"As to the manuscript, every word in it is as true as our finite human brains can know aught to be true. Nothing is written but what I have seen with my own eyes or heard with my own ears. The narrative will amaze you, doubtless, but I give you credit for the intelligence not to meet it with a stupid unreasoning denial. Let me appeal to you to put aside all your preconceived notions as to what is and what is not in this queer, half-known quarter of the earth. Above all, banish from your mind the least shadow of suspicion that I am either mad or insincere. I am as sane as you are, and in dead earnest. Consider the probabilities. Is it for one instant to be supposed that I, who see death hard upon me, should write a monstrous hoax?--that I, who came East when I was little more than a boy and have given my whole working life to the search for hard facts regarding the East, should now fritter my last hours on mere romance of the imagination?--that I, who have boldly stated the truth as I found it, even though this often exposed me to hostility and derision from the orthodox, timid-minded scholars of this land, should abandon truth for falsehood at a moment when I am due to appear before a Higher Tribunal which knows nothing but eternal truth? "I take my leave of you with every warm wish for your happiness. I am, I may say, without kin of my own, and at about the time this package arrives you will receive from the same firm of lawyers a notification that I have named you my heir to such small parcels of this world's goods as I possess. The property consists almost wholly of personal effects, trophies, curios--some of them valuable, by the way--and the copyright of my published works. The more precious part of my belongings goes with this letter. I offer it to you not as proof of the truth of my narrative, but as a gift made in good fellowship to a comrade who risked his life with me in a quest few men in the world would have taken on. But there is a condition attaching to the legacy. I charge you that if at any future date it becomes possible, in the manner I have hinted, for you to publish this manuscript, you should do so, using what may be necessary of the proceeds from sale of the contents of the accompanying box. Even should you print the narrative on gold leaf and bind it in choicest silk, there will still be left money enough to maintain you in luxury to the end of your days. "Good-bye. "Ronald Mirlees, known as Ran Mirlees, Master of Arts in the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and now resident in the Marco Polo Hotel, Shanghai, China, this first day of January in the year of Our Lord 19--."