I opened the telegram. It was from Holmes.
‘Dear Watson,’ it read. ‘Inconvenient for you to visit right now. Shall explain at some other time.
Yrs S.H.’
P.S. Am busy designing a single-shot pistol. Prototype as below. In your judgement what calibre would be best? .25 or perhaps .22 (if .22, short or long?).
I tossed the telegram into a waste-paper basket. At least I would avoid inadvertently giving the game away. I would reply later, recommending the .25 calibre.
Another rat-tat at the same side-entrance a half-hour later presaged the delivery of a weighty parcel from Foyles, ‘the world’s first purpose-built bookshop’. It contained Major C.F. Close’s text-book of topographical and geographical surveying. In case I needed to pass myself off as an archaeologist, I ordered the account of excavations at Anau in the foothills of the Kopet Dagh. Ostentatiously tucked under an arm it could be useful for averting suspicious eyes as I passed through borders between one wild region to the next.
The day of departure arrived. A two-horse Hansom carriage dropped me at the boat-train platform for Southampton. The same high excitement coursed through me as thirty years earlier when I set off from exactly the same platform to catch a troop-ship for Bombay to begin my life as an Army doctor. This time a second Hansom accompanied me with the overflow of baggage. The elderly porter ran an inquiring eye over the assemblage of trunks, bags, leather valises, battered tin-box and packages crowding the platform at my feet. He took off his cap, scratched his head, peered at me and asked waggishly, ‘Away for the entire weekend, are we, Sir?’
I handed him a half-crown - a handsome gratuity –and advised him to keep it to place on a horse called The White Knight at the next Ascot Gold Cup.
Exhaust steam vented upwards into the atmosphere through the monster chimney, giving rise to the familiar chuffing sound at the start of many an adventure. The seat opposite me was vacant, empty of a Sherlock Holmes clad in his Poshteen Long Coat with its many flaps and pockets. I wondered what Holmes would make of it when eventually I was able to let him into the secret, that for once I was the principal player in the mission - and at the request of His Majesty’s Government. For the first time since my India and Afghanistan days I would not be the side-kick or, as a rude American described me - in print - ‘the great Detective’s Performing Flea’.
The platform guard waved his green flag with a flourish worthy of a colour guard. I was about to slam the carriage door when the chauffeur who had delivered the invitation from Grey and Haldane came running down the platform and thrust a package into my arms. He fell back as the train pulled away, hand still held to forehead in a salute.
The parcel, the size of about half a dozen books, contained a curious box-like apparatus. An accompanying note from Mycroft Holmes wished me well and offered an explanation. A sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence would soon be formed to investigate the potential of flying machines for reconnaissance and artillery observation. A Pole by the name of Prószyński had approached them with the ‘Aeroscope’, a new hand-held film camera he planned to patent and manufacture in Britain. An ingenious compressed-air system made it possible to film in the most difficult circumstances, from airplanes and for other military purposes.
Before considering ordering some hundreds of Aeroscopes the War Office wanted it tried out in precisely the harsh conditions I would meet on my journey to Peking. The device came with several 400-foot reels of 35mm film and a small bicycle pump to compress the air. It was, Mycroft advised me in parenthesis, the only Aeroscope at present in existence. I placed the device in my tin-box alongside my favourite camera, the Lizars 1/4 Plate Challenge Model E.
I settled back uneasily. An hour with Sir Ernest Satow, the recent British Envoy in Peking, at his quintessential English gentleman’s club, The Travellers, had left me with deep misgivings.
‘Take the Yellow River as a metaphor,’ were Satow’s cautionary words as he saw me to the street. ‘Unfathomable to every Western investigator the Chinese unquestionably are. Treacherous they may well be. One may as well seek to peer into the muddy waters eddying around the piles of the ... (he mentioned some bridge over the Yangtze River) as hope to penetrate the mystery behind the eyes of the Chinese people.’
He took my hand in a farewell shake.
‘Remember, Watson, the man who presumes to interpret the Chinese mind is doomed, his theories snares, his conclusions perilous.’
Those final words of Satow’s would stay with me for a very long time.
Mid-September. The start of my travel diary though so far nothing to report. The waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth, the English Channel, came and went. So too Brussels and Berlin. And Moscow. Am crossing immense stretches of the Russian plain that saw some of the last horse-mounted nomadic tribes of Europe, the Tatar of the Golden Horde. Now the hardest part lies not too far ahead.
October 4. Today is the fourteenth day sailing down the River Irtish in a shallow-draft steamer to the Russian outpost of Zaissan. The steamer leaks badly. Every morning the Captain pays obeisance to the God of the Rivers, before we start. The crew and half the passengers join in with him. The other half of the crew and passengers spend their time in the bilges removing the water and plugging new leaks. The journey is giving me time to start recording my thoughts for the lesser of my assignments, China’s first New Army Field Service Pocket Book. I plan to include concise information on every conceivable contingency faced by the serving officer - from subaltern on the furthermost Frontier to staff officer at Headquarters. I shall start with advice for moving badly-sited garrisons to more favourable ground, reminding the engineers that no natural or artificial strength of position will of itself compensate for loss of initiative when an enemy has time and liberty to manœuvre. The choice of a position and its preparation must be made with a view to economizing the power expended on defence in order to increase the power available for offence. That should be clear enough.
With the world of aviation growing apace I plan an appendix on Aeronautical terms and their meaning, e.g. ‘Aeroplane’ - a flying machine heavier than air. ‘Fuselage’ - the outrigger connecting the main planes with the tail-piece or elevator. ‘Nacelle’, the enclosed shelter for the pilot of a biplane. Etc.
At Sir Edward Grey’s personal request I have also started to keep notes on natural phenomena. When he and I parted at the Foreign Office he presented me with a manuscript copy of a work he plans to publish privately. It will be dedicated in memory of his deceased wife Dorothy under the title A Cottage Book. My first note records a remarkable fact: I find myself in a region where there is hardly any autumn colouring. The leaves die green.
October 6. Along with nearly all the passengers I have left the waterlogged steamer. Today on trek to a fort near the remote village of Mo-tao-chi I came across another curiosity of Nature, a gigantic conifer. The tree with its beautiful light-green ferny spring foliage may be completely unknown to European dendrologists. The village headman led me to the stand just as dawn broke. It reminded me of the California Redwood. I shall informally name it Dawn Redwood. I have collected a pocketful of seed to hand to the Royal Botanical Gardens on my return. If it turns out to be unknown to science perhaps the Society will name it Sequoia watsoniana.
Avery different curiosity of Nature leapt into my tent unbidden today, a big green grasshopper with a reddish head and a broad amber stripe all down its back. We had a good look at each other. It stayed a while before giving a prodigious spring back into its own world.