The Rose of Tibet

by Lionel Davidson

  To Houston, after the silent weeks in the mountains, it was as though he had been pushed into a steam organ at a fair. The stupefying blare of sound seemed to batter all the sense out of him. Traders cried, musicians clanged, dogs barked, gramophones ground, and above all, like the amplified noise of a colony of parrots, shrieked the voice of the crowd.

  The boy sold the mule before they had gone a hundred yards, for eighty rupees, and they continued, pushing their way through the throng, lumbered with the sleeping kit and their personal bags. It was a scene of such extraordinary animation that Houston found himself unable to stop smiling. On all sides the people gesticulated and laughed, handsome, vivacious, noisy people, fluttering like butterflies in the warm brilliant of the butter lamps. They clustered thickly round the cloth merchants with their lengths of glistening silk; and round the trestle tables piled high with jewellery and mouth organs and hand mirrors. Tight knots of them chattered and shoved outside the booths of fortune tellers and letter-writers, barbers and dentists; and more argued and bantered across the provision stalls with their stocks of yak butter, tsampa, dried fruit, tea bricks, green ginger, purple beans and blocks of melting yellow candy.

  Here and there groups squatted and drank in narrow lanes between the stalls. Ringling pushed his way through one of these, and Houston saw that behind lay a terrace of tall houses built of rough stone, several storeys high. People were leaning out of the glassless windows in the warm evening, and behind them, more batteries of butter lamps shone in the crude rooms. From one end to the other, this side of the street seemed to be a single enormous catacomb of flickering stone chambers, and he saw that these must be the doss-houses the boy had mentioned.

  A stream of people was being turned away from the first doorway, and they had to hump the baggage up and down the exhausting, noisy street for over an hour before they could find a house with accommodation to offer. The room they were allotted, with two other men and a woman, was on the fifth floor, and they struggled, hunched under their baggage, up a narrow, tunnel-like staircase reeking of hot rancid butter from the lamps lining the walls.

  The landings ran off into a bewildering series of narrow corridors, brilliant and choking with the fuming butter; and in each was a warren of tiny stone chambers. The young Tibetan who had led the way showed them into one, and left, and Houston looked at his three new companions. They were little, lithe, gay people who had chattered and laughed all the way up through the building, and they were still at it as they came in the room. They clasped their hands and told their names, and Ringling told his own, and pointed to his mouth and his head as he explained that Houston was dumb, and not quite right in the bargain.

  There were five palliasses on the stone floor, and a big leather bucket in the corner; this seemed to be the only furniture. A hide cover was fastened over the window and the tiny room stank even worse than the corridor. One of the men removed the hide and hung out of the window, singing, while the other, with the woman, began preparing a meal on the floor with a small butter burner unpacked from the baggage.

  Houston lay back on the palliasse and closed his eyes and mouth while Ringling unpacked their own kit. He had never in his life been assailed by such an overpoweringly evil stench, and his head was swimming with the noise and the glare. The clanging and shrieking in the street seemed if anything to be louder now that they were above it, and the people in the room were shouting to make themselves heard. Ringling was shouting as loudly as any of them, quite happy and quite unaffected by the confusion.

  Houston lay back on the palliasse and closed his eyes and tried to shut out the stone box and the yellow smoking glare, and succeeded for some minutes, till the boy shook him and he sat up and saw that the woman had prepared a large bowl of some soup-like substance and all were sitting round eating.

  ‘Eat now,’ the boy said loudly in Tibetan, grinning at him.

  ‘Eat. Good to eat.’

  Houston looked at the bowl and saw something swimming in it, and in an unwary moment breathed through his nose, and he was struggling to his feet, gagging. He didn’t know where to go, and the boy was quickly beside him, and he hung, trembling, over the bucket, and saw that it had not been empty even to begin with, and spewed, and leaned on the greasy rim some time longer, knees trembling and eyes watering into the vile receptacle.

  He turned, smiling apologetically, to the people round the bowl, and they smiled back at him, in no way disturbed and still eating heartily.

  They went out after that, for he couldn’t bear to stay in the same room with the food and the bucket; but out in the street found himself suddenly hungry, and they ate.

  They ate at a stall at the far and less noisy end of the village, sitting on boxes and entertained by a single blind musician who played gentle tunes on five small gongs. They ate hard barley cakes with soft cheese and washed it down fairly copiously with a mild malty beer, and with this fare, the finest he had tasted for weeks, and the respite in the cooling night air from the din, Houston felt himself again. They strolled round the village smoking each a coarse but flavoursome cigarillo, and Houston saw how the monastery lay in relation to the main street.

  They had come in behind it in the dusk, and had divined only its bulk. But now, half a mile away along the lakeside, and with the moon up and glinting on the overhanging gold eaves, they could see it quite clearly. Thousands of lights glimmered in seven tall columns against the dark hillside. It seemed, from this angle, like some great leaning tower lit up for a celebration.

  A breeze was scudding across the lake, and the bridge of boats moved uneasily in the chop; the butter lamps danced like fireflies. Even at this hour, the procession had not ceased, and the ant-like lines went endlessly there and back to where the white walls of the shrine stood pallid in the moonlight, the slender spire shining like a needle.

  ‘You want to go to the shrine, sir?’ Ringling asked, watching him.

  Houston didn’t want to; he thought he had done as much as he wanted for one day. But he recalled that the monkey was the boy’s father, so he smiled and nodded, and they turned and walked back along the lakeside. As they neared the monastery, he saw how enormous the complex of buildings was. Even the lowest level reared high above them in the dark sky, peppered with light and pulsing with sound.

  A flight of steps led up from the lake to a broad courtyard; and from the courtyard another flight to the monastery’s great iron gates. Uniformed men stood outside the gates, with clubs and togas and what looked like Grecian helmets, and a small squad of them patrolled the upper flight, evidently to keep it clear. The courtyard below was crowded with people; they stood quite still and quite silent, listening to the chanting inside.

  There was an ululating quality about the chanting that Houston had heard before, and he smiled in the dark, remembering where he had heard it, and who he had heard it with, and he wondered how Michaelson was faring at the other side of the mountains.

  The bridge of boats began from a small jetty at the foot of the steps, and they jostled their way on. The boats were of animal skins and very buoyant, and the slatted bridge bobbed and dipped like a cork in the choppy water. The procession was at first somewhat hushed, affected by the silent crowd in the courtyard above, but by midstream had recovered its form, and both queues, coming and going, laughed and clutched quite gaily at each other as they swayed and stumbled above the glittering water.

  The island was perhaps a quarter of a mile long, and the shrine stood in the middle. There were no guards here and the queue streamed vivaciously and unreverently into the building. Inside was a single room, stone paved, and with a high pointed ceiling. In the middle crouched the monkey. It was made of gold, twenty feet high. There were indications of great kindliness and affability in the fashioning of the monkey’s face and hands; and of high fertility in other of its alert golden features. Houston walked round it with the appreciative crowd, and he enjoyed it. There was a series of murals on the walls, their colours somewhat faded, and he would
have liked to look longer at these, but the crowd pushed from behind, and he was swept on and round and finally out of the shrine. An orange-robed monk waited with an offertory tray outside and Ringling gave money, for himself and for Houston, and they walked back across the dew-soaked turf to the bridge.

  The crowds were dispersing from the courtyard when they came off at the other end, and the lights were going out in the monastery. They would be locking the young priestesses away for the night, Houston thought, and he smiled again in the dark. It was a lively place; livelier, noisier, stranger by far than one would think on hearing of it first in a carpeted office in Wardour Street half the world away.

  A chill breeze was coming off the lake and he felt stiff and tired. It seemed more than only a day since he had wakened in his tent high in the hills. They cut across the darkening market and found the tenement again and climbed the five tunnel-like flights, and spent some minutes searching in the choking warren for the right corridor, and let themselves quietly into the room.

  It was dim now, all the butter lamps but one extinguished; the three Tibetans lying on their palliasses like waxen dolls.

  They undressed in silence and Houston got in his sleeping bag, and just as the lamp went out heard the boy’s soft ‘Good night’ in his ear.

  He stopped himself in the moment of replying. There was no one to hear, but he thought he might as well get it right, so he grunted; a grunt suitable for a man who was dumb and also not quite right in the head, and lay back licking his lips and wondering what the morrow would bring.

  But there were hours before the morrow.

  The Tibetans laughed and murmured in their sleep. Houston lay awake and heard them. Both men visited the woman in the night; and all of them visited the bucket. Houston heard this, too. He couldn’t shut off his hearing, but he could do something about the sense of smell, and he lay breathing through his mouth, throat parching as hour succeeded hour in foetid fumbling blackness.

  It was not the best of nights.

  3

  There was a pump in the backyard, and Houston washed himself gratefully at it in the early sunlight. Men and women had stripped without inhibition all around and were taking stand-up baths. Mindful of the money belts next to their skin, Houston and the boy washed only their faces and feet, and dried themselves on their sweat-stained clothing. They had breakfasted already, on tea and tsampa, in the foul cell of the night, and had booked the room again so that they could leave the kit. There was no reason for them to return, and they left.

  Every day for weeks now, Houston had started out in the morning burdened with baggage and with the discipline of so many miles to cover in so many hours. As they entered the street in the sparkling morning he felt curiously lost and light as air, as though he had forgotten something.

  The stalls were opening in the market and the street already filling with people. They cut through to the lake and walked along the shore. The sun was low on the water still, but a few pleasure boats were out already and kites flew in the morning breeze. The monastery courtyard lay in a pool of shadow.

  They had planned very thoroughly what had to be done today, but familiarity did not make the idea more believable. Even more than on the previous night it struck him as incredible that he should be walking about in a Tibetan village.

  ‘We go inside first, then,’ the boy said in his ear. ‘All right, sir?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘How you feel?’

  ‘Fine.’

  He felt very far from fine. From somewhere inside the monastery a gong was booming steadily, and his heart had begun to boom in time with it. The gates were open now, guards patrolling with their clubs outside. A thin line of people was being admitted at one gate, and from the other orange-robed priestesses came and went.

  The boy said nothing more as they mounted the steps and crossed the courtyard. They joined the queue and shuffled slowly up the second flight. On the terrace at the top, a line of heavy prayer wheels had been set up; they turned, propelled by the hands of all who passed, the greased wooden spindles rumbling softly like a slow train over a bridge. A guard stood on the top step, in helmet and toga, looking over the queue, looking into each pair of eyes as he stolidly swung his club; and Houston felt his heart begin to thud very unpleasantly. From the corner of his eye he saw that Ringling too, was nervous; grinning again with the wild and rigid gaiety that he had come to expect at moments of crisis.

  But they edged up to the guard, and past him; and up to the rumbling prayer wheels, and past them; and they were inside.

  Houston didn’t know what he’d expected to find in there; the result was certainly a let-down. It was like, he thought, nothing so much as St Pancras station: a vast, vaulted place echoing with metallic noise and the sound of scurrying feet. Butter lamps hung in festoons, and in their dim light stood old gilt idols like neglected advertisements. A group of priestesses lugged a trestle table decked with monastery merchandise, and here and there about the hall pilgrims trooped into gated chapels like conducted parties on to railway platforms.

  They paused and looked about them, and Houston saw that there was rather more than this. A number of people crawled forward on the stone floor of the monastery on their faces. A little skeletal old wretch sat beating his head quite savagely against an idol, and here and there groups squatted cross-legged holding smoking incense sticks and chanting while monks beat small gongs. Several small gongs were going off all around; he couldn’t see the big one. The boy touched his arm and they moved off.

  There were perhaps fifteen of the chapels around the hall, some merely cubby-holes with an idol and a tray of flowers. In each people sat in smoky candle-light clutching their incense sticks. The smell of incense was heavy on the air. But there was another smell above the incense, and Houston sniffed and identified it instantly across the months: the veritable odour of the Edith Road Girls’ Secondary. It was borne in on him suddenly that this was indeed an institution for females, and that beneath the robes they were sisters, all of them; and he looked through a pair of gates and saw why the smell was so strong here. In a long stone hall, some hundreds of the shaven priestesses were sitting in rows on the floor, chanting. They were swaying as they chanted, like a bed of marigolds.

  A guard wandered by as they looked in, and spoke to them, and the boy led him away. He saw then that several of the guards were circulating; the butter lamps caught an occasional gleam from their helmets.

  He couldn’t get the hang of the place. There seemed to be many smaller halls leading off the main one, and a number of doors and passages: it was an ancient building that had grown with the years in all directions. But there was little hope of investigating now, for the guards were everywhere.

  The boy had been questing about like a terrier, and he drew Houston into the wall, and said in his ear, ‘It will have to be the other thing, Houston, sir. No beggars here.’

  Houston had seen this for himself, and he merely nodded and they walked back again down the hall.

  The shadow was shifting from the courtyard when they came out of the monastery, and the sun was higher over the lake. It was just on eight o’clock, and their first job was over.

  4

  It occurred to Houston to wonder later what would have happened if he had enjoyed the benefit of an accurate map when he had started out on the journey from Kalimpong. Certainly he would have arrived two weeks earlier. But would he then have shared the bed of a she-devil, or have had his hands awash in the blood of murdered men, or have suffered his own mutilations? He could never tell; but he rather doubted it.

  As it was, owing to the limitations of Hind 4,000 they had arrived in Yamdring on the first day of the spring festival; and this seemed to Ringling nothing but the very best of good fortune, for it lasted in all for seven days, and on each one of them the crowds in the village increased. He could thus snoop to his heart’s content, without attracting undue attention, and he did so. For each of the first three days, he settled Houston in
the line of beggars in the courtyard, and went busily about his inquiries, returning only to see that Houston got his free issue of tsampa at noon.

  There were horrible monstrosities in the mendicant line, and Houston was at first hard put to it to show himself a deserving case. He met with much hostility from the amputees on either side, but by persistent gurgling and grunting, and occasional frothing, at last won acceptance – from the professionals if not from the patrons: his collection was meagre.

  For eight hours a day he sat and sunned himself on the hard flags of the courtyard, and only his backside, already ill-used, suffered from the treatment. For himself he was enchanted. His deepest instincts told him his brother was here, only yards away. He felt himself a spy in an enemy’s open city. He thought he had never known such satisfaction: of observing a scene that few had seen before, and of finding that it appealed most strongly to his tastes and his talents.

  There was a bizarreness to the spectacle that engrossed him. Frequent masses were held, for the monkey’s children to remember him, and their kinship, and notable visitors arrived daily. Once the steps were cleared for the approach of a well- known flagellant, an emaciated wretch who had hobbled forty miles on his knees over a mountain pass, flogging his face and neck and shoulders at every stop with a thong of yak-hide. He crawled moaning like a dog up the two flights, raw from top to toe and still flogging himself, to the respectful hissing of the crowds.

  Once, too, the beggars were moved to make way for a magnificent retinue: the hundreds of caparisoned horses and their attendants quite filled the courtyard. At their centre was a palanquin borne by eight gigantic spearsmen, and out of it stepped a young man clad entirely in turquoise brocade. His long black hair was braided over his head and caught at the back in a jewelled bun, and from one ear dangled a long turquoise ear-ring: he sparkled all over with pearls and precious stones. The beggars saluted him respectfully, hissing and poking out their tongues, and Houston did the same, and watched with astonishment as the young man, bowing to them, stripped himself down to his shift and gave away his clothes and his jewels and turned and went into the monastery. He emerged after the mass, still in his shift, and was again borne away, the palanquin, the equipage, the horses, descending the steps with a slow measured pace.