Casement's own hand. We may draw from this conclusion that it was precisely Casement's homosexuality that sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest from the centres of power. As expected, Casement was found guilty of high treason at the end of his trial at the Old Bailey. The presiding judge, Lord Reading, formerly Rufus Isaacs, pronounced sentence. You will be taken hence, he told Casement, to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution and will be there hanged by the neck until you be dead. Not until 1965 did the British government permit the exhumation of the remains of Roger Casement, presumably scarcely identifiable any more, from the lime pit in the courtyard of Pentonville prison into which his body had been thrown.
6. The bridge over the Blyth — The Chinese court train — The Taiping rebellion and the opening of China — Destruction of the garden of Yuan Ming Yuan — The end of Emperor Hsien-feng — The Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi — Mysteries of power — The town beneath the sea — Poor Algernon
Not far from the coast, between Southwold and Walberswick, a narrow iron bridge crosses the river Blyth where a long
time ago ships heavily laden with wool made their way seaward. Today there is next to no traffic on the river, which is largely silted up. At best one might see a sailing boat or two moored in the lower reaches amidst an assortment of rotting barges. To landward, there is nothing but grey water, mudflats and emptiness.
The bridge over the Blyth was built in 1875 for a narrow-gauge railway that linked Halesworth and Southwold. According to local historians, the train that ran on it had originally been built for the Emperor of China. Precisely which emperor had given this commission I have not succeeded in finding out, despite lengthy research; nor have I been able to discover why the order was never delivered or why this diminutive imperial train, which may have been intended to connect the Palace in Peking, then still surrounded by pinewoods, to one of the summer residences, ended up in service on a branch line of the Great Eastern Railway. The only thing the uncertain sources agree on is that the outlines of the imperial heraldic dragon, complete with a tail and somewhat clouded over by its own breath, could clearly be made out beneath the black paintwork of the carriages, which were used mainly by seaside holidaymakers and travelled at a maximum speed of sixteen miles per hour. As for the heraldic creature itself, the Libro de los seres imaginarios, to which reference has already been made, contains a fairly complete taxonomy and description of oriental dragons, of those that inhabit the skies and of those that dwell on the earth and in the seas. Some are said to carry the palaces of the gods on their backs, while others are believed to determine the course of streams and rivers and to guard subterranean treasures. They are armour-plated with yellow scales. Below their muzzles they have beards, their brows beetle over their blazing eyes, their ears are short and fleshy, their mouths invariably hang open, and they feed on pearls and opals. Some are three or four miles long. Mountains crumble when they turn over in their sleep, and when they fly through the air, they cause terrible storms that strip the roofs off houses and devastate the crops. When they rise from the depths of the sea, maelstroms and typhoons ensue. In China, the placating of the elements has always been intimately connected with the ceremonial rites which surrounded the ruler on the dragon throne and which governed everything from affairs of state down to daily ablutions, rituals that also served to legitimize and immortalize the immense profane power that was focused in the person of the emperor. At any moment of the day or night, the members of the imperial household, which numbered more than six thousand and consisted exclusively of eunuchs and women, would be circling, on precisely defined orbits, the sole male inhabitant of the Forbidden City that lay concealed behind purple-coloured walls. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the ritualization of imperial power was at its most elaborate: at the same time, that power itself was by now almost completely hollowed out. While all court appointments, rigidly controlled as they were by an immutable hierarchy, continued to be made according to rules that had been perfected down to the last detail, the empire in its entirety was on the brink of collapse, owing to mounting pressure from enemies both within and without. In the 1850s and 1860s, the Taiping rebellion, launched by a messianic Christian-Confucian movement, spread like wildfire across all of southern China. Reeling with privation and poverty, the people — from starving peasants and soldiers at large after the Opium war to coolies, sailors, actors and prostitutes — flocked in undreamt-of numbers to the self-appointed Celestial King, Hung Hsiu-Ch'üan, who in a feverish delirium had beheld a glorious future in which justice prevailed. Soon a steadily growing army of holy warriors was making its way northwards from Kwangsi. It overran the provinces of Hunan, Hupeh and Anhwei, and in early 1853 was at the gates of the mighty city of Nanking, which was overwhelmed after a tow-day siege and was declared the celestial capital of the movement. Fired by the prospect of a golden age, the rebellion now flooded wave upon wave across the whole vast country. More than six thousand citadels were taken by the rebels and occupied for a while; five provinces were razed to the ground in battle after battle; and more than twenty million died in just fifteen years. The bloody horror in China at that time went beyond all imagining. In the summer of 1864, after a seven-year siege by imperial forces, Nanking fell. The defenders had long since exhausted their supplies, and had abandoned all hope of attaining in this life the paradise which had seemed within reach when the movement began. Broken by hunger and drugs, they were on their last legs. On the 30th of June the Celestial King took his own life. Hundreds of thousands followed his example, either out of loyalty or for fear of the conquerors' revenge. They committed self-slaughter in every conceivable way, with swords and with knives, by fire, by hanging, or by leaping from the rooftops and towers. Many are even said to have buried themselves alive. The mass suicide of the Taipingis is without historical parallel. When their enemies broke through the gates on the morning of the 19th of July, they found not a soul alive. But the city was filled with the humming of flies. The king of the Celestial Realm of Eternal Peace, according to a despatch sent to Peking, lay face-down in a gutter, his bloated body held together only by the silken robes of imperial yellow, adorned with the image of the dragon, which, with blasphemous presumption, he had always worn.