1938-12-02 — Page 5

CHINA MAIL

FRIDAY SUPPLEMENT, DECEMBER 2, 1938

ARBORD spent two years

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and £5,000 searching the world for romance.

Until he was twenty-nine Har- bord had spent his life at the Fire Renewals desk in a basement office of an insurance company. Nobody imagined that he loathed such clerking, or that the whole of the inside of his head was one long glowing dream of adventure in distant lands, of poetic and spirited romance lurking some- where "beyond the ranges;" that he was filled with a passionate desire to be off to far flung spaces. that white men had never trod, even to risk life and limb in glamorous experiences in the wild spots of the earth.

Not until he was twenty-nine did his companions realise the real Harbord. And not ever then. For when his uncle, died and left him £20,000 he simply posted a letter of resignation without go- ing to the office and walked out into the world.

He knew exactly what he want- ed and the places where he could find it. He knew all that reading could tell him about the few re- maining wild or unexplored tracts, where a man could shake the off civilisation and dare thrills of danger or the unknown. He headed straight for the most likely and promising of such un- mapped wonderlands the Matto Grosso country of Brazil. He would be the first to explore that

Short Story

vast, unplumbed plateau, finding, perhaps, the hidden cities and the fabled White Indians that Colonel Fawcett had failed to find.

He consulted and hired experts in Rio, and after two months sweaty if humdrum travelling had a small but workmanlike expedi- tion marching through the empty enigmas of jungle and campos that make that fabled land. He did find an unmapped river, litter- ed with some undistinguished rubble heaps that were undoubt- edly the ruins of a dead and gone city. He had achieved! He and his party were celebrating the glory of applying feet where no white feet had been set before, when a semi-naked man of whitish skin, one of the fabled White Indians, landed casually from a canoe and said in English: "If you're heading west, go carefully. I've got a trap line from here to the Rio Xingu, and I don't want a herd of strangers ruining my pelt and feather trade."

He was a man who had been born in a suburb through which Harbord's train had passed daily in his working years. The fellow wasn't in the least excited about being on unmapped territory, it was all so everyday to him that he considered it not worth fuss- ing about. He thought it much- more important that his trapping should remain unmolested, for ho had a very good connection with. museums and milliners and hoped to make. enough money to buy a villa with space for a garage when he got home. He was glad of home news and a quarter of a pound human tobacco, but he sim~ ply didn't

seem to know what

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BEYOND THE RANGES

Harbord was driving at when he talked of adventure.

When he reached Moscow this courier even took him to the house of the revolutionaries, say-

Harbord thought there might be a better chance for romanco ́ing:. in the interior of Australia. He tries both Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. In the former he thought he really had found a new map reading in no- where until an old sun-downer slouched into his camp just when he was writing up his "discovery" in his diary one night, and made life a plague trying to sell him options in mineral rights he had been staking all over the un- known.

In the Northern territory it was worse. An air patrol landed beside Harbord's marching co- lumn just when there seemed a glorious risk of their all dying from thirst, and the casual young pilot said to them:

"Hell, I thought you were an- other of these "lost" flying stunts. They're crashing all over the map these days. Water-of course, I can give you water; half my work is carrying tanks to fools of plorers."

ex-

With the bloom rubbed off ex-. ploration, Harbord next tried ad- venture in the wild spots. He mix- ed himself up with a gang run-. ning guns in Manchuria. He took

By Douglas

Newton

it for granted that he carried his life in his hands, for the Japan- ese, to say nothing of three re-

Chinese presentative

govern- ments, were out shooting for them.

He really did get a near-thrill when a Japanese cruiser signalled their tramp packed to the hatches with rifles and machine- guns-to stop. But the smiling. little officer who boarded them, merely apologised and asked them if they had any sal ammoniac to. spare, as their ice plant had broken down.

• They were forced to land their munition cases in a port occupied by one of the Chinese Govern- ments out for their blood. But there was no, thrill, there. The leader of Harbord's party bor- rowed twenty pounds from him, called on the hostile Commander- in-Chief, and after a really jolly. interview the enemy sent one of his regiments down to unload the arms into lorries. Even when they had evaded the sleepy outposts of the second hostile Chinese. Gov- ernment and were captured by the troops of the third, nothing. happened. Since they could not. now get their weapons through to the rebels they sold them at quite

good profit to their captors.

After that Harbord decided there might be more adventure in - Soviet Russia. He carried a dan- gerous message from a White Army chief in Harbin to a secret counter-revolutionary society in Moscow. The Bolsheviks insisted on giving him first class trável all the way, because he was a rich tourist with propaganda value. They even provided a courier so that no harm should come to him,

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'I suppose it really feels ex- citing carrying secret papers; you' English are so adventurous. We don't mind, of course. Our man in Harbin copied out the one. you carry ten minutes after the writer had finished it, and wired it ahead. There was nothing real- ly worth while in it. But, now, you must really see our new Heavy Industries plants. They are a thrill. Not even Ford could be more modern."

Harbord fled from the set pieces of Soviet propaganda, which seemed to him to be the worst aspects of the humdrum he was trying to escape from heaped up in a mass production madness," and headed for the Bosphorus. He'd heard that adventure in the raw could always be had in the Galata quarter of

ple.

Constantino-

He thought he'd found it at last. He got himself tangled up with bright eyes and a hareem. There, in a scented garden be- neath the silken night of Asia, he listened to a dove-like. voice (fortunately knowing French) · pleading for rescue and love.

She was a Circassian princess, kidnapped from her father's tribe and doomed almost at once to be sold into a slavery worse than death. Harbord was just feeling the authentic glow, had, in fact, actually decided to risk the bow string, or whatever one risked for snatching hourïs from hareems, when the little waiter in the cafe he frequented breathed into his ear in the purest cockney:

"Go easy with that dame that's sparking you, boss. She's sly bit o' goods from a Paris cabaret, an - your kind are an old game to her. Yeh, she'll tip off her husband to nab you just as

you elope, an' It'll cost you all of fifty quid to get clear. Quite a regular trade with that pair. They know how... Asia's moon brings out the ro- mantic feelings o' travellers an' make a profit out of it. Only you've treated me like a gentle- man, an' I used to be waiter in a Lyons Corner House, so I don't like to see you put upon.”

Harbord left Constantinople with his desire for adventure. more a note of interrogation than. a passion. But he still went on hunting, He tried the Caucasus,

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which he understood was very tough and bandity, only to be chased out by earnest gentlemen who would give him banquets in the hope that he'd invest in their oil wells.

He sought a thrill among sheiks, and was actually ridden down by a party of armed Arabs in a place beautifully fitted for massacre- but only because the leader of the wild desert men had been educated in an English University and wanted to learn if Oxford had won the Boat Race. yet.

Africa was as blank. He tried several jungles of the Dark Con- tinent, but he found too many charabancs in all of them for glamour. There was nothing do- ing in Spain. He did get caught up in a burst of street fighting in Seville, and a bright eyed senorita beside him did, scream and clutch his arm and appeal for aid.

"Don't fear, Donna mia," he cried splendidly. "I'll see you through safely if it costs me my life,"

"Mel" she cried. "Ah no, not me my little, Carlo. See that little dog in the street there. Get him- quick before, one of these stupid bomb throwers treads on his little paws."..

He didn't even hear a guitar played in the moonlight in old Castile. It seemed all drizzle and gramaphone crooners.”

Nazi Germany was as flat. He went purposely to one of the Storm Centres in the hope of rescuing a beautiful Jewessor someone from something with rubber bound clubs in it. He did see one such Jewess in fact a whole family of Jewesses-sur- rounded by the sinister black uni- forms of Hitler's Shutz staffel in the midst of a riot. He managed to force his way through to them declaring his readiness to rescue and carry them to safety.

The tallest and most beautiful Jewess turned on him calmly, and, taking a supply of chewing gum from her mouth said in the purest Cinamerican:

"Don't be a sap, bo. These gen'lmen are taking us to safety right now. Better come 'long us. you'll be sure o' making your hotel without getting your silly head broken.

That was the final straw, Har- bord, who had travelled those (Continued on Page 7)

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