Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  No answer.

  “Lobsang Pun would never send you into Inner Tibet. You know as well as I do, it’s sure death for a lama to do that without definite orders from Lhasa. If he did it, they’d drown him. And Lobsang Pun couldn’t get orders from Lhasa. How could he? He’s the Tashi — Panchen Lama’s man. But you crave to go to Inner Tibet. You would like to link up with Bön magicians. I know your yearning. There are plenty like you with that complaint, but you have it badly. Therefore you attached yourself to Lobsang Pun. And him you fear and obey. There never was a terrorist who didn’t have to have a secret him-who-is-to-be-obeyed. That’s all that keeps you from dying of fear. Lobsang Pun is your” — he used a Tibetan word— “undeniable-one-whose-unspoken-wish-is-sooner-to-be- obeyed-than-the-spoken-commands-of-any-other-person. Lobsang Pun is my friend.”

  That was a staggerer. Noropa took off his spectacles, wiped his face with his sleeve and muttered. He was cursing Tom and summoning dark forces. Failed by the powers of darkness, there would be nothing left on which to base resistance. Tom went at him again:

  “You half-magicians all believe your own stuff, until you find it won’t work. You can’t even keep a secret.” He took a dangerous chance now. “The Thunder Dragon Gate is near the border between Tibet and Nepal, near Mount Everest, where the Most Reverend and Holy Lama Lobsang Pun is supposed to have spent two years immured in a cave.”

  Pure deduction, based on a retentive memory of hints and chance remarks. If it missed it would restore Noropa’s self-confidence. But there wasn’t a glimmering hint of superior knowledge in Noropa’s eyes. On the contrary, a look of utter desperation had crept into them. Tom followed up:

  “You weren’t accepted as a disciple by Lobsang Pun. You’re not his chela. You’re a stool-pigeon. Such a man as Lobsang Pun could see through you in half a second. But he helped you to become a novice in the Thunder Dragon Gate, because he could do that without betraying his own oath. Later, he sent you to England, because you can speak English. Your job was to compel Thö-pa-ga to return. You weren’t ordered to return from England. Who the hell wants a stinker like you when you’ve done your business? When you followed Thö-pa-ga to India, you found that Lobsang Pun was very angry with you for having dared to get in touch with the Japanese secret agents in London and Paris. Who were you that you should dare to step out?”

  Noropa’s face was a picture. The last layer of all of his skin of mystery was being torn off. Tom went on flaying mercilessly:

  “Eiji Sarao paid your fare to India. Lobsang Pun was particularly angry with you for knowing Eiji Sarao. Now you’re afraid that Lobsang Pun will slam the door on you forever. Why shouldn’t he?”

  Pause — a rather long one. Then:

  “I am the only man in the world who can influence Lobsang Pun to overlook your misbehavior.”

  Not a flutter, but a kind of false dawn in Noropa’s eyes. It vanished. No hurry. Two or three more mental wallops, and almost any spark of hope would look attractive.

  “Lobsang Pun believes you killed Eiji Sarao because you had been rebuked for knowing Eiji Sarao and for accepting his money.”

  First miss! But it accomplished more than a hit. Noropa leaped with relief at a chance to prove that Tom didn’t know everything.

  “Damn-fool-Eiji-waking-up-and-going-library-looking-for- Dowlah-not-there-opening-cage-and-shang-shang-bit-him.”

  “Where’s the shang-shang?”

  “Library-door-open-escaping-into-hall-and-out-through-open-window-good- by.”

  Tom didn’t dare to laugh. Noropa had no sense of humor. He couldn’t be moved by imagination of Dowlah’s mourning for his lost pet and the efforts of skeptics to explain away the shang-shang’s killings.

  “What d’you think Lobsang Pun will do to you when he learns you took money from Rajah Dowlah to kill me? I am Lobsang Pun’s friend.”

  Silence.

  “What will Dowlah do when he learns you failed?”

  More silence.

  “What will Lobsang Pun do when he learns you told me where the Thunder Dragon Gate is?”

  “Ah-h-h! Not me! Not telling! Never!”

  “No? Try to make Lobsang Pun believe you didn’t tell me! Try to make the guardians of the Thunder Dragon Gate believe you didn’t tell me!”

  “ You-who-so-well-knowing-Lobsang-Pun-you-say-you- talking-him-for-me-yes-why-you-say-that?”

  Quietly: “Where is Miss Elsa Burbage?”

  “Not knowing.”

  Tom’s foot moved. Noropa flinched — spoke suddenly:

  “Girl-and-Thö-pa-ga-in-auto-to-Darjeeling.”

  “Where is the Holy Lama Lobsang Pun?”

  “In-auto-to-Darjeeling.”

  “Same auto?”

  “Maybe ‘nother auto. Not knowing.”

  “Coming to Darjeeling, is he? Do you want me to protect you?”

  “You-you-saying-you-his-friend-you-doing-that?”

  “If you obey me. You’re a coward. You’re a mongrel. But I’ll give you a chance.”

  Noropa’s answering gesture was one of almost weird humility. Like a de-fanged cobra, he would need time to grow new fangs and brew new venom.

  “But if you miss your chance, don’t look to me for pity. Walk ahead. To the car. And get in.”

  Noropa didn’t like walking ahead. He couldn’t walk fast, he had been kicked too painfully. To reach the road was about all he could manage. The Bengali had decided to take a chance with the spare tire; the blown one was beyond his skill to repair. He had carried water in a borrowed kerosene tin, but he hadn’t thought of tightening the water plug. Tom attended to that.

  CHAPTER 20. “Did you have trouble with this man?”

  DARJEELING enjoys a climate. It endures the weather. All the way up the magnificent drive from Siliguri Tom leaned back on the comfortless cushions and let his lungs fill with pine scent borne on the snow-sweetened breezes from the Roof of the World. He sat cornerwise, to keep an eye on Noropa, but he only spoke to him once in a while, with long pauses, always speaking suddenly, to give the man no time to invent lies.

  “Can you catch a shang-shang?”

  “No, no!”

  “You useless duffer!”

  “Not-yet-learning-how-to-do-it. That-is-secret-only-known-to-some-few-persons-specially-chosen.”

  “Uh-huh. Do they ever get bitten?”

  “No, no. Same-as-serpent-charmers-never-bitten-knowing-proper-magic.”

  “Is a shang-shang solitary?”

  “Oh, yes.” Noropa shuddered. “She-shang-shang-slaying-any-other-coming-near-it.”

  “Who said so?”

  “I seeing.”

  “When?”

  “Two-three time.”

  Sudden rain put an end to the conversation. Not the climate, weather. Black clouds, shot with lightning, rolled above the mountain. Purple gloom. Chill air. A stupendous deluge that in two or three seconds made an overflowing bathtub of the canvas top. Noropa, speaking vehemently, named the devils who had done it. Being rotten, the canvas burst and let fall about a hundred pounds of water into Tom’s and Noropa’s laps. The spare tire chose that moment for a blow-out. The driver announced he was out of petrol. With the air of resignation of a captain who has done his utmost and now proposes to sink with the ship, he bowed his head over the wheel and nasally praised Allah.

  Tom paid him and left him. A walk in the rain would do Noropa good; it would supple him up where the kicks had left him stiff and painful. It was only three or four miles to their destination. Noropa could carry the bag. That, too, would do him good. It would serve to increase his consciousness of defeat. Noropa made a fuss about it. He pretended the elevation made him breathless, that the rain chilled him and that the sheer weight of the downpour broke his strength. But he didn’t like being laughed at, and he liked still less the prospect of being kicked. So he shouldered the bag and walked ahead, as commanded.

  To reach the Ringding Gelong Monastery, you avoid the township. You follow the wonderful ro
ad that skirts the cliff, where landslides once fell in the rain upon snoozing villages and buried them and all the intervening forest beneath hundreds of acres of wet earth. Four miles along that road, above an aromatic ocean of deodars, and you round a corner and see the monastery rather suddenly, a bit below you. It faces the Himalayas, with Darjeeling above, at its back. From its roof you can see Tibet. In fine weather the horizon-long Himalayas seem only a few miles distant.

  The rain over Darjeeling, being due to the weather, not the climate, cleared as suddenly as it had come. The sun light burst forth and shone upon gleaming rocks and roaring torrents. It was almost impossible to hear anything above the raging of rain-fed waterfalls. Tom paused to stare at the northern sky line. He loved that view. He watched a dark patch, about the size of a postage stamp, moving across the surface of the distant snow — a storm in the Hills — a killer. His ears were full of the cascade music. He didn’t hear a car overtake him — wasn’t, in fact, aware of it until it passed and stopped beside Noropa, who was waiting patiently. An Indian policeman got out of the car and ordered Noropa to the front seat beside the driver. Noropa obeyed without saying a word, as if he believed Tom had done this by superior magic. What else could it be? Tom hadn’t phoned — wired — sent a message ahead.

  A police officer on the rear seat called to Tom:

  “Is that your bag he’s carrying?”

  Tom went up and took the bag in silence. The officer stood up to remove his waterproof.

  “You’re wet through,” he remarked. “How far are you going?”

  “I’ll be all right. Not far. Is he under arrest?”

  “Detention. Suspected of being an unregistered alien — held for investigation.” The officer looked straight into Tom’s eyes. He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes looked merry. “Incommunicado,” he added. “The station-master phoned from Siliguri. You’re expected, so we kept a dekko lifting. Followed you along to a quiet place. Is his name Noropa?”

  “That’s what he says his name is. Who expects me?”

  “Some one at the Ringding Gelong Monastery.”

  “Okay.”

  The officer studied the beaten-dog glare in Noropa’s eyes:

  “Did you have any trouble with this man?”

  “None whatever. Take care of him, please. I guess I’ll need him.”

  Hugging Noropa’s poisoned dagger beneath his jacket, and carrying his own bag, Tom trudged away toward the monastery, humming to himself.

  CHAPTER 21. “Quite a scholar, the old abbot.”

  THE Ringding Gelong Monastery is a rather large one, built in the Tibetan style, with a great main building like a keep and a number of courtyards. It dates from the days when Darjeeling was within the political boundary ruled by the Maharajah of Sikkim. There were no railways in those days. So there are stables, in the first courtyard, for a great number of transport animals. Almost the first thing Tom noticed, as he did his greetings under the arch over the main entrance, was that the stables in the first courtyard were crowded with Tibetan ponies. There were more than forty obvious camp-followers squatting in groups in the yard, smelly fellows with their sheepskin jackets rolled up beside them. Loads by the dozen, roped and ready.

  “Tum-Glain! Tum-Glain!” The sloe-eyed monk on duty at the gate was all smiles. He took Tom’s bag and passed it to another monk.

  Tom was expected; they made that evident. They asked all the proper questions about his health and well-being, and they blessed him with countless blessings. But beyond that, they said nothing at all.

  He was led across two courtyards, in one of which some devil-dancers were practising. Their steps looked very comical without masks and costumes. They were being narrowly watched by twenty Tibetans who were seated with their backs against the wall, beneath a long wooden gallery that served as corridor for the cells and dormitories on the upper story. One was an obvious shaman of the type who wander all over Tibet, Turkestan and Mongolia, working fake magical cures, selling poison and telling fortunes. The men who sat near him looked like herdsmen.

  But one man sat apart. A Bön priest, six paces away from a sturdy-looking novice. They two were hooded mystery men — magicians — real practitioners of the black arts that survived the conversion of Tibet to Buddhism. There was no mistaking them. They were what Noropa craved to be. Insolent eyes. Lips that wouldn’t care to tell the truth if they were offered for it all the plunder in the world.

  Until they noticed Tom’s arrival all the others were as rapt as children at a picture-show, dividing their attention between the devil-dancers and the monks on the opposite roof who were extracting one another’s beards with tweezers. But they two sat in meditation in the attitude that only Bön magicians can assume. It is acquired by years of self-torture, and it looks like a caricature of the posture of Buddhist saints.

  They had strange-looking luggage. It was certainly not Tibetan — or, at any rate, the baskets weren’t. Those might have come from the Salween country in Upper Burma, where there is cane of which to make such things and a more or less Chinese idea of what cane can be fashioned to do. Shaped like flat loaves, to be slung on poles and borne by women, or to be mounted one on each side of a horse. The two biggest were round, like snake-charmers’ baskets, only much bigger — cart-wheel diameter — with slightly domed lids, and neatly covered with waterproofed cloth. Nothing Tibetan about that.

  All the same, all those men were recently from Tibet. They bore all the signs of having come a long way, by forced marches. Except for the Bön magician and his novice, who sat motionless, they were all munching the last of their Tibetan cheese. On top of one basket was a hunk of yak-meat that stank like the devil; they had partly covered it with a scrap of cloth and the cloth was black with flies. All except the Bön magicians stared at Tom with the silent curiosity of nomads.

  Tom turned aside to speak to them. The Bön priest ignored him as if he didn’t exist. So did the novice. He asked the others, in Tibetan, whose servants they were. They got up and stood between him and the big baskets.

  The monk came running and almost dragged Tom away. He led him up the well-remembered stone steps to the gallery. The Bön priest moved. Followed by his novice he went to the middle of the courtyard and got in the way of the dancers, in order to watch Tom as he walked the entire length of the gallery and turned down a passage toward where Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po’s chamber faced the winds from the Roof of the World.

  Through a heavy teak door into the antechamber. That was nothing more than a wide, dim, masonry passage with a very small window and stone benches against the walls for the attendant monks. There were four monks. The most solemn of the four — he had ears that resembled the lugs on a cast-iron cooking-pot — entered the inner room and came out bowing. He dismissed Tom’s guide with scant ceremony. The guide was evidently not a suitable person to enter that sanctum on a Thursday forenoon. Tom entered alone. The thick door thudded at his back.

  A weird light, from two arched windows wide apart in masonry walls many feet thick. Heavy roof beams in the gloom above the shafts of sunshine. An image of Chenrezi against one wall, flanked by beautiful paintings of the Buddha. Two prayer wheels on a heavy table that was almost invisible in mid-room because of the difficult light. A prayer drum, in an iron frame on the floor, rigged up with a treadle and the free-wheel mechanism from a bicycle. Old Mu-ni Gam-po was notorious as an innovator, and a humorist to boot. The prayer drum had been given a good treadling, perhaps by the monk who had announced Tom; it went on spinning for two or three minutes; two or three hundred repetitions of the thousands of prayers written on little scraps of paper in the drum.

  There were two men in the room, but the light was so baffling that he could only recognize one of them. Old Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po hadn’t changed in the least. He stepped down from his dais between the windows, black-robed and benevolent, all smiles and blessings.

  “Tum-Glain! Tum-Glain!”

  He was very stoop-shouldered from reading and writing all day long in
a light that would have destroyed most men’s eyesight. As thin as a wraith, all wrinkles. Big ears with long lobes. Big, good-humored eyes and a firm mouth. Skin the color of old parchment. Full of chuckles that shook his frail body. A deep voice:

  “Tum-Glain! Tum-Glain!” Then in sonorous Tibetan: “O Nobly Born, a hundred thousand times a hundred thousand welcomes!”

  Two or three minutes (and Tom out of practise) of galloping Tibetan syllables, chained together into words a yard long that spilled themselves into sentences like sunlit water burbling over gravel. Then old Mu-ni Gam-po took Tom’s hand and led him toward the farther window. In the shadow to one side of it the other man sat on a throne like the Abbot’s, only smaller, of raised masonry spread with a woolen rug woven in Lhasa and blessed in Tashi-lunpo. Mu-ni Gam-po patted Tom between the shoulders as he introduced him to the son of sunlight, incarnation of Kun-fu-tse and blessed with millions of blessings — Norman Johnson!

  “How d’you do,” he said gruffly, staring as if Tom hadn’t any business to be there.

  Tom laughed. He went and treadled the prayer drum until it spun like an electric fan.

  “That’s how,” he answered. “I’m raring to go.”

  “Oh, yes?” said Johnson.

  His manner and appearance were the same as they had been in Delhi. There was the same sullen glower in his eyes, the same hectoring note in his voice, the same heft to his shoulders, even in repose, as if he were thrusting his way through a crowd.

  “Don’t you ever sit down?” he demanded.

  Tom went and sat on the deep window embrasure between him and Mu-ni Gam-po. There was nowhere else to sit, except the table or the floor. Mu-ni Gam-po struck a gong, commanded, and presently a monk brought in a chair. He set it facing the light. Tom moved it out of the wedge-shaped zone of sunlight and sat down where he could watch both men’s faces as conveniently as they could watch his.

  Johnson glared at Tom as if he were some sort of strange animal under scrutiny. However, Tom didn’t mind being stared at.