by Talbot Mundy
“You say Gombaria didn’t provide it?”
“No. No, indeed. Nancy explained that. Old Gombaria is a kind of dweller on a threshold. He likes to open psychic doors for other people, but he never goes in himself. He never talks about it. He knows all about psychic centers, whatever that means.”
“It might mean anything,” said Andrew. “Psychics spend most of their time thinking up different meanings for words that had just one plain meaning to the Greeks who invented ’em. Forget the Greek words. Try to tell what happened.”
Elsa sighed and summoned patience. But instead of it came the storm, in a sudden blast as if the mountains were at war. Hail smote the shelter, seethed, crashed along the ledge. Deafening thunder. Lightning. Wind howled and shrieked like ice-cold devils. Andrew wrapped the blankets around both of them, hugging her close to him, sharing the warmth of his strong body. They sat side by side, not sure whether they or the mountain trembled. Elsa had an almost unbelievable sensation that Andrew was more afraid than she was. Perhaps his was the dread that the last day’s march would end in disaster. Her only dread was that she might fail in emergency. Was this an emergency? Did he need reassurance? How could she give it? They couldn’t hear each other speak.
But the shelter held. The hail died. Andrew went out again, facing the wind, to make sure that the ponies were snug in the lee of the ledge. He found them all lying down, too weary to be terrified. The Tibetan watchman lay snoring, too tired to fear even devils. Bompo Tsering, tented in the lee of an overhanging ledge, was preaching gloomy Tantrist doctrine to eleven other numbed, awed Tibetans. Their breath steamed; their eyes glowed ghostly in the rays of Andrew’s flashlight. He stayed and talked with them, asking questions. Little by little he eased their superstitious fear, by getting them to tell him about monstrous semihuman entities that guard forbidden heights and whelm the trespasser. They unloaded their fear on himself, teaching him mysteries. Teachers don’t kill attentive pupils, even to oblige the devils of a pass into forbidden Tibet. That danger died of its own propaganda, strangled in terrible words.
Elsa sat watching her breath freeze on the heavy blanket, wondering what she should say to Andrew. It was like nostalgia — saddening almost to tears, but she scorned tears as self-indulgence — to know what she knew, and to be unable to tell. No one had forbidden her from trying to tell, although Nancy had warned. She could almost hear Nancy’s experienced, humorous voice:
“Tell and be damned! ‘See that thou tell no man’ was wise advice. You will use words. They will be turned against you. It will hurt. Words mean ‘thus far we come, and this we know.’ Words are the nails that crucify. It was the literal, accurate word-definers who condemned Jesus out of his own mouth. When your soul — the real soul — conscious you — can speak straight to the soul of another, then you can awaken the other to experience reality. Life has to be lived. It can’t be told.”
She had a clear clairvoyant glimpse of Nancy, talking to children around her fireside, telling the children truth that grown-ups labor all their days to misinterpret. She kept her promise to send Nancy an “all’s well.” She saw Nancy again — and Old Ugly-face — and, strangely, Father Patrick of the Jesuit Mission. What could that mean? Why the Jesuit?
Then came Andrew, with his thought full of Bompo Tsering’s devils: humorless, monstrous, conscious forces, said to be sometimes visible, whose passion is envy, their motive hate, and their goal the undoing of all things done.
“There’ll be glare ice on the lower ledges,” he remarked, as he crawled in. “The snow thawed this afternoon. This’ll freeze it smooth. We’ll have one hell of a day’s march. Do you know an antidote for devils?”
“Are the Tibetans badly scared? Andrew, are they—”
“Damn their religion! Damn everyone’s religion. The hell with it. It only rots guts.”
“Andrew! It isn’t long since you reproached me for saying there isn’t a God! I’ve changed my mind. Have you changed yours?”
“God won’t get us down tomorrow’s glare ice. Gravity’ll do it. That’s another of God’s funny inventions — too much gravity in the wrong place. Well, we’ll beat it somehow.”
“Andrew.”
“Yes.”
“Are you still curious?”
“What about?”
“About what happened at Gombaria’s.”
“Sure. Eaten up with curiosity.”
“If I try to tell, will you try to understand?”
“Yep. Use plain words.”
“Think some poetry.”
“I’m off that stuff, for the moment. Too much grue in the air. They kind o’ don’t mix.”
“Try the first poem that comes to mind. No matter what it is. Try it.”
Andrew thought a moment. Grim humor seized him. He began, sonorously, chanting verse so inappropriate that even Milton’s music hardly veiled the sarcastic motive:
“With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons, and their change — all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds—”
He laughed. “There’ll be a dark daybreak. Screaming lammergeiers. Twenty or thirty below zero. Three thousand feet of glare ice. One day’s rations for the ponies. Yep. Every prospect pleases.”
“Try again,” said Elsa. “Try something different. Please, Andrew. Won’t you help? I would almost rather die than not tell you. But if you won’t get into the right mood, I can’t even reach your everyday intelligence. And I must aim much higher than that.”
He reached for the candle lantern, held it so that he could see her face, studied her eyes a moment, then set it back in the niche in the rock.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t get you at first. All right, poetry it is. Here goes.”
He plunged into a mood, as she had seen him plunge, numbers of times, into raging cold water and swim for the fun of it. His right fist seemed to strike an invisible gong, commanding silence. Then he chanted:
“In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection—”
He chanted on, Elsa listening, watching him silhouetted in dim candlelight against the piled-up pony loads — unshaven, free-shouldered, wearing a brown blanket like a toga. He went lost in the poem. Words ceased. Thought went wandering along the overtones toward the universal wonderland whence poems come.
“Andrew.”
“Yes?”
“Were you ever in love?”
“Why?”
“If you were, it would help.”
“I was. Once. For a short time.”
“Do you remember the ecstasy part?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did it lead up the same ray of consciousness that creeps upon you when you chant poetry?”
“Maybe. I haven’t thought of it.”
“And you can’t speak of it. Can you?”
“I don’t wish to speak of it.”
“At Gombaria’s, after I saw Lobsang Pun — for a long time — I don’t know how long — I was actually soul-conscious. I was me. Not this thing. Me. My soul. You understand?”
“No. Darned if I do.”
“I was, what I shall be. What we’re all evolving into. What we all really are. There were no limits. Beauty — joy — oh, I can’t tell it! — Soul! Make me tell it! Speak! — Andrew, won’t you try? There are thousands of ways.”
“Tell one way.”
“I think one follows poetry, or music, or being in love — all the way inward and up to the heart of the universe — God’s heart.”
“Leaving the world to go to hell?”
“No, no, no! One loves the world! It’s good! It’s full of pain and sorrow—”
“You bet it is.”
“But one sees it all differently. We are all one vast oneness, working toward—” She hesitated.
“Annihilation?” he suggested. “Do we lose our identity?”
“Never! Awareness of that is what we lack now! Soul is identity! Andrew, does the word ‘love’ set your teeth on edge?”
“They’re on edge already from the wind. An extra twinge won’t hurt ’em.”
“Does passion offend you?”
“Whose?”
“I don’t mean sentimental emotion. Andrew, reality — real being — is an ecstasy of passionate love. That’s all I can tell you. It is so far beyond human love and passion that they’re darkness in comparison. But they’re parts of it. Follow your high thought to wherever it leads. You will find your soul. Say to yourself ‘I am my soul!’ Your soul will show you what you are!”
“It might show me something I’d rather not know,” he retorted. He remembered what Lewis had said. “How about sleep?” he suggested.
“Have I scandalized you?”
“Hell, no. I’m damned interested. But we’ve a stiff march tomorrow. Get some sleep.”
“I wish you would sleep, and let me stay awake.”
“No. No more talk now. Turn in.”
“Why must you stay awake? Are you afraid the Tibetans might—”
“Hell, no. They’ll make no trouble.”
“Then what are you watching for? Andrew, you’re worried! What is it?”
“No, I’m not worried. Be a good girl now and turn in.”
“Why are you thinking about Bulah Singh?”
“Read my thought, eh?”
“Yes. You thought a blood-red picture of him, right then.”
“Will you go to sleep if I tell you?”
“Try me.”
“Bulah Singh may have been arrested. But I guess not. I think Lewis jiggled the bait too long, and missed him. If so, Bulah Singh’s one chance would be to chase us.”
“But he couldn’t do anything, could he?”
“He could hang on. He could count on my not making a habit of shooting people.”
“But could he possibly overtake us?”
“If he’s traveling light. We broke a trail for him through all the drifts. There was a light near the summit, just after sunset. It may have been Bulah Singh’s lantern.”
“But the summit’s half a day’s march behind! Would he dare to come on in the dark?”
“No such luck. That ‘ud be the end of him. He’s too wise to take that risk.”
“Then why stay awake, Andrew?”
“I want to figure him out. You go to sleep and leave me think about him.
CHAPTER 28
The next day was too dreadful to remember, afterwards, except as flash- backs from a dream, remote in time and space. Fog-veiled precipices — eagles, looming and gone — glimpses of sky amid clouds that wallowed, wave on wave, bursting on mountain peaks, until the world seemed upside down. Ice-slithering ponies, roped, off-loaded, lowered — loads skidded downward — hairbreadth, unbalanced teetering on windy ledges above echoes that boomed in a rolling mist. Standing out in memory like a bell buoy at sea, was a prayer rag on a human thigh bone, protected from storms by a crude shrine to which each passing Tibetan added a stone. Right there the Tibetans mutinied. They declared it was track’s end — luck’s end. The mountain had been changed into a cloud by magic. Devils. They would turn back. The muffled thunder of an ice-imprisoned waterfall, heard through a hurrying maelstrom of gray mist, was the voice of doom.
“No, Gunnigun. No.”
Elsa, too, had premonitions. She said so: she was thinking of Bulah Singh, although she didn’t name him. Andrew made no comment. He roped himself and made the end of the rope fast to an upstanding spur of rock. He scouted forward alone, vanishing like a ghost along a foot-wide track that crossed a crumbling rock-strewn slope. To his left, nothing. To his right, a looming, unclimbable glacis. He found the path was practicable. Only a rope’s length of it, leading to wide, level rock on the far side. Returning, he kicked loose stones off the narrow track and listened — heard them, after a long pause, crash amid cannonading echoes. No foothold to the left or right. No margin for error. But the stones hadn’t started an avalanche. The loose rocks, on the glacis above, were apparently frozen in place. One pony at a time, one man at a time, might make it without vibrating loose the invisible menace.
When he came back he gave his orders quietly, and repeated the command to Bompo Tsering. Then he said six words to Elsa, and himself led the pony that carried the Tibetans’ blankets, the precious tea urn and personal odds and ends: a better argument than millions of words. Elsa, obeying the curt command, followed, with her heart in her throat, handing the rope to prevent it from catching under the pony’s load, and to prevent the pony from treading on it when it slackened for a moment. They reached the far side safely. Andrew was starting back, to bring the next pony across, when disaster emerged. It came through the fog like the coming of world’s end.
Urged by some Tibetan blend of loyalty, obliquity and disobedience; and by the siren tea urn and the life-preserving blankets all gone in the fog; perhaps, too, by shame that he had condoned mutiny, Bompo Tsering went from one mistake to another. He denied it afterwards. He swore a panic took hold of the men and he couldn’t prevent. But all the other Tibetans agreed it had been he who gave the order to untie the end of the rope and get going across. It was almost a stampede. They flowed through the fog. They were like scurrying ghosts. Andrew had to turn about and run back to the far end. Prodded by the frightened Tibetans, the ponies trotted. Down came the avalanche — random — sporadic, at first. By the grace of the Unpredictable the rope, with one end made fast to Andrew’s shoulders, fell clear of the ponies’ feet and down over the precipice. By the time he had hauled it in, most of the ponies and all the Tibetans, except the man from Koko Nor, were safely across, untouched by stones that slid down from the glacis as from a devil’s ambush — faster, faster — hundreds of rocks, each loosening another, to miss their marks and plunge into echoing mist.
The man from Koko Nor rode last, on a loaded pony. There being no one to forbid, he had vaulted up over the staggering pony’s rump. He was halfway across before he was visible through the haze, perched on the load like a lunatic, waving his arms to balance himself against the wind and the pony’s movement. Perhaps he was praying — making yokel-magic to appease mountain devils. The last of the avalanche — one lone clattering rock, struck the pony’s hind legs out from under him. Pony and rider disappeared into the fog — like phantoms. If there was sound, none heard it: horror blotted it out. Then, breathless moments later, a cry came up out of the mist. Not a man’s cry. It was the heart-breaking scream of a pony. An eagle — so near that Elsa felt the wind of its wings — swooped downward. The pony screamed again. The Tibetans laughed. Andrew cursed them into silence. Then he lay prone on the rock, peering downward, waiting for wind to tear a hole in the driving whiteness. After about two minutes he got up and spoke to Elsa:
“The pony’s alive. Perhaps the man is. They’re on a ledge about fifty feet below us.”
He pulled out his Mauser pistol and examined it. Elsa said nothing.
She thought he intended to try to shoot the injured pony from where he stood. But he returned the pistol to the holster under his armpit, beneath his sheepskin jacket. Then he carefully passed the rope around a smooth rock, tested it, examined the noose around his shoulders, and gave Elsa the loose end.
“Hold that.”
She didn’t dare to speak to him; she might have said the wrong thing.
He and his anger were one. Anger was the very blood in his veins — the breath that misted from his nostrils. It made him white-lipped. He beckoned Bompo Tsering.
“Give me your Mauser.”
Bompo Tsering hesitated, met Andrew’s eyes and quickly plunged his hand into his coat. He surrendered his precious pistol, butt first.
“Four men!”
Bompo Tsering beckoned four men. They came slowly, unconfident, wondering, watching the pistol. They followed Andrew’s
glance and laid hold of the rope.
“I’m going down there.” He glanced at Elsa, jerked his head toward her. “Do as she tells you.”
Bompo Tsering protested: “Gunnigun! Hot damn! Your not—”
Speech died in time to check the swing of Andrew’s fist. “Your saying, Gunnigun — my doing.”
Andrew cocked the surrendered Mauser and gave it to Elsa: “Shoot to kill, if they disobey you! Shoot him first. Then the others, one by one until they do obey.”
“Very well, Andrew.”
“You are not to look over the edge.”
“Very well, Andrew.”
“Stand back here. When I shout, repeat the order to Bompo Tsering.”
With another glance at the rope he was gone, letting himself down hand over hand, until she saw the rope chafe on the rock as he swung in the wind, and heard him shout: “Lower away!”
She repeated the order, pointing the pistol at Bompo Tsering’s head, setting her teeth. She would obey. She would kill if she must, and she wouldn’t blame Andrew. It should be her own doing. One of the men spoke. He held the rope and leaned outward, staring downward. Presently she saw the rope slacken, heard the scream of the indignant eagle, followed by the crack of Andrew’s pistol. He had shot the pony. She wondered what it would feel like, later, if she should have to shoot Bompo Tsering. Then an eternity of waiting, with her fingers freezing on the pistol butt and her imagination fighting against pictures of Andrew losing foothold, falling — falling — ten thousand times she saw him in imagination falling headlong, before she heard him shout:
“Haul away!”
The echoes repeated it. The Tibetans had to be cursed by Bompo Tsering until they feared his curses worse than the voice of the underworld, and set to work hauling, in silence except for their grunts and Bompo Tsering’s low-voiced “Ho-ay-ho! Ho-ay-ho!” as he set the time. Elsa snagged the rope’s end as fast as it came up, with her heart in her teeth, watching the rope chafe — watching for Andrew’s head to appear.
And when it came, it wasn’t Andrew. It was the pony’s load, harness and all. It caught, blown under the overhanging edge of the rock. The harder they pulled, the faster it stuck, until she gave an order to Bompo Tsering, backed up by a gesture with the pistol. He stuck his tongue out, grinned, noosed his belt around the rope, crawled down and hove the load up over the edge. He himself had to be hauled back, scared almost numb. He stood gasping beside the load, smiling at her along the Mauser barrel.