journeys are scarce. A shy man who disliked crowds and social events, he avoided publicity and self-promotion. He became prodigiously learned in Asian history and languages. I met him once, when he came to New York about 1958 to consult with his editors at Doubleday. In his sixties, he was a big, well-built, handsome man with close-cut gray hair and a hearing aid. Having just studied ancient Persian for a historical novel, I greeted him in that language, to which he replied without hesitation in the same.

  In 1927, Lamb published his first best-selling book, a biography of Genghis Khan. Thenceforth he gave less and less time to fiction and more to popular history and biography, always on his favorite theme of East-versus-West. He wrote histories of the Crusades and of the conquests of the Turks, the Mongols, and the Cossacks. He wrote biographies of leaders on both sides of this millennial struggle, such as Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal, Justinian, Charlemagne, Timur, and Suleyman the Magnificent. His last book was a life of Babur, the first Mogul emporer of India. In the Second World or Hitlerian War, he traveled in the Arab lands on behalf of the Office of Strategic Services. He died after a brief illness in 1962, aged seventy-nine.

  Marching Sands (originally published in 1920) is very early Lamb—in fact, probably his first published book. The setting is China and Mongolia, but in modern times. The story contains several elements that were then common in science fiction and fantasy writing but have since dropped out of general use. This, however, should not interfere with our enjoyment of the story.

  For instance, there is the lost-race plot, a staple of adventure fiction of half a century ago. It has since been made obsolete by the perfection of the airplane, as a result of which scarcely a square mile of the earth's surface has not been viewed from the air. No room is left for lost cities and lost races to hide in.

  There are touches of the now discredited idea of "the white man's burden" and references to the "Aryan race." This latter concept was subsequently made infamous by Hitler and exploded by advances in anthropology and genetics.

  Finally, there is the exemplary sexual purity of the leading characters, which in our promiscuous age seems quaint. Such a convention, however, had its uses. The sexual revolution has more or less ruined the old-fashioned love story. A storyteller used to be able to make a whole novel out of the efforts of a young couple to overcome legal, financial, moral and other obstacles to achieve union. Now it is all to simple and predictable. Boy no sooner meets girl than they are racing off to the bedroom. End of story. The old way was really more fun for the reader.

  CHAPTER I

  The Lost People

  “You want me to fail.”

  It was neither question nor statement. It came in a level voice, the words dropping slowly from the lips of the man in the chair as if he weighed each one.

  He might have been speaking aloud to himself as he sat staring directly in front of him, powerful hands crossed placidly over his knees. He was a man that other men would look at twice, and a woman might glance at once—and remember. Yet there was nothing remarkable about him, except perhaps a singular depth of chest that made his quiet words resonant.

  That and the round column of a throat bore out the evidence of strength shown in the hands. A broad, brown head showed a hard mouth, and wide-set, green eyes. These eyes were level and slow moving, like the lips—the eyes of a man who could play a poker hand and watch other men without looking at them directly.

  There was a certain melancholy mirrored in the expressionless face. The melancholy that is the toll of hardships and physical suffering. This, coupled with great, though concealed, physical strength, was the curious trait of the man in the chair, Captain Robert Gray, once adventurer and explorer, now
listed in the United States Army Reserve.

  He had the voyager’s trick of wearing excellent clothes carelessly, and the army man’s trait of restrained movement and speech. He was on the verge of a vital decision; but he spoke placidly, even coldly. So much so that the man at the desk leaned forward earnestly.

  “No, we don’t want you to fail, Captain Gray. We want you to find out the truth and to tell us what you have found out.”

  “Suppose there is nothing to discover?”

  “We will know we are mistaken.”

  “Will that satisfy you?”

  “Yes.”

  Captain “Bob” Gray scrutinized a scar on the back of his right hand. It had been made by a Mindanao kris, and, as the edge of the kris had been poisoned, the skin was still a dull purple. Then he smiled.

  “I thought,” he said slowly, “that the lost people myths were out of date. I thought the last missing tribe had been located and card-indexed by the geographical and anthropological societies.”

  Dr. Cornelius Van Schaick did not smile. He was a slight, gray man, with alert eyes. And he was the head of the American Exploration Society, a director of the Museum of Natural History—in the office of which he was now seated with Gray—and a member of sundry scientific and historical academies.

  “This is not a lost people, Captain Gray.” He paused, pondering his words. “It is a branch of our own race, the Indo-Aryan, or white race. It is the Wusun—the ‘Tall Ones.’ We—the American Exploration Society—believe it is to be found in the heart of Asia.” He leaned back, alertly.

  Gray’s brows went up.

  “And so you are going to send an expedition to look for it?”

  “To look for it.” Van Schaick nodded, with the enthusiasm of a scientist on the track of a discovery. “We are going to send you, to prove that it exists. If this is proved,” he continued decisively, “we will know that a white race was dominant in Asia before the time of the great empires; that the present Central Asian may be descended from Aryan stock. We will have new light on the development of races—even on the Bible—”

  “Steady, Doctor!” Gray raised his hand. “You’re getting out of my depth. What I want to know is this: Why do you think that I can find this white tribe in Asia—the Wusuns? I’m an army officer, out of a job and looking for one. That’s why I answered your letter. I’m broke, and I need work, but—”

  Van Schaick peered at a paper that he drew from a pile on his desk.

  “We had good reasons for selecting you, Captain Gray,” he said dryly. “You have done exploration work north of the Hudson Bay; you once stamped out dysentery in a Mindanao district; you have done unusual work for the Bureau of Navigation; on active service in France you led your company—”

  Gray looked up quickly. “So did a thousand other American officers,” he broke in.

  “Ah, but very few have had a father like yours,” he smiled, tapping the paper gently. “Your father, Captain Gray, was once a missionary of the Methodists, in Western Shensi. You were with him, there, until you were four years of age. I understand that he mastered the dialect of the border, thoroughly, and you also picked it up, as a child. This is correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your father, before he died in this country, persisted in refreshing, from time to time, your knowledge of the dialect.”

  “Yes.”

  Van Schaick laid down the paper.

  “In short, Captain Gray,” he concluded, “you have a record at Washington of always getting what you go after, whether it is information or men. That can be said about many explorers, perhaps; but in your case the results are on paper. You have never failed. That is why we want you. Because, if you don’t find the Wusun, we will then know they are not to be found.”

  “I don’t think they can be found.”

  The scientist peered at his visitor curiously.

  “Wait until you have heard our information about the white race in the heart of China, before you make up your mind,” he said in his cold, concise voice, gathering the papers into their leather portmanteau. “Do you know why the Wusun have not been heard from?”

  “I might guess. They seem to be in a region where no European explorers have gone—”

  “Have been permitted to go. Asia, Captain Gray, for all our American investigations, is a mystery to us. We think we have removed the veil from its history, and we have only detached a thread. The religion of Asia is built on its past. And religion is the pulse of Asia. The Asiatics have taught their children that, from the dawn of history, they have been lords of the civilized world. What would be the result if it were proved that a white race dominated Central Asia before the Christian era? The traditions of six hundred million people who worship their past would be shattered.”

  Gray was silent while the scientist placed his finger on a wall map of Asia. Van Schaick drew his finger inland from the coast of China, past the rivers and cities, past the northern border of Tibet to a blank space under the mountains of Turkestan where there was no writing.

  “This is the blind spot of Asia,” he said. “It has grown smaller, as Europeans journeyed through its borders. Tibet we know. The interior of China we know, except for this blind spot. It is—”

  “In the Desert of Gobi.”

  “The one place white explorers have been prevented from visiting. And it is here we have heard the Wusun are.”

  “A coincidence.”

  Van Schaick glanced at his watch.

  “If you will come with me, Captain Gray, to the meeting of the Exploration Society now in session, I will convince you it is no coincidence. Before we go, I would like to be assured of one thing. The expedition to the far end of the Gobi Desert will not be safe. It may be very dangerous. Would you be willing to undertake it?”

  Gray glanced at the map and rose.

  “If you can show me, Doctor,” he responded, “that there is something to be found—I’d tackle it.”

  “Come with me,” nodded Van Schaick briskly.

  The halls of the museum were dark, as it was past the night hour for visitors. A small light at the stairs showed the black bulk of inanimate forms in glass compartments, and the looming outline of mounted beasts, with the white bones of prehistoric mammals.

  At the entrance, Van Schaick nodded to an attendant, who summoned the scientist’s car.

  Their footsteps had ceased to echo along the tiled corridor. The motionless beast groups stared unwinkingly at the single light from glass eyes. Then a form moved in one of the groups.

  The figure slipped from the stuffed animals, down the hall. The entrance light showed for a second a slender man in an overcoat who glanced quickly from side to side at the door to see if he was observed. Then he went out of the door, into the night.

  CHAPTER II

  Legends

  That evening a few men were gathered in Van Schaick’s private office at the building of the American Exploration Society. One was a celebrated anthropologist, another a historian who had come that day from Washington. A financier whose name figured in the newspapers was a third. And a European Orientologist.

  To these men, Van Schaick introduced Gray, explaining briefly what had passed in their interview.

  “Captain Gray,” he concluded, “wishes proof of what we know. If he can be convinced that the Wusun are to be found in the Gobi Desert, he is ready to undertake the trip.”

  For an hour the three scientists talked. Gray listened silently. They were followers of a calling strange to him, seekers after the threads of knowledge gleaned from the corners of the earth, zealots, men who would spend a year or a lifetime in running down a clew to a new species of human beings or animals. They were men who were gatherers of the treasures of the sciences, indifferent to the ordinary aspects of life, unsparing in their efforts. And he saw that they knew what they were talking about.

  In the end of the Bronze Age, at the dawn of history, they explained, the Indo-Aryan race, their own race, swept eastward from Sca
ndinavia and the north of Europe, over the mountain barrier of Asia, and conquered the Central Asian peoples—the Mongolians—with their long swords.

  This was barely known, and only guessed at by certain remnants of the Aryan language found in Northern India, and inscriptions dug up from the mountains of Turkestan.

  They believed, these scientists, that before the great Han dynasty of China, an Indo-Aryan race known as the Sace had ruled Central Asia. The forefathers of the Europeans had ruled the Mongolians. The ancestors of thousands of Central Asians of today had been white men—tall men, with long skulls, and yellow hair, and great fighters.

  The earliest annals of China mentioned the Huing-nu—light-eyed devils—who came down into the desert. The manuscripts of antiquity bore the name of the Wusun—the “Tall Ones.” And the children of the Aryan conquerors had survived, fighting against the Mongolians for several hundred years.

  “They survive today,” said the historian earnestly. “Marco Polo, the first European to enter China, passed along the northern frontier of the Wusun land. He called their king Prester John and a Christian. You have heard of the myth of Prester John, sometimes called the monarch of Asia. And of the fabulous wealth of his kingdom, the massive cities. The myth states that Prester John was a captive in his own palace.”

  “You see,” assented Van Schaick, “already the captivity of the Wusun had begun. The Mongolians have never tolerated other races within their borders. During the time of Genghis Khan and the Tartar conquerors, the survivors of the Aryans were thinned by the sword.”

  “Marco Polo,” continued the historian, “came as near to the land of the Wusun as any other European. Three centuries later a Portuguese missionary, Benedict Goes, passed through the desert near the city of the Wusun, and reported seeing some people who were fair of face, tall and light-eyed.”