Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/112



the varied collection of guidebooks and tourist schedules in the possession of Miss Catherine Rand there had been one pamphlet that described briefly the location, climate, picturesqueness, points of interest, population, and means of travel of the mountain city of Kashgar.

Four kingdoms, said the guidebook in florid phrases, met at the center of the Himalayas. But the makers of maps hesitated over the Himalayas. They were a no man's land. Only in Kashgaria did the slovenly, quilted, musket-bearing soldiers of the Celestial Republic emerge from guardhouses of mud and cry "Halt!"

But the guidebook did say that there were two Kashgars, two cities: the old and the new, some five miles apart. In the new were progressive Chinese merchants, silk-clad magistrates, and the Taotai with all his pomp and power; likewise Samarkand and Punjabi traders, two isolated but indefatigable British missionaries, and even a native officer of British India who acted as a makeshift chargé d'affaires. Edith Rand had not seen the guidebook. She was ignorant of the nature of the two towns of Kashgar. Iskander of Tahir would have said that destiny drew her to the older city, away from the men of her own race.