by Tom Martin
‘The King looked at me with a strange expression on his face. I was getting through to him, perhaps. I continued to speak, but in a gentler tone; I was afraid that my revelations might have a catastrophic effect.
‘“Japan and Germany were defeated. America, France and Britain were victorious. Hitler committed suicide when the Russians entered Berlin. It’s all over. These monks never helped you, they imprisoned you . . .”
‘And then he laughed at me; a laugh of such maniacal force that I found myself stepping backwards towards the staircase.
‘“You fool. You have been brainwashed, which is as we intended. Germany didn’t lose the war. Which three countries of the world have been the economic power-houses since 1945? Which three countries have the highest life expectancy, the greatest technological skill, the best educational institutions, the finest engineers?”
‘I stared at him in shock. My mind had gone blank. He sneered at me and for a second time his hollow laugh rang out around the battlements.
‘“The United States, Germany and Japan. They were the victors of the war, they and not the so-called Allies. They agreed the terms of peace between themselves. That is how we wanted it. It was all foretold far in advance by the Book of Dzyan. Three great power centres were to be established to lead mankind forward: one in Asia, one in Europe and one in North America. They are the engines of a global material culture which – when it blossoms to its full extent – we will sacrifice in order to release enormous psychic powers. Only then will we create the real superman.”
‘I could barely contain my rising feeling of nausea; I tried desperately to marshal my arguments but my voice was shrinking as I spoke.
‘“You are wrong. The Nazis were defeated. Hitler died in Berlin.”
‘The King smiled at me pityingly.
‘“You poor man. How many Nazis were ever brought to justice? A token handful. And they were only tried and executed because they were not loyal to us, not for any other reason. The rest? Some came here, many went to America, most remained in Germany. We were untouchable because we had won. And as for Hitler, even you must know his body was never found. We have monitored everything carefully from here. I have presided over the great triumph of the German people. Many have been called upon to sacrifice themselves; it is fitting in a sense that I should now be added to their number.”
‘For the first time in my life, I began to doubt all that I knew. I began to doubt the basis of the mythology that has sustained the free world this last sixty years: the glorious struggle against evil, the dark years, the final victory. For it was true: Germany, Japan and America were the global hegemons, and it was their technology and material culture that had overtaken the world; their machines, their computers, their breeds of men. The King smiled at me again and in a soft, patronizing voice, continued.
‘ “It is not necessary to tell the defeated of their defeat. Let them live by whatever fantasies they wish; let them believe that despite what they can see with their own eyes, they have not lost and their countries do not lie on the slag heap of history. All that is necessary is to hasten the coming of the superman.’
‘I was slipping into the void. In a whisper, I said, “And the Book of Dzyan did all this, foresaw all this?”
‘The King’s eyes were glowing with zeal.
‘ “Yes. It is here. It is our patrimony. It connects the worlds, it bridges time and space. It controls us all. It brought you here today and it will bring others. And it will bring on the next global war – a war that will be the Götterdämmerung – the Twilight of the Gods – a war for which even now we are sowing the seeds. We will create a mass human sacrifice and so we will rise to the next level of being. You will be the King. You will lead the world over the abyss. You will be the great destroyer. You will be Kali. You will be death itself.”
‘As I stood with this man, his golden fetters shining in the sunlight so that a harsh and terrible glare emanated from him, I feared that I had lost myself entirely. I felt very small and as if I was slipping away, into blackness. The journey had been too much for me, the decades of searching, the metok chulen, the terton’s death, the emerald valley, the decaying heads and the human cage – I couldn’t take any more, but still the King’s voice was booming in my ears.
‘“The Book of Dzyan comes from the depths of the past; it has helped man to emerge from the state of savagery in which he found himself long ago. Our work is drawing to a close. I only wish I could see it to the end. You will have that privilege, you and your Queen whom we have also summoned.”
‘“Black magic.” I was clutching my head. “It’s black magic . . .”
‘“No. It is the voice of the universe, and all who look into the book come under its control. The book is responsible for all our actions and thoughts. The book controls us all . . .”
‘The King fell silent for a moment. He was like a religious maniac. I had to take control of the situation. I had to prove him wrong. I was almost shouting: ‘“Who created the Book of Dzyan? It was made by men was it not? Therefore it is fallible?”
‘“No. It was not written by men. It wrote itself. It represents the voice of the universe, speaking to itself.”
‘I was flabbergasted, speechless.
‘“What do you mean?”
‘ “It first appeared in the pattern on the back of a tortoise’s shell many millennia ago. The sages recognized its wisdom. They transcribed it to papyrus. It began to grow in power. It began to hatch its schemes. Those who listened to it prospered. More copies were made. Its power grew and grew.”
‘Suddenly, as he said these words, I felt as if I had just awoken from a nightmare. The King shrank before me, reverting to the proportions of a normal man. Tortoise shells? Ancient sages? A book growing in power and hatching schemes? Growing from writing on a tortoise’s shell? It was gibberish. With relief, I realized that I didn’t have to listen to him a second longer.
‘The one thing I had to do was to leave immediately. It was clear that this lunatic King would not be able to escape. The gold hoops made sure of that, and anyway his mind was ruined. But I had no intention of getting fitted out with a set of luxury manacles myself. I had to block his insane words out and focus on my escape.
‘I turned on my heels and bounded down the tower stairs, the King’s words echoing in my ears as I went. I had one idea in my mind; I still had some of Terton Thupten Jinpa’s powder left over from the metok chulen. Although I hadn’t recovered from the effects of the last session I was going to have to gamble and use it again. I hoped – it was a desperate hope but it was simply all I had – that it might just help me to make it over the mountains to the nearest trading route or settlement. If it failed, at least I would die on the mountain, on my own terms, in the free air and not on a foul funeral pyre. And before I left, if at all possible, I would steal the Book of Dzyan.’
The Abbot’s deputy, lost in Shangri-La with the stranger, marvelled at all he heard. The opium had carried the stranger aloft: he was a great orator, a Teutonic bard, weaving a beautiful and strange tale, beguiling all who listened. But behind them both the blackness beckoned; the deeper depths of the cave summoned them all to oblivion. He had not saved this man, thought the Abbot’s deputy, he had betrayed him. The story of escape that the stranger was recounting ended here, in this ancient place. He would be betrayed again, as he had been betrayed already. The Abbot’s deputy shivered in the darkness and he raised his eyes to the ancient rocks above as the dying man’s voice filled the night.
49
For some time Jen led them onwards. They edged along the path, climbing higher and higher, scrambling on all fours up the steeper sections of the track. At one point the route shared its course with a stream and they found themselves slipping and sliding over rocks covered in wet moss. Jen led the way, remorseless in his energy. He was moving so fast that even Jack, a seasoned mountaineer, was wheezing slightly, and Nancy thought her lungs must burst.
Suddenly they came to a
halt. Nancy wiped the sweat and dust from her eyes and saw that Jack was standing with his hands on his hips and Jen was pacing frantically up and down on a short, sandstone ledge. And then she realized with a sick lurch what the problem was: they were faced with a chasm that dropped away in front of them, almost perpendicularly. It plunged down into a distant crevasse that must have been driven into the mountainside aeons ago, during some geological cataclysm. The chasm was about ten feet wide, and close to where they were standing lay a length of rope. Anchored around a tree, the rope snaked across the sandstone ledge and disappeared over the edge of the crevasse. On the other side of the crevasse, Nancy could make out the other end of the rope, tied around another tree. But it had been hacked through and all that remained was a frayed end. The monks had cut it down, there was no way across.
She glanced at Jen; for the first time since they had met him, he seemed to have lost his habitual calm. Even just after they had got him out of the net, he had still sustained an air of detachment, but now she could see that he was exceptionally agitated.
Jack, still panting, said, ‘We could almost jump it; it’s tantalizing.’
Nancy stepped up to the edge. It was impossible even to see the bottom of the crevasse; the rock sides plunged straight down, with occasional patches of scrubby vegetation clasping to its sides. She certainly couldn’t jump it, whatever Jack thought. Jen was shaking his head and muttering in Chinese, leaning out and scanning the chasm to the left and right as far as they could see. There appeared to be no narrower point in either direction, and besides, the jungle was dense; it would take hours even to clamber a hundred feet up or down the sides.
Without even telling them what he was doing, Jen threw off his rucksack and unsheathed Nancy’s kukri, which he had been carrying since they began their march. Then he disappeared back into the jungle. For a few moments, Nancy and Jack stared at each other in confusion, and then they heard a thwacking noise. It sounded as if Jen was chopping down a tree.
Looking down the steep path, Nancy could see Jen smashing the kukri onto the trunk of a tree ten yards tall. It was slender, the circumference of a man’s neck. She couldn’t imagine it would be strong enough. Now Jen turned to them and shouted up breathlessly:
‘Here – you can cut off the branches whilst I do this, so that we can drag it up the path to the ledge.’
They hurried down the path and Jack began to hack off the lower branches while Nancy pulled them away and flung them down the slope. After a few minutes of furious work, Jen had cut through the trunk, but the tree remained stubbornly upright, its higher branches still intertwined with those of neighbouring trees. With a sigh of frustration, Jen began slicing at the upper limbs, levering himself up, holding on with one hand. Jack grasped the leafy extremity of one of the higher branches and, pulling as hard as he could, bellowing with anger and exhaustion, dragged the felled tree to the ground. Frantically, Jen began to trim off the remaining branches, and within a few minutes they were hauling it back up to the ledge. Nancy could hardly believe that they had managed to do it all so quickly. They were all now drenched in sweat from their exertions, but she could see in the faces of the two men that they were determined to get over to the other side as quickly as possible.
Once on top of the ledge, they manoeuvred the log into place. Without hesitating, Jen grasped hold of the log with both hands and let his body hang. For a moment he vanished under the lip of the crevasse, but then Nancy saw him swinging his way across the void, like a monkey in the forest canopy. It looked easy, but the thought of doing it herself made Nancy nearly sick with vertigo and fear. On the other side, Jen dragged himself up onto the path and then, using a length of rope he had taken from Jack’s bag, he dextrously tied the two ends together and the bridge was restored. They now had a log to stand on, and at shoulder height a rope to hold on to.
‘You go first,’ said Jack, his voice hoarse.
There wasn’t time for fear; that would come later, thought Nancy. Not looking down, she shuffled her way across, hearing Jack behind her. The rope swung and creaked as they handed themselves across. On the other side, she breathed deeply, aware that she was trembling violently. No one said anything; they began to move at once along the path.
Night was falling. In faded light they struggled upwards, until they had outstripped the treeline once more and the vegetation had thinned out. Nancy thought they must be nearing the precipitous ledge where they had first observed the monks and Herzog. For the first time since they had scrambled onto the outcrop below, they could see the entire length of the lush valley, and at intervals of a mile or so they could see tiny bobbing lights.
Jen pointed at the valley floor. ‘Search parties.’ As they were swaddled in night, Nancy perceived – quite distantly, almost as if she was detached from her destiny – that she was reaching the limits of her endurance. And yet she was so very near to the end now, or to some sort of culmination. She could no longer imagine what she might encounter, if she managed to catch up with Anton Herzog. Back in Delhi, she thought she had a clear idea of Herzog – urbane, driven, eccentric, but fundamentally explicable in the terms of her trade, the terms of her ordinary world. Layer upon layer of complexity had been added to this picture; new identities and new motives had piled up at every stage, and she had lost all notion of what he might really be like. She suspected she had never encountered anyone remotely like him before; his skills and personality seemed to be almost boundless, uncategorizable and exceeding the normal limits.
And it seemed a long way from the bustling streets of Delhi to this narrow precipice, a last bridge of stone, stripped bare even of lichen and moss, a barren promontory that would deliver her up to her fate.
She looked up the path. She could just perceive that Jen was moving forward. Relentless, she thought. What was it that had made them so driven, so urgent – was it a force within them, or something beyond – something in the restless night, some ancient power of the mountains, beyond their comprehension?
Now she saw that Jen was turning towards the rocks, and then suddenly he ducked his head and disappeared.
‘He’s found it,’ Jack was shouting, hurrying towards the gap in the rock-face.
And Nancy, her heart pounding, laboured in pursuit.
50
In the darkness, Nancy heard a voice. A cracked, desperate voice, it hardly sounded like Colonel Jen.
‘They’ve gone. We’re too late.’
The dull sound echoed around the rocks. Nancy was too stunned to say anything, but she heard Jack sighing in disappointment beside her.
‘Did they leave no sign, no trace?’ he was saying.
Breathless from the last sprint towards the cave, Nancy put a hand out to the dank wall. She leaned forward, thinking she might be sick.
Then, in a changed voice, Jen said:
‘Wait. Look.’
Nancy turned to see the Colonel staring into the darkness at the side of the cave entrance, transfixed by something he had seen. He ducked into a crouch and flicked on a cigarette lighter. The feeble flame cast dancing shadows on to the cave walls. And there in the shadows, just a trace, a suggestion in the half-light, Nancy saw it. There was something on the floor. With the next flicker of the flame, she saw it was not a thing. It was a person.
‘Is it Herzog?’ she gasped. In a second she had joined Jen. ‘Is he dead?’
The figure lay a couple of yards from the smoking remnants of the fire – at first they had missed him in the darkness. A plastic sheet had been slung across the body; the head was lolling to one side. There were no signs of life. Jen held the cigarette lighter above the man’s face. Now Jack, shaking his head, knelt beside the figure and scrutinized his face.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘It’s him all right. He must have had a terrible fever – he’s barely recognizable.’
The man’s gaunt cheeks were sunken into grotesque hollows, the skin stretched like parchment across them. Matted grey hair was pasted to his scalp.
His face was so white and pale that it was hard to imagine that blood had ever flowed under his skin. Jen gingerly placed two fingers on his neck, searching for a pulse.
Suddenly, like a reptile’s, the man’s dark eyes flickered open.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Jack, recoiling in shock.
‘Quickly, help him,’ said Nancy. ‘Get him some water.’
Jack was scrabbling in his satchel.
‘He doesn’t just need water, he needs drugs.’
He pulled out a bottle of pills. Jen looked at it doubtfully.
‘I don’t think we’ll be able to get them down him.’
Now, Herzog was making a noise, his eyes bulging with the effort.
‘Pa . . . pa . . .’
At first it sounded like a death rattle, but then it became recognizable as an attempt to speak. Jen looked at the two Westerners in silent appeal.
‘What’s he saying? What does he want?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jack.
‘Pie . . .’ Herzog was wheezing. ‘Pie . . .’
Then Nancy saw it and almost shrieked:
‘Pipe! There on the ground. The pipe – he wants the pipe . . .’
An arm’s length from the dying man lay a slender black opium pipe.
‘Jen, do something. Fix it. He’s desperate for it. He must be in grave pain.’
Jen passed the lighter to Jack and picked up the pipe. He looked inside it. ‘The pipe’s empty – we’d better hope there’s some more somewhere . . .’
Nancy was staring in disbelief at the dying man’s skull-like face. The dry lips parted again. She could see his tongue moving. Now Jack pulled a water bottle out of his bag and passed it to her. She unscrewed the cap and touched it to his lips and carefully let a few drops fall into his mouth. Slowly the man turned his eyes towards her and uttered a single word:
‘Belt.’
Jen whipped off the blue sheet, revealing a wasted, skeletal body, barely clad in filthy rags, the rancid feet unshod, covered in sores. A money belt was slung around his emaciated hips, and Jen opened it roughly, felt inside and brought out a ball of opium.