The Man Who Measured the Wind

By Harold Lamb and Karl Wurf

Sand drifting through centuries of wind buried Bolazan, the City of the King, from the time of Ghengis Khan. But the theory that it held lost treasures spurred the interest of two Westerners, who planned to seek it out and win their fortunes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667659961

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Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

THE MAN WHO MEASURED THE WIND, by Harold Lamb

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2022 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in Short Stories, March 10, 1923.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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INTRODUCTION

Harold Albert Lamb (1892–1962) was an American historian, screenwriter, short story writer, and novelist. He was born in Alpine, New Jersey to Eliza Rollinson and Frederick Lamb and was the nephew of the architect Charles Rollinson Lamb. He attended Columbia University, where his interest in the peoples and history of Asia began. Lamb’s tutors at Columbia included Carl Van Doren and John Erskine. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for twelve months, starting on April 1, 1929.

Lamb built a career with his writing from an early age. He got his start in the pulp magazines, quickly moving to the prestigious Adventure magazine, which became his primary fiction outlet for nineteen years. In 1927, he wrote a biography of Genghis Khan, and following up on its great success, turned more and more to writing nonfiction, including numerous biographies and popular history books. The success of Lamb’s two-volume history of the Crusades led to his discovery by Cecil B. DeMille, who employed Lamb as a technical adviser on his movie The Crusades and afterwards used him as a screenwriter on many other movies.

Lamb spoke French, Latin, Persian, and Arabic, and, by his own account, a smattering of Manchu-Tartar. During World War II, He was an OSS agent serving in Iran, which deepened his understanding of the Middle East and its people.

He died in 1962 in Rochester, New York

LAMB’S FICTION

Although Harold Lamb wrote short stories for a variety of magazines between 1917 and the early 1960s, and wrote several novels, his best known and most reprinted fiction is that which he wrote for Adventure between 1917 and 1936. The editor of Adventure, Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, praised Lamb’s writing ability, describing him as always the scholar first, the good fictionist second. The majority of Lamb’s work for Adventure was historical fiction, and it can be thematically divided into three broad categories of tales:

1. Stories featuring Cossacks

2. Stories featuring Crusaders

3. Stories with Asian or Middle-Eastern Protagonists

Lamb’s prose was direct and fast-paced, in stark contrast to that of many other contemporary adventure writers. His stories were well-researched and rooted in their time, often featuring real historical characters, but set in places unfamiliar and exotic to most of the western audience reading his fiction. While his adventure stories had familiar tropes such as tyrannical rulers and scheming priests, he avoided the simplistic depiction of foreign or unfamiliar cultures as evil; many of his heroes were Mongolian, Indian, Russian, or Muslim. Most of his protagonists were outsiders or outcasts apart from civilization, and all but a very few were skilled swordsmen and warriors.

In a Lamb story, honor and loyalty to one’s comrades-in-arms were more important than cultural identity, although often his protagonists ended up risking their lives to protect the cultures that had spurned them. Those holding positions of authority are almost universally depicted as being corrupted by their own power or consumed with greed, be they Russian boyars or Buddhist priests, and merchants are almost always shown as placing their own desire for coin above the well-being of their fellow men. Loyalty, wisdom, and religious piety is shown again and again in these stories to lie more securely in the hands of Lamb’s common folk.

While female characters occasionally played the familiar role of damsel in distress in these stories, Lamb more typically depicted his women as courageous, independent, and more shrewd than their male counterparts. Their motives and true loyalties, though, remained mysterious to Lamb’s male characters, and their unknowable nature is frequently the source of plot tension.

Lamb was never a formula plotter, and his stories often turned upon surprising developments arising from character conflict. The bulk of his Crusader, Asian, and Middle-Eastern stories (as well as the latter stories of Khlit the Cossack) were written in the latter portion of his pulp magazine years. They demonstrate a growing command of language, including poetic metaphor in descriptions.

Writers influenced by Lamb’s work include the creator of Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard (who described Lamb as one of his favorite writers), Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Norvell Page, Gardner Fox, Thomas B. Costain, Harry Harrison, and Scott Oden.

—Karl Wurf,

Rockville, Maryland

THE MAN WHO MEASURED THE WIND,

by Harold Lamb

CHAPTER 1

At the Palace

IT WAS a gala night in Fen Shi’s place under the wall of Kashgar. In the first moon of the New Year all Chinese pay their debts, and, having paid, hold the festival of a clear conscience. And a clear conscience, even to an old rascal like Fen Shi, is more to be esteemed than silver, which they desire more than gold.

Fen Shi’s house, like its owner, is two-faced. That is, on the alley side, it is a curio shop where Kashgar’s few white tourists can buy old coins, old weapons and old manuscripts, dug out of the Gobi desert by Fen Shi; behind the curio shop and separated from it by a screening mat is the rum shop. Here Afghan chieftains can buy wine, forbidden to Moslems; derelict Russians can procure vodka, also illicit; those who desire can taste hashish or opium, toasted by one of the several girl slaves of Fen Shi.

That night there was a fight at Fen Shi’s, and a man died.

This had happened before, many times. Kashgar lies in the center of the heart of Asia, on the far side of the Gobi desert from China, and beyond the Himalayas; it stands on one of the oldest caravan routes known to men, from China to India. So Kashgar is still a meeting place for the drifters of Asia, and Fen Shi’s is a rendezvous of the flotsam of Kashgar.

An ex-Cossack sotnik, that night of the feast, lay drunk on the sand of the floor. The Arab storekeeper puffed at a hubble-bubble, a water pipe that added its odor to the taint of cooking and the stench of sheepskins. Black Gordon, the American, stretched his legs under a sandalwood tabouret and leaned back against the wall, frowning.

For several moments he had been aware that Fen Shi was watching him. From a dark corner by the entrance mat, a tall Chinese in coolie dress, although Gordon knew him to be one of the innkeeper’s knife men, tong men, in fact, also had him under scrutiny.

Black Gordon seldom came to Fen Shi’s. He was a hunter of the desert, who had found the Gobi very like the desert plains of Arizona.