Sherlock Holmes in the Great Detective on the Roof of the World
SHERLOCK HOLMES
ON THE ROOF OF THE
WORLD
or,
The Adventure of the Wayfaring God
Thos. Kent Miller
Author of “Sherlock Holmes at
the Crucible of Life,” Etc.
From the Journal of Leo Vincey, Esq.
ROSEMILL
H O U S E
Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World
(also published as The Great Detective on the Roof of the World)
Copyright © 1987, 1990, 2007, 2012 by Thos. Kent Miller
Published with the permission of the copyright owner of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate. This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events; to real people, living or dead; or to real locales are intended only to give the fiction a setting in historical reality. Other names, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental. The opinions expressed in this book are not necessarily those of the author.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the expressed written consent of the author and publisher.
Published by Rosemill House
roofoftheworld@earthlink.net
Also by Thomas Kent Miller
SHERLOCK HOLMES AT THE CRUCIBLE OF LIFE;
Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire
(An Allan Quatermain Memoir)
Coming in 2013
SHERLOCK HOLMES AT THE DAWN OF TIME;
Or, The Adventure of the Star of Wonder
(An Allan Quatermain Memoir)
For the Joy and the Miracle of Nicholas Lawrence Miller this service this hymn
Table of Contents
Foreword, by Thos. Kent Miller
Introduction, by Leo Vincey
Chapter I: Sigerson the Norwegian
Chapter II: The Fate of Poor Paljori
Chapter III: The Dalai Lama Beckons
Chapter IV: The Dalai Lama’s Story
Chapter V: The Monk of Long Ago
Chapter VI: An Undertaker and a Doctor
Chapter VII: Sigerson’s Solutions
THE JOURNAL OF ISSA
Conclusion
Addendum
Acknowledgments
About Thos. Kent Miller
This tale has no further intention beyond providing food for thought.
Foreword
As I prepare Leo Vincey's manuscript for publication, there is one thing, I find, that especially saddens me: namely that, in this entire heretofore unknown Sherlock Holmes adventure, there is only one oblique reference to Watson—Dr. John H. Watson, friend, confidant, and biographer of the great detective. What, I ask myself, is a Holmes story without his trusty Watson?
As is known, nearly all the lost adventures that have come to light since the passing of the principal characters have been through an agency connected somehow either to Watson or his estate, or to Holmes' estate. But even that cannot be said for the tale you are about to read. It is apparent, I think, that Watson never had any knowledge of either the manuscript or the incident which it describes, and that Holmes kept the matter entirely to himself, as he was in the habit of doing with so many particulars of his life.
Be that as it may, I will now explain how the manuscript came to the attention of this editor. My wife and I lived in a secluded part of a rustic town midway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. In April of 1984, our neighbor up the court from us, Jan Needleman, was preparing to travel to Nepal. As an employee of an airline, Jan could travel virtually anywhere without cost. The day before she was to take off via British Airways to Calcutta, she called us and asked if we would keep an eye on her house for three weeks and bring in her mail. At the time, we were still fairly new to the neighborhood; I barely knew Jan and had no idea that she was about to embark on such a grand adventure.
As it happened, as I spoke to her over the phone in my basement office, I was surrounded by stacks of books about the Himalayan region—Seven Years in Tibet and Return to Tibet by Heinrich Harrer, The Secret Exploration of Tibet by Peter Hopkick, The Third Eye by T. Lobsang Rampa, The Trekker's Guide to the Himalaya by Hugh Swift, The Way to Shambhala by Edwin Bernbaum, and The Arun: A Natural History of the World's Deepest Valley by Edward W. Cronin, Jr., to name a few. As coincidence would have it, during the several months previous, I had developed an interest in that part of Central Asia called the Roof of the World and had done extensive research on the subject with the intention of parlaying the information into some sort of book. The fact is that Himalayan trekking had become a popular pastime among young urban professionals, and interest in the region had simply picked up appreciably. It seemed to me inevitable that a new travel book of some sort or a reference book about northern India, Nepal, Tibet, and the Himalayas was virtually guaranteed to succeed.
Such was my background in the subject when, out of the blue, Jan called to say she was leaving the next day. Naturally I was very excited for her and was about to summarize all of the above for her and to ask her to be alert on my behalf for anything of interest of an anecdotal nature that I could use in my book. But before I could broach the subject, my wife drove in from the market beeping the car horn, indicating that she needed help unloading the car. Knowing where my duty lay, I simply wished Jan fun on her trip and agreed to look after things for her while she was gone.
Life went on as usual, and at the end of the third week Jan returned—at once enchanted by her experience and disappointed. Don't ask me how she did it, but despite all her research into the trip, two critical facts had evaded her: April may be the best time of the year to witness the miracle of Nepal's rhododendrons, but it is also the month that the entire Himalayan range is socked in by mist and fog so that not even the slightest pinnacle is visible.
She enjoyed herself nonetheless, especially her excursions in the towns and cities on her trip, and she returned with a small gift for us for our trouble: a packet of handcrafted stationery.
The stationery was in a lovely 10-inch by 7-1/2-inch envelope covered with a blue and red stencil of what appeared to be a conch shell repeated innumerable times so that very little of the beige paper showed through. The flap on the envelope was secured by a strand of red string tied in a bow knot. As I handled this token of appreciation from the other side of the planet, I was immediately impressed with the craft involved and the brilliant colors. I undid the string tie and pulled out the contents—several sheets of red-stenciled "Dambar Kumari" paper with black-stenciled matching envelopes. An enclosed rough explanatory note indicated that the paper was named after "a famous beauty in the Nepalese court" who had been the first to wear printed cloth, and explained that "two hundred years ago in the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal a group of men started the tradition of textile printing," having learned the technique from the Muslims of northern India.
As I riffled through the stationery, I saw that there were several consecutive sheets in the back that had already been written on. These sheets proved to be much older than the others, of a different paper altogether, and brittle besides. The writing was in English and in an elaborate hand. Questioning Jan, she had no idea how these sheets got into the stationery packet. She had purchased this gift, as well as a number of other souvenirs, trinkets for friends and family, and the like, from various street vendors and market bazaars on her travels. One can only guess how the sheets got into the hands of a Nepalese peasant, or of what went on in his or her mind
: probably some notion of economizing or something of the sort. It was impossible to say.
What follows is the contents of those sheets in toto, edited only to improve the title from the original "Journal of Events in Lhasa" to one of a more Watsonian cast, to add a few applicable epigraphs, to correct or update spelling (e.g., "Tibet" for "Thibet"), and to add appropriate chapter titles and notes.
Whether the manuscript is authentic and whether the events it chronicles really happened is anyone's guess. Whether what it records has any basis at all in reality or is just the rambling writings of a delirious man also is anyone's guess. For my part, I believe that the manuscript is authentic, was penned by one Leo Vincey in 1891, that the events chronicled did in fact happen as described, and that it was left in the safekeeping of Sherlock Holmes himself. How it passed from Holmes' hands into a packet of stationery 93 years later is a tale that may never be told. We may simply be pleased that it did reach our world intact so that its contents can be shared with our generation.
But one fantasy persists. What if Holmes had in fact delivered the manuscript into the hands of his friend, Dr. Watson, as he had no doubt intended? How would the good doctor have edited it? What would have been his approach? What sort of droll commentary or imaginative framing device would he have included to temper the impact of the story, as he was wont to do with the more sensitive of his friend's exploits? Perhaps such questions are pointless, but they are seductive.
Two points, it seems to me, are clear. This is one of the few stories to come to light regarding events involving "Sigerson," the fictitious name Holmes went by during the nearly three years of his Great Hiatus (a point that he discusses in "The Adventure of the Empty House" and which is elaborated on at great length in Baring-Gould's biography of the sleuth and also in his Annotated Sherlock Holmes). Besides this extraordinary claim to fame, the following tale also has the distinction of being the true first sequel to Horace Holly's famous journal, She, which was published in 1887 under the byline of Holly's agent, Henry Rider Haggard. The only heretofore known sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She, was published in 1904 and records events that occurred some twenty years after She. This new tale is a record of events that occurred between the previously published adventures.
For those unfamiliar with the events that precede this new story, I have included the following synopsis of She and the pertinent early sections of Ayesha.
The adventures of L. Horace Holly and Leo Vincey as recorded in She, in brief, plus some early incidents from Ayesha:
Late at night, Ludwig Horace Holly, a student at Cambridge University, is studying in his rooms when his friend, Vincey, unexpectedly arrives with a heavy strong-box. Vincey explains that he is dying, and asks Holly to act as guardian to his son, Leo. Vincey does in fact die, and the years roll quickly by. When Leo turns 25, he opens the box his father had left him. In it he finds a broken potsherd inscribed with ancient writings.
The inscriptions tell a weird story: Leo's ancestor Kallikrates, a priest of Isis, had broken faith and fled Egypt with a young princess, Amenartas. The inscriptions also tell of the queen of a savage people—a white goddess—and a strange Pillar of Fire which she had shown Kallikrates and Amenartas. The queen fell in love with Kallikrates and, in a fit of jealousy, slew him, but Amenartas escaped to give birth to Kallikrate's son. The writing ends in Amenartas' plea that the son she was leaving behind, or another courageous descendant, avenge her against the Queen of the Pillar of Fire.
Leo and Horace take up the quest and after many trials come to the hidden African city of Kôr, carved out of solid rock, where reigns the mysterious Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Ayesha explains to Horace that she has been living in her hidden city for two thousand years without news of the outside world. Time means nothing to her; nor can death touch her.
The next day, Ayesha visits Leo, who is dying of fever from a wound. When she enters his room and sees him for the first time, she draws back in astonishment. Leo has the features of the dead Kallikrates: He is the man she has loved and whose rebirth she has awaited for two thousand years. Ayesha then restores Leo's health.
Eventually she persuades Leo and Horace to see the Pillar of Fire for themselves. Leo, though, hesitates to enter the flame as it shoots up from the bowels of the earth. To assuage his fears, Ayesha enters the fire where she bathed only once before two thousand years earlier. Her features begin to shrivel, her arms grow scrawny and wilt, and before the stunned audience, she shrinks into a small bundle of skin and bones. Why? How? No one knows. Perhaps the flame's magic can only be used once in a lifetime. Three weeks after they penetrated the African interior, the two men emerge and make their way to England.
During a period of morbid isolation in England, Leo and Holly strive to wring some meaning from the joke called Life. Leo's despair is so great, he contemplates suicide. However, a Universal Power greater than his intervenes, providing two separate but related signs—one a dream, the other the sun bursting through a particular cloud formation—that give our adventurers hope once again. At once they arrange to leave for Central Asia. They travel through the snows and mountains of that region for a number of years seeking the solidly real manifestation of the symbols they saw in the signs...and seeking the meaning of Ayesha's last words: I shall come again. For a while they tarry in Lhasa.
T. K. M.
I traveled for two years in Tibet...and amused myself by visiting Lhasa, and spending some days with the head Lama.
—SHERLOCK HOLMES in "The Adventure of the Empty House"
We are...going away again, this time to Central Asia, where, if anywhere upon this Earth, wisdom is to be found...
—L. HORACE HOLLY in She
Introduction
It is Horace who is the incurable chronicler, not I. I'm afraid the arts of writing have never been to my taste, except in regard to the mundane affairs of life. Pen and paper have more often been foreign to me than not despite my university days, but those days are long past and seem remote beyond ken, at least in the light of the events of subsequent years. Indeed, I am writing this account now for two reasons only: The first is that Horace is incapacitated with an ailing heart, or so he believes it is, for we must make do here without Western medicine of any sort. Also, the resident medical authority, who is more a priest than a doctor, concurs with Horace, but, in any event, my friend and foster father is hardly well. Frankly, I believe that his Christian soul has suffered a severe shock of the most profound sort. I can say this with some certainty because I suffer as well, even as I write.
Which brings me to the second purpose for this account. That which Holly and I and a Norwegian chap named Sigerson learned or deduced in recent weeks is of such incalculable import that a record of the whole affair must be made, for better or for worse. Of course, there is the temptation to simply disregard the evidence and to "let sleeping dogs lie" as they say; yet I cannot in conscience simply abandon a point of knowledge of civilization-shaking import. I suppose that this is the university training coming out in me, or perhaps it is simply a respect for knowledge and truth that I never dreamed I possessed before now. On the other hand, the very prodigious and threatening nature of our discovery could well shake civilization in fact and not at all figuratively. Do I want, I must ask myself, to be accountable for the maelstrom of confusion that must inevitably follow the release of a manuscript such as I am about to set down?
* * *
So, there are the two poles of the problem with which I am confronted. If only Horace was strong enough now to guide me in this matter as he has guided me in so many matters over the years. Yet I dare not impose on him any part of this quandary, at least at this time, for fear of aggravating his condition. In any case, I have made my decision: While they are still fresh in my mind, the circumstances must be set down as well as I understand them. At the least, this is my duty as an intelligent man.
Yet, neither do I rate lightly my current circumstances: Where am I? In the vicinity of Lhasa, Tibet, wher
e to my knowledge no other Europeans—and no other Westerners—other than Horace and Sigerson have been allowed to sojourn during this century. What am I doing here? Even more importantly, when do I intend to return to England or, for that matter, to any part of the world that is considered "civilized," "a safe harbor," "a port in a storm," et cetera? The answer to that is of course when I find Ayesha, which may be next week or in a thousand years. Knowing these facts, then, an ordinary man would be naturally prone to ask further: If even the manuscript were to be written, what is the probability that it would even reach a discerning world? What chance will such a fragile thing as a manuscript—written on old notebooks—ever have of reaching the world beyond these encircling mountains? So it is that I've determined to do what I must, and then let the dice fall where they may. I cannot say for certain whether or not God intercedes in human affairs, yet I believe He must, at least in matters of consequence, as this affair must be considered.
I will write, the dice will roll, and the rest is in Hands far greater than mine.
* * *
Five or six years ago, following our return to England from Kôr, Horace busied himself recounting in some detail the adventures we experienced both approaching and in that fabulous land, which we were the first white men to enter in two thousand years, or so Ayesha led us to believe. And though this woman, who is so much more than a mere woman, may be the veritable sun lighting my path, I have known her on occasion to alter the truth to suit her own needs. Thus, whether this bit of information is totally accurate or not, I know not. [Editor's note: Allan Quatermain of King Solomon's Mines fame, records in She and Allan an adventure he had in Kôr in 1872.] In any case, after Horace had completed setting down all the strange things that happened to us, we deliberated for some time to decide what to do with his "book," as we were wont to call it at that time. We mutually decided that nothing would happen to it so long as either one of us lived. But since it contained an account of things we believed to be of "unparalleled interest," which was, I believe, the phrase we bandied about all during this time, we would make arrangements with a certain agent for it to be made public following our demises, however and whenever those may occur. Then, in the end, we decided to leave with the agent the final determination. As it turned out, however, circumstances arose quite unexpectedly the result of which was that Horace and I prepared to leave England in some haste. I understand from Sigerson that this agent found the script worthy enough to publish and that it enjoyed some popularity.