The Mask of Fu Manchu

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“Shan! Shan!”

Someone calling my name persistently. The voice was faint. I had been asleep, but dreaming hard, an evil from which ordinarily I don’t suffer. The voice fitted into my dream uncannily....

I had dreamed I was asleep in my tent in that desolate spot on the Khorassan border, not a hundred yards from the valley called the Place of the Great Magician. No expedition of Sir Lionel’s in which I had been employed had so completely got on my nerves as this one.

Persia was new territory for me. And the chief’s sense of the dramatic, his innate showmanship ( a trait which had done him endless damage in the eyes of the learned societies) had resulted in my being more or less in the dark as to the real object of our journey.

Perhaps, when names now famous are forgotten, that of Sir Lionel Barton will be remembered; he will be measured at his true stature—as the greatest Orientalist of his century. But, big, lovable, generous, I must nevertheless state quite definitely that he was next to impossible to work with.

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