Chapter 137: Five Men in the Quarantine Camp

“When you’re finished, pack your things. We’re going to Lingao.”

“Really? Master,” Dermot said excitedly. “I hear the Australians in Lingao have built many churches and monasteries.”

“No, not many. Only three or four.”

“Will they let me paint murals for the churches?”

“Of course, I don’t think they would refuse.” He’s such a simple person! Jin Lige thought. All he thinks about is painting.

Although both Geronimo and Father Comanjet had assured the small mission that the Australians would welcome them to preach and were very friendly to priests, and would surely receive them warmly, Jin Lige’s confidence began to waver as soon as he reached Australian territory.

Not long after the Jesuit ship entered the Qiongzhou Strait, it was intercepted and boarded for inspection by an Australian patrol boat. Father Trigault found that even though the war was over, a tense atmosphere still lingered in the strait. He guessed that the Ming government’s armed campaign was not yet completely over.

The priest explained his identity and purpose in Cantonese to the Australian soldiers who boarded the ship, presenting the Jesuit’s credentials and a personal letter from Father-General Geronimo. But the Australian officer on board seemed uninterested in any of it, his attitude cold. Father Trigault silently recited a prayer. It seemed Father Lu Ruohua’s claims about the glory of the Lord shining all over Lingao were an exaggeration. Spreading the gospel here would be no easier than in any other part of China.

“You will follow the patrol boat,” the officer commanded the sailors. Several soldiers then took control of the helm and other key positions on the ship.

The ship, escorted by the patrol boat, sailed toward Lingao. The strait was still empty, with no other vessels in sight, only Australian ships flying their blue and white flags, ostentatiously declaring their dominion over the waters.

After their vessel was “escorted” to Bopu Port by two single-masted patrol boats, what followed was a whirlwind of bizarre and overwhelming events.

Father Trigault and his companions had not yet recovered from the shock of the giant iron ships, the trains on the docks, and the steam cranes, when a squad of marines with fixed bayonets surrounded them. No matter how loudly he declared that he was an envoy of the Jesuits, here to serve the local church, the soldiers turned a deaf ear and, with a combination of pushing and pulling, herded them into a massive building. There, the priest was separated from his companions and subjected to a long, dizzying interrogation.

The interrogator spoke excellent Italian, though with a somewhat strange accent and vocabulary. When he learned that Father Trigault was from Flanders, he immediately switched to German, apologizing that he only knew High German.

“You don’t have to accommodate my language. I can speak Italian, and High German is no problem either,” Father Trigault thought. So, the claims of the Australians’ ‘erudition’ and ‘versatility’ are true.

The man’s polite words were in stark contrast to his questioning. He was asked many questions, some of them over and over again. Even some private matters he had not intended to reveal were elicited through this method.

By now, Father Trigault had lost count of how many times he had made the sign of the cross, silently reciting scriptures. Though he tried to soothe himself with the greatest patience a Christian should possess, the treatment he was receiving was beyond his imagination.

Is this suspicion or a form of torture? he wondered silently, while also worrying about his companions.

The exhausting interrogation finally came to an end as abruptly as it had begun. Two men in short, belted tunics, with strange short firearms hanging from their waists, led him out of the room, through a series of corridors and staircases.

The corridors and stairs were gloomy, lit by skylights from above. Every door in the corridor was shut, marked with a red number.

Although every door was closed, he could still hear something clicking in a rhythmic pattern, and muffled dictation. A shrill bell rang incessantly—he didn’t know what it was, not the bells rung by the church priests, but a sharp, intense, piercing sound. As he passed through a corridor with large windows, he glanced outside and saw the bay in the distance, and the ship that had brought him to Lingao, with laborers unloading its cargo.

Somehow, Father Trigault had a premonition of doom. He was terrified that he was being taken to some secret chamber to be executed.

And I haven’t even made my confession! he thought. I wonder if they will allow a brother to hear my confession? As he began to silently recite the prayer of confession, he found himself walking out of a back door and into a sunlit square. His companions were there, all with bewildered expressions. The two men with short guns had vanished like ghosts, and another squad of fully armed soldiers escorted them into an open area enclosed by an iron fence, with rows of low-slung buildings in the middle. As Father Trigault was pushed into one of the buildings, he just had time to see the sign above the door with three Chinese characters: “Quarantine Camp.”

A whistled tune echoed through the room of the quarantine camp. Father Trigault disliked the tune very much. Though he had never heard of Verdi, the strange music still agitated him.

The rectangular room was large, and from the number of bunk beds, it could sleep at least twelve people. The room was clean and tidy, but at the moment, it contained only the five members of the mission. Friar Cecilio—the priest was very fond of this devout and respectful young man—knelt on a straw mat, clutching his rosary tightly, his lips trembling and pale. John Dermot, however, stood at the window, mesmerized by the giant iron structure on the other side of the bay.

“It’s truly incredible,” he exclaimed. “Such a slender structure, with no support! And yet it’s built so high! It’s almost impossible for it to exist!”

And then there was the black man Weiss Lando had brought, sitting on a pile of rotten straw near the door. After experiencing the Australians’ incredible sanitary inspection services, even his usually foolish face wore a look of confusion. After entering the room, he had searched in vain for a while—the priest knew he was surely looking for food.

Finally, there was the source of the whistling, Weiss Lando, the attendant the Jesuits had assigned to him. He was a common soldier who tried to put on the airs of a nobleman but was clearly of low birth. He had spread his blanket on a straw mat and was leaning comfortably against the wall, whistling a little tune, seemingly unconcerned by the situation.

A dangerous man, a desperado! Father Trigault told himself. And what frightened him even more was that Lando was a very suspicious heretic. This was not only because of his strange behavior and remarks in Macao, but also because when the Australians had forced them to undress for a shower, he had caught a glimpse of Weiss’s bare back. The strange tattoos on it had almost made the priest think he had seen an incarnation of the devil. He began to silently resent Geronimo for assigning him this attendant—a heretic. He had already made his judgment about Weiss Lando: a heretic feigning piety, or perhaps worse, a cultist.

This place is so damn boring, Weiss thought, changing his tune. They had been confined to this room for two days, and the four white men had exchanged no more than five sentences. The sound of the priest’s prayers in the corner had died down again. If Verdi’s Triumphal March had made him restless, then The Merry Widow was practically a lewd ditty.

Weiss watched with schadenfreude as the priest struggled to contain his anger. He’s scared, Weiss Lando thought. Everything the Australians, or rather, the Chinese of Lingao, had done had frightened the two missionaries to death. In comparison, the red-haired Irishman was doing better. As for the somewhat neurotic young friar, the forced physical examination had scared him out of his wits, and he had almost fainted. Father Trigault had been making the sign of the cross ever since he saw the so-called “holy ship” at Lingao Cape—of course, given his level of knowledge, it was not surprising that he thought it was a creation of the devil.

The priest hadn’t noticed the smile on his attendant’s face when he saw the tall ship. Weiss liked the familiar and friendly feeling the “holy ship” gave him. In another world, in years past, he and his comrades had often traveled on a similarly dilapidated Polish freighter, carrying tons of arms and ammunition to Sierra Leone and the Congo.

It was noisy outside. Someone was shouting loudly. Lando didn’t understand Chinese, but he knew the rhythmic shouts were commands. He could see a large open area on the other side of the wire fence outside the window. A group of people dressed in identical gray homespun clothes—which, in the friar’s opinion, could hardly be called clothes, more like sacks—had their heads shaved clean and wore straw sandals. They were being drilled in formation by an Australian soldier with a stick.

At first, he thought they were new recruits, but when he saw that they were old and young, men and women, Lando abandoned the idea. It was clearly a form of daily military drill, the purpose of which was simply to force these poor souls to obey discipline and develop a conditioned reflex to commands.

“A typical example of a totalitarian state,” he commented to himself, turning over on the straw mat to find a more comfortable position. Something hard in his pocket dug into his waist. It was a cigarette case. Weiss desperately wanted to pull out an Australian cigarette and take a couple of long, satisfying drags. He swallowed the urge along with his saliva.