The Rose of Tibet (30 page)

He went out himself while the boy was away, to find wood. The boy had taken the only knife and he couldn’t break the leathery branches that he found. He broke off little twigs and spent exhausting hours chasing them in the wind. But he filled a couple of knapsacks, and they had a fire that night.

The boy had not returned by morning, and Houston went to look for him. It was a couple of hours before he found him. He was simply sitting on the track. He had his back to the wind, and his face was screwed up with strain.

‘Are you all right?’

‘All right, sahib, all right.’

‘What the hell are you sitting here for?’

‘Having a rest, sahib. Just a short rest.’

‘Does your arm hurt?’

‘Yes, it hurts.’

This was the first time the boy had ever so much as admitted that his arm gave him the slightest irritation.

He didn’t question him till he had eaten, and then he got off his bandages and had a look at the wound while listening to the story. It was not a very satisfactory story. The boy had found the village. He had found that the villagers were by no means opposed to the Chinese. The Chinese had brought them wrist-watches and clothes. They had hired their men at the highest rates. And they had promised that they would not be carrying burdens over the pass but merely going to and fro to the village for stores as required.

‘Do they know what it’s in aid of?’

‘They know, sahib. They are bad people. The snow is late and it will be a hard winter for them. They hope the Chinese will stay a long time.’

‘When do they expect the snow?’

‘Not for ten days at least.’

‘And how long are the men hired for?’

‘By the day, sahib. As long as necessary.’

‘Not so good, eh?’

‘Not so good, sahib.’

The wound was not so good, either. It was yellow, and the tight swollen flesh around it was yellow. He couldn’t tell if the dye had come off the monk’s robe. The robe had not been very clean to begin with. He threw the bandage on the ashes and cleaned the wound with hot water. The boy sat hissing, his face tight and grey.

‘Mei-Hua, do you know how to heal a wound? Do you know about herbs, leaves, anything of that sort?’

‘No, Chao-li. It is not my function.’

‘Sahib – if the Mother would permit,’ the boy said in English. ‘A piece of her robe – if she would bless a small piece. I don’t know if it is possible for her.’

The girl didn’t know, either. She considered the request, troubled.

‘Mei-Hua, the boy is in pain.’

‘Alas, Chao-li, it must be written for him.’

‘Mei-Hua, it is a small thing that he asks. Give him the piece of robe.’

‘Chao-li, it is a big thing.’

But she snipped off a piece and blessed it. Houston thought the boy’s face cleared a bit as he bound him with this sanctified bandage.  

They stayed in the hole for a week, voyaging out only to collect wood. It seemed to Houston that the boy grew more tottery every day. He seemed to cover the distance from the
chorten
to the track practically on his face, and he would no longer let Houston look at his wound. He bathed it secretively by himself in a corner of the chamber.

On the eighth day, he thought there were intimations of snow in the air.

‘We better leave tonight, sahib. It’s our last chance.’

Houston saw that his face was puffy and flushed and suspected that he was running a fever; but he made no inquiries
for he knew the boy resented them; and as he had said, it was the last chance.

With the boy he had been eating his way through the horse, to leave the tea and tsampa for the abbess, who would not touch the meat. They had a large meal, and rested again after it. Towards midnight, they got going.

Houston hoped he had seen the last of Bukhri-bo. It struck him then – as it was to strike him years later – as the vilest place on God’s earth.    

The snow began long before they got to the pass. It was early bitter snow like little sharp flints and it drove hard in their faces. They bent their heads, and it seemed to come up from the track. They turned their heads, and it whipped them in passing. There was no protection from it. The wind was so incredibly cold that it was simply not possible to face it for longer than minutes at a time. The abbess dismounted and they turned the mule broadside in the track and rested, gasping, behind it. Houston saw that the boy was scarcely able to stand.

He said, ‘Ringling, we can’t do it. We’ll have to try again.’

‘Sahib, no. It will stop. You’ll see it will stop. It will be easier on the pass.’

Whether it was or not, they had no opportunity to learn. For it was iron grey dawn when they came to the pass, and it needed only one look to see that they would not be going through it. The Chinese were still there.  

The abbess slept on the way back.

‘Sahib,’ the boy said, ‘if the Mother should ask for a river, there is one before the village.’

‘All right.’

‘It is frozen and no one will be there. The water moves below the ice, sahib. It moves into the Tsangpo.’

‘Why should she want a river?’

‘If she does, sahib. Remember.’

Houston had not as then begun to keep a calendar, but by later calculation he made it 17 November when they
had taken the last abortive trip to the pass, and the 27th when he and Ringling had gone back to the nomad encampment to buy curdled milk and garlic. The boy had been delirious for a couple of days, and in his delirium he had raved for the curdled milk and the garlic – specifics which had cured him of many a childish ailment, and which alone would enable him to take them over the mountains. He was still hankering for them when he came to.

Because their food supplies were dwindling, and this would be an opportunity to renew them, Houston humoured him. He dragged him on his back across the place of wind devils and sat him on the mule, and they went.

It had been snowing hard for days, and the boy was sure the Chinese would no longer be billeted with the nomads. Houston went cautiously ahead to see.

He found that the Chinese had gone, and a considerable number of the nomads with them. A considerable number still remained.

He gave the boy what money they had managed to retain through their adventures – a sum of three hundred rupees in small notes – and helped him off the mule to transact the business.

They ran right away into unforeseen difficulty. The nomads would not take the money. The Chinese had told them it was worthless and would shortly be replaced by the yuan. They were prepared only to barter.

What would they accept as barter?

They would accept the mule.

The boy had by this time got his hands on the curdled milk and the garlic, and he agreed. Houston took him angrily on one side.

‘What the hell is the point of getting rid of the mule? We need the mule. How can we move without it?’

‘Sahib, how can we move if I am ill? The mule eats. It eats all day. What good is a mule that eats and has no work to do?’

His face was more flushed than ever, his eyes glittering, his voice far too loud.

‘All right,’ Houston said.

For the mule they got garlic, curdled milk, tsampa, dried
meat, mustard oil, needle and thread, and four animal traps. They were offered also either a skinful of chang or a sled to drags the goods away with. Houston gave the boy no opportunity of deciding on this point. He began piling the goods in the sled.

The boy rode the latter part of the journey on the sled, and he ate garlic as he rode. He ate more when he got back, and he boiled up a head of it in curdled milk for his dinner. He crushed garlic in one of the holy hermit’s bowls, and soaked his bandage in a solution of it. He stuffed as many cloves as he could into the wound. He was chewing garlic when he turned in and he was awake and still chewing when Houston turned out.

There were forty heads of garlic. The boy got through them in a week.

‘Just wait, sahib,’ he said. ‘The garlic will work. We will be away soon.’

And indeed the garlic worked wonders. It cleared his fever. It reduced the watery yellow swellings. He had energy to move. Every day he accompanied Houston out of the hole to collect wood. He showed him how to set the traps, and how to skin their catch – two rat-hares and a fox, which they ate immediately to save the dried meat. But he tired quickly, and had to be carried back on the sled.

‘Just wait, sahib. Next week.’

Alas, the next week, which was the second one of December, the weather deteriorated into savage blizzards, which kept them in the hole, and the boy deteriorated with it. The flush came back to his face. The arm swelled up. The pain became unbearable.

Houston woke one night to hear screaming, and swiftly lit the lamp, and saw it was the abbess. The boy was threshing silently on the floor. He was stabbing at his shoulder with the knife.

Houston tore his bag getting out of it.

‘Here, give me that, give me it!’

‘Sahib, it’s killing me! I can’t stand it!’

‘Come here, come here, stay still.’

‘Sahib, stop it, oh, stop it! Take it away, sahib. Get it away from me.’

Houston took the knife and got him on his back and sat on the writhing chest and looked at the wound.

‘Sahib, only stop it! Do anything! Cut it off. I can’t stand it any more, sahib.’

‘All right. Let’s wash it first. Let’s see what we’ve got.’

What they had got was something that all the garlic and all the curdled milk in the world would not cure. From shoulder to wrist, the arm was a puffy yellow mass. It spread under the armpit and over the shoulder. Blood and pus had streamed from the place where the boy had stabbed.

Houston’s stomach turned over, and his heart failed him. For he saw that what the boy in his agony had prescribed was indeed the only remedy. The arm would have to come off. In a frenzy, because he could not stand the agonized bellowing, and because he knew he must stop it, he hit the boy hard on the head with a boot, and knocked him mercifully out, and held his own sweating head in his hands and thought what to do.

‘The boy will die,’ the girl said.

‘No!’

‘He will die, Chao-li. It is written for him.’

‘Nothing is written!’ Houston said savagely. ‘I’ll save him. I’ll cut the arm off.’

But he didn’t cut the arm off, and he didn’t save him. Ringling died, as near as Houston could judge, on the 19th December – which was the date he gave his mother – and his death brought peace to them all, for he had bellowed continuously for three days.

Houston wept for him as he had not wept for his own brother. The girl remained composed.

‘The boy was not a native of Tibet, Chao-li?’

‘No, he came from Kalimpong, in India.’

‘Then we will need a river,’ she said.  

Houston found the river, and as the boy had said, it was frozen and no one was there. He cut a small hole in the ice with the boy’s knife, and dragged the stiff body off the sled.

The girl crouched beside it, shivering in the bitter wind.

‘Where does the river flow, Chao-li?’

‘Into the Tsangpo.’

‘Very good. It will carry him home.’

She snipped a lock of the boy’s hair, and murmured over it, and dropped it into the ice hole. Then she bent over the body and made two small incisions, above the eyes, and murmured again.

Houston remained looking into the ice hole. The hair was still there in the slow-moving water. It went just as the girl rose beside him.

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes. His spirit is now released. If it loses the way, the river will lead it home. For an outlander, it is very simple.’

‘Yes,’ Houston said. It had been very simple the first time, in the little stream, in the little wood, between Sikkim and India; a few drops of water, a posy of flowers.

‘Good-bye,’ he said into the hole.

T
HEY
left the boy on the ice. They left him naked to preclude the possibility of identification. They returned bleakly to the cave, and did not speak on the way. They turned in as soon as they had eaten.

The next day, Houston became very busy.

He slit two of the sleeping bags and sewed them together. He went out and began very methodically his immense collection of wood. He drew up his calendar on the wall with a bit of burnt stick.

In the week before the boy had died they had agreed upon a rough plan. The plan was to stay in the hole for the winter and to make a quick dash for the pass as soon as the thaw set in. In this part of the country it set in very rapidly in the middle of April. In the space of three or four days the blizzards stopped and the sun shone. Unless the Chinese had left a party in the village – and it would be necessary to check on this – they could have as much as three days’ start on any
troops sent to cut them off. In three days they could be well into the Chumbi valley.

Houston drew out his calendar from December to May, and made a ring round 1 April when he thought he would make a reconnaissance of the village, and another round the 8th, for a final one.

The long-range planning struck him as utterly fantastic. The thought of April, in December, seemed to him as remote as the next century. But he clung to it doggedly, for there was nothing else to cling to. He even worked out for himself some refinements. The emeralds were heavy – the eight bags weighing each something like thirty pounds. With no one to help him, he thought he had better ferry them up to the pass a bit at a time. He thought he might make one trip on 8 April – when he would be going for his second look at the village – and another on the 10th. The rest could go with them when they left.

There were seventeen weeks from the end of December to the middle of April. Houston set himself to regulate them by a strict routine. They rose at seven, as they had done in the monastery, and washed and ate, and then while the girl, after setting their home to rights, embarked upon the ritual of prayer and mental exercise that had always made up her day, Houston went out on his wood-collecting and trap-setting labours.

He went out whatever the weather, and the weather in January was the most abominable he had ever encountered. The snow came continuously, and horizontally, and at tremendous velocity, driven by iron hard winds. He stood for a moment in the strange icy chillness beside the
chorten
and listened to the unbelievable howling, and took a deep breath before heading out into it.

He took the sled with him and collected his wood methodically, covering a different area every day and making a complete tour over a radius of some ten or twelve miles from the hermit hole every week. The traps provided at first almost nothing, but after a week or two he took to baiting them with what was left of the horse, and was soon picking up his dinner at least twice a week.

In the third week of January, when the weather grew suddenly worse, he found two rat-hares in the one trap; they had evidently gone for the same bit of food simultaneously. He took out the animals and rebaited the trap and moved on, and had no sooner turned his back than he heard the jaws go again. He looked round. Another rat-hare was in the trap.

Deducing that the worsening weather was bringing them down from the heights and that his remaining traps might be working just as hard, he gave up collecting wood (for a large pile was already drying in the hermit hole) and went straight away to inspect them. He was not disappointed.

For the following four days, in the vilest of blizzards, Houston went smiling from one trap to another. Some of the traps were buried deep in snow; but his little prey had smelt out the food, and they were waiting for him. He returned blue at the nose and chilled to the marrow; but by the end of five days he had returned with twenty-eight meat dinners.

Houston regarded this period, which was from the third week of January to the end of February, as one of the most rewarding of his life. The routine very quickly developed into a most regular and pleasing pattern. He would leave sharp on half past seven, punctual as some clerk going up to the city. He would climb the steps into the
chorten
, and pick up his sled, and nod familiarly to the bones of the holy hermit, and go out into it. The more horrible the weather, the greater his feeling of virtue. In all the seventeen weeks he did not come face to face with another soul; and for the first five of them was never happier.

He looked forward with the keenest relish to the evening. For it was dark when he left, and it would be dark again when he returned, hungry, half-frozen, with just energy enough to lug his tight-lashed haul across the place of wind devils. Smoke would be filtering out of the
chorten
, and the first breath of it would hit him as he removed the entrance stone. He would park the sled and clamber down in his bulky clothing – clamber down like Santa Claus descending a chimney, the warm scented air rushing deliriously up his body; and then it would all be there, waiting for him – a magnificent bombshell of light and heat, a treasure box of unfailing delight.

The cave was hot – gloriously, bakingly hot after the unremitting horrors of the frozen world above. The girl wore a light robe in it all day. Houston would strip, down to his singlet and trousers, and wash and eat, and then the evening was before him.

He taught her draughts, with bits of black and white stick, and noughts and crosses, and he drew pictures for her. On one wall he made a mural of Yamdring and on another of Bond Street. He drew for her also Trafalgar Square, and Fitzmaurice Mansions, and the living-room of number 62 a (and at this period, too, on the back of her robe, the thirty sketches of her now in the Kastnerbank of Zürich). He told her about television and cinema and underground trains and ocean liners; and he tried to explain the basic political ideas of Western Europe. The political ideas bored her. But she was keen enough on religious ones, eagerly – sometimes scornfully – anticipating the theory underlying certain of the beliefs.

The instruction was not all on one side. For she explained to Houston many details of the life of the country that still baffled him. She taught him a number of mantras, religious chants, very useful for repulsing demons, and also for inducing, by repetition, a state of trance. Houston could not put himself into a trance by these means, but the girl could and very easily did, her pupils not responding to light nor her flesh to pain. She taught him also the rudiments of monastery dialectics, and engaged him in a number of simple arguments. Houston found the arguments fanciful and absurd, and the rules incomprehensible, but lying at ease in the crackling warmth with the gales howling above, he indulged her. He would have indulged her in anything.

He adored her. He could not look at her, or talk to her, or lie with her enough. Her hair had grown now, giving her a haunting waif-like appearance. He watched her by the hour, absorbing every nuance, every gesture as if it might be the last.

‘Mei-Hua, do you love?’

‘Chao-li, I must.’

‘Above all others?’

‘Chao-li, I must love all things. I am in harmony with all things.’

‘But more in harmony with me.’

‘Am I so, Chao-li?’

She eluded him. He thought he knew her every pore, her every molecule. He could trace the beginnings of every smile, and where the hair grew on her head, and where it had begun to sprout again on her body. He thought that physically he knew every inch of her; and not only physically, for she had no affectations, no reticences, no feminine wiles with him. Her nature was of the most unvarying, one of tideless affection. And yet there was something that he couldn’t grasp – a feeling diffused through her of boundless good will for all creatures that he had to channel to himself alone.

Houston had never been particularly humble in love. He found himself now with the 18-year-old girl a suppliant.

He said, ‘Mei-Hua, say you are more in harmony with me.’

‘Very well, I will say it.’

‘And that we will never be parted.’

‘Oh, Chao-li, how can I say that? It isn’t true.’

‘Why can’t it be?’

‘Because some day we must die,’ she said gaily.

She was leaning over him, rubbing her nose against his; so he said with a smile to match her own, ‘The she-devil cannot die. You told me that. She only goes away and comes back.’

‘Her soul, Chao-li. Her body must die. All seventeen of her bodies have died. And so will this one. And so will yours. All bodies must.’

‘Can’t we stay together till they do?’

‘Where will we stay?’

‘Wherever you want.’

‘Will we stay in heaven?’

‘Mei-Hua, it isn’t a joke.’

‘Will we stay in the hermit hole?’

‘I’ve been very happy in the hermit hole,’ Houston said.

‘I, too, Chao-li. Very happy with you.’

‘Then be happy with me in Chumbi also.’

‘In Chumbi I must be the abbess again. There will be nobles and lamas there. We could not live there as here. Besides, you would soon become bored with me.’

‘Never,’ Houston said.

‘You would go away to paint your pictures.’

‘I would paint you.’

‘How often could you paint me?’

‘Every day, until you’re quite old.’

‘No,’ she said, nuzzling.

‘Till you’re
very
old. Till you’re just an old, old body.’

‘Alas, Chao-li, it isn’t possible.’

‘Why isn’t it?’

‘Because this body will not grow old. I must leave it young.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I have always known. It is written for me.’

‘You know when you will die?’

‘The year and the month, Chao-li.’

‘Then tell me.’

She drew back and looked at him with a wistful humour. ‘Not now, Chao-li. Not ever, perhaps.’

Houston’s heart sank as he saw how little it meant to her. But he persevered. He awoke one night to find her poring over his face in the firelight.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I was just loving you. How beautiful you are, Chao-li!’

Houston drew her down with sleepy joy. It was some little way from the totality that he desired; but he thought he was making progress.

The first faint flaw in the gold appeared in the middle of February. The supply of animals dried up. It had started drying up within days of his last big haul. He thought he had worked out these particular areas, and shifted the traps. He had shifted them three times by 17 February, and his total catch for the period was two little rat-hares and one old diseased fox. He thought it was time to take stock of the larder.

He had for himself nine small hares, about a pound of dried strip-meat, six of the tablets of meat extract, and some unsavoury leftovers of horse. The girl had something over a
stone of tsampa, several pounds of rice, about a pound of tea and two of butter.

Houston had been eating one of the hares at a meal, with either a bowl of hare soup if he had boiled it, or of extract soup if he had not. He thought he had eaten rather well, and that it would be of no great hardship for him to cut down. If need be, he could manage for a month on what he had. That would take him, however, only to the middle of March. It would be the middle of April before they left.

The girl was in rather better case. At a pinch, her stocks would last the full period. She had already been rationing herself, and it seemed that she had had at the back of her mind the possibility that Houston might need to share her food.

‘No,’ Houston said. ‘No, I shan’t do that. The tea and tsampa are yours. Something will turn up.’

It was not until the very last day of the month, the 28th, that it was borne in on him that nothing was going to. He had finished that day a tour of all his traps. There was no sign of any animal. The traps sat in hard ice, the springs frozen solid, the bait frozen solid; no life, no life at all stirring.

He took his dinner with him the following day and also Ringling’s sleeping bag; for he had come to a conclusion in the night. The animals had left the mountains. They had gone to seek food near humans. He would have to seek them there himself.

He went as near to the village as he dared, until he saw smoke. He baited his traps with meat that he could ill spare, and took himself back to a cave that he had marked on his way. He spent a miserable night in the cave, hungry and sleepless, a prey to morbid reflections. He had passed on his journey the hole in the frozen river. He had tried not to look. But he had seen something there; something; all that had been left by animals even hungrier than himself.

Because the country was unfamiliar to him, he had taken careful note of where he had left the traps. He was out early in the morning to find them. The first one wasn’t there. He wasted half an hour checking to see that he was not mistaken before going on to the next. That wasn’t there, either. He had got to the third spot before he saw the man. He was quite a
long way off, trudging away from him with a mule towards the smoke.

Houston didn’t bother to look any further. He went back to the hermit hole.       

He had three rat-hares left and three tablets of meat extract. If he didn’t exert himself too much he could make them last a fortnight. If he shared the girl’s food they could both last another fortnight. There were six weeks to get through.

Houston lay in his sleeping bag and tried to face the situation. He would soon have no food. He had no traps to catch any food. How was he to live without food? To share the girl’s was obviously no solution, for then the pair of them would starve. He had to get his own. Where was he to get it?

The nightmarish situation seemed to have been sprung upon him so suddenly that he couldn’t all at once comprehend it. He was warm, well housed, comfortably bedded. He had three million pounds in emeralds and three hundred rupees in money. There was a nomad camp on one side of him and a village full of people on the other. How was it possible, with all these assets, that he should die from lack of food?