Adventure stories; Asia, Central -- Fiction; Fantasy fiction; Love stories; Science fiction
“I am to a certain extent. I had a great-great-uncle who was a bit
of a rolling stone. He wandered a bit in those parts, and he left a
diary, written rather like I write, but you could follow it in parts.
I’ll show it you later on. There’s some quaint stuff in it. But it
interested me, and last year when I was demobbed after the Armistice, I
toddled up there to have a look-see. I was not keen on going back to
my old job in Bengal, and, as I’d saved a bit of cash, I thought I’d
take a holiday, which I hadn’t really done since I left school. So I
trekked off to Kashgar and then east.”
He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a worn pocketbook, and extracted
something which he passed across.
“Ever see anything like this?” he queried.
I examined the object closely. A silver coin, new-looking, but rough at
the edges. On one side was a mass of Greek lettering. On the obverse
was a man’s head, rather clear-cut.
I turned it over again. The names on the coin were unfamiliar, and the
head was unlike any coin I knew.
“What country is it, John? It’s Greek, though the lettering is quaint,
but whose is the head? It’s not from Greece. Is it one of the funny
little new States that the Peace Conference of the war to end war has
started to ensure war going on?”
Wrexham looked at me despondently.
“You handle a pen quickly, Harry, but you’re slow sometimes at
deductions. Yes, it’s Greek; but it’s a long time since any one wrote
Greek quite like that, and I think that the country it came from never
heard of the Great War of 1914-18.”
“Antique, is it?” I looked at it again. “It looks fairly new-make. Is
it a copy? Central Asia’s full of old Greek relics, I know. Have they
started an antique mint in Kashgar in the hope of a tourist boom after
the war? Where did you come by it?”
“Well, it’s a long story, but, if you’re doing nothing to-night, come
over to my hotel and dine and I’ll tell you. By itself the coin isn’t
much, but I’ve got two other exhibits which fit in. What is it ‘Sapper’
says? ‘Once is nothing, twice is coincidence, three times is a moral
certainty.’ I think I’ve got a moral cert.”
And not another word would he say on the matter then, shifting the
conversation to France and Palestine, old scraps, old friends, all the
miscellany of memories that make up the wandering soldier’s life.
I slipped home and changed, and then to his hotel, where I found him
awaiting me in the lounge with a tall, clean-shaven, fair-haired,
blue-eyed man who seemed to carry a smack of the sea about him, though
somehow I did not set him down as a sailor.
“You’ve not met Forsyth, have you, Harry?” said Wrexham. “This is Lake,
Alec; you’ve heard me speak of him often enough.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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