by Talbot Mundy
A dark figure shrouded in black cloth slid down following the stones and, before Ommony could move, had jumped to his rein. A young woman’s face peered up at him, flashing white teeth, but the smile vanished instantly.
“Dawa Tsering,” she muttered, and then began talking so fast that Ommony could hardly understand her. Dawa Tsering was in danger; that seemed clear enough. Also, she, her own self, wanted him, desired him desperately. She had a baby wrapped in a shawl slung over her shoulder and had laid another bundle on the ground.
Ommony pointed down the track, and as he moved his arm two men leaped out of a shadow and rushed uphill at Dawa Tsering. Diana flew at them and they backed away. They had weapons, but appeared afraid to use them. Dawa Tsering ran uphill toward Ommony, feeling for the knife that was not there, and Ommony whistled to Diana. The two men followed her cautiously, advancing step by step as she retreated, snarling. From the opposite direction around the bend, the sirdar came cantering back downhill, sending stones scattering over the cliff-side. The girl flung herself at Dawa Tsering, seizing him around the neck and pouring out a stream of words, half-intelligible, choked with anger, grief, laughter, command, and emotions unknown to those who have not loved and do not still love an adventurer from Spiti.
“Sooner than expected!” the sirdar grunted, drawing rein.
The sirdar seemed pleased, and to have changed his mind about being in a hurry. He sat bolt-upright on his pony and waited in silence for something to happen; but the Tibetan behind him drew a long knife and showed it to the two men who were standing in the attitude of wrestlers. Dawa Tsering seemed to want to run, but the woman clung to him. Diana growled thunderously but awaited orders.
“Who are these men?” asked Ommony.
“My wife’s husbands!” Dawa Tsering shook the girl off and stepped between Ommony and the sirdar. It appeared he meant to slip away, but the sirdar’s pony made a sudden half-turn, and there was nothing left for him but to stand or jump over the cliff. “Protect me, Ommonee! I have been a friend to you. That dog hasn’t a flea on her. Moreover, Missish-Anbun has my knife.”
“Who is this young woman?” Ommony demanded. The sirdar answered. The two husbands were about to speak, but waited, open-mouthed. The woman was watching the sirdar as if destiny hung on the movement of his lips.
“She is his. It is his child. Choose!” he commanded, shoving Dawa Tsering, making him turn to face him. “Go with her to Spiti, or go with them to Ladakh* and the wife of many husbands. Which?”
“But how do I know it is my child?” Dawa Tsering grumbled.
The sirdar’s face was in darkness from the shadow of the overhanging cliff. He did not laugh, but his smile was almost audible. “She knows. You may learn from her. Choose quickly!”
“Is it a man child?” Dawa Tsering asked; and the woman burst into excited speech, beginning to unwrap the bundle that swung at her back.
“Well, that is different,” said Dawa Tsering. “If it is a man child — there is need of men in Spiti. Very well, I will take the woman.”
“To Spiti!” the sirdar commanded. “Understand: I will write to the Rajah of Spiti. You will stay in Spiti and obey him. If you ever again cross the boundaries of Spiti without a letter from your rajah giving permission and stating the reason for it, you will deal with me!”
“Oh, well!” said Dawa Tsering, shrugging his broad shoulders. “Must I go now?”
“Now!” said the sirdar.
“Good-by, Ommonee. Now you must pick your own fleas off the dog. I will be sorry for you when I think of you without a servant, but I am too well born to be any man’s servant for long, and this woman is a good one. I will sing songs of you in Spiti after you are dead. I think you will die soon. Look out for that sirdar; he is a tricky fellow.”
He kicked the bundle the woman had dropped, as a signal for her to pick it up and follow him. In another moment he had vanished, clambering by a goat- track up the cliff, humming cheerfully through his nose each time he paused to let the laden woman overtake him.
The sirdar faced the discontented husbands, lifting his right hand for silence.
“Go back to that woman in Ladakh, and to her say this from me,” he ordered. “That it may be I will come to Ladakh. If I come, and when I come, it will be well for her if I have no reason to concern myself about her. Turn neither to the right nor to the left, nor delay on the road to Ladakh, but hasten and tell her my message. And when she has beaten you, tell her a second time, and add this that if again she sends men across the boundaries of Ladakh, she shall lose them! Go!”
They went, retreating backward downhill toward Tilgaun, whence another track led over a seventeen-thousand foot pass toward their polyandrous neighborhood. The Tibetan followed them, presumably to see the order was obeyed. The sirdar turned and rode uphill in silence, keeping the middle of the track so that Ommony had no room to draw alongside. On the left a cliff fell sheer into the darkness; on the right it rose until it seemed to disappear among the stars.
Ommony rode with his woolen clothes wrapped closely against the penetrating wind that moaned from over the ravine on his left-hand. Mystified by the sirdar’s confidently used authority, that could not possibly have been vested in him by the British or by any other government (for it seemed to extend into several states), his sensations began to be mixed and bewildering.
Suggestions of fear are assertive on a dark night, riding into the unknown, without a weapon; and the sirdar’s mysterious silence was not reassuring. Hannah Sanburn had said he was “always a friend”; but a woman all alone in charge of a mission, surrounded by potential danger, would be likely to overestimate the friendship of anyone who was not openly hostile.
It occurred, and kept on recurring, however hard he tried to dismiss the thought, that, with the exception of Hannah Sanburn, he alone knew the secret about Elsa Terry — he and probably that sirdar just ahead of him; and the sirdar might be one of those dark fanatics whom jealousy makes murderers. What if the sirdar were leading him now to his death in the unknown?
For what purpose had Elsa been educated? Why had she been taken into India on that weird dramatic venture? Why had she been to Lhasa, the “forbidden city?” Who were the men to whom Hannah Sanburn said the Lama went for advice? Mahatmas? Masters? Or something else? What was their purpose? The Lama might easily be a saint and yet their tool — an unworldly old altruist in the hands of men who had designs on India; as pliable in their hands as the girl appeared to be pliable in his. That journey into India might have been a trial venture to discover how far the girl’s trained personality could be counted on to turn men’s (and women’s) heads. Gandhi in jail, all India was ripe and waiting for a new political mahatma.
Why, if not to spy on Ommony, had the Lama tolerated Dawa Tsering in his company? Dawa Tsering’s suspiciously prompt obedience to the sirdar rather looked as if the whole thing had been prearranged. In fact, it certainly was prearranged; the sirdar had admitted he expected something of the sort. And Ommony remembered now that back in Delhi Dawa Tsering had been remarkably complaisant about transferring allegiance from the Lama to himself.
Then — the Ahbor Valley. Was it likely that the sirdar could be leading him into that forbidden country for any other purpose than to make sure of his death or possibly to keep him prisoner up there? No white man, no government agent, not even one trained Nepalese spy who had penetrated the Ahbor Valley had ever returned alive. The only one who ever did return had floated, dead and mangled, down the Brahmaputra River. Thirty-five miles — not a yard more — from the boundary of Sikkim; perhaps thirty miles from where they were that minute, the Upper Ahbor Valley was as unknown as the mountains of the moon. Why should he suppose that he was to be specially favored with permission to go in there and return alive!
But there was no turning back now — nothing, of course, to prevent but nothing further from intention. Afraid, yes. Faint-hearted, no. The two emotions are as the poles apart. Fear acted as a spur to obstinacy, the unknown as a lure tha
t beckoned more compellingly than safety; habitually, since his school-days, personal safety had been Ommony’s last, least consideration. He told himself it was the cold wind that made the goose-flesh rise, and all that night, shivering, he forced himself to believe that was the truth, following the sirdar’s pony along trails like a winding devil’s stairway that led alternately toward the sky and down again into a roaring underworld.
It was pitch-dark, but the deepest darkness lay ahead, where the enormous range of the Himalayas was a wall of silence ridged with faint silver where the starlight shone on everlasting snow. Darkness may be a substance for all that anybody knows about it; it lay thick and somber, swallowing the sounds — sudden, crashing sounds, that volleyed and were gone. A tree fell into a watercourse. A rock went cannoning from crag to crag and plunged into an abyss. Silence; and then a howl along the wind as a night-prowler scented the ponies.
Bats — unimaginable thousands of them, black, and less black than the night — until the air was all alive with movement and the squeak and smell. Chasms into which the ponies’ hoofs struck stones that seemed to fall forever, soundless. Dawn at last, touching untrodden peaks with crimson-gleaming gold, and stealing lemon-colored down the pillars of the sky, to awaken ghosts of shadows in the black ravines. Tree-tops, waist-deep in an opal mist, an eagle — seven thousand feet below the track — circling above those like a fleck of blown dirt. A roar ascending full of crashing tumult; and at last a flash of silver on the waves of Brahmaputra, a mile and a half below, plunging toward Bengal through the rock-staked jaws of Ahbor Valley Gate.
Downward then, by a trail that seemed to swing between earth and sky, the ponies sliding half the time with their rumps against the rock or picking their way cautiously with six-inch strides along the edge of chasms, over which the riders peered into fathomless shadow that the sunlight had not reached. Down to the eagle-level, and the treeline, where the wet scent of morning on moss and golden gravel made the ponies snort and they had to be unsaddled and allowed to roll.
Not a word from the sirdar, although he stroked Diana’s head when she approached him, and laughed at the ponies’ antics. On again downward, and a hut at last, built of tree-trunks, perched on a ledge of rock above a waterfall, on the rim of a tree-hung bowl through which the Brahmaputra plunged.
CHAPTER XXVII. Under the Brahmaputra
When that caressing light forgets the hills
That change their hue in its evolving grace;
When, harmony of swaying reeds and rills,
The breeze forgets her music and the face
Of Nature smiles no longer in the pond,
Divinity revealed! When morning peeps
Above earth’s rim, and no bird notes respond;
When half a world in mellow moonlight sleeps
And no peace pours along the silver’d air;
When dew brings no wet wonder of delight
On jeweled spider-web and scented lair
Of drone and hue and honey; when the night
No longer shadows the retreating day,
Nor purple dawn pursues the graying dark;
And no child laughs; and no wind bears away
The bursting glory of the meadow-lark;
Then — then it may be — never until then
May death be dreadful or assurance wane
That we shall die a while, to waken when
New morning summons us to earth again.
— Chant Pagan
SMOKE came from the hut, through a hole in the roof, giving the sharp air a delicious tang, all mixed with the aroma of fallen leaves and pine trunks. Over beyond the hut spray splashed from the waterfall — rose-colored diamonds against moss-green. The air was full of bird-music, that the ear caught after it was once used to the ponderous roar of water.
A man who was undoubtedly an Ahbor — black hair low down on his forehead, high up on his cheeks — Mongolian cheek-bones — glittering, dark, bold eyes — hairy legs showing beneath a leather- colored smock — waist girdled with a leather belt, from which a kukri like a Gurkha’s hung in a wooden scabbard — peered from the hut door. He stared at the sirdar in silence, curiously, as at someone he must tolerate; it was the half-shy, half-impudent stare of a yokel at a wealthy man from town.
He took the ponies and was very careful of them, unsaddling, leading them to drink, dragging out a sack and spilling grain in the hollow of a rock, feeling their legs and rubbing them down with a piece of bark while they munched contentedly.
The sirdar led the way into the hut, but laid a finger on his lips for silence. The reason for silence was not evident; there was nobody else in there. The place was clean, but almost bare of furniture; there was a hearth of rough stones in the midst, a rough table, and a bunk in one corner, littered with blue trade-blankets. There was no bench — no chairs or stools — but there were wooden platters on the table, with big silver spoons beside them, and on the hearth imported cereal was cooking in an earthen vessel set in a brass one containing water. There was honey in a white china bowl, and a big glass pitcher full of milk, which looked as if it had stood there overnight; the layer of cream was more than an inch thick. There were two cups, without handles, made of alabaster.
In silence, as if it were a ritual, the sirdar served the meal and they ate it standing. Then he walked out and sat on a rock that overhung the waterfall. He was not cross-legged in the usual Indian attitude of meditation; his long booted and spurred legs were out in front of him, the way a white man sits, and he leaned an elbow on one knee, his chin on his right fist; motionless in that attitude he stared at the bewildering view until he seemed almost physically to become a part of it.
Ommony watched him from the hut door, now and then losing sight of his form in the spray as he wondered what sort of thinking it might be that could so absorb the man, and as he watched, wondering, his own inclination was to take his shoes off; he felt a pagan reverence possess him, as if that dew-wet, emerald and brown immensity, with the thundering river below and the blue sky for a roof, were a temple of Mother Nature, in which it were impertinence to speak, imposture to assert a personality.
Diana was watching fish in a pool above the waterfall; the aborigine from Ahbor was using his kukri to fashion a wooden implement with which to comb the ponies’ manes and tails; the birds were hopping on tree and rock about their ordinary business, and an eagle circled overhead as if he had been doing the same thing for centuries. But there began to be a sensation of having stepped into another world.
Things assumed strange and strangely beautiful proportions. The whole of the past became a vaguely remembered dream, in which the Lama, Samding and Hannah Sanburn stood out as the only important realities. The present moment was eternity, and wholly satisfying. Every motion of a glistening leaf, each bird-note, every gesture of the nodding grass, each drop of spray was, of and in itself, in every detail perfect. Something breathed — he did not know what, or want to inquire — he was part of what breathed; and a universe, of which he was also a part, responded with infinite rhythm of color, form, sound, movement, ebb and flow, life and death, cause and effect, all one, yet infinitely individual, enwrapped in peace and wrought of magic, of which Beauty was the living, all-conceiving light.
The enchantment ceased as gradually as it had begun. He felt his mind struggling to hold it — knew that he had seen Truth naked — knew that nothing would ever satisfy him until he should regain that vision — and was aware of the sirdar walking toward him, normal, matter-of-fact, abrupt, spurs clinking as his heels struck rock.
“Are you ready?” asked the sirdar.
Ommony whistled and Diana followed them along a fern-hung ledge. There was opal air beneath them; crags and tree-tops peered out of slow-moving mist that the sun was beginning to tempt upward. Presently, leaping from rock to rock, until they could hear the river laughing and shouting, sending echoes crashing through a forest that had looked like moss from higher up, they descended breathless, downward, and forever
downward, leaping wild water that gushed between worn boulders, swinging by tree-roots around outleaning cliffs, Diana crouching as she hugged the wall along a six-inch ledge, crossing a yelling cataract by a fallen tree-trunk, whose ax-marks were the only sign that the trail was ever used before. They came at last to a bank with a cliff behind it, still more than a thousand feet above the Brahmaputra, whose thunder volleyed as if a battle were being fought for right of way through a rock- and tree-staked gorge defended by all the underworld.
Ommony threw himself down, panting, his clothes sodden with sweat and his head in a whirl from the violent exertion and the change in altitude. Every sinew in his legs was trembling separately, and his heart thumped like a steam-injector. Diana lay still at his feet. The sirdar appeared calm and not particularly out of breath; he sat down on a rock near by with an air of concentrated attention.
Presently Ommony began to feel the chill of damp earth under him. He got to his feet to look for a better place closer to the cliff, and stood for a moment craning upward trying to gauge with his eye the distance they had come from the lip of the ravine that showed at one point sharp as a pencil-line against the sky. He realized he could never find the way back if life depended on it, and guessed there must be another way than that into the Ahbor Valley, or how could men and animals find egress? He turned to speak, leaning one hand against the cliff.
“This way!” said the sirdar’s voice on his left hand; and before he could turn he felt himself shoved violently. His head still singing from the strain of the descent, a vertigo still swimming through his brain, he was sure, but only dimly, that he had been pushed, then pulled through a narrow fissure in the shadowy corner of a projecting spur. He had scarcely noticed the opening — had not observed that the lower portion of the spur was split away, like the base of a flying buttress, from the wall itself. Within, the opening turned and turned again, a man’s breadth wide each shoulder against the wall, a zigzag passage driven (there were tool marks) into a granite mountain; and when he turned to look, there was nothing to see but the outline of the sirdar’s head against dim light behind him.