Opium Smoking

by WALTER DURANTY

1

I WISH I had seen those days, those wonderful hundred days when the armies of America and Britain with its Dominions and the French stormed on to their goal, the battle of August 8 which Ludendorff said was the one that decided the German defeat, because then for the first time the Allied troops in line broke German troops in line without any great bombardment; it was then that our troops broke deep through the German lines. I ought to have seen it all; my credentials were accepted to go to French Headquarters as a regular correspondent. That was in ‘18 — in August, ‘18. I’d ordered my uniform and even tried it on; it was ready for me to wear. And then, in a Paris taxi, there in the Rue Montmartre, one morning about eleven, the silliest of things: my taxi driver was killed as the big truck thundered upon us. I lived, but my hip was broken.

There is nothing worse than pain. To lose a child that you love, or a mother who loved you, yes indeed, that is bitter and sad. To lose money and comfort and hope, and your friends and the golden girl, all that is sorry and hard; but not so cruel as pain when it aches and goes on aching, and there is nothing to do; when your monstrous sciatic nerve — which is thinner than a thread — pulses and beats and burns and you don’t know what to do. When you know that death would be rest but somehow you don’t want to die. Pain can destroy your pride and sap your resolution; and that was what happened to me when Clifford Hawtrey suggested the thing which De Quincey called “just, subtle, and potent opium.”

I was living in Saint-Tropez, at that time a little port unknown to tourists or kings. It looked more Italian than French, the little square port and its harbor, with houses clustered around, more like Rapallo than France. Hawtrey lived up on the hill, in a villa with two old servants. A tall, bent, wraithlike man with a white beard and pale blue eyes. I met him one day in the bar that abuts on the mole of the harbor. He was English and fiercely patriotic, and told me something which stunned me. He said, “I am sixty-five and always have hated women. I hate the smell of women and their affected ways, and the clothes they wear and their looks. I always have hated women. But now I wish I had loved them; I wish I had loved eighty women and had sons by every one of them, so that now they could fight for England.”

My leg was aching like hell, and I felt very sad and low. I thought I could kill this old man who talked such nonsense as that. I thought, “What a bloody fool to tell me such nonsense!” His hands were withered and thin, with the dryness that comes from age. I didn’t like his hands, and I thought what he said was silly, but I rather liked his voice. He said, “Please don’t think me impertinent, but you suffer rather, don’t you?”

I said, “Yes, it hurts like hell and is hurting at this minute.”

He sipped his glass of milk and said, “You know, whiskey won’t help you.”

I said, “There is nothing that can help me.”

His faded eyes came alight. He said, “Oh, indeed there is. Let us see, it is four o’clock — another fifteen minutes. Oh yes, there is something which helps!”

Thus I found opium. I was desperate and didn’t care.

He took my arm and helped me to his car — it’s not fun to hobble on crutches, when the damned bone won’t unite and link and get strong again, and that monstrous sciatic nerve— It did, of course, get better, just as the doctor said, after a lapse of time. It left me with a limp, and sometimes hurts me now when the weather is damp and chill. Put then I thought it would never — I thought it would never get healed and let me live like a man and have freedom once more from pain.

In his house was a little room with two mattresses on the floor. One big, soft Chinese picture, a tiger in the snow, with trees and a hill behind it, and small, gay Chinese pictures of ugly dancing monkeys and slim delightful girls.

The place had a curious smell, like toasted nuts and chocolate. Hawtrey said, “You lie there; is the pillow high enough? I know how your leg must hurt, but now I will make you a magic to conjure the pain away.”

Oh yes, De Quincey is right, so potent is that drug.

He lighted a tiny lamp and said, “This is coconut oil. Olive oil isn’t bad, but coconut oil is better.”

The lamp had a chimney of frosted glass with butterflies painted on it — a chimney which sloped to a peak like the pictures of Fujiyama. Like volcanoes, a hole at the top.

He took out a bamboo tube, heavy and black with age, and said, “Look how heavy it is. Some people like silver pipes, or ivory or gold; but that is affectation. Bamboo absorbs the savor and essence of the drug.”

He fitted a shining thing, red and convex, of terra cotta, into a hole of the pipe, and said, “This we call the bowl, and — wait, you can watch and see.”

He dipped a long steel needle in a jade pot of dark-brown gum — it looked like gum to me, looked just like dark-brown gum. He took a drop of the gum and held it over the lamp and twirled the needle around. The drop of gum bubbled and swelled and was brown at the top of the lamp. There were tiny puffs of smoke which smelled like toasted nuts.

Then he twirled the plastic mass on the convex bowl of the pipe, until it became a cone, and quickly stabbed the central hole in the bowl of the pipe, and pulled out the needle and left it, and said, “Now you breathe it slow; you inhale it, slowly and slow.” He held the pipe over the lamp and said, “You inhale it slowly.”

The little cone fizzed and bubbled as I drew its smoke to my lungs. What a strange unforgettable taste, the infallible opium smoke! What refuge and cease from pain! What beauty and what heaven! What lack of all desire but release from fear and pain! I have lived and seen death and life, and a woman bearing a child, and war in its ugliest form, and famine that takes young children and bloats them until they look like dropsical little spiders. I have seen some unpretty things, and enjoyed many lovely things, but opium is the best. It’s a shameful thing to say, and saying it now I’m ashamed, though De Quincey wasn’t ashamed, and wrote English as good, or nearly as good, as the Bible.

Do you know that passage of his about “sempiternal Tyre”? No, it wasn’t that at all, it was Babylon; no, it wasn’t, the word was grander than that, the word was Hekatompylos, the seven-gated Thebes. He wrote about the splendor of “Babylon and Hekatompylos,” and said that was opium’s gift, to bring them before your eyes, those cities of the Past.

You like it or you don’t; it makes most people sick, but so does a cigarette, or the first cigar you stole from the big black box in the corner where your father kept his cigars. They say it’s a dangerous drug. They prohibit it everywhere and even put you in prison if you own it and smoke it at home. The very word is accursed; they say opium is a crime and a sin and a horrible thing — none of which is true. It’s a mild and pleasant intoxicant, with the unusual faculty of sharply intensifying any thought or emotion which you happen to have at the moment. That’s what it really is, a terrific intensifier. Alcohol can’t do that, or hashish, or Indian hemp. Cocaine is a deadly thing which can steel the weak hand of a coward and send him out to kill. Cocaine is a deadly drug; but opium eases pain and allows you to relax.

You can float on a rosy cloud, and if you want sleep you can sleep, if you want to talk you can talk, if you want to read you can read, if you want to hear others read — perhaps that is best of all — you hear them reading and see the cities of which they read, or the shining bay under the mountains, or the lovely gold-skinned girls. Or anything you want; it gives you a magic carpet on which you can fly and travel and visit the unknown lands, the lands which lie east of the Sun and the lands which lie west of the Moon, the immortal lands of fancy, the unattainable lands. The Irish have said it best from a thousand years ago when they talked about blessed isles somewhere distant in the West, and the Greeks with their Isles of the Blest where golden apples grew. But the Irish did it best, and even to this day the poverty-stricken fishermen of the Aran Islands still talk of those blessed isles and believe that somewhere, out where the sun sinks down, there is a lovely land where there is no more sorrow or pain. Lord Dunsany, who is Irish, has brought us this mystic hope, this hope which is not of heaven, but for something here on earth, some place to which we can go and find whatever we call it. Call it Tahiti or Bali, call it man’s endless hope — the place in which roving men can at last reach their heart’s desire.

That is what opium can do for a secondrate reporter with a busted hip. At least it did for me, and by God, I don’t regret it.

2

That rascal-genius Claude McPherson wrote a few startling lines which may give a glimpse of my picture. He wrote, I have to admit, about morphine, which is the 10 per cent derivative of opium, and from which there is no escape. He wrote: —

High-falutin declamatory verse, like Macaulay if you don’t like Macaulay, and Byron if you don’t like Byron, but horribly true if you know about morphine. What they call a “habit-forming drug,” and only those who have formed that kind of habit can understand what I say. I knew a girl who broke it, because she loved a man. She was hopped right up to the neck, and he said, “My dear, you must choose. I can’t have a wife like that, a dope fiend, a slave to this stuff; I can’t have a wife like that, so, my dear, you’ve got to choose.” She chose and tore herself free. But her motivation was love, than which there is nothing stronger. Love and death — you have to admit that those are the ultimates.

Hawtrey read me a curious book by Claude Farrère, who at that time was a popular and successful French playwright. The book was called Opium Smoke, a collection of short stories. I did not perceive it then, but discovered later that this book epitomized and symbolized man’s commerce with the poppy. It began with attractive legends about China, tender, fanciful fairy tales — painted junks on a sapphire sea, men like heroes, and lovely maidens, the literature of dreams. That is the initial stage. Opium doesn’t give dreams, but it aids your imagination. You lie and think of things — the things you’d like to do, the places you’d like to go, the heights that you wish to conquer.

We all can do that; but after you’ve been smoking, such flights of imagination are more vivid and more real. You think, “Suppose I were rich, or president, or a king.” The drug intensifies your imagination so much that for a moment you are rich, or president, or king. Mind you, there’s no delusion, no crude intoxication. You know that you’re lying there, that you’re awake and sane, but the drug is schizophrenic in the sense that your mind can wander, can get away from your body and travel to distant lands and scale insurmountable cliffs. With what clarity of perception, what novelty of vision, what keen unexampled enjoyment of the sights your fancy pictures, or the words that someone is reading — that is the charm of the drug, the clearness and sharp intensity of all your mental sensations. It doesn’t hinder your work, dull your mind, or thicken your speech. You don’t reel or fumble or stagger, like the sot who is steeped in liquor. After you’ve smoked your pipes you enjoy a deep dreamless sleep and wake up without a headache or queasiness of stomach. That’s perhaps where the danger lies: the stuff is so seductive. It gave me release from pain, and happiness of mind, and a vast new world to explore.

Then one day I found I was caught, like a fly with its feet in the horrible gooey stuff they put on what are known as “flypapers” in England. They never thought of screens to keep flies out of their homes, but used these disgusting papers covered with something I believe is called birdlime. Darkishgreen, and viscous, and utterly sticky. What evil creatures are men, how black is the pitch of their souls! I have sat there and watched a fly with its poor little feet in this mess. Its effort to pull one out only plunges the others deeper. How vainly it beats its wings in its struggle to escape! No hope; you are caught, little fly. Oh pity, those dreadful words, “You cannot escape us now.” Perhaps the fly prays to its god. Perhaps the fly says to its god, “Oh, God, won’t you come to save me?” It flutters its fragile wings, but its god is asleep or afar. Or doesn’t care about flies, although the Good Book says that God has regard for sparrows. But the Good Book also says that the god of flies is Beelzebub, who is not a kindly being.

3

That stopped my opium smoking, that “You cannot escape us now”; because, as I said, you get caught, and your feet are stuck in the glue, and your lovely and fanciful dreams change suddenly to nightmare, That, if you wish to know, is the horror and damnation of poor little human flies that are caught in the syrupy gum which oozes in the spring from the fat round bud of the poppy.

The opium poppy is white, but before the flower has blossomed they make nicks under the bud. They nick it with a knife under the fat green bud where the stem swells up to the bud. White stuff like cream comes out; they leave it there overnight, and in the morning it’s brown. That’s poppy juice, that’s opium.

It has to be cooked before it’s fit to smoke. You take the brown drops of gum and cook them in a pan. You bring the brew to a boil, but only just that and no more. Just when the water boils, then you take it away from the fire and strain it through a cloth. If you let the stuff go on boiling, you’ll never be able to smoke it; there’ll be bits of leaf or something, or dust, or I don’t know what, but you won’t be able to smoke it. It is, as De Quincey said, “a magic and potent drug,” which you must respect and serve. You wait for the boiling moment, you strain it through a cloth, and then you let it simmer until the excess water is removed and the residue has a dark syrupy consistency, like the stuff they put on fly-papers to catch the small feet of flies.

Acs, indeed, it caught me too, and that book of Farrere’s was right, which began with fanciful stories, then advanced to clear French stories — tile clarity of the drug — which de Maupassant might have written. And then made a further advance, or a dreadful retrogression, when the fly knew its feet were caught and fluttered its wings in vain.

Farrère’s approach to the final stage, of nightmare which leads to madness, is strange and almost mystic. He tells how the spirit of smokers who have sunk too deep in the drug is loosened from their bodies, and walks before they are dead in the company of ghosts. The living amongst the dead; because they too are lost, and their spirits grown so fragile that they hardly live any more as men live who see the sun and hear birds twitter at dawn. Their life is the life of the dead. Farrère has a story like that, which he wrote in Trebizond, of the smoker who left his body and walked with the ghosts of the Past, the ghosts of the cruel Turks who killed because they were cruel, and the ghosts of Tamerlane’s Tartars who killed because they were Tartars. As the story recedes in time there comes the ghost of a dog, a little skeleton dog trotting behind his master, a king who had died by torture. Last of all, in the furthest distance, the ghost of a lovely woman whose features are ravaged by pain as she looks at the ghosts of two children gliding along beside her. This was Medea of Colchis, the disciple whom Hecate loved — Hecate, goddess of witches. Medea killed her children as vengeance on Jason, their father, when he cast her aside for another.

That is the nightmare stage which leads swiftly to the end, the horror of madness and death. From the last I escaped in time, but narrowly, as I know; and, strangely, it was fear, fear of a dreadful dream, which saved me on the brink. I had had that dream as a child, as an echo from reading Dickens with Cruikshank illustrations, because in my dream I fled from four men dressed in black Cruikshank clothes. A childish dream, halfforgotten; but now it recurred again with added pangs of terror, because, as it came more often, I found it each time less easy to wake myself from its clutches.

To this day I shudder to think of those four black men. One was tall and one was a dwarf; their faces were ugly and evil and their eyes were cruel as daggers. It always happened like this: a party with lots of people, big rooms and lots of people, amidst whom the four would appear and make their way towards me. They never said a word, but closed in, and I’d leave my food and the girl with whom I was talking, and move to another room. There they would follow me and again move close, and again I would slip away. I’d evade them from room to room, but at last there was one little room with books around it, and no other door or outlet, no rescue or escape.

Everyone has had nightmares which proceed to a climax of terror and the sleeper wakes gasping for breath. But with opium you don’t — you are drugged and you can’t wake up. At first I found a defense. When I reached the inner room I would dive my head into the books, and that would wake me up, that was my way of escape. I did it several times, and rose up out of my sleep, away from the dagger eyes and skinny, grasping fingers. Then one time I didn’t escape. I fell back from the shelf of books, and then the tall one spoke, the first words he had uttered, “Burrow away, little mouse. You cannot escape us now.”

I dived again at the books, threw my head against the shelves, and came up to my bed, my own bed in my home, to feel the sheets in my bed and know that I was not there alone in that dreadful room with those creatures closing upon me. My God, what relief that was! I hit my hands on the wall, hit them and hit and hit. Something to keep me awake! Something to save me from Them. The pain of it kept me awake, to get up and drink strong coffee. The wall was covered with blood, and my knuckles were cut to pieces, but I was saved from damnation, from Nodens and the Chaos, the powers of the Abyss. Do I believe in devils? Or in what do I believe? I don’t know what I believe or what I disbelieve; but they were with me that night, the creatures of the Dark.

Kipling once wrote the same story, though perhaps he didn’t know it; and a ghastly story it is, called “At the End of the Passage,” or just “The End of the Passage. An Englishman down in the plains of Central India in the hottest time of the year had a recurrent nightmare of walking along a passage with a great oak door at the end. Behind it there lurked, he knew, a greedy and fearsome vampire, awaiting the destined hour when he must open the door. I hat, as he told his friends, was the essence of his nightmare; every time it recurred he was nearer the end of the passage before he could awake. Some day the door would open, and then, he knew, he was lost.

For some reason it happened, said Kipling, that their usual weekly visit was delayed by a day or two. They found the man dead in bed with agonized staring eyes. When they examined his body, there lay behind it a big, sharp cavalry spur, which had torn and roweled his back like the flanks of a racing horse. He had placed it there, they were sure, to save himself from sleep and the door at the end of the passage.

Kipling does not mention opium, and implies that the case was one of heat fever, insomnia — which seems an incongruous note — and the obsession of the dream; but I am convinced that my interpretation is the true one, because it happened to me, or as nearly as made no matter.

From that night I was done with the drug; I had been too fearfully scared. I couldn’t stop it at once; its hold is too strong for that. Once it has caught you tight, you must have your daily ration, more needed than daily bread. Sudden severance racks your nerves beyond any power of bearing, with savage, incessant pains in forehead and solar plexus. I didn’t smoke any more, but slowly with opium pills I graded down the daily doses, until at last I was free — gaunt, yellow, and haggard, but free. Three months longer I lay in the sun and bathed in the warm blue sea, until I was fit and well. One thing it seemed I had gained, apart from some baleful knowledge: my hip didn’t hurt any more, and never has bothered me since, except of course for a limp, and an occasional twinge in damp or chilly weather.

4

Several years later, in China, a dealer told me of treasure trove in a desecrated temple or tomb in the “Red Spear” country, south of the Yellow River near Lo-yang. Not frescoes, he thought, but old jade. That suited me well because I wanted to visit that section. I wanted to find out about the “Red Spears” — were they Communists or not, and what was their contact, if any, with Russia? Secondly, Chang Tso-lin had recently sent an army down the railroad a little further east across the river into Honan, under the command of his son, Chang Sui-Iiang, the Young Marshal. Many of the foreign observers in Pekin had an idea that they were going to drive south towards Hankow and challenge Chiang Kai-shek. I thought they were out on a limb.

I met a German boy whose father had been in charge of an arsenal at Lo-yang. He had worked before for Krupps, and took his wife and baby son with him to China just after the war. The youngster when I knew him was about twenty-one and spoke the local dialect, which had indeed been his first language, and German and English as well. A tall, strong kid with nice manners and good nerves. He was undismayed by reports current in Pekin that the Red Spears had an unsavory trick of sitting people on pointed bamboos. This is an old Asiatic custom which Egypt and Russia and China preferred to the Roman penalty of crucifixion. They say it takes you thirty-six hours to die, which didn’t frighten me much because I knew my heart would stop beating long before that. But the German boy might have lasted forty hours, and so I thought he was brave in agreeing to go there.

I also had a talisman with me. There was a French drugstore attached to the Grand Hotel at Pekin, and the druggist said to me, “If you are going down to the Red Spear country, I think you’d be well advised to take two half-grams of morphine. When they sharpen the bamboo, you swallow the first half-gram; and when they sit you upon it, you swallow the second. Then you can laugh at them, because morphine makes you feel good, and moreover that will be an excellent thing for white prestige.” I thought this was a sinister remark, but I thanked him and took the poison with me.

We went to a place named Changsha, south of the Hwang Ho, as they call the Yellow River. Across a most rickety bridge which shook my heart up to my throat, so dangerous it was. This was a close, quick danger, whereas the Red Spears — I have always found that the danger around the corner is less terrifying than the danger under my nose, and that physical dangers like shaky bridges or bombs are worse than the possible risk of enemies catching you and disliking you and treating you rough. Courage is relative. Some men are brave in their hearts; and the greater the danger, the more bravely they rise to meet it. Some men are devoid of fear, without that swell of courage, but just don’t feel afraid. They say, “If it comes, that’s that,” but they do not feel afraid. I always feel afraid, but only of things that bang and quiver, like a bridge, representing immediate danger.

I don’t pretend that I’m brave, but I say that I do not fear the moral, impalpable dangers, the what-may-happen-tomorrow, the uncertain or unknown. To express the whole thing simply, I have armor in my mind against dangers my mind foresees, but my body is weak and frail against actual factual risk. I have sat and watched my own knees shaking with fright in an air raid. I couldn’t stop them shaking, although I retained enough common sense and free will to know that I could walk down a lot of stairs and get myself into a cellar where the danger was diminished. Why didn’t I run downstairs? Oh, the answer is easy enough. Because I had a piece to write and couldn’t write it in the cellar. Any reason’s good enough; the point is that you have to beat yourself to conquer your own fear.

But with this Red Spear trip I didn’t have any fear. That shows what a fool I was, because, of all the silly and reckless things I’ve done in my life, this was the most foolish. The Red Spears weren’t dangerous because they were bad or cruel, but simply because they were frightened.

It was about nine-thirty in the evening when this German boy and I set out for the Red Spear country. We rode for two hours on a motor rail car, until the driver said he wouldn’t go any further and we must continue on foot. He was a bright young Chinese mechanic who talked English, and he said to us, “Good-bye. No need to wish you luck, because I shall not see you again.”

Young Hans, my German interpreter, said, “When that one sees us again I’ll ask him why he soaked us twenty dollars for this run, although his boss said fifteen.”

I said, “Oh, what is money? But it’s yours if you can get it.”

Here was something interesting, which perhaps goes deep into the psychology of nations. Hans in reality was a mercenary, just working for me for thirty dollars a week. He knew the country and its local language, but he’d nothing much to lose or nothing much to gain. Except of course his life, for which he seemed to care little. He was willing to take a chance, and beyond that — he didn’t care. I had three good motives for doing what I did. I wanted to find out, to know what the Red Spear movement was — was it connected with Russia, or was it something else? Secondly, I wished intensely — and this went back to my childhood — to see and touch and acquire the jade or other treasures of a tomb that was as old as Christ. Third, I was driven by an inner recklessness which I can only translate into words by saying it was the drive to go ahead and see for myself, and a sort of indignant rejection of what I’d been told by people sitting safe and comfortable in the Pekin Club.

We trudged for an hour along the empty railroad tracks; then someone yelled in the darkness, and before we could answer back a bullet buzzed past our ears. Hans shouted, and we went on to meet a young Chinese in threadbare khaki uniform. Hans told him, “How dare you shoot at us? We are coming to see your leaders. Where are they? Take us to them.”

That’s one of the differences between Chinese and Westerners. This sentry had shot at us because he thought we were enemies. Elis shot missed, and then he found that we were apparently friends. So he said as a matter of course, “The center of our camp. You go ahead down this lane . . .”

“Come on,” said Hans, “it’s all right,” and led me through the dark to a small, square wooden house with a Chinese outer door which keeps devils away. He kicked at the outer door. From one side came a burly Chinese peasant with a ten-foot spear, on the other side a soldier in uniform with an automatic pistol. Both of them shouted something in Chinese, but Hans paid no attention. He walked straight toward the man with the gun, — you might almost say straight through him, — telling me to follow along. We crossed the courtyard, and Hans boldly opened the door of the building beyond.

5

I have heard it said that no one who has not nearly died or approached the gates of death should be permitted to have authority and rulership. This may be true or nonsense, but one thing you do get from close approach to death’s door is a certain indifference at critical moments which may stand you in good stead.

At any rate, when I came into that room my first instinctive reaction was through my nose. I smelled it, and that was that. I turned to Hans and said, “Tell them I like the stuff they’re smoking; it smells much better than any we can get in Europe. Go on,” I said quickly, “tell them! You don’t have to understand, but tell them what I say.”

There followed some Chinese jabber, and Hans turned back to me. “This is bad,” he said. “These people are lunatics. They are going to kill us because we are foreigners.”

Meanwhile I’d been thinking, and there was an older man smoking his opium pipe on a mat in the corner. I had caught the smell of opium and suddenly understood that Hans was no more good to himself or to me. I walked over to the corner and looked at the old man and said quite simply in English, “That smells good; I’d like to smoke it,” and held out my hand for the pipe, with no evidence of fear.

That of course is the secret. You can sit in a lion’s den, and if you don’t seem afraid the lion will lick your boots. To be honest, I wasn’t afraid; I’d forgotten to think of fear, I was so profoundly interested in it all and so fascinated by the fumes of opium. You folks who read this won’t understand what I mean; but I can smell it now in my nostrils, this curious smell like burnt chocolate, which is better than that and which means so terribly much.

Anyway, the old man motioned me with his hand to lie down, and handed me his pipe. Then he himself twirled the opium gum above the lamp and made the little cone for me to smoke. As I sucked the smoke into my lungs I felt double satisfaction: the restful delight of the drug and the feeling that I was saved because I lay defenseless beside another smoker.

Somewhere in the Bible it says that “he that loseth his life shall find it”; and the Russians have a proverb that you only get by giving. I don’t know what this means, but that night with the Red Spears I was perfectly at ease, devoid of alarm or distress. I lay there smoking the pipes which the old man cooked for me, with Hans lying across my knees, talking to them gently. Some of the other Chinese were clustered round the old man, not smoking, they nor Hans.

I have wondered what was the secret of that night. Was it the freemasonry of opium whereof De Quincey speaks? Or was it that among these poor wretched devils, whose hand was against every man and every man’s hand against them, we came like gods from a cloud, who were not afraid or hostile?

I hadn’t smoked for some years, so the effect of the drug was strong upon me. I don’t remember clearly, but three things I do know. The Red Spears were not Communists at all, but only unhappy peasants whose homes and women had been looted by soldiers of different armies, until at last they revolted and went out to fight by themselves against all soldiers and armies. Second, they were my friends. And third, I had to go back. Although they were my friends, they would not allow me further.

I told them about the tomb with its ancient jade. They simply shook their heads and said they were sorry, but — The truth was they were frightened, with every man’s hand against them. They dare not let me go further.

As I lay there in the corner, opium’s magic power of imagination and picture showed me suddenly something dreadful. The series of German prints published after the Thirty Years’ War which cost Germany half the lives of all its population. Terrible pictures they are, the wolfish figures of peasants tearing the soldiers down and hanging them in pieces. The Red Spears were just the same, a maddened revolt of peasants against soldiers.

The next morning I said good-bye, still grumbling that they would not allow me to go on towards the place where this ancient tomb had been discovered. They bade me farewell in friendship, and we passed out of their lines.