The Tu-Tze's Tower

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Excerpt from The Tu-Tze's Tower: A Novel Lot rose, frowning. "Noisy dogs!" he murmured, in a tongue which the noise-makers would not have understood. Clumping across the courtyard awkwardly, but, on account of his soft Chinese shoes, soundlessly, he rapidly descended the crumbling steps of the temple, walking straight into a lovely bed of delicate running fern at their foot. Without caring how he crushed this, or knocked the petals off gigantic roses and azaleas like Hindu miracle flowers, whose bushes blocked his way, he strode toward a small black tent, pitched a stone's throw from the building. All about his feet, pillowing their heads indifferently on stones or on tufts of soft fragrant fern, lay sleeping gaunt yellow men, most of them half naked to the piercing mountain air. Only one, who lay across the flapping doorway of the tent, partly roused on his approach. "No frightee, Matang!" said Lot, in the "pidgin" speech of intercourse between foreigner and coolie. "It allee right." As the native settled back into instant slumber, Lot called through the opening, in the third language he had employed within the past five minutes, "Madame!" There was no answer. Raising to his lips a small whistle, he blew a note whose sharpness he tried to muffle with his fingers, and almost upon the second a tall woman of about thirty, bronzed like a man, dashed to the doorway, the thin, supple fingers of one hand outspread over her beating heart. "Have I overslept?" she panted. "Or is he - oh, Lot, cannot you speak quickly?" About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.