| THE next day we explored the little island from one end to the other and discovered that it was completely encircled by the moat of lava. There was no way to build a bridge or a boat that wouldn't either sink or burn, and waiting on the other side was the Hand That No One Sees. |
1 |
| "What luck!" I said. "I shall spend the rest of my life on this delightful oasis sipping spring water and eating fruit. No more ghosts, no more monsters, no more laughing dukes, no more lunatic quests--" |
2 |
| "And no more Lotus Cloud," sighed Miser Shen. |
3 |
| He had a point there. Life without Lotus Cloud seemed to be no life at all, but what could I do about it? The only way to escape would be to fly away, but this time we had no materials for a kite, and no place to launch it from anyway. I decided that the only man in the history of the world who could have escaped from this island was Chang Heng, which made me wonder whether he actually did. What started me on that train of thought was the seed that blew against my face: a sycamore seed. I caught it and held it out for Miser Shen to examine. |
4 |
| "Did you ever hear the story of the great Chang Heng and a seed like this? They say that one day the great man was sitting on the grass like we are, with his back resting against a tree, and a sycamore seed blew in front of his eyes. Then two or three more followed, and he caught one and studied the design. Chang Heng decided that he could build a flying machine designed like a sycamore seed, but he would need some sort of propelling force. So he filled tubes with a special type of Fire Drug - the burning rate was slowed by adding resin - and attached them to a wheel around a revolving pole. At the top of the pole he fixed fan-shaped arms like those of a sycamore seed, and that is how he came to build the marvelous Bamboo Dragonfly. I saw the plans at the Pool of Past Existences," I said. "A very interesting design, although terribly dangerous." |
5 |
| Miser Shen examined the sycamore seed, and the circle of fan-shaped arms that spun round and round so that the slightest breeze could lift it and send it flying for miles. There was an extraordinary variety of trees on that little island, and Miser Shen happened to be leaning, against a giant palm. He pointed up. |
6 |
| "You know, the leaves of this tree are very large, very light, very strong, and fan-shaped. If you put a circle of them together you would have an oversized sycamore seed," he said. "Of course you still could not build the Bamboo Dragonfly. For that you would have to have tubes of the Fire Drug." |
7 |
| "Simplest thing Chang Heng ever invented," I yawned. "Nothing but sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal. There are natural deposits of saltpeter in every corner of China, probably on this very island. The lava is full of sulfur, and we would be idiots indeed if we could not make a little charcoal. Then some resin which is all around us, bamboo tubes, reed fuses - nothing to it." |
8 |
| "Of course it would be suicidal," said Miser Shen. |
9 |
| "No hope of survival at all," I agreed. |
10 |
| "Insanity," said Miser Shen. |
11 |
| "Total madness," I agreed. |
12 |
| "Not even the faint chance of getting back to Lotus Cloud could justify such lunacy," said Miser Shen. |
13 |
| "Of course not," I agreed. |
14 |
| "Not even the faint chance of seeing her reaction when we brought her a ton of pearls and jade," said Miser Shen. |
15 |
| We got to our feet. |
16 |
| "You build a fire for the charcoal and I will try to find some saltpeter," I said. "We had better hurry, because it will probably take us three months to build the thing." |
17 |
| "Three years," said Miser Shen. "I shall almost certainly die of old age before we get finished." |
18 |
| It took us three weeks, but I doubt that Chang Heng would have approved of the result. The Palm leaves made an excellent imitation of a sycamore seed; the blades whirled very nicely around the revolving bamboo pole; the basket which Miser Shen made from reeds attached to a bamboo framework was very comfortable to sit in; but the tubes of Fire Drug left something to be desired. We had never been able to make the test samples burn evenly and both of us were scorched and blackened from tubes that had exploded. Besides, I could not remember Chang Heng's steering mechanism for the life of me, and we could only hope to steer the thing by shifting our weight in the basket. |
19 |
| "This is moronic," Miser Shen said gloomily, as he climbed into the basket. |
20 |
| "We are obviously deranged," I agreed. I picked up a rock and hurled it across the moat to see if the Hand That No One Sees was still waiting. The rock bounced away from nothingness and the monster shrieked with rage. |
21 |
| "It sounds almost like an insect," Miser Shen said thoughtfully. |
22 |
| "I see what you mean," I said. "A cicada might sound something like that if it were twenty or thirty feet tall and weighed a couple of tons." I lit the fuses and climbed into the basket beside Miser Shen. "Farewell, tree." |
23 |
| "Farewell, sloth," said Miser Shen. |
24 |
| We closed our eyes and covered our ears and waited for disaster. The first tube of Fire Drug began to spurt flame and smoke, and the Bamboo Dragonfly shuddered. More and more tubes began spurting in sequence, and the wheel to which they were attached spun round and round. The pole revolved rapidly and the palm leaves flashed around In a circle and the grass bent beneath a hard downward wind - and then the Bamboo Dragonfly lifted straight up into the air! |
25 |
| "Miser Shen, we are rising!" I yelled. |
26 |
| "Li Kao, we are falling!" howled Miser Shen. |
27 |
| And so we were. We had lifted about a hundred feet into the air and now we were dropping back down, straight toward the molten lava. |
28 |
| "Lean back!" I yelled. |
29 |
| We shifted our weight and at the last second the Bamboo Dragonfly straightened out, and now we were flying across the moat straight toward the invisible hand! "AAARRRGGGGGGGHH!" we howled as we shot toward our doom. |
30 |
| The hand nearly got us. An invisible finger slashed the air and ripped off one of the whirling palm leaves - which proved to be a blessing because the Bamboo Dragonfly stopped shuddering and began performing very nicely indeed, except that it was flying around in circles. So we flew round and round the ruined city, and below us we watched the fingerprints crawl quickly over the salt as the Hand That No One Sees scrambled after us. Suddenly I realized what the monster was doing. |
31 |
| "Miser Shen, that cursed thing has a fiendish plan!" I howled. "It is scuttling toward the ruins of the palace, and if it climbs to the top of the barricade and we keep circling like this we will run right into it!" |
32 |
| Nothing could persuade the Bamboo Dragonfly to change course. Around and around it flew, spurting flame and smoke, and with one more circle the hand would have us! |
33 |
| "Take off your tunic!" I yelled. "Try using it as a rudder!" |
34 |
| We spread our tunics behind us to catch the wind, and by the grace of Buddha it worked. We suddenly veered to the left, just beyond the reach of the invisible fingers, and zoomed out over that lake of lava behind the palace. |
35 |
| "Look! The barricade is falling!" cried Miser Shen. |
36 |
| The Hand That No One Sees had made one last furious snatch at us, and that had been a bad mistake. The stone slabs teetered and tottered and toppled down into the lava, and they were followed by a monstrous splash as a great invisible creature plunged into the molten rock. "Ehr-lang protect me!" gasped Miser Shen as the thing rose to the surface. |
37 |
| What had been invisible was now covered with lava. We saw a huge hairy hand - perhaps sixty feet long - palm up, with clenched fingers, and then the monster shuddered and the fingers jerked convulsively open. They were not fingers at all. They were the legs of an enormous spider! A round crimson mouth opened just above the bloated sac behind the fingers, which we had taken to be the heel and palm of the hand, and we saw a terrible circle of gigantic pointed teeth. Then the spider screamed so horribly that we covered our ears, and lava poured into the gaping mouth, and the Hand That No One Sees sank forever beneath the fiery surface of the lake. |
38 |
| We flew on in silence for quite some time. "You know," I said at last, "I would guess that it was simply an oversized relative of the common trap-door spider." |
39 |
| "Yes, and invisible because it lived underground before the eruption where there was no need for sight perception. Nature is astonishingly adaptable," Miser Shen said thoughtfully. "There are many sea creatures which have become transparent to the point of invisibility, and a few insects." |
40 |
| "A remarkable specimen in many ways," I said. "Nonetheless, I do not think that we shall mourn its passing." |
41 |
| So the Bamboo Dragonfly clattered on across the Desert of Salt, belching cheerful spurts of flame and clouds of black smoke, while the palm leaf blades whirled round and round, just like sycamore seeds. Hour after hour we flew above the whirlwinds and scorching heat and glaring white salt, but in the last light of the setting sun Miser Shen pointed to a faint dark line ahead of us and cried: |
42 |
| "Look, there are trees! The desert is coming to an end!" |
43 |
| The best proof of that observation was that black clouds were covering the rising moon, and the air smelled of rain. I watched lightning flicker in the distance. We were in for a thunderstorm. |
44 |
| "You know, if this basket we are riding in fills with water we may be in bad trouble," I said. |
45 |
| So we pried two pieces of bamboo from the bottom of the basket. This not only gave us a nice drainage hole, but also provided us with poles for umbrellas. Bamboo strips taken from the circular rim of the basket made very good frames, and our tunics and trousers served as covers. We finished just in time, because rain began to fall by the bucketful and lightning darted across the sky like the tongues of snakes - pssst!- and thunder roared baroom-aroom-aroom!, and in the bright flashes we could see the branches of trees far below waving frantically in the wind. But we clutched our umbrellas and flew through the storm as dry as could be. |
46 |
| "I have always wanted to fly through a thunderstorm!" yelled Miser Shen above the crash of thunder. |
47 |
| "Magnificent!" I shouted. |
48 |
| We were rather disappointed when the storm passed and the moon and stars came out, but we passed the night singing songs and telling stories while the palm leaves whirled steadily overhead and flame spurted out behind from the tubes of Fire Drug, and when the sun rose we found that we were clattering over lovely green fields and forests that looked as though they bad been soaped and scrubbed and left outside to dry. About three hours after sunrise the Fire Drug began to sputter and fizzle, and the palm leaves whirled slower and slower, and we began to descend. We came down directly over a small village, and you may be sure that the peasants gathered from miles around to watch this fire-breathing bird descend from Heaven. The palm leaves twirled lazily, clickety...clickety...clickety, and the Fire Drug produced one last puff of smoke and spurt of flame - boom! - and then we settled down as gently as a falling leaf. We stepped grandly from the basket clutching our umbrellas, tastefully attired in loincloths, moneybelts, and sandals. |
49 |
"My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao and there is a slight flaw in my character," I said to the awestruck peasants, with a polite bow. "This is Old Generosity, formerly known as Miser Shen. We hereby donate the Bamboo Dragonfly to your delightful village. Build a fence around it! Charge admission! Your fortunes shall be made. And now you may direct us to the nearest wineshop, for we intend to stay drunk for a week."
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50 |