Michael Moorcock
The Land Leviathan
INTRODUCTION
My grandfather, who died relatively young after he had volunteered for service in the Great War, became increasingly secretive and misanthropic in his last years so that the discovery of a small steel safe amongst his effects was unsurprising and aroused no curiosity whatsoever in his heirs who, finding that they could not unlock it (no key ever came to light), simply stored it away with his papers and forgot about it. The safe remained in the attic of our Yorkshire house for the best part of fifty years and doubtless would still be there if it had not been for my discovery of the manuscript which I published a couple of years ago under the title The War Lord of the Air. After the book was published I received many interesting letters from people asking me if it was merely a piece of fiction or if the story had come into my hands as I had described. I, of course, believed Bastable's story (and my grandfather's) completely, yet sometimes felt quite as frustrated as my grandfather had done when he had tried to get people to share his belief, and I couldn't help brooding occasionally on the mystery of the young man's disappearance after those long hours spent talking to my grandfather on Rowe Island in the early years of the century. As it turned out, I was soon to find myself in possession of, for me, the best possible proof of my grandfather's veracity, if not of Bastable's. I spent this past summer in Yorkshire, where we have a house overlooking the moors of the West Riding, and, having little to do but go for long walks and enjoy the pleasures of rock climbing, I took to looking through the rest of my grandfather's things, coming at length upon the old steel safe jammed in a corner under the eaves of one of our innumerable attics. The safe was hidden behind the moulting remains of a stuffed timber wolf which had used to terrify me as a child, and perhaps that was the reason why I had not previously found it. As I pushed the beast aside, his dusty glass eyes seemed to glare at me with hurt dignity and he toppled slowly sideways and fell with a muffled crash into a heap of yellowing newspapers which another of my relatives, for reasons of his own, had once thought worth preserving. It was as if the wolf had been guarding the safe since the beginning of Time, and I had a slight feeling of invading hallowed ground, much as some booty-hunting Victorian archaeologist must have felt as he chipped his way into the tomb of a dead Egyptian king!
The safe was about eighteen inches deep and a couple of feet high, made of thick steel. The outside had grown a little rusty and the handle would not budge when I tried it. I hunted about the house for spare keys which might fit the lock, finding the best part of a score of keys, but none which would open the safe. By now my curiosity was fully whetted and I manhandled the safe downstairs and took it into my workshop where I tried to force it. All I succeeded in doing was to break two or three chisels and ruin the blades of my hacksaw, so eventually I had to telephone a specialist locksmith in Leeds and ask for expert help in opening the thing. I was pessimistically certain that the safe would contain only some out-of-date share certificates or nothing at all, but I knew I should not be able to rest until it was opened. The locksmith came, eventually, and it took him only a short while to get the safe undone.
I remember the rather sardonic glance he offered me as the contents were displayed for the first time in almost sixty years.
It was plain that he thought I had wasted my money, for there were no family treasures here, merely a pile of closely written foolscap sheets, beginning to show their age. The handwriting was not even my grandfather's and I experienced a distinct sinking sensation, for obviously I had hoped to find notes which would tell me more about Bastable and my grandfather's experiences after he had set off for China to seek the Valley of the Morning, where he had guessed Bastable to be.
As he left, the locksmith gave me what I guessed to be a pitying look and said that his firm would be sending the bill along kter, I sighed, made myself a pot of coffee, and then sat down to leaf through the sheets.
Only then did I realize that I had found something even more revealing than anything I had hoped to discover (and, it emerged, even more mystifying!) - for these notes were Bastable's own. Here, written in his hand, was an account of his experiences after he had left my grandfather - there was even a brief note addressed to him from Bastable:
Moorcock. I hope this reaches you. Make of it what you will. I'm going to try my luck again. This time if I am not successful I doubt I shall have the courage to continue with my life (if it is mine). Yours - Bastable.
Attached to this were some sheets in my grandfather's flowing handwriting and these I reproduce in the body of the text, making it the first section.
This first section is self-explanatory. There is little I need to add at all. You may read the rest for yourself and make up your own mind as to its authenticity.
michael moorcock
Ladbroke Grove
September 1973
PROLOGUE: IN SEARCH OF OSWALD BASTABLE
If I were ever to write a book of travel, no matter how queer the events it described, I am sure I would never have the same trouble placing it with a publisher as I had when I tried to get into print Oswald Bastable's strange tale of his visit to the future in the year 1973. People are not alarmed by the unusual so long as it is placed in an acceptable context. A book describing as fact the discovery of a race of four-legged, three-eyed men of abnormal intelligence and supernatural powers who live in Thibet would probably be taken by a krge proportion of the public as absolutely credible. Similarly, if I had dressed up Bastable's story as fiction I am certain that critics would have praised me for my rich imagination and that a reasonably wide audience would have perused it in a couple of summer afternoons and thought it a jolly exciting read for the money, then promptly forgotten all about it.
Perhaps it is what I should have done, but, doubtless irrationally, I felt that I had a duty to Bastable to publish his account as it stood.
I could, were I trying to make money with my pen, write a whole book, full of sensational anecdotes, concerning my travels in China - a country divided by both internal and external pressures, where the only real law can be found in the territories leased to various foreign powers, and where a whole variety of revolutionists and prophets of peculiar political and religious sects squabble continuously for a larger share of that vast and ancient country; but my object is not to make money from Bastable's story. I merely think it is up to me to keep my word to him and do my best to put it before the public.
Now that I have returned home, with some relief, to England, I have become a little more optimistic about China's chances of saving herself from chaos and foreign exploitation. There has been the revolution resulting in the deposing of the last of the Manchus and the setting up of a republic under Sun Yat-sen, who seems to be a reasonable and moderate leader, a man who has learned a great deal from the political history of Europe and yet does not seem content just to ape the customs of the West. Possibly there is hope for China now. However, it is not my business here to speculate upon China's political future, but to record how I travelled to the Valley of the Morning, following Bastable's somewhat vague description of its location. I had gathered that it lay somewhere in Shantung province and to the north of Wuchang (which, itself, of course, is in Hupeh). My best plan was to go as directly as possible to Shantung and then make my way inland. I consulted all the atlases and gazetteers, spoke to friends who had been missionaries in that part of China, and got a fairly clear idea of where I might find the valley, if it existed at all.