by Talbot Mundy
“He opens eggs,” he said, “with sledge hammers.”
Ten minutes after that the woman leaped into the hollow with her hair all caked with snow and frozen; it was almost like a fashionable hat and made her look ridiculous. She laid her lips to Lhaten’s ear and whispered.
Then Grim came, dog-tired, and dropped beside me, seeming surprised to find me there but saying nothing. Narayan Singh slid down the side of the hole and squatted on his heels between Grim and Lhaten.
“There is nothing else than dugpas in this land!” he shouted. “It is fit for nothing else!”
“Have you seen one?” asked Lhaten.
“I slew one?”
“Man of blood!” said Lhaten. He got up at once and led the way out of the hollow, finding a track that brought us to the ledge beside the cave where we had left the ponies.
“You will have to sleep here,” he remarked. “She will show you where fuel is hidden.”
He stood aside to watch us pass in, taking ‘care, I thought, that the Sikh’s clothes should not touch him. I went instead to the rear of the cave to pull Chullunder Ghose out of his hole, and it took me several minutes to dislodge him without tearing half his skin off. He was chattering with cold and nearly off his head with terror.
“Voices, Rammy sahib! Voices along the tunnel! When you pulled my feet I thought you were a dugpa! Oh, this thusness! Why leave home to come to such a place! Nevertheless, I shall not turn back! This Caesar has crossed Rubicon!”
Lhaten ceased talking to Grim as Narayan Singh entered the cave behind the woman, both of them heavily burdened with wood from some nearby cache. Narayan Singh threw down his heap on the floor and stood and looked at Lhaten, folding his arms truculently.
“Man of peace, I offend you!”
“No,” said Lhaten.
“Take me by the hand then!”
Narayan Singh held out his right hand, which Lhaten took in his without the slightest hesitation.
“But if you keep on killing you will kill yourself, because blood draws blood,” said Lhaten.
“Lo, I slew a dugpa,” said the Sikh. “ What of it? I have slain many whose time had come to die, but who were worthier to live than that one. Consider: I followed Jimgrim in search of the woman. She beckoned us over that ridge we crossed a while ago, and we came to a cave, which she entered, bidding Jimgrim follow. But to me she said,’Wait and guard the place.’ So I stood in the storm until a man came who sought to enter. I forbade him and we had speech civilly enough until he told me he would show another entrance to the cave that I should guard instead of that one and I gave him leave to go to Lhasa or wherever else he chose, so be he moved himself. He went, but he pointed to where the other entrance was.
“And soon I saw Jimgrim leave that other entrance; or it seemed to me that I saw Jimgrim. He walked away from me in great haste, so I followed. He led me a great climb over the mountain, I can tell you, and when I came on him — or thought I did — he vanished!
“‘Dugpas!’ I said to myself; and I set to work to find that cave again. But the snow had blotted out my trail. And when at last I drew near the cave there were footsteps showing that many people had come out of it. And there, standing in the cave mouth was the one who had sought to enter. He said he would show me where Jimgrim had gone, so I followed him. But there were no footsteps where we went and the trail was very difficult, so I called a halt. Then he said to me: ‘Your Jimgrim is no good. He is in the wrong hands. He will soon be like Rait is — mad and being practiced on. You should abandon Jimgrim and let me show you genuine mysteries.’
“So I showed him a genuine one — how a man’s life leaves the body when a pistol bullet enters at the brain. After a while came Jimgrim and the woman looking for me. Have you anything to say to that?”
“Not a great deal,” Lhaten answered. “Only if you keep on killing there will be a weight of death against you that not even your courage can prevail against.”
“You speak riddles,” the Sikh answered.
“The word two is a riddle, until you divide it into one plus one,” said Lhaten and then, buttoning his overcoat as if he heard a summons through the gale, he took his leave of us and hurried off.
Lhaten always came and went as if there were an hotel or a club house just around the corner.
CHAPTER XVIII. Chullunder Ghose Chenresi.
Of every ten who tread the Middle Way to Knowledge there are nine who turn aside through avarice, though not all avarice is born of belly-hunger or the greed for gold. Some seek preeminence, such eminence as they have won corroded by insane pride. So by this mark you shall know the Middle Way, that whoso treads it truly avoids vices, having found them in himself, so that he knows their habit and is temperate in judgment, throwing no stones lest he break the windows of his own soul.
— from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup
GRIM now knew something I did not know. He saw something I did not see; and, though all sorts of similes suggest themselves to illustrate the feeling I experienced, none quite explains it.
Not being an artist with either pen or brush the facts of art don’t limit me, and none except an artist, possibly, will smile when I suggest that a hack portrait painter or a writer of journalese may feel the same toward a rising genius as I began to feel toward Grim. I was aware his genius had gone beyond mine and, though by his own unrecognition of the fact he puzzled me, I felt an impulse, free (I think) from rivalry or any meaner instinct, to discover the secret and so to keep, if not abreast of him, at least not far behind.
The change in the attitude of others toward him was much more marked than any outward change in Grim himself. The old woman treated him as if he were a young god, to be waited on and possibly reproved at times, but destined for a throne on high Olympus. She shared the cave with us that night, and though Grim did not notice it I saw that she lay where her body would keep the draught away from him.
Narayan Singh, who had sustained his whole life long that hugely difficult role of a proud and patriotic free man in a conquered country, seemed to take his cue from the old woman. His deference became extravagant, the more effective since he cloaked it under military gruffness. She threatened our babu with mayhem for daring to use the word Jimgrim without the added “sahib.” He was even distant toward me because I argued with Grim about how much barley we should give the ponies. (I was for conserving rations, Grim for keeping up the ponies’ strength and trusting the future for additional supplies of grain; and, as it happened, Grim was right.)
That blizzard was the worst we had experienced and it raged the whole night through. We lay amid a din of avalanches, crashing boulders and a cataclysmic orchestra of shrieking wind. The very mountain seemed to tremble, and the tunnel that led from the rear of our cave kept up a series of irregular explosions like the booming of a big drum.
But dawn broke cold and clear, with no wind, and our thermometer at zero — falling steadily. The silence as we filed out of the cave on ponyback and saw the tumbled range around us glittering under an azure sky, was stupefying. Where the wind had shrieked the night before, now sound itself seemed frozen. When a pinnacle of ice a mile away crashed down into a chasm and was split into glittering jewels on the fanged rocks, all the resulting din came to us like a whisper, as if even echoes were afraid to speak.
Hitherto we had marched into curtains of snow that revealed only glimpses of crag and chasm when the wind tore momentary rents in it. Now square leagues looked like inches and the peaks a hundred miles away seemed almost within pistol shot. The ponies, stringing out along the trail in front of me, picking their way behind our bare-legged guide, resembled insects. Yet in the clear air I could count the feathers of an eagle’s wings, soaring a hundred feet below me and a thousand feet above the snow-filled valley bottom.
Nine-tenths of all the track we traveled was bare ridge, swept by the wind so that no snow lay on it. At times we crossed naked summits; oftener we skirted their flanks along ledges that hung over fa
thomless space. There was made trail here and there, with boulder bridges heaped across wide fissures in the rock. But now and then the trail ceased altogether, where the storms had wrecked a mountainside, and there we had to chop a foothold for the ponies across slopes where the frozen crust would bear a man’s weight but let the loaded ponies through on to the glass ice underneath.
There was one such place that sloped toward a chasm on our left hand and for more than half a mile we had to skirt the edge of it, keeping away from the cliff on our right because icicles hung there, that crashed in the strength of the sun. We were midway over when we saw men peering at us, their hooded heads jet black against the sky as they leaned over the top of the cliff from which ice hung like blades of guillotines.
There was a noise that at first suggested intermittent rifle fire and Narayan Singh made swift to load one of the Tibetan rifles Benjamin had sold us. But the crash of ice explained the sound. They were chopping the ton-weight icicles to make them fall across our path.
Narayan Singh fired three times, and it was impossible to see whether he had hit a man or not. But one of his bullets smashed into the very root of an enormous icicle and brought it avalanching down on us, crushing the loaded pony next ahead of me and sweeping him over the edge of the slope. A yell of exultation from the cliff announced that the disaster had been seen, but the rifle had served its purpose; no more ice was dropped on us and our assailants vanished.
When we reached the end of that gruesome slope Grim called a halt to rest the ponies and our guide came back to find out why we were not following. Grim asked her who the men might be who had dropped that ice on us.
“Did not Lhaten warn you!” she retorted. “Did he not say, in the cave last night, that monks are watching for you?” Not long after that we saw their monastery — if the name serves for a wasps’ nest built on a cliffside under the projecting shoulder of a mountain so that none could reach it from above, and from beneath the only access to it was up a zigzag path a few feet wide that, if defended, not an enemy in the world could force.
“Whither you go next,” she said and pointed to the monastery, laughing at the expression on Chullunder Ghose’s face.
“Krishna!” he exploded. Then, with a grimace at me:
“Rammy sahib, they have made our Jimgrim mad! He leads on!”
“None but the mad can lead except in circles,” said Narayan Singh. “I have served under many officers. Madmen were always the best.”
Lhaten probably had said a great deal more to Grim than I overheard in the cave the night before. While I was dragging out the babu from the tunnel and Narayan Singh was bringing fuel there was plenty of time for conversation. However, while we lingered on a broad ledge, where one dead, dwarfed and twisted tamarisk was held by the roots in rock that it had burst asunder in the days gone by, a shower of boulders dropped from overhead, one shearing off the tree as cleanly as if a giant’s axe had done it.
“So much for doubt!” said Narayan Singh. “We should have ridden on.”
He suited action to the word and led the way, another volley of boulders crashing to the ledge behind us, many of them striking where we had sat our ponies half a dozen breaths before, then bounding down into the ravine, whence their echoes followed us like laughter from the underworld.
I tried to overtake Grim, but there were ponies in the way and the track kept narrowing until the loads on one side scraped the cliff and on the other hung projecting over the ravine. When I shouted he merely waved his hand and rode on; and I could see the woman, striding along like a mountaineer ahead of him, looking straight toward the distant monastery. Whoever was frightened, she was not. Her gait suggested cheerfulness because of the journey’s end in view.
And now, instead of following the ridge that joined two mountains, we descended by hair-raising grades to the very depths of the ravine and crossed it where echoing ice had spanned the frozen watercourse with a bridge that Romans might have built. The ice was even yellow from the ocher borne down- stream, and from a hundred yards away it so resembled masonry that I looked for a guard-house and expected to see someone with a rifle standing there.
The effect was increased by the presence of tamarisks crowded nearby in the folds of the gorge, and of wood stacks where the monks had cut their winter’s fuel and piled it, cleaning up even the splinters of the precious stuff. There were crags on the cliff behind the bridge that looked like castle turrets, and the track beyond the ice bridge led between two bastions of naked rock that would have checked artillery.
But instead of a man with a rifle a young monk in a soiled cloak of faded yellow appeared midway in between the bastions and, with a prayer wheel whirling in his right hand, seemed to challenge us. He was shouting, but the echoes threw the words into confusion, so that it sounded as if ten or twelve men were holding a noisy argument.
Our gray old guide strode straight toward him, swinging along with the stride of a man, her spiked staff like a marshal’s baton in the hollow of her arm, and though the monk kept shouting at her she neither changed her gait nor paused until she came within two yards and turned her back on him to wait for us — we taking our time about it because the far slope of the bridge was slippery and the ponies needed help.
By the time we reached those bastions the monk was foaming at the mouth. The frenzy in his eyes was like a maniac’s. He kept his prayer wheel spinning like a top while he searched our faces; but when Chullunder Ghose came dragging the last of the ponies he seemed to choke, as if his heart was in his throat — stared with his yellow eyes popping — and ran.
Our gray guide looked at Grim and laughed, her wrinkles leaping into sudden life and vanishing again.
“They in the twilight jump at all illusions,” she said. “I told the fool the Lord Chenresi is his monastery’s guest,” and, with a mocking gesture at Chullunder Ghose, she strode on between the bastions.
We had nearly a dozen miles to traverse yet, although the monastery was not more than one mile distant as an eagle would have gone. The trail led all around the bases of the intervening hills, marked well enough because the monks had used it for packing fuel, but steep, difficult and dangerous. Our ponies were exhausted when we reached the cliff on which the wasps’ nest buildings perched with their stone walls leaning outward from a ledge three thousand feet above us. And, weary though the ponies were, they had to climb three thousand feet, up a path that I imagine is unique even in that land of guarded solitude.
At the foot there was a chorten — a very big one, looking something like a dome over a tomb. It was placed in the midst of the track which forked around it, so that all who came or went could pass it on their right hand. Behind it was a fissure in the cliffside, narrow and as ragged as forked lightning. Entering that, we found ourselves inside a screen of rock that enclosed a space of two or three acres, deep under accumulated snow. An irregular road had been dug through the snow to a gash in the foot of the cliff, where it entered and ascended for a hundred feet through a tunnel that had been enlarged out of a natural cave. Then we came into daylight on a ledge of half an acre from which we again entered a tunnel and rose another hundred feet, if not more. From the upper mouth of that second tunnel the track led for nearly half a mile along a level parapet of rock until it turned sharply and began to zigzag upward across the face of the cliff. It was so steep that a loaded pony had the utmost it could do to climb; but it was very largely hand-hewn and had been surveyed so that the prevailing wind would sweep it clear of snow.
In places it looked almost as if dynamite had done the work, but the rocks were split too evenly along the grain. The fractures were ancient, but at one of the hairpin turns we passed a rock that told the story: they had bored and filled the bore with water, leaving that to freeze in the terrific winter weather. Nature had done the rest.
There was a marvelous economy of distance — a contempt of steepness indicating that the men who did the work had not had horses in their minds. And there were sections where the wind
would not have swept the snow away and where tunnels had been cut for fifty yards or more — not straight, but following the rock faults.
Leading our staggering ponies we emerged at last through a ragged gap on to a ledge so small that the buildings reared on it appeared to be pushing one another off. There was a courtyard, thirty or thirty-five feet square, crowded between the mountain and the monastery storehouse; but in order to make room for that the builders had projected the foundations of their walls out over the sheer cliffside — which created the appearance of a wasps’ nest from below. The roofs looked Chinese, but the architecture was careless, crude and (compared to the road we had climbed by) modern. There was possibly accommodation for a hundred monks, if they should choose to live with economy of comfort. We were greeted by a great horn blowing and the clangor of a group of bronze bells swung on one beam. Not a monk was in sight until a man in yellow hood and robes emerged out of a door that faced us, on the far side of the courtyard, and went through the motions of a Lamaistic benediction. He was followed by a group of excited monks, a few of whom wore black, the others yellow. All had prayer wheels, which they kept in constant motion.
He looked nervously suspicious of our old guide, who greeted him with a note of laughter that seemed, nevertheless, to hint at consequences should he fail to answer civilly. And civilly he spoke up, in Tibetan, using complimentary phrases as he asked our names, and whence we were, and why we came.
The woman glanced at Grim and stepped back, leaving him a pace or two in front of all of us. But the man in yellow hardly looked at Grim at first; his eyes were on Chullunder Ghose and his lips kept working as if something choice to eat were almost within his grasp.
“Our names don’t matter,” Grim said. “Tell why your monks attacked us on the road.”
“It is the custom,” he answered, his eyes meeting Grim’s for a second, then returning to the babu’s face, which seemed to fascinate him.