The Rose of Tibet

by Lionel Davidson

  It was a long time before he slept that night, and when he did he dreamed that searchlights were turned on him and that his very soul was being investigated, and he awoke just before dawn, chilled and afraid. He seemed to know with complete nightmarish certainty that his future had just then been settled. He wondered how he knew this, and what his future was, but at the same time told himself there was no point in worrying. Someone would tell him soon enough next day what his future was.

  In this, Houston was wrong. No one told him anything. He waited all that day, and the next, and the one after, for some official tidings. No tidings came. His only visitor was an old priestess, who, though tending him most solicitously and with the greatest respect, would neither talk nor listen to him. It took him some time to realize why: the old creature was both deaf and dumb. He wondered if she had been chosen for this reason.

  During these three days of perfect seclusion, with nothing to occupy him – for they had taken away all his possessions – Houston got to know his cell pretty well. He could recall it in later years with peculiar vividness.

  It was twelve feet long by eight wide. It was constructed entirely of eighty-one stone slabs. It contained no furniture of any sort apart from his bed, which was made up on a stone shelf, and the butter lamp fixture on the wall. He had a view of the sky through an outside grille that was too high for him to reach, and one of the corridor through the grille in the door: apart from this his view was circumscribed by the ninety-six square feet of cell.

  He got out of bed and measured it. He did this with his forefinger. He also measured his bed; and finding that the snuffer of the butter lamp was operated by a cord, measured that, too; and tied several hundred knots in it, and untied them again. Between times, he exercised his trunk. This was now giving him so little discomfort that he doubted if his ribs were cracked at all; he felt in most respects perfectly fit, eye back to normal, bruises fading fast.

  With all this excess of time and fitness, he thought that if somebody did not very soon bring him some news he would go off his head.

  But nobody brought him news, and he did not go off his head. He measured, and knotted, and exercised his trunk, instead, and in this way somehow managed to pass the three uneventful days (during which, as it happened, nine masses were held in his honour, nine thousand candles burned to his glory, and his name inscribed in the Golden Book of the Trulkus); speculating continuously, at first with dread, and then anger, and finally only despair, on what was going on.

  3

  What was going on was an operation of considerable complexity. Houston was being canonized. It had seemed to the abbot and the governor and the duke that there was no other measure even approximately applicable to a problem that was in itself for the moment quite insoluble.

  Fifty thousand people had witnessed the arrival of the man announced as Hu-Tzung. They would not believe it if it were stated that he was not Hu-Tzung. From every point of view it was best that he should be handed over to them, thus at one stroke settling the civil disturbance, fulfilling the prophecy, and averting the evil mission – all without stain of blood on the hands of the monastery.

  It was a solution the governor would most dearly have wished to approve. But he could not. For he knew very well who the stranger was, and even better, that it was his own errors of judgement that had brought him here. He had gone to Kalimpong to inspect him. He had gone to see if he was the kind of man who would ultimately become discouraged and go away. He had formed the conclusion that he was not of this kind, and had ordered certain preventive measures to be taken.

  But the measures had been too few and too late; the governor knew it now. And error had compounded error, until the worst had come about; until in some ghastly and inscrutable way this most damnable of men had become confused with the Incarnation.

  The soul of the governor yearned to apply a little of the Chinese torture, to ease his worry, and perhaps the situation. He would most willingly, in the interests of law and order, have turned a blind eye on his special knowledge of this man. But for one thing the man had recognized him, and for another he had come up against religious objections.

  As the abbot had pointed out, to agree to such a course would lay them open not only to a charge of illegality, but also to one of blasphemy – and of being accessories to sacrilege. For in acknowledging Houston as the Incarnation, if he were not, they left the abbess, the monastery, and the monastery treasure, unprotected against the real Hu-Tzung, who, in the terms of the prophecy, must certainly come between the sixth month of Earth Bull and the last of Iron Tiger.

  From the abbot’s point of view it would be dangerously wrong to accept Houston as the Incarnation; from the governor’s dangerously wrong not to. Impasse. From out of the impasse, Little Daughter had spoken.

  Little Daughter had sat in silence so far, balancing her vast bulk on a tiny stool and nodding her tricorn in occasional agreement. She was a person of some consequence in the monastery, for she was the only one in regular contact with the abbess; but her duties were domestic rather than administrative, and she was somewhat overawed in this masculine and worldly-wise company. She spoke therefore hesitantly.

  The issue that Little Daughter raised was one that had vexed scholars for several generations: the question of how it was possible for Hu-Tzung, having once been destroyed by Chen-Rezi, the God-Protector, to return as a man. That he should return in some form to the scene of his crimes was of course expected and perfectly proper; as, perhaps, a mule, a dog, a flea. But that he should do so as a man – in the same order of body in which he had transgressed – this was scarcely in accordance with the divine rule.

  What Little Daughter had to suggest, therefore, with the greatest deference to the abbot, was that this man, having passed his tests infallibly, was perhaps a companion spirit of Hu-Tzung; as it might be, an alter ego, who had returned either to expiate the transgressions of his pernicious partner, or to avert some further expected ones. Was it possible, she asked, hoping not to be taken for a fool, that they were here dealing with a trulku?

  ‘A trulku?’ said the abbot in astonishment.

  ‘Since he has arrived at the right time,’ Little Daughter faltered, screwing her tricorn in confusion, ‘and giving the right name –’

  ‘A trulku!’ said the governor, feeling some miraculous easement come stealing to his hernia at the very suggestion.

  The governor knew that he would never himself be a trulku; once escaped from the mortal coil nothing whatever, no hope of extra merit, no prospect of early oblivion in nirvana, would ever induce him to return to it. None the less, it was a fact that some did. Through merit they were released from the wheel of existence that Shindje, the monstrous Judge of the Dead, revolved between his teeth; and they gave up the opportunity, to come back, to show the way, to watch and ward. He looked curiously at the abbot to see how he was taking the idea.

  The abbot was taking it very cautiously, rubbing his hands and scrutinizing them with extreme care.

  ‘A trulku or a yidag?’ he said at last.

  ‘Are we not bound to believe, my lord, rather in a trulku – since he has been sent? An unconscious trulku,’ said Little Daughter eagerly, ‘who has merely felt himself drawn here –’

  ‘With a specific mission?’

  ‘To protect the Mother and all of us,’ said Little Daughter. She said it devoutly, but also, the governor thought, a shade plainly, as though to indicate that one hundred monks and an abbot and a duke had not between them so far managed to provide any very effective alternative form of protection.

  Although this was unquestionably a theological matter, the governor saw so much sense in it that he felt bound to intervene. ‘Bearing in mind the difficulties raised by The Return,’ he said, ‘and if this suggestion, Abbot, is at all possible –’

  ‘It’s possible,’ the abbot said briefly, and stood up. ‘We must have immediate guidance from the Oracle.’

  It was then shortly after three in the morning, an
d the Oracle, a young woman whose abnormal psychic qualities in no way interfered with her quite normal physical ones, had been in her cell for six hours. Little Daughter went discreetly ahead to see that she was in it alone.

  Within minutes, the small procession, now including the Oracle, was making its way through the silent monastery; across the main hall, across the smaller one, up the narrow corridor, to the cell where Houston lay sleeping. The Oracle slipped quietly in; and five minutes later, quietly out again.

  ‘There is an aura,’ she announced. ‘It is a good one. The soul is perfectly healthy. I cannot say more.’

  For the governor, she had said enough.

  Half an hour later, having disposed of all objections, and also a stiff nightcap, he sank with a little moan into bed. There were feather cushions at his head, and more at his hernia, and the sheer unimagined bliss after the dreadful day gave him a sensation of floating so marvellously euphoric that, mindful of his irreligious reflections of the day, he made a swift act of contrition.

  He forgave his wives. He forgave the English nation. He forgave his fellow conspirators; and even the old vile body whose hungers and weaknesses had brought him to his present indignities; and said good-bye to this old body, to every particle of it, as it slipped away from him into limbo.

  Each one of these particles told the governor that his judgement had been right; and as sleep sang in his ears and he drifted down to join them, he felt himself smiling.

  Statesmanship, after all, worked. For a year at least there would be no more troubles at Yamdring; for a year no more journeyings. It was a prospect so delightful that he carried it with him into sleep, and as he slept still smiled, this doomed and luckless man.

  Later, on a morning when his doom was certain, he was to confess all of this to Houston; all of his hopes and dreams, every small part of what had led up to this moment. He did not spare himself, for he was bent not upon justification but a purging of the soul; he was morally certain what lay before him the next day.

  He was drunk at the time, and Houston also; they sat in the governor’s library with the governor’s wives and the governor’s volumes, drinking the last of the governor’s arak: he was taking a melancholy farewell of all the pleasures and vanities of his life.

  But that was a morning still in the future.

  On the morning when the governor could still smile in his sleep, his proclamation was posted. It was posted inside the monastery and out, and all that day runners carried it throughout the province. By noon, when the first of the nine canonical masses began, several thousand people had managed to squeeze in to participate. By evening, thousands more were addressing their prayers through the new trulku.

  The new trulku himself at this time was resting after a long day of measurement and exercise.

  During the next two days, while the cycle of masses was completed and the village cleared, he continued with these activities; and on the morning of the fourth day awoke prepared wearily to resume them. He had almost given up wondering what was going on, and he despaired of talking to another human being ever again. On this day, however, one came to see him.

  The duke arrived early, with only a small retinue, and by midday was bearing Houston back with him to his mansion at Ganzing. Houston sat beside him in a double palanquin on the journey, deeply bewildered, and for this reason at first mistook the obeisance that was being offered on all sides as respect due to his companion. But he could not mistake it when, in the country, relays of men and women began running beside the palanquin, braving the blows of the outriders for the privilege of kissing his feet.

  The duke had hoped to put off all explanation until they had reached the house, but he saw that the hope was a forlorn one.

  ‘A what?’ Houston said.

  ‘A trulku,’ the duke said diffidently. ‘It means a sort of saint.’

  ‘I see,’ Houston said.

  A large number of weird things had happened to him in the past year, but this was certainly the weirdest. He found himself wondering, just for a moment, what two young women in London would make of it.

  4

  The mansion of Ganzing sat magnificently at the end of a wooded valley, and comprised within its walls a self-supporting feudal community. There was a farrier and a tanner, and a mason and a tailor, and several other craftsmen besides: their little shops and dwellings had been added to two parallel wings of the building, so that the house, with its stables, granary, brewery and working quarters had developed with the years in the shape of an elongated U.

  As Houston approached it, by way of a landscaped park and a mile-long mani wall, he saw that the young man’s substance was very great. For hour after hour in the fertile Ganzing valley, they had passed vast herds of yaks and rolling fields of barley. All this belonged to the duke. There had even been a couple of sawmills at work, erected by the duke himself – riches indeed in a land where timber fetched almost its weight in butter.

  The sawmills were not the duke’s only works. In his park he had laid out a golf course and tennis courts; and in his living quarters a central heating system. (The boiler for this system, specially adapted to burn yak dung, had come over the mountains from India, piece by piece, en route from Bonnybridge, Scotland: he later pointed out the trademark to Houston, with particular pride. ‘See – a link with your mother,’ he said warmly above the roar of the burning dung.)

  In the course of the next few days, Houston was able to observe how the quality lived in Tibet. It was on a considerable scale. The duke kept not merely one priest but an entire chapter; not merely three wives but five. (‘Just a matter of form, old chep. I only really hit it off with a couple of them.’) He had real glass in his windows and electric light (from a petrol engine) in his library. He had the finest Scotch whisky in his cellars, and the choicest cigars in his cabinet.

  Houston stayed a week sampling these delights. He drank the duke’s whisky and smoked his cigars. He rode for miles with him over his estates, and learned a good deal about the agricultural situation of south-western Tibet. He learned very little more about his own. This remained, after four days, as mystifying as ever.

  He knew that he was a trulku. He knew that he was the trulku of the man called Hu-Tzung. He knew that he was expected to avert the evil designs of this man. But he did not know what the designs were; and this the duke refused quite firmly to tell him.

  ‘Why not look on it as a kind of vacation, old chep?’ he urged Houston amiably as they sat over their whisky and cigars. ‘As a rather unusual kind of vacation.’

  ‘What happens when the vacation is over?’

  ‘You’ll go home. I promise you. We’ve only got to wait for a few prophecies to work themselves out.’

  ‘How am I concerned in the prophecies?’

  ‘I hope not at all, old chep.’

  ‘Will my brother and his friends go home, too?’

  ‘Of course they will. Absolutely.’

  ‘Why can’t I see them, then?’

  ‘Ah, now. Now, now, old chep,’ said the duke.

  In the face of such stonewalling, affable but resolute, Houston was powerless. He felt himself a prisoner in some extraordinary dream. Each morning a young woman came to kiss his feet and wash and dress him, and each night another did the same in reverse. When he went out in the courtyard, the masons and tailors and farriers and tanners and their families ran out to touch him and poke their tongues, and when he stayed in a succession of their objects was brought to him to bless.

  A somewhat more disturbing attention was being paid him: a monk had come with the party from Yamdring, and the monk accompanied him everywhere. He walked with him and rode with him and sat with him and all but slept with him; he slept indeed on a rug in the same room. The functions of this monk were so plainly those of a guard rather than an acolyte that Houston lay awake late in the night plotting how to confound them. For a plan had sprung to mind during these days; a somewhat nebulous plan but one that would require complete freedom from
supervision.

  Its germ had come on his very first night in Ganzing when, still dazed by the mystery of his sudden translation to sainthood, he had thought back over all that had happened, and had come upon another mystery: the miracle of the she-devil’s return from the Courtship.

  The she-devil had gone to the island in her palanquin, but she had not returned with it. She had returned in some other way. What other way?

  She couldn’t have boated back, or swum back, or walked back over the bridge, for such a miracle would not have weathered the centuries. For the same reason she couldn’t have returned in the procession in disguise.

  Yet unless there had genuinely been a bit of magic – and after all that had happened he was not prepared to say there wasn’t – she had managed by some physical means to shift herself from island to monastery. By what means?

  ‘A tunnel,’ Houston said aloud in the darkness.

  Of course a tunnel! What else but a tunnel? A tunnel whose one end was buried deep and undiscoverably somewhere in the vast and complex monastery; but a tunnel whose other end was on the island – which was neither vast nor complex; a tunnel, moreover, which since it had to be entered in perfect privacy, must start in the shrine.

  Houston’s visual memory was very keen, and he could recollect the shrine in intimate detail. A circular room, some thirty feet or so across at the base; a room paved with stone slabs… .

  By the end of the week he thought the time had come to find out more about it.

  He said, ‘I think I’d like to go back now.’

  ‘Go back, old chep? What on earth for? Aren’t you enjoying yourself here?’

  ‘Very much. But I’d like to do a bit of painting. I’d like to paint the monastery.’

  Paint the monastery! said the duke. Nobody had ever painted the monastery of Yamdring. Why, it was by way of being a sacred, a supernatural building.