by Talbot Mundy
The monastery was almost snow-white; the diagonal shadow across its face, bright blue. It was backed by snow-clad mountains that looked like huge waves breaking in dazzling foam. On the roof were the usual chortens, bells and Buddhistic symbols. There was almost no wind, so the bells were silent. From behind the main building there arose a cloud of dense white steam to a great height before it mushroomed and spread, shutting off part of the view of the mountains. A high wall enclosed the monastery — main building, two long wings, and what looked like a small town of jumbled roofs. Heads peered over the wall; until they moved they looked like big black birds.
Tom walked behind the Japanese. There had been an argument about that. They all had repeaters, but he had his Mauser, so they yielded the point, grinning, as much as to say they could manage him comfortably when they should be out of Dowlah’s range. They had no idea Tom had broken the machine-gun.
Striding along behind them, he was careful to look as little as possible like a prisoner. They didn’t know he understood Japanese, so they talked. They seemed to be puzzled, anxious, discontented.
He noticed a prodigiously long radio aerial strung high above the monastery roof. That was the only modern touch; it looked new; the copper wire hadn’t turned green.
The very military-looking man in command of the escort seemed rather afraid of his men. He was almost diffident toward them. They kept whispering to one another without turning their heads, the way prisoners and monks do where there is a rule of silence. Twice he told them they had not acted nobly in refusing to try to recapture the machine-gun and rifles. They laughed, and one of them retorted that he hadn’t led with any noticeable valor. Discipline seemed to have become undermined by resentment or disillusion.
The trails debouching on the monastery from the fissures in the face of the cliff looked well worn. Tales of pilgrims from the ends of Asia, secretly wending their way to the Thunder Dragon Gate for words from the lips of “Wonderful-to-hear,” seemed credible. There were caves, too, in plenty that might be, or might formerly have been occupied by solitary hermits. It might be true that His Holy Magnificence Lobsang Pun had once occupied one of those. There isn’t any limit to religious eccentricity in Tibet. Humility earned in a cave at thirty below zero is exchangeable for arbitrary vigor.
Outside the monastery main gate there was a huge heap of refuse and stable manure. It was being carried away in baskets by men in the rags of religious clothing. They appeared to be starving. One of them, bent under his stenching load, didn’t get out of the way soon enough. He was knocked down, and kicked as he lay, by the man in command of the escort, who seemed relieved by encountering some one on whom he dared to vent malice.
Tom helped the monk to his feet. The Japanese had marched a dozen paces before they realized what he was doing. They didn’t hear what he said in Tibetan:
“The Holy Lobsang Pun Rinpoche is coming! Run swiftly and tell your brothers!”
The Japanese, cockier now they were close to the wall, surrounded Tom. They tried to make him march in their midst. Their leader, having kicked a man and feeling consequently overbearing, laid a hand on him with the usual Japanese assurance that no foreigner knows anything about jiu-jitsu. He began to use pressure and his other hand reached for Tom’s Mauser. So he landed on the manure heap, heels-over-head, on his face, with a mouth full of filth. Tom drew the Mauser.
“Shoot it out if you like! There are others coming. Kill me, and see what you get!”
The man who knew English interpreted. Two or three of them got in the way to prevent shooting and one of them went to his officer’s rescue, brushing him off and talking to him. Tom caught the name Naosuki.
The great gate opened. They marched in, Tom last. There were forty or fifty monks within the wall, in groups that seemed unfriendly to one another. At least two groups. Perhaps three. They had a sort of jail-yard atmosphere. Instead of laughing at the sight of a foreigner, as would be normal in Tibet, they scowled; instead of whirling prayer wheels, they talked in surly undertones, group by group. Some had cudgels.
At irregular intervals there was an unplaceable sound like muted thunder. It seemed to come from every direction. It was like an earthquake noise, without any perceptible earth tremor. Weird.
Tom’s escort turned sharp to the right, marched along the face of the right wing of the monastery and turned left into a long courtyard that separated the wing from a maze of stores and stables. There were several big chortens, and a building that looked like a mausoleum, with a flight of stone steps leading to a door near the top of the wall.
At the far end of the yard was an enormous prayer wheel, built of heavy lumber. It was at least fifty feet high, about twelve feet broad, big enough to contain millions of prayers written on scraps of paper. It had been recently mended with iron straps. It was kept in motion by a waterfall that plunged out of the cliff above it, turned the wheel and spilled into a sluice, along which it vanished into a hole in the ground. The officer went and washed his face at the sluice, rinsing his mouth and grimacing savagely.
Near the wheel a couple of obvious Japanese, dressed as Tibetans, stood guard with rifles over a small, newly built stone shed, into which a raw-hide belt disappeared. The great wheel had been hitched to a dynamo; its hum was quite distinct above the thump-thump-thump of the wheel and the splash of water.
The man who knew English grinned at Tom. He seemed tolerably unresentful of the punch he had had in the jaw. He touched his own chest. His eyes nearly disappeared amid wrinkles as he grinned with the pride of showmanship:
“Dynamo — come in pieces — long way — killing many horses — camels! Me, mechanic!”
“Banzai!” Tom answered, purposely mispronouncing the word, and the Japanese laughed.
Through a thick door in the wall on the left hand they entered a long, dark, draughty passage. Near the door there were some monks on mats, engaged in silent meditation. One of them stood up and bowed to the Japanese with surprising humility, although he didn’t stick his tongue out. They took no notice of him. Behind their backs he pressed a scrap of paper into Tom’s hand. Then he squatted again on his mat and appeared to resume his meditation where it left off.
Tom unfolded the scrap of paper. Where a shaft of sun light filtered through a narrow slot high in the wall he stopped and pretended to blow his nose. Every man of the escort faced about suspiciously, but he managed to read the note without their seeing it.
Your message received. Oh, Tom! Thundergate entrance is through chapel. Beware of shang-shang. Sudden rumor that Lobsang Pun is coming has created new situation. They believe he must be bringing a foreign army. Thöpe and Abbot busy propaganding you are special sending to prepare way for Lobsang. Chou Wang, deadly desperate, has locked me in room behind his office, but this monk is pro-Abbot. He will deliver this to you and get me out of here. He promises. ELSA
Tom crunched the paper in his left fist and followed the Japs. There were two stands of piled rifles with fixed bayonets, near a door at the end of the long passage. Opposite the door was another, open, through which came cigarette smoke and the talk and laughter of the guard. One sentry lounged near the rifles. He knocked on the closed door. A bell rang. He opened the door. The escort stood aside for Tom. Two of them, the commander and the man who knew English, followed him into the room, where they stood at attention to right and left of the door.
Stone walls. Pictures of heaven and hell. Against one wall a large radio-receiving set, not yet quite fully assembled, with all its parts exposed to view. One window, glazed with oiled paper. A charcoal brazier. A tea urn. An immense table. Some Chinese cigarettes. A rather small man seated at the table, facing the door, in a heavy wooden chair heaped with cushions. An automatic pistol on the table within reach of his right hand. In front of him, near the ink-pot, a big bronze dorje, emblem of authority. Beside him, at his right, a kneeling monk was rummaging in one of Elsa’s bags and laying her belongings one by one on the table. Tom’s bag was also on the floor, a
s yet unopened. A high, carved screen behind the man in the chair suggested that there might be a door there leading into another room.
Tom walked straight up to the table and spoke first, standing with his back to the window within reach of the kneeling monk.
“Are you Chou Wang-Naosuki?”
The man at the table touched the automatic. After one sharp glance at Tom he nodded to the officer, who at once began speaking very rapidly in Japanese, reporting what had happened. He spoke so fast that Tom could hardly follow what he said, but that gave him plenty of time to study the man in front of him.
Small, but mentally and physically powerful. His eyes and mustache were cat-like. Not a trace of humor. Prodigious shoulders for his size, lumpy with muscle and rather stooped. He was wearing a magnificent embroidered Tibetan lama’s cloak over a red Russian blouse. He looked incapable of any emotion other than sulky delight in enforcing his will. Brown, absolutely merciless eyes of the color of English ale, which revealed nothing except that mercy wasn’t in them.
“Why was this man not disarmed?” he demanded angrily.
Before the officer could answer he met Tom’s eyes and said sharply, in English:
“Lay your weapon on the desk.”
Tom went one step nearer to the kneeling monk.
“You damned rat, Naosuki!”
Naosuki pushed his chair back, stood up suddenly and snatched his automatic off the desk. Tom kicked the kneeling monk and sent him sprawling against Naosuki’s legs, upsetting his balance and spoiling his aim. His bullet pierced the paper window, followed by another. Tom’s fist hit him hard on the nose. With his other hand he snatched Naosuki’s automatic, hurled it through the window, splitting the oiled paper from top to bottom, letting in a flood of cold, bright day light.
It all happened too quickly for the other two men in the room to do anything about it. By the time they had drawn their weapons, Naosuki was writhing in Tom’s arms, barking his own shins against the table edge in his efforts to kick Tom’s, and crying out to his men not to shoot. They might have shot Tom, but they would much more probably have killed Naosuki.
The noise brought the guard on the run. They nearly broke the door down in their hurry. The Bön monk, on the floor under the table, tried to get his teeth into Tom’s leg, but all he bit was the top of a boot. Tom had Naosuki helpless in an agonizing hold. He shook him the way a terrier shakes a rat, hefted him and pitched him across the table into the midst of the guard. Their rifles broke his fall. He slid to the floor unharmed, off sloping butts and bayonets and got up fuming like a madman, making horrible faces. He seemed on the verge of an epileptic fit. Tom’s feat of strength so astonished the guard that they stood still gaping at him.
He kicked the monk in the face to make him let go. Then he sat down in Naosuki’s chair, a split second ahead of a bullet that splintered the screen. He produced his Mauser, but didn’t answer the shot. And at last he spoke Japanese, using the jargon that passes muster along harbor-fronts, pungent, plain. He hadn’t time to remember grammar and flowers of speech:
“I have been sent to tell you fools to clear out before you’re caught in that man Naosuki’s company. Have the others told you that he betrayed your Emperor’s secrets to Rajah Dowlah?”
Plainly, the guard had been talking it over. Plainly, they had long suspected Naosuki. Plainly, if they could only feel justified, they were ready to turn on him.
“Naosuki is a thief, a murderer, a forger, a liar and a traitor to his Emperor,” said Tom. “What are you honest men going to do about it?”
Naosuki tried to snatch an automatic from a man’s belt, but its owner wouldn’t let him have it.
“The game is up,” said Tom. “Your expedition has failed. Naosuki betrayed you by betraying his Emperor. Save your Emperor’s face and what is left of your own honor by going away swiftly, leaving no disgraceful tracks. You may take a pack-train from the monastery stables and get out of Tibet by the way you came. You may do what you please with Naosuki.”
“Who says it?” asked one of the guard.
“I say it, and who I am is none of your business. Naosuki has been counting on the support of Tibetan troops from Lhasa and Kalimpong. It isn’t coming. There isn’t a soldier, officer or man, in Tibet who would dare to invade this sacred valley to support foreigners, or for any other reason than to rid the place of foreigners. There’s a force on the march, how ever, that doesn’t consist of Tibetan soldiers. You will be cornered here like rats, unless you pull out quickly. If you’re caught, you’ll be sent to Japan by way of India, with a letter to say you are Naosuki’s accomplices. The proof of Naosuki’s treason to his Emperor is in Japan now.”
They all stared at Naosuki. Tom continued:
“Naosuki sent you out to shoot the man who knows the truth about him — Dowlah. By saving Dowlah, I have saved you all from being parties to Naosuki’s guilt. Now I will save you from something else.”
He stood up, pulled aside the screen and let it fall to the floor with a crash. There was a locked door, with a key in the lock. He went on talking:
“Living or dead, do you wish to be known or remembered as savages? Have you been parties to the rape or torture of a defenseless woman? You see her bags. Naosuki was dishonorably pilfering from them. You see her clothing on the table. Where is she?”
He turned the huge key in the ancient lock and flung the door wide open. It revealed a bare room — empty. The key fell to the floor. He picked it up and stuck it in the lock on the inside of the door, carelessly, as if he wasn’t thinking what he was doing.
“Where is she? What has Naosuki done to her?”
Naosuki was speechless, making grimaces as inhuman as a tragic actor’s on a Japanese print.
“You were told you were heroes,” said Tom. “You were told you were being sent to do an honorable duty for Japan, to make it easy for Japan to conquer Asia. You have been lied to and misled by a traitor who sold his Emperor’s secrets. Where is that woman?”
Without the slightest suggestion of hurry, he entered the inner room and shut the door behind him. The ancient lock, as he turned the key, made hardly any noise. It was a very thick door; through it he could barely hear the murmur of angry argument.
There was another door, unlocked, with the key on the outside. On the stone floor near it was the broken lip-stick with which Elsa had scrawled on the panel:
Chapel. Hurry. ELSA
He hurried, with methodical decision, making better speed than if he had run wildly. There was a maze of doors and corridors, stone stairways leading to the upper floor and downward to the kitchens and into echoing cellars. There were passages within walls that were twelve feet thick. At almost every corner there was a dark hole where a monk might sit and meditate or lurk in ambush.
But there was no one in sight, only sounds of men running — the boom of a great bell — a roar of voices from a long way off, like a sea-roar — and the weird, intermittent, irregular muffled thunder-sound that shook nothing but seemed to come from all directions. Then, suddenly, the unmistakable staccato rattle of rifle-fire — no guessing whence it came, along echoing passages.
Out into a courtyard, and the sound of rifle firing louder. A long cloister to a courtyard behind the monastery. Steam — lots of it. On the far side of the courtyard a big chapel, door wide open and a riot roar coming through it. Tom entered quietly.
No sign of Elsa or of Thö-pa-ga, but a monk with bull lungs, standing on a platform, was holding up Elsa’s frock. It was the frock she bought in Delhi. He was tearing it into strips, like prayer streamers, and distributing them at random to whoever could get near enough. At the end of the chapel, on the altar platform, an old man in a yellow robe, who couldn’t be any one else than the Abbot, surrounded by a dozen monks who were protecting him, held a carved box above his head. It probably contained sacred relics. The monks surrounding him were all shouting at once, and one of them was pounding an enormous gong as if his life depended on it.
; There were not less than a dozen dead or dying or severely wounded monks underfoot, amid pools of blood. In mid-chapel about thirty monks were fighting thirty or forty half-starved wretches in rags, who were led by the bow-and-arrow yak-man who had told Tom he wouldn’t fight in any circumstances. He wasn’t using bow and arrows. He and his two comrades, for some reason better fed than the scarecrows they led, were hard at it with cudgels. Religious frenzy had burst the restraint of doctrine. The meek had inherited righteous indignation. The skulls of the proud were cracking.
It was easy to distinguish the proud. They were Böns, with their backs to the wall — the long wall, with a dais in the middle and a gallery above that. They were the well-fed ones.
Beneath the gallery, behind the dais, was a studded door, deeply carved and painted red. On either side of it were hideous tantric images of devils devouring men who yearned upward in agony toward the carved head and shoulders of Gautama Buddha, smiling from an arched recess, illuminated by colored glass lamps in the dimness above the door and below the gallery.
Apparently no one had any firearms, but there were missiles flying in all directions, chiefly prayer wheels and brass lamps. Nearly all the paper windows were broken. The Böns seemed to outnumber all the others, but to have used up all the missiles within their reach. They were chanting, to invoke their magic and to fortify their courage. The man who was tearing Elsa’s dress into strips appeared not to be a Bön. It was hard to guess what he was. He seemed to be preaching a war of his own. It was he who first caught sight of Tom. He went into a frenzy, pointing at him, bellowing, slobbering. Impossible to tell what he was shouting about — demanding summary execution or offering welcome.
Tom went for him. As he crossed the floor, scrumming his way through the brawl, a bow-and-arrow man let drive at him from the gloom under the gallery. The arrow buried itself in a monk’s back. Some one slew the bowman with a bronze candlestick. Another bowman, from the doorway by which Tom had entered, took a shot at the Abbot. He hit him. The Abbot fell. There was a roar of rage. Some one struck down that bowman from behind. A man entered, cowled like a monk, but black-whiskered like no monk in all Tibet. He had a rusty sword, but when he tried to use it some one snatched it from him, and in a second there were ten monks fighting for it, all in a scrimmage, rolling over one another on the floor.