by Talbot Mundy
“Whose orders?” I asked.
I sat up on the bed. Chullunder Ghose was clutching at his blankets and his teeth were going like castanets, but there was still no sound from Narayan Singh or Grim. The embers were dying, but I could see the man’s eyes.
“The orders of them who will guide you to where you shall go,” he replied.
He spoke English, but that did not strike me as peculiar at the time.
“What is the danger?” I asked him.
In the dim glow from the embers he had become hardly visible, but he stood up. I could see that. His anger was almost tangible.
“Disobedience is death!” he answered.
Suddenly there came the swish of steel in air, and a thwack as a sword struck home into the man’s neck from behind. He fell forward with a groan on to the embers. Someone pulled him off them, struck a match, lighted our lantern, and I saw Grim leaning over him. Behind the hearth Narayan Singh stood with the sharp sword in his hand.
“So I deal with dugpas!” said Narayan Singh, and Grim looked up.
“Take a dekko at him,” he exclaimed.
He held the lantern so that all of us might see the man who lay there with his neck three-quarters severed. He was clean shaven. He did not bear the least resemblance to the bearded man who had come and spoken with us in Sidiki’s house. He was the monk who had attended on the abbot that day, carrying his stool and mat — snub-nosed, dull-eyed and unintelligent!
CHAPTER XIV. Lhaten’s Guru.
There be many gurus, and some good ones whom it is no great task to differentiate, seeing that those who make the loudest claim are least entitled to respect. They who are the true guides into Knowledge know that nothing can be taught, although the learner easily can be assisted to discover what is in himself. Other than which there is no knowledge of importance, except this: that what is in himself is everywhere.
— from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup
IT WAS something below zero in the room. Grim pulled on his overcoat and went to the door to summon a monk to tell the abbot what had happened; but as he opened the door the abbot entered, hurrying, with a monk behind him. Chullunder Ghose threw himself face downward on his mattress and pulled up the blankets trying to pretend he was still asleep.
Grim held the lantern in mid-room, its light on the old abbot’s wrinkled face, the corpse in shadow.
“What brought you?” he asked.
“Who slew?” asked the abbot, in the harsh voice that he used to discipline his monks.
Narayan Singh, wiping the sword on the dead man’s clothing, grunted:
“I slew a dugpa. Did I not say I should show you how to deal with one!”
“Man of blood! Man of blood!” said the abbot. “You befoul my monastery. Go now! All of you must go.
He glanced toward me.
“Can you travel?” he asked.
I would have died outside in the snow rather than remain there after being asked to leave the place. I made him such answer, as politely as I could. Grim started to ask questions; the old fellow silenced him with an angry exclamation and a gesture.
“Maniac!” he spluttered at Narayan Singh.
The Sikh stood erect like a man on parade, his eyes glowing in the lamplight. “You know well I slew a dugpa,” he retorted.
“Incorrigible butcher! You shall be reborn into a boar! Men and the dogs and the other boars shall hunt you! Slew a dugpa? You have cracked a jar and let the water out!”
“He changed himself into a man with a beard,” said the Sikh. “These eyes beheld him.”
“Fool!” exclaimed the abbot. “Can a tree not cast a shadow on a wall? Can even you not see your image in a pool! Shall not an arch dugpa then use this poor weakling to reflect his image?”
The old man’s anger made him stutter. He raised his staff and struck Chullunder Ghose to force him to get up from the mattress.
“Go!” he ordered. “You shall have my blessing, save the one who slew. If that one should stay here he would make a shambles of the place — he lets in death — he is in league with death — he—”
“Nay, nay, holy one, no curses!” said Narayan Singh. “If I have done wrong I am already cursed enough.”
“Slayer, if I bless you, you will slay more!” said the abbot.
“If you curse me, will I slay less?” asked the Sikh.
“Die then by the sword,” the abbot answered, “for I see you are an honest man. You will serve some though you injure others. You shall eat your own sin and be done with it.”
Narayan Singh bowed proudly to him, suggesting rather tolerance than too much faith in the old abbot’s vision.
“Jimgrim, my son,” said the abbot, “I could have taught you much — but not these. You are a better one than any of my monks, yet you come with a crew of brawlers and my monastery is in danger through them. This one” (he pointed at me) “shall have medicines lest he die by the way. Such virtue as he has is in his friendship. He may win through on that account. I doubt it. That one” (he made a gesture with his staff in the direction of Chullunder Ghose) “is a coward whose curiosity is greater than his cowardice; whose honesty is stronger than his zeal. His cunning shall protect him, though his flesh shall be a weariness.” He pointed at Narayan Singh. “Death is no answer to riddles,” he said, “as you shall know when you are slain, you who have slain so many.”
He turned to go, giving his staff to the monk who attended him and beginning to spin his prayer wheel, but I broke the silence by asking him what was to be done about Sidiki ben Mohammed and his young wife. He turned in the doorway, answering impatiently:
“What are they to you?”
“I owe the man money,” I told him.
“Then pay it,” he retorted irritably. “So much talk about such unimportant things!”
Presently monks came into our cell to carry out the dead one. Others waited for us to pack up our belongings. Nothing was left undone to make it obvious that our welcome had expired although no actual discourtesy was offered. Evidently someone told Sidiki we were leaving, for he came in a great state of excitement carrying paper, pen and ink-horn.
“You go, sahibs? You go? And at this hour? You were not-you were not forgetting — ?”
I wrote him his order on Benjamin, attaching no conditions to it, knowing that if there were any peculiar wording about the order or anything that might arouse Benjamin’s suspicions the old Jew would refuse to honor it. Grim, Narayan Singh and Chullunder Ghose all added their signatures as witnesses, and before we left the place I persuaded the old abbot to attach his seal.
Sidiki wept at our departure. He pretended he would like to come with us and swore he would have done so but for having a young wife on his hands.
“Nor can I leave her, sahibs. You don’t know this country. They would make a cuckold of me before my back was turned! There is something in me of Lord Roberts — I should oh, so dearly love this campaign into the unknown — yes, yes, I should love it. But my honor — a man’s honor is his first consideration. I must wait here until spring, when these monks will kindly escort me as far as Leh, where I shall appeal for government protection and proceed to Delhi. Is your honor sure this money will be paid to me by Benjamin?”
In darkness, for it lacked two hours of dawn, we watched our loads, and then Narayan Singh and the babu, being lowered in a great basket between natural rock bastions, and heard the basket — windblown — crash against the rock wall in fathomless darkness. My turn and Grim’s came at last, and, knowing something about pithead gears, I sat near the rickety wooden winch manipulated by two monks, and examined the rope made of leather and various odds and ends. It occurred to me to ask whether there was no other way of leaving the place.
I was told that the steps hewn in the rock could not be used in winter because of ice that spoiled the foot-and finger-hold; but the old abbot did his best to reassure me about the two-monk-power elevator, pointing to a prayer wheel, yoked by a leather belt in such way tha
t a thousand prayers were repeated automatically at each revolution of the winch.
“So you are quite safe,” he answered me. “They who raise and lower the cage have orders that if the rope should break they must continue turning. Thus blessing would accompany the dissolution. There would be no curse in such a death.”
He grieved sincerely at our going but assured Grim that after one of us had shed blood he had neither authority nor will to offer us another minute’s hospitality.
“Bloodshed within!” he exclaimed. “Who then shall protect us from the bloodshed from without!”
Grim offered no apology; it would have been lame and useless; probably it would have shut off speech, whereas there was something about the old abbot’s attitude and the way he champed his jaws that suggested he had something he would still say if we let him. A mere regular ritual blessing might set his own conscience at ease as having done what duty indicated, but a few more words of explanation of the dugpa mystery would be a much more acceptable parting gift from our bewildered point of view. They came as we waited in silence while the two monks wound up the cage on its complaining wooden roller.
“Since dugpas wished to get you out of here, where you were safe, how else should they expel you than by causing you to expel yourselves by violence? When fools make war they expend their resources squandering money and life and food until the victor loses with the vanquished, and another, who is wiser, overwhelms them both. No dugpa would do such foolishness. He sacrifices little dugpas, even as the governments send soldiers to be slain, because there are always plenty who will fill the lower ranks. But one little sleepy, stupid, belly-loving dugpa is as useful to him as an army that a government flatters and sends to its death; because he wages war by causing his enemy to make mistakes, and he wins not by what he himself does, but through the self-destroying acts of whomsoever he would conquer.” “Do you mean to say,” Grim asked him, “that the dugpas actually calculated that Narayan Singh would kill that monk of yours?”
The bitter wind was whistling and moaning and the winch squeaked like an animal in pain. Flickering lamplight filled the low-roofed open shed in which we waited, but beneath us the rope vanished into blackness and there were not even shadows to show where a dozen monks stood watching, hardly two arms’ length away from us. The old abbot thought a while, and chewed the cud of his reflection, spitting at last before he spoke:
“The wind blows. Where there is a window open, or a keyhole or a cranny or a crack, does the wind not find its way! Thought is much thinner than wind. That Sikh is predisposed to shedding blood, and he who sheds blood may not stay in this place. There is a force that makes men shed blood, even as another force will make them commit another sin — even as the wind makes windmills turn. He who is not on guard against the dugpas will obey the forces they direct.”
Grim answered with one of his comical smiles which mean he is mocking himself as much as anyone:
“Magic would make a wonderful excuse for a criminal on trial! Unfortunately, in the West we don’t believe in it.”
“Of course not,” said the abbot gently. “In the East we are older. We know more. We know what threw the whole world into war. And if the dugpas wish to rule you, what is plainer than that they will first of all make you believe there are no such things as dugpas? Does a man who will break in and steal first announce what he will do, and how he will do it, and when? Do your criminals in the West not make you all believe they are honest citizens? Be on guard against dugpas, my son!”
Then the basket came up through the hole and he blessed us while we stepped into the swaying thing. The last we saw of him was his old wrinkled ivory face framed in yellow lamplight and black shadow as he clung to a beam and peered down watching our descent. After that we were both of us busy with poles for a long time, fending off the basket from the cliff side as the two monks lowered us, we never knew how many hundred feet, to the platform of rock at the head of a track that descended along the lip of a snow-hung precipice into the valley.
In a cavern thick with dung, whose opening was sheltered from the wind by a clump of tamarisks that had rooted themselves in fissures in the platform, all our ponies waited — fat and villainously quarrelsome from lack of work. There was only one lantern and but two monks there to help us lift the loads on, while the ponies kicked their heels up at the cavern roof, bit, squealed and broke loose to hide in dark corners.
So it was dawn, for all our haste, before we took the trail at last and rode, with one leg over the edge of a precipice and the other being skinned against the cliff, down a declivity that seemed to lead into the bowels of the earth. Above us there were gilded peaks that shone like lightning, so that we could hardly bear to glance at them with the icy wind making our eyes run. Beneath us was a gruesome black hole, colder as the track descended, full of alternating silences and sounds of savage cataclysm as the wind broke great icicles away and sent them splintering on unseen rocks.
Unguided, we could not have found our way among those gorges for a single hour. More often than not there was no track to be seen at all until we actually found it under us, with the ponies picking their way like cats where one false footstep would have meant destruction. It was a goat trail, cunningly marked and helped out here and there by pick and shovel, along the line of the prevailing wind, where snow could never lie deep even in the storms. The monk who led us, wrapped to the ears in yak-skin, riding an ancient mule, kept singing to himself a tune that sounded older than the hills, the same few bars of a simple melody ever and ever repeated, reaching us in fragments between gusts of wind. It suggested a pagan hymn to nature, but Grim said the words were all about beer and pretty ladies. He never glanced back at us once to make sure we were following, and when the ponies rose like moving steps above us and we caught sight of him turning around some pinnacle of rock sharp-cut against the sky, he had the air of leaving the whole business of leading to his old mule, that seemed to know the way as intimately as if he carried a man along it every day of his existence.
The last half of that day’s march was nightmare in which I clung to the saddle desperately, growing weaker at every leap the pony made and trying not to let Grim know how ill I felt. One wound reopened and I felt the blood ooze; and though I took the medicines the abbot gave me, and drank brandy now and then from Grim’s flask when there was room for two of us to halt together on the track, the cold began to creep into my wounds and fill me with the thought of how comfortable death would be.
I contrived to finish the day’s work only by remembering Mordecai and his retreat over the passes, alone, sick, starving, hunted. I did not propose that Mordecai should play the man and I lie down under less than half his difficulties; and in a sort of half-delirium I clung on during the last hour of a scampering struggling climb imagining I actually was the battered Jew escaping from Tibetan enemies in devil masks.
The noise of Grim’s clambering pony behind me became galloping monks. The volleys of echoes, as stones went rattling off the ledge over the precipice, were rifle shots. It seemed to me that I was making for a wayside inn, which, funnily enough, contained white-skirted waiters and a jazz band, where the nemo (who was Benjamin’s fat daughter, spreading food on a yellow tablecloth under an ancient temple lamp) would presently be beaten to make her tell my name and hiding-place.
I was almost unconscious when at last I rolled into a man’s arms and was carried somehow into a cave whose entrance had been masked against the wind by a barrier of limestone blocks and mud.
I remember I thought I was going to die and the prospect was not unattractive. That cave had the feel of a sepulcher, although it was warmed by a good fire of tamarisk branches. The voices of my friends appeared to reach me faintly from a mile away, as if I had already passed into the borderland of death, and I was not even vaguely interested in what they were talking about. I no longer felt cold, and though they laid me near the fire I did not feel the heat. There seemed to be a vast dark wilderness in front of me, which I mu
st traverse presently toward a dim light in the distance, and anything that took my mind off that was an annoyance.
I don’t know how long I lay in that condition, but at last I began to rebel against something (I did not know what) that was pulling me back in the direction of my friends. I tried to summon all my will power to resist the interference — even tried to cry out to my friends to help me shake the interference off. I think it was my own voice that I heard first. Then Grim’s:
“Rammy, old top, wake up, confound you! You’ve got no right to die here. It’s a rotten breach of hospitality. Save up your dying for later on when it won’t be so infernally inconvenient!”
I was conscious of being shaken violently and of feeling indignant. It occurred to me as indecent to disturb a dying man, but I did not associate the shaking with Grim’s hands that had me by the shoulders. Then I heard a strange voice, speaking Pashtu: “Any fool can die. The thing is to know when to die.”
Strange though the statement looks on a written page, it was that argument that made me cease resistance to the force that appeared to be pulling me back into the world. I saw it as unfair to Grim to leave him and began to wish myself alive again and strong enough to help him in some undertaking — although what the undertaking might be I could neither remember nor imagine. Soon after that I tasted brandy in my mouth, and then there was another lapse into unconsciousness.
I awoke in utter darkness but rolled over on a heap of blankets and saw that our loads had been set up like a wall between me and a fire in the midst of the cave. Narayan Singh heard me move and, pulling a couple of loads aside to make a passage, brought me water in a clay pitcher. Someone threw fresh wood on the fire, and by the light of the blaze of sparks I saw Grim and Chullunder Ghose sitting side by side staring at two other men whose faces were in shadow.
“There is a greatness,” Narayan Singh said in his gruffest voice, putting his arms under my shoulders. “Will your honor try it? This is something manlier than death in the dark.”