The Rose of Tibet (12 page)

‘Very good,’ the boy said. ‘You’ve not forgotten. You speak like a Tibetan, sahib.’

‘Hadn’t you better stop calling me sahib, then?’ Houston said.

‘What shall I call you?’

‘Try Houston.’

‘Houtson.’

‘Not Houtson. Houston. Hoo-ston.’

‘Yes, sir, Houtson. Hoo-tson. Hoo-tson,’ Ringling said, trying.

Houston had noticed before the boy’s inability to get his tongue round certain words, so he merely smiled and let it go for the moment.   

He extended his vocabulary to something like a hundred words in the next couple of days as they dropped down through the delicious summer drifts of pine and rhododendron and maple; and he felt better than he had ever felt in his life. The woods were loud with the sound of birds and falling water, and there was an effervescence in the air that made him want to sing. The weeks on the mountain seemed like some ghastly nightmare, and he recalled with astonishment his
desire to remain there, neither dead nor fully alive, his recollections of the beautiful world below so sadly awry.

They came to a valley, alive with flights of multi-coloured birds and aflame with rhododendrons, and he laughed aloud with pure delight.

The boy laughed back at him.

‘It’s good, Houtson, sir?’

‘Very good.’

‘Only one day more. You need to shave your face tonight, Houtson.’

The boy’s own face was as smooth as when they had started, but Houston’s was thick with black beard; he had worried in case it should be pale underneath. But when that evening he shaved, painfully, and with the boy’s assistance, the skin beneath was almost as darkened by wind and exposure as the rest of him.

The boy examined him critically, and passed him, but he was mildly troubled at the need for Houston to keep shaving – a rare necessity in Tibet.

‘Well,’ Houston said, aware that this was one among so many problems. ‘Let’s face that when we come to it. Turn in now.’

‘Yes, Houtson.’

‘Houston.’

‘Yes, sir. Houtson. Good night, Houtson.’    

Houston awoke the next morning with a slight breathless- ness that had nothing to do with the altitude, and they washed and breakfasted briefly, and got started on the last lap. The boy took him again through his few bits of Tibetan as they talked, and he even managed to add to his modest store. But he did not manage to improve Ringling’s pronunciation. The boy was still calling him Houtson, and he was still extracting mild amusement out of it when they came out of a little grove of rhododendron and found themselves on a smooth turf cliff that dropped steeply into the emerald waters of a lake. Just one hour later they were looking down on the seven golden roofs of Yamdring. That was early in the afternoon of
12
May
1950
.

I
T
had been only seven months since he had first heard of this place, and only four since he had left London to hear more; but it was as familiar to him as if he had known it all his life.

Just so the film party must have come on it for the first time, nearly a year before; and just so the acute camera eye of Kelly had recorded it for him. Two thousand feet below the fluted gold canopies swam in the rising currents of air; the monastery glistened on its seven toy terraces like the layers of a wedding cake. Multi-coloured specks seethed in the lower courtyard, and a line of them weaved and swayed across the bridge of boats to the little island. There was a building on the island, a flattened obelisk with glittering white walls inclining inwards to a green roof which sloped steeply away into a thread-like gold spire. The narrow lake lay like a green cheval glass in the cleft of the valley, a score of boats drawing thin insect trails across its perfect surface. At the far side, the village began, and straggled, winking, along the shore to the monastery, and lost itself in the green hills behind.

In the warm afternoon a rich and spicy smell came up out of the valley, and with it, a thin tintinnabulation of sound: the distant clink of metal on stone, snatches of music from some curious, tinkling instrument, an occasional high, disembodied cry, and, from the monastery, enclosing all the sound and regulating it, it seemed, the wafted dong and boom of a gong.

‘Yamdring,’ the boy said.   

They sat and watched it in silence for some time. The boy had estimated it would take three hours to get down, and was in no hurry to move. Evening was the best time to arrive; they could then turn immediately, and without attracting attention, to finding themselves a place to sleep in the crowded doss-houses of the village.

Houston smoked a cigarette and gazed down at the extraordinary spectacle, wonderfully at peace and most keenly aware of himself sitting in this place in the golden glow of the May afternoon.

He had made it, then. By mule and bicycle and his own two feet he had crossed the impossible mountains to find this prize in its hidden place. He knew that he couldn’t have done it by himself, and that he nearly hadn’t done it at all. All the same it had happened.

He breathed deeply, experiencing again the feeling he had had weeks before when he had sat on his sleeping bag and watched the blue mountains lean in towards him in the sunset: the strange feeling that he was both actor and observer in the events that were happening, and that with a little effort he could see what was still to come. And again the glimpse vanished as swiftly as it appeared, leaving him only with the sure knowledge that his brother was here somewhere, not half a mile below him.

The boy had stretched himself out full length on the turf and was peering over the edge with satisfaction.

‘It’s very good for us, Houtson, sir. Plenty of people here today.’

‘Yes.’

‘It must be the spring festival. They come to pray to the monkey.’

Houston threw his cigarette over the edge and came reluctantly out of his reverie. He said, ‘What monkey is that?’

The boy told him then, the legend of how the monkey had come over the mountains from India, and had found the benevolent she-devil in her cave, and had tempted her; and of how in the spring he had carried her to the island in Yamdring lake, and in the autumn had coupled with her.

‘They did it there,’ the boy said, pointing. ‘Just there where the shrine is now.’

‘I see. So that’s how Tibetans were made.’

‘Yes, sir. By the monkey. He is my father,’ the boy said simply.

‘Mine, too,’ Houston said wryly. ‘Or maybe that was another monkey.’

‘Yes, sir, another monkey. This one is still here.’

‘He must be a very old monkey now.’

‘Ah, it’s not the real monkey. It’s only the body of the monkey. The real monkey died,’ the boy said with regret.

‘And the she-devil?’

‘She wept and her tears turned the lake green in his memory. Then she built the shrine as another memory. She went to live there,’ he said, pointing to the lowest level of the monastery. ‘She lived there nine hundred years.’

‘What happened to her then?’

‘She went away.’

‘She didn’t die?’

‘The she-devil can’t die. She just comes and goes.’

‘And she’s just gone again now, is she?’

‘No, sir, no, Houtson,’ the boy said keenly. ‘She’s here.’

‘In the monastery?’

‘In the monastery. In the top one. She’s the abbess – the abbess
and
the she-devil. She goes away and comes back. She is in her eighteenth body now.’

‘I see,’ Houston said cautiously. ‘How about the monkey – does he come back?’

‘Oh, Houtson, no,’ the boy said, swiftly covering a smile with a charming gesture of his slender hand. ‘The monkey can’t come back. Not the real monkey. What a surprise for the abbess if the monkey came back for her.’

‘H’m,’ Houston said, bemused by the complexities of this legend, and squinted at the sun. ‘Isn’t it time we were moving?’

‘Yes, sir. We can go now,’ the boy said, and got up and punched the mule lightly in the ribs, still chuckling at the nature of the abbess’s predicament.

They started down, for Yamdring.    

The mani wall began after half an hour, and continued, with intervals, almost all the way. The boy bowed to the inscribed tiles, with their regular invocation of the jewel in the lotus, and chanted a little as they walked. He was still in excellent spirits at the thought of the monkey returning, and inclined to be somewhat ribald.

The track left the cliff to skirt a long field of barley in which women were at work, and Houston saw that many of
them had dropped the tops of their orange cloaks, exposing copper breasts in the hot sun. The boy whistled and waved enthusiastically, and one or two of them turned, teeth glinting in the sun, and waved back.

‘Yamdring women, sir. Lovely women,’ Ringling said, grinning cheerfully at them. ‘From the monastery,’ he added.

Houston looked again and saw that each of the splendid young creatures had her head shaved, and he said in astonishment, ‘You mean they’re nuns?’

‘Nuns, sir? I don’t know.’

‘Holy women?’

‘Oh, yes, sir, holy. Priestesses. They live in the monastery, one thousand of them. Very holy women, Houtson, sir.’

‘H’m,’ Houston said. The bare-breasted young women did not look particularly holy. Even allowing for the customs of the country, he thought there was a certain liveliness of glance and gesture that he would not have associated with nuns.

The boy caught something in his tone, and he glanced at him, grinning. He said, ‘You mean – do they do it, Houtson, sir?’

‘Is that what I meant?’

‘Oh, they do it, sir. My God, they do it. They do it like rattlesnakes! They do it whenever they can!’ the boy said joyously.

Houston looked again at the lively young priestesses in the barley, and he didn’t for a moment doubt it. He said, ‘Are they allowed to do that?’

The boy laughed aloud. ‘No, sir, not allowed. But they do it. They can’t help themselves, sir. All the young ones do it.’

‘You seem to know a hell of a lot about it.’

‘Oh, everyone knows, sir. It’s the only pleasure they have. They live in stone cells. They sleep on stone shelves. They have a hard life, sir. It’s no wonder they love to do it so much.’

‘When do they get the opportunity?’

‘In their cells, at night-time, sir. They’re locked in, but the monks unlock the doors. There are only one hundred monks for all those women.’

‘That must keep the monks very busy.’

‘Yes, sir, very busy. But sometimes people can get in from
outside. Some of the women can do it ten times in one night,’ the boy said, running his small pink tongue round his lips with a leer of extreme lasciviousness.

Houston shook his head. ‘You’re a bad young devil, Ringling,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you’ve had time to find all this out.’

But it was not Ringling’s badness, or even how he had come by his detailed knowledge, that made him smile as they left the barley field behind. Something else had come to mind; something he had read, weeks before, in a dusty newspaper office in Calcutta, and he pondered over it as they dropped steeply down to the labyrinthine monastery with its thousand stone boudoirs.

The proclivities of the holy women of Yamdring had come, certainly, as a great surprise to him. He didn’t think they would surprise the astrological correspondent of the
Hindustan
Standard
.

They got to the village at dusk and entered a narrow, jostling thoroughfare that became, before they had gone half-way through it, as bright as day. Thousands of butter lamps were being lit: on the ground, on the stalls, and above the stalls on rods stretched across the street. The market was in full cry.

To Houston, after the silent weeks in the mountains, it was as though he had been pushed into a steam organ at a fair. The stupefying blare of sound seemed to batter all the sense out of him. Traders cried, musicians clanged, dogs barked, gramophones ground, and above all, like the amplified noise of a colony of parrots, shrieked the voice of the crowd.

The boy sold the mule before they had gone a hundred yards, for eighty rupees, and they continued, pushing their way through the throng, lumbered with the sleeping kit and their personal bags. It was a scene of such extraordinary animation that Houston found himself unable to stop smiling. On all sides the people gesticulated and laughed, handsome, vivacious, noisy people, fluttering like butterflies in the warm brilliant of the butter lamps. They clustered thickly round the cloth merchants with their lengths of glistening silk; and
round the trestle tables piled high with jewellery and mouth organs and hand mirrors. Tight knots of them chattered and shoved outside the booths of fortune tellers and letter-writers, barbers and dentists; and more argued and bantered across the provision stalls with their stocks of yak butter, tsampa, dried fruit, tea bricks, green ginger, purple beans and blocks of melting yellow candy.

Here and there groups squatted and drank in narrow lanes between the stalls. Ringling pushed his way through one of these, and Houston saw that behind lay a terrace of tall houses built of rough stone, several storeys high. People were leaning out of the glassless windows in the warm evening, and behind them, more batteries of butter lamps shone in the crude rooms. From one end to the other, this side of the street seemed to be a single enormous catacomb of flickering stone chambers, and he saw that these must be the doss-houses the boy had mentioned.

A stream of people was being turned away from the first doorway, and they had to hump the baggage up and down the exhausting, noisy street for over an hour before they could find a house with accommodation to offer. The room they were allotted, with two other men and a woman, was on the fifth floor, and they struggled, hunched under their baggage, up a narrow, tunnel-like staircase reeking of hot rancid butter from the lamps lining the walls.

The landings ran off into a bewildering series of narrow corridors, brilliant and choking with the fuming butter; and in each was a warren of tiny stone chambers. The young Tibetan who had led the way showed them into one, and left, and Houston looked at his three new companions. They were little, lithe, gay people who had chattered and laughed all the way up through the building, and they were still at it as they came in the room. They clasped their hands and told their names, and Ringling told his own, and pointed to his mouth and his head as he explained that Houston was dumb, and not quite right in the bargain.

There were five palliasses on the stone floor, and a big leather bucket in the corner; this seemed to be the only furniture. A hide cover was fastened over the window and the tiny room stank even worse than the corridor. One of the
men removed the hide and hung out of the window, singing, while the other, with the woman, began preparing a meal on the floor with a small butter burner unpacked from the baggage.

Houston lay back on the palliasse and closed his eyes and mouth while Ringling unpacked their own kit. He had never in his life been assailed by such an overpoweringly evil stench, and his head was swimming with the noise and the glare. The clanging and shrieking in the street seemed if anything to be louder now that they were above it, and the people in the room were shouting to make themselves heard. Ringling was shouting as loudly as any of them, quite happy and quite unaffected by the confusion.

Houston lay back on the palliasse and closed his eyes and tried to shut out the stone box and the yellow smoking glare, and succeeded for some minutes, till the boy shook him and he sat up and saw that the woman had prepared a large bowl of some soup-like substance and all were sitting round eating.

‘Eat now,’ the boy said loudly in Tibetan, grinning at him.

‘Eat. Good to eat.’

Houston looked at the bowl and saw something swimming in it, and in an unwary moment breathed through his nose, and he was struggling to his feet, gagging. He didn’t know where to go, and the boy was quickly beside him, and he hung, trembling, over the bucket, and saw that it had not been empty even to begin with, and spewed, and leaned on the greasy rim some time longer, knees trembling and eyes watering into the vile receptacle.

He turned, smiling apologetically, to the people round the bowl, and they smiled back at him, in no way disturbed and still eating heartily.

They went out after that, for he couldn’t bear to stay in the same room with the food and the bucket; but out in the street found himself suddenly hungry, and they ate.    

They ate at a stall at the far and less noisy end of the village, sitting on boxes and entertained by a single blind musician who played gentle tunes on five small gongs. They ate hard barley cakes with soft cheese and washed it down fairly copiously with a mild malty beer, and with this fare, the finest
he had tasted for weeks, and the respite in the cooling night air from the din, Houston felt himself again. They strolled round the village smoking each a coarse but flavoursome cigarillo, and Houston saw how the monastery lay in relation to the main street.