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At Muara Tewe, where we had to make a stay of two days, the doctor of the garrison said that in the case of the common species of wild pigs the full-grown ones are always light in hue. Doctor Tjon Akieh, who came here from Surinam, had some amusing monkeys, a native bear, tamer than most cats, and a very quiet deer.
Then it continues to move for about half a kilometre. It stops. Popof, the major, Caterna, most of the passengers are out on the line in an instant. A network of scaffolding appears confusedly in the darkness, above the piers which were to carry the viaduct across the Tjon valley. Two hundred yards further the train would have been lost in the abyss.
In twelve minutes, so Popof says, we shall pass the junction with the Nanking branch. This branch is only completed for five or six kilometres, and leads to the viaduct over the Tjon valley. This viaduct is a great work I have the details from Pan-Chao and the engineers have as yet only got in the piers, which rise for a hundred feet above the ground.
I told them that if he had defrauded the Transasiatic Company it was thanks to this fraud that he was able to get on to the train at Uzun Ada. And if he had not been in the train we should all have been engulfed in the abyss of the Tjon valley. And I enlarged on the facts which I alone knew.
And now there could be no doubt that the scoundrels worthy of the most refined tortures that Chinese practice could devise were hastening down into the Tjon valley. There, amid the wreck of the train, they expected to find the fifteen millions of gold and precious stones, and this treasure they could carry off without fear of surprise when the night enabled them to consummate this fearful crime.
Decidedly my good intentions ought certainly to qualify me as one of the best paviers of a road to a certain place you have doubtless heard of. We are, as I have said, two hundred yards from the valley of the Tjon, so deep and wide as to require a viaduct from three hundred and fifty to four hundred feet long. The floor of the valley is scattered over with rocks, and a hundred feet down.
"Well, then!" said Major Noltitz, "the rascal who sent us on to the Nanking line, who would have hurled us into the Tjon valley, to walk off with the imperial treasure, is Faruskiar." "Faruskiar!" the passengers exclaimed. And most of them refused to believe it. "What!" said Popof.
Before three o'clock the engine from Tai-Youan ought to be here. I am ready to start." "So am I," said Popof! "I think several of us ought to go. Who knows if we may not meet Faruskiar and his Mongols on the road?" "You are right, Popof," said Major Noltitz, "and we should be armed." This was only prudent, for the bandits who ought to be on their way to the Tjon viaduct could not be very far off.
But before they went one of them has taken off the brakes, jammed down the regulator to full speed, thrown fresh coals into the fire-box, and the train is running with frightful velocity. In a few minutes we shall reach the Tjon viaduct. Kinko, energetic and resolute, is as cool as a cucumber. But in vain he tries to move the regulator, to shut off the steam, to put on the brake.
I was turning to go out of the van, when an exclamation kept me back. "The signal there is the signal!" says Ghangir. "And now the train is on the Nanking branch!" replies Faruskiar. The Nanking branch? But then we are lost. At five kilometres from here is the Tjon viaduct in course of construction, and the train is being precipitated towards an abyss.
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