The valley of eyes unseen

EPILOGUE

So ends, in a hand markedly hurried and scrawled in comparison with the earlier portions of the manuscript, the narrative which was brought into my room on that bitter Peking morning so long ago: a narrative which, leaving out of consideration the ingenious but confessedly fictitious compositions of the professional romancers, struck me and strikes me still as the most remarkable record of human experience ever set down in black and white. I have already written, in my preface to the manuscript, that the reader must judge for himself of its truth or falsity; but I may perhaps fittingly add a few lines as to my own view and the circumstances under which this narrative now comes to be published.

Firstly, regarding Ronald Mirlees, the writer of the manuscript. I had had personal experience of him in the past, and found him to be a man of the staunchest trustworthiness. No one who had known him would, I am convinced, ever credit that he could be guilty of deliberate falsehood; indeed, his greatest handicap in advancing his repute among scholarly Europeans of the East had been a too dogmatic manner of stating what he believed to be the truth. Critics who were reluctant to accept the fruits of his researches on sight he treated invariably with a cavalier outspokenness approaching to contempt—an attitude which may have been at times in some degree provoked, but was certainly not calculated to make him popular with other orientalists. As for engineering an elaborate hoax and planting it on a former friend and comrade in adventure, I should eternally believe him incapable of this, if only for the reason that to the best of my knowledge he was totally devoid of a sense of humour. So much for the character of Ronald Mirlees.

Then as to his proofs. These are admittedly scanty. Yet the uncut diamonds which he sent to me were real enough and, as I found when I came to have them polished and weighed, of extraordinary value. This fact alone must be accepted as ample evidence that he had visited a region yet undiscovered by the world. As is well known, there are tracts of the wild mountainous land to the west of China where valuable minerals are found in plenty—particularly the minor precious stones such as amethyst and jade; but anything like the rich diamond field from which these magnificent stones must have come has certainly not yet been brought to light.

Next, I endeavoured to find out something about the men whom Mirlees describes as having accompanied him on his adventure, paying a special visit to Shanghai for this purpose. At the Consular offices I discovered that a British subject named Stephen Poyning had indeed been registered as a newcomer to China but very shortly before the time when Mirlees' narrative begins; and some months later an Indian Army friend employed in the Intelligence Department at Delhi, to whom I had written for information, replied that there was a Major Poyning who had mysteriously vanished from his regiment on the frontier some years before. Of the man known as Saunders Philipson I was able to collect several scraps of hearsay. Most of the evidence represented him as a person of wealth and extraordinary habits, believed to be profoundly versed in the languages of the East and to have spent much time travelling as a native in the interior. He had apparently shunned European society even when resident in the Treaty Ports, and what few men had known him were unanimous in describing him as a dark horse—"shady" even was the expression used by one of my informants. The manager of the Bank of Cathay told me that he had known Saunders Philipson, but not intimately, and that he believed him to be now absent on one of those long journeys up country which had been customary with him for years: beyond that, I would of course understand the affairs of his clients were not a matter he could disclose to strangers. I did not deem it discreet to push my inquiries further in that direction, but so far, I had to confess that the evidence bore out well enough the truth of Mirlees' narrative.

I pass on to his discovery of the highly civilised white—or rather hybrid—race hidden away in a valley of Central Asia. This would seem on the face of it to be an astonishing claim, yet when I came to weigh up the probabilities I found myself less and less confident to reject it out of hand. In the first place, Mirlees' story seems to me to be told with a plain straightforwardness that has the distinct ring of truth. Secondly, we of the outer world know practically nothing of those regions through which he travelled, and are therefore hardly in a position either to indorse or contradict any assertion regarding them. The profundity of our ignorance can perhaps be represented by an illustration. If half a dozen ants were set down at intervals on one side of Hyde Park, and crawled once to the other side, but avoided the central area altogether, their tracks might very well stand for the mere threads of country observed by the half dozen or so white men who have ever won across the barren heights of Northern Tibet; and the ants' knowledge of Hyde Park at the end of their journey would be fully as extensive as our acquaintance with that other region of the globe. Moreover, no one familiar with the writings of our greatest authorities on Central Asia—allowing that any man can be counted an authority on lands which remain to this day practically unexplored—need be reminded that among the native tribes of the lower, inhabited districts there are persistent traditions of buried and lost cities. And from what known history tells of Greek penetration into the regions around ancient Baktria—the modern Balkh—it would seem not too great a stretch of the imagination to suppose that other bands of adventurers thrown off from the main current of Alexander's advance penetrated farther east still.

But admitting the existence of the Greek-descended race to be possible, one comes to the real strain to credence when Mirlees goes on to say that this nation had been founded by Alexander the Great in person. I am open to admit that I was at first disposed to put aside this notion as the merest, wildest legend, unsupported by historic fact or even probability. After a while, however, it began to appeal to me with a peculiar fascination, which deepened the more I pondered over it. I became interested. I ordered in books for which the stores of our far corner of the world were seldom troubled and had to keep me waiting long. They arrived at last, however, those tomes of ancient history, and I devoured every word that has come down to us regarding the last years and the last hours of the great conqueror; yet nowhere in any authentic record was I able to find one fact by which the claims of this lost race of Hellas could be disproved. To their theory of Alexander's "death," history itself would seem if anything to lend colour. We know that there has been down through the ages an uneasy, vague feeling that the fever which was supposed to have carried him off was insufficient to account satisfactorily for his end; that long after the event there persisted a widespread suspicion that the real cause was poison. We know that the conqueror's features were remarkably like those of his friend Hephaistion, and from this may reasonably assume that his was a type of personal beauty not uncommon among the Macedonians who followed him into Asia. It is tolerably well vouched for, too, that the commanders of his army were at the time engrossed one and all in their own greedy designs on the empire; they wished Alexander dead, and seeing that no live Alexander came forward to refute the story of the dead one, it would hardly have occurred to them to stop and verify that the body on the royal bier was really Alexander's and not that of a "double" from among his own comely Greeks.

I had also to confess that the reason given by the people of Hellas for Alexander's abdication from the world seems plausible enough. Even a cursory reading of the history of his last years makes it quite clear that the great conqueror was a disappointed, a disillusioned man. He wept not because—to quote the tag of our schooldays—there were no more worlds to conquer, but for the failure of the great ideal which had inspired his conquest of this one: a union of the races of East and West not only by political fusion but by actual inter-marriage, and an overthrow for good and all of the barbarous fetich which would set the people of either continent necessarily in a position of superiority to the other. It may even be that among ourselves the time will come when this humane ambition is held, more than all his marvellous military adventures, to be his true claim to the title "great." During his life Alexander strove to put the ideal into effect; and history tells us how he failed. His ideas were many centuries ahead of his time; there seems likelihood, indeed, that were he alive now—leaving aside for a moment his supposed reincarnation in the person of the man called Philipson—he would find the world little farther advanced towards a liberal and truly civilised outlook on these questions than in his own day. His generals gave lip-service to the ideal of race-fusion, but it was from mere submission to the will of the king, and without true sympathy or understanding.

But that Alexander, despairing of his followers and abandoning the struggle against intolerance, gathered a handful of enlightened spirits and voluntarily disappeared from the known world to found a new kingdom in the unknown, remains to my mind a riddle which written history is incapable of solving. The historians who place his death in Babylon in the year 323 B.C. wrote merely what was currently believed in their day. Mirlees, in the foregoing remarkable narrative, records the belief of a people in the secret interior of Asia that Alexander brought his small band of faithful to that fertile valley in the midst of the eternal snows, where his ideal of blending European with Asiatic blood might be realised without interference from the outer world. It will be noticed, however, that Mirlees does not quote proofs beyond the universal belief of the people of the valley, the inscription on the obelisk, and the statue said to have been by the hand of Dinocrates. Of these, the first two do not appeal to me as strong evidence. Supposing the original settlers were Macedonians, it is quite possible that among their descendants the tradition may have arisen in the course of the centuries that among those who first came to the valley was Alexander himself, and that this tradition finally crystallised into accepted history. Probably, too, it was at some such later date as this that the obelisk recording the tradition was erected: Mirlees, it will be remembered, describes the carving on the monument as easily legible, which could hardly have been the case had it dated from Alexander's own time. The statue, however, is a much harder nut to crack. From its perfect resemblance to the features of Saunders Philipson, who, as Poyning noticed on first seeing him, was astonishingly like the extant effigies of Alexander, it seems likely that the statue was done from life, and it certainly must have been done in the valley, since the first settlers would neither want nor be able to carry a heavy iron image across the mountains. Altogether, after a long examination of the evidence, I was driven to the conclusion that while it might be rash to allow the claim of the people of Hellas, it could be scarcely less rash to deny it.

To the remarkable powers of mind with which Mirlees credits this people, again, it would seem unwise to oppose a blank unbelief. Admitting that they had lived secluded from the world for twenty-two centuries, undistracted by the wars and turmoils and oppressions which have crippled the rest of humanity during the same period, one might not unnaturally expect that their energies, turned inwards, would lead them to great advances in science and the arts. The race, it must be remembered, brought into the valley the highest civilisation then known to the world, and thereafter, to build upon this solid basis the wonderful superstructure of enlightenment which Mirlees describes, would be merely a question of time. In two things, the art of flight and the prolongation of human life, they appear after all only to have anticipated by some centuries the surprising discoveries made by ourselves during recent years. In psychics, a marvellous advancement is ascribed to them, but is this beyond belief? We ourselves have sanely and soberly studied the subject for barely half a century, yet already we have made some progress; we have even recorded cases of projected personality, though in most instances the act was probably involuntary and the power unreliable. Is it too much to suppose that a race originally of great intellectual and nervous force, which had studied these matters for centuries, should have so perfected their control of the human mind as to be able to launch it forth at will? I think not. Nor, I fancy, is it unthinkable that an actual visible shape of the projected personality might appear to the person who was the subject of the visitation. But that the mind-wizards of Hellas, by willing such a visitation and infusing it with hostile intention, should be able to cause the death of the person visited—on this point, I must confess, I am sceptic.

That brings me to the death of Ronald Mirlees. Frankly, in spite of the mysterious and inexplicable nature of his end, which baffled doctors and public alike, I incline to think that he himself was under a delusion as to its cause—particularly as a far simpler explanation occurs to me. Men of Mirlees' stamp, who in their quest of knowledge plunge into the perilous underworld of native life, with its secret organisations and obscure religious cults, often meet with a fate as dark as the matters they went out to explore. Many such cases lie buried in the dusty official files of the East. Sometimes it is a jealously guarded secret filched, sometimes a criminal betrayed to justice, but always there is the possibility that sooner or later the rash foreigner who has ventured into such deep waters will pay for his temerity with his life. Mirlees, as I knew, was in the habit of thus diving into the underworld, where his knowledge of native life and language enabled him to move in a way that would have been possible to few other foreigners living; and he was, as I also knew, a man utterly devoid of fear and not greatly gifted with common prudence. In this manuscript he represents himself as having incurred the wrath of a secret, semi-religious society whose members were also on the track of the hidden land of diamonds. Blood had been shed—it may have been the blood of men highly placed in the organisation; and his story of the renewed attempts on his life when he had ventured back into China bears to my mind the character of extreme probability. Also, I am inclined to believe that one of these attempts finally succeeded. The murder may have been effected by means of some subtle native poison which no European doctor could detect—it will be remembered that he records an attempt of the kind as having been already made and frustrated. His own belief—that he was being done to death by mental force acting at a great distance—seems wild enough, but by no means hard to understand after the experiences through which he had passed. The amazing powers of the people of Hellas had obviously left a profound impression upon his mind, so much so that he was able to put forward the astonishing hypothesis that the mechanism of those artificial wings on which he fled from the valley was actuated by isolated brain force; the grim mystery surrounding the death of Major Poyning would still further deepen this impression; and Mirlees' dream-interview with the Princess Euphrosune—I prefer to regard this as merely a dream, since at his meeting with Saunders Philipson on the following night the latter appears to have made no mention either of it or of Mirlees' supposed oath of secrecy—may well have rendered the delusion complete. All this, taken in conjunction with the cumulative horror of the several attempts on his life, would seem to me to afford an adequate explanation of Mirlees' extraordinary belief.

I come, in conclusion, to my reason for now breaking the silence of thirteen years and giving Mirlees' manuscript to the world. When the document reached me I read it several times from beginning to end, with astonishment that deepened rather than dwindled, and then put it away in a place of safety as the writer had requested. This was not because I believed—to quote Mirlees' words—there was "a doom in it"; as I have made clear in the foregoing paragraph, I found myself unable to accept that theory. But there were other considerations. It seemed to me that the statements made by Mirlees were so daring, so sensational, so flatly contradictory of what has passed for history during two millenniums, that they would be greeted with incredulity—perhaps even resentment—on all sides, and that the ultimate result would be to damage Mirlees' well-earned repute as an orientalist and scholar. There were, as I knew, rival "authorities" who would possibly even welcome such an opportunity to throw discredit on the whole of his life-work.

Now, however, the aspect of affairs is rapidly changing. With the great strides recently made in the art of air-travel it seems likely that before long the last secrets of this vast continent of Asia will be wrenched from her. Where previously a mere handful of indomitable adventurers have been able to cross the awful heights of Northern Tibet on foot, taking months of the most tremendous exertion and peril in the crossing, soon the perfected swift planes of modern explorers will be traversing that unique region of the globe in a few days. Then the race which Mirlees describes as lurking hidden beyond the great mountain barrier will be discovered willy-nilly to the world at large; and it is my most earnest wish that the fame of having first placed upon record a description of this people and their supposed origin and history should be awarded to the man who struggled so gallantly and suffered so much in winning through to their secret land. I knew Mirlees as a trusty comrade, a brilliant scholar, and a most disinterested seeker after truth. He deserved greatly of his fellow man for his services in exploring and making better known these little-known portions of the earth, and it is no more than common justice that the credit for his last and greatest discovery should go to him and no other.

Whether subsequent exploration will confirm his assertions, only the future can show. For myself I will say candidly and without fear of derision that I believe that somewhere deep amid the mountain solitudes there does exist that Navel of Light; that it is peopled by a race from whom the outer world has much to learn, not only in scientific ingenuity but in breadth and humanity of ideas; that it is ruled by a modern Greek of great personal beauty and strength of body and mind, whom the folk of Hellas believe, rightly or wrongly, to be the reincarnated personality of their great founder. Whether my belief is warranted or not, let the reader of this narrative decide. I have done my part in publishing, literally and without so much as the addition or removal of one comma, the manuscript which reached me from the representatives of Ronald Mirlees shortly after his lamented and most mysterious death.

Terminat hora diem: terminat auctor opus.

DUCKWORTH'S FICTION.

THE GREAT MOMENT By Elinor Glyn

THE PRIMROSE PATH Stories by Arthur Mills

THE MARSDEN CASE By F. M. Ford (Ford Madox Hueffer)

OUT OF BONDAGE By Olive Mary Salter

THE ROAD By Lady Dorothy Mills

BODIES AND SOULS By Shaw Desmond

THE VALLEY OF EYES UNSEEN By Gilbert Collins

REVOLVING LIGHTS By Dorothy Richardson

BLOWING WEATHER By John T. McIntyre