he sent to
find them.

Chang Ch'ien set out in 139; traversed the desert, and was duly
captured by the Huns. Ten years they held him prisoner; then he
escaped. During those ten years he had heard no news from home:
a new emperor might be reigning, for aught he knew; or Han Wuti
might have changed his plans. Such questions, however, never
troubled him: he was out to find the Yueh Chi for his master,
and find them he would. He simply went forward; came presently
to the kingdom of Tawan, in the neighborhood of Yarkand; and
there preached a crusade against the Huns. Unsuccessfully: the
men of Tawn knew the Huns, but not Han wuti, who was too far away
for a safe ally; and they proposed to do nothing in the matter.
Chang Ch'ien considered. Go back to China?--Oh dear no! there
must be real Yueh C'hi somewhere, even if these Tawanians were
not they. On he went, and searched that lonely world until he
did find them. They liked the idea of Hun-hurting; but again,
considered China too far away for practical purposes. He struck
down into Tibet; was captured again; held prisoner a year;
escaped again,--and got back to Changan in 126. A sadder and a
wiser man, you might suppose; but nothing of the kind! Full, on
the contrary, of brilliant schemes; full of the wonder and rumor
of the immense west. These he poured into Han Wuti's most
sympathetic ears; and the emperor started now in real earnest
upon his Napoleonic career.

The frontier was no longer at the Great Wall. Only the
other day Sir Aurel Stein discovered, in the far west, the
long straight furrows traced by the feet of Han Wuti's sentinels
on guard; the piles of reed-stalks, at regular intervals,
set along the road for fire-signals; documents giving details
as to the encampments, the clothes and arrows served out
to the soldiers, the provisions made for transforming armies
of conquest into peaceful colonies. All these things the
sands covered and preserved.

And behind these outposts was a wide empire full of splendor
outward and inward; full of immense activities, in literature,
in engineering, in commerce. New things and ideas came in from
the west: international influences to reinforce the flaming up
of Chinese life.

The moving force was still Taoism; the Blue Pearl, sunk deep in
the now sunlit waters of the common consciousness, was flashing
its rainbows. Ts'in Shi Hwangti, for all his greatness, had been
an uncouth barbarian; Han Wuti was a