Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  On the outside of the wallet were the letters E.R. stamped in gold. Inside it was Rait’s passport, some receipts, a woman’s letter, and a photograph of me!

  The receipts were all for trade-goods — matches, dyes, cooking utensils and silk that Rait had bought to take with him to Tibet in his guise of merchant; they were made out to bearer and marked “goods to be delivered at place agreed on road to Gyangtse.”

  The letter from the woman had no right to be in anybody’s wallet. She was an author with an international reputation, who had learned of Rait’s intention to visit Tibet and was trying to dissuade him. Her passionate appeals to him to come to Europe and “continue a soul-communion begun in Simla” would have been burned by any decent fellow instantly, to prevent their falling into strangers’ hands.

  That letter in Rait’s wallet was a searchlight thrown on his character. It scandalized Chullunder Ghose, who is no sufferer from squeamishness, but having been Rait’s partner for a number of years I had understood something of his cynicism. I was about to burn the letter, when Grim snatched it from me.

  “Didn’t you see the use he’s made of it?” he asked.

  He held it close up to the lantern. Some of the words had been faintly underscored with an instrument — perhaps a thumbnail — that had scratched the paper without penetrating deep. Grim — hunting for the underscored words — read the message

  “Buried — and — spot — marked — to — satisfy — you — this — is — right — direction — Look — out — for — indications — of — turning — toward — West — this — side — of — Lhasa — Remember — it — is — hard — to — look — into — fierce — light — which — casts — black — shadow — consequently — don’t — expect — important — discovery — without — nerve-racking — experiences — This — fool’s — letter — doesn’t — deserve — to — be — put — to — such — good — use — but — [and here a whole sentence was underscored] the very universe seems to be built on a foundation of broken hearts, so come at once, come quickly!”

  Grim wrote down the message and I burned the woman’s letter. It was plain enough that Rait had left Lhasa, had taken some trail leading westward, and had left that wallet buried by the road to mark the trail for me. But two things were not at all clear: why had he carried with him into Tibet documents that, if found on his person, would convict him of being a foreigner? And how had the wallet come into Tsang-yang’s possession?

  There was nothing to be learned just then from the Tibetan, who was still unconscious from the contact with his head against the wall. We decided not to let him know that we had found the wallet, but to wait and see what happened.

  Meanwhile, what to do with him? There was a back door to the warehouse and, near that, a barrow with bicycle wheels and a canvas cover, not unlike an ambulance. We tied him securely on that, arranging our lighter baggage around and over him, almost breaking down the frail conveyance, which Narayan Singh and I pushed out through the back door, while Grim and Chullunder Ghose went to make excuses to our hosts, who turned out to be only too glad to be rid of us, barrow and all.

  They explained to Grim exactly where the ponies were, that had been bought on Benjamin’s instruction, and promised to send our heavier loads neat day by porter to an empty storehouse in a ravine beside the road to Ladakh, where we could repack them if we wished, and load the ponies at our leisure, without anyone being the wiser.

  It was a cold black night. The north wind, whistling from the Karakorum Mountains, seemed to make the bright stars shiver and reduce themselves to pin-points. The River Jhelum, flowing through the midst of Srinagar, lapped noisily against the bridge piles. There was a lonely feeling — a foretaste of winter — sharpened by a few bright lights from the hotels, where the last of the summer visitors were making the most of the season’s end and probably dreading the hot plains of India as much as we dreaded the snowbound passes leading into Tibet.

  But we were off. And though we sneaked into the night like criminals, the thought was comforting that we had caught the only man likely to betray us. When he recovered consciousness he would be a nuisance and a danger, but not nearly so dangerous as he would have been had we left him behind without knowing he was on our trail.

  CHAPTER V. Painless Parker Ramsden, and the tale told by the Devil’s spies, Tsang-Mondrong and Tsang-Yang.

  Let your thought dwell on this for a while, since the tree of meditation beareth wholesome fruit and he whose duty is to teach should set examples, though he know the answers, yet withholding them: The dogs bark when the caravan moves on. The dogs fight when the caravan has gone. The caravan proceedeth, and the dogs lick, each his own wounds, in the dust.

  — from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup

  WE trundled the barrow all night along the road that follows the Sind Valley, startled by shadows that leaped at us out of the darkness, and by night — prowling scavenger dogs that yelped and ran. It does not take much to scare people who are on the run, and Rait’s mysterious warning of nerve-racking experiences had filled us with foreboding.

  Long before morning our prisoner came to his senses and announced the fact by shouting at the top of his lungs, but Narayan Singh prodded his ribs a few times with a sharp stick and he took the hint, lying still after that until we came to a halt at daybreak.

  That Ladakh Road is used by countless peasants, some of whom would have been sure to take exception to the rubber-tired barrow. It was neither in keeping with our guise of honest merchants nor in any way suited to the nature of the road ahead. We looked like prosperous men, who could well afford horses or porters, but we were likely to be reported as thieves escaping with our loot unless we got rid of the barrow and invented a likely story to account for our loads by the wayside. So we removed the wheels and dumped the barrow into a stream, where the reeds concealed it. Then Grim and Narayan Singh took off their shoes and made scores of naked footprints in the dust, while I took Tsang-yang in hand.

  The Tibetan assumed an air of indifference, chafing his wrists where the cords had hurt him a bit and obeying without comment when I told him to stand in front of me. Not knowing much about Tibetans yet, I mistook the attitude for one of sullen, watchful waiting.

  “You think you will appeal to the first passers-by,” I said. “If so, we will accuse you of being a bandit — one of many who attacked us in the night and made our porters ran away. We will say we captured you by hitting you over the head, showing the bruise on your head, in proof of it. And if you deny it, we will add that the bandits ran off with our women, and the first peasants who come along will beat you half to death. Do you like the prospect?”

  “What do you wish?” he asked, turning up his thumbs. Suddenly he put his tongue out at me — a slobbery, big tongue that looked almost too big to withdraw. I was minded to hit him to teach him manners, but Chullunder Ghose came to his rescue, having watched with deliberate interest, as he sat with his shoes off, chafing tired feet.

  “Don’t hit! That is Tibetan abjectness of white flag, belly upward, all four feet in air! He is law of heredity functioning! He is product of bad food, blizzards and religion!”

  The babu was right. Veneer had peeled off. The Tibetan had relapsed into the savagery of the State of Kam, where nature in the raw and superstition in authority present men with facts they must accept and suffer under or else perish. The monastery monks might whip him again now without risk of reprisals. Rightly handled he was ready to submit to anything — although how long the relapse would last might be another question.

  “Remember!” I warned. “If I catch you speaking to a stranger I shall simply say you are a woman-stealer and you will be beaten to death.”

  It was Grim’s suggestion that I should bully him while Chullunder Ghose should pretend to pity him: a sort of third degree that might induce him to confide in one of us.

  So I made him gather fuel for our breakfast fire, calling him a dog who would eat at each meal twice what his labor
was worth. Chullunder Ghose, outpouring mock compassion, called him “little Kam-kin” and inquired whether he liked chapatis burned on both sides or only on one.

  Chullunder Ghose believes himself an expert at chapati making, but as we did not want to unpack the loads the only tools he had were a spoon and an upturned biscuit-tin, whose solder melted, letting the flat cakes fall into the smoky fire.

  However, we had eaten after a fashion when the first of the peasantry came in sight — sixteen or eighteen men in single file on their way to the magistrate’s court in Srinagar. The five in the lead were mounted on half- starved ponies; they were principals in a lawsuit and continued on their way, refusing to have anything to do with us, but the others were merely going as spectators and were eager to stop and listen to any form of entertainment. We told them how our porters had all run away and left us when we were attacked by bandits.

  They believed the story, because there were the marks of many footprints in the road and because the police patrol was known to have returned to Srinagar the day before, thus officially opening the season for highway robberies. When we suggested they should carry our loads toward the nearest village they refused pointblank — then sat down to discuss the matter, bent on discovering exactly how grave our predicament might be before setting a price on their services.

  We were utterly at their mercy. If we had offered them a high price we might have aroused suspicion that we were fugitives from justice; yet we did not dare let them proceed on their way and tell all Srinagar about us.

  However, at the end of fifteen minutes’ talking it occurred to one of them to ask exactly who we were, and he began with me (I suppose, because I was the biggest). That gave Chullunder Ghose his opportunity. He described me as a great physician gifted with powers of divination and possessed of infallible remedies for curing barrenness of acres, camels, cows and wives.

  “He is puller of teeth, being known as Painless Parker — which is Greek word meaning altruist. He is setter of bones. He is increaser of longevity. He cured the King of the United States of leprosy. The Crown Prince of Switzerland conferred on him the Order of the Garter for healing him of so-called Republican Tendencies, which is a terrible disease. The Emperor of France offered him his only daughter in marriage, on condition he should live in the Louvre, which honor he refused, however, on account of insufficiency of palace furnishings. He is now on his way to cure the gallstones of a chieftain of Ladakh by means of magic poultices.”

  Before he had finished his nonsense every one of them felt symptoms of disease, which, after silent diagnosis and much frowning, I proceeded to treat with equally imaginary remedies produced out of an ancient Chinese tea-chest Benjamin had given me. There were Chinese pictures on the inside of the lid, quite easily mistaken for a gallery of Buddhist saints, and although these villagers were far from being Buddhists they were none the less impressed with a sense of my sanctity and mistook the taste of Worcestershire Sauce for the semi-divine flavor of Tantrist drugs. Grim made them avert their eyes in silence while I mixed the stuff with whisky and Narayan Singh chanted a mantra, of which neither he nor I nor anyone could guess the meaning.

  Then, when they had all been dosed, and had rubbed their stomachs and felt wonderfully better, they bethought them of their village headman, who had abscess of the jaw. No sooner thought than acted on: they seized our loads — except the biggest, naturally, which Grim compelled Tsang-yang to carry to prevent his civilized veneer from filming over him again — and hurried toward their village, chattering like children, with their heads too full of my wizardry to remember our tale of the midnight hold-up.

  Even if they had remembered it, the danger of their telling tales about us for the present had entirely vanished. I was their treasure trove, and they proposed to keep me to themselves until my usefulness was squeezed out to the last drop; tales of a mighty magician who could heal all manner of diseases were likely, they knew well, to bring too swift investigation from a health department whose officials believed in such heresies as cleanliness and vaccination — and who were known to be extremely jealous of genuine thaumaturgists.

  So, though we passed at least two hundred peasants on our way, their questions were not answered, and the merely mild interest we aroused was likely to be forgotten long before those dawdlers reached the shops of Srinagar.

  At the end of four or five hours’ walking we reached a filthy village, where the headman lay groaning in agony in a dark stone hut, under a thatched roof where the rats were nesting; and I had to operate on him at once before a breathless audience that filled the room. I would have funked it if Grim had not been there, but Grim is afraid of nothing except fear itself, and he stood at my elbow, urging me in whispers.

  “He’ll die anyhow if you don’t do something. His whole system is being poisoned by the abscess. You may kill him, or it may be your lucky day — and his! Go to it.”

  Whoever has managed mining camps a hundred miles or so from rail-head has incidentally performed all manner of minor operations as often as not without any proper instrument or a drum-and-fife band to drown the victim’s yells. So I was not quite green at the business. Benjamin had supplied me with the very latest thing in forceps.

  At the risk of poisoning the man I drowned his pain with half-a- syringeful of local anesthetic, gave that time to work, and pulled out all the teeth on one side of his head. One molar broke and I had to fish for it, but when I had done the poor wretch was alive and grateful; he offered me three chickens and a month-old calf (born too late in the year to be likely to live) and beat his only son on the shoulders with a carved Kashmiri stool for not making me a suitable obeisance.

  That was naturally not the whole of it; success involves responsibility, and Chullunder Ghose had advertised me much too well. My next patient was a woman with shriveled breasts, whose son had died a quarter of a century ago, and who now demanded an elixir to renew her youth. I gave her a full dose of Worcestershire Sauce and whisky, and Grim told her to eat two handfuls of sugar by the light of the next new moon, which she must see over her left shoulder without thinking of her age; if she dared to think about her age the remedy would fail, but otherwise she would have twins within twelve months.

  She might have had twins there and then, so far as my standing went in that community. Men who would have dreaded a genuine doctor’s visit more than the plague began to try to force presents on me and to beg for stuff that should make their wives bear children. I was busy lancing boils and dosing more or less imaginary stomach-aches all afternoon, and when night came there was nothing for it but to accept the headman’s hospitality.

  By that time I would have given almost anything for the privilege of speech, and that infernal rascal Chullunder Ghose, enjoying my predicament, did his utmost to make me miserable, telling tales about me that would have made Münchhausen blush. He explained my silence by saying that my power to heal depended on it; a great hermit had conferred the magic on me on condition that I should not speak to anyone for thirty years, of which nineteen had still to run. Tsang-yang, he said, had to be silent, too, because he was my chela, who was going to be taught how to pull teeth after ten years’ apprenticeship, provided he did not speak one word in all that time; for each word that he should speak until then, one month would be added to his sentence.

  The villagers mischievously did their best to ruin Tsang-yang’s prospects by inducing him to talk, but Narayan Singh sat next to him, growling threats of mayhem into his ear. The Tibetan was still under the spell of that half- religious, half-climatic consciousness of being licked and though, as we discovered later, he had another motive for submitting to us, it was the Sikh’s threats just then that appealed to his imagination and made him obedient.

  We slept in the headman’s bug-infested hut — an honor that we only conferred on him after he had promised to supply us with as many porters as we needed. We had hard work to keep him to his word, because he wanted us to stay and hold another clinic, for the honor it would d
o his village, but we got off, about two hours after dawn, behind a string of men who sadly lacked enthusiasm now that they knew there was nothing more to be had from us.

  They dawdled, and delay was likely to prove fatal, since a chill wind from the northwest hinted at falling snow and, far ahead of us, we caught rare glimpses of the mountain peaks through a curtain of grayish cloud. It might mean death if storms should overtake us in the Zogi-la, but if we could hurry through the pass before the first heavy storm the drifts would close the door to India behind us.

  So where the road branched off toward a village where the ponies were supposed to be waiting, we divided forces, paying the porters and sending them home. We left Chullunder Ghose, who was foot-sore, along with Narayan Singh to guard the loads, while Grim and I went off with Tsang-yang to find the ponies. The trail wound around the shoulders of hills and crossed valley bottoms where the brooks spread into swamps, so we lost the way twice, but arrived at the village, dog-tired, shortly after sunset — only to discover that the villagers had mistaken Benjamin’s instructions and had sent all twelve animals to await us at a village half-a-day’s march farther along the Ladakh Road.

  After a lot of arguing the headman agreed to send for the ponies and have them brought back along the road toward us the following morning; then we returned, along a trail that had been difficult to find by daylight. Well for us that we had brought Tsang-yang! Tibetans all see marvelously in the dark. His hardly human-looking eyes picked out the landmarks he had only seen once, from the opposite direction; and his awkward-looking legs, that looked slouchy and weak when the going was moderately level, swung along now over rise and descent at a speed that was nearly too much for us.

  We began to feel faith in the man, he took such pains to guide us and did it so cheerfully. Grim has a way of gaining the affection of most savages, less by what he says and does, than by being what he is; they simply take to him. Tsang-yang had begun to behave toward him like a stray dog adopting a master, and I believe that if nothing unexpected had happened to corrupt him again he might have turned into a faithful servant.