Lost Horizon Read Online Free

enclosing a draft to pay the expenses I’d been put to on his account. He thanked me and said he was very fit. He also said he was about to set out on a long journey—to the northwest. That was all.”
    “Where did he mean?”
    “Yes, it’s pretty vague, isn’t it? A good many places lie to the northwest of Bangkok. Even Berlin does, for that matter.”
    Rutherford paused and filled up my glass and his own. It had been a queer story—or else he had made it seem so; I hardly knew which. The music part of it, though puzzling, did not interest me so much as the mystery of Conway’s arrival at that Chinese mission hospital; and I made this comment. Rutherford answered that in point of fact they were both parts of the same problem. “Well, how did he get to Chung-Kiang?” I asked. “I suppose he told you all about it that night on the ship?”
    “He told me something about it, and it would be absurd for me, after letting you know so much, to be secretive about the rest. Only, to begin with, it’s a longish sort of tale, and there wouldn’t be time even to outline it before you’d have to be off for your train. And besides, as it happens, there’s a more convenient way. I’m a little diffident about revealing the tricks of my dishonorable calling, but the truth is Conway’s story, as I pondered over it afterwards, appealed to me enormously. I had begun by making simple notes after our various conversations on the ship, so that I shouldn’t forget details; later, as certain aspects of the thing began to grip me, I had the urge to do more, to fashion the written and recollected fragments into a single narrative. By that I don’t mean that I invented or altered anything. There was quite enough material in what he told me: he was a fluent talker and had a natural gift for communicating an atmosphere. Also, I suppose, I felt I was beginning to understand the man himself.” He went to an attaché-case, and took out a bundle of typed manuscript. “Well, here it is, anyhow, and you can make what you like of it.”
    “By which I suppose you mean that I’m not expected to believe it?”
    “Oh, hardly so definite a warning as that. But mind, if you do believe, it will be for Tertullian’s famous reason—you remember? quia impossibile est. Not a bad argument, maybe. Let me know what you think, at all events.”
    I took the manuscript away with me and read most of it on the Ostend express. I intended returning it with a long letter when I reached England, but there were delays, and before I could post it I got a short note from Rutherford to say that he was off on his wanderings again and would have no settled address for some months. He was going to Kashmir, he wrote, and thence “east.” I was not surprised.

ONE
    D URING THAT THIRD WEEK of May the situation in Baskul had become much worse and, on the 20th, Air Force machines arrived by arrangement from Peshawar to evacuate the white residents. These numbered about eighty, and most were safely transported across the mountains in troop-carriers. A few miscellaneous aircraft were also employed, among them being a cabin machine lent by the Maharajah of Chandapore. In this, about 10 A.M., four passengers embarked: Miss Roberta Brinklow, of the Eastern Mission; Henry D. Barnard, an American; Hugh Conway, H.M. Consul; and Captain Charles Mallinson, H.M. Vice-Consul.
    These names are as they appeared later in Indian and British newspapers.
    CONWAY WAS THIRTY-SEVEN . He had been at Baskul for two years, in a job which now, in the light of events, could be regarded as a persistent backing of the wrong horse. A stage of his life was finished; in a few weeks’ time, or perhaps after a few months’ leave in England, he would be sent somewhere else. Tokyo or Teheran, Manila or Muscat; people in his profession never knew what was coming. He had been ten years in the Consular Service, long enough to assess his own chances as shrewdly as he was apt to do those of others. He knew