by Tom Martin
‘And then, a hand touched my shoulder. When I managed to focus my weary eyes I saw a Chinese man, of sixty or so years. He was speaking to me and pressing a water bottle to my lips. It contained a sweet liquid that warmed me to the core. Revived a little, I sat up and discovered that this man was accompanied by several sherpas. He himself travelled in a curtained chair, carried by four of the sherpas. He spoke to me in Chinese, and when I explained where I was from he addressed me in precise and perfectly accented English. “Welcome. You are very lucky. We only pass this way once every ten years. We have little need of contact with the outside world. You must come with us to our lamasery and we will help you to regain your strength.”
I could scarcely believe my ears. I was indeed lucky. But I had questions. “I am most grateful for your offer and willing to accept it. But perhaps you can help me? Am I far from Shangri-La? Is that the name of you lamasery?’
‘No,’ said the Chinese man. ‘You are not far. Stay with us. You will find our hospitality to be most generous.’
‘I could hardly contain my joy. In my father’s tale of his own visit, he had described how he had been invited to visit Shangri-La by an old Chinese man who spoke beautiful English. So, not only had I been saved from death but I suspected I was about to be led into the heart of the sacred kingdom. The coyness of the Chinese man as to whether or not Shangri-La was the name of his lamasery did not surprise me at all; it was all quite in keeping with the mythology of the place.
‘He helped me into his chair, and for the next five hours he walked beside me whilst the sherpas climbed ever higher up until finally, eventually, we crossed over the pass and the path began to descend steeply . . .’
Now a thickset monk had stepped over to the side of the Abbot’s deputy and was whispering in his ear. Herzog heard a rustling, like leaves, as the monks conferred. And in the jungle, something was stirring; he felt it deeply. A force, something was coming for him. He knew they would find him; it was simply a matter of time. He had no fear. There was little he could do now; the time when he might have exerted some control over events had long gone. Something urgent was being said. Though Herzog could not lift his head to see it, the Abbot’s deputy was looking anxious, and now he said, ‘We cannot stay here any longer. There are dark tidings; we have to leave at once. We are taking you to safety.’
‘To safety?’ asked Herzog, with hope in his voice.
‘Yes. To the holy city of Agarthi. But we must leave at once.’
With that the Abbot’s deputy gave an order and the entire company of monks sprang to their feet. The youngest monks lifted Herzog on his stretcher once more; he felt his head tipping backwards, and then the familiar rolling motion began again. Aloft, he thought, drifting like a leaf in the wind, or bark on a storm-lashed sea. And below him, his face set grimly, the old lama began to lead the sodden and bedraggled collection of monks through the darkness of the night, through the cloying embrace of the ever-moving forest.
29
‘Chomolongma! Chomolongma!’
The shouting woke Nancy with a start. She could not recall when she had dozed off – she remembered the take-off and for some time she had watched Hussein and the co-pilot as the plane rose through the night towards the Himalayas and Tibet. Then her jetlag had overwhelmed her, and now she had no idea how much time had passed. She saw the co-pilot grinning at her and pointing at the window with his gloved hand. Khaled Hussein was nowhere to be seen. The sun was up and for a moment, because of the way the sunlight was being refracted through the glass of the windscreen, Nancy couldn’t see anything but the crystalline blue of the sky. She rubbed her bleary eyes and twisted her neck from side to side and then leaned forward to take in the view.
‘Chomolongma! Mother Goddess of the Universe!’ the co-pilot said.
It was the most breathtaking sight she had ever seen. Level with the aeroplane, off to the right, was the most enormous and beautiful white mountain.
‘Mount Everest?’
The pilot made the thumbs-up sign. The snow-covered slopes of the mountain rose up to a crinkled peak that looked like a fabulous Arabian headdress, pleated and folded to hide the modesty of the Goddess’s face. Below, an infinite distance further down, a river curled like an azure necklace around the mountain’s base. In all directions, snowy peaks extended towards the horizon – like a thousand worshippers reaching upwards to touch the Heavens, thought Nancy. The vastness of the mountain suggested a realm completely beyond the human, something scarcely comprehensible to the brain. She glanced briefly to her side and saw that Jack Adams was awake – he was staring down at the seemingly endless depths of the valleys below. In a low voice, he said, ‘It reminds me of something Anton once said: “Hell is the mould for heaven.” The way the valleys are like the mountains except upside down.’
Nancy stared in wonder at the bottomless crevasses and ravines that opened up in all directions below. It was true; they looked like plaster of Paris moulds she had played with as a child. The valleys were the mirror image of the mountains, she thought, or their natural opposite. Yin and Yang. Occasionally, she could pick out an alpine valley, a splash of emerald green in the white and grey of the massive mountains.
‘Such a beautiful hell, though, just as lovely as heaven,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t mind which one I ended up in.’
She peered forwards so that she could almost look straight down: were those tiny dwellings that she could see, clinging to the green slopes of a valley? Half to herself, she said:
‘I wonder what the people who live down there know of us. I bet they’re happier than we are.’
Jack laughed, and she imagined he was once more mocking her for her ignorance. But then he said, ‘Now that really sounds like Anton. I’ve heard him going on about the perfect isolation of the valleys – how people who lived here would be able to survive anything, even nuclear war and the end of civilization. He thought that these valleys were the best hiding places that you could ever dream of.’
‘Have they all been surveyed?’
‘No. Far from it. It’s an impossible task. They can’t even be surveyed from the air. Who knows what is down there? I know sherpas who swear on their souls that there are other mountains higher than Everest and that there are kingdoms and peoples that we know nothing about. And the lamas take it as historical fact that some of the valleys were used as refuges during the last Ice Age. The seeds of civilization have been kept alive here many times over, while the rest of the world has frozen or burnt . . .’
Nancy laughed nervously, struggling to process what he was saying.
‘Now who’s sounding like Anton?’
Just then, the co-pilot motioned with his right hand down towards a gorge that splintered at the base of the great mountain.
‘Lhasa – Gongkar airport!’
The plane banked in a graceful arc, turning towards the gorge.
On the tarmac at the airport, 12,000 feet above sea level, Jack and Hussein were talking earnestly to a pair of Chinese soldiers. Nancy waited by the aeroplane steps, breathing the thin, cold Himalayan air for the first time. The purity of the atmosphere seemed to heighten the brilliance of the light, so that she squinted in the glare. Two hundred yards away, a fuel truck trundled slowly across the tarmac towards a waiting plane. Everything was swimming in this clear, blinding light. It made Nancy feel ecstatic and at the same time slightly dizzy.
A package was pushed into the hands of one of the Chinese soldiers. The other smoked, and looked bored. Something seemed to have been resolved among them. Now Jack motioned to Nancy to join them, and she followed him into a waiting army jeep. Khaled had vanished silently away, without saying goodbye. On the jeep, no one was smiling. Jack was looking around the airport, as if he feared a threat might emerge from any direction. She sensed the tension and anxiety. If they were caught attempting to bribe the Chinese soldiers, who knows what would happen – to them, to the soldiers themselves. They passed through a gate in the perimeter fence, and turned
onto a dusty road, clouds of dust pierced by sunlight. With a sputter, the truck paused and the soldiers nodded to Jack.
‘Here’s where we get out,’ said Jack to Nancy. She stepped down from the truck. As soon as they were on the ground, the truck turned and roared back through the gate. As they stood in a cloud of dust, coughing out their relief, Jack said:
‘Jesus, that gets worse every time. Now, let’s see if we can get a lift down to Lhasa . . .’
Their furtive progress, thought Nancy. Bribing guards, sneaking past security gates, and naturally it was all entirely illegal. She had never done this sort of work before. She sensed this was only the beginning, that she would break many more rules before this was all over.
‘Come along,’ Jack was saying. ‘We’ll admire the view later.’
30
She walked past oxblood-red and white walls, up zigzag flights of steps, until finally there it was before her: the Potala Palace, floating like a lone ship in the sea of clouds high above Lhasa’s main square. It dwarfed all the other buildings in the capital. The biggest temples and lamaseries of western Tibet would fit inside it many times over. But it was a sad sight, thought Nancy. For centuries it had buzzed with life: home to thousands of monks, it had housed vast libraries and enormous dining halls that could feed hundreds at a sitting. Now it was deserted, as empty and echoing as an abandoned city. There were no lamas filing in and out of the great doors, on pilgrimages from far-flung corners of the Tibetan empire. No monks tended the tens of thousands of butter lamps that lined the interior corridors; there was no need. Masses were no longer chanted night and day to crowded rooms and in the dark recesses and quiet cloisters.
No, it was clear to Nancy that the Palace was nothing but an empty husk, a memorial to former greatness. There was something grave about its unsymmetrical white and red walls – it reminded her of a photo she had once seen of the Ark Royal aircraft carrier, after it was retired from service and put into dry dock before being dismantled. From the very top, on the highest golden tower, a Chinese flag fluttered in the breeze. A handful of monks kept up a semblance of activity, but in reality the heart of the fortress–cathedral had long since stopped beating. The main visitors to the place were aged caretakers, carrying juniper broomsticks, or monks in the pay of the Chinese secret police, come to sniff around. Outside, soldiers were keeping careful watch. Chinese tourists were milling around having their photos taken. Some of them had purchased traditional Tibetan chubas, and were posing for the camera.
Nancy and Jack stood in silence, until eventually Jack said, ‘The first time I saw it, it wasn’t like this at all. It had a different feel.’
He sounds almost distressed, thought Nancy, as if he cares passionately. She glanced at him, but he was staring up at the Palace, his face impassive.
He continued, in a harder tone, ‘Which is odd, because even then it was pretty much disused. I think that people still believed that Tibet would be free, and so when they looked at the building it was still a symbol of hope, whereas now it is a reminder of failure – failure to throw off the Chinese.’
‘When was that?’
‘Oh – years ago now. It was when Tibet was virtually impossible to get into – unless you had masses of cash and came in on a guided tour. I didn’t – I was a student, so I hitch-hiked in from Sichuan province. It was quite a journey. Eleven days in the back of a lorry that was carrying flour up to Lhasa. I had to sit in the back the whole way because the driver was so terrified of being stopped. I slept on the bags of flour – quite comfortable actually. By the end I was completely white – the flour got into every pore of my skin and every inch of my clothes. The only window was a tiny little gap just above the lorry cab. I had to stand on tiptoes on the bags of flour to see out of it. On the eleventh day, we were driving across the Lhasa plateau and I looked out and on the horizon I could see the white walls and gold stupas of the Potala Palace. It was the closest I’ve ever come to a religious experience . . .’
He lapsed into silence. Curious, thought Nancy. He seems completely sincere. In the depths of his ragged and compromised soul, there is still something, something almost pure, almost meditative, she thought. And then the hardened exterior, all the cynicism and toughness – she wondered what the balance was, how much softness there remained within him. Not so much, she suspected, just a tiny kernel. But she didn’t know. Now Jack leaned close to her – she thought he might be about to reveal something else, some further aspect of his inner life, but instead he whispered, ‘Let’s get going to Balkhor market and the Jokhang Temple, that’s where the Tibetan quarter is. But don’t discuss anything to do with the trip while we are in public. Half these so-called tourists will be spies. They are paid to walk around and eavesdrop on people’s conversations . . . Stay close to me and don’t discuss anything till we get inside the Blue Lantern tea house.’
She glanced around at the little groups of Chinese, photographing one another. They didn’t look like spies, but then what did she know? She shifted the weight of her bag on her shoulder, and turned for one last glimpse of the unhappy palace. Then she followed Jack across the square.
31
They walked through streets filled with beggars and pilgrims, confused-looking nomads from the steppes and ambling tourists, until they came to Jokhang Temple, its thick stone walls reminiscent of a medieval European castle. As an aside, Jack explained to Nancy that this similarity was often pointed out by the Chinese in their anti-Lamaist propaganda. The reason for these massively sturdy walls was that like all of the gompas in Tibet, the Jokhang monastery was designed to double up as a fortress.
‘Tibet was a wild and dangerous land,’ he told her, ‘and before the Chinese came, the Dalai Lama’s remit often didn’t extend that far beyond the gates of Lhasa. Tales abound of his emissaries to western and eastern Tibet being thrown into ditches and laughed at. Outposts of Lamaism had to be able to defend themselves, from Chinese and Mongol invaders but also from recalcitrant Tibetan lords.’
Jokhang Temple was fronted by a cobbled square and a cobbled lane that ran right around the perimeter of its great stone walls. This lane, sandwiched between the massive walls and the stout Tibetan houses that made up the native quarter, was the home of an immense market. Glancing at the stalls, Nancy noticed that the market seemed to be more exclusively Tibetan than those in other streets they had been through. There were no Chinese stalls selling roasted nuts and chicken feet, as she had seen nearer to the Potala Palace.
And now Nancy watched in amazement as a man walked to the centre of the cobbled square. He seemed to be a young monk, lean as a whip, his face bronzed the colour of teak by the elements. He stood and flung his arms towards the heavens and then he collapsed onto his knees before finally lying flat on his front on the ground. Then, after a brief pause he picked his weary body from the street, took a step forward and then the cycle began again. Surely he must be in enormous pain each time he knelt on the ground, though the look on his face was of pure bliss. How far has he come, she wondered, advancing like a centipede, and almost as slowly? A level of religious devotion almost unimaginable in the West these days.
Where is Jack? she thought suddenly. She had been distracted by the bizarre and moving sight. Turning frantically a few times, she managed to locate him: he had marched off down the lane into the depths of the market. Had it not been for his height and shock of blond hair, he would have been lost to sight. Cursing him under her breath, Nancy shot after him, struggling through the crowds. Fifty yards up ahead he suddenly stopped and turned and ducked under a low doorway and into what she assumed must be the Blue Lantern.
32
The walls of the tea house were black from the centuries of butter-lamp smoke. The floor was made of flagstones, the furniture primitive but sturdy: low wooden benches and stout three-legged stools. There were half a dozen tables around which sat young men, some in cheap Chinese suits, others in casual sportswear. A couple of the men were wearing trilbies, and all of them seem
ed to be smoking. The tea house had an atmosphere of gangland menace, thought Nancy, and she kept her head down as she passed among the benches. At the far end of the room was a small bar and beyond it a doorway opened onto what was clearly the kitchen. The small windows were nothing more than grey smudges in the unhealthy dark.
Jack was talking to the man behind the bar. Selfconsciously, Nancy crossed the room to join him, and for all the gloom she was aware that she was nonetheless being scrutinized as she walked. They turned unsmiling faces on her, and she tried not to meet their eyes. Jack was speaking in Tibetan, so when she reached him she was obliged to wait, uncomprehending, all the time thinking of what she had discovered and what it might mean.
Indeed, she had to admit to herself that she was regretting her impetuousness. She had thought that finding Herzog would be a useful thing to do, somehow honourable, that she would be doing a good turn for a colleague she had always admired, even hero-worshipped. She had not imagined he would emerge as such an ambiguous and troubling figure. Nancy wondered if she should tell Jack what she had discovered, about her confusion, her apprehension. He and Anton Herzog had never been great friends, but at least he knew something of Herzog’s ambitions. He might be able to help her process the information. Or perhaps she should just announce that she had decided to leave. Jack wouldn’t care at all. He would take the money and she would never hear from him again. She looked across at him as he talked, and wondered at his rudeness, that he failed even to acknowledge her as she stood there. She was, after all, his employer. Perhaps he was finding out useful information, or perhaps he was just playing another of his bizarre power games, or generally acting up: it made her click her tongue impatiently, and she rolled her eyes and hoped he was noticing how bored she was.