by Talbot Mundy
“It is so with life — with men. A newsboy lives in a world of short horizons and extremely sharply drawn convictions. But he gains by the experience. He rises and becomes a clerk. And is he not now in a new world? Is any contour of it quite the same, or are the old associations as important! Values have altered, or rather his sense of them. Good: let us say he has character; he goes on up until he manages a business. And at each new forward step do his horizons not increase? Imagine him at last, the President of the United States. Could he return into the newsboy mold — or cease to have a sympathy for newsboys, or for clerks or managers or for all the men in circumstances he himself has battled with?
“It is the same with all life: everything is evolving into something else. What then becomes of men who have evolved above your plane and mine without as yet becoming more than men? They can understand us, having been as we are. Can we understand them? Could they associate with us, to our advantage or to theirs, any better than a president could live among the newsboys, or than Einstein, let us say, could live among race-course touts? Would any of you choose to live among the riffraff of the docks? Or, if you had the opportunity, would you refuse to influence that riffraff for their good, to the extent that they could understand you?
“Forgive me if I seem too frank, for I do not intend discourtesy. The difference between you and the riffraff of the brothels of Bombay is not greater than the difference between the Masters and yourselves. Should they then associate with you? And what good would it do?”
“What happens if a man should try to make that grade — and fails?” Grim asked him.
Lhaten seemed to hesitate, as if he listened to the wind under the monastery eaves. Then:
“How are the ranks of master criminals recruited?” he asked. “What happens when a scientist goes wrong, or a philosopher, or any educated man? Is he not worse than the ignorant? Is he not more dangerous? So — whence do you suppose the ranks of dugpas are recruited? The White Lodge will exclude, but it will never kill. Then what shall he do who has learned much, yet has erred because of evil in him and by his own lack of integrity excludes himself? Can he forget his knowledge? Envy, hatred and malice enter into him and he becomes a leader of the enemies of light. He calls his darkness light and seeks to justify himself by deeds. He uses his intelligence to smother light, identifies himself with all negation and attracts to himself all those who by nature are unwilling to resist or are too stupid to prevent him. That is the source of the legend of fallen angels.”
“What finally becomes of them?” asked Grim.
Lhaten stared at the embers a while. Then, at last:
“What becomes of the fire that has eaten the wood!” he replied. “Fire is a bad master. Better to grow trees, though fire come and consume them. The very worst that fire can do is to release the elements of what it burns. Does any of you wish your very spirit to revert into its elements? Serve evil if you do. Become a dugpa. It is first a little comfortable fire that warms the intellect; and some, by growing used to heat, endure it for a long time. Even rocks burn when the heat grows great enough. Better to grow trees and guard against the fire.”
He left the room then silently, as if he had said too much, closing the door without making a sound, and for an hour, I dare say, we all stared into the embers while the wind howled like the baying of the dogs of Death, from over the Roof of the World beyond which lay the deserts and the mystery of Tibet — until at last I fell asleep and dreamed about black devils torturing Rait in a dungeon underneath a mountain, where Grim and Narayan Singh had gone away and left me. It seemed to be my turn to be tortured next.
CHAPTER XIII. A dugpa — and a mystery as easy to elucidate as that of life and death.
It is easy to kill. It is equally easy to destroy glass windows. But the one act no more solves a problem than the other. Both are foolishness, since any foot can do then. Why is it only the wise who perceive that it is wisdom to let live, when even lunatics can sometimes understand that it is better to open a window than to smash the glass?
— from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup
THE FOLLOWING morning Grim gave me the news that Lhaten had come all the way from Leh to tell us that Sidiki ben Mohammed’s two senior wives were safe and being cared for by their relatives; his house and all his stores were burned to ashes but the cattle had been saved and none of his servants injured. There was a hue and cry for Sidiki, and for ourselves, who were reported to be Tibetan bandits; and the discovery of dead bodies in the snow, a mile away from the burned house, had led the police to suppose that we bandits had quarreled among ourselves as to the possession of Sidiki’s girl-wife. The fact that Sidiki had not been found dead had led to the presumption he was being held for ransom.
Sidiki’s two senior wives had been questioned and had talked, of course. But they had told such a weird story about two white men in disguise, in company with two Indians and two Tibetans, accepting Sidiki’s hospitality in order to be able to admit the other bandits in the night, that nobody believed a word they said and they themselves were actually under the suspicion of having betrayed Sidiki to his enemies on the score of jealousy, it being notorious that the new young wife had had the household by the ears.
“The long and short of it is,” said Grim, “that nobody believes we’re white men and nobody feels inclined to send an expedition after us. Snowstorms have covered our tracks, and between us and Leh the drifts have become pretty well impassable. So we’re safe from pursuit. We can go forward. We can’t go back. “Sidiki and his wife will have to stay here until spring, when he proposes to make his way to Delhi and cash that draft on Benjamin you promised him. By that time we’ll be in Tibet, or else dead, so it won’t matter whether Sidiki talks or not. Lhaten has promised to get word to Benjamin about Mordecai’s fate; he’s to be told we did our best for his son-in-law, which will leave the old man feeling that we haven’t neglected our obligation to him.
“Lhaten seems to come and go as he pleases. I don’t know how he does it, but there are probably lines of communication where snow won’t lie because of wind or some such reason; and the whole of this country is dotted with hermits. You can’t make me believe that a thousand hermits would all choose to live in limestone caves in wintertime just for the sake of being lonely. One man, — ten men might; not a thousand. The story, of course, is they’re meditating on the life to come. It’s this life that amuses me; I’ll bet they feel the same about it. You know how a man can use his time up listening in on radio. And d’you remember how, when Younghusband reached Lhasa with his troops, they knew it in Bombay before the government had the news in Simla? Radio was a pipe dream twenty years ago. Will you bet me that twenty years from now men can’t dispense with radio and relay thought without the use of electricity? Will you bet me it isn’t the hermits all over Asia who pass thought-waves along? Can you give me a better guess how information travels — true and false? We know it does travel. Did you ever talk with a hermit who hadn’t all the latest news?”
A more important problem at the moment was for me to get in shape to travel. The knife wounds and the pounding that the giant gave me had left me stiff and weak, although the wounds were healing in the mountain air with the aid of the old monk’s nursing and mysterious drugs. He came in every hour or two with his prayer wheel, and when he needed both hands to change the bandages he would give the wheel to Chullunder Ghose with orders to keep it spinning. It seemed to make no difference to him whose hand made the imprisoned paper charms revolve provided their motion did not cease all the while he was in the room.
Grim busied himself meanwhile with monastery manuscripts. The library was underneath the building in a cellar that was partly natural cave and partly hewn out of the rock. Some of the “books” were rolls, as much as fifty feet long; others were sheets of ancient paper tied between wooden blocks; there were enough of them to have kept a dozen translators busy for a lifetime, but there were not more than forty monks in the monastery, of whom not more
than ten or twelve could read that ancient script. They not only did not object to Grim’s exploring among their treasures, but actually carried up the books for him into the cell, and the abbot himself, who sometimes helped Grim to translate them, even gave him one of them from which Grim has quoted so often that I have a number of its paragraphs by heart.
That abbot was a gently smiling ancient of days, as genial toward us as he was stern with all the monastery household. He was a little man, wrinkled and stooped, with a beard like a Chinaman’s, who wore black robes much too big for him, so that he could fold them over and over against the draughts that made him shiver. He was hugely amused with Chullunder Ghose, from whom he endured outrageous banter with emotions that suggested an old maid being flattered by Don Juan; but if one of his monks looked sidewise at him, or as much as smiled at any of the babu’s jokes, he reproved him instantly and ordered Draconic penances — such as ten thousand repetitions of a long prayer on the monastery roof, where the wind blew through a leather overcoat like water through a sieve. “You are a bad rascal — a bad rascal!” he assured the babu. “You will be reborn as a fish for having mocked the Lord Chenresi, whose outward shape you so resemble. There is no hair on a fish,” he added, apropos apparently of nothing.
He called Grim his son (which gave Chullunder Ghose fresh opportunities for scandalous insinuations), and he spent hours trying to find in ancient books some proof that Jimgrim was a word of Pali origin with roots that could be traced into the very womb of dawn. Neither Grim nor anyone else could guess whether he was in earnest or merely amusing himself; he seemed to be a mixture of the rankest superstition, almost absolute unworldliness and variegated knowledge. But there was no doubt whatever about his liking for Grim, or about his dislike for Narayan Singh.
He vowed he could smell blood on the Sikh, and invariably held his nose and looked away from him when he entered the room, keeping the Sikh on his left-hand side whenever possible. He seemed to like to sit at Grim’s feet, making him take the carved square stool, that was carried wherever he went for him to squat on, and himself sitting on the mat that was placed in front of it.
His mixture of frankness and reticence was not much different from that of any high dignitary of an established and historic church; he would discuss things one expected him to shy off from, and grow suddenly silent — even leave the room — when one of us asked him something, that, to us, seemed commonplace. He did not in the least mind talking about dugpas, although he spun his prayer wheel while he did it; but when I asked him by whose authority Benjamin had been given the key to the secret route into Tibet he looked at me as if I had slapped his face and went out, slamming the door and scolding the monk who waited on him. For two days after that he would not speak to me.
“Dugpas?” he said in answer to one of Grim’s questions. “Spiritual criminals. Look out for them! Look out for them! I have some in this monastery. You say to a dugpa ‘Bless you,’ and he tries to use the blessing for a stick to beat you with. You say to him `This is so,’ and his mind begins to work at once to prove it isn’t so. You say to him ‘Love your enemies,’ and he goes to work to make some enemies, yourself first, in order to have someone to love. You show him money; he begins to think of how to imitate it out of baser metals. You make peace in your household; he proceeds to try to break it up. He thinks vice is virtue. He looks upon virtue as vice.”
“Why not get rid of your dugpas?” Grim suggested.
“How!” he asked and cackled with comical laughter, looking at Grim like an old grandparent amusing himself with a favorite grandson.
“Kick them out,” Grim suggested.
“Kick out a bellyache! Why not? Cut off your nose because it bothers you to blow it — eh? As for me, I prefer to blow my nose. Did you ever try to sweep out darkness with a broom? It’s easy. Only when you’ve finished, there’s the darkness still there. There won’t be any dugpas in the monastery when I’ve got rid of all the dugpas here.” He touched himself over the heart.
“Do you mean you’re a sorcerer yourself?” Grim asked.
The old eyes twinkled and the wrinkled lips moved as if he were chewing something while he thought out a reply.
“Teach a child arithmetic,” he said at last, “and he can use it to cheat with, can’t he? Teach a man the laws and forces of the universe, and he can turn them against his teacher, can’t he? Give a child a box of matches, and there will always be someone to show him how to set fire to a house. Teach me spiritual knowledge, and for every one desire to use it rightly I shall have a thousand impulses to do the wrong thing. Persistence in thinking the wrong thing makes a man a fool if he is untaught and a dugpa if he knows too much. Do you think you know enough to be a dugpa?”
Grim denied having any ambition in that direction.
The old abbot chuckled at him.
“Nevertheless, my son, you area mixture of good and bad like any other man. The good and bad is in your mind — or at any rate, that is where you think it is. So it is your mind that learns. And as the good learns, so the bad learns and there is war between the two. Your bad side — I am trying to use terms that you will understand — will seek to use your knowledge on the side of evil; and it is that side of you that the dugpas, who are vastly your superiors in evil, will continually cultivate. As long as there is any evil in you dugpas will discover it, as flies find rotten meat. It will be a long time before there is no evil in you,” he added dryly.
“Is that how you account for criminality?” asked Grim.
“How do you account for virtue!” asked the abbot. “Do I not teach virtue, day in, and day out, to a number of ingrate monks? And am I not one inconsiderable teacher among thousands? All over the world are there not superiors and their subordinates, of all sorts and kinds of creeds, who all teach virtue or try to teach it? Well, I tell you there are just as many who teach non-virtue and with just as much enthusiasm, though they call it something else. As there are lamas, cardinals, archbishops and professors of virtue, so there are lamas, cardinals, arch-bishops and professors of non- virtue. At each step upward that a man takes, he must choose all over again on which side of the ladder he will climb. There is magic in good; there is sorcery in evil. Non-virtue, which is sorcery, has no existence until virtue, which is magic, finds expression first; but for every light there are at once a million shadows, and nobody has to tell the shadow where to find the light; it is created by the light, and by the very virtue of the light it procreates non-virtue. Moreover, it would smother virtue if it could, just as the water, in which only fish can live, would smother men. Therefore, beware of the dugpas, who are all they who say no to virtue, and who for every gleam of light invent its opposite. There are grades and grades of them — little, ignorant, unwise ones who are at the mercy of the others and commit crimes without knowing what or why — and wise, far-seeing ones who understand the laws of evil.”
“Show me a dugpa,” said Grim. “You say some of your monks are dugpas.”
“Aye, show us one,” Narayan Singh echoed. “I will show you a good way to deal with him.”
The abbot rang the copper bell he carried at his waist. The cell door opened and the monk came in whose duty for the day it was to wait on him and to carry his stool and carpet. He was a very ordinary-looking, plain-faced man with dull uninterested eyes.
“There are degrees, and then degrees of them,” the abbot said, and made a gesture. The monk picked up his stool and mat, and the abbot walked out of the room with his prayer wheel twirling, followed by the other rutching sandals in his wake.
“You have offended him,” Chullunder Ghose remarked. “Such holy men as he don’t like to be asked to betray even dugpas.”
But Narayan Singh took a long Tibetan sword out of a corner and tested its sharpness with his thumb, holding it then between feet and knees and beginning to file the edge.
“I think we shall see a dugpa,” he said pleasantly.
That night while we slept in our separate corners, with the
shutter fastened and the embers dying dull-red on the hearth, a sound like a footfall awoke me suddenly. For a while I lay still. The cell door had been left unfastened to admit the old monk who visited me at intervals to dose me and change my bandages and I supposed the intruder was he. But nobody came to my bedside, so I stared toward the hearth. There was someone sitting there, his face toward me and his back toward Narayan Singh; he appeared to be fanning the embers, and I still thought it was the old physician.
But suddenly the embers flared and a red blaze shone on the man’s face. I felt the hair rise all over my body. He was the same long-haired and classically handsome man who had visited us in Sidiki’s house and offered to protect us from Lhaten, that night our Tibetans were murdered.
He was sitting in exactly the same posture as he had then, with the same immobility, the same half-contemptuous expression on his face. He seemed to be waiting for us to speak to him, but none spoke — though I could hear Chullunder Ghose’s teeth chattering. There was no sound from Narayan Singh or Grim. I did not know whether they were awake.
The man sat without moving until the blaze died down again and his face receded into shadow. Then a voice, that was his, but that hardly seemed to come from him, spoke very clearly, in an accent of command:
“You are in danger. You must leave this place. You may wait for the dawn, but no longer.”