The Rose of Tibet (29 page)

All this was on the night of 23 November. It was eight days after the party had left Yamdring, and two since Houston had gone over the cliff with the girl. He didn’t know what had happened to the other members of the party, and was so dazed by his privations that he didn’t care.

Something else happened before they left the camp. The girl left Houston’s knife on the ground. It was the silver one with his name on it that he had carried since the age of 14. He forgot to ask her for it back, and it thus remained beside the body of Little Daughter until the Chinese found it when they brought up the mules. It was an oversight that Houston was later to pay for very dearly.

They kept going all night, the girl on the horse, the boy on the mule, Houston on his two flat feet. His sores came alive as he walked, and he greeted them like old friends, for they seemed to provide his only contact with reality. He could not believe that he had gone through the fantastic incidents in the cave. Somebody else seemed to have gone through them. He seemed to have been watching this other person, and he seemed to be still watching him, from a pace or two ahead, looking back and observing the flat-footed figure approaching him with the horse and the mule and the two sleeping riders. There was a connexion between him and this dogged person, and he worked soberly to preserve it, checking off the regular signals that passed between them from thighs and neck and ankles.

The boy sat up suddenly after a couple of hours as if some internal alarm clock had gone off.

‘What time is it, sahib?’

‘Three o’clock.’

‘We’re still on the track?’

‘Yes.’

‘Stop now, sahib. Stop.’

‘What is it?’

‘Help me down. We must muffle the hooves. We are coming to the nomad camp. The soldiers are there.’

He helped the boy down, and they muffled the hooves with strips torn from their clothing, and he helped him up again and trudged on.

What followed struck Houston in later years as in a way even less believable than the incidents in the cave, and indeed he often wondered if it had really happened, or if he had not himself fallen asleep as he walked and merely dreamed it.

The nomads were camped on an area the size of Salisbury Plain. They were camped with their tents and their cattle in a series of low-walled enclosures like sheep-pens; and the soldiers were camped with them. For miles on every side, the camp fires gleamed; the plain seemed to be populated as far as he could see. It was encircled entirely by mountains; a vast amphitheatre that shone in the light of the moon like some enormous stage set. Houston thought that he could see every detail of it as plainly as if it had been day: the clusters of tents, the pickets at their fires, cattle stirring behind walls, and even, standing by themselves, the two helicopters, like giant spiders upon the plain.

It seemed to Houston that he simply walked through the middle of this encampment. He had had an idea earlier that nothing could ever frighten him again; but he knew then it was wrong, for as he walked between the enclosures his hair stood on end. He had the fantastic notion that some spell had been cast on the men and animals who seemed to peer at them from both sides; that they had all of them petrified in the moonlight; or that he himself with his companions had been rendered invisible. He turned to see if the boy was aware of it, too, and saw, incredibly, that he was asleep again; and that the abbess was asleep, and that the horse and the mule seemed to be asleep also; and could not be sure in the drugging moonlight that he was not himself fast asleep.

Nobody checked them. No dog came to investigate. Like ghosts they passed silently through the camp, and by half past five had reached the mountains at the other side. The
moon was still out. Houston kept on. The moon went half an hour later, but he still kept on; for he knew that if he stopped he would simply fall down. He had lost contact with his sores. He seemed to have lost contact with everything. There seemed to be no reason why he should not keep on in this way for ever.

He was aware that the boy was awake again.

‘What time, sahib?’

‘I can’t see.’

‘The moon has gone. How long since we left the plain?’

Houston didn’t answer at all this time; for as he had feared, once stopped all his strength had gone. He found himself inexplicably grasping the horse’s leg, and having to reach up to do so.

‘Sahib, sahib, hold on. Don’t sleep yet, sahib. I can’t carry you.’

The boy was beside him, and he was smiling up into his face, telling him that he was far from being asleep, very far; and then he was asleep, and knew that he was, and tried to stop it buzzing for a moment to hear what the boy was saying. Something about his legs; that he should do something with his legs. But he couldn’t find the legs, they had gone now, left him, positively would not be found; and he had to give up trying, had to open to the imperative buzzing, and he opened, and the buzz flew in, and sat upon his ear, and it buzzed.    

It was day when he awoke. It was half past three. He looked at his watch and wound it. The abbess was there. The boy was there. The mule and the horse were there. All present. He tried to stir himself to get up, but could not stir himself. He was not sleepy; merely full of an immense lassitude. He looked about him and saw it was not a cave, but a big overhang; the first place the boy must have found. It was a dangerous place. It was too dangerous a place for them to stay. He fell asleep thinking how dangerous it was.     

They stayed another day in this dangerous place. Neither the boy nor the horse would wake on the first. Houston tried, and couldn’t wake them. He opened the boy’s bandages and
found the wound soft and yellow. He poured on another powder. That left two, for the soldiers had had four between them. They had also had a brick of tea and one of butter, a little sack of tsampa and another of rice, eighteen tablets of meat extract and four small wads of dried strip-meat.

Houston and the girl ate in the evening.

Later they slept again.

Ringling woke the second day, but the horse still slept. It slept lying down with its eyes closed. Houston tried kicking it for a few minutes.

‘It’s no good, sahib. The horse is sick.’

‘What’s to be done?’

‘There’s only one thing to be done,’ the boy said in English, looking at the abbess.

‘Can you walk?’

‘I can walk. We could use the meat, sahib.’

‘All right,’ Houston said.

The boy killed the horse in the late afternoon while the abbess slept, and skinned it, and bound the meat under the lashings of the bales.

They left as soon as it was dark.    

‘Chao-li, the boy is in pain. He must have walked two hours. If he wishes, I will walk.’

‘Are you in pain?’ Houston said.

‘No, sahib, no,’ the boy said. He was hobbling stiffly on the icy path, holding his shoulder. ‘With thanks to the Mother,’ he said. He had not once looked at her, or addressed her directly.

‘Does he know where we are?’

‘Do you know where we are?’

‘Ahead there is a place of wind devils.’

‘Must he disturb the wind devils?’

‘Is it necessary?’ Houston said. He was tiring of his role as intermediary; but he knew it would be more tiring still to ignore it, for neither of them would speak to the other, except through him.

‘There is a hermit hole there,’ the boy said. ‘We could rest in the hole, sahib.’

‘Is the hermit known to us?’

‘Do we know him?’

‘The holy hermit is dead. He died two years ago. Ten of us were sent for from the nearest caravan to witness his funeral. The abbot himself directed the holy hermit’s spirit.’

‘Yes, I remember,’ the girl said. ‘I blessed that hermit. It is not wise, Chao-li, to disturb the spirit of the hermit, or the wind devils.’

‘It isn’t wise,’ Houston said.

‘Sahib, it lies in our path. No one would dare go there. From there it is only six hours to the pass into Chumbi. The pass will soon be blocked, sahib. We must get there quickly.’ ‘Is there no other way he knows, Chao-li?’

‘What other route?’ Houston said.

‘Sahib, if we leave this track we must go over mountains. I don’t know if we could do it. I don’t know how long it would take. The place of wind devils is the wisest choice.’

‘I must see the place,’ the girl said.

It took several hours to reach. The track narrowed gradually, and suddenly narrowed still further, so that it was barely a track at all but rather a cleft in the mountains. The wind blew through it at their backs with extraordinary force like some pillow-covered engine shunting them along. It blew steadily, without gusts, in a single high-pitched note, peculiarly wearing on the nerves, and Houston, stumbling along in single file in utter blackness could well see how it might be taken for the malevolent voice of some devil.

He was quite unprepared, however, for the place of devils itself. The cleft had narrowed so sharply that, to enable the bales, which had jammed against the sides, to be swung round on top of the mule, the abbess had to dismount. She went ahead. A few minutes later they stopped again. The trail had stopped. It had come out to a little clearing, a depression, a mere space of bare rock and ice with a pillar of stones in the centre. The moon could penetrate here, and Houston was glad of it, for if he had not been able with his own eyes to see, he would have thought it full of wild animals. There was a fantastic roaring, a yowling, a moaning; the winds rushing and meeting from similar clefts in the surrounding rock. He
thought he could distinguish with clarity the distinctive notes of a dozen mature cats in the row.

He could see the girl mouthing towards him, but her words were lost in the wind. There was no way round the mule or over it; he crawled on his hands and knees beneath.

‘What is it?’

‘Chao-li, the devils are angry!’

‘Sahib, they are always angry.’

‘Does he know where is the hole?’

‘It is below the
chorten
, sahib – the pile of stones in the centre. The holy hermit’s bones are in the
chorten
. The floor lifts up and there are steps down.’

‘Has he ever heard the devils so angry?’

‘Sahib, I have heard them only once. They were just as angry. See, they are not angry with the holy hermit. Not a stone has fallen.’

‘The hermit has made his peace with them, Chao-li.’

‘Only because the Mother allows, sahib. The holy hermit lived here fifty years, and the Mother protected him from all harm. She can protect us also.’

‘All right,’ Houston said. He wished she would set about it. The tearing cold and the unearthly row had combined suddenly to reduce him again to a state of utter exhaustion.

The girl looked at him and turned away and walked out from the cleft. She was knocked down at once. Houston made to assist her, but was held back by the boy. She picked herself up, and was again knocked down, but raised herself in a doubled-over position, and went on. It could not have been more than fifty yards to the
chorten
, but it took her the best part of a minute to get to it, the wind hurling her this way and that, once spinning her round entirely. A few feet before the
chorten
, she stood suddenly upright, and Houston heard the boy gasping in his ear, but whether with pain or with astonishment at this manifestation of power over the wind, he could not tell. He had already calculated that since the pillar of stones was standing upright it must lie out of the wind; perhaps in the very eye of the turmoil. And such indeed proved to be the case, for when the abbess had bowed to the
chorten
and embraced it with her arms, she turned and beckoned to them, and after some bruising and suffocating seconds in the
wind, Houston found that he too could stand upright. For a radius of some six feet around the
chorten
, the air was quite still; a dead freezing calm.

A large slab formed the doorway. The boy lowered it, and the abbess went in. A few moments later, they followed her.

The hermit hole of Bukhri-bo – such was the name of this abominable spot – was hewn out of solid rock, some ten feet below the ground. Its narrow approach passage led to a single large chamber, twenty feet by ten. The hermit’s possessions had not been touched; they consisted of three wooden bowls, a small sack of tsampa, a lamp, and a kruse of cheap mustard oil to burn in it. The hermit had not used a blanket or a bed. He had not used the sunken fireplace, either, for there were no ashes in it. He had kept a calendar on the wall with a writing brush; it had stopped on the eighth day of the fourth month of Earth Mouse, two summers previously. The boy said he had been dead four months when found. The chamber smelt like it.

They heated snow over the reeking mustard oil lamp and made tea. They slept in their bags on the floor. The mule slept with them.

 They left as soon as it was dark, and, as the boy had promised, took six hours to reach the pass. They turned round when they got there and came back again right away. The Chinese were camped on the pass.

The boy slept heavily for a day and a half on their return, and Houston let him. He had no more powders to put on the wound, and it was looking no better. The shoulder had puffed up like a football. He had sweated as he slept.

‘Sahib,’ the boy said when he awoke. ‘I must go back to the pass. I will go alone, by day. It will be quicker.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘The pass will soon be blocked. We must know how long the Chinese will stay.’

‘How can you find that out?’

‘They had porters with them. There must be a village near by. I will ask in the village.’

‘What’s the alternative if the pass does become blocked?’

‘We must go over the mountains and find another.’

‘I see,’ Houston said. It was quite obvious to him that the boy would not be climbing any mountains for a long time. But he didn’t see how he could tell him this; and he didn’t see therefore how he could stop him from going.