THE EQUINOX
ape-like creature,
though
without
his
cunning
and
his
purpose.
" Only, no water's left to feed its play."
“Up with it on the tripod
I
It's extinct."
But surely I am not a dead man at thirty! ”
The entry is followed by an undated entry earlier than
the 25th, suggesting a method of “discipline."
But nothing
else.
Indeed, there is absolute silence on all mystic matters
until December
20,
over
a
month
later.
On that
day,
jumping on to his Burmese pony, a few yards after fording
the stream which marks the Chinese frontier, the animal
backed before he was in the saddle, and fell with him over a
cliff of some forty feet in height.
“ Neither hurt,” he remarks.
“ Later, kicked on the thigh by a mule.”
lt is of no purpose here to deal with Fra. P.‘s private
affairs; but one must mention that all this time of interior
insanity he was “ playing the man” very vigorously.
His
moral force no doubt saved the Europeans of Tengyueh from
a panic which might easily have resulted in massacre.
After
the death, perhaps by poison, of the Consul, the admirable
and undervalued Litton, he was the only person who kept his
head, and knew how to assert the authority of the white man.
So that we must understand that this “black insanity"
of which Fra. P. speaks was a private little insanity of his
own; it in no way interfered with the normal working of his
magnificent and heroic brain.
Not to be turned aside from any purpose, however trivial,
once he had formulated it, we find him leaving Tengyueh-Ting
{or the wildest mountains and deserts of Western China.
12