Snake Bite Read Online Free PDF

begin.’
    ‘I don’t understand,’ Sherlock admitted.
    ‘Good,’ Wu said. ‘That is a start.’ He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. ‘I have told you a little about China, but you should know more about the
Chinese before you arrive.’ He glanced around at the other sailors. ‘These men are all fools. They do not care about where they are going. They want everywhere they go to be the same
– same food, same language, same kinds of people. They are not interested in difference, only sameness. You, you are different. You look for differences, and are interested in them. You are
more intelligent than them.’
    ‘I’ve always been interested in learning things,’ Sherlock admitted.
    ‘In your country, boxing and God and food and nature – they are different, yes?’
    ‘Ye-es,’ Sherlock admitted, not sure where Wu was going.
    ‘In China, they are all parts of something. We believe that everything is connected. Changes to one thing affect everything else.’ He smiled.
    Wu kept talking, and Sherlock listened, but he wasn’t sure that he understood much of what was said. It didn’t really matter. Wu was obviously passionate about his beliefs, and
Sherlock found himself entranced by his friend’s eloquence. On a couple of occasions Wu shifted into Cantonese when he didn’t know the correct English words, and Sherlock found that he
was still following the conversation. What Sherlock did understand was that
T’ai chi ch’uan
was something between a way of meditating and a way of fighting, and that it was a
reflection of a deeper religious aspect of Chinese life.
    Eventually, when Wu ran out of words, Sherlock asked, ‘Could you teach me?’
    ‘I am already teaching you – Cantonese. You want me to teach you cooking now?’
    Sherlock smiled. ‘No – not cooking. I want you to teach me
T’ai chi ch’uan
.’
    Wu stared at him for a long moment. ‘You want me to teach you to fight?’
    Sherlock recognized the trick in the question.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to teach me how to control my body with my mind.’
    ‘Right answer.’ Wu smiled. ‘Then I teach you that. The fighting will come with it.’
    The weather got hotter as they hooked around the bottom point of Africa – the Cape of Good Hope – and headed back towards the equator. The skies returned to their pure blue, and the
sun beat down on the deck and on the sailors, drying the one to the point where the wood began to crack while raising blisters on the backs and shoulders of the other. The sea grew quiet again, and
porpoises began to accompany the ship, as they had done before, racing ahead of it like a pack of hunting dogs. Sherlock sometimes caught glimpses of other things paralleling the ship, beneath the
waves, dark shapes that seemed as big, if not bigger, than the ship itself, but they never broke the surface. Were they sharks? Or maybe whales? He had read about whales. Or were they some other
kind of life that nobody had yet given a name to? He didn’t know, but he desperately wanted to.
    The days blurred into one another. When he wasn’t working or sleeping then Sherlock was practising the violin, learning Cantonese from Wu Chung or following the slow-motion movements of
T’ai chi-ch’uan
that Wu Chung rehearsed on deck every morning. Sherlock was beginning to see that if he took the graceful movements and speeded them up then they really would
make an effective form of defensive fighting – blocking punches and then returning blows with either the hands or the feet. He could also see that by practising the movements slowly at first,
so slowly that his muscles sometimes began to scream under the strain, he was building up a memory of them. If he ever had the opportunity to use this martial art for real then he could see how his
body would automatically follow the movements that it had memorized without him even having to think about it.
    Why had something like
T’ai chi ch’uan
never been