The Ninth Buddha

“Now this one,” Christopher ordered. The orderly tied the third man to another chair.

“Please, sahib,” he pleaded when he had finished.

“You don’t have to tie me up. I am staying here as long as you want. I am keeping quiet. Not interfering.”

Christopher ignored his pleas and tied him to the desk chair. He turned to the captain.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’ll be a good deal sorrier when you’re pulled in. You won’t get away, you know. Better to give yourself up now. Save yourself a lot of trouble. Save yourself getting hurt.”

“Yes,” said Christopher.

“I’d like to do that. But I didn’t kill Martin Cormac and I don’t have time to waste proving it. This isn’t a police matter. Tell your people to keep their noses out of it.

Speak to somebody at DBI. Ask to talk to Winterpole. He’ll explain.

He’ll explain everything.”

He turned and made for the door. Behind him, the flies had started moving into the living-room.

Two large cars were parked outside the Knox Homes. Christopher recognized them as Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts: they were popular cars with some of the local potentates. Evidently, Carpenter had visitors. Important visitors.

He saw the confusion on the girl’s face as soon as she opened the door:

she simply did not know what to do with him. Christopher was no longer persona non grata he had taken dinner with the Carpenters the night before and been introduced to the assembled orphans as a man of sorrows. But something held her back from granting him immediate admission. He resolved her dilemma by pushing past into the hallway. Ignoring her cries of protest, he made his way directly to Carpenter’s study and flung open the door. It was empty. The vacant eyes of dead animals stared at him from the walls. He closed the door on them and headed for the Carpenters’ drawing-room. He did not bother to knock.

Moira Carpenter was receiving visitors: a wealthy Indian lady dressed in the indoor garb of a Muslim nobleman’s wife and a spinsterish European woman in serviceable clothes, who sat and held her teacup with the bored self-deprecation of a governess in the throes of middle age. When the door opened and Christopher burst in, the governess spilled tea into her ample lap and Moira Carpenter almost scalded the cat. Only the be gum held her ground, as though rude interruptions were part of the daily round for her.

Christopher was the first to speak.

“Where’s your husband, Mrs. Carpenter?” he snapped. His nerves were on edge.

“Mr. Wylam, I .. .” Moira Carpenter began, carefully replacing her blue and white china teapot on the doily-topped table by her elbow.

“I want to speak with him. Where is he?”

“Really, this is most improper.” Mrs. Carpenter was recovering quickly from her shock “Just what do you mean bursting in here like this? You “Martin Cormac is dead. Murdered. I think your husband knows something about it. Where is he?”

Moira Carpenter had been half-way to her feet when Christopher broke the news. Her legs seemed to give way under her and she sank back into the chair. The colour that had started to rise in her face deserted it instantly and was replaced by a ghastly pallor.

Christopher thought for a moment that she would faint, but within seconds her true nature had reasserted itself. Cormac had been right: beneath the skin, she was cast iron cast iron of the highest quality.

“Explain,” she said. Her lips were taut and pale.

“Martin Cormac dead explain.”

“I found him at his bungalow less than half an hour ago. In bed.

Someone had cut his throat. That’s all I know.”

“And you think my husband knows something you do not.

Explain.”

“I’ll explain that to your husband, Mrs. Carpenter, if you’ll kindly tell me where he is.”

All this time neither of the other two women had spoken. The pale governess was plainly distressed and kept rubbing mindlessly with a small lace handkerchief at the tea stains on her lap. The be gum watched unperturbed, as though the cutting of throats, like rude interruptions, was a commonplace of her unruffled existence.

“You will explain it to me, Mr. Wylam, or not at all,” Moira Carpenter riposted. She was still pale, but the blood that had fled her face was doing its work elsewhere.

“Martin Cormac knew something about your husband, something the Reverend Carpenter may have wanted to remain hidden.

I went to Cormac’s place this morning to find out what it was. I found him dead and his desk broken into. That is your explanation.

Now, will you tell me where your husband is?”

“The Reverend Carpenter is with my husband.” It was the be gum voice. She was a plumpish woman in her forties, clearly a senior wife whose power in the harem owed less to personal beauty than political acumen. Christopher thought she would, in truth, be no stranger to sudden and unexplained death.

“I regret,” she continued, ‘that they cannot be disturbed under any circumstances. Perhaps Mrs. Carpenter will arrange an appointment for this afternoon. In the meantime, you will be good enough to show yourself out.”

“And who exactly is your husband, madam?” Christopher demanded. He was not in a mood to be cowed by a woman who took her governess for morning tea in a Silver Ghost.

“The Nawab of Hasanabad,” Moira Carpenter explained, as if in deference to some obscure point of Muslim etiquette that did not allow the be gum to utter her husband’s name.

“And what the Begum says is correct they are not to be disturbed. Go home, Mr. Wylam. Collect yourself. Think about what you have been saying.

And if you still feel you should speak to my husband, return later this afternoon as the Begum suggests and he will be pleased to entertain you. Would you like me to send a boy to notify the police of your gruesome discovery?”

With an effort, she was casting a veil of normality over the scene.

The governess had begun to breathe more easily. The tea stains would wash out.

“His throat was cut from side to side,” Christopher barked at her.

“With a scalpel. Would you like me to show you? Why don’t you all drive up to the hospital with me in one of those shiny cars outside and see for yourselves? We could bring tea and sandwiches.

You’ll just have to be careful about the flies there are rather a lot of them just now.” He sensed that he was on the verge of snapping, but it didn’t seem to matter.

The two European women blanched visibly at Christopher’s tirade, but the be gum remained unmoved. Unlike the others, she had seen men with their throats cut from side to side. The talk of flies made her think the stranger was insane.

“Please leave at once,” she said, ‘or I shall have to call for my husband’s men to throw you out. They won’t be gentle, and I won’t be upset if they break your neck.”

Christopher swore and stormed out of the room. He had wasted enough time already.

The transition from the Carpenters’ quarters to the orphanage was effected by a double doorway. He felt the chill as he went through the Carpenters kept their own heating high. The evening before, he had formed only a hazy impression of the place’s layout. The ground floor, which he had briefly toured, consisted of the assembly hall, classrooms, dining-room, and kitchens. On the first floor to his right were the girls’ dormitories and bathrooms. To his left lay the boys’ section, which he had visited the evening before.

He headed there first. Going through a plain door, he found himself in a long, empty corridor. On either side were wooden doors set with panes of glass in their top register. Glancing through the first, he saw a teacher at a blackboard and the first two rows of desks. The voices of the boys came to him through the glass, singing in a monotone:

“Nine times seven is sixty-three; nine times eight is seventy-two;

nine times nine is eighty-one; nine times .. .”

The voices faded as he moved on. The corridor led directly into a tiled hall, where his feet echoed. Away from the classrooms, where only the dreary chanting of parrot phrases gave any hint of life, the building was heavy with a peculiar, cloying silence. It was a silence grown from misery and boredom as weeds are grown from their particular seeds, dense, desolate, and forbidding. He felt himself slow down and move on the balls of his feet, falling instinctively into harmony with the atmosphere of the place. A broad staircase lay to his left, connecting with the floor above. He moved toward it, drawn without any reason to the upper floors.

The staircase led on to a narrow corridor, redolent with the smells of un perfumed soap and starched bed-linen. The walls were white and stark, without concession to mortality or pain. Here, sleep was a chore like any other, with fixed times and set rules.

Only the dreams escaped regimentation. The dreams and the nightmares.

Christopher opened the door of the dormitory. It was a long, bed-lined room, like the one he had slept in at Winchester, but colder and more cheerless. Someone had left a window open. A cold wind moved restlessly through the room, its appetite undiminished after its long journey from the mountains.

He felt a sense of inquietude grow in him. Pale sheets were moving in the gusts from the open window. The small beds with their iron frames, the white walls, the rows of foot-lockers without colour or personality all reminded him once more of the ward of a hospital ... or an asylum. What nightmares did the children of the Knox Homes have when they lay dreaming in their narrow beds on a winter’s night? he wondered. Dark gods ... or the Reverend and Mrs. Carpenter smiling their slow smiles and reading comforting words from the Bible?

Next door, there was a cold bathroom. Water dripped from a washer less tap on to white enamel. Damp towels hung limply on wooden rails. Lattices of pale light lay on the tiles like bars.

At the end of the corridor was a small wooden door marked “Sick-bay’.

Christopher knocked softly, but there was no answer.

He tried the handle. The door was unlocked. Inside was a low bed covered in tightly folded sheets, and beside it an enamel washstand with a hand-towel draped over the bowl. Even here there were no concessions. He remembered how Moira Carpenter had tried to explain to him that sickness was a token of sin, that the sick should be cared for but not coddled. To comfort sickness was to comfort sin.

He was about to leave when something caught his attention.

Along the wall opposite the bed stood a small linen-chest. It seemed to have been shifted recently, about two feet further from the door, leaving a noticeable patch of lighter paint on the wall where it had stood. Christopher could not understand why it had been moved: its new position was awkward, much too close to the washstand to allow the drawers to be opened fully.

He opened the lid and looked inside. Just a pile of sheets, all neatly folded and stacked evenly. There were two drawers at the bottom of the chest. He opened each of these in turn, but found only towels and a few basic medical items. Perhaps there was something wrong with the wall behind the chest. He squeezed between the chest and the washstand and pushed. The chest was heavy, but it moved across the uncarpeted floor without much difficulty.

He had to step away from the wall in order to allow the light from the window to shine on it. It was so unobtrusive that he might not have noticed it but for the business of the chest. Someone had cut two letters in the wood, using a nail or possibly a pocketknife. He had seen the letters before, he did not have to ask what they meant or who had written them: W W William Wylam. He had devised the simple monogram about two months ago for his son’s use. There was no longer any doubt. William had been here.

Ill

He ran all the way back to the entrance hall. At the foot of the stairs leading to the girls’ dormitories, two exquisitely dressed figures were standing, evidently the Nawab’s personal bodyguards.

As he approached, one of them stepped towards him and held a hand palm forwards in his direction.

“Very sorry, sahib, but I have been given instructions not to let you go any further You have been asked to leave. I will take you to the door.”

Christopher was in no mood to argue. He reached for his belt and raised the revolver he had taken from the policeman at Cormac’s house. He pointed it straight at the bodyguard’s forehead.

“We’re going nowhere near the door,” he said.

“Over there,” he ordered, waving the gun in the direction of the living-room.

“Your friend as well. Tell him to move or I’ll blow your head off.”

The man knew better than to argue. With his colleague, he made for the living-room door.

“Open it and go inside.”

They did as ordered. Inside the room, the trio of women were still sipping morning tea and nibbling at caraway cake. This time the governess dropped her cup and saucer on to the floor. The be gum looked up from her plate, saw what was happening, and gave Christopher a look that was probably the nearest thing to a death sentence in Hasanabad. Moira Carpenter looked like the antithesis of Christian charity reluctantly made flesh. No-one said a word.

Christopher stepped inside only long enough to remove the key from the lock. He closed the door again and locked it, putting the key into his trouser pocket. He wondered if they had had time to warn Carpenter.

Upstairs, he visited each of the rooms in turn. All were cold and empty. Somewhere, a door slammed. There was a brief flutter of voices in the distance, then silence again. At the end of the ‘ corridor, a flight of narrow stairs led up to an attic storey.

Christopher remembered it had been in the attic that Tsewong had hanged himself.

The stairs led directly to a plain wooden door. Christopher climbed slowly, waiting on each step, his feet patient, his ears straining for a sound. His heart was beating rapidly. He thought , he could hear voices beyond the door, but the sound faded and he could not be sure he had heard anything at all. And yet he ‘ imagined that, beneath the silence, there was something else.

There was nothing behind the door but a narrow, wood-panelled passageway, a dark tunnel lit by a single bulb. At the end of the passageway was a second door, identical to the first. He advanced cautiously, feeling cramped by the dark walls on either side A floorboard cracked and he stood still for what seemed an age.

A sound of scraping came from behind the door, a steady,

rhythmic sound, muffled and indefinable. Scrape-scrape. Then a brief pause. Scrape-scrape. Another pause. Scrape-scrape. A pause.

And so it went on.

Christopher hesitated, listening, trying to work out what the sound could be.

Scrape-scrape. Pause. Scrape-scrape.

Set into the door at eye height was a small shutter with a knob, about six inches long by three high. It reminded Christopher of the shutters on prison doors. He thought perhaps the room must be the girls’ sick bay, a place where fevers could be isolated or heartaches given room to heal. The monk Tsewong would have been kept here.

Scrape-scrape. The noise came more loudly now.

Christopher put his hand to the knob and drew back the shutter.

Through a small glass pane, part of the room came into view. The walls and floor were powdered with light and dust. Through a ‘ I skylight of marbled glass, sunlight filtered, effortless and slow, into the tiny room. Christopher stepped closer to the glass and put his eye to the aperture.

Immediately opposite, his back turned to Christopher, John

Carpenter sat hunched over a low fire. In one hand, he held a long poker which he was dragging mechanically across the top of the grate. It was this that was making the scraping noise. The fire seemed old, a thing of cinders mostly, its few coals grey and smouldering. Here and there, flashes of red struggled for life in the ashes, but the weight of all that greyness about them was too great, and they fell deeper and deeper into oblivion. Carpenter moved the poker in and out of the ashes listlessly, raising from time to time a solitary spark that rose briefly above the cinders and was gone.

But it was not Carpenter that drew Christopher’s eyes. Carpenter was peripheral, a side-show to what was happening in the centre of the room. Two people stood there, a man and a girl, a living tableau caught in the angry sunlight. The man was an Indian, but he wore a Savile Row suit and leaned on a silverheaded cane. He was a man of perhaps fifty, small and round and soft. He looked as though someone had taken him off and polished him like an old spoon in an antique shop, all gleaming and mellow and filled with curious reflections. His eyes were on the girl, watching her with a wild intensity that held him captive.

The girl was naked. A white shift lay on the floor where she had discarded it. Long black hair fell across her shoulders and gently touched the edges of small, shadowed breasts. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen. Her eyes were shut, as though she were trying to dream the room away, but Carpenter’s little nightmare was all about her, sweet and tight and inescapable.

The man reached out a hand to touch her lightly, running soft fingers along her skin, sweeping them against the soft hairs of her forearms. Then he made her turn. Round and round he made her turn, like a dancer, like a tiny mechanical dancer spinning on top of a music-box, to the sound of an old melody. He made her raise her arms above her head and lower them again, watched her breasts rise and fall, admired the smooth line of her throat as she held her head back. There was no sound but the scraping of the poker in the grate. Finally, that too stopped and there was silence.

The naked girl turned to music she alone could hear, lost in gardens of amazing symmetry, from which there was no escape.

She was the dancer at the edge of the dance, alone and silently turning in a dream.

Christopher opened the door. No-one noticed him enter. Carpenter was lost in contemplation of the embers in the fireplace, the Nawab’s attention was all on the girl, and the girl was in a trance.

He stood for a long time watching them, waiting for their ritual to end. It was the Nawab who noticed him first, out of the corner of his eye. The little man turned, a look of incredible fury on his face.

“I say! What do you mean bursting in here like this? Who the hell do you think you are? By Jove, I’ll have you flogged if you don’t leave at once!”

The Nawab had been to Eton and Oxford, where he had studied how to be an Oriental gentleman. Eton had taught him English manners and Oxford how to row. He had taught himself how to treat anyone who was not a Nawab or a Viceroy.

“I would like to speak to the Reverend Carpenter,” said Christopher.

“The matter doesn’t concern you, so you can just get out.

Before I throw you out.”

“Do you know who you are speaking to? I can have you horsewhipped for this insolence!”

“You aren’t in a position to argue,” Christopher snapped. He pointed the revolver at the Nawab.

“And I don’t have time. I’ll shoot you if I have to. It’s entirely up to you.”

The man spluttered and lifted his cane as if to strike Christopher, but he was not fool enough to do it. Still expostulating to himself, he made for the door. As he was leaving, he turned.

“My chaps downstairs will put you in your place. You’ll be sorry you were ever born when they’re through with you. By God, I’ll see you’re sorry!”

Christopher slammed the door in his face. He glanced at Carpenter, who had remained seated in front of the fire, then picked the girl’s shift from the floor. She was standing absolutely still, her eyes watching him, wondering what was going to happen next.

“Put this on,” he said, holding it out to her.

She took it from him, but remained holding it, as though uncertain what to do.

“Put it on,” he repeated.

She remained unmoving, so he took the shift and pulled it over her head, helping her slip her arms through the sleeves.

“You have to leave,” he said.

“Get away from here. You mustn’t stay here, do you understand?”

She looked at him, uncomprehending. He had to make her understand.

“You’ll only come to harm here,” he insisted.

“You must go away.”

As though he had not spoken, she began to turn, just as she had turned before, raising and lowering her arms. Christopher snatched at her and slapped her face, trying to bring her to her senses. She looked at him as though nothing had happened.

“Don’t you understand?” he shouted.

“This is no place for you.

You must leave!”

“Leave?” she said. Her voice quavered.

“Where can I go?” she asked.

“This is my home. There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere.”

“It doesn’t matter where you go,” he said.

“Just as long as you get away from this place.”

She looked at him with blank eyes.

“It matters,” she said almost inaudibly.

“Leave her, Wylam. She understands it all better than you ever will.” Carpenter had got up from his seat in front of the fire. He came across to the girl and put an arm round her shoulders. They walked together to the door, the missionary and his charge, while he talked to her in a low voice, inaudible to Christopher.

Carpenter opened the door, said something further to the girl, and let her out. He watched her walk away down the narrow passage, then closed the door and turned to face Christopher.

“Tell me, Mr. Wylam,” he said.

“Do you believe in God?”

The question seemed bizarre and out of place to Christopher.

“I don’t see what God has got to do with this,” he said.

“I told you before, I haven’t come here to discuss theology.”

“Oh, but Mr. Wylam, don’t you see? It all goes back to theology in the end. It all goes back to God. How could it be otherwise? But if you are not yourself a believer, you may find it hard to understand.”

“’mm not here to understand. I’m here to find my son. He was here in this orphanage. For all I know, he may still be here.”

Carpenter went over to his seat by the fire and sat down. He looked tired and unhappy.

“What makes you think he was here?” he asked.

“I found his initials carved into the wall behind a chest in the sick bay. So let’s stop playing games. Martin Cormac was killed sometime this morning because he had information about you and your activities. Until something happens to convince me otherwise, I’m holding you responsible.”

The look of shock on the missionary’s face seemed genuine enough.

“Cormac? Dead? What do you mean? I know nothing about any killing.”

Christopher explained. As he did so, the blood drained from , Carpenter’s face. The look of horror grew more pronounced.

‘ “I swear I know nothing whatever about this,” he stammered.

“I

swear it to you. I know about your son, yes. I know about the monk, Tsewong, yes. But this other thing, I swear I had no hand in it. You must believe me.”

“Tell me about my son. Where is he?”

Carpenter looked away.

“He’s not here. You are right: he was. But he left a week ago.”

“Who is he with? Where have they taken him?”

“Mishig took him, the Mongol Agent They left for Tibet. I think he planned to travel over the Sebu-la.”

“Where are they headed?”

Carpenter shook his head. He looked directly at Christopher.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“They’re going to Tibet: that’s all L know.”

“Are they going to Dorje-la? Is that their destination?”

The missionary seemed agitated. He shook his head vigorously.

“I don’t know where you mean. I’ve never heard of a place called Dorje-la.”

“You sent some of your children there. Never girls, just boys.

The monk Tsewong came from there, didn’t he? He was sent here by the Dorje Lama.”

Carpenter took a deep breath. He was shaking.

“You know a great deal, Mr. Wylam. Who are you’ What do you want?

What’s so important about your son?”

“I thought you might tell me that.”

“I only kept him here until they were ready for the journey.

Mishig told me nothing. Tsewong told me nothing. You must believe me!”

“Where is Dorje-la?”

“I don’t know!”

“Who is the Dorje Lama?”

“The abbot of Dorje-la! That’s all I know, I swear.”

Christopher paused. Just what did Carpenter know? What was he prepared to do, who was he prepared to sell, for a little influence, a little funding?

“And you know nothing about Martin Cormac’s death?”

“Nothing! I swear.”

“Did they pay you?”

“Pay me?”

“To keep William here. To hand him over to Mishig.”

The missionary shook his head.

“Not money. Promises. Promises of help. Listen, you must try to take the broader view. I have important work to do, the Lord’s work. There are souls to be saved. Do you understand that? They are going to hell, all these millions, with no Saviour to redeem them. I can rescue them, I can give them Paradise. Don’t you see?

The Lord is using us: you, me, my orphans, your son. We’re all his tools. It’s mysterious, the way He works is mysterious. Unless you understand that, you will understand nothing. I do what I do for His sake, for the sake of His work.”

Christopher reached out and grabbed hold of the man. He pulled him out of his chair to his feet.

“You sell little girls for God? You sell boys to convert the

heathen?”

“You don’t understand .. . !”

Christopher threw him back into the chair.

“Have they harmed him? I pray God they haven’t harmed him.

For your sake,” The Scotsman shook his head violently, protesting.

“No! He’s safe, he’s well. I swear it! They haven’t harmed him.

They won’t harm him. They want him for something. They want him safe.

He’s important to them. Believe me, he’s safe.”

Christopher could not bear to touch the man again. There was nothing he could say to him, nothing that would bring back Martin Cormac or draw William an inch nearer to him.

“When you have your mission in Lhasa,” Christopher said, ‘remember what it cost. Think about it every day. Every time you hear the trumpets in the temples drowning your prayers. And ask yourself if it was worth it. Ask yourself if God is worth that much.”

He opened the door and went out slowly. It closed behind him with a dull click.

Carpenter looked at the remains of the fire: no phoenix, no bright feathers, no flurry of sudden wings just ashes crumbling into dust. He glanced up and caught sight of the hook in the ceiling. The sunlight lay on it like gold leaf. He still had the girdle that the monk had used: he had not given it to Cormac. It was in a drawer in the corner. The chair was just high enough to allow him to reach the hook.

There was a policeman at the rest-house door. He looked as though he had always been there, a fixture, a solidity in the flux of the busy street. He wore the regulation blue uniform with a dark pugaree bearing his divisional badge. Huge moustaches sagged over and round a humourless mouth. He stood rigidly, like a tin soldier on parade. Christopher knew he was waiting for him. Waiting and planning a promotion based on his arrest. He carried a thick riot stick and looked as though he knew how to use it.

Smoothly, Christopher slipped into the shadows on the side of the street. A buffalo cart screened him further from the eyes of the policeman. He became invisible. Until now, he thought, he had been stumbling about like a beginner. It was time he grew up again. Breathing deeply, he scanned the street rapidly in both directions. He had to leave Kalimpong now. But he had left his equipment and money in the rest-house, the latter well hidden beneath a floorboard.

There was a back entrance. Slipping through a maze of stinking alleyways, he made his way unobserved to the small, rubbish choked courtyard at the rear of the house. As he expected, the police had forgotten to post anyone there. Cautiously, he tried the rickety door. It was unlocked. He slipped inside and found himself in a gloomy passage at the end of which a dusty shaft of sunlight beckoned. He closed the door gently; the stagnant air of the rest house began to fill his lungs. The smell of rancid butter permeated the place.

The house was quiet, and he succeeded in making his way unchallenged to his room. The room itself was unguarded. He let himself in with the simple iron key.

The man in the chair showed neither surprise nor welcome as Christopher entered. Christopher closed the door gently and put the key back in his pocket. He saw that the room had been given a thorough going-over again, but he did not think his visitor had been responsible. The man was dressed in the robes of a Tibetan monk, but he was clearly no ordinary trapa. His clothes, his bearing, his eyes, his lips all gave token of a man of some standing.

His face was badly scarred by smallpox. He stared at Christopher without blinking.

“Who are you?” Christopher asked.

“What do you want?”

The monk regarded Christopher with an intense scrutiny that went far beyond the merely curious. His gaze tore away skin and scar tissue, exploring living flesh.

“I want nothing,” he said in a soft voice. His English was clear but stilted.

“But you,” he went on, ‘are in quest of something. I wonder what it is you want.”

“If you want nothing, what are you doing here?” asked Christopher. The monk’s gaze unnerved him. Being in the same room with him unnerved him.

“To warn you,” said the monk, very quietly.

“Warn me?”

The gecko on the wall shifted in its search for shadows and concealment.

“You have been asking questions. Indelicate questions. Improper questions. Questions that have no answers you can understand.

You are holy, I cannot touch you. But already one man has died.

I will carry his blood on my hands. Do you understand? Into the next world and beyond. You are holy for me, but others can harm you. I know you do not understand. It is better for you that you do not. But this is my advice: leave all thought of the lama who died here. Leave all thought of your son. Leave all thought of revenge. Go home. All other ways are closed. The gods are only playing now. Leave before they grow tired of games.”

What did he mean, ‘you are holy for me?” Christopher remembered the thin man in Hexham.

“I am ordered not to harm you,” he had said.

“Are you telling me you killed Martin Cormac?” Christopher took a step towards the monk. The man did not move.

“You do not understand,” the monk whispered. Christopher thought he could hear flies buzzing in the room. He could see sunlight spilling on to white, disordered sheets. He felt suffocated.

“I understand,” he shouted above the buzzing.

The monk shook his head.

“You understand nothing,” he whispered.

Christopher stepped nearer, but something held him back from actually attacking the man.

“Please,” said the monk.

“Do not try to harm me. If you do, I will be forced to prevent you.

And I do not want that on my conscience.

I have put blood on my karma today. But you are holy: do not make me touch you.”

Inarticulate anger grew in Christopher, but the very placidity of the monk made it hard for him to strike him. The man stood up, his robes falling elegantly into place around him.

“I have given my warning,” he said.

“Leave Kalimpong. Go back to England. If you seek to go further, I cannot be responsible for what will happen to you.”

He passed Christopher on his way to the door, brushing him with the edge of his outer robe.

Christopher never knew what happened next. He felt the touch of the monk’s robe against his hand. He remembered the touch of Cormac’s mosquito-net against his bare skin and felt a surge of anger rise in him. The monk’s placidity was nothing: he wanted to strike him, to drag him down to some sort of justice. He reached out, intending to haul the man round, at the very least to confront him. Perhaps he had intended to strike him, he could not be sure.

All he felt was the monk’s hand on his neck, a gentle touch without violence or pain. Then the world dissolved and he felt himself falling, falling endlessly into a lightless, colourless abyss out of which nothing ever returned.

He dreamed he was in silence and that the silence clung to him softly, like wax. The wax melted and he was walking through empty corridors. On either side, vast classrooms stood empty and silent; chalk-dust hung like bruised white pollen in long beams of sunlight. He was climbing stairs that stretched above him towards infinity. Then he was on a landing that took him into another corridor. From somewhere, he could hear the sound of buzzing.

He passed through the first door he came to and found himself in a long white dormitory drenched in silence. Two rows of rusted hooks had been screwed into the ceiling over the central aisle.

From each hook a rope was suspended, and at the end of each rope the body of a young girl was hanging. They all wore white shifts and their backs were turned to him, and their hair was long and black and silken. He watched in horror as the ropes twisted and the bodies turned. The sound of buzzing filled the room, but there were no flies. A door slammed suddenly, sending echoes throughout the building.

“Wake up, sahibl Wake up!”

He struggled to open his eyes, but they were glued together.

“You can’t lie here, sahibl Please get up!”

He made a final effort and his eyes opened painlessly.

The monk had gone. The boy Lhaten was bending over him, a look of concern on his face. He was lying on the floor of his room, flat on his back.

“The monk told me I would find you here, sahib. What happened?”

Christopher shook his head to clear it. It felt full of cotton wool.

Cotton wool mixed with iron filings.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“How long have I been here?”

“Not long, sahib. At least, I don’t think so.”

“Lhaten, are there still police outside?”

“One man. They say they are looking for you. Have you done something, sahibT He shook his head again. The cotton wool was feeling a little more like cement.

“No, Lhaten. But it won’t be easy to explain. Can you help me up?”

“Of course.”

The boy put an arm under Christopher’s neck and raised him to a sitting position.

With the boy’s help, Christopher made his way to the chair. He felt more winded than anything, as though all the air had been forced out of him suddenly. Whatever the monk had done, it had rendered him unconscious briefly but left him otherwise unharmed.

He had often heard of such techniques, but until now had never witnessed them used.

“Do the police know I’m here, Lhaten?”

The boy shook his head. He was sixteen, seventeen perhaps. By his accent, Christopher guessed he was Nepalese.

“I need to get out without being seen,” Christopher confided in the boy.

“Can you help me?”

it~”v f} ;

“No problem, sahib. There’s no-one watching the back. But where will you go? They say there are police everywhere, looking for you. You must have done something very wicked.” The boy seemed pleased by that possibility.

Christopher tried to shake his head, but his neck refused to join in.

“I’ve done nothing, Lhaten,” he said.

“But a man has been killed.

I found him.”

“And the police think you killed him?” Lhaten raised his eyebrows and whistled. Christopher remembered that William used precisely the same gestures to express amazement.

“Yes. But I didn’t. Do you believe me?”

Lhaten shrugged.

“Does it matter? No doubt he was a very bad man.”

Christopher frowned.

“No, Lhaten he wasn’t. And it does matter. It was Dr. Cormac.

He was with me last night. Do you remember?”

This seemed to sober Lhaten up. He knew Cormac. The doctor had treated him on several occasions. He had liked him.

“Don’t worry, sahib. I’ll get you out. But you must have somewhere to go.”

Christopher hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he could trust the boy.

But already he was on his own. Nobody in London would vouch for him. Nobody in Delhi would want to interfere. He needed the boy’s help badly.

“Lhaten,” he began, knowing he was taking a risk.

“I want to leave Kalimpong. I have to get out of India.”

“Of course. You should not stay in India. Where do you want to go?”

Christopher hesitated again. If the police questioned the boy .. .

“You can trust me, sahib.”

What did the boy want? Money?

“If it’s money you .. .”

“Please!” A look of genuine pain crossed the boy’s face.

“I don’t want money. I want to help you, that’s all. Where do you want to go?”

Christopher realized he was wasting time. The police could return to his room at any moment to make a further check on his belongings he guessed it was they who had given the room its second going-over.

“I want to cross the Sebu-la,” he said in a low voice.

“Into Tibet.

I want to leave tonight if possible.”

Lhaten looked at him in disbelief. It was as if he had expressed a wish to visit the moon.

“Surely you mean the Nathu-la, sahib. The Sebu-la is closed. It will remain closed all winter. Even the Nathu-la and the passes beyond it may be closed again if the weather changes.”

“No, I mean the Sebu-la. Along the Tista valley past Lachen, then through the passes. I need a guide. Someone who knows that route.”

“Perhaps you’re not feeling well, sahib. That blow last night. And today .. .”

“Damn it, I know what I’m doing!” Christopher snapped.

“Yes. I’m sorry, sahib.”

“That’s all right. I’m sorry I shouted, Lhaten. I must sound a bit doolaly, eh?”

The boy grinned.

“Thought so. Well, do you know anyone who’d be fool enough to take me at least that far? I wouldn’t want him to come across with me. Just to take me to the Sebu-la. I’ll pay well.”

“Yes. I know someone.”

“Excellent. Do you think you can get me to him without being seen?”

Lhaten grinned again.

“Very easy.”

Christopher stood up. His head spun.

“Let’s go, then.”

“No need, sahib, your guide is here already. I can take you to the Sebu-la. Maybe I’m a little doolaly as well.”

Christopher sat down again. He felt irritated by the boy, though he knew he ought not to be.

“Bloody right you are. I’m not going on a picnic. I’m trying to get into Tibet without an alarm going off half-way across the Himalayas. The main purpose of the exercise is to get there in one piece. I need a proper guide, not a rest-house pot-boy.”

Lhaten’s face fell. It was almost as though Christopher had slapped him.

“I’m sorry if .. .” Christopher began, but Lhaten interrupted him.

“I am not a pot-boy. I am eighteen. And I am a proper guide.

My family are Sherpas. We know the mountains the way farmers know their fields. I have crossed the Sebu-la with my father many times.”

“In winter?”

The boy hung his head.

“No,” he said.

“Not in winter. No-one crosses the Sebu-la in winter. No-one.”

“I am going to cross the Sebu-la in winter, Lhaten.”

“Without my help, sahib, you will not even make it to the first pass.”

Lhaten was right. In this weather, Christopher would need more than just luck and his own limited experience to find and cross the Sebu-la. At this point, he wasn’t even thinking about what he would do when he got there. One thing was certain: he could not attempt the journey by way of the Chumbi valley and the more popular route to the east. There were sentries everywhere. All the caravans and isolated travellers were stopped and examined closely. If he was fortunate, he would merely be turned back. More probably, his visitor of half an hour ago and his chums, whoever they might be, would be waiting for him and the monk had made it clear that his friends would have no compunction about harming him.

“Why do you want to risk your skin on a journey like this, Lhaten?”

Christopher asked.

The boy shrugged.

“This is my third winter in this place, sahib. How many winters could you spend here?”

Christopher looked at the room, at the shabby furniture, at the gecko sleeping on the wall.

“Aren’t you frightened to make such a journey in this weather?”

Lhaten grinned, then looked more serious than ever “Very frightened.”

That decided Christopher. He would take the boy. The last thing he needed on this journey was someone who didn’t know the meaning of fear.

They were lost. For two days now, they had been battling against the snow and the wind, but there were no signs of the chorten that Tobchen said would mark the entrance to the valley of Gharoling.

They had lost the pony. It had fallen into a deep crevasse the day before, taking with it most of their remaining provisions. He could not forget the sound of the dying animal, trapped beyond reach, screaming in pain: the sound had carried in the stillness and followed them for miles.

The old man was growing visibly weaker. Not only physically, but in his mind. His will-power was slackening, and the boy knew he was near the point of surrender. Several times he had had to rouse Tobchen from a reverie or a sleep out of which he did not want to be wakened. Sometimes they climbed up into banks of freezing cloud, where everything was blotted out in the all consuming whiteness. He felt that the old man wanted to walk on into the cloud and disappear, so he held his hand tightly and willed him to go on. Without him, he would be lost forever.

“Will the Lady Chindamani come to Gharoling, Tobchen?” he asked.

The old man sighed.

“I do not think so, my lord. Pema Chindamani must remain at Dorje-la.

That is her peflace.”

“But she said we would meet again.”

“If she said it, it will happen.”

“But not at Gharoling?”

“I do not know, lord.”

And the old man continued to plod on into the blizzard, muttering the words of the mantra, om mam pad me hum, like an old woman ploughing in her field. Yes, that was it. He was just like an old woman ploughing.

He lost the old man on the seventh day, early, between waking and first halt. There was no warning. Tobchen had gone in front as usual, into a bank of cloud, telling the boy to follow slowly. At first all had seemed normal, then the cloud had lifted and the way ahead was empty. On his left, a sheer precipice plunged away from the path, its lower depths hidden in cloud. He called the old man’s name loudly, pleadingly, for over an hour, but only dull echoes answered him. A ray of sunlight bounced off the peak of the tall mountain opposite. Suddenly Samdup felt terribly alone.

He was ten years old. Tobchen said he was many centuries old, but here, trapped in snow and mist, he felt no more than a child.

Without the old man, he knew he was finished. He had no idea which way to turn: ahead or back, it was all the same to him. The mountains seemed to mock him. Even if he was centuries old, what was that to them? Only the gods were older than they.

He carried enough food in his bag to last him for about two days, if he was frugal. If only he could see the chorten or a prayer flag or hear the sound of a temple-horn in the distance. But all he saw were pinnacles of ice and all he heard was the wind rising.

He spent the night in the dark crying, because he was cold and alone and frightened. He wished he had never left Dorje-la Gompa, that he was there now with Pema Chindamani and his other friends. No-one had asked him if he wanted to be a trulku. They had just come to his parents’ house seven years ago and put him through some tests and told him who he was. He had liked living with his parents. True, it was nothing near so grand as life in his lab rang at Dorje-la, but nobody had made him study or expected him to sit through long ceremonials, dressed in silk and fidgeting.

When the night ended, the world was shrouded in mist. He stayed where he was, feeling the damp seep into his bones, afraid to move in case there was another precipice. He knew he was going to die, and in his childish way he resented it. Death was no stranger to him, of course. He had seen the old bodies of the abbots in their golden chortens on the top floor of the gompa, where no-one could stand above them. One of his first acts at Dorje-la had been to preside over the funeral of one of the old monks, a Lob-pon named Lobsang Geshe. And everywhere, on the walls and ceilings of the monastery, the dead danced like children. From the age of three, they had been his playmates. But he was still afraid.

Time had no meaning in the mist, and he had no idea what part of the day it was when he first heard the footsteps. He listened, petrified. There were demons in the passes. Demons and ro-lang, the standing corpses of men struck by lightning, who walked the mountains with eyes closed, unable to die and be reborn. In the long nights of the lab rang Pema Chindamani had entranced him with spooky tales, and he had listened pop-eyed in the candlelight.

But here, in the mist, her stories returned to freeze his blood.

A figure appeared, tall, shadowy, swathed in black. The boy pressed himself back against the rock, praying that Lord Chenrezi or the Lady Tara would come to his protection. He muttered the mantras Tobchen had taught him. Om Ara Pa Tsa Na Dhi, he recited, using the mantra of Manjushri he had recently learned.

“Rinpoche, is that you?” came a muffled voice. The boy closed his eyes tightly and recited the mantra faster than ever.

“Dorje Samdup Rinpoche? This is Thondrup Chophel. I have come from Dorje-la in search of you.”

He felt a hand on his arm and almest bit his tongue in fear.

“Please, Rinpoche, don’t be afraid. Open your eyes. It’s me, Thondrup Chophel. I’ve come to take you back.”

At last the boy conquered his fear and allowed himself to look.

It was not Thondrup Chophel. It was not anyone he knew. It was a demon in black, with a fearsome, painted face that scowled at him. He leapt up, thinking to run. A hand gripped him by the arm and held him fast. He looked round at the demon, panicking.

The creature lifted a hand to its face and removed a mask. It was a leather mask, like one of those the travellers had worn three days earlier. Underneath was the familiar face of Thondrup Chophel.

“I’m sorry I frightened you, lord,” the man said. He paused.

“Where is Geshe Tobchen?”

The little Rinpoche explained.

“Then let us be grateful to Lord Chenrezi that he guided me to you. Look, even the mist is lifting. When we have eaten, it will be time to leave.”

They ate in silence at first, plain tea and tsampa as always.

Thondrup Chophel had never been a talkative man. The boy had never liked him: he was the Geku of his college in the monastery, the official responsible for disciplining the monks. Samdup remembered him in his heavy robe with padded shoulders, striding between the rows of shaven heads at services in the great temple hall of Dorje-la. He never disciplined Samdup personally that had been the task of Geshe Tobchen, the boy’sjegtengegen, his chief guardian and teacher. But Thondrup Chophel had often given him fierce looks and was never backward about reporting him to Tobchen.

“Have you come to take me to Gharoling?” the boy asked.

“Gharoling? Why should we go to Gharoling, lord? I have come to take you back to Dorje-la Gompa.”

“But Geshe Tobchen was taking me to Gharoling, to study with Geshe Tsering Rinpoche. He said I was not to return to Dorje-la.

Not under any circumstances.”

The monk shook his head.

“Please do not argue, lord. I have been instructed to bring you back. The abbot is concerned for you. Geshe Tobchen did not have his permission to take you away, let alone bring you to Gharoling of all places. You are too young to understand. But you must return with me. You have no choice.”

“But Geshe Tobchen warned me .. .”

“Yes? What did he warn you of?”

“Of... danger.”

“Where? At Dorje-la?”

The boy nodded. He felt unhappy, unable to defend his teacher’s wishes.

“You must be mistaken, lord. There is no danger at Dorje-la.

You will be safe there.”

“And if I choose to go to Gharoling myself?”

He saw the anger rise in the Geku. He was a powerful man with a short temper. Samdup had often seen him mete out punishment.

“You would die before you reached Gharoling. This is not the path.

Gharoling is far from here. I have come to take you back to Dorje-la.

There will be no argument. You have no choice.”

The boy looked into the mist. The world was indeed a terrible place. Animals and men fell into its empty places and did not return. If he stayed here, he too would fall and be swallowed up.

Geshe Tobchen would have known what to do. He had always known. But Geshe Tobchen was gone into the mist. There was no choice: he would have to return to Dorje-la.

PART TWO

Incarnation

Dorje-La “I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end.”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

They left Kalimpong late at night, when it was fully dark and not even a glimmer of moonlight could betray them. Only the barking of stray dogs marked their passage. On a balcony somewhere, hidden from them, a woman was sobbing into the darkness. In the Knox Homes, behind the church, bed-time prayers were over; a little girl lay sleepless in her bed, listening to the dismal cry of a screech-owl.

Christopher had spent the rest of the day in a disused outhouse while Lhaten bought supplies a few here, a few there, so as not to arouse suspicion. He had purchased a little food, mostly tsampa or roasted barley flour, some butter, some tea, some strips of dried beef, and salt. Christopher had also given him a list of items whose purpose Lhaten could not guess: a bottle of dark hair-dye, iodine, walnut juice, some lemons, and a jar of glue. He also changed a little money, giving rupees for Tibetan trangkas at the rate of one for five. At his own discretion, Lhaten had further changed some of the trangkas for smaller copper coins: only a very wealthy man or a pee-ling would carry that many silver trangkas, and he didn’t think his new friend would want to be identified as either.

At the Post Office in Prince Albert Street, Lhaten sent a telegram to Winterpole: “News of Uncle William. Complications here make it impossible stay Auntie’s. Friends suggest camping in hills. May be out of touch for next month.” He also left a more detailed sealed message at the British Trade Agency, for Frazer to transmit to London by a more secure route. It was to let the folks at home know how young Christopher was getting on in distant India, and it asked Winterpole to get Delhi CID moving on an investigation of Carpenter and the Knox Homes.

Before leaving, Christopher transformed himself. Shivering, he stripped to the skin and daubed himself liberally with a mixture made from the walnut juice and iodine. When the dark stain had dried, he dressed again, putting on heavy clothes suitable for the conditions ahead. Over these, he draped an ensemble of evil smelling rags and much-patched cast-offs that Lhaten had dredged up from somewhere unspeakable. Christopher had not asked where he preferred not to know. The hair-dye worked well enough for something labelled: “Phatak’s World-Renouned Hare-die and Restore, Effektive against Greyness of He’d, Baldiness, and Skalp Itchingness.” There was enough left in the bottle for a touch-up every week or so provided Christopher’s hair hadn’t all fallen out by then. The last touch was the most difficult: he squeezed a few drops of lemon directly into his eyes. It stung like hell, but when he was able to look in the mirror again, he could tell that his eyes had lost most of their blueness and were now dark enough to match his skin and hair.

They travelled as far as they could that night, to be well away from Kalimpong by morning. Their first destination was Namchi, about seven miles to the north-west. In the darkness, without sign or token, they passed over the border between British India and Sikkim. Christopher knew that more than a physical frontier had been crossed. The mountains that lay ahead were in the mind as much as in nature.

They passed Namchi soon after midnight. It was a collection of bamboo houses, silent, unguarded, sleeping. Christopher could not tell how Lhaten found his way in the darkness. The path went upwards, sometimes steeply, across damp meadows and once through a patch of forest. The forest would grow thicker later on, before they left the treeline and entered the pass country.

On Lhaten’s advice, they made camp about three miles from Namchi. Christopher felt wide awake and wanted to go on, but Lhaten insisted they rest.

“You will be tired tomorrow, and we still have a long way to go before we leave the villages behind. Even if you can’t sleep, you should rest. I’m going to sleep. I’ve had a tiring day .. . and I know what’s ahead.”

It was as if Lhaten had shed a false skin since leaving Kalimpong. There, he had been obsequious, almost servile, constantly calling Christopher ‘sahib’ and behaving in all respects as a member of a subject race should behave towards his master. The further they moved away from the town, however, the more some innate sense of independence asserted itself in him. He used the word sahib far less frequently and with increasing irony coupled, perhaps, with a little affection. Christopher still wondered why the boy had volunteered to act as guide to a murder suspect. But it was evident from the start that he had not been boasting when he said he had done this sort of thing before.

Christopher made an effort to sleep, but he managed nothing more than a fitful doze, out of which he would start from time to time to hear Lhaten breathing evenly beside him. The ground was hard and the air bitterly cold. It would soon warm up during the day, but that was no comfort now. For Christopher, the images of the day before were still too close and fresh to shut out from his thoughts.

The sky turned hazily purple, then scarlet and gold, as the sun returned above the hills of Bhutan. Lhaten woke with the light. He wanted to make good progress today, to get as far away as possible from the beaten track. At a distance, the pee-ling might pass as a Nepali traveller, but he did not want the disguise put to the test close up. Apart from anything, Christopher’s height would draw unwelcome attention. And there was nothing they could do about that.

At Damtung, the road forked. On their left, a path led to the Buddhist monastery of Pemayangtse, and on the right a broader road began to descend toward the River Tista. This was the main road to Gantok, the Sikkimese capital.

“We’ve got to take the Gantok road, sahib. No choice. If you’re seen, leave the talking to me. I’ll say you’re dumb.”

The descent was steep. At the bottom, the Tista ran high, still swollen from recent rains. It was a large river, but it had the tight violence of a mountain stream churning through steep gorges.

They bypassed the villages of Temi and Tarko, like men in a hurry, eager to get to Gantok by market day. The heat became unbearable. By noon, they were walking stripped to the waist. The cold of the night was like a dream or a distant memory.

All around them, the dark, humid jungle closed in with suffocating intimacy. It touched them as they passed, with fingers of damp green leaves and tendrils that hung from moss-covered boughs, snake-like and slimy to the touch. Giant ferns struggled for space with bamboos and palms. Vines and creepers twisted themselves round everything in sight. Orchids grew in profusion, white grave flowers heavy with a drugged and sickly scent. In the shadows, bright-patterned snakes glided through tangled and rotten undergrowth. The air was moist and heavy and full of corruption. They breathed it reluctantly, like men in a place they know to be full of contagion.

Here in the forest, life and death were inextricable: things died and rotted and provided food for the profusion of new life that sprang up everywhere. Life seethed around them, hot and green and restless. There was a fever upon everything: insects, flowers, birds, snakes, animals all were burning with it.

Once, Christopher saw a horde of butterflies quivering in a sunbeam close to the ground. Their wings caught fire: reds and blues and yellows spun like fragments of stained glass in a dark cathedral. But when he approached more closely, he saw that they had battened on the decaying body of a small animal, on which they seemed to be feeding in some fashion. On another occasion, Lhaten showed him an isolated flower of great beauty, a scarlet jewel hanging from a long branch: and above it, secreted in darkness, spun about the flower’s stem, was a thick spider’s web in which dying insects, attracted by the red petals, struggled helplessly.

From the beginning, they were plagued by leeches. Like short, thin earthworms, the little creatures dropped on them at every available opportunity, insinuating themselves through the narrowest of apertures until they reached the naked flesh they so coveted.

Once there, they would suck blood until sated. It was useless to pull them off- if they snapped, the mouth would remain intact, if torn away, they would leave a suppurating wound. Every few miles, Lhaten and Christopher would stop and apply small bags of salt dipped in water and the leeches would shrivel and fall away.

For much of the time, they walked in silence. The heat and the stifling air made speech a luxury. There were bright-plum aged birds to speak for them, and frogs and monkeys and all the chattering denizens of their greenhouse world. The jungle itself wove a spell over them, sucking words from their tongues as the leeches sucked blood from their veins.

But at night when they stopped to sleep, they would whisper in the darkness while beasts of prey stalked their victims and the ripe flowers gave up their perfumes to the night.

“Did you fight in the war, sahib? In the Great War? Did you see tanks and aeroplanes?”

“No, Lhaten. I saw none of those things. I was here in India.

There were spies, German spies. They wanted to bring the war here, to take India away from us.”

“From you. They wanted to take India from you.”

“Yes, of course. But not to give back to the Indians. They wanted it for themselves. There would have been a German Raj.”

“Would that have made a difference?”

Christopher pondered. For the British, yes; of course. But for the Indians? Or Nepalese like Lhaten? He would have liked to say “Yes’ to that as well, but he felt no conviction and could not say it.

“Did you catch Germans in India?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill them?”

“Some of them. The rest were put in prison.”

“Because they wanted to conquer India?”

“Yes.”

“Like the British?”

“Yes.”

In the darkness, something moved. An inarticulate cry was followed by the fluttering of wings. Predators and victims came and went in an intricate night-time game.

On the third day, they stumbled across the ruins of a temple in a weed-choked clearing. Ivy worshipped the fallen images of Shiva and Vishnu after its own fashion, with slow and intimate fingers.

Eveywhere, stone lay upon fallen stone, cracked and twisted by rain and heat and the green creeping flesh of the jungle.

Christopher stepped inside the clearing, drawn by morbid curiosity. But Lhaten hung back, unwilling to set foot within a place so long abandoned. He watched Christopher walk from moss-covered stone to moss-covered stone, his fingers tracing ancient carvings and forgotten inscriptions. He glanced fearfully at the strange gods, leaning at crazy angles in the grass. He watched a black snake glide through the fingers of Shiva like a living rod in the god’s hand.

“You should not go there, sahib,” he called from the trees, his obsequiousness returning through fear.

“There are bad spirits in this place. You should apologize and go, sahib.”

High up, in the treetops, a bird screeched once and was silent.

Here, in the vicinity of the ruins, the jungle seemed quieter, as though this was the heart of some ancient silence. Christopher turned and saw Lhaten beckoning to him from the side of the clearing, fear visible on his face.

“It’s all right, Lhaten,” he shouted, but his voice sounded flat and coarse and out of place. On a low wall to his left, he could make out the figures of men and women making love, their limbs softened by the remorseless green moss. Nothing stirred. There was no breeze, no freshening wind to move the leaves. At his feet, the broken hand of a statue clutched at the moist air. Christopher felt the walls of the jungle close in on him. He wanted to get on suddenly, to break away from this place and breathe the air of the mountains. Wordlessly, he rejoined Lhaten. They skirted the clearing and pushed on through the undergrowth, heading north.

That night in the darkness, Lhaten returned to his questioning.

“There are no Germans now, are there, sahib?”

“In India, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The British and the Germans are good friends now. Is that right?”

Christopher shrugged.

“I don’t know about “good”, but we have made peace with one another.”

“So you are not looking for Germans.”

“No, Lhaten. I’m not looking for Germans.”

“Who are you looking for?”

Christopher wished they could light a fire. How many more nights of this darkness would there be?

“I have a son,” he said.

“A boy often called William. Someone kidnapped him. He was brought to Kalimpong. But they’ve taken him further now into Tibet, across the Sebu-la.”

Lhaten was silent for a while.

“You have spoken about this to the Reverend Carpenter Sahib?”

he asked at last.

“Why should I talk to him?”

“Because he knows about such things. About boys who disappear. Girls who are never seen again. He is a very religious man.

A very Christian man don’t you think, sahib?”I “What do you know about the Knox Homes, Lhaten?” Christopher remembered the boy’s original reaction to his enquiry about the place.

“It is a place where they keep children. And sometimes the children leave and go elsewhere. A very Christian place.”

“Do many people know about this, Lhaten? That the Reverend Carpenter sells boys and girls to rich customers?”

Lhaten nodded.

“Some people know, yes. But the Reverend Carpenter is a very holy man, a very good man. We are all very grateful for his Christian charity. If I had told you when you first came that children disappeared, would you have believed me? If your own son had not been one, would you have gone to look for them?”

Christopher shivered. The boy was right. Hypocrisy had more allies than any other vice.

“Where are they taking your son?” asked Lhaten.

Christopher knew the answer, or at least he was reasonably sure he did.

“Have you ever heard of a place called Dorje-la?” he asked.

Only the jungle answered.

“Lhaten, I asked if you had heard of somewhere called Dorje-la.”

The thin piping of a bat echoed nearby.

“I think it is time for sleep, sahib,” Lhaten said at last. He did not answer Christopher’s question.

They crossed the river on a shaky bridge at Shamdong three bamboo poles across the icy torrent. The jungle gave way abruptly to more open country. By the sixth day, they had reached seven thousand feet and the climate had started to change. It was no longer warm. On the mountain-tops, now visible from time to time, snow fell in broken patterns. Shadows shifted on the distant peaks, as though shelves of ice were cracking and breaking away.

Grey and white clouds gathered and dispersed above them, bringing a chill, drizzling rain that fell in cold spasms. They took their mountain clothing out of the rolls on their backs and put it on.

Christopher’s heart felt heavy. Not even Lhaten’s banter and laughter could dispel the gloom that had fallen over him. He looked up at the mountains, watching the shadows move behind the snow, and he shivered as though he were already there, in that dark solitude.

They passed deserted bamboo houses, abandoned for the winter.

Sometimes they would shelter in one. Sometimes there was nothing but rain for miles. They saw almost no-one, for they gave a wide berth to any villages or clusters of huts that fell across their path.

Those few travellers they did meet they ignored, walking on huddled and unresponsive into the driving rain.

After Tsontang, the river branched, becoming the Lachung on the right and the Lachen on the left. A soft dank mist filled the narrow Lachen valley. Without speaking, Lhaten led the way into it, picking his path nervously between stones and clumps of dukshing, a poisonous weed that seemed ubiquitous. On the following day, the mist lifted and by evening they saw the first real signs that they were close to the passes: patches of ice and unmelted snow lay in pockets across the valley floor.

The next morning, flakes of icy snow began to fall from a leaden sky.

They trudged on in silence, each thinking his own thoughts.

Lhaten looked worried, but he said nothing to Christopher. The journey was proving harder than he had expected, and he knew that the going would get much worse up ahead. And if the weather deteriorated any more, every further step they took would bring them nearer to the point of no return. Calculating when they reached that point was the single most important thing he had to do.

Not only that, but they were getting close to the critical altitude of twelve thousand feet, beyond which further ascent could prove dangerous or even fatal. Christopher had assured him he had been well above that height more than once. But a man changes: even the heart of a fit man might not stand the strain.

Night descended and they were lost in a huddle of cold and blackness. They could feel the snowflakes descending, slow and soft and deadly, cold presences from another world. They were twelve miles above Lachen village, at the extremity of things.

Beyond them remained only Tangu, the last village before they entered the passes. If the weather and the gods allowed them entry.

The steep climb from Lachen had brought them to the critical height. They would camp here and see how Christopher fared before deciding to proceed or not. If the strain of altitude proved too great, they would have to move back down as quickly as possible. Even a day’s delay could prove fatal.

They pitched their tiny yak-hair tent in a sheltered position near the valley wall. In the night, Lhaten tossed and turned, unable to sleep. The boy was worried. He had not been certain at first, but for the past twenty-four hours he had been sure: they were being followed. They had been followed from at least as far as Nampak, soon after the jungle ended. In all probability, their pursuers he was sure there were at least two had been with them in the forest as well, but he had not been aware of them then.

Christopher slept uneasily while the snow fell in uninterrupted torrents, like white petals in a dark and noiseless spring. Inside, the tent was hot, sealed tight against the freezing cold outside. The elements were turning against them. In the mountains, soft winds were moving slowly across sheets of naked ice.

In the morning, they argued. Lhaten wanted to wait where they were for several more days, until Christopher had had time to acclimatize. Technically, the boy was right, though he could not have explained why. At twelve thousand feet, the alveolar oxygen pressure drops to about 50mm; when this happens, ventilation increases and the carbon dioxide pressure in the lungs begins to fall. The result is hypoxia, a lack of oxygen which can have serious and even fatal consequences if the body fails to acclimatize. During the present journey, they would have to climb to about eighteen thousand feet. If Christopher had done it before, he should be able to acclimatize quickly. But on his own admission, he had never been through the passes in weather like this before.

“I don’t need to acclimatize. I’m feeling perfectly fine,” he

insisted.

“Please, sahib, don’t argue. It’s been easy going up to here. But now things get hard. Give your body time to adjust.”

“Damn it, I’ve done it before, Lhaten. I didn’t bring you with me to give advice. Just show me how to get to the passes, that’s all. You can turn back now and welcome.”

Lhaten said nothing. Irritability was often the first sign of altitude sickness.

“I said I’d come with you to the passes,” the boy said finally.

“If you like I’ll take you through them. You won’t get far on your own.”

“I’ll be all right. Don’t mother me.”

“Won’t you wait at least one day, sahib? Until the weather clears.”

It had stopped snowing earlier that morning, but there were deep drifts everywhere, both ahead of them and behind.

“No. We’ve got to leave now. If it snows again, we may not get through at all. Or perhaps you’d like that. Is that what you pray for enough snow to block the passes?”

“No, sahib. I’m asking the Lady Tara for protection. And for good weather.”

But even as he spoke, he glanced at the dark clouds building behind the mountains. Left to himself, he would have turned back two days ago. Any one of his family or friends would have done the same. But Christopher, like all pee-lings, was stubborn. He lacked a nose for danger. Whatever happened, he would try to push on, even if it meant taking stupid risks. And that meant someone would have to be there to get him out when the time came. Lhaten sighed. There wasn’t any choice about who that someone would be.

They moved on just after 10 a.m.” Christopher going ahead, sullen, irked by the snow-drifts that hindered his progress. Using his body as a plough, he forced a path through the packed snow that lay at times four feet high. Lhaten followed him, carrying far more than his share of the baggage. On either side of the narrow valley, steep hillsides restricted the view. There was no way through them. The only path lay ahead and up.

All that day and the next they pushed on until they came to a flat region almost free of snow. The weather held, but it was growing colder the higher they climbed. In the more open country before the passes, they were exposed to sharp winds that rushed on them like vampires, sucking away their breath and chilling their blood. Lhaten kept an anxious eye on Christopher, watching for further signs of altitude sickness. Sometime about the middle of the second night, a gale-force wind lifted their fragile tent and hurled it ofT into the darkness. To the dangers of altitude was now added the threat of exposure in the freezing nights ahead.

“If we go further,” whispered Lhaten in the darkness, ‘it means going deeper into this. The winds will get stronger, strong enough to tear our flesh. And it may snow again. Not a little, like before, but a great deal. There may be a blizzard. Nothing can survive in that, sahib. Nothing.”

But Christopher did not listen. He felt driven now, and in love with the ice and snow. He could feel his heart beating more rapidly as the air grew thinner and his blood tried to regain lost oxygen.

Lhaten could hear his rapid breathing in the darkness, but he said nothing. He would let the altitude stop him, then lead him back the way they had come, like a lamb.

They reached the Chumiomo Glacier the next day. From there, a narrow side-passage would take them to the first pass. The ascent was steep, and Christopher was forced to stop more than once to rest. When he walked, he leaned heavily on his climbing stick. His breathing was becoming more laboured, and Lhaten wondered how long it would be before exhaustion forced him to surrender and turn back.

They had just reached a point about half-way along the defile when the avalanche came. There was a low rumbling that grew in volume rapidly, like an express train bearing down on them out of a black tunnel. Lhaten knew the sound at once. He looked round, terrified, knowing they were trapped in the canyon. He saw it at once a mass of snow and rock and fine white spume tumbling at breakneck speed down the face of the steep slope to their left. The whole world seemed to shake and their ears were filled with crashing and pounding as ton after ton of dislodged matter thundered towards them.

Frozen to the spot, they watched it come: crystals of snow leapt shimmering into the air, catching the light, dancing in space, cavorting as they fell. It was a thing of beauty, not heavy at all, but free of mass: rare, white and mysterious, fashioned from air and water, as fine as cloud or mist .. . and as destructive as sheets of beaten steel.

Lhaten broke from the spell and snatched at Christopher’s arm.

“Run!” he shouted, but his voice was drowned in the roar from above.

Christopher was like a man in a trance. His feet felt like lead and his legs had no strength left to move them.

“We have to run, sahib,” shouted the boy again, but the thunder snatched his words away like feathers. He pulled at Christopher.

Like a man in a dream who drags himself through a clinging swamp, Christopher followed Lhaten. The first clumps of flying snow started to land in the canyon, striking them with uninterrupted force, snowballs in a deadly game. Fear gripped Christopher and he felt power surge back into his legs. He began to run, following Lhaten up the narrow path. It felt as though he were trying to run at full speed up the side of a mountain.

A stone struck him on the arm, then a larger one chipped his leg. Ahead of him, the world was turning white. Lhaten disappeared in a cloud of whirling snow.

Christopher ran on, his lungs tearing inside him, desperately struggling for air. He thought his heart would stop beating, it hammered so thickly in his chest. He felt himself stumble, then regain his feet and stagger on. The world was nothing but roaring in his ears and redness in front of his eyes. Two steps, three steps, each one an individual agony. The world vanished and he was wrapped in snow and the roaring of snow. All light, all other sounds were blocked out. His body became heavy, then his feet would not move, and he felt himself pitch forward.

The roaring died away and the last snow settled on top of the debris. Silence returned to the valley. The mountains watched, unmoved, uncaring, smug in their white and unsoiled remoteness.

They had seen it all before and they would see it all again.

In the silence, he could hear his heart thumping like a drum at a funeral, slow and melancholy, but alive. He opened his eyes, but there was nothing, only blackness. For a moment, he panicked, thinking he had gone blind. Then he realized he had been buried in the avalanche. He could feel the weight of the snow on top of him, pressing him down.

Heavy, but not too heavy. He was sure he could push his way out.

They had been caught at the end of the slide, where the fallen snow came to only a few feet in depth. It did not take Christopher long to struggle free. Finding Lhaten took him rather longer. The boy had been in front when the avalanche struck, so Christopher looked for him there, scrabbling with his bare hands at every likely looking mound. As he searched, he kept glancing up anxiously at the slopes above him: the crash of the avalanche might well have dislodged more snow higher up or on the opposite slope.

He found Lhaten curled up beneath about three feet of snow, several yards from where he himself had been. Christopher thought he was dead at first, he was so still. But a quick check showed that the boy was still breathing. There was blood on his left temple and a large stone nearby, and Christopher assumed he had been knocked unconscious. It was only when he dragged him clear of the snow that he noticed the leg.

Lhaten’s left leg lay at an awkward angle. There was blood on his trousers below the knee, and when Christopher ran his fingers over the leg, he encountered something hard beneath the cloth.

The boy’s shin had been fractured in his fall, and the broken bone had cut through the thin layer of skin.

Christopher reset the bone while the boy was still unconscious and prepared strips of bandage from his own undershirt. Using thicker pieces cut from his chuba, the sheepskin coat Lhaten had obtained for him in Kalimpong, he made pads to place between the boy’s legs and then tied them together firmly, having first bandaged the actual wound.

When he had finished, he collapsed beside the boy and fell into a deep sleep. If another avalanche began, that would be too bad:

Christopher could not move another step, even to save his life.

When he finally woke, it was dark. A wind had sprung up, a black wind from nowhere, an old wind full of sadness and unreasoning anger. It was lonely and hungry and malevolent. The whole world was filled with it: sky, mountains, passes, glaciers all the high places, all the footpaths of the damned. It moved through the gully in which they lay, raging with all the fraught intensity of a lost soul.

Because of the wind, Christopher was not at first aware that the boy was groaning. Then he heard him, moaning into the darkness like a dog cast out into the storm. Christopher shifted towards him.

“Lhaten,” he called, trying to make himself heard above the din.

“It’s me, Christopher! Are you all right?”

There was no answer, so he bent down closer, bringing his mouth near the boy’s ear. This time Lhaten responded.

“I’m cold, sahib. And my leg hurts. Someone has tied them together my legs. But my fingers are too cold. I can’t untie them.

And there’s a terrible pain in my left leg.”

Christopher explained what had happened and the boy grew calmer. Then he pulled Christopher close and said, “We’ve got to find shelter, sahib. If we stay in this, we’ll die.”

The boy was right. In their weakened condition, exposure would kill both of them, if not tonight, then tomorrow or the day after. In a matter of hours, Christopher might be too frozen to stir, and once that happened they were both doomed. Fortunately, the enforced rest had done him some good. It was the longest stop he had made in a while, and it had given his body a chance to make some progress with acclimatization. His previous experience at high altitudes had rendered his system better able to cope with the abrupt changes of the past few days, and after his crisis he was beginning to return to normal. Now, the real danger was not height, it was the wind and the rapidity with which it could strip the human body of heat.

Christopher found the large canvas bag that had been slung round Lhaten’s neck and which had still been with him when he was found. His own smaller bag had been lost in the slide. Inside Lhaten’s, he found the tiny trenching tool he had insisted they bring with them. It was small, but sturdy. With luck, it would save their lives.

The wind was still rising as Christopher made his way back to the site of the avalanche, crouching low to prevent himself being picked up and spun over by the gale. There was just enough light to find his way by. Once in the snow, he began to cut out blocks, each about two and a half feet long by a foot wide. When he had cleared a six-foot area in this way, he started to stack the blocks edgeways, forming a wall. It took him an hour to build a crude, rectangular igloo, roofed by slightly thicker, longer blocks.

When he got back to Lhaten, the boy was shivering uncontrollably and showing signs of severe heat-loss. He was moaning again and muttering to himself. When Christopher tried to talk to him, he showed no sign of hearing him. His pulse was sluggish and his breathing slow and shallow. It would be impossible for him to walk to the shelter, even with Christopher’s assistance. If nothing else, the wind would just tilt them over like skittles.

Christopher dragged him. It was only a matter of about ten yards, but the wind and Christopher’s desire not to dislocate the boy’s leg again made it seem like a hundred. After the exertion of building the snow-shelter, his lungs were making it clear they would not stand much more of this treatment. He closed his eyes and hauled. Not now, he prayed, not now.

The words of prayer came easily to him. They came unbidden but necessary to his lips, the child in him praying for the man, the believer for the unbeliever. In the howling wind, like Lhaten with his mantras, in another tongue, in another season of faith, he prayed to the Virgin. He prayed for love, for life, for strength to pull the boy another foot across the wind-torn floor of the valley.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Holy Mary, Mother of God .. .

The words were torn from him by the wind. He rested briefly, then pulled again. The boy felt heavy, though he should have been light to Christopher. It seemed an age before they made it to the shelter.

Christopher settled the boy in the back of the dug-out, on a blanket taken from his bag. That done, he sealed the entrance with more blocks cut for the purpose, trimming and squaring them as best he could to ensure a close fit. As the last block slotted into place, the noise of the wind was abruptly cut ofT, leaving Christopher and the boy in the midst of silence, as though they had found the eye of the storm and entered it. Christopher filled the gaps in the makeshift construction with loose snow and curled himself up at the boy’s feet. Within minutes, he was asleep again. He dreamed of harvest and abundance in autumn, of golden sheaves and ripening apples on the bough.

That was the night the weather changed. It was the twelfth of January. The night two caravans were trapped on the Nathu-la and a hurricane tore the roof from the temple at Mindroling. The night a meteor was seen in the sky above Tashi Lhumpo.

That was the night the gods stopped playing and came to walk in places they had never walked before.

By morning, the temperature inside the shelter had risen to a comfortable level. Lhaten had recovered consciousness and said he felt all right, except for the pain in his leg, about which Christopher could do nothing. Christopher found some dried yak-dung left by a summer caravan further up the defile and used it to light a fire.

In Tibet, where there were so few trees, it was almost the only fuel.

He had to light the fire inside the shelter, making a hole to let out the smoke. Outside, the wind still raged. At one point, thick, stinging hail hurled itself into the canyon. In a black sky, rolling clouds collided angrily with one another.

He made hot tea and added it to some tsampa in a bowl. There was a little butter in Lhaten’s bag, and Christopher added this to the tsampa mixture. The boy ate it greedily, then drank some lightly buttered tea. In spite of his pain, he was beginning to look more himself. But Christopher knew it was only a matter of time before he began to weaken again. He would have to have proper attention as soon as possible.

“We’ll have to head back as soon as you’re able to walk,” he told the boy.

“I’ll need a splint,” Lhaten said.

“I’ve thought of that. I’m going out now to find my bag and my climbing stick. They’ll be near the spot where I was hit by the avalanche. It should be no trouble to dig them out. The stick can be cut to fit your leg. It won’t be easy, but if you lean on me, we should be able to get down.”

“What about the avalanche? The snow. The canyon must be blocked. I won’t be able to get through. Leave me here. You can get help at Tsontang. If you hurry, you can be back here in a few days.”

But the boy was lying. He knew what way the weather was going. And there was something else, something he kept to himself as well. Just before the avalanche started, he had heard a sharp crack, high up, like a gunshot. Someone had started the snow-slide deliberately. Perhaps Christopher too had heard the crack. But he had not known they were being followed.

“I thought there might be a way round. Even if we have to go up a little to join it. Surely you know of a way.”

Lhaten shook his head.

“I’m sorry, sahib. There’s only one way that’s back the way we came. Every inch of the way. You must start soon if you’re to clear the snow before nightfall.”

Christopher did not answer. There could be no question of his going back without the boy. And he was not sure that he himself could make it through the avalanche. There was only one alternative: they would have to go on into Tibet and make for the nearest village. It would probably mean Christopher’s capture, but at the moment the boy’s life seemed more important to him even than finding his son.

They set off just before noon that day. Christopher walked bent over so that the boy could use him as a crutch. Even with the splint, Lhaten’s leg would not bear the slightest weight. When, by accident, he leaned on it, it gave, causing them both to stumble.

In the afternoon, the wind rose. An hour later, snow began to fall. Except that it did not fall, but became part of the wind. It was as if the wind had been a spirit that craved a body and now found it in the snow. The higher they climbed, the fiercer the wind grew.

It was like walking against razors. Every breath had to be snatched before the wind could tear it away. They took hours to cover as much ground as they would previously have walked in an hour.

t w

That night, they were too tired even to build a proper shelter.

Christopher dug a deep trench in the snow and they sheltered in that, huddling beneath Lhaten’s namda, a large felt blanket like a rug.

In the morning, Lhaten complained that his left foot hurt more than on the previous day. Christopher undid the boy’s boot and removed the sock underneath. The foot was hard and white and freezing to the touch, like stone. The cold had combined with the interrupted blood-flow to cause severe frost-bite. Saying nothing, Christopher replaced the sock and boot.

“What is it, sahib? Is it frost-bite?”

Christopher nodded.

“Yes.”

There was no point in trying to thaw the foot it would only freeze again, worse than ever. Christopher was worried that the boy’s other foot might go the same way. His boots were made of cheap leather and his socks were too thin. Christopher sacrificed two strips from the namda to provide extra insulation, but he feared it would not be enough.

That day the blizzard set in in earnest. It was as if the fabric of the world was being torn apart. Wind and snow hurtled down from the passes in fits of insanity. Visibility was reduced to almost zero. When they could no longer walk, they crawled, Lhaten dragging his leg.

He made no sound, but Christopher knew he must be in unbearable pain.

By midday they had covered very little distance, but Lhaten could go no further. The gale had not lessened in the slightest, and they still had not reached the pass. Christopher was beginning to think he would have to leave the boy after all, to go for help. But would he be able to persuade anyone to return with him in these conditions?

He built another shelter from the snow. They huddled inside, shivering. From time to time, Christopher made Lhaten eat dry tsampa and wash it down with a handful of snow. In his mind, Christopher was back at Carfax, in front of the roaring fire of logs in the library, reading a tale of Arthur Mee’s to William.

In the night, Lhaten grew feverish and talked in a delirium of frightened words and inarticulate cries.

“Take it away,” he shouted loudly, loud enough to cover the screams of the wind outside.

“Take what away?” asked Christopher.

“What do you see?”

But the boy never answered clearly, and Christopher could only talk to him, offering reassurance that he knew was meaningless.

The night was long. When dawn came, it brought only the faintest of lights.

Lhaten slept at last, like a baby worn out by crying. When he woke, his head was clear, but he complained of feeling weak. He could not keep down the tsampa Christopher offered him. His other foot was frost-bitten now.

Christopher made him walk. It was that or leave him to die.

Like children in a nightmare, holding on to one another as anchors, they clawed their way through the madness of the storm.

They reached the first pass, Sebu-la, that afternoon. Its surface was broad and flat, and they could see a little more clearly through the blizzard there.

“Lha-gyal-lo. De tamche pham,” Lhaten whispered, thanking his gods for giving them this victory.

“The gods have triumphed,” he said.

“The demons have been defeated.” It was this formula all travellers used when they reached the top of a pass in safety. But on the boy’s frozen lips, the words were charged with an intense and cruel irony.

“Lha-gyal-lo,” Christopher repeated, cursing all gods in his heart.

He thought they were still playing games. But the games were over.

Lhaten wanted to stay at the top of the pass, but Christopher forced him to move on when they had rested. It was too exposed there. The path went down now for a bit before rising again to the second and final pass. Every foot nearer was a triumph to Christopher.

They spent that night between the passes. In the early hours of the morning, the wind began to drop, and by dawn the blizzard had stopped. When Christopher looked out, it was as though the world had been restored to him. Out of a grey sky, a grim light filtered down on everything.

That day they made it to the top of the pass, but Christopher knew they were almost at their end. He had to carry the boy on his back much of the way, leaving behind several pieces of baggage to make it possible.

They made their camp just below the pass, in a large cleft in the rock. Lhaten said he could not go any further, and this time Christopher did not argue. He would leave in the morning and head towards the Kampa basin. If the weather held off, someone would return with him. If not, he would buy wood and make a trestle on which to bring Lhaten back.

In the end, it was unnecessary. The next morning, Christopher helped Lhaten out of the cleft into the valley and set about building a snow-shelter for him. It would be warmer than the cleft and easier to find again.

While he was working, cutting and stacking blocks, he heard a voice. It was a man’s voice, calling from lower down the valley. He stopped work and waited as three men approached. They were dressed in heavy travelling clothes, and their faces were muffled behind thick scarves. One was taller than the others and walked ahead as though he were in charge of their party. The men were monks Christopher could see the edges of their orange robes protruding from beneath their chub as They approached slowly, with the caution all travellers show when meeting strangers in the open.

The taller man came up to Christopher and greeted him in Tibetan.

“Tashi delay.”

“Taski delay.” Christopher answered.

“Have you been travelling in the storm?” the stranger asked.

Christopher nodded.

“Yes. We were cut off before the Sebu-la. My friend is hurt. I was going to leave for help today. You’ve come just in time.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

Christopher explained. The man did not pull his scarf down, but scrutinized Christopher over the top of it with dark, piercing eyes. Christopher imagined for a moment that he saw a look of recognition in the stranger’s eyes, as though they had met before.

“When did this happen?”

“Five days ago.”

“I see. You say you were in the canyon before the Sebu-la.”

“Yes.”

“Were you alone? You saw no-one else?”

“No. We saw no-one.”

“Let me look at the boy.”

The man went across to Lhaten and bent down to examine him.

The two monks stood near Christopher, watching. Carefully, the stranger looked at Lhaten’s feet and leg, then examined his general condition. The boy was bad again. He had lost consciousness about an hour earlier.

Christopher did not see what happened next until it was too late to do anything about it. The man stood up and drew something from his pocket. He bent towards Lhaten and put his hand to the boy’s temple. There was a loud report, and Christopher realized with horror that the stranger had just shot the boy. The man straightened up and put his revolver back into his pocket.

For what seemed an age, Christopher stood rooted to the spot.

The gunshot echoed in his head, as if the bullet were crashing again and again into Lhaten’s skull. He looked down and saw a trickle of bright red blood stream from the boy’s temple on to the white, innocent snow.

He cried out in pain and rage, and threw himself at the boy’s killer, but the monks had already seized him by the arms and held him at a distance.

“Why?” shouted Christopher.

“Why did you kill him?”

“He would have died anyway,” the stranger said in an unruffled voice.

“We are still too far here from help. It was better like this.

Better for him. Better for us all.”

“We could have saved him! There’s a village a few miles from here.”

“We aren’t going to the village. He would have delayed us.

Delayed us badly. The weather may deteriorate again. A cripple would have been a threat to all of us.”

Christopher struggled, but it was useless. He wanted to hit the man, to tear his scarf away, to see his face. But the monks held him firmly.

The man cast a glance at the limp body on the ground behind him.

“You were warned, Mr. Wylam. You were warned not to enter Tibet.

There has already been a tragedy as a result of your disobedience.

There must be no more.”

He paused. A gust of wind lifted the corner of his scarf and dropped it again. His eyes looked keenly at Christopher again, as though searching for something.

“Who are you?” Christopher asked. But he already knew.

The stranger lifted his hand and pulled down the scarf from his face.

Christopher recognized the heavily pitted skin.

“I didn’t think you would make it this far, Mr. Wylam,” said the monk.

“But now that you have done, perhaps you had best accompany us the rest of the way.”

“The rest of the way? Where are you planning to take me?”

“You wanted to find your son,” the monk said.

“I can take you to him.” He glanced up at the sky, at banks of grey cloud.

“It’s time we left. We have a long journey ahead of us.”

By the second day, they were deep into the mountains. At the bottom of

the descent from the passes, near the point where the track entered the

Kampa plain, preparatory to turning toward Kampa Dzong, they had veered

west, skirting the mountains along their northern edge, then

re-entering along a valley whose opening it was impossible to detect

with the naked eye.

Christopher could never work out how they traced their path, but the monks appeared to know the way unerringly. They climbed high, sometimes taking what seemed like impossible passages past steep drops or by the edges of dark crevasses. They made their way in silence through the heart of a white, sleeping world, their tiny figures dwarfed by walls of rock and frozen snow. Sometimes fresh snow fell, not violently as before, but in soft showers that covered them quietly in mantles of white. They passed ice-falls that resembled vast abandoned cities encased in glass. In the mornings, out of banks of white mist, pinnacles of rock jutted into view, carved over centuries by remorseless layers of frost. In the evenings, the rays of the setting sun would fall on decaying towers of ice and frozen curtains woven from long, thin icicles.

They walked for days, stopping only briefly to eat and rest.

Christopher, exhausted by his exertions over the past week, felt driven almost beyond endurance. He moved in a dream, urged on by the monks, who shoved and pulled him over the hardest parts.

Sometimes, there was real climbing to be done, and he was afraid he would slip and fall to his death. But luck and dogged perseverance kept him going.

He persevered because he wanted to kill the lama, but no opportunity presented itself. At night, they tied his arms and legs tightly with rope and made him sleep at a distance, trussed up and aching in the bitter cold. He lay awake for hours, thinking of Lhaten and the callousness of his death, of Cormac bloody beneath the buzzing of flies.

The lama’s name was Tsarong Rinpoche. He spoke little to Christopher after the first day. He had brief conversations with the two monks from time to time, but otherwise he journeyed in silence.

The monks were even more silent. When they rested, they prayed. When the going was easy, they brought small silver manikhors out of their robes and spun them, filling the air with a whirring sound. The prayer-wheels were finely decorated drums set on polished wooden handles, about whose axis they turned, driven round by the action of a counterweight attached to a small chain. Inside, block-printed sheets bore the formula of the mani prayer repeated thousands of times. At each revolution, the prayers were ‘recited’ by the mere act of turning. In a single day, the monks sent up millions of invocations. And while they did so, their lips muttered other prayers, muffled behind their scarves.

Christopher could not reconcile their apparent piety with their indifference to Lhatep’s murder or their harshness with him on the journey. Or was it simply a kind of piety he could not hope to understand?

Sometimes they woke in the middle of the night and filled the brutal silences of Christopher’s insomnia with the reading of sutras that seemed to have no meaning. Out of a sky washed clean of cloud, bands of frozen moonlight glided across their still figures.

On several occasions, Christopher saw the lama rise in the middle of the night and walk in and out of the shadows, like someone who cannot bear immobility. He slept little, yet in the mornings never seemed tired or irritated.

Once, he came across to where Christopher was lying, bound in the darkness.

“I’m sorry you have to be tied,” he said.

“But I have no choice. I know you want to kill me. You must take revenge for the boy and the doctor. Since you do not understand and will not easily be made to understand, you must be prevented. I am sorry.”

“Would it have meant much delay to have saved the boy’s life?

A day, two days perhaps.”

“We were in a hurry. We still are in a hurry.”

“If I fall behind, will you kill me as well?”

“You will not be allowed to fall behind.”

His voice made strange verbal patterns in the darkness. Words like ‘choice’, ‘understand’, ‘prevented’, and ‘allowed’ were the links in a subtle chain that was fastening hard round Christopher.

“But if I fall and injure myself, what then?”

“They will carry you. You will not be permitted to come to any harm.

They have been given their instructions.”

Christopher remembered his words in Kalimpong: You are holy:

do not make me touch you.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I am here to see they carry them out.”

“When shall I see William?”

The monk shook his head.

“That is not for me to decide,” he said.

“At least tell me if he’s safe!”

“Yes, he is safe. Or he was safe when I last saw him. If Lord Chenrezi wills, he is still safe.”

“Where is he?” Christopher asked abruptly.

“Where are you taking me? Are we going to Dorje-la?”

The lama reached out a naked hand and touched Christopher’s cheek.

“You are like a child,” he said.

“A child who cannot sleep.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Haven’t I?” replied the stranger and stood up. He walked away into the darkness, silent and tense, waiting for the dawn to come.

They travelled for six days. Christopher tried to work out where they were, but it was useless. There were landmarks the peaks of Kachenjunga, Chombu, Kachenjhau, Panhunri, and Chomolhari lay in the distance, now visible, now hidden from sight by lower but nearer masses of rock or ice. As they progressed, however, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish even the more distinctive peaks. Christopher had never set eyes on them from this angle, and most of the time he was guessing their identity on the basis of comparative height and position.

To make matters worse, the mountains themselves seemed determined to play a madcap game of disguises. First one would put on a crown of clouds, then another would wreath itself in mist while a third drew down on itself a heavy fall of snow that quickly distorted its shape. Light and shadows danced at intervals on every crag and gully they could reach. What seemed a valley one moment might in the next be transformed into a glacier; a flat buttress would suddenly become a razor-edged ridge; a bright snow-field would in the blink of an eye be replaced by a swathe of the deepest shadow. Nothing was constant, and Christopher despaired of ever making sense of the path he followed or of being able to find his way back again. Once or twice, even the monks stopped and consulted before deciding which of two possible routes to follow.

Late on the sixth day, Christopher saw that they were approaching a broad pass. The air felt incredibly thin and he had difficulty breathing. Even the monks, he noticed, were labouring. They stopped just short of the pass to rest.

“Our journey will be over soon,” the lama whispered to Christopher.

“That is our destination.”

He pointed upwards in the direction of the pass. Fading sunlight beaded the edges of a curved ridge. A lammergeyer swooped effortlessly down through the opening, then rose again, catching the sunlight momentarily on its wings. Beyond the light, at the head of the pass, a bank of mist moved lazily.

“I see nothing,” Christopher said.

“Look more closely,” the lama told him.

“Up there, just to the left of the mist.” He pointed again.

Christopher saw something fluttering. It took him a few moments to make out what it was a tarcho, the traditional pole bearing down its length a cotton flag printed with prayers and the emblem of the wind-horse. Somewhere nearby, there would be a habitation a small village or a hermit’s cell.

Suddenly, as though Christopher’s discovery of the tarcho had been a signal, the valley reverberated with sound. From high above came the deep notes of a Temple prayer-horn. It was no ordinary trumpet but a giant dung-chen. Low and deep-throated, the voice of the great horn penetrated every corner of the pass and the valley below. In that dreadful silence, in that vast solitude, its bellow filled Christopher with something akin to terror. He felt his flesh creep as the sound echoed and re-echoed over everything.

And then, as suddenly as it had come, the sound ceased. The last echoes died away and silence flooded back.

They began to climb towards the pass. The ascent was steep and treacherous. Wide patches of ice forced the men to crawl part of the way. Although the head of the pass had seemed near from below, now it appeared to tease them, receding and receding ever further into the distance as they climbed. It was some sort of optical illusion, caused by a curious combination of shadow and the light of the setting sun.

Finally, they reached the top and rounded the corner of the pass.

The monks shouted “Lha-gyal-lo Lha-gyal-loV loudly. It was the first sign of anything approaching exuberance Christopher had ever observed in them.

Tsarong Rinpoche came up close beside Christopher and grasped his arm. There was a look of intense excitement in his eyes. The rest of his face was hidden by his scarf.

“Look up,” he said in a sharp whisper that sounded exaggeratedly loud in the crisp air.

Christopher looked. At first, he could see nothing out of the ordinary: just a rock face that rose up and up into a curtain of swirling mist. The mist seemed to fill the region ahead of them, rising like a wall into a bank of freezing cloud. On either side of them, ice and mist formed a cradle in which they were gently rocked.

“There’s nothing,” Christopher murmured.

“Stones and mist.

That’s all.”

Suddenly, the trumpet sounded as before, but nearer this time.

Much nearer. Its deep, throbbing notes travelled through the mist like the blasts of a foghorn at sea. But wherever he looked, Christopher could see nothing but rocks covered in ice, rolling mist, and low cloud.

“Wait,” whispered Tsarong Rinpoche “You will see.”

The other monks were busy whirling their prayer wheels, adding the tinny whirring sound to the reverberations of the unseen trumpet that blared out from behind the mist.

And then, quite remarkably, as though the trumpet had wrought a miracle in the heavens, a portion of mist parted, revealing a golden roof and a terrace below it on which an orange-clad figure stood motionless against the dying light. The man blew into a large trumpet resting on wooden blocks. Obliquely, the sun’s rays caught the bowl of the instrument, turning it to fire. Then, it fell abruptly silent once more, and across the silence, like the murmur of waves falling on a pebbled shore far away, the sound of chanting voices came faintly to their ears. The figure on the terrace bowed and vanished into the mist.

As Christopher watched, the mist parted further, revealing bit by bit the clustered buildings of a vast monastery complex. The great edifice seemed as though suspended between earth and sky, floating impossibly on a cushion of mist, its topmost pinnacles lost among clouds.

At the centre stood a vast central building, painted red, to which a variety of lesser buildings clung like chicks about a mother hen.

The main edifice was several storeys tall, with brightly gilded roofs and pinnacles that burned in the light of the setting sun. Its windows were already shuttered against the evening wind. Icicles hung from eaves and lintels everywhere, like decorations on a giant cake.

Christopher was awed by the sight after so many days of unrelieved whiteness and desolation. The colours of the place dazzled him. He had forgotten how much life there could be in colour. Like a hungry man, he feasted on the golden vision in front of him until the sunlight turned violet and began to fade, taking the warm colours with it. His vision turned to darkness and he wondered if it had really been there at all.

“What is this place?” he whispered, to no-one in particular.

“Our destination,” said Tsarong Rinpoche.

“The pass we have just climbed is Dorje-la. The monastery in front of you is Dorje-la Gompa. But its proper name is Sanga Chelling: the Place of Secret Spells.”

Christopher looked up again. In a window high up near the roof, someone had lit a lamp. Someone was watching them. Someone was waiting for them.

Dorje-la Gompa, southern Tibet, January 1921 They entered the monastery the following morning after dawn.

The sound of the temple-horn had awakened them, braying high up on the wide terrace, calling in the darkness for the light to return. And it did return, lingering briefly on the broad peaks of the Eastern Himalaya before sliding reluctantly down into the dark valley below Dorje-la.

The ascent to the building was made on a long wooden ladder that threatened to give way at any moment and send them spinning back on to the rocks below. Christopher climbed without emotions of any kind; dread, anticipation, even triumph at having reached this place all had deserted him.

The first morning assembly had finished by the time they entered the building. They came in through a small red gate, but the monks were still in the Lha-khang taking tea before resuming their devotions. The travellers were met by a fat little monk dressed in the robes of a steward. The two trap as mumbled greetings and at once scuttled off down a dimly lit corridor, like rabbits returning to their warren. The lama entered a doorway on the left and closed the door behind him without a word. Christopher was led in a different direction, along a passage lit by rancid butter-lamps that gave off a jaundiced, almost sulphurous glow. The all-pervasive smells of ancient dri-butter and human sweat were doubly noxious to Christopher after so long in the fresh and rarefied air of the mountains outside.

The steward showed Christopher to a small room on the first floor and asked if he wanted food.

“No, thank you,” he said.

“I’d like to sleep. I’m very tired.”

The monk nodded and backed out, closing the door behind him.

Against one wall was set a low pallet bed. Without pausing to inspect the rest of the room, Christopher threw himself on to the bed. The last thing he thought of before sleep overpowered him was Lhaten’s reaction when he had asked the boy if he had ever heard of Dorje-la.

“I think it is time for sleep, sahib.”

And it was.

When Christopher awoke, he could not tell how much time had passed. The butter-lamp left by the steward still burned steadily on a little table near the door, but it had been full to begin with.

The comfort of the bed and the profundity of his sleep had only served to accentuate the depth of Christopher’s tiredness and the aching he felt in every joint and muscle. He could have lain there forever, he thought, neither sleeping nor waking, but in a state between.

From somewhere far away came the sound of voices, many voices, rising and falling in a dirge-like chant, whether of celebration or lament he could not tell. The chanting was punctuated by the sounds of a variety of musical instruments. A large drum was being struck in slow, steady beats; a conch-shell wove in and out of the deeper notes raised by a shawm; from time to time, small cymbals clashed with a tinny sound. Christopher recognized the tight, nervous sound of a damaru, a small drum fashioned from a human skull and used in the lower Tantric ceremonies.

Slowly, as he lay in the darkness listening to the sound of the monks at prayer, the reality of his situation was borne in upon Christopher. It still made little sense: though all the separate parts seemed to connect, there was a lack of logic to their connection that made him despair. But of one thing he was absolutely certain now his son William was here, within these walls. Whatever madness lay behind his being here, that was all that mattered.

The music and chanting stopped abruptly, and the monastery was returned to silence. Nothing stirred.

Christopher glanced around the room. A draught from the window teased the flame of his lamp and sent speculative little shadows here and there. Above the bed hung a large thangka depicting the Buddha surrounded by eight Indian saints. Opposite, an old lacquer chest had been transformed into a private altar, adorned with paintings of lotuses and various sacred emblems. On the wall over the altar hung a wooden cabinet with glass doors: inside were painted images of Tsongkhapa and his two disciples. Near the window stood a small table and a chair, and on the wall above them a narrow wooden shelf holding bound copies of scriptural texts.

He stood up and went to the window. Tibetan monasteries did not as a rule have glass in their windows, so the heavy wooden shutters were kept permanently closed throughout the long winter months. He found the latch and pushed one half of the shutter open. Outside, it was night again. A sharp wind had whipped the clouds away, and in the black expanse just visible above three distant peaks, the sky groaned with the weight of innumerable stars. From somewhere outside Christopher’s range of vision, moonlight fell like icing on the crystal landscape of the pass below.

He closed the shutter, shivering, and sat down on the chair. He was feeling hungry now and wondered how he could get hold of someone to bring him food. Perhaps they were waiting for him to give some indication that he was awake. He stepped across to the door and pulled on the handle. It was locked. His monastic cell was to serve as a prison cell as well.

In the morning, he found food waiting for him on a low table: some lukewarm tsampa, a few barley-cakes, and hot tea in a covered cup. It was plain enough fare, but after days of nothing but cold tsampa, its warmth alone was delicious. After he had eaten, he opened the shutters and looked out of the window. Sunlight had grown out of nothing overnight, spreading itself across the valley below. He could just make out the path he and his companions had followed the day before. Patches of grey mist still clung to the rocks at the foot of the monastery, like small pools of colourless water left on the seashore by the departing tide. If he craned his neck upwards, he could just make out the shapes of distant mountains through gaps in the cliffs surrounding the small valley.

There was a light tap on the door. Christopher closed the shutters and called.

“Who’s there?”

There was the sound of a key turning in the lock, then the door opened and the steward of the day before entered. He held a tall staff in one hand, less for support than as a token of his office. In the other, he carried a flickering butter-lamp.

“You’re to come with me,” he said.

“Why am I being kept locked in this room?”

The steward ignored his question.

“You have been summoned. Please follow me.”

“Who is summoning me? Where am I being taken?”

“Please,” the steward said, fixing his abrasive eyes on Christopher.

“Don’t ask questions. There is no time. You have to come with me now.”

Christopher sighed. He was in no position to argue. And anything was better than being cooped up in this tiny room indefinitely.

The steward led the way in silence along a different route to the one along which he had led Christopher the previous morning, along deserted and unpainted corridors. It grew cold. No-one passed them.

After a while, they entered regions that seemed to predate the main monastic foundation. No-one lived here any longer. Christopher could feel the touch of the wind as it forced its way through untended cracks in the fabric of the building. At last they reached a heavy door covered with painted eyes. The paint had long ago faded, but the eyes still seemed to possess the power of sight.

The steward opened the door and motioned Christopher through. For a moment, he thought they had abruptly left the monastery and gone outside. He stood on the threshold, bewildered, trying to make sense of the sight that met his gaze.

Snow fell in patches, bright and translucent, fine white flakes like the forms of tiny angels descending, wing upon white wing, in heavy, dreaming multitudes. Someone had lit thousands of butter lamps and placed them all around the room: they lay thick on the snow-covered ground, a shifting carpet of fireflies catching breath.

The tiny flames trembled and cast pale patterns on walls of naked ice.

Everywhere, a caul of snow and ice lay silent upon the sleeping room, veil upon white veil, glaze upon frosted glaze, year upon frozen year. It was a room of ice and ivory, its broken ceiling open to the sky and its mirrored walls exposed to the endless breath of the mountains. Shafts of sunlight lay everywhere like slanting rods of glass: the snow fell through them, flickering as it dropped earth wards On plinths throughout the room, statues of gods and goddesses stood unrecognizable beneath thick garments of tattered frost. Their hair was white and stiff with icicles; from their frozen hands, long strands of ice trailed to the floor.

At the far end of the long chamber, hidden away among shadows, in an area out of reach of the shafts of sunlight, Christopher made out a grey figure seated cross-legged on a throne of cushions. Slowly, feeling his heart trip repeatedly in his breast, he made his way towards the shadows. The figure did not move, did not call out. He sat immobile, hands resting on his knees, back straight. His eyes were fixed on Christopher.

The figure was dressed in the simple robes of a monk. On his head, he wore a pointed cap with long ear-flaps that hung down to below his shoulders. His face was partly hidden in shadows. It seemed lined and full of sadness. The eyes, above all, ached with sadness. Christopher stood in front of him, not knowing what to do or say. He realized that he had not brought a khata scarf with him, that he could not perform the ritual of greeting. Some time passed, then the stranger raised his right hand gently and motioned to Christopher.

“Please,” he said, ‘be seated. You do not have to stand. I have had a chair brought for you.”

For the first time, Christopher noticed a low chair just on his left. He sat down, feeling self-conscious. He could sense the old man’s eyes on him, scrutinizing him with a fierce intensity mixed with terrible sadness “My name is Dorje Losang Rinpoche. I am the Dorje Lama, the abbot of this monastery. They tell me your name is Christopher, Christopher Wylam.”

“Yes,” said Christopher.

“That’s correct.”

“You have come a long way,” said the Dorje Lama.

“Yes,” said Christopher, his voice feeling cracked and awkward.

“From. India. From Kalimpong.”

“Further than that,” the abbot contradicted him.

“Yes,” Christopher said.

“Further than that.”

“Why have you come? Please be truthful with me. No-one comes here for a trivial reason. There must be matters of life and death to bring a man to us. What has brought you here?”

Christopher hesitated. He feared and distrusted the abbot. This man had played a major role in what had happened. For all he knew, Zamyatin was himself a pawn in a greater game.

“I was brought here,” he replied.

“By three of your monks:

Tsarong Rinpoche and two trap as Tsarong Rinpoche killed my guide, a Nepalese boy named Lhaten. He killed him merely because Lhaten was injured. Before I answer any of your questions, I demand justice for the boy.”

“You are making a serious charge.” The abbot bent forward, as though trying to see the truth in Christopher’s face.

“It is not my only charge. I met Tsarong Rinpoche before that in Kalimpong. He admitted killing someone else there: an Irish doctor called Cormac. Did you know of that? Was he acting under your orders?”

The abbot sighed and straightened himself again. His face was that of an old man, but extremely pale. The eyes were still pools of sadness, but Christopher sensed another emotion in that look.

Compassion? Love? Pity?

“No,” he said.

“He was not acting under orders from me. I had no reason to want either the doctor or your guide dead. Please believe me. I have no wish to cause the death of any sentient being.

My purpose on earth is to diminish suffering in any way I can. If Tsarong Rinpoche has acted wrongly, he will be punished.”

The abbot paused and blew his nose gently on a small handkerchief which he took from inside his long sleeve. The ordinariness of the man’s action was more reassuring to Christopher than his words.

“Tsarong Rinpoche tells me,” the abbot continued, ‘that when he met you, you were on the borders of Tibet, just beyond the Sebula. Is this true?”

Christopher nodded.

“Yes.”

“He also tells me that he warned you not to leave India, not to attempt to enter Tibet. Is that also true?”

“Yes. That is true as well.”

“You had been warned of possible danger. Danger to yourself and anyone who travelled with you. You chose a route that you must have known to be almost impassable. Tsarong Rinpoche tells me he thinks you were already seeking for this place, for Dorje-la.

Is that true too?”

Christopher did not say anything.

“You do not deny it is true? Very well, then I must conclude that something of great importance drove you here. Or perhaps I should say “drew you here”. What would that thing be, Wylamla? Can you tell me?”

Christopher remained silent at first, his gaze fixed on the old man. On the abbot’s chest, a silver gau caught particles of light from the lamps and transformed them into shadows.

“Not a thing,” Christopher said at last.

“A person. My son. His name is William. I believe he is here, in this monastery. I have come here to take him home.”

The abbot stared at Christopher with a look of intense sadness.

All around, snow kept falling. It lay sprinkled on the old man’s hair and covered the cushions on which he sat.

“Why do you think your son is here, Mr. Wylam? What possible reason could there be for his presence in this place?”

“I don’t know the reason. All I know is that a man called Zamyatin ordered my son’s kidnap. Zamyatin’s instructions were carried out of Tibet by a monk named Tsewong. Tsewong is dead, but a letter was found on him that identified him as your representative. Carpenter, the Scottish missionary in Kalimpong, has told me that my son was taken to Tibet by a Mongolian called Mishig. Mishig is Zamyatin’s agent.”

The Dorje Lama listened to all of this with his head bent, as though Christopher’s words weighed him down. There was a lengthy silence.

“You know a great deal, Wylam-la,” he said finally.

“A very great deal. And yet you know very little.”

“But I’m right. My son is here. Isn’t he?”

The abbot folded his hands.

“Yes,” he said.

“You are right. Your son is here. He is alive and well. He is being looked after with the greatest possible attention.

There is nothing for you to worry about.”

“I want to see him. Take me to him at once.” Christopher stood up. He felt faint and angry.

“I’m sorry,” the abbot said.

“That will not be possible. There is so much you do not understand.

But he is no longer your son.

That much you must try to understand. For your own sake. Please try to grasp what I am saying.”

“What do you want with him?” Christopher was shouting now.

He could hear his voice echoing in the empty, snow-filled chamber.

“Why did you bring him here?”

“He was brought here at my request. I wanted him brought to Dorje-la.

As yet even he does not understand. But in time he will.

Please do not make it difficult for him. Please do not ask to see him.”

The abbot reached down and picked up a small silver bell from a low table. He rang it gently, filling the room suddenly with a loose, fluttering music, like fine crystal being struck. There was a smell of old incense, like crushed flowers in a tomb.

“You will have to leave now,” he said.

“But we shall meet again.”

Footsteps sounded behind Christopher. He turned to see the steward waiting for him. As he walked away from the abbot, the old man’s voice came to him out of the shadows.

“Mr. Wylam. Please try to be wise. Do not attempt to find your son. We do not wish any harm to befall you: but you must take care. You ignored Tsarong Rinpoche’s warning. Do not ignore mine.”

Christopher was taken back to the room in which he had been confined before. He sat for hours in the silence of his own thoughts, trying to come to terms with his situation. The revelation that William was alive and being kept here in Dorje-la had shaken him.

He needed time to think, time to decide what to do next.

Several times he went to the window and looked down at the pass below. Once, he saw a party of monks moving along a narrow path away from the monastery. He watched until they vanished from sight. Later, he saw someone running to the monastery from a point just above the pass. From time to time, he heard the sound of chanting, punctuated by the steady beats of a drum. On a terrace below him and to his left, an old monk sat for hours turning a large prayer-wheel At sunset, the trumpet on the roof brayed into the coming darkness; it was quite near him and very loud.

A monk came and left him some food, lit his lamp, and left again without saying a word in reply to his questions. There was soup and tsampa and a small pot of tea. He ate slowly and automatically, chewing and swallowing the balls of roasted barley without enjoyment. When he had finished eating, he lifted the cover from the teacup. As he raised the pot to pour, his eye caught sight of something white pressed into the cup.

It was a sheet of paper, folded several times and pushed firmly down. Christopher took it out and unfolded it. It was covered in Tibetan writing, in an elegant Umay hand. At the bottom was a small diagram, a series of intersecting lines that lacked any obvious pattern.

He took the sheet across to the table by the bed, where the lamp was burning. His knowledge of written Tibetan was limited, but with a little effort he was able to decipher most of the text:

I am told you speak our language. But I do not know if you can read it

also. I can only write and hope that you will be able to read this. If

you

cannot read it, I will have to find a way to send someone to you; but that may be difficult. The trapa who brings your food does not know that I had this message placed in your cup: do not speak of it to him.

I am told you are the father of the child who was brought here from the land of the pee-lings. I am told other things, but I do not know whether to believe them.

You are in danger in Dorje-la. Be careful at all times. I want to help you, but I too must be careful. I cannot come to you, so you must come to me. Tonight, your door will be unlocked. When you find it open, follow the map I have drawn below. It will lead you to the gon-kang.

I shall be waiting for you there. But take care that no-one sees you leave.

There was no signature. He re-read the letter several times, making sure he had understood it. Now that he knew the diagram was meant to be a map, he thought he could make some sense of it, even though he could not relate the rooms and corridors it showed to places he had actually seen.

He stood up and went to the door. It was still locked. He sighed and went back to the bed, feeling restless now that a possibility for action had at last presented itself. Who had sent him the message?

He knew no-one in Dorje-la. And why should one of the monks want to help him, a stranger?

Several times over the next few hours he went to the door and tried it. It was always locked, and he began to think that the mysterious letter-writer had been unable to carry out his plan. The last service of the day was sung, the monks returned to their cells for the night, and a profound silence settled on Dorje-la at last.

About an hour later, he heard a low fumbling sound at his door.

He got up and advanced cautiously to it. Silence. He reached out a hand and tried the handle. It turned without resistance.

Quickly, he found his lamp and stepped outside. He was in a long corridor: at the far end, a single butter-lamp burned. There was no-one in sight. AH around him, he could feel the monastery sleeping. It was freezing in the corridor.

Consulting the map, he set off slowly to his right, down to where the corridor joined another. The second corridor stretched away into shadow. There were lamps at intervals, faint offerings to the surrounding gloom. In the dim light from his own lamp, the painted walls seemed half alive, seething with a dark, tormented movement. Everywhere, red predominated. Faces appeared for a moment out of the darkness, then vanished again. Hands moved.

Bared teeth grinned. Skeletons danced.

Imperceptibly, a sense of deep antiquity began to impress itself on Christopher as he padded deeper into the sleeping monastery.

He could see, if only imperfectly, how the character of the regions through which he passed was undergoing a gradual change. Like geological strata, the individual sections of the gompa showed clearly how they had been built up, a little at a time. The further he penetrated, the more a primitive quality revealed itself to him in the paintings and carvings. Chinese influence gave way to Indian and Indian to what Christopher recognized as early Tibetan. He could feel growing in him a sense of trepidation. This was like no monastery in which he had ever set foot before.

The final corridor ended in a low door on either side of which the images of guardian deities had been painted. Two torches burned in brackets half-way up the wall. This was an ancient part of the monastery, perhaps a thousand years old.

He stood at the entrance to the gon-kang, the darkest and most forbidden place in any gompa. Christopher had only ever heard descriptions of such places from Tibetan friends, but he had at no time been allowed to set foot in one. They were dark places, narrow crypt-chapels where the masks for the sacred dances were kept.

This was the ritual abode of theyi-dam, the tutelary deities, whose black statues watched over the monastery and its inhabitants. It was the seat of the sacred horror at the heart of Tibetan religion.

Christopher hesitated at the door, oddly frightened at the prospect of entering. He had no reason to be frightened: there was only darkness inside, darkness and strange gods in whom he did not believe. But something made him hesitate before finally putting his hand to the door and pushing.

It was unlocked. Immediately behind lay a second door bearing the brightly painted face of a yi-dam. Red, staring eyes confronted him like living coals. The light of his lamp flickered and shone on old paint and flecks of gold leaf. He pushed open the second door.

Darkness visible, darkness like velvet pressing against his eyes, darkness palpable and entranced. Here, night was permanent. It had never been truly broken, it would go on forever. A strong smell of old butter filled the stale, lightless air. It was like entering a tomb.

Christopher held up his lamp. From the ceiling near the entrance hung the stuffed car cases of several animals a bear, a yak, a wild dog. These ancient, rotting things were an integral part of every gon-kang, as much an element in the place’s dark mystery as the figures of the gods on the altar. Christopher felt his skin crawl with disgust as he passed underneath, crouching low to avoid contact with the mouldering fur hanging loosely from the poorly preserved cadavers. They had been hanging there for God only knew how long, and would go on hanging in the same places until they finally decomposed and fell apart. Generations of spiders had added a thick outer carapace of their own to the mildewed fur. Dusty cobwebs brushed Christopher’s cheeks as he went through.

It was old. He knew as soon as he was inside that the gon-kang was an ancient place, older than the monastery, half as old as the mountains themselves. It was a cave, low and dark and dedicated from the beginning of time to the most hidden mysteries. The dance-masks hung by thick ropes from the ceiling to Christopher’s right, images of death and madness, painted long ago and set here in the darkness with the grim guardians of the monastery. Once or twice a year, they would be taken out and worn in the ritual dances. They would turn and turn to the sound of drums and flutes, like the naked girl Christopher had seen in the orphanage, her face a mask hiding the dull terror beneath. The faces of the masks were grotesque and larger than life the malign features of gods and demi-gods and demons, faces that would transform a dancing monk to an immortal being and a man to a god for a day.

Near the masks, set against the wall, were piles of old armour spears and swords and breastplates, hauberks and crested helmets, Chinese lances and pointed Tartar hats. It was ancient armour, rusted and useless for the most part, kept there as a symbol of sudden death, weapons for the old gods to wield in their battle against the forces of evil.

Standing before the rear wall were the statues of the yi-dam deities, their many arms and heads swathed in old strips of cloth placed there as offerings. Yamantaka, horned and bull-headed and festooned with a coronet of human skulls, leered out of the darkness. In the flickering shadows, the black figures seemed to move, as though they too were dancing in their eternal night.

Filled with a foreboding he could neither understand nor master, Christopher went closer.

Something moved that was not a shadow. Christopher shrank back, holding his lamp out in front of him. Before the altar at the back of the room, facing theyi-dam, sat a dark figure. As Christopher watched, the figure moved again, prostrating briefly in front of the gods before resuming a seated position. It was a monk, wrapped up against the bitter cold, engaged in meditation. He did not appear to have noticed the light from Christopher’s lamp or heard him enter Christopher was uncertain what to do next. He guessed this must be the monk who had written the letter, but now he was about to confront him, he felt suddenly wary. Was this perhaps nothing more than an elaborate trap, set by Zamyatin or Tsarong Rinpoche? He had, after all, just violated the monastery’s innermost sanctum. Had that been the intention all along to provide someone with an adequate justification for his death?

The figure moved, not abruptly like someone startled, but gently, like a man woken from sleep and still half in the world of his dream. He stood up and turned. A shadow fell across his face as he did so, veiling him.

“You have come,” he said. The voice was soft, like a girl’s.

Christopher guessed the monk was a ge-tsul, a novice. But what would a novice want with him?

“Was it you who wrote the letter?” Christopher asked, stepping towards the figure.

“Please! Don’t come any closer,” the monk said, stepping back further into shadow.

Christopher froze. He sensed that the ge-tsul was nervous, in some way frightened by Christopher’s presence.

“Why did you ask me to come? What do you want?”

“You are the father of the pee-ling child?”

“Yes.”

“And you have travelled from far away to find him?”

“Yes. Do you know where he is? Can you take me to him?”

The monk made a hushing sound.

“Do not speak so loudly. The walls of Dorje-la have ears.” He paused.

“Yes,” he continued, “I know where your son is being kept.

And I can take you there.”

“When?”

“Not now. Perhaps not for several days.”

“Is he in any danger?”

The novice hesitated.

“No,” he said.

“I don’t think so. But something is happening in Dorje-la, something I do not understand. I think we may all be in danger very soon.”

“I want to take William away from here. I want to take him back through the passes to India. Can you help me?”

There was silence. Shadows gathered about the small figure by the altar.

“I can help you take him from Dorje-la,” he said at last.

“But the way to India is too hazardous. If you want your son to leave here alive, you must trust me. Will you do that?”

Christopher had no choice. However mysterious, this was his only ally in a world he did not understand.

“Yes,” he replied.

“I will trust you.”

“With your life?”

“Yes.”

“With your son’s life?”

He hesitated. But William’s life was already in jeopardy.

“Yes.”

“Go back to your room. I will send another message to you there.

Be sure that you destroy any letters I write to you. And speak of this to no-one. No-one, do you understand? Even if they appear to be a friend. Do you promise?”

“Yes,” Christopher whispered.

“I promise.”

“Very well. Now you must leave.”

“Who are you?” Christopher asked.

“Please, you must not ask. Later, when we are safe, I will tell you.

But not now. There is too much danger.”

“But what if something happens? If I need to find you?”

“You are not to look for me. I will find you when it is time.

Please leave now.”

“At least let me see your face.”

“No, you must not!”

But Christopher raised his lamp and stepped forward, letting !

the light fall directly on the shadows before him. The mysterious stranger was not a novice, not a monk. Long strands of jet-black hair framed small, delicate features. An embroidered tunic shaped itself about a slender body. The stranger was a woman. In the shadowed light, her green eyes sparkled and the tiny yellow flame cast drops of liquid gold over her cheeks. Her hair was filled with golden ashes.

She stared at Christopher, her eyes startled. One hand sprang to her face, covering her from his gaze. He took another step, but she recoiled, stumbling back into the shadows once more. He heard her feet run softly across the stone floor. Holding the lamp high, he followed, but the light fell on nothing but figures of stone and gold. On the walls, paint crumbled and fell slowly to dust.

Time stood still. The bright patterns of a dozen heavens and a dozen hells shuddered like tinsel in the darkness. The girl had vanished utterly into the shadows out of which she had come.

He returned to his room, passing through the sleeping monastery like a phantom. As far as he was aware, no-one had seen him leave or re-enter the room. About half an hour after his return, he heard the sound of fumbling at his door again, and when he tried the handle he found it had been locked once more.

He lay in bed, trying to get warm, his thoughts in turmoil. There were so many unanswered questions. Who was the woman who had brought him to the gon-kang? What did she really want with him? And could she really help him get William out of this place?

He tossed and turned in the darkness, tiring himself without coming any closer to satisfactory answers. In the end, his restless thoughts became restless dreams. But even in sleep there were no answers.

He was woken abruptly by a sound. His light had gone out and the room was in pitch darkness. He could hear his own breathing but nothing else. What had wakened him? Breathing evenly, he lay in the darkness listening. It came again, a soft, fumbling sound.

Someone or something was outside his door, trying to get in. This was not like the sound he had heard before, when his door had been unlocked and locked again. This was furtive, secretive, not intended to be heard.

A key turned in the lock. Whoever was outside was taking great care not to waken him. He cast back his blankets and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Working by instinct, he found his boots and slipped them on. The key turned gently, with an almost inaudible grating sound. He stood up, careful not to make the bed creak. The door began to open, an inch at a time. He got up and crept to the other side of the room, next to the shrine.

The intruder did not carry a light. Christopher could see nothing,

hear nothing. He pressed himself against the wall. As his eyes grew

accustomed to the darkness, he realized that a small amount of

illumination came through the shutter, which he had

closed imperfectly. A slight creak drew his attention back to the door. A shadow was easing itself through the opening. Christopher held his breath.

The shadow moved to the bed on silent feet. There was an abrupt movement as it bent down, then Christopher saw it fumble with the blankets in confusion. There was a glint of something metallic in the darkness: a knife-blade. Christopher waited for the figure to straighten up, then dashed forward, his right arm extended, and grabbed for the neck.

The intruder grunted as Christopher pulled back with his forearm against his throat. He heard the knife clatter to the floor.

Then there was a quick movement and Christopher felt himself being twisted. A sudden blow took him in the small of his back, near his kidneys. As he jerked away from the blow, the man turned again and freed himself from the arm lock A second blow took Christopher in the pit of his stomach and sent him reeling back against the shrine. Bowls crashed to the ground, spilling water everywhere and clanging like bells in the stillness. The stranger did not speak.

Suddenly he lunged, and Christopher felt something tighten round his neck. It was a thin cord and the man was pulling hard on it His head spun as the cord tightened and air and blood were cut off. He had seconds before he began to weaken. Throwing himself forward, he crashed into his assailant, causing him to stumble and fall back against the bed. The cord slackened and Christopher grabbed hold of it, ripping it from the man’s hands.

He tossed it aside.

Christopher realized that his one advantage was his weight. The man beneath him was much smaller than he, but clever with his hands. Without warning, Christopher’s attacker uncoiled himself and directed a blow to his throat. His chin took most of the blow’s force, but he felt a searing pain run through his jaw. He remembered the way the monk in Kalimpong had disabled him so effortlessly. Springing back, he hit the chair and knocked it over.

Without thinking, he picked it up.

“Who are you?” he hissed, but his assailant said nothing in reply.

He saw the shadow move towards him, lifted the chair, and struck out. He felt the chair connect with his attacker, lifted it again, and struck a second time. There was a dull cry, then the sound of feet stumbling as Christopher’s assailant tried to find his balance. He saw the man stagger, then straighten up and make for the door.

Christopher made a dash after the man, groping for him in the semi-darkness, but one foot caught on an altar-bowl and he tripped. When he got to his feet, his attacker had gone. Christopher went to the open door and looked in both directions along the corridor. There was no sign of anyone. He took the key from the lock and closed the door, locked it and put the key inside his boot.

Further sleep would have been madness. He remained awake until dawn, then tidied the room, replacing the bowls on the altar as accurately as possible. He found his assailant’s knife, a thin weapon with an eight-inch blade, and tucked it into his other boot.

He was beginning to feel that the attack had turned in his favour.

Breakfast came long after dawn and the first morning service.

There was no message in the cup this time. When the monk returned later that morning to take the crockery away, Christopher told him that he wanted to see the abbot. At first the man denied that this was possible, but Christopher implied there would be trouble if his message were not passed on. The monk said nothing when he left, but later that afternoon the steward returned and told Christopher to come with him.

They did not follow the same route they had taken the day before. Instead, they climbed dark stairs that led to the top floor of the building. Christopher guessed that he was being taken to the abbot’s private quarters. As befitted an incarnation, he would live in the highest storey, so that no-one would be able to stand or sit above his head.

They seemed to be leaving behind more than just the lower monastery. Up here, it was another world. At the top of the stairs, a large window looked out across the pass; it was glazed, not with the wax paper often used in Tibet, but with panes of real glass that must have been carried all the way from India. Christopher paused for breath and looked out: in the distance, sunlight was resting on the peaks of dazzled mountains, dappled and quiet among the white snow. He felt closed in, a prisoner in this murky place, shut away from the air and the sunshine.

The steward led him through a doorway with huge bronze rings round

which coloured ribbons had been tied. Above the door, a

Chinese inscription proclaimed a message incomprehensible to Christopher. An imperial name, a paean, a warning?

The door closed behind them and they were in a square chamber filled with painted cages within which birds of all sizes fluttered and hopped. The air was thick with birdsong, a greedy twittering that bounced off the walls and ceiling in strange, bewildered echoes. There were blue pigeons and red starts grey and red accentors, snow pigeons cloaked in white, thrushes, finches, and canaries from China, bright-plum aged parakeets from India, and two birds of paradise with feathers like the edges of rainbows.

Coloured plumage coruscated in the light of the lamps, awakening silent echoes on the unpainted walls. But for all that, the room was a prison, a cell where shadows and wood and wire conspired to dim all brightness. As Christopher passed through, heavy wings flapped against bars on every side; there was a deep, deep fluttering, like cloth in a nightmare. The steward opened a second door and ushered Christopher into another room.

Great bottles stood everywhere, each the height of a tall man and correspondingly broad terraria filled with living plants brought up from the jungle regions below. Each was a universe forever sealed in a cycle of growth and decay. Among the plants, huge butterflies soared and swooped, beating cramped wings silently against the glass sides of the bottles, or moving from flower to flower restlessly. More prisons, more cells. Light fell on the bottles through glass shafts set in the ceiling, and the plants fought and strained to suck what life they could from the thin blades of tired sunshine that entered.

They went through several more rooms, each as bizarre as the one before. In one, great spiders scuttled in glass cases and wove savage webs like clouds of silk. In another, fish swam in giant tanks, endlessly prowling back and forth in the dark, quiet waters, turning and turning nervously, never still, never at rest, like sharks that will die if they stop moving. And finally there came a small room filled with bright flames. Everywhere, lamps burned, throwing tongues of fire into the shadow-encrusted air. Earth and air, water and fire all the elements and creatures from each one. The world in miniature.

At the end of the fire-room was a door different to the others they had passed through. It was painted with mandalas circular patterns in which the worlds of air and land and sea were depicted.

From reality to shadow, from the shell to the kernel. The steward opened the door and stood aside to let Christopher pass.

Beyond the mandala door lay a great chamber that seemed to stretch across most of the upper storey. Shafts of dust-laden light drifted lazily through apertures in the ceiling, but they were insufficient to dispel the abundant shadows lurking everywhere.

The tiny flames of butter-lamps wavered in the distance like fireflies above a dark lake. Christopher heard a sound behind him.

He turned to see the door close. The steward had gone.

As his eyes grew accustomed once more to the gloom, Christopher saw what sort of room it was he had entered. He had heard of such places before, but had never expected to see one. This was the chorten hall, where the tombs of all the past abbots of the monastery were ranged along one wall: great boxes, vaster than the deaths they contained, untarnished, polished, dusted gleaming receptacles for decaying flesh and mouldering bones. The lights flickered and picked out the facades of the great tombs, built from bronze and gold and silver, encrusted with jewels and precious ornaments.

Each chorten stood on a large pedestal and rose almost to the ceiling. In an impermanent world, they were tokens of permanence, like crystal in ice or gold in sunlight, never melting, never shifting through the dark, uncertain boundaries of change and chance.

Inside each one, the mummified remains of an abbot had been placed. From time to time, salt was added to keep the mummies in a state of semi-preservation. Through grilles set in the front of the chortens, the gilded faces of their inhabitants gazed out forlornly on a world of grey shadows.

Slowly, Christopher walked along the row of golden tombs.

Outside, he could hear the whistling of the afternoon wind. It was cold up here, cold and alone and, somehow, futile. There were twelve chortens in all. Some of the abbots would have died as old men, some as children but if the monks were to be believed, they were one and all incarnations of the same spirit, the same being in a multitude of bodies. Each living abbot would dwell up here all his life, side by side with his old bodies, as a man will dwell with his memories or his castoff clothes, waiting for his own body to join the others, waiting to take on a new form but never a new identity.

‘

The abbot was waiting for him just like the day before, in a niche at the far end of the long hall, seated on cushions among gilded shadows and gods like fire. He seemed more diminished here, dwarfed by the huge chortens, a pale figure lost among his own past lives. It was as if he had been sitting there, on that same throne, on that same spot, down long centuries, watching the chortens being built and occupied, waiting for someone to come and say it was finished, that it was time to leave at last. Christopher bowed low and was told to seat himself on a padded seat facing the abbot.

“You asked to see me,” said the old man.

“Yes.”

“An important matter.”

“Yes,” said Christopher.

“Go on.”

“Someone came to my room last night. While I was sleeping. Do you understand? He entered my room while I was sleeping. He tried to kill me. I want to know why. I want you to tell me why.”

The abbot did not answer straight away. He appeared shaken by Christopher’s revelation.

“How do you know he wanted to kill you?” he asked at last.

“Because he had a knife. Because he carried a gar rotting cord and tried to use it on me.”

“I see. And you think I know something about this, that I am perhaps responsible for it.”

Christopher said nothing.

“Yes. You think I tried to have you killed.” There was a long pause.

The abbot sighed audibly. When he spoke again, his voice had altered.

It was weaker, older, sadder than before.

“I would not have you harmed. That you must believe, even if you doubt everything else you see or hear in this place. That alone is true. Do you understand me? Do you believe me?”

You are holy to me. I cannot touch you. The words came unbidden into his mind, like birds that had been caged and suddenly set free.

They fluttered grey wings at him and were gone. But I can harm you, he thought. He could feel the cold blade of the knife nestling against his calf.

“How can I believe you?” he said.

“You’ve taken my son by force and killed a man while doing so. One of your monks has killed a boy whose only crime was to have been injured. And a man comes to my room in the dark, carrying a knife. Why should I believe a word you say?”

He saw the abbot’s eyes watching him intently.

“Because I am telling you the truth.” There was a pause.

“When you met me first, you mentioned someone called Zamyatin. Tell me now what you know of him.”

Christopher hesitated. He knew so little of Zamyatin himself, and so much of what he did know depended on information that would be meaningless to the abbot of a remote Tibetan monastery that he scarcely knew where to start. It seemed easiest to begin with the basic facts that Winterpole had supplied him with.

When he had finished, the abbot said nothing. He sat motionless on his throne, carefully sifting everything Christopher had told him. After what seemed an age, he spoke again.

“Zamyatin is here, in Dorje-la. Did you know that?”

“Yes. I guessed he must be.”

“He has been here for several months. He came as a pilgrim. At first.

Tell me, do you think he was behind the attempt on your life?”

Christopher nodded. It was highly likely.

“You are enemies, you and this Russian?”

“Our countries are .. . not at war, exactly. But in a state of

rivalry. Tension.”

“Not your countries,” said the abbot.

“Not your people. Your philosophies. Not long ago, your countries were allies in the great war against the Germans. Is that not so?”

Whoever this abbot was, thought Christopher, he had underestimated his knowledge of the world outside his monastery.

“Yes, we were allies .. . But then the Russians had a revolution.

They killed their king and his family his wife and children. A party called Bolsheviks came to power. They killed anyone who stood in their way tens of thousands, guilty, innocent: it made no difference.”

“Perhaps they had a reason for killing their king. Was he a just king?”

Not just and yet not a tyrant, thought Christopher. Just weak willed and inept, the figurehead of an autocratic system he could not change.

“I think he wanted to be just. To be loved by his people,” he said.

“That is not enough,” the abbot answered.

“A man may want to enter Nirvana, but first he must act. There are eight things necessary for liberation from pain: the most important is right action. When a just man takes no action, the unjust will act instead.”

“That is true but Zamyatin must be stopped,” Christopher said.

“The Bolsheviks are planning to take control of Asia. They will reach out and take each country on their borders. And then they will go further. No-one will be safe. Not even you, not even this place. Zamyatin has come to Tibet to further those ends. If you value your freedom, help me stop him.”

The old man sighed audibly and leaned forward again. The trace of a smile crossed his lips.

“And you,” he said, ‘what will you do when you have stopped him?”

Christopher was unsure. It depended on what Zamyatin was up to. Would he have to stay .. . and turn Zamyatin’s work to the advantage of Britain? Or would stopping Zamyatin be enough? .

“I’ll return home with my son,” he said, acutely conscious of the half-truth. Winterpole had offered him William at a price.

“And what will your people do? Will they leave us alone once the Bolsheviks are defeated?”

“We have no desire to be your masters,” Christopher said.

“We helped the Dalai Lama when he fled the Chinese. When the Chinese were defeated, he was free to go back to Lhasa. We didn’t interfere.”

“But in 1904 you invaded Tibet yourselves. Your armies entered Lhasa. You showed your fist. You interfered directly, more than the Russians have ever interfered in this country. And you rule India. If you can enslave one country, you can enslave another.”

“The Indians are not our slaves,” Christopher protested.

“But they are not free,” said the abbot quietly.

“We do not oppress them.”

“Last year, you massacred hundreds in the Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar. If they rise against you one day, as they did before, as the Russians did against their king, will it be because you wanted to be just and did not act ... or because you were unjust and acted? I want to know.” There was a sharpness in the abbot’s voice now. Christopher wished to see him clearly, but the shadows clung to him tenaciously.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Christopher said. In his own mind, old doubts came soaring in like moths to a flame.

“I think we are sincere. I think we act justly most of the time. Amritsar was a mistake, an error of judgement on the part of the officer commanding the troops that day. It was an aberration.”

“An aberration!” The abbot spoke angrily. His composure had slipped and his voice grown rough.

“Amritsar was inevitable in a country where one race rules a subject race. It was no aberration, no mistake it was a result of years of petty injustices, of arrogance, discrimination, blindness. Amritsar was a symbol of all that is rotten in your Empire. And you come to me with tales of Bolsheviks, you try to frighten me because a single Russian has set foot in these mountains, you tell me your people have no intentions towards Tibet. Do you take me for a fool?”

The old man fell silent. There was a pause, a long pause. As quickly as the anger had come, it went again. Christopher felt the old man’s eyes on him, sharp and probing, yet still sad. When the abbot spoke again, it was in a changed voice.

“You should know better, Wylam-la. You should not be a prey to such foolishness. Were you not brought up to be one with the Indians to eat their food, to breathe their air, to lose your identity in their identity? Weren’t you taught to see the world through their eyes, to listen with their ears, to taste with their tongue? And you talk to me of errors of judgement, you talk to me of aberrations, you talk to me of dead kings? How can you have forgotten what I taught you? How can you have strayed so far from what you once were?”

Christopher felt a deep chill take hold of him. He was afraid. He was dreadfully afraid. His whole body shook with the beginnings of this fear. The shadows shifted about the abbot and his throne, ancient shadows, thin things that moved like hungry ghosts. Lights flickered. The room seemed full of voices whispering to him voices from his past, voices from long ago, voices of the dead. He remembered the crucifix he had found in Cormac’s desk, its sharp edges digging into his flesh.

“Who are you?” Christopher asked in a voice made dry by fear.

The old man came forward into the light. Slowly, the shadows gave up their hold on him. He had dwelt so long in them and they so long in him, but now, for a brief moment, they parted and returned him living to the light. He stood up, a frail old man in saffron robes, and stepped down from the dais on which his throne was set. Slowly, he came towards Christopher, taller than he had appeared seated on the cushions. He came right up to Christopher and knelt down in front of him, his face only inches away from his.

“Who are you?” whispered Christopher again. The fear was a living thing that struggled in him, threshing about in his chest like a caged animal or a bird or a butterfly.

“Don’t you know me, Christopher?” The abbot’s voice was low and gentle. It did not strike Christopher at first that these last words were spoken not in Tibetan but in English.

The world shattered.

“Do you not .. .”

The fragments crumbled to dust and were scattered.

‘.. . remember me .. .”

A wind howled in Christopher’s head. The world was a void filled with the dust of the world that had been. He heard his mother’s voice, calling him:

‘.. . Christopher.”

And his sister’s voice, in the long days of summer, running after him on a sunlit lawn:

‘.. . Christopher.”

And Elizabeth, her arms stretched out in pain, her eyes distended, dying:

‘.. . Christopher.”

And at the end, his father’s voice, in the centre of the void,

reassembling the dust, refashioning the world:

‘.. . Christopher? Don’t you remember me, Christopher?”

They stood by the last of the chortens together. Christopher’s father had opened shutters in the wall so that they could see out across the pass. For a long time, neither man spoke. The sun had moved, and from its new position it carved patterns of light and darkness on dim white peaks and snow-filled gullies. Apart from shadows, nothing moved. The whole world was still and silent.

“That’s Everest,” said the old man suddenly, pointing south and west, as a father will point something out to his child.

“The Tibetans call it Chomolungma, the Goddess Mother of the Earth.”

He paused while Christopher located the peak to which he had pointed. Fragments of cloud covered all but the last extremity of the great mountain, dwarfed by distance.

“And that’s Makalu,” he answered, pointing a little further south.

“Chamlang, Lhotse you can see them all from here if the air is clear. Sometimes I stand in this spot for hours watching them. I never grow tired of this view. Never. I can still remember the first time I saw it.” He fell silent again, thinking of the past.

Christopher shivered.

“Are you cold?” his father asked.

He nodded and the old man closed the shutter, confining them inside the chorten hall once more.

“This was my last body,” Christopher’s father said, brushing his hand against the burnished metal of the tomb.

“I don’t understand,” said Christopher. Would even two and two make four again, or black and white combine to make grey?

“Surely you understand this much,” his father protested.

“That we put on bodies and take them off again. I have had many bodies.

Soon I shall be getting rid of this one as well. And then it will be time to find another.”

“But you’re my father!” Christopher protested in his turn.

“You died years ago. This isn’t possible.”

“What is possible, Christopher? What is impossible? Can you tell me?

Can you put your hand to your heart and say you know?”

“I know that if you are my father, if you are the man I knew as a child, you can’t be ... the reincarnation of some Tibetan holy man. You were born in England, at Grantchester. You married my mother. You had a son. A daughter. None of this makes sense.”

The old man took Christopher’s right hand and held it firmly in his own.

“Christopher,” he said, ‘if only I could explain. We’re strangers now, you and I; but believe me that I’ve never forgotten you. It was never my wish to leave you. Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know what you wished. I only know what happened.

What they told me happened.”

“What did they tell you?”

“That you disappeared. That you left camp one night and could not be found in the morning. After some time had passed, it was assumed you were dead. Is that true? Is that what happened?”

The old man let go of Christopher’s hand and turned away from him a little.

“After a fashion,” he said in a quiet voice. He was a small man, dwarfed by the tombs of his predecessors. His lined and wrinkled face showed signs of great weariness.

“It is true, but only after a fashion like most things in this world. The deeper truth, the truth they could not guess, much less tell you, was that Arthur Wylam had been dead long before he walked out of his tent that night. I was a shell, I was empty, there was absolutely no substance to me, none at all. I acted, I performed my duties, such as they were, I passed for a man. But inwardly, I was already dead. I was like one of the ro-langs people believe they have seen in these mountains.

“When I left the camp that morning, I didn’t know what I was doing, where I was going. I remember very little, to be honest. All I know is that there was nothing more for me in that life. I’d exhausted everything it had to offer and found it rotten at the core.

All I wanted to do was walk. And that is exactly what I did. I walked and climbed and stumbled for days, deeper and deeper into the mountains. I had no food, I had no idea how to find any, I was lost, and my mind was in total confusion.”

He paused, remembering, tasting again the emptiness and the horror of those days.

“They found me at a place called Sepo two monks from Dorjela. I was in a state of collapse, close to death. Nothing extraordinary, really a dying man, cold, hungry, with his mind in tatters.

But in Tibet, nothing is quite ordinary either. They find signs in everything in a meteor, a monstrous birth, a bird circling a hill.

It is often the tiny things that draw their attention the shape of a child’s ears, the way the thatch lies on a farmer’s roof, the path smoke takes as it rises from a chimney. Things you and I would not even notice. We have grown out of touch.

“The place they found me at was a junction where two glaciers met.

There was a sharp peak to the east and a steep precipice to the west. On the day they found me, two vultures had been seen nearby, just hovering. I rather think they were waiting for a meal once I was finished. All simple things those but they took them as signs. They said there was a prophecy, that the new abbot of Dorje-la would be found in a place of that description. To this day, I don’t know if that was true or not, if there was a prophecy or not.

But they believed it. And afterwards ... I came to believe it too.”

Christopher broke in, still not comprehending.

“But you weren’t a child,” he said.

“You were a man of forty, an adult. They always choose children as new incarnations, at the age of three or four.”

His father sighed and placed a hand on Christopher’s shoulder.

“This isn’t an ordinary monastery, Christopher. This is Dorje-la.

Things happen differently here.” He paused and sighed again.

“I

am the thirteenth abbot of Dorje-la. My predecessor died in the same year I was born and left instructions not to seek for his successor until forty years had passed. He said the new incarnation would come from the south, from India. And that he would be a pee-ling.”

He fell silent. Christopher said nothing. If the old man believed this nonsense, what right had he to object? And perhaps it was not nonsense after all. Perhaps there was some substance to it that Christopher’s western mind could not appreciate.

“Shall we go to another room?” the old man asked.

Christopher nodded.

“I’m in your hands,” he said.

His father looked at him, still trying to find in the man the child he had left so many years before. Was there anything left, anything at all?

“No,” he said, ‘you’re in your own hands.”

They left the chorten hall and passed through heavy curtains into a small room. It was a. circular chamber, about twelve feet in diameter, empty of the usual cushions and hangings, devoid of ornamentation. At the end of the world, Arthur Wylam had found austerity. A plain carpet covered the floor and a long bolster ran along a section of wall. In niches books were ranged in small piles.

Several lamps hung from a shallowly domed ceiling.

They sat down together, leaning against the bolster, father and son.

“It’s very simple, I’m afraid,” the old man said.

“No birds, no butterflies, no fish.”

“Why do you have them?” Christopher asked, meaning the animals and plants in the rooms he had passed through earlier.

“My predecessor began the rooms. He was curious about things.

He wanted to have examples of the world about him. I preserve them, replenish them when necessary.”

“They represent the elements? Is that their significance?”

The abbot nodded.

“The elements, yes. That and more. They show us decay. And birth.

And the levels of existence. And much else besides.”

“I see.” Christopher hesitated. He wanted to talk about other things.

“After they brought you here,” he said, ‘why didn’t you try to get in touch with someone, explain what had happened? You never even wrote to me. I thought you were dead.”

“I wanted you to think that. What else could I have done? Told you I was alive, but that I was never coming back? You would have tried to find me. At first, I didn’t understand this place or what it stood for. I didn’t even know who I was, who they expected me to be. So how could I have coped with your coming here, seeking me out, reminding me of who I had been? And later .. .

later I began to understand. And when I understood .. . there was no going back.”

“What about love?” asked Christopher.

“What about trust?”

The old man sighed. He had not heard those words in any language for a very long time.

“Don’t you see I was beyond all that?” he replied.

“Beyond love, beyond trust. I had no more of either in me not a shred, nothing.

I pray you never reach that state. Not, at least, in the way I came to it. In the end, you will have to abandon all such things love and trust and desire. Especially the last, especially desire. Otherwise they will devour you. Believe me, they are greedy. Desire is insatiable, it knows no beginning and no end. There are no boundaries to it. But they are the cords that bind you to suffering.

They will bind you for the rest of your life if you do not prevent them. And for all your future lives.”

“Why did you steal my son?” Christopher asked abruptly.

The abbot did not answer. His face was troubled. He looked away from Christopher at shadows.

“He’s important to you for some reason, isn’t he?” Christopher persisted.

“Because he’s your grandson. That’s the reason, isn’t it?

You want him to be some sort of incarnation as well, don’t you?”

His father bent his head.

“Yes.” he said.

Christopher stood up angrily.

“Well, you’re wrong. William is my son. My wife’s son. You have no part in him. It was your choice to die. Very well, stay dead: the dead have no claims on the living. William is my son and he belongs with me. I’m taking him home with me.”

The old man looked up.

“Sit down,” he whispered.

Christopher remained standing.

“I am old now,” his father said.

“I don’t have much longer to live. But when I die, Dorje-la will be without an abbot. Please try to understand what that means. These monks are like children, they need someone to be a father to them. Now especially, when the world outside is changing so rapidly. They may not be able to remain secluded here much longer. When the world comes knocking on the gates of Dorje-la, there must be someone in charge who can meet it on its own terms. An outsider, a pee-ling like ourselves.”

“But why William, why my son?”

The old man sighed.

“There is a prophecy,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter whether you believe in prophecies or not. The monks here believe in them, and in this prophecy in particular.”

“And what does it say, this prophecy?”

“The first part refers to myself. So they believe.

“When Dorje-la is ruled by a pee-ling, the world shall be ruled from Dorje-la.” The second part refers to “the son of a pee-ling’s son”. He will be the last abbot of Dorje-la. And then the Buddha of the last age will appear: the Maidari.”

“And you think William is this “son of a pee-ling’s son”?”

“They believe all Europeans marry and that the child must be the grandson of the pee-ling abbot. I did not believe that at first.

Even if you had a son, I could see no way of ever bringing him here. I had no means.”

“What made you change your mind?”

The abbot paused. Whatever was troubling him had returned with renewed force. Christopher thought he was frightened by something.

“Zamyatin changed my mind,” he said finally.

“When he came here, he already knew of the prophecy. He knew of me:

who I was, where I had come from. He told me that, if I had a grandson, he could arrange to have him brought here. At first I argued, but in the end he persuaded me. I needed the boy, you see. I needed someone to carry on the line.”

“Couldn’t you have tried to find a new incarnation in the normal way? Here, in Tibet. A Buddhist child, one whose parents would have been happy for him to be chosen.”

The old man shook his head.

“No,” he said.

“There was the prophecy. During the years after my predecessor died, before I came here, there was a vice-regency.

A man called Tensing Rinpoche ruled in the abbot’s place. When they brought me here at first, he opposed my selection as the new abbot. He died two years later, but a section of the monks has always thought of him as the true incarnation.”

“When he was a young man, he belonged to another sect, one that does not require its monks to be celibate. He had a son. That son is now an important man in his own right here. His name is Tsarong Rinpoche. If I leave Dorje-la without an abbot most of the monks can accept, Tsarong Rinpoche will have his opportunity.

There are enough who will follow him. And I need not tell you what it will mean if he proclaims himself abbot.”

“Why don’t you get rid of him?”

“I cannot. He is the son of Tensing Rinpoche. Believe me, I cannot send him away.”

“Why did Zamyatin offer to help you? What was in it for him?”

The abbot hesitated. Behind him, a candle stirred in the chill air.

“He came to Tibet in search of something. What he sought was here, in Dorje-la. He made a deal with me: my grandson in exchange for what he wanted. At first I refused, but in the end I saw I had no choice. I accepted his offer.”

“What was it he came here to find?”

“Please, Christopher, I can’t explain. Not yet. Later, when you have been here a little longer.”

“And William will I be allowed to see him?”

“Please be patient, Christopher. Eventually, when it is time. But you must understand that you cannot be allowed to take him away. You must reconcile yourself to that. I know it will be hard, but I can teach you how. You may stay in Dorje-la indefinitely. I would like it if you stayed. But you can never leave with your son.

He belongs to us now.”

Christopher said nothing. He went to the curtains and pulled them aside. Outside, the sun had set and darkness had taken hold of the chortens. He could feel the knife in his boot, the hard metal against his skin. It would be so easy to hold the blade against his father’s throat, force him to give William up to him. No-one would dare to stop him while he held their abbot hostage. He wondered why he was unable to act.

“I want to be taken back to my room,” he said.

His father stood and came to the doorway.

“You can’t go back there. Zamyatin has tried to have you killed once:

he won’t make a mistake the next time. I’ll give instructions for you to be housed on this floor, near me.” He looked out at the darkened chamber beyond.

“It’s already dark. I have my devotions to attend to. Wait here: I’ll send someone to show you to your new room.”

The abbot turned and went back into the little room. Christopher watched him go, his hair white, his body bent. His father had come back from the dead. It was like a miracle. But if it meant he could take William out of this place, he would gladly wipe out the miracle and send his father back to the grave.

The room to which Christopher was shown was larger than the cell in which he had first been confined. It was square and finely furnished, with high walls that were finished with brightly glazed tiles that had come all the way from Persia. Peacocks strutted and sloe-eyed maidens cast alluring glances over brimming bowls of wine. On a blue sky, the silhouettes of nightingales and hoopoes formed patterns elaborate as birdsong. It was a place of riches, hardly a monastic room at all; but for all that, it was as much a prison as the tiny chamber below had been.

He lay awake afterwards in a tight darkness that smelled to him of childhood. His butter-lamp had extinguished itself, leaving him to relive his past in the sudden knowledge that his father had been alive all along. While Christopher had mourned, his father had been here in Dorje-la, perhaps in this very room, assuming the contours of a new identity. Did it make any difference at all? he wondered. Nothing could change what had been. He fell asleep uneasily, just as he had gone to sleep that first night long ago, on the day news of his father’s death had reached him during a passage of the Aeneid.

He was awakened by a small sound, and at once saw a light flickering in

the room. Someone was standing near his bed, watching him silently. At

first he thought it was his father, come to watch over him while he

slept; but then he saw that the figure with the light was smaller and

un stooped

“Who’s there?” he called out; but he knew. “ “Shshsh,” the intruder hissed. In the same moment, the small light was lifted higher and he saw her, captured for him in its glow.

How long had she been standing in the half-darkness, watching him?

She came over to his bedside, without a sound.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” she whispered. Close by, he could at last make out her features perfectly. He had not imagined it: she was extraordinarily beautiful. Her face bent out of the darkness towards him with a look of concern.

“I came to see if you were awake,” she continued, still in a whisper.

He sat up. Even though he was fully dressed, the room felt cold.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“I don’t think I’ve been asleep long. To tell the truth, I’d rather stay awake.”

She put her lamp down on a low table and moved back into the shadows.

He sensed that she was frightened of him.

“Why did they move you to this room?” she asked.

He explained. She was very subdued when he finished.

“How did you know I was here?” he asked.

She hesitated.

“My old nurse Sonam knows everything that goes on in Dorjela,” she said.

“She told me you had been moved here.”

“I see. How did you get here? The monk who showed me to this room said the door would be watched all night.”

He thought she smiled to herself.

“Dorje-la was built to hold secrets,” she whispered.

“And you?” he asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“Are you one of its secrets?”

She looked down at her feet. When she looked up again, her eyes seemed darker, but full of stars.

“Perhaps,” she answered in a small voice.

Christopher looked at her. Her eyes were like pools, deep pools in which a man could drown if he were careless enough.

“How do you come to be here?” he asked.

“I have always been here,” she said simply.

He looked at her again. It seemed impossible that such grace could belong in a place like this.

“There has always been a Lady at Dorje-la,” she went on.

“A Lady?” he said, not understanding.

“Someone to represent the Lady Tara,” she answered.

“The goddess Drolma, Avalokita’s consort. She has always dwelt here in Dorje-la, in the body of a woman.”

He gazed at her in horror.

“You mean you’re a goddess? That they worship you?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“No,” she said.

“Tara is the goddess. Or Drolma, if you prefer she has many names. I am a woman. She incarnates herself in me, but I am not she; I am not the goddess. Do you understand?”

He shook his head.

“It’s simple,” she said.

“We are all aspects of the eternal Buddha.

My aspect is Tara. She can be seen in me and through me. But I am not Tara. I am Chindamani. I am just a vehicle for Tara, here in Dorje-la. She has other bodies in other places.”

Christopher shook his head again.

“None of this makes sense to me. I could believe you are a goddess, that’s not hard. You’re lovelier than any statue I’ve ever seen.”

She blushed and looked away.

“I am only a woman,” she murmured.

“I have known nothing but this life, this body. Only Tara knows my other bodies. When I am reborn, Tara will have yet another body. But Chindamani will be no more.”

Outside a gust of wind clattered briefly and was still.

“I’m sorry this is hard for you,” she said.

“I’m sorry too.”

She looked at him again and smiled.

“You should not be so sad.”

But he was sad. Nothing would turn him from that now.

“Tell me,” he said, ‘what does the name Chindamani mean? You said Tara had many names. Is that one of them?”

She shook her head.

“No, it’s a Sanskrit word. It means “the wish-fulfilling jewel”.

The jewel is part of an old legend: whoever found it could ask for all his wishes to be fulfilled. Do you have stories like that where you come from?”

“Yes,” said Christopher. But to himself he thought that they all ended in tragedy.

“You have not told me your name,” she said.

“Christopher,” he replied.

“My name is Christopher.”

“Ka-ris To-feh. What does it mean?”

“It’s difficult to explain,” he said.

“One of the names of the god my people worship is “Christ”. “Christopher” was the name of a man who carried him on his shoulders when he was a child. It means “the one who carried Christ”.”

He though she looked at him oddly, as though his words had struck a chord in her. She was silent for a while, lost in thought.

He studied her face, wishing it were daylight so he might see her better.

“Chindamani,” he said, changing the subject, “I know who the Dorje Lama is. I know why he brought my son here, why he wants to keep him here. You said you could help me take William away.

Are you still willing to do that?”

She nodded.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why do you want to help?”

She frowned.

“I need your help in return,” she said.

“I can find a way out of Dorje-la for you and your son. But once we are outside I am helpless. I was brought to this place as a little girl: the world is just like a dream to me. I need you to help me find my way in it.”

“But why should you want to leave at all? Help me to get William out and I will take him the rest of the way.”

She shook her head.

“I told you there was danger here,” she said.

“I have to leave.”

“You mean you’re in danger?”

She shook her head again.

“No. No-one would dare harm me. But others are in danger.

One in particular: his life is in great danger. I have to help him escape. I want you to help me.”

“I don’t understand. Who is this person? Why is his life in danger?”

She hesitated.

“It isn’t easy to explain.”

“Try.”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said.

“It will be better if you see for yourself. Come with me. But be quiet. If we are discovered, I won’t be able to help you. He will have you killed.”

“Who? Who will have me killed?”

“A Mongol. They say he comes from a distant place called Russia. His name is Zamyatin.”

Christopher nodded.

“Yes,” he said.

“I know about him. Is he the source of the danger here?”

“Yes. Zamyatin and those who support him. He has followers in the monastery. The man who brought you here, Tsarong Rinpoche, is one of them.”

It was still unclear, but Christopher could see the beginnings of a pattern.

“Where are we going?” he said.

She looked at him directly for the first time.

“To see your son,” she said.

“I promised I would take you to him.”

They left Christopher’s room through a hidden door in the wall, behind a heavy hanging. There was a long, musty passage that led them to a second door, through which they entered a public corridor. Chindamani knew her way impeccably. He watched her glide ahead of him, a mere shadow blending with other shadows.

They remained on the upper storey, passing along curiously shaped corridors and through dark, freezing rooms. Finally, they came to a spindly wooden ladder that led up to a hatch set in the roof of the passage. On hooks near the ladder several heavy sheepskin coats were hanging.

“Put one of these on,” ordered Chindamani, passing a chuba to Christopher.

“We’re going outside?”

She nodded.

“Yes. Outside. You’ll see.”

She slipped into a chuba that was several sizes too big for her, drew its hood over her head, and without another word turned and scrambled dexterously up the ladder. At the top, she used one hand to raise the hatch. It was like opening a door into a maelstrom. A freezing wind came down like a breath from a northern hell. Chindamani’s lamp was snuffed out instantly, leaving them in total darkness. Christopher climbed up after her.

“Stay close to me!” she shouted.

The wind drove into her face with a brutal force that almost toppled her from the ladder. She crawled out on to the flat roof, bending low in order to avoid being caught by the wind and tossed aside. The darkness was not darkness, but a mass of indecipherable sounds: the howls and whimpers of lost souls in a wilderness of pain.

Christopher clambered out beside her and replaced the hatch with difficulty. He reached out and found her in the darkness. She took his hand, gripping it tightly with cold and frightened fingers.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, Christopher could make out vague shapes around them: the golden cupolas and finials, prayer-wheels and gilded statues that he had seen from a distance on the day of his arrival at Dorje-la. Chindamani knew her way across the roof from long experience. Together, they moved through the gale until they came to the very edge. Chindamani pulled Christopher close and put her lips to his ear.

“This is the hard part,” she said.

He wondered where the easy part had been.

“What do we have to do?” he asked.

“There’s a bridge,” she shouted.

“It goes from the roof to another shelf of the mountain. It isn’t far.”

Christopher looked into the darkness beyond the roof.

“I can’t see anything!” he yelled. His lips brushed her ear; he wanted to kiss her. Now, in the darkness, in the storm.

“It’s there,” she called back.

“Believe me. But in this wind we have to go on our hands and knees.

There are no rails. Nothing to hold on to.”

“How wide is it?” This did not sound like a very good idea.

“As wide as you want it to be,” she said.

“Ten miles wide. As wide as Tibet. As wide as the hand of Lord Chenrezi. You will not fall off.”

He looked into the darkness again. He wished he had her confidence.

“Don’t be so sure,” he said.

She let go of his hand and dropped down on all fours. He could just make her out, a small dark figure ahead of him, crawling into the night.

He followed suit. The chuba made him feel huge and awkward, an easy target for the wind to snatch and bowl over. He felt acutely anxious for Chindamani, fearful that her tiny figure would be no match for the fierce gusts, that she would be taken like a leaf and thrown into the void.

The darkness swallowed her up, and he crawled forward to the spot where he had last seen her. He could just make out the first few feet of a stone bridge jutting out from the roof. He had asked how wide it was, but not how long. As near as he could judge, it was less than three feet wide, and its surface seemed as smooth as glass. He preferred not to think about what lay beneath it.

His heart beating uncomfortably, he held his breath and moved out on to the bridge, gripping the sides with his hands, keeping his knees close together, praying that the wind would not gust suddenly and tear him off. In spite of the freezing air, he felt hot beads of sweat form on his forehead and cheeks. The chub a kept getting in the way, threatening to entangle itself with his legs and trip him. He could not see Chindamani in front. There was only wind and darkness darkness that had no end, wind that kept on coming, blind and inexhaustible.