“I know the mandarin personally,” Talham went on. “An Oriental of exceeding affability, and it would seem to me that the possibility of the Oriental mind----” He might have developed his speech into a discourse on Chinese metaphysics, but Tillizinni interrupted him. “We have to go,” he said, “and the roads are pretty bad.” They were worse than the men anticipated, and the progress along the wild and tortuous path, which was dignified by the name of road, was a painful experience. The two leaders of the expedition could not afford to leave their escort. They were in an enemy’s country, and although the fifty soldiers which the First Mandarin of the Empire had supplied them was a formidable body, Talham knew the Chinamen well enough to know that they could not be depended upon if they were convinced that the object of his trip was the desecration of a grave. He would gain nothing by explaining to them that he had no intention of robbing the grave of its treasures, or that he sought some wonderful mechanical secret which the dead years held--that was too supple a distinction for words. He had sent messengers ahead a week before to collect as many of the soldiers who had served in his regiment as could be found, to meet him at Hoo Sin. Soo might send a story flaming through the bazaar that would set the city of Hoo Sin in a ferment--if he dared. That reservation was Talham’s only hope. If Soo himself had designs upon the tomb, desired exact knowledge as to its location, and wished for himself to unravel the mystery and to take the treasures of the dead king, he would be silent. Once he set the city in a ferment he might spoil whatever chance Talham had of achieving his object, but he would just as assuredly defeat his own ends, and might, moreover, call down upon the city of Hoo Sin a detachment of Imperial troops, to say nothing of commissions of enquiry. The thought comforted Talham as he jogged along, the rain falling in sheets above his head, the pony under him stumbling across rocks and through pools of liquid mud, towards the blurred horizon. There is no more cheerless sight in the world than a Chinese landscape; on either side the flat black land stretched drearily to the stunted hills. Now and again they would pass a half-ruined temple or a collection of squalid huts, too tiny it seemed to bear the long name which custom had given to them. Night was falling when they clattered up the broad irregular street, littered with garbage, and passed through the high, gaunt city gates of Hoo Sin. The rain had ceased, and the city was filled with people who looked curiously at the “foreign devils,” whom no Chinese costume could disguise. No demonstration was made, however, as the two men and their escort rode up to the Yamen and dismounted. There was the inevitable delay.