by Talbot Mundy
There was nothing in sight that would float and I had to plunge after him, cursing his bad manners, for the water chilled the very marrow in one’s bones and, though it was no task to overhaul him, it was desperate work to reach the rock-staked shore across that current. Ice froze in my hair as I swam, and I could hear the thunder of the cataract grow louder as I caught the babu by the neck of his cloak, pulled him over on his back, and tried to turn toward the bank.
It was impossible. The only chance we had was to go forward with the current in the hope of being thrown up on an ice-covered beach across the river; and we never could have reached that if two men had not put out from the farther side in a sort of coracle made of inflated skins which they let out by a rope made fast to the shore and, paddling furiously, guided across our course. They hauled us into the unsteady craft and let it swing down current by the rope until it struck the ice at the edge of the beach, where it bucked and swayed and we had to jump toward ice strong enough to bear our united weight, whence we dragged the coracle, with the babu lying in the bottom of it, to the beach and safety.
Then we ran, dragging the babu with us, and lay breathless on a cave floor by a drift-wood fire while four men stripped us naked and rubbed warmth into our bones. Another dried our clothing at the fire.
It was an hour before Grim and Lhaten came, since they had to wait for another coracle to work its way across the river for them. And by that time it was dark. Grim said nothing, but sat down beside the fire when he had noticed I was not much worse for the experience. The Tibetans who had rescued us sat near him with the firelight on their faces, making them look like disembodied spirits framed in the flickering gloom. Lhaten paced to and fro with his hands behind him, paused after a while and, looking at the babu, said abruptly:
“So. Well, we have crossed the river.”
That was the only comment any of us made. In less than half-an-hour, before supper was ready, Chullunder Ghose was in delirium and raging fever. Lhaten brought snow and packed him in it, alternating that with sheep-skins, motioning the rest of us away, requesting silence and taking his place at last, cross-legged, near the babu’s head. There he remained the whole night long, except that once or twice when I awoke I heard him ordering one of those Tibetans who had rescued us to bring more ice. In the morning the fever was less and the babu was breathing easily but still unconscious. Lhaten told us we must march at once, but added, pointing at the babu:
“Don’t question him. Don’t speak of it. That sort of fear is like a sleeping snake. If you stir it, it strikes.”
That day’s march was the hardest of them all. The litter bearers had to pass their load from hand to hand up naked cliffs where there was hardly foothold and the wind blew such a gale that sometimes there was nothing possible to do but cling with hand and toe to the projections and wait for a lull. There was a couloir where the sky looked like a patch of smooth glass resting on the summit of the walls and, as we climbed, infinity appeared to yawn beneath us. Once, between the ridges of a parallel escarpment, we passed through a tunnel of snow and ice, through which the sun shone as if through heaps of jewelry. And there was one descent, of a mile or more, on sheet ice that we had to break for foothold. Lhaten led, pausing only to pay attention to Chullunder Ghose.
It was sunset when we reached this cave in which I am now writing. It is a long cave with two entrances that are very nearly at a right angle, and at the angle’s apex, facing the cave’s interior, there is the tall, carved image of a seated man, who rather resembles Rodin’s Thinker, except that his features are Asiatic and his figure like an Athenian’s of the time of Pericles. He is carved from a block of marble that crops out from between retaining walls of porphyry. The rest of the cave is partly porphyry and partly limestone.
There, that night, we slept, dog-weary. In the morning Lhaten said that Grim should go with him, but said he did not know how long Grim was likely to be absent. He offered to leave two Tibetans, one to tend the fire and cook for us, the other to help me with Chullunder Ghose, adding that a messenger would come at intervals with food and medicine. So Grim and I restated the terms of our bargain, argued a little about it and shook hands. I haven’t seen him since he strode away across the snow, two paces behind Lhaten.
There is a sort of altar in the middle of the cave, half-marble and half- porphyry, as smooth as glass except where broken, and the floor around it has been worn smooth by the tread of countless feet, although it does not seem to have been used for centuries. I got up on the altar and sat there after I had watched Grim vanish over the horizon, and for a while a sense of abject loneliness swept over me. The cave felt like a sepulcher. The cold, and the wind moaning in through the double entrance added physical discomfort. I began to feel as though I were going mad. I even went to the cave mouth with the thought of hurrying after Grim and calling him back to reconsider things but returned, determined to control myself by giving full attention to Chullunder Ghose.
He had no fever. He was lying in a sort of comatose condition, conscious, perfectly aware of me and of what had happened recently, but apparently unwilling to speak. I felt inclined to kick and shake him to arouse his will, but remembered what Lhaten had said about fear. I did not want to kick him into kingdom come or to terrify the reason put of him. Lhaten had restored his physical condition; he was breathing naturally and his pulse, if anything, was too quick. It was fear, it seemed to me, that had him by the brain and I wondered why Lhaten had not found some means to relieve it.
There was nothing else for me to do but occupy my mind with him and I began to try to think of ways of stirring up his will, to make him think of something else than what obsessed him and begin to talk. For a while I sang — all the idiotic songs I could remember — even danced, clowning for him as I used to do for men in mining camps to get them in a reasonable humor. But though I grew warm with the effort and recovered something of my own equanimity, it was afternoon before I found the way to manage the babu.
I sat down where he could not see me, near his head, as Lhaten had done, and began to moan. I haven’t cried for thirty years, but I can sob behind my hands like a Worthington pump with an overload and valves that need repacking. I can sound like a man with a broken heart and a cow with her throat cut moaning a duet. I kept that up for fifteen minutes, until at last the babu’s voice said very wearily:
“What is it, Rammy sahib? Are you also hopeless person?”
I pretended not to hear him and sobbed on, inserting a crescendo bar or two suggestive of hysteria. At last he sat up.
“Rammy sahib, let us make clean breast of miserable business!”
I sat in shadow, so he could not see I was dry-eyed, and in another minute he himself was crying, the tears streaming down into the coarse black beard that had made him hardly recognizable.
“Rammy sahib, I am miserable babu!” he exclaimed. “Oh, would that I had died the way the Sikh did! I cannot go forward. I shall not submit to being made to see more clearly than I do. Yet, if I turn back I am self-confessed coward! Furthermore, how can I turn back! How shall I reach India, alone, alive? As a corpse I should no longer interest myself. And if I should succeed in reaching India, I should despise myself, because you and Jimgrim treated me as fellow man and yet I failed you. On the other hand, if I go forward they will teach me the reality of things, of which already I know much too much! It has been bad enough as failed B.A. to stick my tongue into my cheek and flatter blind men — pompous Englishmen and supine Indians — for a living. I have had to eat dust from the wheels of what the politicians think is progress; and I have had to be polite when I was patronized by men whom I should pity if I had the heart to do it! And I could endure it, Rammy sahib, because I only knew more than was good for me and not all of it by any means! I do not wish to know more. If I saw more clearly I should have to join the revolutionaries — who are worse than those they revolute against! It is already bad enough to have to toady to the snobs on top. To have to agree with the snobs underneath, who
seek to level all men to a common meanness since they cannot admire any sort of superiority — that would be living death! I would rather pretend to admire the Englishman whose snobbery exasperates me, than repeat the lies of Indians whose only object is to do dishonestly and badly but much more cleverly what the English do honestly and with all the stupidity of which they are capable!” I suggested that wisdom, if that should prove to be the essence of Sham-bha-la’s teaching, almost certainly would counterbalance revelation of the dismalness of things with knowledge of effective remedies.
“No, no!” he almost screamed. “No more! Wisdom only makes the heart ache. For a babu with a wife and children ignorance is the best condition. But you also were weeping, Rammy sahib. You must tell me why you wept.”
I told him the plain truth about it: that I had pretended, in order to get him to talk. At that he threw himself down on the blankets in abject misery, beating the floor with his fists.
“Krishna! How I wish I had refused to come with you!” he shouted. “Then I should have suffered only from regret. But now what shall I do? WHAT SHALL I DO?”
I went and climbed back on the altar, and sat there until one of the Tibetans came and cooked our supper at a small fire over in the farthest corner of the cave. I did not know what Grim would have to say to the determination that was forming in my mind and setting there as solidly as concrete. It was growing clear to me that I had neither right nor inclination either to compel Chullunder Ghose to go another yard with us or to desert him. Yet I knew that Grim would not desert me. I was torn between unwillingness to rob Grim of his goal and obligation, as clear as daylight, to stand by a man who had done nothing to forfeit our friendship.
“I will take you back to India,” I said at last. “I don’t know how. We shall have to ask Lhaten for guides and provisions. I will wait for Grim in India if we can persuade him not to come back with us.”
During that night and the following day Chullunder Ghose spoke only at rare intervals. There was something he was turning over in his mind, but whenever he tried to speak of it he always checked himself and seemed to go back to his thinking. He was silent when, at sunset, a man came into the cave and handed me a note from Grim, scribbled in pencil on a leaf torn from a memorandum book.
“All right, Jeff. Come forward. I am waiting in a guest house and can see our destination from the window. I refused pointblank to go another yard without you, but I never was so keen on anything in all my life. However, the bearer of this, who is somebody, will doubtless do his best to scare both of you of the lot, so summon all your resolution, put the spurs into Chullunder Ghose, and come soon. J.G.”
I read the note by firelight and then looked up at the man who brought it to me. He was tall, straight, robed in yak-skin, bearded, neither a Tibetan nor a Rajput. He resembled Michael Angelo — or John Singer Sargent’s painting of Moses. It was difficult to see him in the firelight.
“You may come,” he said in sonorous English, “but neither may the bird return into the egg nor you resume your former ignorance. I warn you: stay away, if you have any hunger for the life you knew.”
I answered, I had found the world quite good enough for me but Grim was much the best thing in it, so that if I should have to choose between losing Grim or all my other friends I must decide to go with Grim.
“But I’ve a friend here,” I added, “who needs looking after and who prefers to turn back. Consequently, I must turn back. Will you kindly tell Grim—”
I paused, for I hardly knew what he should tell him. It was no use lying. I suspected he would not consent to take a lying message, anyhow. I asked a question:
“Was there something about willingness? Lhaten said—”
“Your own free will,” he answered.
“Then will you kindly tell Grim I have been refused admission on the ground that I am not entirely willing. Say that I shall wait for him in India, and that I hold him strictly to our bargain, the terms of which were that we should all three try to enter and the devil take the hindermost.”
For about a minute he was silent and his face in firelight took on something of the expression of that Thinker carved in marble near the entrance of the cave. Then:
“Speak! Which way do you prefer?” he asked, in a voice like no man’s I had ever heard. He did not speak loud. Neither is an earthquake loud. I answered:
“I should rather go with Grim, but—”
Chullunder Ghose spoke up, crying aloud to call attention to himself, then bowing three or four times, Hindu fashion — seated cross-legged, that is, and repeatedly raising both hands to his forehead.
“Pranam!” he exclaimed in Hindi. “This babu has come a long way, seeking — seeking.”
“What have you sought!” asked he who stood beside me.
“Nameless one, my heart is seeking what this head denies!” He beat his head with both hands. “My heart is a lion. My head is a jackal. There are these two sahibs who have never stooped to be my fellow men; they have never imagined me anything else. Not stooping, they have seen me as their equals. Shall I undeceive them?”
“Let the heart speak.”
“Shall I show ingratitude?”
“Strip the heart bare.”
“How shall I repay them?”
“He who asks repayment — nay, I tell you, he who will accept it, is a victim of illusion. That which has been given, is not given if the giver can retake it. He who looks for his reward receives the ashes of his own gift. As the sun sends forth his rays into the dark, thus only shall a man give of his manhood. There is nothing else.”
“Holy one, give me then, of your manhood!” said the babu; and the man beside me smiled as if he liked that answer.
“Can the jackal kill the lion?” he retorted. “Not until the lion is caught in a trap, when none the less the jackal fears to kill him, saying ‘Whence will come the carrion I preyed on?’ The lion is the heart that hunts. The jackal is the head that whimpers and yelps and guzzles dead stuff that the lion leaves. What says your heart?”
“I am unwilling to betray these sahibs. I am the man they trusted.”
“And the head?”
“I am afraid.”
There was silence then for longer than a minute, while the babu sat swaying himself in agony of indecision. The firelight shone on beads of sweat that stood out on his forehead. Holding the wall to support himself, at last he stood up, standing very straight for a man recovering from sickness.
“I am afraid,” he said, “but I shall face fear. I will go alone to India. I say, I will. If Ramsden sahib wishes to return with me, he shall not. I will not permit; for I will rather kill myself than keep him or Jimgrim from their goal. That is all. I will return alone to India.”
He sat down and collapsed, laying his head on the rolled sheepskin that served for pillow.
“You will return. Who said you will return alone?” the man beside me asked.
“My head — my head. It aches!”
“Aye, aches because the heart has beaten it! Lhaten shall go with you to Darjeeling. When your head says you have thrown away what you might have had, your heart shall answer: ‘You have given.’ For without you, your friends would have refused to enter; and yet with you they could not have entered, because none may come but of his own free will.”
“Then goodbye, Rammy sahib,” said the babu, rather piteously, doing his best to sit up and to smile. He tried to hold his hand out, but collapsed again. I told him I would stay with him until he should be fit to travel, never mind how long that might be; and as I said that, another thought occurred to me.
“They must be secrets that are told where Grim and I are going — very well kept secrets. Shall I ever be allowed to write about them, or to talk of them!” I asked.
“Then they would not be secrets,” said the man beside me. “What is known in the heart cannot be spoken by the lips. What you learn, you will live; what you think, you will do; there is no other way.”
“But until then I am
in no way pledged to secrecy?”
“In no way.”
So I asked him for paper and pens and an ink pot, which he sent by messenger in two days’ time together with a fat brass tube with caps at either end in which to pack my manuscript. And ever since, for nearly four weeks, while Chullunder Ghose recovered from his illness, I have sat here at the porphyry and marble altar writing what I can remember of our journey.
He who brought the paper told me that Grim had gone forward as soon as he heard of how the babu’s difficulty had been solved; so I suppose when I get there that Grim will be, as usual, a dozen or more jumps ahead of me in comprehension. But I would rather keep my eye on Grim’s back than be neck-and-neck with any other dozen men I know.
It is an hour after dawn and wind is blowing like a whip-lash through the entrance of the cave. Chullunder Ghose is well, and ready for his journey. I shall send this manuscript by his hand to Will Hancock at the mission near Darjeeling, and if Will decides that it is fit to see the light of day in company with his books on the Pentateuch and what not else, he has my leave to publish it or to send it along to another friend of mine, who, having no board of trustees to censor his activities, may see fit to stand as its sponsor. If he does so, he is warned that he will run risks, since a reputation for veracity depends on making such assertions as the public thinks are true. I can hardly expect him to believe what Rao Singh said: that it makes no difference what people think of you, or what they do to you. The only thing that matters to you is what you think, and what you do to others. If he should by chance believe it, I can hardly hope that he will act on it; so probably this manuscript of mine will never see the light of day.
I have been warned that somebody will come for me this morning, and that I shall have to go at once without keeping him waiting. I have given to Chullunder Ghose an order on my bankers that he seems to think not niggardly. He copiously overestimates the value of this manuscript and is as proud as Lucifer to be entrusted with its delivery.