![]() The mouse seemed to blink at Baldric, as if to confirm that Baldric was right to ignore Antonio’s insane cult, which seemed to have more in common with Kaa’s nonsense than with Kipling’s world of espionage, Great Games, and colonial firing squads. In the middle of his father’s paean to celestial serpents and sultan rats, Baldric saw a little mouse, an ordinary everyday little mouse, peek his bristling nose out from behind the Great Altar of the Cosmic Python. This wasn’t the only revelation Baldric had at the end of Antonio’s Tyrian corridor. At the end of this dark purple corridor was a heavy wooden door, which had on its lintel a fresco of a rat and a serpent: Along the walls of the corridor were antlers, scorpion busts, and vampire bats in ultraviolet cages. Baldric had a vague recollection of going down a Tyrian corridor beneath Antonio’s study. What was it, now? Ah, yes, he remembered - with a shudder! It was during his childhood in his father's mansion. The rat reminded him of the backstreets of Dali, but also of something else. Later, he found out that Hotel Number One was in the nearby town of Xiguan, which will suggest to the perceptive reader that Timbuktu is by comparison a well-known tourist resort. In Dali he stayed at the only hotel in town, which for some reason was called Hotel Number Two. For Baldric had just returned from Dali, a small rodent-friendly town 200 miles west of Kunming, and a further 200 miles to the Burmese border. ![]() Rolling in his soft white bed on the seventeenth floor of The Kunming Hotel, Baldric didn't think it strange to see a middle-aged rat snooping through the backpack of a fellow traveler. Fairy Tales □ Black Diamond & China The Tyrian Corridor Kunming, Yunnan Province, Ancient China (1986) ![]()
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