By the Edwardian standards of rationally-arrived-at code of values and stable career, young Traverse here was an obviously drifting wreck without much hope of ever being straightened out. What on earth sort of family produced wastrels like this? As long as he was this far from the orbit of an ordinary life, he might as well be pressed into service for a mission the Lieutenant-Colonel had had in mind since Prance had brought his news. Without an unambiguous go-ahead from home, Halfcourt had decided to resurrect a long-shelved plan to project a mission eastward to establish relations with the Tungus living east of the Yenisei.
“Of course you’re free to refuse, I’ve no authority, really.”
They went in to the library, and Halfcourt took down some maps.
“A journey from the Taklamakan to Siberia, over fifteen hundred miles as the bergut flies, northeast across the Tian Shan, across the southern Altai, to Irkutsk and the Angara, and on into shamanic Asia. Islam does not flourish there. Few if any Christian explorers will journey there—they prefer polar wastes, African forest, to this wilderness without issue or promise. If they must be among the Tungus, say for reasons of anthropology, then they will approach from the sea, against the river.”
For his own part, Kit supposed he was game, imagining that the journey here so far had been too easy, that stranniki do not depend upon railway travel, that this must be the next stage in a mission beyond Kashgar, that Yashmeen and Swome had perhaps known nothing of.
He was to be accompanied on his journey by Lieutenant Prance. They looked over the maps in Halfcourt’s library. “We must begin here,” Prance pointing. “This great Archway known as the Tushuk Tash. Which means ‘a rock with a hole in it.’”
“This area all around it, the Kara Tagh? looks like it hasn’t been mapped very well. Why bother with it, why not skirt it completely? Be a lot more direct.”
“Because this Arch is the Gateway,” declared Prance—“unless we enter by way of it, we shall always be on the wrong journey. Everything between here and the Tunguska country belongs to the Northern Prophet. We may follow the same route there as ordinary travelers, but if we do not pass first beneath the Great Arch, we shall arrive somewhere else. And when we try to return . . .”
“‘We may not be able to,’” said Kit. “Yes, and some would call that metaphysical hogwash, Lieutenant.”
“We will be disguised as Buriat pilgrims, at least as far as Lake Baikal. If you are lucky enough to grow into your role, perhaps, somewhere on the journey north, all will become clearer to you.”
Fine one to talk, given his own, one could say, regionally inappropriate appearance—pale, redheaded, eyes perhaps a bit too far apart, more reasonable-looking in a top hat and frock coat, and some setting a bit more urban. His attempts at disguise would not, Kit feared, suggest the Buriat pilgrim so much as the British idiot.
Early next morning Halfcourt was in Kit’s room, shaking him awake and puffing cigar-smoke like a steam engine. “Bright eyes, everyone, heave out and trice up, for you’ve an audience in half an hour with the Doosra himself.”
“Shouldn’t it be you, you’re the ranking English speaker around here.”
Halfcourt waved his cigar impatiently. “Far too well known. What’s needed is an unknown quantity to everybody out here, but marginally less so to me, it being at the margins, you see, that I do most of my business.”
THE DOOSRA WAS YOUNGER than Kit had imagined and lacked gravitas. Plumper than the general run of desert ascetic, he was packing a new Japanese “38th Year” Arisaka rifle—basically a .26-caliber Mauser whose eponymous Colonel had improved some on the bolt design—captured in a raid whose bloodiest details the young visionary had no reluctance to share with Kit, in fluent English, though his plausibility was not helped by a pronounced University-nitwit accent. Kit had arrived on one of the small shaggy local horses, more like a pony, with his stirrups almost touching the ground, whereas Al-Doosra was mounted on his legendary Marwari, and some horse it was, a horse of great bravery and endurance, all but deathless, finely quivering with some huge internal energy, as if poised to ascend and fly at any moment. Many in fact were the people out here who swore they’d seen the horse, whose name was Ogdai, soaring against the stars.
“I am only a servant in this matter,” said the Doosra. “My own master will be found in the north, at his work. If you wish to seek him for yourself, he will receive you. He will satisfy all your questions about this world, and the Other. You can then come back and tell the English and Russian officers in Kashgar all they wish to know. Will you assure me that you have their trust?”
“I don’t know. How will I find him, the one you prepare the way for?”
“I will send with you my loyal lieutenant Hassan, who will help you through the fearful Gates and past those who guard them.”
“The . . .”
“It isn’t only the difficult terrain, the vipers and sandstorms and raiding parties. The journey itself is a kind of conscious Being, a living deity who does not wish to engage with the foolish or the weak, and hence will try to dissuade you. It insists on the furthest degree of respect.”
AROUND MIDNIGHT Mushtaq looked in. Halfcourt had been reading Yashmeen’s letter again, the one the American had brought. His cigar, ordinarily a cheery coal in the dimness of the room, had in this sorrowful atmosphere gone out.
“I am contaminated beyond hope, Mushtaq.”
“Find her again, sir. Even if you must ascend the highest tower in the cruelest city in the world, do what you must to find her. At least write back to her.”
“Look at me.” An elderly man in a shabby uniform. “Look at what I have done with my life. I must never so much as speak to her again.”
That said, one day he creaked up onto one of the tough, low-set Kirghiz horses and went riding out alone, perhaps in search of the Compassionate, perhaps of whatever, by now, had become of Shambhala. Mushtaq had refused to go with him. Prokladka, convinced that the Englishman had lost his mind at last, went on with his devious activities in Kashgar.
SOME WEEKS LATER Auberon Halfcourt appeared at a book-dealer’s in Bukhara, clean, trimmed, and pressed—respectably turned out, in fact, except for the insane light in his eyes. He was no surprise to Tariq Hashim, who had seen at least a generation of these searchers pass through—most of them, lately, German. He led Halfcourt into a back room, poured cups of mint tea from a battered brass pot, and from a lacquered cabinet inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl produced, reverently, it seemed to the Englishman, a box containing a loose stack of long narrow pages, seven lines to the page, printed from wood blocks. “Early seventeenth century—translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan by the scholar Taranatha. Included in the part of the Tibetan Canon known as the Tengyur.”
Since he had left Kashgar, Halfcourt had been dreaming persistently of Yashmeen, always the same frustrating narrative—she was trying to get another message to him, he was never where he should have been to receive it. He tried now to summon the benevolence of dream.
“I have also heard of a letter, in the form of a poem,” he said carefully, “from a Tibetan scholar-prince to his father, who has died and been reborn in Shambhala. . . .”
The bookseller nodded. “That is the Rigpa Dzinpai Phonya, or Knowledge-Bearing Messenger, by Rimpung Ngawang Jigdag, 1557. Directions for journeying to Shambhala are addressed by the author to a Yogi, who is a sort of fictional character, though at the same time real—a figure in a vision, and also Rinpungpa himself. I do know of a variant currently for sale, which contains lines that do not appear in other versions. Notably, ‘Even if you forget everything else,’ Rinpungpa instructs the Yogi, ‘remember one thing—when you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ Easy for him to say, of course, being two people at once. I could put you in touch with the seller, if you were serious.”
“I’m serious,” Halfcourt said. “But I don’t read Tibetan.”
Tariq shrugged in sympathy. “Translations of these guides to Shambhala are usually into G
erman—Grünwedel’s Shambhalai Lamyig, of course . . . most recently, three pages from Laufer’s volume of Uyghur Buddhist literature, author unknown, supposedly thirteenth century, which all the Germans who come through here seem to be carrying in their rucksacks.”
“I suppose what I’m asking,” Halfcourt struggling not to give in to a strange premonitory sense of exhilaration and sorrow he had been feeling for days, of something gathering, “is, how practical are any of them, as directions to finding a real place.”
The bookseller nodded perhaps for longer than he had to. “It helps to be a Buddhist, I’m told. And to have a general idea of the geography out here. It is all but certain, for example, that one should be looking north of the Taklamakan. Which does not narrow anything down much. But it is all I know anyone to be agreed upon.
“I am myself submissive to the way of the Prophet, very conventionally so I’m afraid. But Shambhala—though it is all very interesting, I’m sure—”
By now the city outside was saturated in shadow, the women gliding away in loose robes and horsehair veils, the domes and minarets silent and unassailable against unwished-for depths of blue, the markets wind-ruled and deserted, every insane desert vision ever experienced out here, for just a moment, plausible.
There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.
Kit had always thought he would return somehow to the San Juans. It had never entered his mind that his fate might be here, that here in Inner Asia would be his bold fourteeners and desert snows, aboriginal horsemen, trailside saloons and altogether-incomprehensible women, somehow most desirable whenever there was other business, often deadly in nature, at hand.
It was not until he finally saw Lake Baikal that he understood why it had been necessary to journey here, and why, in the process of reaching it, penance, madness, and misdirection were inescapable.
Prance had stayed back in Irkutsk, pleading exhaustion, but Hassan was insistent that for a devout Buriat the object of pilgrimage must be the great stone at the mouth of the Angara, where the river flowed out of the lake.
“But that was only a cover story,” Kit reminded him. “We aren’t Buriats, either of us.”
Hassan’s gaze was open but unreadable. “We have nearly completed the journey.”
“And the Prophet? The Doosra’s master? Shall I speak to him?”
“You spoke to him,” said Hassan.
“When—” Kit began, and in the instant, there was Baikal.
He had gazed into pure, small mountain lakes in Colorado, unsoiled by mine tailings or town waste, and was not surprised by the perfect clarity which had more than once taken him to the verge of losing himself, to the dizzying possibility of falling into another order of things. But this was like looking into the heart of the Earth itself as it was before there were eyes of any kind to look at it.
It was a mile deep, so he’d been told by Auberon Halfcourt, and sheltered critters unknown elsewhere in Creation. Trying to sail on it was dangerous and unpredictable—winds rose in seconds, waves became small mountains. A journey to it was not a holiday excursion. In some way he was certain of but had not quite worked through, it was another of those locations like Mount Kailash, or Tengri Khan, parts of a superterrestrial order included provisionally in this lower, broken one. He felt swept now by a violent certitude. He had after all taken the wrong path, allowed the day’s trivialities to engage him—simply not worked hard enough to deserve to see this. His first thought was that he must turn and go back to Kashgar, all the way back to the great Gateway, and begin again. He looked around to tell Hassan, who he was sure had already seen into his own thoughts. Hassan was of course no longer there.
BACK AT THE BEGINNING of their journey, though it lay only a short distance from Kashgar, near the village of Mingyol, and could sometimes be seen from odd angles looming in the distance, the great stone Arch known as the Tushuk Tash was considered impossible actually to get to even by the local folks. A maze of slot canyons lay in the way, too many of them ever to have been counted. All maps were useless. Cartographers of different empires, notably the Russian, had been driven to nervous collapse trying to record the country around the Tushuk Tash. Some settled for embittered fantasy, others more conscientious left it blank.
When Hassan had heard that Kit and Prance must begin their journey by first passing beneath the great pierced rock, he had excused himself and gone off to pray, aloof and morosely silent, as if the Doosra had sent him to accompany them as some kind of punishment.
Some spoke of the colossal gate as a precipice, a bridge, an earthen dam, a passage between high rock walls . . . for others it was not a feature of the landscape but something more abstract, a religious examination, a cryptographic puzzle. . . . Hassan had always known it as “the Prophet’s Gate,” bearing not only the title but also the sanction of a Prophet who was understood to be not only the Prophet Mahommed but another as well, dwelling far to the north, for whom Hassan’s master the Doosra was the forerunner.
It had taken them all day. They went into a gray region of deep ravines and rock towers. Hassan led them without error through the maze of canyons. What earthly process could have produced them was a mystery. With the sun at this angle, the Kara Tagh looked like a stone city, broken into gray crystalline repetitions of city blocks and buildings windowless as if inhabited by that which was past sight, past light, past all need for distinguishing outside from in. Kit found he could not look at this country directly for more than a minute or so—as if its ruling spirits might properly demand obliquity of gaze as a condition of passage.
When they came at last to stand before the Gate, it did not seem like a natural formation but a structure of masonry, shaped stones fitted together without mortar, like the Pyramids, long before recorded history would have begun. In the distance, its peaks shimmering white, rose the Altai range, which their route would take them past. Kit looked up—it was a perhaps fatal risk, but he had to.
In the still-luminous sky, the thing was immense—a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred feet high, at least, flat across the top, and beneath that a great sharply pointed Gothic arch of empty space. Huge, dark, unstable, always in disintegration, shedding pieces of itself from so high up that by the time they hit the ground they’d be invisible, followed by the whizzing sound of their descent, for they fell faster than the local speed of sound. . . . At any moment a loose rock fragment might fall too fast for Kit to hear before it slashed into him. Down here everything was dark, but up there the gray conglomerate was being struck by the final light of day to an unanswerable brilliance.
Hovering, so high and stationary that at first she could have been mistaken for a flaw in his field of vision, a golden eagle caught the rays and seemed to emit light of her own. Among the Kirghiz these eagles were used for hunting, and needed two men to handle them, being known to bring back the carcasses of antelopes and even wolves. The longer she hung above him at her majestic altitude, the more certain Kit became that this was a messenger.
The Chinese remind us that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, yet they keep curiously silent about the step itself, which too often must be taken, as now, from inaccessible ground, if not indeed straight down into an unmeasured abyss.
The moment he passed through the Gate, Kit was not so much deafened as blinded by a mighty release of sound—a great choral bellowing over the desert, bringing, like a brief interruption of darkness in the daytime, a distinct view now, in this dusk, of sunlit terrain, descending in a long gradient directly ahead to a city whose name, though at the moment denied him, was known the world over, vivid in these distances, bright yellow and orange, though soon enough it would be absorbed into the same gray confusion of exitless ravines and wind-shaped rock ascensions through which they had labored to get here and must again to regain the Silk Road. Then the vision had faded, embers of a trail-fire in the measureless twilight.
Turning to H
assan, “Did you see . . .”
“I saw nothing, sir.” In Hassan’s face sympathy and a plea for silence.
“Heard nothing?”
“It will be night soon, sir.”
THROUGHOUT THE JOURNEY, then, Kit had dreamed of the moment he had stepped through the Gate. Often the dream came just before dawn, after a lucid flight, high, æthereal, blue, arriving at a set of ropes or steel cables suspended, bridgelike, over a deep chasm. The only way to cross is face-skyward beneath the cables, hand over hand using legs and feet as well, with the sheer and unmeasurable drop at his back. The sunset is red, violent, complex, the sun itself the permanent core of an explosion as yet unimagined. Somehow in this dream the Arch has been replaced by Kit himself, a struggle he feels on waking in muscles and joints to become the bridge, the arch, the crossing-over. The last time he had the dream was just before rolling in to Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian. A voice he knew he should recognize whispered, “You are released.” He began to fall into the great chasm, and woke into the wine-colored light of the railroad carriage, lamps swaying, samovars at either end gasping and puffing like miniature steam engines. The train was just pulling into the station.
AFTER PASSING THROUGH the Prophet’s Gate, they had proceeded along the southern foothills of the Tian Shan, one Silk Road oasis to the next—Ak-su, Kucha, Korla, Kara-shahr, guiding on the otherworldly white pyramid of Khan Tengri, Lord of the Sky, from which light poured, burst continually, illuminating even the empty sky and transient clouds, past nephrite quarries where dust-covered spectres moved chained together on their own effortful pilgrimage toward a cup of water and a few hours’ sleep, through evening hailstorms that left the desert blindingly snow-covered in the morning, pockets of green garnet sand queerly aglow in the twilight, and sandstorms making it all but impossible to breathe, turning the day black—for some of those it overtook, black forever. By the time they arrived wayworn at the oasis of Turfan, beneath the Flaming Mountains, redder than the Sangre de Cristos, Kit had begun to understand that this space the Gate had opened to them was less geographic than to be measured along axes of sorrow and loss.
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