by Talbot Mundy
Our two Tibetans appeared to dread the passes more than we did, having had experience. The nearer we came to the Zogi-la the more they urged us not to make haste, arguing it would be wiser to camp on some wind-swept level where the snow would not lie, and there to await the first storm, than to be caught in the midst of the pass in a blizzard with the wind against us. But their argument only aroused our suspicion; if it should happen that they knew we were being followed, they would naturally try to delay our march and prevent us from putting the snow-filled pass between us and pursuit.
And besides, there was the psychology of delay to reckon with. Whether or not, as they said, it would be easier to cross over the drifted snow than to fight our way through against a storm, there was no doubt that to postpone the crossing of your Rubicon is bad generalship. Difficulties tackled and overcome at the start encourage you to greater effort later on; a policy of waiting for the early difficulties to resolve themselves rots determination.
But when we camped one evening, within two hundred paces of the entrance of the pass, snow had already begun to fall and the wind was howling through the gorge with such force that we could hardly pitch camp on the only level place beside the road where there was any shelter. It was impossible to drive pegs, so we weighted the tent down with rocks and used most of our loads for a wind-break. Then we blanketed the ponies, fed them extravagantly in a hollow fifty yards away, and turned in, all in one tent.
The others fell asleep at once, but I was restless. The howling wind filled me with a strange foreboding of calamity; and it was cold, although we were huddled close together and I lay under a yak-skin overcoat. For another thing, I lay between the two Tibetans and the laced tent-opening, and I had not yet grown used to their disgusting body smell. On high elevations Tibetans almost never clean themselves (although they adopt more agreeable habits when they travel in India); our two were half-ripe, so to speak: cleanliness was giving place to filth and the two smells blended sickeningly. One way and another my senses were all nervously alert.
I could hear the driven snowflakes spattering against the tight-blown canvas and felt, with my hand, the drift creep swiftly up the tent-side, until the rocks that held it down were buried. The wind shrieked as if all Tibet’s hosts of devils had been loosed to wreak havoc in the Zogi-la, blast following blast, with short, ominous lulls when it sounded as if an army, wheeled transport and all, were struggling through the snow.
In one of those brief moments when the wind drew breath and the frozen snow fell downward instead of driving nearly parallel with the ground, I thought I heard a man’s voice shouting. I tried to peer out of the tent but could see noting. I could not even see the falling snow. We had put out our lantern because it made the air in that confined space almost unbreathable.
There came another blast of wind that shrieked like a million voices, so, believing I must have been mistaken, I drew in my head; but as I fumbled with the lacing of the flap I heard the cry repeated. Even then I was not sure it was not imagination, since I knew my nerves were all on edge; I did not care to wake the others, who would probably lose a whole night’s sleep if I should set them speculating about a false alarm. I was fully clothed, with my boots on, so I groped for the yak-hair overcoat, pulled on a leather cap with ear-flaps (something like an aviator’s) and crawled out under the tent-flap.
For several minutes my senses reeled before the storm. I could not even see the outline of the tent two yards away, although the change in the sound of the wind as it struck the slanted canvas was easily distinguishable. The whole earth seemed to be swaying over an unseen chasm is which chaos yelled and thundered. Then, suddenly, there came another of those awful pauses, and I nearly fell, because I had been leaning against the pressure of the wind. Before I could recover balance, and before the storm burst along the pass again, I heard the cry repeated.
It did not sound like a cry for help; it was more defiant than that, but the note was desperate. I shouted an answer as loud as I could but could hardly hear my own voice; the storm snatched it and hurried it off to nowhere; the men in the tent did not hear it at all. Nevertheless, the cry of a man had reached me through a pair of leather ear-pads, so it must have come from the direction of the pass and I began to try to make my way toward it.
There was nothing to give direction but the wind, but by keeping that full in my face, so that the sharp snow stung my eyes, I was able to move forward very slowly without much risk of falling into the ravine that, I knew, flanked the road on the left-hand side. I went almost inch by inch, minded to lie down and wait for morning if the shifting wind or my own inexperience of snow should make me lose sense of direction.
Once or twice I tried shouting again, and stopped to listen, but there was no answer. The snow was already knee-deep, and moderately firm, but drifted into waves that made progress in the dark increasingly difficult. I gave up hope of finding anyone when I had reached where I supposed the entrance of the pass must be. At that point there seemed to be a veritable wall of snow, and I turned, cursing myself for a fool for having ventured out on such a mad quest, wondering how to find the way back. My own tracks were already covered. There was absolutely nothing visible; I could not see my hand before my face. There was just one chance in a thousand that my voice might carry downwind to the tent and waken someone, who would miss me and then show a light, so I began to yell. As I did so, something clutched my right foot.
I can feel the clutch now, when I think of it. It was like the hand of death. In imagination I felt myself falling over the edge of the ravine beside the road. But it was a horse’s leg that tripped me, and I fell on the horse’s stone-dead body. Groping, I felt a man’s arm, and that brought me back to my senses; I pulled him up out of the snow, hugging him close to me to preserve what little life he had. He was a moderately heavy man, with a great weight of frozen snow in his whiskers, but I could not see even his outline. He lay in my arms like a child, and once or twice I thought he tried to speak.
I began to shout again, working my way cautiously toward where I supposed the tent was, trying to judge direction by the feel of the wind behind me and counting footsteps in order to estimate the distance. But once I paused with a foot over the edge of the ravine and only the force of the blizzard saved me from stumbling over; and the next thing I did was to crash into the rock wall on the opposite side of the road. I was abreast of the tent, although I thought I had only gone half-way, when Grim heard me shouting at last and I saw the warm glow of our lantern through the snow-white canvas.
The tent nearly blew away when Narayan Singh opened it to pull me in, and it took our united strength to get it closed again and laced up. The wind blew out the lantern and we had to work in the dark, like sailors aloft in an arctic sea. When we had the tent secured at last, and the lantern lit again, it took us half an hour of rubbing, slapping, rolling, brandy-dosing and questioning before we could get a word out of the man I had carried in. Then at last he spoke to us in English.
We asked him his name, and he said it was Mordecai. “Son-in-law of Benjamin of Delhi?”
“Sure!” he said. “You fellers — you know Benjamin? You seen my wife and kids?”
CHAPTER VII. The Strange Tale Told by Mordecai.
Around a virgin daughter of a king are guardian walls, and ere one cometh at the walls are fierce men. He must therefore be acceptable in all ways who shall enter in. So is it wonderful that God should cause His secrets to be guarded by ferocity, and that of many kinds? Else were it a too simple thing for fearful men to enter in and ravish. Lo, I tell you, there is nothing worth the winning that must not be won; and this also: he who hath the secret hath it by his own worth, and that proved.
— from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup
HIS face was hollow and wan from long privation. When Grim and I knew him seven or eight years before he was a stocky sturdy individual, clean shaved, with a face not unlike Lenin’s but better humored — nearly always smiling. Now he was a tortured wreck
with a straggling black beard that partly concealed his thinness, and as full of fear as he had formerly been full of impudence.
It was a long time before he remembered me, and longer yet before he knew Grim. He was in terror of our two Tibetans, whom we kept away from him as far as possible, but there was only room for us all to sit chin by jowl with our heads exactly underneath the ridgepole. Nothing could persuade Mordecai to talk until we sent Tsang-yang and Tsang-Mondrong outside to dig themselves into the snow beside the ponies. Even so, he feared Narayan Singh and Chullunder Ghose — nagged them with insolent questions and tested their knowledge of Benjamin — before he consented at last to tell his story.
“Rait!” he said. “Yes, curse him! The swine calls himself Lung-tok. You listen. The Tibetans know a white man got through, and they’re after him, searching all the inns and stripping travelers — strip a man naked and scratch him to see if the skin’s white under the dirt. I was all right; I’d a letter for the Kun-Dun. I delivered it. He treated me first class, same as he does everyone who can get to him, but he asked who the chiling is who’s in Tibet without permission. I didn’t let on that I knew. After a bit the Dalai Lama gives it me in writing to go anywhere I pleased, me wanting to trade — so I told him. Gimme some more o’ that brandy.”
We gave him food instead, and then a cigarette, which he smoked to the end. When he resumed his tale his voice had lost some of its hoarseness.
“Lung-tok, Rait calls himself. That’s my name. The letter the Dalai Lama gives me’s made out to Lung-tok. I’ve used that name in Tibet since the first time Benjamin sent me up there. Rait learned all about me in Simla, where I’m answering his questions and a Tibetan comes up and calls me Lung-tok. I didn’t see no harm in telling him, not knowing yet that he was making plans to go to Lhasa, though I should have seen through it — him asking more questions than a Hindu lawyer, most of ’em about a place called Sham-bha-la. I got wise to him after a bit; and I’m as keen as what he is to find Sham-bha-la. Me, I goes to Benjamin and talks him into sending me to Lhasa — see?
“So I’m in Lhasa, and business ain’t bad. I’d sold all I’d brought with me and put the money out at interest, so’s Benjamin ‘ud have a credit there to trade against. And talking around the bazaars and one thing and another, I hears of a feller named Lung-tok — which they think it’s a coincidence there’s two of us of one name and there’s some mighty inquisitive questions asked. But I’ve that letter from the Kun-Dun, which makes me all right; and I says nothing about Rait. Not even if he’d stole my name, I wouldn’t put him in bad — not in that country. But me, I’m out to find Sham-bha-la just as keen as he is.
“I ain’t got no copyright on the name, you understand. But fifty fifty. If he’s using my name, I’ve a right to sit in, haven’t I? If he’s found where Sham-bha-la is, I’m coming. There’s old books in that place that ‘ud fetch a fortune in New York.
“So I changes my name and lets a beard grow, meaning not to spoil his chances; but I takes along that letter from the Kun-Dun just in case of accident. I can pass for a Tibetan any time, and I takes the name of Shatra; but you never know what’ll happen next up in that country, so I makes sure of the alibi by keeping the Kun-Dun’s letter in a tube tied to my left arm.
“I found Rait in a monastery. And, same as I’d heard, he was showing ’em how to get gold out of the dirt they bring from Thok Jalung. The stuff’s rich. They bring it all the way in baskets. They was losing more than half the gold, the way they roasted it, and even so it was good business; but he was showing ’em how to do it better — kidding ’em he’d learned the trick in China, where he said he’d been sold as a slave when he was two years old, along with his mother. He had the Chinese accent down fine. And another thing I’ll give him credit for: he had ’em all believing he was taught in China by some kind of a living Buddha; he could talk ’em stupid when it came to arguing their own religion.
“Most of ’em had heard of me under the name of Lung-tok, though none of ’em had seen me, me not having visited those parts. So Rait has no trouble in getting away with my name, nor no trouble of any kind, since it’s well known I’m 0.K. in Lhasa. I knew him first look I had at him, and he knew me. But I couldn’t get to talk to him, and though I made him all allowance for the danger we was both in, all the same it struck me he weren’t acting right. Mind you, I’m not saying it was him that set ’em all against me. It ain’t easy to believe that of a white man. I’m just telling you what happened.”
Memory of what happened made him shrink into himself. For a while he appeared to go mad, muttering Tibetan phrases, but Grim could not understand a word he said. It did not need much to make us all feel spooky, with that storm howling outside and the lantern casting shadows on the tent. “The wrong lodge!” said Chullunder Ghose, and Grim nodded. Narayan Singh swore Sikh oaths through his teeth and reached for the brandy, forcing some of it into Mordecai’s mouth to keep him from groveling on the ground sheet with his hands over his eyes. When he sat up again at last he looked like a man recovering from epilepsy — weak, and afraid of the things he had seen in his fit. He began talking in a hurry, as if the sound of his own voice comforted him.
“They’re all extremes,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the north. “They’re whites and blacks, and you can’t tell which is which, till something happens. There’s white Mahatmas, and black Mahatmas — and a kind of war going on between them behind the scenes. But nobody never sees them Mahatmas — or if he does, he don’t let on. If a Tibetan’s white — no matter if he don’t wash — that don’t mean nothing — that’s climate and a bit o’ superstition — you can trust him if he’s white. And if he’s black, you can’t. The blacks are known as Red Hats, but that’s only the name outsiders call ’em by. You can’t tell which is which; there’s blacks and whites all in one monastery. Say, are you going through the pass?” he asked suddenly.
I told him yes. He flew at once into a panic.
“You can’t! You’re mad! Turn back, I tell you! If they’d skin you, that ‘ud be a mild thing! They hunted me over the passes to Leh — and I give ’em the slip there — thought I had. They found me, damn ’em, but I got a horse. I’d no money left — only some bread in my pocket. I rode like hell all over the Dras plateau and the horse dying under me mile after mile, me keeping life in both of us by cursing Rait! Snow was coming, but I see if I could make the Zogi-la first, snow ‘ud save me, like a door shut in their faces. And I made it! Krishna! Ach Ihr lieben Gottesmenschen! Yoi-eh-h-h! Listen to me! Through the Zogi-la I come — at midnight — and the storm behind me! Then the horse died. How long ago was that? Where am I, anyhow? Gimme some brandy.”
His mind wandered again. He relapsed into gibbering madness, leaning his back against my knees, his eyes staring into vacancy, his hands warding off imaginary specters. Chullunder Ghose seized his hands and slapped the backs of them. Narayan Singh covered him with an extra overcoat. Grim forced brandy between his lips; and after a while the brandy brought him around.
“What was I telling you? Rait? He’s rotten! I’ve seen ’em flog men — and women too, till they looked like great worms writhing in purple mud — and that’s too good for Rait! Mind you, I don’t say, even now, he did it. We’ll talk, though, him and me — alone somewheres — if I have to find Sham-bha-la first! Damn his eyes, he maybe thought I’d tip off the Tibetans he was white. He ain’t white! Me and Rait has a talk — felt coming. You think what you like about it. If I prove it on him —
“The monks was all friendly to me, and they’re hospitable. I’m put to share a cell with one of ’em, and he — a lazy, good-for-nothing sort of bum that ‘ud rather talk all night and eat all day than read his books. He’s not much good at reading anyhow, but he’s good natured, so I figures I’ll do myself a turn by showing him the Kun-Dun’s letter, me holding my thumb over where it says my name is Lung-tok. After that I asks him about Sham-bha-la, and he says it isn’t a place at all, but a kind of state of consciousness like
getting drunk — only, drinking’s vicious, whereas Sham-bha-la isn’t. He laughs then about Raid — Lung-tok he calls him — wanting to get to Sham-bha-la, and we has a drink together which is against the rules, him humming a song about chang and pretty ladies. Chang is the kind of beer they drink. It’s potent, some of it.”
There came a more than usually violent gust of wind that seemed to shake the earth. It screamed among the rocks and Mordecai shuddered with terror. “That’s them! That’s them! I heard ’em! I tell you, they wasn’t a mile behind me! They’ll have fought their way through, same as I did! Give me a gun, somebody!”
We could not quiet him until Narayan Singh crawled out and pretended to scout through the storm. When he came back with ice on his beard he reported that dawn was breaking but the storm was growing worse. We put the lantern out to save oil, but then it was almost pitch-dark in the tent and Mordecai, laughing hysterically at his own fear, urged us to light it again.
“They got caught in the drifts!” he said. “Let’s hope! There’s a place where the wind comes three ways, freezing cold, and nearly blows you off your horse. That’s where the pass turns sharp to your left, and on your right—” He shuddered again. “What was I sayin’? Oh yes, me and the monk. He must have told about that letter from the Kun-Dun, which was what I hoped he’d do. Just to prevent accidents I wanted ’em all to know I stood O.K., without having to show my credentials, which might have made it bad for Rait. You see, I could prove my name was Lung-tok, and he couldn’t, and if they’d once begun to suspect him he’d have been up against it.
“They was more friendly to me than ever when it got known. I had that letter from Kun-Dun — that’s the ‘Presence’ — what they call the Dalai Lama. Some of ’em asked to see it, but I only showed the tube what it was in. And somebody told Rait. I’ll give him credit for being smart! He guessed it was made out to the name of Lung-tok. And not long after that there was some Tantric ceremonies. Ever heard of ’em? Black stuff.”