THE JESUIT'S TALE
463
bury the man the next day. His flesh, supposedly indestructible, was
already stinking badly. I was somehow afraid to look at his face again
but could not avoid it. I qragged
him
to the graveyard of our church,
and threw him into the hole I had dug for him. I buried him to–
gether with
all
the ants that were devouring his body. The ants, I
believe, must have found their way out .again, or at least they must
have been enjoying their new underground habitation so richly pro–
vided. But not the flies. For the man's body was strangely covered
with sores, and the flies had been relishing them. I had never known
that flies could be as tenacious as leeches, so when I shoveled back
the earth into the hole, the flies, swarms of them, were buried alive.
Nice company for the dead, I thought with a grim smile.
"Hung around the man's neck was a little red bag, inside which
I found a piece of yellow paper. I had some friend of mine read
the characters on it for me, for I had not yet started my lessons in
Chinese. I found the inscription very interesting-but who could
suspect that it contained a curse? I can recite it to you now and you
will see why the votive tablet in the Jade Emperor's Temple fifty
years later should have produced such a terrible effect on me:
Golden Light Holy Mother's Most Miraculous Body-Protection
Amulet:
The Net of Heaven is cast over everything;
Both Good and Evil will get their desserts:
He that kills me shall perish;
But I shall rise from the dead.
Perhaps it was a mistake not to bury the amulet together with the
body it was supposed to protect. Instead I kept it, as well as the sword
the Boxer had dropped into my room, and those trophies became
the first two items of my once-famous collection of Orientalia, which,
of course, like everything else that might be said to be mine, has
been taken over by the Communists.
"We buried all the dead; we held a Mass for the repose of their
souls; we even erected crosses on their tombs. But I had never ex–
pected the Boxer, long buried, would reappear in the Communist
court of interrogation. Now here he w.as, the same hideous person
whom I once had held in my grip. But instead of my pulling him
in, I felt he was pulling me out of the window. And my strength
