Tulku

10

AT NOON NEXT day they halted among the snows on the highest pass they had yet tried to cross. Theodore had lost all sense of direction among the intertwining mountains, though the position of the sun seemed to say that three days ago they had been heading south and now they were going north again.

‘We done a detour,’ explained Mrs Jones. ‘He went out of his way south, so as the old holy man at Daparang could have a dekko at you, and now he’s taking a short cut north, save time, instead of going the whole way back and round.’

They had halted not for the noon rest – the thin icy air made stillness seem half way to death – but because a wall of snow had slid down from the peak on the right and was lying, twenty feet high in some places, across the narrows of the pass. Two of the escort were stamping and digging a narrow passage at the lowest part, but they hadn’t gone more than a few feet in when the wall of the passage collapsed on them and they had to be dug out; the hindmost man emerged laughing, as though being buried alive was a splendid joke, but the leader took longer to rescue and therefore longer to see the humour of it.

Meanwhile three of the escort had been expostulating with the Lama, clearly from their gestures saying it would be better to go back. He listened to them without a word, then turned away and moved along the obstacle, wading knee-deep through loose drift. He stopped and stood with slowly nodding head by a place in the wall that looked no better than the first they had tried. The escort, grumbling and unwilling, started to hack and dig and stamp again until they were out of sight. This time they wore ropes round their waists in case of another collapse. Lung was holding Albert’s head while Mrs Jones cleared a ball of snow from his hoof. Sir Nigel, unloaded and swathed in blankets hung his head and gasped at the useless air.

Suddenly there was an excited cry and the escort started to lead the yaks into the gap. Theodore followed in his turn, leading Bessie, and found that at the point which the Lama had chosen, the ground on the far side fell sharply away and most of the thickness of the snow wall had spilt down it. Now the escort were stamping a ledge back along to the path, which dropped precipitously down through snow-fields to another of the lushly forested valleys that threaded among the peaks.

They had not reached the trees when they heard from above and behind them a long, slow grumbling roar; the air quivered with shock-waves below the threshold of hearing, and lesser roars followed as snows loosened by the first vibrations slid and settled. The escort broke into mutters, which seemed centred as much on the Lama as on the noise in the mountains.

‘Avalanche,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I bet his Reverence has managed to make ’em think it come just where we was standing. He’s a sly old geezer, ain’t he?’

‘He was right about where to make the path,’ said Theodore over his shoulder.

‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘But you mustn’t go thinking that proves he’s right about everything else.’

There was a note in her voice which made him look round to where she was leading Albert down the path. Even through the dimness of the veil he saw one large eye wink.

‘Are you sure?’ he cried.

‘Course I ain’t,’ she snapped, suddenly angry. ‘And watch where you’re walking. And keep your voice down.’

Theodore turned his head and trudged on, confused. The night before, on their way down from their interview with the Lama, she had suddenly said, ‘I’m not telling old Lung till I know for certain, one way or the other. I don’t want him puppying round, all anxious, right? And that means you’ll have to ask His Reverence not to mention it in front of him – don’t tell him why – perhaps he won’t fancy the kid having a Chinese Daddy. Just let him think I don’t want Lung to know ’cause I’m a bit ashamed, like.’ No doubt that accounted for her asking Theodore to keep his voice down now, but not for the violent shift of tone. She had sung most of the time on their way up to the pass, until the air became too thin for wasted breath, but between whiles Theodore had noticed her riding or walking with an unaccustomed slouch, as if deep in thought.

He was confused at a deeper level too. Obviously it would be best if there were no child – an infant conceived in sin, born out of wedlock and doomed to be reared in an idolatrous creed . . . but Theodore had slept uneasily, and in the timeless slithering intervals when he was neither awake nor asleep he had been conscious that somebody or something was standing at the top of the ladder outside the upper room in the farm, waiting to be let in. Sometimes he thought it was the Lama Amchi, come down from the hillside; once he had been certain that it was Father, alive and safe; but several times it had been a vaguer being, a bodiless cloud, the soul of the unborn Tulku. Theodore had even dreamed that he had slid out of his cot and opened the door and found nothing there but the starlit mountains – and then he would be awake in his blankets, raging with fleas and knowing he had never opened the door at all. Of course it was only dreams, but the memory was still strong as he picked his way down the tilt of the track towards the cedar-scented woods.

They slept that night in a village in the valley, where the villagers held an impromptu festival to celebrate the Lama’s presence. It seemed that the expedition was now returning to territory where he was well known and revered. Next day they climbed a good broad track up the far side of the valley and came to a wide plateau, ringed with ridged peaks, quite barren and without even snow to vary the deadness. For two hours the track wound north across this desert and all the time the peaks funnelled in until, about the middle of the afternoon, they crossed a slight ridge and looked down on an extraordinary bowl or plain. It was four or five miles across, almost circular, reaching on this side to the foot of the ridge where they stood, rimmed to left and right with cliffs which were really the beginnings of the peaks, and on the far side apparently ending with a steepish slope of bare ground which rose to a horizon between the flanking mountains. The floor of the plain was made entirely of close-packed rounded boulders, some as small as a clenched fist and others large as a hay-bale, but all lying so level that from the distance they looked like dark grey water, made opaque by the ruffling of a breeze.

Here, to Theodore’s surprise, the escort started to make camp by unloading the yaks and building a larger-than-usual fire of dried dung. Anywhere would have been a more appealing place than this, he thought. Surely they could have crossed the plain – it was still three hours till nightfall – and found somewhere better beyond it. The wind, which was full of fine, abrasive grit, slashed at them from erratic directions and set up vague hootings among the stones. They ate their meal early and then simply sat and waited for nightfall, but when Mrs Jones set out for a stroll towards the nearer cliffs the Lama immediately sent two of the escort to fetch her back.

‘There are fourteen devils in this place,’ he explained solemnly. ‘Within my protection you are safe, but beyond it they will cast you down and break your limbs, howling.’

Indeed at dusk he performed a ritual, circling round the camp with a weird, gliding step and stopping at four points to make an invocation which sounded like no language at all, but a mixture of whooping cries and sharp barks and a booming hum with bits of gabble threaded through. The escorts turned inwards towards the fire, shutting their eyes and stopping their ears while he performed, and as soon as he had finished rolled themselves in their blankets and lay still. Lung and Theodore copied them and Mrs Jones went to her tent, but Theodore spent longer than usual saying his prayers. Though he was praying to the emptiness which was all he had found for many days, it crossed his mind to ask that Mrs Jones should turn out not to be pregnant after all; but before the thought had formed itself into words he tried to erase it – there was something appalling about the idea of praying that a life should not exist.

Again he slept badly, and whenever he woke he saw the Lama sitting a little further up the hill, bolt upright, staring out across the mysterious plain, cross-legged and motionless, sentinel against the princes of the powers of the air and spiritual wickedness in high places. St Paul’s strange phrase repeated and repeated itself in Theodore’s muddled brain. He kept telling himself that these fourteen silly devils didn’t exist, and suppose they did, there was nothing a heathen priest could do to control them; but at the same time he knew quite well that he was scared, and that if the Lama hadn’t been there he would have been more scared still.

Early next morning they set about crossing the plain, and Theodore at once discovered why they hadn’t tried the previous afternoon. Night would certainly have caught them somewhere out in the middle. Each stone, though apparently just like all the others except in size – a flattish dark blue-grey oval, very smooth and veined with paler lines – seemed to have a life of its own. In places they lay loosely on beds of the sharp grit and it was possible to pick a way between them, but mostly they were many layers deep and one had to pace across them as if they were stepping-stones, never knowing whether they would stay firm or shift with one’s weight. All the while the stinging, buffeting wind came and went, seeming to strike at the exact moment when one was balancing for the next pace.

‘Don’t need no devils to cast us down round here,’ grumbled Mrs Jones. ‘This wind! We’ll be lucky if we get the horses across in one piece.’

Certainly, though the stones were trying enough for the humans, for the animals they were almost impossible. The yaks managed a little better than the horses, being more sure-footed, lower-slung, and readier to take a stumble, but even they had to be coaxed or prodded almost every yard. In the worst places the escort gathered all the bedding and laid it out, several layers thick, to make a pair of rafts. An animal could be led onto one of these, then the other one laid in front and when it was standing on that the first one could be taken round to make another short stretch of tolerable footing. Elsewhere the escort piled the larger stones together to make a rough causeway. There were stretches where the remains of previous causeways showed clearly, the results of earlier crossings by other travellers, and they used these where they could. But frequent repairs were necessary, as though something had come since they were made and started to tumble the stones into their normal loose ruin.

Lung was leading Rollo along one of these stretches of old causeway when a stone, apparently as stable as any other, tilted sideways under Rollo’s hoof. The movement was so sudden that to Theodore, following next behind, it looked as though the other end of the stone had been violently flipped up from below. The pony’s leg shot down as if into soft bog and through the beginnings of its squeal Theodore heard the bone snap. The Tibetans left their yaks and came crowding round, gabbling at each other as they tried to drag the struggling animal free. It squealed with fresh pain. Mrs Jones strode past Theodore with her gun under her arm, her face invisible beneath the veil. The click of the bolt stood out sharply through the clatter and scrape of hooves on stone. Theodore looked away. The shot rang out, clapped against the nearing cliffs and came back in echoes that sounded like laughter from stone lungs.

The Tibetans dragged the pony’s body a few yards to one side and began to pile a heap of stones over it. The Lama turned to the cliffs and intoned a few short sentences in Tibetan.

‘The old ones have taken their sacrifice,’ he said in Mandarin. ‘We will have no more trouble.’

Indeed from that moment the causeway became wider and better-built, leading them in twenty minutes out on to a sound track which climbed across a long slope of thin-grassed soil and bare rock and disappeared round a buttress of brown cliff. By now it was well into the afternoon, so they fed the weary horses and yaks and improvised a hurried meal for themselves.

‘We’re getting somewhere near,’ said Mrs Jones in a low voice to Theodore while Lung was still with the horses. ‘Soon as the old boy’s finished his hobson-jobson, ask him how much further, and while you’re doing that see if you can ask him, natural like, if there isn’t an easier way than this. If I find he’s right, what he said about me, I’m getting back to civilization double quick, where there’s proper doctors. But don’t let him see that’s what you’re on about.’

The Lama was standing at the end of the causeway, arms raised, crying aloud in a series of wailing repetitive phrases as though he were preaching or singing to the stones; sometimes in a pause between the phrases the distorted echo of his voice came whining back, as though the stones were answering. When he had finished he turned to Theodore and answered both his questions without being asked.

‘We are in the territory of Dong Pe,’ he said, smiling like a host welcoming expected guests. ‘This night I shall sleep in my own house. I am sorry that the journey has seemed so difficult, but the old ones who dwell round the stone lake are our guardians as much as our tormentors. This is the only path to Dong Pe, and close though we are to the border I do not think that even the Chinese could drag cannons across here.’

‘Cannon?’ asked Theodore.

‘When I was a young man I walked all across the mountains and plains, both to seek wild and waste places in which to perform my spiritual exercises and also to visit monasteries and learn from their teachers. I went to the great monastery at Nachuga, in the far west, a place famous for learning and for its many shrines, but I did not stay there long because I found that the monks had begun to quarrel among themselves, and all learning was forgotten in the arguments. The summer after I left, this argument broke into fighting and the Abbot drove his opponents out of Nachuga. They, however, journeyed to Lhasa and complained to the Dalai Lama. Now in those days the Chinese had much influence in Lhasa, and they persuaded the Dalai Lama that the time had come to break the power and independence of Nachuga, so he sent a message to the Abbot ordering him to restore the rebel monks and reform the monastery according to their wishes. Naturally the Abbot refused. Then, with Chinese help, soldiers came from Lhasa, bringing cannons, and they bombarded Nachuga until most of its rooms and shrines were rubble. It was a poor inheritance those rebel monks came into . . . But with the help of the old ones I will see that this does not happen at Dong Pe. Come now. We will ride these last few miles, so that the Mother of the Tulku shall see Dong Pe in daylight.’

‘We’ve only got three horses now.’

‘The Chinese can follow with the yaks.’

Lung did not like this arrangement at all, but in the end he accepted it, scowling. Theodore perceived suddenly that Lung was aware that something was being hidden from him, something which Mrs Jones and the Lama and Theodore knew. This would have been wounding enough if they had merely been companions, but for poor Lung, already half-sick with the ending of his idyll, it must have seemed a sign like the ending of love itself.

While they were redistributing the horse-loads among the yaks, Theodore saw Mrs Jones, standing alone a little to one side, holding Sir Nigel’s head. Her veil as usual hid her face, but again he noticed how her stance had changed, an imperceptible slackening in the line of her spine and shoulders that showed deep inward thought, and, he guessed, an echo of Lung’s unhappiness. He could almost feel her fear and uncertainty. This was so unlike her that without thought he led Bessie across towards her. She turned her head to look at him, stiffening her stance as she did so.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he muttered.

She reached out an arm, took him by the shoulder and drew him close against her side, holding him there while the wind flapped her cloak round him in swirling folds.

‘Let’s hope,’ she whispered.

Beyond the stone lake the track was better than any they had travelled for many days, sometimes steep but always reasonably smooth, twisting its way around rock outcrops that covered all the long slope between the two pincer-like ranges that ringed the stone lake. The Lama rode Albert, sitting sideways across his haunches like a peasant and seeming to control him as easily as Mrs Jones controlled Sir Nigel, without visible signal or command. He hurried them on, apparently impatient for the first time in the whole journey, though the horses gasped and stumbled with the steadily increasing height until Mrs Jones insisted on dismounting and leading Sir Nigel up the steeper stretches. Once or twice, looking over his shoulder, Theodore caught a glimpse of the yak-train, already ant-like with distance, and beyond that the stone lake, which from this height seemed to glimmer and shift as if it were indeed a lake of water.

At last the ground levelled and the track swung east, dipped, and began to sidle steeply down along the far side of the right-hand range. Now below them opened another precipitous valley, wider than most they had seen and splitting into several side-valleys. Beyond it stood a single massive peak, not rising to any dramatic points but topped by a long smooth snow-ridge which made the whole slab seem solemn and tremendous.

‘Now that’s something,’ said Mrs Jones in an awed voice.

‘In our language it is called the Dome of Purest Light,’ said the Lama. ‘Its contemplation brings self-knowledge. Tell the Mother of the Tulku that henceforth she shall gaze on it every day.’

‘I wish he wouldn’t keep calling me that,’ grumbled Mrs Jones, who had learnt by now to recognize those particular syllables. ‘Counting chickens, that is.’

They rode on down the twisting track. All along its length the little shrines sprouted on every small level, like a field of weird stone fungi. Slowly the snows of the great mountain changed their colour and the shadows on it, which had been a brighter blue than the sky, darkened and grew as the sun westered. There were pinks and golds among the glittering white, and the depths below were already heavy with dusk, when the track reached a point where it seemed about to lance out over empty space. The Lama rode unhesitatingly to this dead end and swung out of sight round a pillar of sheer rock. Theodore followed Mrs Jones round the bend and reined to a halt beside her. All three sat perfectly still, as if transfixed by the shock of vision. Then the Lama flung out his arm in a wide gesture.

‘Dong Pe,’ he said.

Mrs Jones and Theodore sat and stared.

The buttress they had just rounded had concealed the way in which the dark cleft of the valley widened suddenly to an enormous bowl ringed by the towering ice ramparts, flanked with steep forests and floored with little meadows. The Lama was not pointing at any of that, but at the mountainside ahead. There, clinging like the hive of wild bees to what seemed almost vertical cliff, was the monastery. Its walls were white. Many of the roofs were flat; others were shallow curves of hummocky tiles, ending in wide-spreading eaves. In several places the roof-line erupted into pyramids topped with spiky onion-domes, and the largest of these, near the middle, seemed to be covered with a dull yellow metal. The monastery spread apparently endlessly along the cliff, as if it had grown there, section by section, wherever a ledge or cranny gave the builders foot-hold. The flat roofs and the sharp lines of buttresses and the heavy-lintelled deep-set windows along the upper storeys made this growth seem more like that of a crystal, which increases by angles and facets, than that of a plant.

Above the main buildings the cliff was pocked with the mouths of caves, and below lay a huddle of small squat huts and exotic shrines. The whole site faced east and was already deep in the shade of the mountain behind it, so the faint glow of lights at many of the windows added to the sense of a huge, mysterious life born out of the very mountain.

‘I have been to Lhasa and seen the great Potala,’ intoned the Lama in his clanging Mandarin. ‘I have travelled in India and seen the mighty shrines of that land. I have seen even the sea. But in all this world of illusion I have seen no illusion that can compare with Dong Pe.’