The Land Leviathan (A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel) Read Online Free PDF

sorting through our baggage, suspecting us, doubtless, of being revolutionists or bandits. The better hotels had been taken over almost entirely by high-ranking officers and we were forced at last to put up at a none-too-clean inn near the quays, and even here there were a good many soldiers to keep us awake with their drunken carousing into the night. I pitied any town they might be called upon to defend!
    Mr. Lu disappeared very early the next morning and returned while I was eating an unpalatable breakfast of rice and some kind of stew which had been served to me with genuine apologies on the part of our host. There was little else, he said. The soldiers had eaten everything—and no-one was paying him.
    Mr. Lu looked pleased with himself and soon took the opportunity to let me know that he had managed to secure passage for us on the next train leaving Wuchang. The train was chiefly a troop transport, but would take a certain number of boxcars. If I did not mind the discomfort of traveling with the men and horses, we could leave almost immediately.
    I was glad to agree and we gathered up our luggage and went to meet the rest of our party on the far side of town where they had been camped, sleeping in the open, curled up against their steeds. They looked red-eyed and angry and were cursing at each other as they saddled up and prepared the baggage for the pack animals.
    We made our way to the station in something of a hurry, for there was precious little time. Mr. Lu said that a troop transport was more likely to leave on time—or even ahead of time if it was ready to go. The army could decide.
    We got to the station and the train was still in—drawn by one of the largest locomotives I have ever seen. It belonged to no class I recognized, was painted a mixture of bright blue and orange, and was bellowing more fire and smoke than Siegfried’s dragon.
    We crowded into the boxcars, the doors were shut on us, and off we jerked, hanging on for dear life as the train gathered speed.
    Later we were able to get one of the sliding doors partly open and look out. We were in high mountain country, winding our way steadily upwards through some of the loveliest country I have ever seen in my life. Old, old mountains, clothed in verdant trees, the very image of those Chinese paintings which seem so formalized until you have seen the original of what the artist described. And then you realize that it is Nature herself who is formalized in China, that the country has been populated so long that there is scarcely a blade of grass, growing in no matter what remote spot, which has not in some way received the influence of Man. And here, as in other parts of China, the wilderness is not made any less impressive by this imprint. If anything, it is made more impressive. Mr. Lu shared my pleasure in the sight (though he took a somewhat condescending, proprietorial attitude towards me as I gasped and exclaimed and wondered).
    “I expected to be delighted with China,” I told him. “But I am more than delighted. I am overawed—and my faith in the beauties of Nature is restored forever!”
    Mr. Lu said nothing, but a little later he took out his cigarette case and, offering me a fine Turkish, remarked that even Nature at her most apparently invulnerable was still in danger from the works of mankind.
    I had been thinking of Bastable and his description of the bomb which had blown him back into his own time, and I must admit that I gave Mr. Lu a hard look, wondering if perhaps he knew more of Bastable than he had said, but he added nothing to this remark and I decided to accept it for one of generalized philosophy.
    Accepting the cigarette, I nodded. “That’s true. I sincerely hope this civil strife does not destroy too much of your country,” I said, leaning forward to give him a match. The train swayed as it took a bend and revealed to me a lush forest, full of the subtlest greens I had ever seen. “For I have fallen in love with