The Last Samurai

Then at the far end a woman looked up. Her black hair was as rough as a pony’s; she had the broad features of a true Mongolian. She gazed intently at the boy and at last came forward. The boy walked into her arms and began to cry and she too cried. Then she stood back and hit the boy on the side of the head and shouted and cried again. The boy lay in the dirt. HC made some gesture. The woman looked at him dumbly.

HC gestured at the boy’s torn feet and the woman looked at him dumbly. He gestured from himself to a pot of food and she spat at his feet.

At last one of the other women offered HC some food. None spoke while he ate and through the long afternoon there was complete silence in the encampment.

The men returned from hunting and still no one spoke, and HC at last slept in some straw by the horses and no one spoke either to protest or to offer him hospitality, and the boy slept with him.

He stayed for eight years. For five years no one spoke to him, and if they spoke to each other and he approached they fell silent, but in his fifth year he had a terrible disappointment.

HC had been thinking for some reason of RD, who had based his method of Greek pronunciation on the authoritative work on the subject, W. S. Allen’s Vox Graeca. RD, being largely self-taught, had always made a point of pronouncing Greek with the pitch accents, with the result that no one could ever understand a word he said. Thinking of RD, HC realised suddenly after five years with the tribe that their language was in fact Indo-European, but Indo-European filtered through a Chinese system of pitch accents to the point where it sounded like nothing he knew. He was now able to recognise a few words. It was a terrible anticlimax after all the languages he had learned, but he stayed another three years and was befriended at last and mastered it.

But then he was forced to leave.

The tribe moved around as nomads do, and it had moved to an area which was disputed between the Soviet Union and China. They were close to a village which had been punished severely by both sides for not implementing government policy and thus showing where its allegiance lay. One day a plane crashed in the desert near the encampment; the survivors were arrested as spies to forestall reprisals from above. The spies were thrown into jail and beaten to give a good impression.

HC knew he had to do something. He suspected the prisoners knew no Chinese, so he went to the jail to reason with the authorities. When he got into town he was told to come back the next day. When he got back to the encampment he found that the tribe had disappeared.

The jail was badly built and badly guarded. HC broke into it and freed the prisoners. He decided that the best plan was to march south and make their way into India. It had been ten years since he had heard a European language spoken, and he found it almost unbearable to articulate the old words with his tongue, but it had to be done.

Sibylla put her head on her hand. She seemed tired of the words in her own mouth. At last she went on.

The march south was very arduous, and three of the captives died en route. The survivors walked at last into the British consulate in Peshawar and demanded repatriation. HC was almost turned away: he had no passport, of course, and no proof of identification, and as he had been missing for more than seven years he was officially dead. Luckily for HC, however, it turned out that a man he had beaten in various prize examinations was now the British consul in Bombay. A trunk call was put through, and HC was able to recite from memory his translation into Greek verse of Wee sleekit cow’rin’ tim’rous beastie, and the man at the other end said there was only one man in the world who could do that. This was not strictly true, since RD could probably have done it, but HC was not about to argue.