“After my company left Palestine in January, ’19, and came back to India, I got myself demobbed and pondered what I should do. Home lacked attraction, I’d been away so long. There was I with a certain amount of dibs, no calls, my own master, up in Pindi at the end of the Kashmir road with the hot weather coming on, and all the earth in front of me. “I’ve always wanted to travel up that way, and this seemed the absolute chance. If I went home or back to my old job in Bengal, I might not get another opportunity for years; my old firm in Bengal were good, but sticky in the matter of leave. So I packed my kit, dumped what I didn’t want, motored to Srinagar, and took the road for Yarkand. “I stuck to the main road practically all the way, steady, easy marches. And as I went I read everything I could find on the country. Most of my kit was books, I think, but by the time I hit Yarkand I had a working knowledge of Kashgaria at other people’s expense. “I moved fairly light, but I lugged the books along and also a few survey instruments. You remember that in Palestine I used to play about with survey toys. “I stopped a bit at Yarkand to study local conditions, and work up the smattering of Turki that I’d been assimilating on the road up with the aid of a prehistoric textbook. “From there I pushed on to Aksu, and hence towards Hami, always keeping to the main road. There’s nothing to talk about during that part of the show. But when I got Hami-way, I put aside the printed books and restudied my great-great-uncle’s diary.” He stopped and pulled meditatively at his pipe. “What was the great-great-uncle doing up there, John?” I asked. “He was a bit of a rolling stone, rather like me, I fancy. He started with a commission in the East India Company’s army, got tired of it, went north, and joined the Sikh army. Then he dropped that and took to wandering. Went up into Kashmir. Thence he conceived the idea of following the old trade route into China. His library apparently consisted of Marco Polo. “Three years later he turned up again in Ferozepur, where my great-grandfather, his brother, was commanding a regiment, and announced his intention of fitting out and going off again to Central Asia. But before he could start again he went out with cholera. However, before he died he gave my great-grandfather a diary and a bundle of old papers, and said that, if ever any other member of the family got the wanderlust, the papers were to be given to him. “My great-grandfather, who was married, had no particular desire to travel, and, I fancy, after reading through the stuff, he locked it up and dismissed the whole lot as a traveller’s yarn, due to overmuch Marco Polo combined with fever.