The book brought me fame, or at least notoriety, but little else. Certainly not money. Indeed, to the best of my belief, I lost substantially over it. I never could give business correspondence the applied study it no doubt deserves, and I'm afraid my publisher's letters remained for the most part on my mantelpiece, half skimmed through, wholly undigested, eventually to become spills. I have an uncertain recollection of his telling me once that to produce _Treasure of Asia_ the way I wanted it produced would mean selling the book at a loss. Perhaps that's what happened. I cared little, for at the beginning of our dealings I was, strangely enough, well off, as the result of a risky but highly profitable investigation I had carried out some months before. The proceeds of that adventure took wings and flew. Soon I found myself drifting again towards the impecuniousness that has been my normal condition through life. Also, I was getting restless, short of patience, dissatisfied with the one bed I was sleeping in night after night. Arrangements to publish _Treasure of Asia_ had confined me a good deal to the European quarter of Shanghai, a city for which I never harboured any great love, and I felt once more the stirrings that have so often driven me up country to the wild interior. I wanted to see life raw and naked again, to wrestle another fall with those yet unprobed mysteries of the East that have always held such a profound, half-grim fascination for me. My wife had died several years before, and with her passed out the one tie that could have reconciled me to fixture in one humdrum existence; since her death, indeed, I'd been a planet with a zigzag orbit, halted only by shortage of funds--and not always that. I come now to my last adventure, beside which whatever I had met before in the way of queer experience--and my life has embraced some very queer experience--seems tameness itself: an adventure surely stranger and wilder than ever fell to the lot of another man living or dead. Let me say at the starting out that this narrative which follows is literally true from beginning to end. It may, if ever it sees the light of day, be disbelieved; it may even be laughed down as the vapourings of a lunatic. That will not detract one jot from its truth. If I have dwelt at length on my previous record, it is only for the purpose of making my real position clear, and letting any reader of this narrative see that if I have been regarded in the past as no true authority on oriental matters, that was not because of my failure to write facts about the East, but of my resolute refusal to perpetuate accepted errors. Let this suffice for the present. Later on the time must come when wider knowledge and exacter exploration will vindicate my assertions up to the hilt. * * * * *