The Rose of Tibet

by Lionel Davidson

  The boy was trying to pull him up, and he was not ready yet to get up, and the praying stopped and Ringling was shouting urgently in his ear. ‘Sahib, not here… . We mustn’t stop here.’

  ‘I’ve got to rest,’ he said, and heard the words come in a soft, drunken mumble. ‘I’ve got to rest here.’

  ‘Not here, sahib. It will snow. We get stuck on the pass. Come, sahib. Come, now.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t move.’

  ‘On the mule.’

  He was upright again, enormously bulky and clumsy, the boy pulling and the wind pushing, and he leaned backwards into it again, and found he was leaning against the mule while the boy shifted the load. He had a leg up, and was lifted, and felt himself coming off the other side, slipping, clutching feebly, till the boy wrestled and held him there, and they were moving again. His head rocked up and down, face sunk in the stiff icicled hair at the mule’s neck, and presently the chant began again, in his ear.

  ‘Om mani padme hum.

  ‘Om mani padme hum.

  ‘Om mani padme hum.

  ‘Om mani padme hum.’

  The emphasis was shifting rhythmically, and his head rocking in time, and he tried to say the words himself, but found the effort too great and let them slip away. An enormous wave of fatigue was sweeping over him, and he let it take him, and went away, rock-rocking into a deep and soft and finally furry ocean.

  The waves had stopped and all was still, and he knew he had been dreaming and lay listening to a curious low-pitched moaning that was neither human nor animal. It was a minute or two before he had it. The wind was coming up in the mouth of the cave, and they had to be off. He stirred himself, and in the same moment the mule tossed its head, so that he clutched instinctively, and so saved himself from falling.

  He sat up, on the mule’s back.

  He was alone, in an enormous cave, a great bowl of ice- coated rock. The wind was moaning. He could see no entrance to the cave. He looked up, and saw sky. Something was moving there, and he peered, and it was Ringling, coming down fast, scrambling from one boulder to another. They were in a cleft of the mountain; he saw that this must be the pass, and deduced that the boy had been shouting defiance and throwing the obligatory stones at the devils who lived there.

  He was mumbling as he scrambled down, and his face, beneath the big goggles, was skeletal and grey with fear and fatigue. He showed no surprise that Houston had wakened, but merely thumped the mule, and walked instantly ahead, so that Houston again had to clutch to save himself as the animal jerked into movement.

  The rock bowl ended in scattered boulders, ice-covered but with a surface of hard snow. The mule slipped on the first, and Houston fell off.

  The boy turned and looked at him a moment without ceasing his chant, and motioned to him to walk, and helped him. The snow began to fall, almost immediately. It fell solidly, not in flakes but as though sacks were being emptied above, and Houston saw the reason for urgency in negotiating this trap. In the space of minutes the jagged jumble of boulders was obliterated and a deceptive slope of clean snow swept smoothly upwards.

  The boy went first, falling between the rocks and picking himself up and climbing steadily. The mule followed in his tracks, and Houston followed the mule.

  He had to find the strength to keep up, and for the first minutes he did, husbanding his resources and using himself with care. But the hellish day had gone on too long, his exhausted sleep had been insufficient, and the limp muscles stretched and sagged on him. He had to stop, just for a moment, to recover, and did so, bent double and panting into the blank white wall that increased freshly like a gigantic mound of flour; and he knew right away that it was a mistake, for all the strength seemed to drain out of him, and he hung on, willing his trembling thighs to keep their hold, and seeing with despair the shuffling fastidious hind legs of the mule recede from view.

  The boy had not once turned to watch him, but suddenly he was beside him, with an encircling arm, and they were going up to where the mule waited, head, down and already almost invisible in a robe of snow. He leaned on the mule, but there could be no further rest; the snow fell incredibly through the cleft in the mountain. He hung on, making the motions with his feet while the uncomplaining animal dragged him slowly upwards; and in this fashion they left the pass.

  This was the last ascent of the outward journey. From Kotchin-la the track fell – slowly at first, and then very rapidly. They turned in at three o’clock in the afternoon, under a rock overhang, too exhausted even to put up the tent. Houston dozed and woke, in his sleeping bag, several times, coming to so feebly that he had to ride the mule all day.

  He remembered sitting on his rolled bedding that evening waiting for the tea to boil, but had no recollection of drinking it, and next came to to find himself in the sleeping bag with the feeling that weights had been removed from his chest and that he had slept a long time. Daylight was coming in through the tent flap and he looked at his watch and saw it was ten o’clock; he had slept eighteen hours.

  He felt wonderfully refreshed. He had an enormous desire to eat. He could hear the boy outside, and he put on his boots and crawled out to him.

  Ringling had not been up long himself, and was still gathering snow. Houston saw that he was singing.

  He said, ‘Hello. We’ve slept in.’

  ‘Yes, sahib,’ the boy said, grinning. ‘Good sleep here. Come and see.’

  Houston went with him to the edge of the track and looked down to where he pointed; and that was the best thing of all this splendid morning. It was a bush. It was not much of a bush. It was a little grey stunted thing that seemed to be part of the rock itself. But it was not part of the rock. It was a bit of spiny, leathery life, and it was growing there.

  They had come out of the lifeless land.

  5

  They got to the tree-line in the evening, the track dropping steeply, and walked over the little cones of a sparse pine wood, and had energy enough to talk and smoke for an hour before turning in.

  The boy had been teaching him a few words of Tibetan at the start of the trip three weeks before – for though they had agreed that he should act as a dumb man it seemed common prudence that he should arm himself against necessity – and he took up the lesson again over a final cigarette in their sleeping bags.

  ‘Very good,’ the boy said. ‘You’ve not forgotten. You speak like a Tibetan, sahib.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better stop calling me sahib, then?’ Houston said.

  ‘What shall I call you?’

  ‘Try Houston.’

  ‘Houtson.’

  ‘Not Houtson. Houston. Hoo-ston.’

  ‘Yes, sir, Houtson. Hoo-tson. Hoo-tson,’ Ringling said, trying.

  Houston had noticed before the boy’s inability to get his tongue round certain words, so he merely smiled and let it go for the moment.

  He extended his vocabulary to something like a hundred words in the next couple of days as they dropped down through the delicious summer drifts of pine and rhododendron and maple; and he felt better than he had ever felt in his life. The woods were loud with the sound of birds and falling water, and there was an effervescence in the air that made him want to sing. The weeks on the mountain seemed like some ghastly nightmare, and he recalled with astonishment his desire to remain there, neither dead nor fully alive, his recollections of the beautiful world below so sadly awry.

  They came to a valley, alive with flights of multi-coloured birds and aflame with rhododendrons, and he laughed aloud with pure delight.

  The boy laughed back at him.

  ‘It’s good, Houtson, sir?’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘Only one day more. You need to shave your face tonight, Houtson.’

  The boy’s own face was as smooth as when they had started, but Houston’s was thick with black beard; he had worried in case it should be pale underneath. But when that evening he shaved, painfully, and with the boy’s assistance, the skin beneath was almost as darkened
by wind and exposure as the rest of him.

  The boy examined him critically, and passed him, but he was mildly troubled at the need for Houston to keep shaving – a rare necessity in Tibet.

  ‘Well,’ Houston said, aware that this was one among so many problems. ‘Let’s face that when we come to it. Turn in now.’

  ‘Yes, Houtson.’

  ‘Houston.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Houtson. Good night, Houtson.’

  Houston awoke the next morning with a slight breathless- ness that had nothing to do with the altitude, and they washed and breakfasted briefly, and got started on the last lap. The boy took him again through his few bits of Tibetan as they talked, and he even managed to add to his modest store. But he did not manage to improve Ringling’s pronunciation. The boy was still calling him Houtson, and he was still extracting mild amusement out of it when they came out of a little grove of rhododendron and found themselves on a smooth turf cliff that dropped steeply into the emerald waters of a lake. Just one hour later they were looking down on the seven golden roofs of Yamdring. That was early in the afternoon of 12 May 1950.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1

  IT had been only seven months since he had first heard of this place, and only four since he had left London to hear more; but it was as familiar to him as if he had known it all his life.

  Just so the film party must have come on it for the first time, nearly a year before; and just so the acute camera eye of Kelly had recorded it for him. Two thousand feet below the fluted gold canopies swam in the rising currents of air; the monastery glistened on its seven toy terraces like the layers of a wedding cake. Multi-coloured specks seethed in the lower courtyard, and a line of them weaved and swayed across the bridge of boats to the little island. There was a building on the island, a flattened obelisk with glittering white walls inclining inwards to a green roof which sloped steeply away into a thread-like gold spire. The narrow lake lay like a green cheval glass in the cleft of the valley, a score of boats drawing thin insect trails across its perfect surface. At the far side, the village began, and straggled, winking, along the shore to the monastery, and lost itself in the green hills behind.

  In the warm afternoon a rich and spicy smell came up out of the valley, and with it, a thin tintinnabulation of sound: the distant clink of metal on stone, snatches of music from some curious, tinkling instrument, an occasional high, disembodied cry, and, from the monastery, enclosing all the sound and regulating it, it seemed, the wafted dong and boom of a gong.

  ‘Yamdring,’ the boy said.

  They sat and watched it in silence for some time. The boy had estimated it would take three hours to get down, and was in no hurry to move. Evening was the best time to arrive; they could then turn immediately, and without attracting attention, to finding themselves a place to sleep in the crowded doss-houses of the village.

  Houston smoked a cigarette and gazed down at the extraordinary spectacle, wonderfully at peace and most keenly aware of himself sitting in this place in the golden glow of the May afternoon.

  He had made it, then. By mule and bicycle and his own two feet he had crossed the impossible mountains to find this prize in its hidden place. He knew that he couldn’t have done it by himself, and that he nearly hadn’t done it at all. All the same it had happened.

  He breathed deeply, experiencing again the feeling he had had weeks before when he had sat on his sleeping bag and watched the blue mountains lean in towards him in the sunset: the strange feeling that he was both actor and observer in the events that were happening, and that with a little effort he could see what was still to come. And again the glimpse vanished as swiftly as it appeared, leaving him only with the sure knowledge that his brother was here somewhere, not half a mile below him.

  The boy had stretched himself out full length on the turf and was peering over the edge with satisfaction.

  ‘It’s very good for us, Houtson, sir. Plenty of people here today.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It must be the spring festival. They come to pray to the monkey.’

  Houston threw his cigarette over the edge and came reluctantly out of his reverie. He said, ‘What monkey is that?’

  The boy told him then, the legend of how the monkey had come over the mountains from India, and had found the benevolent she-devil in her cave, and had tempted her; and of how in the spring he had carried her to the island in Yamdring lake, and in the autumn had coupled with her.

  ‘They did it there,’ the boy said, pointing. ‘Just there where the shrine is now.’

  ‘I see. So that’s how Tibetans were made.’

  ‘Yes, sir. By the monkey. He is my father,’ the boy said simply.

  ‘Mine, too,’ Houston said wryly. ‘Or maybe that was another monkey.’

  ‘Yes, sir, another monkey. This one is still here.’

  ‘He must be a very old monkey now.’

  ‘Ah, it’s not the real monkey. It’s only the body of the monkey. The real monkey died,’ the boy said with regret.

  ‘And the she-devil?’

  ‘She wept and her tears turned the lake green in his memory. Then she built the shrine as another memory. She went to live there,’ he said, pointing to the lowest level of the monastery. ‘She lived there nine hundred years.’

  ‘What happened to her then?’

  ‘She went away.’

  ‘She didn’t die?’

  ‘The she-devil can’t die. She just comes and goes.’

  ‘And she’s just gone again now, is she?’

  ‘No, sir, no, Houtson,’ the boy said keenly. ‘She’s here.’

  ‘In the monastery?’

  ‘In the monastery. In the top one. She’s the abbess – the abbess and the she-devil. She goes away and comes back. She is in her eighteenth body now.’

  ‘I see,’ Houston said cautiously. ‘How about the monkey – does he come back?’

  ‘Oh, Houtson, no,’ the boy said, swiftly covering a smile with a charming gesture of his slender hand. ‘The monkey can’t come back. Not the real monkey. What a surprise for the abbess if the monkey came back for her.’

  ‘H’m,’ Houston said, bemused by the complexities of this legend, and squinted at the sun. ‘Isn’t it time we were moving?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We can go now,’ the boy said, and got up and punched the mule lightly in the ribs, still chuckling at the nature of the abbess’s predicament.

  They started down, for Yamdring.

  The mani wall began after half an hour, and continued, with intervals, almost all the way. The boy bowed to the inscribed tiles, with their regular invocation of the jewel in the lotus, and chanted a little as they walked. He was still in excellent spirits at the thought of the monkey returning, and inclined to be somewhat ribald.

  The track left the cliff to skirt a long field of barley in which women were at work, and Houston saw that many of them had dropped the tops of their orange cloaks, exposing copper breasts in the hot sun. The boy whistled and waved enthusiastically, and one or two of them turned, teeth glinting in the sun, and waved back.

  ‘Yamdring women, sir. Lovely women,’ Ringling said, grinning cheerfully at them. ‘From the monastery,’ he added.

  Houston looked again and saw that each of the splendid young creatures had her head shaved, and he said in astonishment, ‘You mean they’re nuns?’

  ‘Nuns, sir? I don’t know.’

  ‘Holy women?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir, holy. Priestesses. They live in the monastery, one thousand of them. Very holy women, Houtson, sir.’

  ‘H’m,’ Houston said. The bare-breasted young women did not look particularly holy. Even allowing for the customs of the country, he thought there was a certain liveliness of glance and gesture that he would not have associated with nuns.

  The boy caught something in his tone, and he glanced at him, grinning. He said, ‘You mean – do they do it, Houtson, sir?’

  ‘Is that what I meant?’

  ‘Oh, they do
it, sir. My God, they do it. They do it like rattlesnakes! They do it whenever they can!’ the boy said joyously.

  Houston looked again at the lively young priestesses in the barley, and he didn’t for a moment doubt it. He said, ‘Are they allowed to do that?’

  The boy laughed aloud. ‘No, sir, not allowed. But they do it. They can’t help themselves, sir. All the young ones do it.’

  ‘You seem to know a hell of a lot about it.’

  ‘Oh, everyone knows, sir. It’s the only pleasure they have. They live in stone cells. They sleep on stone shelves. They have a hard life, sir. It’s no wonder they love to do it so much.’

  ‘When do they get the opportunity?’

  ‘In their cells, at night-time, sir. They’re locked in, but the monks unlock the doors. There are only one hundred monks for all those women.’

  ‘That must keep the monks very busy.’

  ‘Yes, sir, very busy. But sometimes people can get in from outside. Some of the women can do it ten times in one night,’ the boy said, running his small pink tongue round his lips with a leer of extreme lasciviousness.

  Houston shook his head. ‘You’re a bad young devil, Ringling,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you’ve had time to find all this out.’

  But it was not Ringling’s badness, or even how he had come by his detailed knowledge, that made him smile as they left the barley field behind. Something else had come to mind; something he had read, weeks before, in a dusty newspaper office in Calcutta, and he pondered over it as they dropped steeply down to the labyrinthine monastery with its thousand stone boudoirs.

  The proclivities of the holy women of Yamdring had come, certainly, as a great surprise to him. He didn’t think they would surprise the astrological correspondent of the Hindustan Standard.

  2

  They got to the village at dusk and entered a narrow, jostling thoroughfare that became, before they had gone half-way through it, as bright as day. Thousands of butter lamps were being lit: on the ground, on the stalls, and above the stalls on rods stretched across the street. The market was in full cry.