The Rose of Tibet

by Lionel Davidson

  He took the sled with him and collected his wood methodically, covering a different area every day and making a complete tour over a radius of some ten or twelve miles from the hermit hole every week. The traps provided at first almost nothing, but after a week or two he took to baiting them with what was left of the horse, and was soon picking up his dinner at least twice a week.

  In the third week of January, when the weather grew suddenly worse, he found two rat-hares in the one trap; they had evidently gone for the same bit of food simultaneously. He took out the animals and rebaited the trap and moved on, and had no sooner turned his back than he heard the jaws go again. He looked round. Another rat-hare was in the trap.

  Deducing that the worsening weather was bringing them down from the heights and that his remaining traps might be working just as hard, he gave up collecting wood (for a large pile was already drying in the hermit hole) and went straight away to inspect them. He was not disappointed.

  For the following four days, in the vilest of blizzards, Houston went smiling from one trap to another. Some of the traps were buried deep in snow; but his little prey had smelt out the food, and they were waiting for him. He returned blue at the nose and chilled to the marrow; but by the end of five days he had returned with twenty-eight meat dinners.

  Houston regarded this period, which was from the third week of January to the end of February, as one of the most rewarding of his life. The routine very quickly developed into a most regular and pleasing pattern. He would leave sharp on half past seven, punctual as some clerk going up to the city. He would climb the steps into the chorten, and pick up his sled, and nod familiarly to the bones of the holy hermit, and go out into it. The more horrible the weather, the greater his feeling of virtue. In all the seventeen weeks he did not come face to face with another soul; and for the first five of them was never happier.

  He looked forward with the keenest relish to the evening. For it was dark when he left, and it would be dark again when he returned, hungry, half-frozen, with just energy enough to lug his tight-lashed haul across the place of wind devils. Smoke would be filtering out of the chorten, and the first breath of it would hit him as he removed the entrance stone. He would park the sled and clamber down in his bulky clothing – clamber down like Santa Claus descending a chimney, the warm scented air rushing deliriously up his body; and then it would all be there, waiting for him – a magnificent bombshell of light and heat, a treasure box of unfailing delight.

  The cave was hot – gloriously, bakingly hot after the unremitting horrors of the frozen world above. The girl wore a light robe in it all day. Houston would strip, down to his singlet and trousers, and wash and eat, and then the evening was before him.

  He taught her draughts, with bits of black and white stick, and noughts and crosses, and he drew pictures for her. On one wall he made a mural of Yamdring and on another of Bond Street. He drew for her also Trafalgar Square, and Fitzmaurice Mansions, and the living-room of number 62 a (and at this period, too, on the back of her robe, the thirty sketches of her now in the Kastnerbank of Zürich). He told her about television and cinema and underground trains and ocean liners; and he tried to explain the basic political ideas of Western Europe. The political ideas bored her. But she was keen enough on religious ones, eagerly – sometimes scornfully – anticipating the theory underlying certain of the beliefs.

  The instruction was not all on one side. For she explained to Houston many details of the life of the country that still baffled him. She taught him a number of mantras, religious chants, very useful for repulsing demons, and also for inducing, by repetition, a state of trance. Houston could not put himself into a trance by these means, but the girl could and very easily did, her pupils not responding to light nor her flesh to pain. She taught him also the rudiments of monastery dialectics, and engaged him in a number of simple arguments. Houston found the arguments fanciful and absurd, and the rules incomprehensible, but lying at ease in the crackling warmth with the gales howling above, he indulged her. He would have indulged her in anything.

  He adored her. He could not look at her, or talk to her, or lie with her enough. Her hair had grown now, giving her a haunting waif-like appearance. He watched her by the hour, absorbing every nuance, every gesture as if it might be the last.

  ‘Mei-Hua, do you love?’

  ‘Chao-li, I must.’

  ‘Above all others?’

  ‘Chao-li, I must love all things. I am in harmony with all things.’

  ‘But more in harmony with me.’

  ‘Am I so, Chao-li?’

  She eluded him. He thought he knew her every pore, her every molecule. He could trace the beginnings of every smile, and where the hair grew on her head, and where it had begun to sprout again on her body. He thought that physically he knew every inch of her; and not only physically, for she had no affectations, no reticences, no feminine wiles with him. Her nature was of the most unvarying, one of tideless affection. And yet there was something that he couldn’t grasp – a feeling diffused through her of boundless good will for all creatures that he had to channel to himself alone.

  Houston had never been particularly humble in love. He found himself now with the 18-year-old girl a suppliant.

  He said, ‘Mei-Hua, say you are more in harmony with me.’

  ‘Very well, I will say it.’

  ‘And that we will never be parted.’

  ‘Oh, Chao-li, how can I say that? It isn’t true.’

  ‘Why can’t it be?’

  ‘Because some day we must die,’ she said gaily.

  She was leaning over him, rubbing her nose against his; so he said with a smile to match her own, ‘The she-devil cannot die. You told me that. She only goes away and comes back.’

  ‘Her soul, Chao-li. Her body must die. All seventeen of her bodies have died. And so will this one. And so will yours. All bodies must.’

  ‘Can’t we stay together till they do?’

  ‘Where will we stay?’

  ‘Wherever you want.’

  ‘Will we stay in heaven?’

  ‘Mei-Hua, it isn’t a joke.’

  ‘Will we stay in the hermit hole?’

  ‘I’ve been very happy in the hermit hole,’ Houston said.

  ‘I, too, Chao-li. Very happy with you.’

  ‘Then be happy with me in Chumbi also.’

  ‘In Chumbi I must be the abbess again. There will be nobles and lamas there. We could not live there as here. Besides, you would soon become bored with me.’

  ‘Never,’ Houston said.

  ‘You would go away to paint your pictures.’

  ‘I would paint you.’

  ‘How often could you paint me?’

  ‘Every day, until you’re quite old.’

  ‘No,’ she said, nuzzling.

  ‘Till you’re very old. Till you’re just an old, old body.’

  ‘Alas, Chao-li, it isn’t possible.’

  ‘Why isn’t it?’

  ‘Because this body will not grow old. I must leave it young.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I have always known. It is written for me.’

  ‘You know when you will die?’

  ‘The year and the month, Chao-li.’

  ‘Then tell me.’

  She drew back and looked at him with a wistful humour. ‘Not now, Chao-li. Not ever, perhaps.’

  Houston’s heart sank as he saw how little it meant to her. But he persevered. He awoke one night to find her poring over his face in the firelight.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just loving you. How beautiful you are, Chao-li!’

  Houston drew her down with sleepy joy. It was some little way from the totality that he desired; but he thought he was making progress.

  2

  The first faint flaw in the gold appeared in the middle of February. The supply of animals dried up. It had started drying up within days of his last big haul. He thought he had worked out these p
articular areas, and shifted the traps. He had shifted them three times by 17 February, and his total catch for the period was two little rat-hares and one old diseased fox. He thought it was time to take stock of the larder.

  He had for himself nine small hares, about a pound of dried strip-meat, six of the tablets of meat extract, and some unsavoury leftovers of horse. The girl had something over a stone of tsampa, several pounds of rice, about a pound of tea and two of butter.

  Houston had been eating one of the hares at a meal, with either a bowl of hare soup if he had boiled it, or of extract soup if he had not. He thought he had eaten rather well, and that it would be of no great hardship for him to cut down. If need be, he could manage for a month on what he had. That would take him, however, only to the middle of March. It would be the middle of April before they left.

  The girl was in rather better case. At a pinch, her stocks would last the full period. She had already been rationing herself, and it seemed that she had had at the back of her mind the possibility that Houston might need to share her food.

  ‘No,’ Houston said. ‘No, I shan’t do that. The tea and tsampa are yours. Something will turn up.’

  It was not until the very last day of the month, the 28th, that it was borne in on him that nothing was going to. He had finished that day a tour of all his traps. There was no sign of any animal. The traps sat in hard ice, the springs frozen solid, the bait frozen solid; no life, no life at all stirring.

  He took his dinner with him the following day and also Ringling’s sleeping bag; for he had come to a conclusion in the night. The animals had left the mountains. They had gone to seek food near humans. He would have to seek them there himself.

  He went as near to the village as he dared, until he saw smoke. He baited his traps with meat that he could ill spare, and took himself back to a cave that he had marked on his way. He spent a miserable night in the cave, hungry and sleepless, a prey to morbid reflections. He had passed on his journey the hole in the frozen river. He had tried not to look. But he had seen something there; something; all that had been left by animals even hungrier than himself.

  Because the country was unfamiliar to him, he had taken careful note of where he had left the traps. He was out early in the morning to find them. The first one wasn’t there. He wasted half an hour checking to see that he was not mistaken before going on to the next. That wasn’t there, either. He had got to the third spot before he saw the man. He was quite a long way off, trudging away from him with a mule towards the smoke.

  Houston didn’t bother to look any further. He went back to the hermit hole.

  He had three rat-hares left and three tablets of meat extract. If he didn’t exert himself too much he could make them last a fortnight. If he shared the girl’s food they could both last another fortnight. There were six weeks to get through.

  Houston lay in his sleeping bag and tried to face the situation. He would soon have no food. He had no traps to catch any food. How was he to live without food? To share the girl’s was obviously no solution, for then the pair of them would starve. He had to get his own. Where was he to get it?

  The nightmarish situation seemed to have been sprung upon him so suddenly that he couldn’t all at once comprehend it. He was warm, well housed, comfortably bedded. He had three million pounds in emeralds and three hundred rupees in money. There was a nomad camp on one side of him and a village full of people on the other. How was it possible, with all these assets, that he should die from lack of food?

  He had not told the girl that his traps had gone, and he didn’t therefore tell her what he planned to do about it. He thought she would object to the plan. He was not very keen on it himself. All the same, three days later Houston made another journey.

  He travelled fast, recklessly spending energy for he meant to replace it before he returned. He took Ringling’s pistol with him. His plan was to barter the pistol for food. It seemed to him that if the nomads wished to hand him over to the Chinese, they would not let him buy food first. If he bought food he was going to eat it, a lot of it, right away.

  A group of them had been cooking when he was there last. They had been cooking a yak steak. They had hung a bowl beneath to catch the drips as it was basted over a fire, and they had dolloped the contents of this bowl over the steak before eating it.

  Houston could smell it still. He felt his mouth dribbling as he smelt it. The thought that he would within a few hours be fastening his teeth into such a steak was so golden that it fairly lent him wings. With the wind pushing like a wall straight into his face and so light-headed with hunger that all his hesitations were dispersed, he made the journey in five hours flat.

  He got to the plain at midday. It was not snowing. It was only slightly overcast. He could see for miles across it. He could see not a soul.

  His shock and disappointment were so great that he felt his knees buckling underneath him.

  The nomads had gone. It had simply not occurred to him that they could have gone. Where had they gone? Why had they gone?

  They had gone because of the law promulgated in 1948 which forbade them to winter at the foot of the mountains. It was a taboo law, the only kind they obeyed, and they had gone as a matter of course as soon as the first heavy snows had set in. The Chinese, aware that they would do so, had not bothered to post among them the description of Houston that was now circulating in every village for a hundred miles. It was the only reason why he had not been apprehended earlier, when he had gone to buy food with the boy. He would otherwise most certainly have been; for there was a price on his head of a million old yuan (about £70, a fortune in money), and the Chinese were no longer enemies.

  The fighting had finished in December, two months after the invasion and just a few weeks after Houston had taken up residence in Bukhri-bo. The ex-enemy was now treating quite amiably with ‘ruling circles’ exiled in Chumbi who were cautiously seeking ways in which they might without too much loss of face return to the comforts of life in Lhasa. One of these ways was by handing over certain specified ‘criminal elements.’ Houston was such an element.

  He did not know this at the time. All that he was aware of as he looked across the plain was that there was some six feet of snow upon it, and that it was unlikely that the nomads would be returning to it for some time.

  That seemed to leave him with only one alternative.

  3

  It was several days before he could screw himself up to it. His food, cut it as small as he would, was inexorably shrinking. His love for the girl was put nightly to an acid test as he watched her exercising a healthy appetite. He nerved himself to do what he must.

  As reluctant as he had been to go to the nomad camp, he was still more reluctant to go to the village. He knew he dare not go during the day among people who had shown themselves so well disposed to the Chinese. He would have to go in the dark, and steal, with the gun as an ultimate persuader. The idea was so unattractive that he thought he had better try some others first.

  He tried to eat wood and leaves. He boiled them to make a soup. The soup was bitter, bitter with the resin that enabled the wood and leaves to burn even when wet, and it merely made him vomit. He had to stop that quickly, for he could not afford to waste what he had already eaten.

  He tried to fish. He nerved himself to return to the frozen river. But either the hook he fashioned from a buckle was unsatisafactory, or the bait unattractive, or the fish simply not there. For he found no trace of life.

  There was no life anywhere. Nothing moved on land or water or in the air. The country was frozen hard, and there was nothing in it for him to eat.

  By the 16th March, Houston saw that he could put it off no longer. He had a fragment of hare left and a few crumbs of meat extract. At the rate he was eating, there was enough for two days. He boiled them up, ate the solid parts that night, and in the morning set off with a cruse of the soup.

  He had not been outside for a couple of days, and he realized right away that he wa
s very much weaker. He had scarcely the strength to pull the sled. He thought he had better take a rest every hour.

  After three hours an unpleasant suspicion began to dawn on him that he was not going to make it. He had a constant headache and there was a sensation of floating about his knees. He saw that he had run himself down too severely for such a journey, that he should either have made it days earlier, or have availed himself of the girl’s food.

  Houston tried to put the idea out of his mind for he realized that even at this juncture it would be all too easy to persuade himself against the mission. But once there, the idea grew. Why, after all, had he not shared her food? Could she survive if he starved? It was joint food. It was not only meat that he was after in the village. There was more likely to be tsampa there than meat. He would be getting food for both of them.

  It was not yet time for Houston to have another rest, but he took one. He saw he had been foolish not to eat properly before attempting such a mission. By not eating he was jeopardizing them both. Unless he built himself up, the mission had no chance of success. He had much better go back and eat.

  By half past ten, he had quite convinced himself, and he got up and went back. He carried the pistol in his hand as he walked, for he carried it with him now wherever he went. He had still not lost hope that some animal might be moving, and that Providence might set it in his path. And on that day, 17 March, at about eleven o’clock, Providence did.

  Providence set the bear in Houston’s path.

  It was a very old bear, a hungry one. Houston calculated later that it had not eaten enough before hibernation, and had awakened early in the savage winter. It had blundered down the mountain looking for a meal.

  At eleven o’clock it saw one.

  Houston had not been using his goggles, but when his eyes began to ache with the snow glare, he put them on. The moment he did so, he was aware that he was being watched.