by Tom Martin
Suddenly, as she leaned forward, the man’s eyes opened wide. She froze. She had never seen blue eyes before, and these eyes were the blue of precious living coral, the blue of the Tibetan sky in cloudless midsummer when not a drop of moisture taints the crystalline atmosphere. She screamed in terror, but even as she did so she felt his huge bony hands grip her shoulders, causing her to scream even louder. Within a second four monks sprang to their feet and grabbed hold of the white man’s arms. The schoolteacher was thrown backwards to the floor, where she lay whimpering whilst the young monks grappled to subdue the ghoulish figure. A second later the Abbot’s deputy was there. The white man had calmed down, though he was hyperventilating. He had the glassy thousand-yard stare of someone in the grip of delirium. With fear and extreme anxiety in his voice, the Abbot’s deputy attempted to regain control of the situation. ‘Who are you?’
No response. The white man’s chest rose and fell. Then, slowly, he turned his head so that he could look straight up at his questioner. There seemed to be tears in his eyes but he was smiling. With ecstasy in his voice, he said, ‘I have been to Shangri-La.’
The doctor, who was standing next to the Abbot’s deputy, leaned towards him and whispered, ‘He is out of his mind.’
A look of fury crossed the white man’s face – he seemed to have heard the doctor’s words, or at the very least intuited his doubts.
‘I have been there.’
Then he fell back, exhausted. His eyes closed and he said almost in a whisper, ‘I followed Felix Koenig.’
The Abbot’s deputy leaned forward, praying the man would not slip into unconsciousness again, and asked:
‘Who is Felix Koenig? Is he another of your companions? Is he dead?’
The piercing blue eyes opened again, and though the head remained still, the dazzling pupils flickered and turned to deliver the full force of their gaze. The man smiled weakly.
‘Felix Koenig did not die . . . he was captured.’
‘By who?’
‘By the Russians. They took him to Siberia . . .’
The Abbot’s deputy thought that the white man was mad or delirious, that was for sure: there were certainly no Russians in Tibet. He studied the man a moment longer and then, speaking very slowly, he made one last attempt.
‘Tell me: who are you and what are you doing in Pemako?’
‘We have been to Shangri-La. We have seen the Book of Dzyan.’
The man fell silent. The Abbot’s deputy turned to the doctor monk and said quietly under his breath, ‘What do you think?’
The doctor frowned.
‘He is fantasizing. He is delirious. We have to get him to eat and drink.’
‘Can you give him something for the fever?’
‘Yes. But let me ask him a question.’
The Abbot’s deputy nodded. The doctor knelt down so as to be closer to the stranger’s ear.
‘Do you know where you are now?’
The man’s eyes had closed again, but the lips moved and in a barely audible whisper he said, ‘Of course. Germany. Before the Second World War. Felix Koenig was at the university, in Munich . . . Professor of oriental languages. He was such a good student . . . he spoke all the languages of the East . . . he was not a soldier . . .’
The two Tibetans stared at each other in bafflement as the voice trailed off to nothing. The Abbot, unsure what else to do, said:
‘Prepare him a pipe.’
The doctor glanced at the Abbot’s deputy.
‘Deputy, a pipe will ease the pain and help him to speak, but it may also make him dream.’
‘It is a risk we will have to take.’
The doctor reached into his satchel and pulled out a long pipe and a little rolled-up leather case containing tobacco, matches, metal pins and small, greasy balls of yellowy brown opium. The Abbot’s deputy leaned over the white man and whispered in his ear the one question that any human being can always answer if they have a grain of sanity left, ‘What is your name?’
Too late. He had gone, slipped away into a private reverie. The Abbot’s deputy shook his head and then turned to survey the rain-lashed jungle, a feeling of nausea rising up from the pit of his stomach. Then he looked down at the corpselike figure again. He could see the great bony chest rise and fall. Where was this troubled man now? Of what was he dreaming in his delirious sleep?
Anton Herzog, for that was the name of the cadaverous blue-eyed man who lay on the damp earth beneath the rocky overhang, dreamed of a great city. He could smell and see and hear Munich before him: the wide boulevards, the elegant pre-war bridges that spanned the Isar, the streets thronged with unemployed people in their dark clothes. He had never been to Munich, but Felix Koenig had described it to him a thousand times, and so it was through Felix’s eyes that he was transported now. It was Munich in the Thirties that Felix had always described for that was when, at the height of his powers, he had lived and worked there, a world-famous scholar. It had been a dark city then, down on its luck, no jobs, no money for new clothes, no money even to fix the roads – the world was in the grip of the Great Depression.
Anton Herzog left the jungle and the monks far behind and in his dream he walked the musty corridors of Munich university until he came to Felix Koenig’s door. There he was now, sitting at his desk surrounded by dusty books in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Bhutanese, Chinese and a host of lesser-known dialects. In Herzog’s mind’s eye, Felix Koenig was a muscular young man with curly blond hair and boyish good looks, poring over the ancient books. His intellect was legendary – even at the Gymnasium in Vienna, the teachers had marvelled at his concentration and mental stamina. He had once told Herzog that these powers were earned in the harvest fields of his native village, where as a boy he would toil for whole days in the sunshine.
In his dream Herzog could see over the rooftops of the city. A storm was gathering to the south, over the Alps. Wotan, the ancient German god of war, was awakening from a long sleep; a second great war was brewing, a war that would transport Felix Koenig to hell and back. Poor Felix Koenig worked on in his library, oblivious, content to pursue his private interest in the history and origins of the Germanic peoples, deeply fascinated by old mysteries such as the dream of Atlantis. The young scholar sat at his desk, poring over the ancient texts of long-dead civilizations.
But then Anton Herzog felt the rain on his face. Where was he? In Munich or Tibet? His eyes opened again and he felt the Tibetan doctor again, sponging him gently with the wet towel, and he saw the dark rock of the overhang above, the jungle all around and the endless rain. He did not want to be drawn away from his visions and his dreams; he did not want to leave. He wanted to go up to Koenig’s door. He moaned and protested and tried to roll his face away, but the doctor would not leave him alone and then he felt hands grasping his shoulders and back and he was hauled into a sitting position. The doctor forced a pipe between his lips and urged him to breathe. He did as commanded; the delicious smoke filled his lungs and seemed to coil up into his brain, covering up the pain and hiding all possibility of sadness.
He smoked the pipe through until it was empty and then the monks allowed him to lie down again. He could hear the doctor’s voice, asking him questions. He wanted to speak; he wanted to help the monks, to tell them what he had seen, to tell them who he was and why he had followed Felix Koenig. He tried to focus on the doctor’s face but all he could now see was a soft blur.
Yet now he could clearly see Felix Koenig in the Munich university faculty cafeteria, talking to two men. He began to describe the scene to the doctor, or at least, that is what he thought he was doing – but perhaps he was not speaking at all, perhaps he dreamed the phrases he was saying. He knew who the two men were, for Felix had described the scene so many times: Karl Haushofer and his student assistant Rudolf Hess. Haushofer – a senior professor, a man of strange occult leanings and enormous intellect, a highly decorated soldier, a prophet for the German people; and Hess – one of the demons who would drag his bel
oved Germany over the abyss and into war, one of Hitler’s closest henchmen.
It was too early for Koenig to know all this, and even as Herzog thought he was speaking to the doctor, he wanted to cry out to warn the young man, to tell him to beware. Shun them! he wanted to cry. But they were speaking calmly, these man-devils, explaining to Koenig that they needed manuscripts translated from Tibetan and Chinese and, in the near future, they planned to send expeditions to Tibet. If Koenig liked the work he could perhaps accompany Haushofer on one of his expeditions there. Young Felix was examining the documents, manuscripts never seen before, written in long-forgotten tongues, which explained the origins of the Aryan race and the myth of Shangri-La, the paradise in the clouds. Never before had Felix Koenig seen source documents like these. It was a treasure trove. With these he could make his academic name – he would be immortalized for all time. And now Herzog was trying to tell the doctor that this was where it all started, that within a month Koenig had attended his first meeting of the Thule Society, an esoteric group of men with a thirst for true knowledge of the past. Visions floated before Herzog’s eyes: the I-Ching, the Oracle that Koenig was introduced to at the Thule Society.
Then Herzog could see the doctor’s face clearly again for the first time. He was leaning towards him, his voice laden with anxiety.
‘What were these men hoping to find in Tibet?’
The Abbot’s deputy was squatting at the doctor’s shoulder, listening in horror. Anton Herzog, lifted high on the wings of opium, began to speak with ever more fluency:
‘They believed that many thousands of years ago there existed in the Far East a highly developed civilization – a civilization that was the work of the people who had fled the collapse of ancient Mu, or Lemuria as it was also known, the great continent that used to exist somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, inside the Ring of Fire. These refugees from Mu were the ancient Aryans, the forefathers of the German peoples, and they made their new home in what is now the Gobi desert many aeons ago and established a thriving civilization, gloriously distinct from the fallen races of lesser men who eked out a turbulent existence across the rest of the globe . . .’
The Abbot’s deputy listened with a baleful expression on his face as Anton Herzog spoke. On several occasions, he had tried to interrupt the sickly Westerner, to ask questions, in an attempt to make sense of the deluge of strange information. But it was only now that the ravaged man seemed to hear him; only now did he turn to listen as the deputy asked, ‘Why did this Pacific civilization collapse beneath the waves?’
Anton Herzog did not know, or could not remember. But he knew of the belief in the cyclical winnowing of the human races that was slowly but surely refining mankind until one day the superman would be reborn, the Aryan superman who would be a world Messiah – a German Jesus. Then he said that in accordance with this theory of the alchemical purification of the master race through successive tests, this second civilization was itself destroyed later by a massive cataclysm that was suspected to have been of atomic origin. The lush homeland of the master race was turned into the present-day Gobi desert, and the survivors, the Aryan kings, fled west and south and created a new capital – a vast underground kingdom beneath the Himalayas from where they could continue to rule the world. The name of this new capital was Shangri-La. Some said that it lay south-west of present-day Lhasa, near Shigatse monastery. Other sources claimed that it lay beneath the great mountain of Kanchenjunga, still others that it was in Afghanistan or Nepal. Finally, said Herzog, in May 1935 Koenig joined his first Thule Society expedition to Tibet.
The Abbot’s deputy listened in horror.
‘So Shangri-La was their goal.’
‘Yes,’ replied Herzog. ‘They were to locate Shangri-La and attempt to establish contact with the Masters, and most important of all, they were to retrieve the lost wisdom of the Aryan race: wisdom from Lemuria itself that would explain how to turn any human into the superman, part of the perfected master race, destined to rule the world. They went first to Mount Kailash and Shigatse in the west and then to the mountains north of Lhasa before finally ending up in the east, in the little-explored region of Pemako. There they disappeared . . .’
‘Where did they go?’ asked the Abbot’s deputy.
‘Five months later,’ said Herzog, and now sweat was running down his face, so that the doctor tried to cool him with the wet rag again, ‘Felix Koenig walked into the German Consulate in Bombay, alone and seemingly out of his mind. He could not explain what had happened to the other members of the expedition and he refused to talk about where he had been, but he made a statement that Germany was heading in the wrong direction and that the German people was being misled. He was put aboard a ship to Hamburg, arrested on his arrival, sent to an asylum in the Alps, discharged from the army and relieved of all his privileges, a broken and exhausted man. Then a ray of light: Anna, a beautiful, vivacious twenty-two-year-old girl who was – alone of all people – able to distract and console him. They were married in ’44.’
And now Herzog was in tears, mingling with the sweat, and he turned his half-seeing eyes upwards. There, the jungle canopy. Or was it the firs of the Bavarian Alps? He did not know. The doctor wiped his brow again, and Herzog said, ‘It is true, what I say, everything is true. You do believe me?’
The Abbot’s deputy looked grimly at the doctor, who looked back at him. For a moment nobody spoke. Herzog sweated and wept in the fit of his delirium, though in a sense, thought the Abbot’s deputy, he was sounding more and more lucid, even though what he actually said was so strange.
‘We believe you,’ said the Abbot’s deputy softly, and Herzog turned his eyes towards him – bright blue but filmy with moisture.
‘Then I must tell you that Koenig became implicated in a plot to murder Hitler. When the secret police arrived at his house, he had been married for only three days. They had not even had time to register their marriage at the town hall; the policemen had literally to tear him from the arms of his Anna. He was given an unholy choice: either Auschwitz or the Russian Front. The following day Koenig was parachuted into the Kessel, the besieged triangle of German-occupied territory to the west of Stalingrad, in November 1944, with the rank of lieutenant. In charge of eleven young men, none of whom was over the age of eighteen, he was last seen leading his troops on a dawn raid, in an attempt to capture the ground floor of a derelict department store – just one more soldier lost in the brutal fighting on the Eastern Front . . .’
Now at last, Anton Herzog had exhausted himself. The Abbot’s deputy managed to stutter out a question. ‘So Felix Koenig died and that was the end of the dream of finding Shangri-La?’
Herzog sighed long and hard. Wearily, he struggled to say, ‘No, you don’t understand. He told all this to me, he taught me the I-Ching. I promised him I too would go to Shangri-La. Felix Koenig was my father.’
22
What on earth to do? So much had happened, and so quickly. Nancy’s world had been turned upside down. Everywhere she looked, more and more mysteries seemed to be emerging. And yet she felt more energetic and focused at this moment than she had ever felt in her old monotonous life in New York.
She looked at her watch: eight p.m. The flight she could catch if she wanted to get to Tibet unnoticed by the authorities left in four hours. There was no point pretending to herself that she wasn’t very tempted. The injustice of her arrest, the lack of support given to Herzog by Dan Fischer and the paper, the chance of getting in on the greatest story of all time, and now the tragic plight of Herzog’s fiancée, all motivated her to go in search of him – and yet still she prevaricated, still she couldn’t decide. Krishna’s arguments were perfectly sensible and his logic was overwhelming. Quite simply it was reckless to pursue Anton Herzog into Tibet, if indeed he was in Tibet at all. Dan had given her clear instructions to stay in Delhi and do some local-colour stories; the police had bailed her on condition that she stayed put. She had made snap decisions throughout her life, bu
t she had never before been drawn to a course of action so clearly fraught with danger.
Krishna had gone to make a phone call, and she could hear him in his office, though his words were indistinct. She felt helpless and alone.
For some reason she could not entirely unfurl, she could not just forget about Anton Herzog. It perplexed her that he had been abandoned, but it perplexed her too that she felt such a significant sense of loyalty to him – it would be so much simpler just to leave his fate in the hands of Dan and the police. He was a colleague she admired, but he was not a friend after all and, in a way, he hardly needed more people searching for him; he already had an array of spooks combing the mountains and plains of the Far East to find him. Admire him, she told herself, but don’t charge in there and imagine you can save him.
For all she knew, Anton Herzog wanted to be lost. That was a whole other strand she hadn’t really considered. And perhaps he wanted no part of Maya’s life. Perhaps he had wanted to escape before the child was born. She had always heard him spoken of as a confirmed bachelor, after all. But despite the urgings of her reason, something was still drawing her in. The unresolved questions, turning in her brain: what had Herzog really been doing all these years in India? What was he really doing in Tibet? Why had he watched over her career? What in his past had propelled him to these extremities, to such obsessions and dangerous acts? Most of all she wanted to know what was the great story that had caused Herzog to disappear into Tibet like a great hunter in search of a mythical beast?
Despite all these questions, all the caveats she rehearsed to herself, she knew she had to try – nothing else would do. And if she did, something told her that all the threads of the last twenty-four hours would be drawn together: the inconsistent family history, the disturbing fact that the second medal had the same design as the ancient bone trumpet – even Jack Adams’s sudden enthusiasm to take her to Tibet: all would make sense, all would become clear.