Blood of the Reich

13

The Lhasa Road, Tibet

September 2, 1938

T he Tibetan Plateau averages three miles in height and sprawls across an area four times the size of France, but it is not the simple tableland the name implies. The German “descent” from Kangra La (La was the Tibetan name for “pass”) was in fact a journey into an unending sea of treeless, arid, undulating mountains, swell after corrugated swell that ran on without obscuring haze until limited by the curve of the earth. It was magnificent desolation, only the highest peaks capped with snow at the end of summer. Tibet was grass-and-rock emptiness completely different from humid Sikkim, its brown folds meandering and stark. Rock cliffs broke through its grassy felt with vivid bands of ocher, yellow, and white. Rivers braided their way across gravel bottoms in deep valleys like the silver strands of a necklace. The sky was a deep, violet blue-Prussian blue, Raeder told the others, though his companions thought it purpler than that-and sunrise and sunset were yellow-green in the icy sky, dawn and dusk more electric and urgent than at home. Clouds and cliffs cast deep shadows that made a pinto contrast to the sunny ridges, and everything had a sharpness that confused any sense of distance. The Germans could pick out snowy peaks-Muller said one of them was Everest-that on the map were nearly a hundred miles away.

The air was thin but more precious because of it, and breathing reminded Raeder of drinking champagne. Lungs sucked greedily, throats raw and chilled from the draft, and there was a curious feeling of giddiness. The druglike euphoria countered the ache of muscles from the ceaseless climbs and descents.

At first, this side of Tibet-different from the Chinese border areas a thousand miles to the east that Raeder had explored with Hood four years before-seemed utterly empty. But then the explorers realized the dark humps they might mistake for distant boulders were in fact grazing yak, and that the black smudges were not patches of heather or thorn but nomadic felt tents. Southern Tibet was essentially steep pasture.

As the Germans marched, dirty, snot-nosed nomad children would sometimes run out to the dirt trail to fruitlessly beg. Or herdsmen would gallop on their ponies to pull up and stare at the German caravan as it passed, their faces dark and angular and their bodies wrapped in their chuba, a cloaklike fleece coat. The Germans kept their guns in view, Diels wearing the submachine gun and Raeder slinging his hunting rifle with scope across his back.

On three occasions the dugchen offered them tea, and Raeder and Eckells would then amuse the herdsmen by competing at shooting at rocks up to four hundred yards away. The men shouted approval at each puff of dust. But once, when Raeder aimed at a distant antelope, a chieftain gently shoved the muzzle aside. The Buddhists would not abide unnecessary killing.

When Raeder and Eckells were alone, however, they amused themselves by picking off animals that showed white against precipitous cliffs. They left the carcasses to the vultures.

The few Tibetan soldiers they encountered still practiced archery, since they had no spare bullets to expend on practice.

The Western show of arms was balanced by the little red swastika pennants that jutted up from the German pack animals like sturdy stalks, the wind snapping what Raeder hoped the natives would take as a familiar goodwill sign. Certainly they spotted similar swastikas inscribed or painted on doorways, monastery porticos, and farm carts. In some the swastika arms were extended into the intricate circular geometry Himmler had called a sun wheel. It was an encouraging suggestion that the Aryans were, indeed, finding ancient cousins.

The villages, made of mud brick with flat clay roofs, blended with the dun-colored hills and were hazed by yak-dung fires. With the only trees growing in remote river bottoms, the dung was a substitute for wood. It was slapped into bricks by young girls and stacked at each residence for winter fuel, proudly lining the top of every courtyard wall and reaching to the sill of every window.

The village roads were dirt, each plod of the yaks raising a plume of dung dust. Ill-fed dogs would bark and snarl as the Nazis passed, lunging against felt-rope tethers. The Germans shared the winding, lumpy lanes with scarlet-robed monks who hiked down from monasteries perched like forts on nearby hills. There were also barley farmers, herdsmen, shopkeepers, and migratory traders. The women were pretty, the Germans noticed: high-cheeked, dark-eyed, with hair like black silk. But they were modestly wrapped against the wind in colorful dress and striped apron called a pangden that discouraged much discernment of their form. The SS men were restless for women, but had no idea how to obtain any in this strange, contemplative culture.

Raeder wanted one to dominate, to hear her cries, but he dared not risk it. The mission required discipline. The craving made him moody, and when Diels tried to joke with him about the dung and the dust, he snapped in reply.

Submission was what he’d wanted from Lotte, until she hinted to her family about his tastes. The marriage became too complicated and had to end. And the accident was nearly that, an accident-he’d not planned it at all-but when the muzzle swung to follow a flight of rising ducks and traversed her body, his finger had acted on its own. He’d pretended that shotgun had been at the bottom of the boat, accidentally set off, and had just enough celebrity to discourage too many close questions. So Lotte died in surprise, sprawled in the bottom of the boat, the top of her head gone and the rest gushing blood, her mouth gaping with questions he himself couldn’t answer.

She’d been beautiful, innocent, naive, and uncooperative. He needed to find something great here, something truly colossal, to cement his place in history so that he’d finally be able to sleep.

“What are you brooding about, Kurt?”

“Victory.”

Raeder wondered if titans like Himmler had their own demons.

Religion was everywhere. Prayer flags were strung at every sacred hill. Prayer wheels spun on the walls at each holy site. Pointed white chortens, reliquaries for souls and saints, poked up at town entrances like upside-down turnips, or gigantic, golden-topped spark plugs. Every second male seemed to be a monk, and the monasteries seemed the only real industry. People shuffled while working mala s, Buddhist rosaries of 108 beads.

But Raeder’s quintet was drawn more to the old abandoned military forts, called dzong s. These medieval strongholds were empty and haunted, replaced by the monastic strongholds of an overpowering religion. The SS men felt more at home in these fortress ruins than in the dark, smoky monasteries with their ominous chants. Raeder’s men scrambled through their labyrinth of rooms like boys at a German castle. Here, they speculated, their Aryan ancestors would have ruled.

“It was a more heroic, military age,” said Kranz, their archaeologist. “Now all they do is pray.”

The valleys were planted in mustard and barley because wheat would not grow at this altitude. Chang, the odd beer, was made from barley. Incised into cliffs above the farms were red-daubed Buddha statues, or painted black and white ladders symbolic of the long prayerful climb toward nirvana.

Tibetan technology was primitive-there were virtually no wheeled carts-but the Germans did occasionally encounter a waterwheel. One, near Gyantse, was used to mill barley. Another used the waterpower only to turn prayer wheels outside of a monastery, each revolution a radio beam aimed at God.

Lakes were turquoise or cobalt, vivid against the treeless hills, and birds hung over them like kites, rotating in the wind. The Germans’ porter Akeh, one of several Tibetans they’d hired, pointed out sites for sky burials, where the dead were dismembered and left for vultures to hasten the cycle of returning to the earth. The carrion birds were holy.

“Poverty, superstition, ignorance, prayer, and barbarism,” Raeder summed up one night as they camped by Lake Yamdok Tso, enjoying the luxury of a wood campfire fed by a nearby copse of stunted trees. “Reichsfuhrer Himmler might begin to doubt that these Tibetans are or ever were Aryans, or that they could have left anything worth rediscovering.”

“We certainly haven’t found ruins of a nobler race,” said Muller. “Just crude forts.”

“Or any food beyond yak meat and barley cakes,” moaned cameraman Eckells. The tsampa cakes were as tasteless as they were commonplace.

“And yet we’re closer to heaven,” said Raeder. “The stars tight as a ceiling, the air sharp as a shard of ice. I think I know why they’re obsessed with religion. It’s the only occupation that makes sense here, a way to make use of this weird clarity. In such a case, might a civilization not make discoveries obscured to empires in lower, murkier places? Could the legends of Vril be true?”

“I don’t know, Kurt,” said Muller. “My God, they labor like peasants.”

“But they may have lost our secret wisdom,” said Kranz. “We need the help of the Tibetans, and for that we have to convince them that Germany and National Socialism are their natural allies.”

“With our runes and our swastikas,” said Diels.

“Our machines and our modernism,” said Eckells. “Our guns and our magnetometers.”

“Yes, and with our mysticism and belief in the past,” said Raeder. “Tibetans are a people lost in the past, and we seek it, too. They believe in lives beyond this one, and so does our Reichsfuhrer. We’re the new druids, my companions, the black knights who will lead the world to the purity of ice. Come, let’s build up our fire and sing for our porters.”

Their fire blazed higher, light reflected on the lake, and red sparks climbed to mingle with cold stars overhead. The Germans began singing a Reich military anthem, voices carrying across the water.

Flame upraise!

Rise in blazing light.

From the mountains along the Rhine.

Rise shining!

See, we are standing

Faithful in a blessed circle,

To see you, flame,

And so praise the Fatherland!

Holy Fire,

Call the Young together

So that next to your blazing flames,

Courage grows…

They seized burning brands and began marching, circling their camp as the mules shifted nervously. Then they paraded down to the dark lakeshore and, at Raeder’s command, hurled the brands high over the water. The torches fell like meteors, hissing into the frigid water. Fire and ice, World Ice Theory. Everything a struggle between light and dark, white and black, hot and cold, the immaculate and the corrupt.

Then they toasted one another with schnapps, howling at the moon like German werewolves.

The Tibetan porters watched silently from the shadows.