The Rose of Tibet (24 page)

They lit fires in two of the caves with rhododendron wood (the abbess and Little Daughter with one cave to themselves); and blanketed the horses and staked them behind a boulder on the beach.

Within minutes butter was being churned for tea, the rhododendron flaring in the draught of air, and the party thawing in the orange blaze. Houston, sour and oppressed, ate briefly, and went to turn in.

The corporal of the guard came to him as he got his feet in the bag.

‘I have picketed the men,
trulku
– four will watch for two hours at a time.’

‘Good.’

‘And the Mother will see you now.’

Houston got his feet out of the bag. He put on his fur jacket and went guiltily out into the bitter blackness – for he had given her scarcely a thought all day – and climbed to the upper cave. Two guards with rifles squatted miserably at its mouth. He found the pair of them still eating, on the wool- wrapped bales containing the leather sacks.

‘Oh, Chao-li, you have been so long. I thought you would never come. Isn’t it marvellous?’

‘Marvellous,’ Houston said.

‘It’s the most wonderful day of my life. I can’t remember anything so wonderful. Chao-li, don’t you think I could move about a little in the boat? Must I stay in the palanquin all the time? My veil is secure.’

She had worn the heavy silk veil all day and she was sitting with her back to the cave mouth now so that none could see her.

He caught Little Daughter’s warning glance.

‘Not yet, Good Mother. Perhaps when we leave the river.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said.

He climbed back, chilled and depressed, the arak still in his system, and took off his boots and crawled in again, and slept, heavily.

It was snowing slightly when he turned out; but his spirits were perversely raised. They had made, it was a fact, excellent progress the previous day. Perhaps it was, after all, possible to let someone else have a go at the oars. He decided to try, and after an hour or two, when the early confident chanting had died away, put other men to the task.

He tried one boat at a time, and though they wobbled a
bit and progress was slowed, there were no catastrophes. The boatmen chanted again when they took over.

For most of that day (and for years after) their plaintive cries rang in his ears. 

Perhaps the Boundless One heard; perhaps the expedition was merely easing into a routine. The second day sped past with, for Houston, few of the strains of the first.

They shot the bridge before midday, passing swiftly beneath and seeing not a soul; and with this link with caravan routes and possible pursuers behind him, he began to feel a certain swelling confidence. Someone, after all, had to lead. It was not a duty calling for years of scouting experience; simply one of convenience so that one voice should speak and the rest follow. There was plenty of skilled assistance. Several of the guards had tracking experience, and all twelve of them were well-armed. He had merely to get them to the mountains of the south, and once there to pick a route to the east that would bring them from an unexpected angle into the Chumbi valley.

The snag was, as he realized that evening, that the hurtling river was now taking them in a direction well to the west. The map was a Tibetan one, very detailed in its information as to the location of communities of mountain and water devils, less detailed in purely geographic lore. Towards nightfall, when the river, had emerged from its canyon-like tunnel into a broad, rock-strewn tundra, the sunset had lit up distant brick-coloured peaks. Ringling thought he recognized one of them as Nanga Parbat, and another as Cho Oyu. The peaks were many miles ahead of them still; but mysteriously to the east. They should have been far to the west.

It seemed to be time to leave the river.

The boatmen remained with them that night, but in the morning collapsed their craft and set off overland to Yamdring. Houston watched them with some uneasiness. It would take them a couple of days to reach the caravan route (where
the Chinese might then have reached); and in two days his own party could be well out of sight in the mountains. It was a risk, all the same. He had had to balance it against another, that of taking extra mouths with them into unknown country.

He had made the decision alone, and nobody had questioned it; but Houston questioned it then himself.

‘May the Buddha guide your steps!’ cried the boatmen as the parties diverged.

‘And yours. Go slowly!’ replied the guards.

It was the normal formula of leavetaking in Tibet. Houston hoped they would heed it; but had his doubts. It would take them a week, going overland, to get to Yamdring, and he had given them exactly a week’s rations.

That was another decision he was questioning as he turned his horse to the distant peaks.

From the river bank the stretch of country facing them had appeared flat; but in less than an hour its true nature became plain. It was covered entirely, and very closely, by a series of wearying hillocks of sandy rock. The wind came up at ten o’clock, after they had been going four hours. It was a dry, cold, dust-laden wind, peculiarly hateful, and they took shelter in the lee of boulders and made tea and waited for it to die down.

The wind did not die down. It went on all day (stopping abruptly at sunset and starting up again punctually at ten the next morning, as though some gigantic machine had been switched on and off in the mountains). They waited an hour, and went on, noses and mouths muffled and eyes goggled against the dry spray, their faces at first raw and then merely numb from the incessant blast. With the hearse-like palanquin in their midst they picked their way through the geological debris like a party of mourners in a valley of bones.

In the late afternoon, with the horses stumbling and sneezing miserably, and the governor’s wives and children moaning again, he decided to camp, early. They got the tents up with some difficulty in the shelter of boulders, and Houston crawled into his own and lay there with eyes closed.

Ringling shook him presently.

‘Sahib, come and see.’

He went out. The wind had dropped. In the vast uncanny stillness, a great red sun had appeared, arcing swiftly. The barren wilderness was suddenly alive, a glowing bed of fiery red, writhing and vibrating in the fast-changing angle of declension of the huge disc in the sky. He saw the others standing to watch, silent, red-tipped figures, immobile in a spectacle of unearthly stunning beauty.

The boy had not, however, called him out to admire the spectacle; he was pointing to the peaks, visible again, still distant – but to their right now, Nanga Parbat far to the west, Cho Oyu less so. They had passed them both.

On this day, 27 October, despite the dust and the depressing terrain, they had covered nearly forty miles.

‘We can go in the mountains now, sahib,’ the boy said.  

By noon the following day, they were in the foot hills. They camped that night in the shelter of a frozen waterfall. There was no wood to burn, and they cooked with butter lamps. The cold was intense, but Houston felt it less than on the outward trip, for on the governor’s advice he was wearing under his clothes a shift of silk.

They were on the move early, before it was light; and it was still not quite light when the first accident occurred. Four horses had passed over the spot when the track suddenly gave; the fifth (with, as it happened, Wister tied to it) simply disappeared. The following horse pulled up sharply, but the preceding one was dragged backwards and fell in a flurry of limbs, hindlegs into the gap.

They had been riding roped together, and the guards were quickly taking the strain. The horse that had fallen completely had broken both forelegs; they dragged it, whinnying and threshing with pain out of the crevasse (Wister, comatose for the past couple of days, no whit the worse) and cut it loose. The other animal, uninjured, climbed out itself.

The injured horse was quickly destroyed, the guards licking their lips as they hacked the carcase into manageable loads. The ropes were retied, and the horses, unmounted, led across a different section.

Horse steaks, somewhat underdone, were on the menu that night.

As near as they could manage they were going due east, but with insufficient altitude and surrounded on all sides by a jumble of mountains, found it hard to get their bearings. From time to time in the first couple of days, Ringling thought he identified peaks; but on the third when the vagaries of the passes had taken them in all directions and rather to the north than to the east, had to confess himself beaten.

He confessed this towards noon as they were proceeding along a broad defile; and shortly afterwards they saw the monastery. It was a tiny place perched like a bird’s nest in the angle of two sheer rock faces far above them, approached evidently by a flight of rock steps that began at some point beyond their line of vision.

Houston weighed up the chances as they stopped to eat. Sited so far from any caravan route or village, it was plainly a retreat for mystics. It seemed unlikely that such a remote community would have any frequent or regular business with the outside world. He decided to chance it.

He moved the party back down the defile out of sight of the monastery. He sent a couple of guards up to it with a request for the loan of guides. He sent Ringling to watch the guards.

By three o’clock the boy had not returned, and Houston found himself in something of a quandary. They were in an unsuitable spot for camping the night. It would be dark in an hour or so. There had been some other spots that he had marked as suitable.

He sent two more guards after Ringling.

They met on the way, and all returned together. The boy was puzzled. The ascent had evidently been more difficult than it looked. He had only been able to see the latter half of it, for an overhang was in the way. One of the guards seemed to have injured himself; the other one had helped him up the steps. He had waved to them, and was sure they must have seen him, but they had not waved back. He had seen the uninjured one come out of the monastery after some time with a couple of orange-robed monks, and they had been pointing, evidently indicating a route. They had gone back into the
monastery, but although, mindful of the coming dark, he had waited as long as he could, no one had emerged again.

‘Didn’t you call to them?’

‘No, sahib, they knew where I was.’

‘Maybe they couldn’t see you. They might have lost the direction on the way up.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Yes,’ Houston said.

He knew the guards would not have lost their direction, and he knew why the boy had not called. He would not have called himself. After days of hiding, and particularly since sighting the monastery, an oppressive silence had fallen on the party. Even the governor’s children had stopped their snuffling.

Houston didn’t know quite what to make of this. If the climb were as difficult as it sounded, the guards were unlikely to return in the dark. There was no point in waiting; he must either go on or go back. He turned the party round and went back down the defile.

Although the light was failing with every minute, he let a couple of suitable spots go by and picked a third because it was protected by a little promontory of rock that commanded the track. Beyond the promontory was a hollow with scattered boulders. He camped there, posting half the guards on the promontory, and the rest back along the track. The cold was so bitter that he knew they would not be falling asleep in it, so he made no arrangement for reliefs.

He didn’t think he would be sleeping very much himself that night.

There was no point in getting the party out of sleeping bags into the bitter chill until they were ready to move; so though he turned out himself at dawn, he let them sleep on. He had tea, and sent out an urn to the guards on the promontory, and when they had drunk it, swapped round the shifts so that those along the track could warm themselves, too. He sat in his tent, licking the tsampa from the bottom of his mug, and tried to decide what to do.

The dirty grey light was brightening outside. He thought he would give it till eight o’clock, and if nothing happened, move on, leaving two men to wait and to follow them with news.

But soon after seven something did happen; a thin, distant clamour on the air, a gong sounding in the monastery.

Houston walked back along the defile; he found the pickets very nervous, two men watching the monastery from behind a boulder.

‘Any movement up there?’

‘Some monks have been out for water,
trulku
.’

‘No sign of your comrades?’

‘Not yet.’

The steps, he realized suddenly, continued above the monastery; he had not seen this in the afternoon light. He realized it now only because an orange-robed figure appeared on the clifftop and began to descend slowly with a pitcher. He watched the figure disappear behind the monastery. It did not appear again.

‘Is there another entrance at the back?’

‘There must be,
trulku
. That is where the monks have come from. Nobody has come from the front yet.’

Houston watched for some minutes longer, and walked back. He had gone only a few yards when one of the men ran after him. He returned.

Three figures had emerged from the back of the monastery and were climbing the steps; two orange figures, one dun- coloured; one of the guards he had sent up.

‘Has he looked down here yet?’

‘None of them have.’

The figures mounted slowly.

‘Should we call,
trulku
?’

‘No,’ Houston said. ‘No, don’t call. Keep out of sight. We’re leaving now.’

Something was very seriously wrong. As he walked back along the track, his face carefully scanned by the guards posted along it, he tried frantically to think what to do. The man evidently did not wish to give their position away. They had to move away from this spot, fast. Where? The track backwards led nowhere. They had been lost in it for two days,
a twisting, boulder-strewn defile. It occurred to him that it was not a bad position to defend if he had to defend it. But he didn’t want to defend it; he wanted to get away from it. It also occurred to him that the Chinese might be moving up in their rear, and that this might explain the reason for the mysterious delay.