Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

12 THE METAL MONSTER No need to dwell here upon that—it has been written. Nor shall-I recite the reasons for my restlessness—for these are known to those who have read that history of mine. Nor is there cause to set forth at length the steps by which I had arrived at this vale of peace. | Sufficient is to tell that in New York one night, reading over what is perhaps the most sensational of my books—“The Poppies and Prim- ulas of Southern Tibet,” the result of my travels of 1910-1911, I de- termined to return to that quiet, forbidden land. There, if anywhere, might I find something akin to forgetting. | There was a certain flower which I long had wished to study in its mutations from the singular forms appearing on the southern slopes of the E/burz—Persia’s mountainous chain that extends from Azerbai- jan in the west to Khorasan in the east; from thence I would follow its modified types in the Hindu-Kush ranges and its migrations along the southern scarps of the Trans-Himalayas—that unexplored upheaval, higher than the Himalayas themselves, more deeply cut with precipice and gorge, which Sven Hedin had touched and named on his journey to Lhasa. Having accomplished this, I planned to push across the passes to the Manasarowar Lakes, where, legend has it, the strange, luminous purple lotuses grow. An ambitious project, undeniably fraught with danger; but it is written that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and until inspiration or message how to rejoin those whom I had loved so dearly came to me, nothing less, I felt, could dull my heartache. And, frankly, feeling that no such inspiration or message could. come, I did not much care as to the end. : In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes, more than this, a companion and counselor and interpreter as well. He was a Chinese; his name Chiu-Ming. His first thirty years had been spent at the great Lamasery of Palkhor-Choinde at Gyantse, west of Lhasa. Why he had gone from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never asked. It was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had found him. He recommended himself to me as the best cook within ten thousand miles of Pekin. For almost three months we had journeyed; Chiu-Ming and I and the two ponies that carried my impedimenta. We had traversed mountain roads which had echoed to the march- ing feet of the hosts of Darius, to the hordes of the Satraps. The high- ways of the Achaemenids—yes, and which before them had trembled tothe tramplings of the myriads of the godlike Dravidian conquerors. We had slipped over ancient Iranian trails: over paths which the warriors of conquering Alexander had traversed: dust of bones of GOGO .S (GO)