to the ground. Rudolph
entered a sombre, mouldy office, where the darkness rang with tiny
silver bells. Pig-tailed men in skull-caps, their faces calm as polished
ivory, were counting dollars endlessly over flying finger-tips. One of
these men paused long enough to give him a sealed dispatch,--the message
to which the ocean-bed, the Midgard ooze, had thrilled beneath his
tardy keel.

"Zimmerman recalled," the interpretation ran; "take his station; proceed
at once."

He knew the port only as forlorn and insignificant. It did not matter.
One consolation remained: he would never see her again.

CHAPTER II

THE PIED PIPER

A gray smudge trailing northward showed where the Fa-Hien--Scottish
Oriental, sixteen hundred tons--was disappearing from the pale expanse
of ocean. The sampan drifted landward imperceptibly, seeming, with
nut-brown sail unstirred, to remain where the impatient steamer had met
it, dropped a solitary passenger overside, and cast him loose upon the
breadth of the antipodes. Rare and far, the sails of junks patched the
horizon with umber polygons. Rudolph, sitting among his boxes in the
sampan, viewed by turns this desolate void astern and the more desolate
sweep of coast ahead. His matting sail divided the shining bronze
outpour of an invisible river, divided a low brown shore beyond, and
above these, the strips of some higher desert country that shone like
snowdrifts, or like sifted ashes from which the hills rose black and
charred. Their savage, winter-blasted look, in the clear light of an
almost vernal morning, made the land seem fabulous. Yet here in reality,
thought Rudolph, as he floated toward that hoary kingdom,--here at last,
facing a lonely sea, reared the lifeless, inhospitable shore, the
sullen margin of China.

The slow creaking of the spliced oar, swung in its lashing by a
half-naked yellow man, his incomprehensible chatter with some fellow
boatman hidden in the bows, were sounds lost in a drowsy silence,
rhythms lost in a wide inertia. Time itself seemed stationary. Rudolph
nodded, slept, and waking, found the afternoon sped, the hills gone, and
his clumsy, time-worn craft stealing close under a muddy bank topped
with brown weeds and grass. They had left behind the silted roadstead,
and now, gliding on a gentle flood, entered the river-mouth. Here and
there, against the saffron tide, or under banks quaggy as melting
chocolate, stooped a naked fisherman, who--swarthy as his bac