Page:Weird Tales Volume 43 Number 02 (1951-01).djvu/66

 The worthy doctor's belief in dragons was fixed as his belief in the eclipse of the moon.

OCTOR SHEN FU sipped his tea languidly. "It is ironic that you should be searching for dragons," he mused, "when plagues of war and famine are sweeping over China, decimating our people as though their lives are of less value than chewed mellon seeds."

"At such a time," John Steppling said, "surely we have need for dragons."

"I bow humbly before your wisdom," said the doctor. "I will give you all the help I can."

They sat in a room set aside for teadrinking in the Drug Shop of a Thousand Years in Hangchow. Fighting had reached the fringe of the city but the doctor was not disturbed. In a land of 450,000,000 people with only 12,000 physicians, a doctor is not carelessly destroyed. Though enemy soldiers had been persuaded by their officers that they were invincible, they knew that they were helpless against the ravages of poison and disease. It was comforting to have a doctor in their midst. How were they to know that Doctor Shen Fu's hatred was more deadly than cobra venom?

"I approach my subject with an open mind," said John Steppling. "I am aware that thirty years ago near the city of Ichang on the Upper Yangtze River, about a thousand miles from the Yellow Sea, the fossils of several dragons were found in a cavern known as the Dragon Cave. According to legend, the cave extended for fifty li and led to the Lung Wong Tung or the Cave of the Dragon King. The length of the largest fossil was seventy feet. It was about two feet thick, with a flat head. An interesting article about it appeared in the Far Eastern Review for December, 1915."

"I refuse to be excited by your disclosures," said Doctor Shen Fu gently, "for my belief in dragons is as fixed as my belief in eclipses of the moon. For more than a thousand years this drug shop has been dispensing drugs in which powdered dragon bones have been prime ingredients. Do you know that the most costly and aromatic of all perfumes is dragon saliva, or that rubies are drops of petrified dragon blood? Our sages have written, 'The small dragon is like a silk caterpillar. The large dragon fills heaven and earth. When it arises, it gallops over the clouds. When it hibernates, it crouches in an abyss. The scaly dragon becomes a true dragon in a thousand years. In five hundred years more he becomes a horned dragon and in a thousand years more he becomes a flying dragon.' The dragon through the ages has embodied our loftiest ideals. But it reembodied our loftiest ideals.

"Dragons in summer live in the clouds and when they quarrel with each other the clouds are churned into rain. The dragon loves jade and the flesh of wallows, but he seems to have a fear of iron. He is fond of arsenic and if a bamboo grove is deserted he likes to repose therein. In the folklore of all peoples much space is given to dragons. If they do not exist and never have existed, why do your anthropologists write such weighty scrolls about them? However, the Chinese see them in «true perspective. For thousands of years dragon robes were reserved exclusively for our Emperors who ruled from a Dragon Throne. It is said in the Yih King: 'The chief dragon has his abode in the sky, and all the clouds and vapors, winds and rains are under his control. He can send rain or withhold it at his pleasure. Hence all vegetable life depends upon him.' Therefore throughout the ages of written history the Emperor of China sat on his Dragon Throne, watching over the welfare of his people, and conferred upon them those temporal and spiritual blessings without which they would perish. Now we have no more Emperors and we are beset by one war after another and China is shaken by all the new ways that have been thrust upon her. I am an old man and can remember that in the days of my youth wu