They came to Baghdad - Agatha Christie [46]
‘But who are these people?’ Victoria demanded.
‘They are not, we think, of any special nationality. What they want is, I fear, the betterment of the world! The delusion that by force you can impose the Millennium on the human race is one of the most dangerous delusions in existence. Those who are out only to line their own pockets can do little harm – mere greed defeats its own ends. But the belief in a superstratum of human beings – in Supermen to rule the rest of the decadent world – that, Victoria, is the most evil of all beliefs. For when you say, “I am not as other men” – you have lost the two most valuable qualities we have ever tried to attain: humility and brotherhood.’
He coughed. ‘Well, I mustn’t preach a sermon. Let me just explain to you what we do know. There are various centres of activity. One in the Argentine, one in Canada – certainly one or more in the United States of America, and I should imagine, though we can’t tell, one in Russia. And now we come to a very interesting phenomenon.
‘In the past two years, twenty-eight promising young scientists of various nationalities have quietly faded out of their background. The same thing has happened with constructional engineers, with aviators, with electricians and many other skilled trades. These disappearances have this in common: those concerned are all young, ambitious, and all without close ties. Besides those we know of, there must be many many more, and we are beginning to guess at something of what they are accomplishing.’
Victoria listened, her brows drawn together.
‘You might say it was impossible in these days for anything to go on in any country unbeknownst to the rest of the world. I do not, of course, mean undercover activities; those may go on anywhere. But anything on a large scale of up-to-date production. And yet there are still obscure parts of the world, remote from trade routes, cut off by mountains and deserts, in the midst of peoples who still have the power to bar out strangers and which are never known or visited except by a solitary and exceptional traveller. Things could go on there the news of which would never penetrate to the outside world, or only as a dim and ridiculous rumour.
‘I won’t particularize the spot. It can be reached from China – and nobody knows what goes on in the interior of China. It can be reached from the Himalayas, but the journey there, save to the initiated, is hard and long to travel. Machinery and personnel dispatched from all over the globe reaches it after being diverted from its ostensible destination. The mechanics of it all need not be gone into.
‘But one man got interested in following up a certain trail. He was an unusual man, a man who has friends and contacts throughout the East. He was born in Kashgar and he knows a score of local dialects and languages. He suspected and he followed up the trail. What he heard was so incredible that when he got back to civilization and reported it he was not believed. He admitted that he had had fever and he was treated as a man who had had delirium.
‘Only two people believed his story. One was myself. I never object to believing impossible things – they’re so often true. The other –’ he hesitated.
‘Yes?’ said Victoria.
‘The other was Sir Rupert Crofton Lee, a great traveller, and a man who had himself travelled through these remote regions and who knew something about their possibilities.
‘The upshot of it all was that Carmichael, that’s my man, decided to go and find out for himself. It was a desperate and hazardous journey, but he was as well equipped as any man to carry it through. That was nine months back. We heard nothing until a few weeks ago and then news came through. He was alive and he’d got what he went to get. Definite proof.
‘But the other