The Rose of Tibet (11 page)

He went to a door and opened it, and switched on the light. She said, behind him, Who did you expect to find in your bedroom? He said Fairies, and led her into the living-room. He made to take her coat, but she was huddling into the fur collar, and he said, You’re the chilliest person I know. And she said, That’s why I need so much warming up, wonder boy. He thought this was the first time she had come to the flat. She said, You lured me up for coffee – I suppose I have to make it. He said, If you’re able, and she looked at him sideways in that curious way. Oh, I’m able, wonder boy. Able and willing.

He remembered with certainty that this was the first time, because of his excitement. He was a little tight and the girl, too, and he went up behind her in the kitchen, and put his arms round her. She said, Hey, what about this coffee. And he said, What about it. And she said, as his hands moved, Yes, what about it, but more as a comment than a question, and they went in the living-room. He had switched the light off as he came out, but he had put on the electric fire. There
was an area of soft radiance before the fire, and he went exploring there in it. He explored her thoroughly, and her teeth glinted up at him as she smiled in the rosy light of the fire, the pair of them breathless and writhing through the long thrilling minutes. And here surely was nothing but pleasure, each of them dilated in passionate enjoyment of the other, a limited relationship that gave only pleasure.

But he knew that it didn’t and that it wasn’t, for he was betraying and probably she was betraying, and beyond the firelight there was bitterness and pain; so he left them to it and came back. He thought you couldn’t isolate pleasant bits of the jigsaw, for the pleasure was relative and none of the pieces particularly meaningful or worthwhile unless the pattern was worthwhile. He didn’t think he had managed to find a worthwhile pattern; and he didn’t know now that he wanted one.

Lying on the roof, he had the clearest sensation of the trampling confusion in the hall below; the milling specks darting this way and that on forgotten errands, stopping to make love, to build structures and take them down, to make rules and change them, creating new devices to make the errand easier, and trying at each performance to discover what the errand was.

He saw how easy it was in this high place to find objectivity, and he knew he didn’t want to get lost again in the stifling confusion below. He thought: to remain in this high world of calm mist and freezing stillness; and was presently aware that it was neither calm nor still. Ringling was shaking him violently in the bag.

‘The wind is coming up, sahib. We better move now.’

He turned out, bleakly. It was four o’clock in the morning. The wind sucked and moaned like a vacuum cleaner at the mouth of the cave. The small lamp was lit and the boy had the spirit stove going. Houston was shrivelled in the sudden deathly cold, and he pulled on his boots and his quilted jacket, stumbling about in the dim light of the cave. He rinsed out his mouth with melted snow and rolled up his bedding and sat huddled on it while he drank his tea and tsampa.

The boy had kicked the mule into life and was feeding it. He went silently about his tasks, serious and unsmiling. He
scoured out the mugs with snow and packed them, and the cooking utensils, and the bedding, and strapped everything on the reluctant animal.

He said, ‘We have to move fast, sahib, or we get stuck on Kotchin-la. It’s better if you walk.’

‘All right.’

‘You feel strong enough to walk?’

‘I said all right.’

The boy looked so small and pinched and harassed that he wanted to apologize for his curtness, but Ringling merely turned away, tight-lipped, and began pummelling the mule with hatred, crying ‘Hoya! Hoya!’ until it moved, and the opportunity was gone.

Houston put on his goggles and followed, into howling blackness.

Apart from the blizzard, when he had lain unconscious, there had been no high winds since they had entered Tibet. Houston had no idea what to expect. It hit him like the sea, a terrific icy buffet that knocked him instantly off his feet. He was not sure if he was on his back or his front, the blackness in the first moments so intense, the ocean of pressure so solid all around that he seemed to be in another element. He couldn’t breathe and the freezing current, rushing past his muffled ears, was like the sound of trombones. He floundered and was on his knees, and off them again, two or three times, before he felt the arm pulling him. He was gasping, his mouth full of the suffocating wind, and he bored into the wind and the steady vibration of sound, and found he was boring into the mule, his face pressed hard into its hairy stomach. The boy was holding him there, roaring in his ear.

‘Head down, sahib. Keep double. It will be easier soon.’

He nodded his head, too shocked to speak.

‘Easier when we get to the track… . Head down into it… .’

He nodded again and the boy shook his arm and they turned and went head down into it.

He had scarcely used his legs for days; they felt like a
marionette’s. But he leaned into the wind, and found the way to breathe, head tucked into his chin, and one leg followed the other, and he supposed they were moving.

He lost all idea of time and direction, concentrating grimly on the reciprocating machine-like movement of his legs and the unbelievable roar of sound; and presently fell into a fantasy in which he was a part of the sound, the essential timekeeping part, and it became important that he should not stop, for if he stopped the sound would stop and all would stop.

He had an idea after a while that it was trying to pull away from him, and he worked hard to control it. But it went, tugging and wrenching, screaming into a higher key as it worked first a quarter, and a half, and then a full turn behind him, so that he had to lean backwards with all his weight against it; and he emerged from the fantasy and saw that they were on the track and that it was the track and not the wind that had turned, and that day was dawning.

They were in a wide gorge between rock walls and the funnelled sound had risen higher in pitch like fifes and trumpets. The air was full of flying particles, snow and ice torn from rock, that broke ceaselessly against their heads and backs. Below the knee, all was lost in spray, the whole snow floor of the gorge shifting before the wind so that everything, the glimpsed boulders, the laden mule, themselves, seemed to be bobbing and dipping fantastically in a river of ice. It was a scene of such desolation in the dirty grey light that all vitality left him. He thought they must have been going four or five hours. He was deathly tired.

He caught Ringling’s arm, but the boy merely looked at him and away. Houston saw that beneath the big goggles the boy’s face had become smaller and more pointed, shrivelled by hours of wind into the semblance of a fox’s mask. It looked somehow wild and self-protecting.

It had been their custom to stop every hour or two for tea and tsampa, but it didn’t look now as if they would stop at all. Houston saw that the boy’s mouth was working as he walked, and thought he might be praying.

He knew that prayer could not sustain
him
, and, suddenly, that he was unable to take another step, and stopped to tell
him so; but as he stopped felt a sudden diminution of all his energy and found himself falling backwards, into the wind. He seemed to be falling for some moments, quite gently, but quite powerless to stop himself, and lay there in the shifting spray of snow hearing the wind scream past his ears and feeling only blessed relief at the rest. The boy was bending over him, lips still moving, and he could hear the words now. ‘
Om mani
padme hum
… .
Om mani padme hum
…’ over and over again, the invocation against evil, ‘Hail jewel in the lotus’.

The boy was trying to pull him up, and he was not ready yet to get up, and the praying stopped and Ringling was shouting urgently in his ear. ‘Sahib, not here… . We mustn’t stop here.’

‘I’ve got to rest,’ he said, and heard the words come in a soft, drunken mumble. ‘I’ve got to rest here.’

‘Not here, sahib. It will snow. We get stuck on the pass. Come, sahib. Come, now.’

‘I can’t. I can’t move.’

‘On the mule.’

He was upright again, enormously bulky and clumsy, the boy pulling and the wind pushing, and he leaned backwards into it again, and found he was leaning against the mule while the boy shifted the load. He had a leg up, and was lifted, and felt himself coming off the other side, slipping, clutching feebly, till the boy wrestled and held him there, and they were moving again. His head rocked up and down, face sunk in the stiff icicled hair at the mule’s neck, and presently the chant began again, in his ear.

‘
Om mani padme hum
.

‘
Om
mani
padme hum
.

‘
Om mani
padme
hum
.

‘
Om mani padme
hum.’

The emphasis was shifting rhythmically, and his head rocking in time, and he tried to say the words himself, but found the effort too great and let them slip away. An enormous wave of fatigue was sweeping over him, and he let it take him, and went away, rock-rocking into a deep and soft and finally furry ocean.  

The waves had stopped and all was still, and he knew he
had been dreaming and lay listening to a curious low-pitched moaning that was neither human nor animal. It was a minute or two before he had it. The wind was coming up in the mouth of the cave, and they had to be off. He stirred himself, and in the same moment the mule tossed its head, so that he clutched instinctively, and so saved himself from falling.

He sat up, on the mule’s back.

He was alone, in an enormous cave, a great bowl of ice- coated rock. The wind was moaning. He could see no entrance to the cave. He looked up, and saw sky. Something was moving there, and he peered, and it was Ringling, coming down fast, scrambling from one boulder to another. They were in a cleft of the mountain; he saw that this must be the pass, and deduced that the boy had been shouting defiance and throwing the obligatory stones at the devils who lived there.

He was mumbling as he scrambled down, and his face, beneath the big goggles, was skeletal and grey with fear and fatigue. He showed no surprise that Houston had wakened, but merely thumped the mule, and walked instantly ahead, so that Houston again had to clutch to save himself as the animal jerked into movement.

The rock bowl ended in scattered boulders, ice-covered but with a surface of hard snow. The mule slipped on the first, and Houston fell off.

The boy turned and looked at him a moment without ceasing his chant, and motioned to him to walk, and helped him. The snow began to fall, almost immediately. It fell solidly, not in flakes but as though sacks were being emptied above, and Houston saw the reason for urgency in negotiating this trap. In the space of minutes the jagged jumble of boulders was obliterated and a deceptive slope of clean snow swept smoothly upwards.

The boy went first, falling between the rocks and picking himself up and climbing steadily. The mule followed in his tracks, and Houston followed the mule.

He had to find the strength to keep up, and for the first minutes he did, husbanding his resources and using himself with care. But the hellish day had gone on too long, his
exhausted sleep had been insufficient, and the limp muscles stretched and sagged on him. He had to stop, just for a moment, to recover, and did so, bent double and panting into the blank white wall that increased freshly like a gigantic mound of flour; and he knew right away that it was a mistake, for all the strength seemed to drain out of him, and he hung on, willing his trembling thighs to keep their hold, and seeing with despair the shuffling fastidious hind legs of the mule recede from view.

The boy had not once turned to watch him, but suddenly he was beside him, with an encircling arm, and they were going up to where the mule waited, head, down and already almost invisible in a robe of snow. He leaned on the mule, but there could be no further rest; the snow fell incredibly through the cleft in the mountain. He hung on, making the motions with his feet while the uncomplaining animal dragged him slowly upwards; and in this fashion they left the pass.

This was the last ascent of the outward journey. From Kotchin-la the track fell – slowly at first, and then very rapidly. They turned in at three o’clock in the afternoon, under a rock overhang, too exhausted even to put up the tent. Houston dozed and woke, in his sleeping bag, several times, coming to so feebly that he had to ride the mule all day.

He remembered sitting on his rolled bedding that evening waiting for the tea to boil, but had no recollection of drinking it, and next came to to find himself in the sleeping bag with the feeling that weights had been removed from his chest and that he had slept a long time. Daylight was coming in through the tent flap and he looked at his watch and saw it was ten o’clock; he had slept eighteen hours.

He felt wonderfully refreshed. He had an enormous desire to eat. He could hear the boy outside, and he put on his boots and crawled out to him.

Ringling had not been up long himself, and was still gathering snow. Houston saw that he was singing.

He said, ‘Hello. We’ve slept in.’

‘Yes, sahib,’ the boy said, grinning. ‘Good sleep here. Come and see.’

Houston went with him to the edge of the track and looked down to where he pointed; and that was the best thing of all
this splendid morning. It was a bush. It was not much of a bush. It was a little grey stunted thing that seemed to be part of the rock itself. But it was not part of the rock. It was a bit of spiny, leathery life, and it was growing there.

They had come out of the lifeless land.

They got to the tree-line in the evening, the track dropping steeply, and walked over the little cones of a sparse pine wood, and had energy enough to talk and smoke for an hour before turning in.

The boy had been teaching him a few words of Tibetan at the start of the trip three weeks before – for though they had agreed that he should act as a dumb man it seemed common prudence that he should arm himself against necessity – and he took up the lesson again over a final cigarette in their sleeping bags.