by Talbot Mundy
“What are you fellers doing here! Say — are you going on into Tibet? Honest? Gimme some more o’ that brandy. You — you’re going into Tibet? What are y’ after?”
“Rait,” Grim answered.
Mordecai looked at us curiously one by one. His face gave no indication of his thought.
“Well, you can’t start while the storm lasts,” he said presently. “How’d you like to lend me some of them good blankets while I get some sleep?”
CHAPTER VIII. The Zogi-La lives up to its reputation.
Men think they work for money or some other momentary need; but they deceive themselves, it being curious to witness how unanimously human beings substitute the shadow for the truth — which truth is, that no other impulse governs us than the necessity of growth. Remember it is not the thing done, but the doing that the gods weigh, and that many have failed to reach their goal who none the less accomplished more than he who, coming to a journey’s end, thought that the mere end should justify him.
— from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup
MORDECAI died in his sleep.
We had proposed to let him sleep and to question him at noon about the place where Rait was; and we had proposed to ourselves to give him Tsang-yang and Tsang-Mondrong with three of our ponies to help him reach India, by that means ridding ourselves of the Tibetans, whom Mordecai would probably have been able to keep out of mischief long enough for us to escape across the border.
However, after we had fed the ponies and cleared out the snow that already half-filled the hollow in which they were picketed, we returned to the tent and Narayan Singh, stooping to wake Mordecai to join in our meal, announced:
“So. Buss. His tale is finished!”
Narayan Singh’s was the only spoken comment. I remember what I thought about was old Benjamin’s grief when he should somehow learn the news.
That same hour, in silence, we buried Mordecai in a fissure in the rock, wedging heavy stones in after him and building a cairn to keep out beasts of prey.
Then there was nothing for it but to take those two Tibetans with us. And we had to make haste; if another storm should come while we were struggling with the drifts that blocked the Zogi-la it would mean almost certain death. I led the way with the ponies that had the lightest loads, to break the trail, and for a while we made good progress, crushing a track for the others who thoroughly understood their business, treading carefully where we had trampled the snow firm. But the wind became terrific; less than an hour after we started it was blowing powdery drifts into our teeth and kicking up stinging clouds through which it was impossible to see a yard ahead. I clung to the leading pony’s tail and urged him forward, at the almost certain risk of being kicked whenever he plunged into a drift and struggled out.
The sides of the gorge were invisible. When I paused to rest the ponies and to let the others overtake me, Narayan Singh, who had been bringing up the rear, reported that the drifts were now so deep behind us that we could not possibly turn back.
I led on again; and there were places where the wind had swept the snow down nearly to the road bed, but there it was all that a pony could do to force himself into the blizzard. They turned their rumps toward it and had to be beaten to face it again.
At last, in one of those wind-swept spaces, not yet mid-way of the pass, the leading pony planted and refused to stir. Unable to see beyond him into the stinging drift, I clung to his mane and reconnoitered forward very cautiously, expecting to find we were off the track and had come to the edge of a precipice. I stepped on a man who lay frozen between the legs of a dead horse.
He was a Tibetan, with a bandolier containing twenty or thirty cartridges, but though we hunted around for a while we could not find his rifle. (Nor did we see a sign of any of the others who had been hunting Mordecai.) The man had crept under the horse after it fell, to protect himself against the storm, and died where he lay.
That may have been the place where, as Mordecai described, the wind came at you three ways — through gaps, I suppose, in the wall of the gorge; but we could not see the gorge; the blowing, whirling snow made your hand invisible at arm’s length. We could not hear each other speak.
We left the Tibetan lying there and I led on again; but now Chullunder Ghose was weakening. I had oiled him well from head to foot before the start to protect him against frost bite, but the weight of his extra clothing told on him and he was mountain sick. Yet he would have been an impossible burden for a pony through the drifts.
Grim told him to cling to a pony’s tail and assigned him the place in the column next behind me, which gave me double work to do; for, though he did not complain, he kept falling and I had to turn back to haul him out of drifts from which he had not strength enough to raise himself. It was no use leaving him for the others to rescue; the following pony would stop when it came to him and none could get by without floundering through the drift.
The last third of the eleven miles was much the hardest, for at noon the sun melted the surface and the ponies sank in everywhere, shoulder-deep. We had to haul and dig them out, and then tried spreading a ground sheet for them, picking it up and laying it down in front again but, setting aside the labor of that, the wind made the attempt ridiculous. When we tried to dig a long trench through the drift, the wind blew snow into it almost faster than we could shovel it out.
Then, about two hours after noon the surface froze and the ponies could hardly get foothold before it broke under their weight. Two snow-leopards winded us and came to watch, making the ponies unmanageable, no doubt realizing we were in extremity and expecting to feast off a pony before nightfall. Vultures arrived, too, and watched us from the ledges, some of them looking gorged as if they had demolished that Tibetan and his horse before following us.
However, I believe the hint the vultures gave us saved our lives by spurring us on to greater effort, although Mordecai’s tale was sufficient for me; I was determined not to let that brave Jew beat me in persistence. Besides, I knew the Zogi-la was probably merely child’s play to the work before us in the higher passes; the knowledge that what he is doing now is not the most difficult part of his job, encourages a man.
Snow began falling again by the ton, but that made the surface less slippery. Also the wind lessened, which made it easier to breathe and in many ways reduced the odds against us. However, we were still not through the pass, and the ponies were utterly foundered, at sunset; the game little brutes gave up the fight, and three or four of them lay down. So we dug them a hole in the snow, blanketed and fed them, and then dug another deep hole for ourselves, covering it with the ground sheets of the tents. We had no fuel, so we had to eat frozen canned stuff, but the ponies fared well on the barley they had worked so hard to bring.
All that night long — the two snow-leopards yowled around us, making sleep impossible, and we had to take turns to sit up in the wind with a rifle or they would have rushed in and killed one of the ponies. We fired frequently, but always missed them. They were more invisible than ghosts, and their system was as ruthless as the climate, keeping man and horse awake and nervous until we should grow too weak to defend ourselves. Our Tibetans were much more afraid of the leopards than we were, probably because they knew more of the habits of the brutes; but superstition added to their fear, and Tsang-Mondrong, used though he was to guiding hunting parties, was the worse of the two.
“They are incarnations of the souls of lamas who forsook the true religion and pursued black arts,” he told us with an air of knowing the exact facts. He even told us the names of the lamas. “And as they robbed and misled men’s souls, so now they seek our bodies. If they catch us, we will be as they are leopards in the next life! If a man should die of a sickness, or be slain by a man, then it is safe to throw his body to the dogs and vultures, who will merely eat it and the soul goes free; but if he is slain by an animal he becomes an animal. And all creatures crave company, which is why those leopards seek to slay us men, hoping to add to the number o
f leopards.”
When morning came with dazzling sunlight on the snow, we found we were within three-quarters of a mile of safety on the uplands of the Dras Plateau, where the snow lies less than a foot deep all winter long because of the terrific wind. Three hours’ struggle brought us out into the open, and though we were still followed at a distance by the leopards all the vultures flew away.
And now luck turned our way again. In the place where we rested the ponies, to the leeward of a huge rock, we found quantities of yak-dung, which is the almost universal fuel of the country; so we had a hot meal with tea and Chullunder Ghose began to recover his strength.
Our problem now was how to pass through Leh without being discovered by anyone who might warn the authorities. The door to India was shut behind us, and the handful of military police who guard Ladakh and Baltistan were almost certainly in winter quarters; but there was no way of avoiding Leh, which is a scattering village of about three thousand inhabitants, half-hidden in a valley where converging routes from Tibet meet.
From the Zogi-la to Leh the road follows the line of the Dras drainage by easy gradients, turns near the Indus and then leads nearly straight to the town between parallel, yellowish ranges. Night marches are almost impossible, and by daylight it is hopeless to try to escape observation.
Tsang-Mondrong and Tsang-yang were our chief perplexity. They had worked well with the ponies, and we were willing to take them with us into Tibet if there were any reasonable prospect of their not betraying us; but our arrival in Leh would be sure to arouse curiosity, and to expect those two men not to answer questions in a way that would bring us to the notice of the authorities was to expect altogether too much of them.
Grim solved the riddle, although Chullunder Ghose suggested the key. Our fat babu was full of all kinds of fears since the Zogi-la upset his nerve and spurred an always keen imagination.
“Tsang-yang and Tsang-Mondrong will say we killed Mordecai!” he prophesied. “They will furthermore say that we killed that Tibetan whom we came on in the pass. That means winter in prison — and I assure you, there are bugs in Ladakh! And while we languish amid the bugs, those Tibetans who were pursuing Mordecai will poison our food! I vote we camp here for a long time and observe what happens!”
Grim questioned our Tibetans narrowly, to find out what they knew about Mordecai, and, discovering their ignorance of everything except that he had come through the Zogi-la by night and died in our tent, he told them about the monks who had hunted Mordecai out of Tibet and now were wintering in Leh.
The effect was surprising. If it had been possible they would have left us there and have turned back through the Zogi-la to India. They appeared more afraid of those monks than they had been of the leopards in the night, and each in turn put Grim through a course of questioning to find out whether they could trust us not to hand them over to the monks.
“Jimgrim, they will not believe the Jew is dead. They will say we met him in the pass and helped him on his journey.”
“Rot!” Grim answered. “That isn’t what you’re afraid of. Come on now, tell the truth and perhaps we’ll help you.”
There was nothing to tell, apparently, except that they were scared out of their wits, they themselves being ex-monks who knew the rigors of monastic discipline. They assured us they were not at all afraid of any Tibetan government officials we might meet
“But monks — that is different. They govern themselves. Some monks are fiercer than others.”
“Why are you afraid of these monks in particular?”
They refused to say. But there was no doubt of the fear; their eyes betrayed it. They begged us to pretend they were our Hindu servants — anything rather than admit they were Tibetans or had ever been in Tibet.
They simply would not hear of being left in Leh.
“Those monks would murder us!”
They promised service, secrecy, fidelity to death if we would only take them along with us and help them to avoid the men who had been hunting Mordecai; but at the end of an hour’s talk we were as much in the dark as ever as to why they should fear that particular party and yet not be afraid to enter Tibet with us. They would not even say which monastery they supposed the monks were from.
However, into Leh we had to go; and there we had to stay at least one night, in order to replenish our stock of barley for the ponies and to add to our own provisions, since the Tibetans meant two extra mouths to feed. The puzzle was, how to find Mordecai’s friend without knowing his name and without informing the whole of Leh of our arrival.
We decided to pretend we were a party of merchants on our way home, intending to winter in Leh until the snow should leave the passes in the spring; and Grim, since he could speak Tibetan, went on ahead, alone, to try to find the Ladakhi who had befriended Mordecai. We followed by leisurely stages (if fighting the wind of Ladakh can come under the heading of leisure), so Grim reached Leh a whole day’s march ahead of us. We arrived at nightfall purposely and found him waiting for us beside the road, in the gloom under a clump of twisted tamarisks. There were no greetings, no conversation; almost before we came within hail he mounted his pony and rode slowly ahead, and if we had not recognized the pony we might have doubted he was Grim. Light snow was falling — prelude to a blizzard — and the lights of the Leh houses made the town look like a Christmas card. Except for the rarefied atmosphere and the sensation of being up among the clouds, it might have been a New England village seen through the murk of a wintry night.
Mordecai’s friend’s house stood near the northern outskirts of Leh, in a hollow between two spurs of a rock-littered mountain. There were a few poplar and willow trees around it that gave it a prosperous, civilized appearance but the house itself looked capable of being held against uncivilized marauders, having very few windows facing outward and they extremely small, with heavy iron bars. There was a tower, too, from which rifle fire could sweep the approaches, but the planted trees suggested there had not been much need in recent years to defend the place against assault. In fact, all Leh looks peaceful.
A narrow gate was opened for us that led into a spacious yard all littered up with yak-dung and the junk accumulations of a lifetime. Along two sides of the yard were sheds, in which we stabled the ponies alongside cows, yaks, goats, and mules.
Our host, Sidiki ben Mohammed, came and introduced himself by the light of a hurricane lantern — a rather undersized, lean, active-looking man with bright brown eyes and a brown beard turning gray. He bulked big in his yak-skin overcoat, with a fur cap down over his ears, but when he took them off inside the house the contrast made him seem even smaller than he was. In our honor (I believe) he put on spectacles, which gave him an air of the schoolmaster; there was nothing whatever the matter with his eyes, which appraised us critically and without concealment. In turn we all appraised him, and were disappointed. Mordecai’s account of him had led us to expect a very different type of man.
The room he had brought us into was a large one, heavily beamed and ceilinged with hewn planks. At one end was a cast-iron stove and at the other a rough stone fireplace big enough to have roasted a sheep whole above the blazing lumps of tamarisk root. Along the whole of one side, about eight feet above the floor, there ran a gallery whose railing was concealed by costly rugs. Sidiki ben Mohammed clearly was a man of substance.
There was a phonograph with an enormous rack of records, and an old- fashioned upright piano which must have cost him a fortune to bring all the way from India. Most of the rest of the furniture looked as if it might have been bought at a sale of some dead Englishman’s effects; there was a cushioned lounge, for instance, set before the fireplace, big enough to seat four people comfortably. Costly rugs were spread, in places two, and even three deep, on the rough-hewn floor. The only things in bad taste in the room were two chromographs — one of Queen Victoria with an absurd crown that made one wonder how she balanced it, and the other of Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar with a cast in his eye and a saber a
bout twice too big for him.
“There is something in me of Lord Roberts — something in me of Queen Victoria,” he remarked. “For the One I was an interpreter. From the other I learned dignity, when I saw her at her Jubilee in London.”
He treated our Tibetans with contempt, motioning them toward a mat near the cast-iron stove, on which they went and sat obediently. Not much was said by anyone until two servants in extremely dirty clothes had brought in quantities of curried sheep and an enormous kettle of tea, stewed with butter and salt over a yak-dung fire, which gave it an allegedly exquisite flavor. Our party, including our host, ate at a long table in mid-room, seated on benches, but our Tibetans were served over in the corner by themselves, and when the meal was finished, one of the servants led them outside to a room across the yard. They went without remonstrance, looking rather sheepish and ashamed.
Then we sat down in front of the fire, a little conscious of being watched by women from between the rugs that hung from the gallery railing, our host laughing as he told how Grim had found him.
“Ah, subtlety! How I do love subtlety!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together. “I have made my own fortune by subtlety. This Mister Jimgrim says he had no plan at all until he reached Leh. He did not even know my name. So what did he do but look for the Tibetans who had been hunting Mordecai. They have made their winter quarters in a little monastery near here and were easy to find. He went to them just after sunset, with his face covered, saying his name is Tsang-Mondrong and himself a spy in the pay of the Lhasa Government. Hee-hee! They invited him into the monastery but he told them he must first learn who has sheltered the chiling Rait. Understand, these people think that Mordecai and Rait were one and the same person. So they directed him to my house and told him he should murder me. To that he said ‘no,’ he must first uncover a plot by certain other chilings to enter Tibet in the spring, and if I should be murdered there would be no way of uncovering the plot; he suggested it might be better for him to approach me and pretend friendship, possibly even obtaining lodging at my house in order to spy on me. They believed him! Can you imagine that? Furthermore, he made them promise not to interfere with me or with himself. A man who can do that could make a woman reasonable!”