The Equinox (Volume I, Number VII)

THE EQUINOX ape-like creature, though without his cunning and his purpose. " Only, no water's left to feed its play." “Up with it on the tripod I It's extinct." But surely I am not a dead man at thirty! ” The entry is followed by an undated entry earlier than the 25th, suggesting a method of “discipline." But nothing else. Indeed, there is absolute silence on all mystic matters until December 20, over a month later. On that day, jumping on to his Burmese pony, a few yards after fording the stream which marks the Chinese frontier, the animal backed before he was in the saddle, and fell with him over a cliff of some forty feet in height. “ Neither hurt,” he remarks. “ Later, kicked on the thigh by a mule.” lt is of no purpose here to deal with Fra. P.‘s private affairs; but one must mention that all this time of interior insanity he was “ playing the man” very vigorously. His moral force no doubt saved the Europeans of Tengyueh from a panic which might easily have resulted in massacre. After the death, perhaps by poison, of the Consul, the admirable and undervalued Litton, he was the only person who kept his head, and knew how to assert the authority of the white man. So that we must understand that this “black insanity" of which Fra. P. speaks was a private little insanity of his own; it in no way interfered with the normal working of his magnificent and heroic brain. Not to be turned aside from any purpose, however trivial, once he had formulated it, we find him leaving Tengyueh-Ting {or the wildest mountains and deserts of Western China. 12