Читать книгу Fort in the Jungle - Percival Christopher Wren - Страница 14

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I do not know whether it was because I was an Englishman that Captain Deleuze first took to me. Of the British he was a great admirer, and he had a very high opinion of our Secret Service and of the efficiency of our army generally.

Having questioned me and discovered that I had served in the Life Guards, he was interested at once; and more so when he knew that I had not only been a sailor, but had lived as an Arab among Arabs in Morocco and Arabia, and had actually made the Pilgrimage to Mecca. He seemed to think that the fact that I could, in such surroundings and circumstances, pass as an Arab, showed that I had a great natural aptitude for native languages, and for disguising myself as a native, too.

Having got me put on special duty under him for study of Annamese; of military surveying, map-drawing and map-reading, he made something of a friend of me, treated me in private as an equal, and talked very freely of his ambition, both for himself and his country, in Tonking; of the history and geography of Indo-China; of its ethnology; and particularly of the French connection with the country since 1585 when a Jesuit Father, Georges de la Mothe, established missions, churches and schools throughout the Delta of the Mekong River; of the French campaign which began in 1867; and which, flaring up from time to time, had been active again ever since 1886—so active that, as recently as 1892, Hanoi, the capital itself, had been captured, sacked, and partly burned by an army of Annamese aided by Chinese irregulars.

He also told me a thing which surprised me—and he was in possession of the most accurate information—that in 1883, 1884 and 1885 alone, over fifteen thousand of the best troops of France had died in Tonking.

One evening, when I reported as usual at Captain Deleuze’s office room, I found him seated at his desk with an array of saucers of paint, brushes, wigs, crêpe-hair and spirit-gum—in fact a complete actor’s make-up outfit. Beside him on the floor lay a small and varied heap of native clothing and weapons, panaungs, pasinns,^[1] sakalos, sashes, turbans and such.

“Well, my lad, I’m going to turn you into a damn great ugly Chinese thug. We’ll start by painting you yellow. Then touch up your eyebrows with a razor and black paint, doctor your eyelids with gelatine, and fake the corners with some glue.... I’ll show you.... Give you a long straggling moustache, I think ... and a pig-tailed wig, of course.... Or I wonder if you’d look better as a poogni in canary-yellow robes, with a begging-bowl.... How would you like to have your head shaven? Nice and cool, anyway....”

[1]	Lengths of coloured cloth draped about the body.