by Talbot Mundy
“Who will? You mean the initiates?”
“No initiate would say he is one unless his soul should warn him to remind a younger soul that there is law, authority — a hierarchy higher than ourselves.”
“Well then, how should one know he is genuine?”
“His claim would prove itself. There would be no conceit, no power-hunger to prevent that.”
A long pause, while the monk’s beads clicked and the old Mahratta fidgeted with the lantern. There was no other sound. Then:
“Nancy, what are we waiting for?”
“For Gombaria’s summons.”
“Nancy, are you frightened? You look it.”
“No.”
“I am.”
“Sh-s-sh! Not so loud. Try to keep calm.”
“It’s cold here. Nancy, what happens at an initiation?”
“You will not know that until your own turn comes.”
“My turn? Must it? What if I refuse — if I don’t wish it?”
“Wishing would delay the day,” said Nancy. “Haste is only churning of illusion. You will know when your time is at hand. Be still. Be patient.”
Silence again. Elsa could hear her own heartbeat. She stared at the wormy old door, and at the monk’s back, and at the stalwart, military shoulders of the old Mahratta. She tried to imagine the iron, inscrutable Ringding Gelong Lama Old Ugly-face, on his stubborn knees in an embroidered crimson robe like a cardinal’s, receiving someone’s laying on of hands. But she recognized that as a picture she had seen in the National Gallery. She dismissed it.
“Nancy.”
“Yes?”
“Who chooses candidates for initiation?”
“No one. They evolve.” Nancy looked straight at her, bright-eyed, excited. “No one can receive, who has not. But unto him that hath—”
“I have nothing. Nothing.” Elsa shuddered. “Nancy, I feel cowardly. Inside me, I’m afraid. But I don’t know what of.”
“Only your nothingness is afraid. You are your soul. Be real! You are not this trembler at the door of experience.”
“Nancy, I will go where you lead. But is it right, what we’re doing? Please don’t get us into any Tantric magic, such as Bulah Singh spoke of.”
“Try not to think about Bulah Singh.”
“I can’t help it. I know he isn’t here, but I keep seeing him. Once he spoke of black magic. This place seems—”
“Sh-s-sh! Look straight at him. Order him away! He will go.”
Elsa summoned to her aid the so often defeated will that only now and then beat back clairvoyance. She stood off the mental image of Bulah Singh. It was like facing a dog’s eyes in the dark.
“You were right. He has gone. I don’t see him now. His eyes were staring at me.”
“We have nothing to do with black magic.”
“You promise?”
“Child, if I should knowingly mislead you, it would be worse than death for me. Worse for me than for you.”
“Tell me what is going to happen beyond that door.”
“I don’t know what will happen.”
“Then why go through with it? Why not go back to the guest room?”
“Sh-s-sh! Try reciting the Twenty-third Psalm.”
“Very well. If it pleases you.”
“Let us say it together.’The Lord is my—”
The door opened quietly. Two monks came through like dark-robed spirits from a tomb. They stood aside, with their backs to the wall. There was a smell of incense.
“No questions now,” said Nancy. She seemed to choke with emotion. “Keep on repeating the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. Say them alternately, over and over. Try to be conscious of each word as you say it to yourself.”
She took Elsa’s hand and stood waiting for one of the monks to signal to them to pass through the door. Elsa felt like a frightened child, but she controlled herself, and she knew by the feel of her hand in Nancy’s that she was no longer trembling. The monk beckoned. The old Mahratta chauffeur strode immediately forward, like a soldier stepping from the ranks at the word of command. His not to reason why. His to do, and take the consequences. He asserted, square-shouldered, his beloved mad employer’s license to do as she pleased. He marched down the short hewn-walled passage, through the door at the far end, and stood lantern in hand, with his back to the Lama Gombaria, until Nancy and Elsa had seated themselves. Mats had been piled for them, a dozen deep, on the floor in the far corner. The Mahratta blew out his lantern to save Nancy’s oil, and sat down near them, cross-legged, on one of his own shawls, staring at Gombaria with stony disapproval.
Gombaria was seated on a hewn stone dais, between two looming statues of Bodhisattvas. Those, and a bell and an incense burner, were the only decorations of the chamber. It was hewn from the solid rock — about twenty feet by twenty, with a high, arched ceiling. There was a swimming, underwater sensation, due to incense smoke and the irregular adze-marks on the walls that cast interlacing shadows from the dim light of butter-fed lamps. On the step of Gombaria’s dais, at either side of him, his two subordinates stood in attitudes of saintly meditation. They looked incurious, unconscious of the world; but several times Elsa detected them studying Nancy and herself beneath half lowered eyelids. She was beginning to wonder why she had felt frightened.
The doorkeeper monks entered, closed a thick door behind them, and stood motionless. Elsa left off reciting the Lord’s Prayer. It was distracting to keep her mind on it and she wasn’t afraid any longer. She was fascinated by Gombaria, wondering what he was thinking about. Deliberately, without any success whatever, she tried to get a clairvoyant glimpse of the old Lama’s thought. She couldn’t see even its color. She might as well have tried to guess what a statue was thinking about. She heard Nancy murmuring:
“Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth,
As it is in heaven.”
So she resumed murmuring the Lord’s Prayer, moving her lips to satisfy Nancy that she was obeying orders. Hardly conscious of the words, she caught herself, nevertheless, wondering what good they did. Suppose one did believe in an All-seeing Father — what of it? Sparrows fall — two for a farthing — and Father knows. What of it? Bombs fall, too. And babies die, and —
Something was happening. She couldn’t guess what. It was happening. It was mental. It was like the spell that falls on an expectant crowd. A sensation of awe. She glanced at the old Mahratta chauffeur. He was breathing through his nose — shawled — rigid — angry — contemptuous.
Gombaria didn’t move. Not even his eyelids moved. His protruding underlip was so massively motionless that it lent an appearance of molded bronze to all the rest of him. For five minutes there was no sound except the Mahratta’s breathing and Nancy’s almost inaudible murmur: “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—’”
Then astonishing sound: “Aum-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m!”
It began like the far-away note of a gong, approaching slowly, gradually swelling until it boomed like a chord of organ music. It was Gombaria’s voice. He hadn’t moved. Even his lips hadn’t moved. But it was his voice. His subordinates joined in. Then the doorkeeper monks. Then Nancy, low alto. So Elsa added her own contralto, that some envious forgotten nobody had called a freak voice. After that she had never trained it but had made it a scapegoat for the worse freak, clairvoyance, that she could not get rid of. She could refuse to sing, and she did. Not even Tom Grayne knew what pitch and tone and volume she could produce from her small person. But now, for no reason that she was aware of except that it thrilled her, she gave her rolling contralto full rein.
“Aum-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m!”
Because she joined in last, she lingered last, alone, on the sacred syllable that, if one knows its secret, links the brain-mind with the soul and lets in floodlight from the higher consciousness. She did not know the secret. But she thrilled, watching Gombaria, hardly aware that her own voice was the last on the lingering note. The
n Gombaria’s eyes did move. They met hers. In the dim light, from across the room, they looked brilliant black. She couldn’t guess what he was thinking. Gombaria moved his right hand and rang one clear mellow note with the small bell. Instantly, silently, the two subordinates thumbed the wicks of the four lamps. There was total darkness. Elsa felt Nancy’s hand groping for hers. The old Mahratta chauffeur breathed fiercely.
Nancy’s strong, rough hand felt reassuring, like a branch to clung to in a steep place. But Elsa wasn’t afraid; she felt excited — tensely curious. She had an unaccountable sensation that instead of Nancy and the old Mahratta chauffeur, Andrew Gunning and Tom Grayne were beside her. Nancy’s hand was Andrew’s. She knew it wasn’t, but it felt like it. Tom Grayne was enormously angry, though she knew that was the Mahratta. For two or three minutes there was no audible sound but the Mahratta’s breathing, until Gombaria repeated the chant and they all joined in:
“Aum-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m!”
As the note died away there began to be dim gray light in mid-room. It was formless, cheerless. It resembled wan moonlight. But it began to be shot through with rays of brilliance, like aurora borealis or the glimmer of the morning on distant peaks — as mysterious and beautiful and as unrelated to any visible source. The light faded, died away and was gone.
Nancy murmured: “He needs help. Oh, if we were less dense — less turgid!”
“Sh-s-sh!” said Elsa. She couldn’t imagine why. She just said it. Gombaria’s voice, subdued, hummed alone on the sacred syllable, but he stopped suddenly. The wan gray light returned. Then all at once the universal spectrum seemed to pour its colors like a waterfall into a pool of white. It was a blinding bewildering, soundless spasm — gray all around it — murky, miserable, wan and hungry gray — but in the center pure color in motion that made the senses reel. There was no reflection on the walls. The room remained pitch dark. When Elsa shut her eyes, she still saw the light. Whichever way she turned her head, she saw the center of it — increasing — fading — increasing again, as if a will behind it forced it against waves of an unseen ocean. Suddenly it merged its colors into one — flame color — then God’s blood ruby. It turned golden, like the sun on water — and vanished. Where it had been, stood the Ringding Gelong Lama Lobsang Pun — Old Ugly-face. Living, moving, breathing.
It was black dark. He was as clearly visible as if he stood in sunlight, nearer than mid-room. No light exuded from him. But he was visible. He looked natural, in three dimensions, exactly as Elsa had last seen him — hooded and cloaked in the ritual robes of his high order — bulky — ungainly — almost monstrous — peering with his owl’s eyes through a mass of wrinkles — homely and human as Falstaff — holy, and as full of irony, and dignity, and inner laughter as if Michelangelo had hewn him out of granite to be breathed on by the breath of Life. He moved. His weird owl’s-beak nose twitched. He was talking, making no sound. Elsa knew he and Nancy were talking — knew it, but heard nothing. He changed. He became the younger Lobsang Pun of the smashed photograph. Inaudibly but as overwhelmingly as if the senses heard it, his familiar, jovial belly laugh exploded in Olympian amusement.
So far, to the last, least gesture Elsa recognized him. He was looking at Nancy. That made it all the easier to watch the penetrating attack of his eyes and their equally sudden receptive gleam of understanding — the occasional pout of his lower lip — the habitual, hardly perceptible, slow contraction of his neck, as if he foresaw, and neither feared nor underrated but was ready to meet violence with energy that he held in leash. Old Ugly-face in every incongruous detail, even to the rakish tilt of his cone-shaped hat.
But — as thought lets go its gloom and spirals upward to the surge of music or a remembered poem, until inspiration reaches unknown views that make the heart leap — gradually now he changed into an unknown Lobsang Pun. Nancy’s hand on Elsa’s gripped with the strength of a vise, and then ceased to be felt. Through the old Lama’s ugliness and robed obesity there shone forth a god, young with eternal youth, as splendid as the calm of everlasting morning, smiling with enjoyment of the fire-born glory of evolving worlds. How did one know what he smiled at? Elsa did know. She remembered the Bible story of the Transfiguration — lost it in views like blind Milton’s — glimpsed Andrew — heard him chanting, as she had heard him scores of times:
“Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds:
At which the universal host up sent
A shout that tore hell’s concave, and beyond
Frightened the reign of Chaos and old Night.”
Consciousness surged with wordless experience that knew no form but beauty. Utterly beyond the shapes of things, and uncommunicable in the terms of time, passion rioted, exulted, gloried in motion that moved of itself, creating realms on realms of spiritual harvest ripening in selfless love, that gave and took not. An eternal moment. Being wholly released from having. Consciously exhaustless power to create new newness, now and forever.
Elsa made no attempt to measure how long the experience lasted. Time was no dimension of it: minutes, hours, ages were incomparable nothing. Words brought her back to self-consciousness and the feel of the pressure of Nancy’s hand on numbed fingers.
“‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’”
She didn’t know whether Lobsang Pun or Nancy said it. It was a voice. Perhaps her own voice. She didn’t know whether she heard it with her ears or with that inner hearing that offended people so that she had almost deafened it by self-inflicted torture of mind and nerves.
It was a voice, no matter whose. She had heard and she had seen Reality. She had seen pure spirit. It had almost shattered her human consciousness. A bursting shell, lightning, death itself could demolish no more totally the deaf-blind unrealities that she had feared, and felt, and cherished.
“Now I know.”
Was that her own voice, or some other? “But who am I?”
Nancy let go of her hand. She was alone in the dark. Herself, alone, with Lobsang Pun. The Old Ugly-face whom she knew — clothed now in ragged black, stern, shrunken, apparently suffering — was studying her, looking straight at her. He was seated, cross-legged, it seemed in the snow. He appeared to recognize her — to see through her, to the secret thoughts that fled and tried to hide in the dark womb where she had loved her child toward a destiny that ended almost unbegun. She cowered, flinched, shrunk away — then turned against herself and bared her heart, her very soul, her whole consciousness, to the stare of the terrible eyes. And the eyes changed. Knowledge entered her. She knew, without questioning how she knew it, that Old Ugly-face, hundreds of miles away, had found, clairvoyantly, and with his spaceless, timeless consciousness had reached Nancy, his chela. Nancy had presented her for recognition. She was recognized. It was he, yet not he. With her eyes she could not have seen him. But she had seen him — not with her eyes — never again to forget or be forgotten. He was fading — already a measureless distance gone, withdrawn into a murky, dull gray hungry mist of paling light. Then darkness. Silence. And after a breathless, timeless interval Nancy’s voice murmuring:
“‘Lord, thou knowest all things: thou knowest that I love thee.’”
There were sounds then in the darkness. Someone was moving. The door opened and closed quietly. Then Nancy’s voice, hoarse, almost choking:
“Light the lantern.”
The old Mahratta fumbled with matches and tugged at the squeaky mechanism of the lantern, lighted it, raised it and showed the room empty. He saw the gleam of tears on Nancy’s face, got stiffly to his feet and came and stood in front of her, glaring angrily at Elsa as if she must have offended his beloved mistress. He clucked discourteous sympathy, reproach, and proverbs about women.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why? Why? Isn’t it good that nothing happened?”
Nancy stared at him: “Did you see nothing?”
“Nay, there was nothing to see. These monks are an ignorant lot of humbugs. They know nothing. Look, they have fled. Th
ey played no tricks, because they knew I watched them. They fled from shame, lest we should ask them: why no magic? Hah! Magic! Dry those honorable eyes that weep because they saw no sin! Tschut-tschut! Sin is for men, not for women!”
CHAPTER 26
Andrew Gunning stood with his hands in raincoat pockets, wearing his shabby old felt hat, looking as little as he could like the leader of an expedition. Behind him, fifty yards away, was the Bhutia trading post, where Lan-dor-ling bought hides, sausage skins, wool and whatever else traders might bring from Tibet. It was too soon for the season’s trading to begin. His barns yawned empty — a jumble of mud-and-freestone huts, patched with corrugated iron.
Lan-dor-ling was reputedly one of the richest men in Sikkim. He was one part Chinese, one part Bhutia, two parts Tibetan — a slant-eyed, cunning-looking fellow with a broad, flat face, who always smiled and almost always understood what was said to him in English. But sometimes, if a mood was on him, he would refuse to speak English to strangers. In a buttoned cap and padded overcoat up to his ears he was watching Andrew, from a chair on the verandah that ran half the length of the front of the store. Its mud-and-stone windbreak at the north end shut off the best view of the mountains. It prevented the wind from dispersing an all-pervading smell of living pigs and dead hides. But it was a token, like a war debt payment, guardedly acknowledging the theory of civilization. A verandah.
Around three sides of the group of buildings was a mud-and-stone walled enclosure for goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, and occasional ponies. There were sheds in the enclosure; their irregularly shingled roofs were held down with barbed wire and big flat stones. Three of Andrew’s ponies, noticeably fat, were near one of the sheds; just inside it, sipping Tibetan tea, Bompo Tsering was watching to prevent them from rolling on their new saddles; but he also had an eye on Andrew; and between gulps of scalding tea he watched the lightning at play in a bank of cloud that rolled like a billion tons of blue-black coal dust down the invisible throat of a pass between two mountain tops.