by Talbot Mundy
“You never mentioned it.”
“I know I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like to be disbelieved by my friends. How could I have persuaded you to believe it?”
“All right. That’s the alibi. It gets you nowhere. Now answer the question.”
“If I do, you’ll be angry.”
“If you want to make me angry, don’t answer the question. Then I won’t ever ask you another.”
“Andrew, you can be more cruel than a—”
“Cruel nothing. Tell the plain truth. Why didn’t you tell me what you say you knew about Bulah Singh?”
“Andrew, are you trying to make me hate you?”
“I want the truth. Why didn’t you—”
“Very well. You shall have your answer. If I had told you what I knew about Bulah Singh you might have thought I was trying to work you.”
“Bull’s-eye!” he answered. “Yes. I might have thought that. Now and then I am that kind of a—”
“No, you’re not! Don’t say it! I am sorry I spoke.”
For a minute he sat scowling with his chin on his fist. Then he suddenly threw off silence like a mask that irritated him:
“I’ve been a son of a bitch. Sorry.”
“Andrew, if you want to be forgiven, I will even put it in writing!”
He laughed. His frown vanished as if the wind had blown it. He plunged into the passing moment: “Here’s part of our difficulty. I don’t know this village we’re headed for. Bulah Singh probably does.”
“Andrew, I don’t think Bulah Singh has ever been in Tibet.”
“Is that out of the sky?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe you’re right. But lots of Tibetans go to India. The magician who runs this village is a first-class stinker who has been to Darjeeling lots of times. So he may know Bulah Singh. His name is Lung-gom-pa.”
“That can’t be his real name,” said Elsa.
“Why not?”
“Lung-gom-pa isn’t a name. It’s a word.”
“What does it mean?”
“Flying lama. That’s a person who can walk through the air.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of ’em.”
“No one who really can walk through the air would dream of using such a name as that. The real flying lamas are secretive. So Tom said. Tom knows; he has seen them.”
“Okay. Granted. This man who calls himself Lung-gom-pa is probably a fake of the first order. But he’s a hot shot, and he runs this village. I heard all about him in Darjeeling — got the lowdown — figured how to manage him in case I’d have to take this route. He owns a gang of smugglers — bandits — professional thieves. I’ve got to make a deal with him before Bulah Singh gets at him.”
“How far is Bulah Singh behind us now?” Elsa asked.
“Not many miles. We broke a trail for him. He could come at twice our speed. But he and his men and ponies must be darned near exhausted.”
“How many men has he, Andrew? Have you any idea?”
“No. I’ve counted four men through the glasses, and I think eight ponies, one at a time as they crossed a bare ridge. But I may have counted one man twice. Or there may be a dozen I didn’t see. I don’t know. They’ll be well armed; that’s a safe bet. It’s bad any way you look at it. If Bulah Singh takes our side against Lung-gom-pa and his brigands, we’ll be beholden to Bulah Singh. I’d rather be beholden to the devil. And if he takes the other side, we’re even worse out of luck. So we’ve got to use brains, and not let Nancy and Jesus do any backseat driving — not on this detour.”
Bompo Tsering peered around the rock. He beckoned. Andrew picked up the binoculars and hove himself off the ground, vigorously because he was tired out but unwilling to admit it.
“We’ll know the worst in a minute,” he said over his shoulder.
Elsa followed him to the rim of the hollow, bending nearly double so as not to be seen. All the Tibetans followed. Bompo Tsering angrily drove them away, ordering them to stand by the ponies. Andrew lay down and stared through the glasses. Elsa watched Bompo Tsering. He was playing safe, pretending loyalty, ready to play friend or traitor with equal sincerity. He was more mercurial than really treacherous — quite easy to read.
But there was no reading Andrew’s thought no guessing what he saw through the glasses. What Elsa did get was a glimpse of her own confusion. It was like a dream. It frightened her. It was a secret fear. It coiled within the colored spectrum of her thought. Much worse than the fear of precipices. Nameless — nonphysical. She couldn’t interpret it. But it seemed to include Andrew, as if she herself were evilly betraying him without knowing how or why. It sickened her. She couldn’t speak when Andrew signed to her at last to come and lie beside him. He gave her the glasses, in silence. When he noticed her hand was trembling he thought she was cold. He signed to her to button her fleece-lined coat and to steady the glasses on the rock.
They were wonderful glasses. But when she got them steady at last she didn’t believe what she saw. It couldn’t be true. One man alone, in a sheepskin hat and long overcoat, walked fifty feet ahead of an unloaded pony that followed, limping painfully. The man strode erect with a long stick in his right hand. Nothing cheap about him. Picturesque. Unpleasant. Stride and gesture were unmistakable.
Andrew’s voice was triumphant: “What do you see?”
“Bulah Singh. But he’s alone!”
“Yes. Lost his party.”
“But perhaps they are—”
“Lost ’em. Gone. Baggage and all.”
“What makes you sure of it? Take the glasses again. Look.”
Andrew took the glasses, but he didn’t need them. “The lame pony,” he answered. “It’s the last one left, or he’d have waited for another. Bulah Singh’s footsore. He’s lost his gang. I’ll bet they slipped off that ledge that I warned him against. All right, we needn’t hide from one man.” Andrew stood up, humming to himself. “Guts! You’ve got to hand it to him. He looks as proud as Milton’s Lucifer. Remember?
“His spear, to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast
Of some great admiral were but a wand,
He walk’d with to support uneasy steps
Over the burning marle.”
“Andrew, when you quote your gloomy old Milton, you can sometimes drive away gloom like a bad dream!”
Andrew filled his lungs, as if he breathed new confidence. He laughed: “Let’s leave him to it. He has a long walk ahead, and no resources but his own malice. The first trick’s ours. Let’s go tackle the black magician!”
CHAPTER 30
Seven miles to go, to the village. Now Andrew and Elsa brought up the rear, riding side by side. The starving baggage ponies could be trusted to find the shortest way and needed no urging. They knew instinctively that food awaited them not far beyond the treeless yellow dunes in the distance. Bompo Tsering and the rest of the Tibetans, by another instinct, knew that danger from the rear had dissolved itself. So they, too, could be trusted. If Andrew had told them in words that Bulah Singh had lost his entire gang and all his provisions, they might not have believed. They would at least have doubted; since how could Andrew know what had happened? But they had read Andrew’s thought — or believed they had. That was as convincing as if a skillful political liar had said it. It felt like their own knowledge. They were even inventing dreams, and telling one another, how the soul of the man from Koko Nor had beckoned through the fog and brought the Sikh’s gang crashing down to death to keep him company in hell. Andrew’s message, tied by Bompo Tsering to the good saint’s thigh bone and re-enforced by Bompo Tsering’s prayers, had made that necromancy possible. So Andrew’s cap sported another invisible feather and Bompo Tsering, forgetting that Andrew knew at least some Tibetan and unaware that Andrew listened to him downwind, magnified its importance for his own reflected glory:
“I always told you unbelieving, adulterous bastards that Gunni
gun knows what he’s doing! Wait and see! When we reach this village Gunnigun will know how to deal with the black magician!”
Andrew felt considerably less sure of that than Bompo Tsering did. His head was beginning to feel too much in the sky. His feet weren’t on the ground, the way they had been while there were tangible things to be done. Falling back beside Elsa to think over the problem of Lung-gom-pa, he was silent for several minutes. Then, when he began to talk, he suddenly became expansive. He revealed a phase of himself that Elsa had never before seen. It scared her. She didn’t know what to make of it. It might be a physical reaction from the exhausting march over the mountains. He sounded almost drunk. He said the exact opposite of things he always had insisted were too true to dispute. He said them aggressively. For instance:
“You can’t successfully oppose ideas with facts.”
“Andrew, are you feeling the strain of that awful march?”
“Hell, no. You and I have stood it better than the Tibetans. That’s because we’re not so sure as they are that evil has brains. — But I was talking about—”
“You were talking about a black magician and black magic.”
“That stuff’s a boomerang.”
“Andrew—”
“It’s like poison gas. You can’t aim it. It flows on the wind. If the wind changes, it blows back on the user. That becomes the problem: is there some way of changing the wind?”
“Andrew, it’s not long since you didn’t believe in any kind of magic. Are you sure you do now? Is your mind troubled because Bulah Singh’s men died on that precipice?”
“Hell, no. They followed their own leader. They were like Germans obeying Hitler. Let ’em take the consequences.”
“Andrew, it makes me sick to think of what happened. I believe it upsets you, too. But you’re not to blame. Are you blaming yourself? You did your best to prevent it. You sent Bompo Tsering back to post a warning for Bulah Singh.”
“Sure. But do you know what happened?”
Elsa did know. That was why she was troubled. But she knew, too, what troubled Andrew; and that troubled her worse. He had been trying to use magic in which he less than half believed. That way lies ruin. She closed her eyes, and saw more clearly than in a mirror what had happened. But what disturbed her much more than the vision of death was Andrew’s voice describing it, as if he read it from a book as he rode beside her:
“Bulah Singh was leading. He spotted my message on white paper in the gray fog fluttering in the wind from the saint’s thigh bone beside the trail. He dismounted — read it and—” Andrew paused, as if a cloud had covered what he saw. Too well she knew that sensation. She urged him, as others usually urged her:
“What then? What happened then?”
He seemed to see again. He spoke slowly: “Bulah Singh believed my message might be a trick. So he tested it out. He sent one man ahead, lying to him about the ledge being safe. Nothing happened. Then Bulah Singh followed, alone. Again nothing happened. So he used a police whistle to call the rest of his men forward. They came — and an avalanche of rocks and ice swept them all to death on the crags below — every last one of them.”
He grew silent again, until Elsa spoke: “That might have happened to us.”
“It did happen to them. There was a reason why. It wasn’t a mere accident. I want to figure out the reason.”
“What happened after that, Andrew?”
“The man who had crossed first turned on Bulah Singh in a kind of panic. Perhaps hysteria. He seemed to go mad. He accused Bulah Singh of being in league with devils. He rode at Bulah Singh. They fought. Bulah Singh shot him. The man’s pony went galloping back along the ledge, slipped on a loose stone and fell over to join the rest of them. That’s what happened.”
“And then?”
“Then Bulah Singh had no course left but to follow us.”
“He could have turned back,” said Elsa.
“No, he couldn’t.”
“He thought of doing it.”
“He hadn’t food, or strength enough. If he’d reached India, he’d have had to face trial for murder.”
“Andrew! Do you see that, too!”
“Yes. But if I think about it something gets in the way. If I don’t think, it’s as clear as daylight. On his way from Darjeeling toward the border, Bulah Singh shot a man he thought was Lewis. He still thinks it was Lewis.”
“Yes. But can you see who it really was?”
“No, I can’t. But the victim didn’t look like Lewis. I believe it was someone who was spying on Lewis. Bulah Singh shot the wrong man by mistake.”
“Yes. He did. But where? Can you see where?”
“No. I guess I’ve never been there — somewhere not far north of Darjeeling.”
“Andrew, did you ever see the Jesuit Mission?”
“No. Off my route.”
“Did you never meet Father Patrick?”
“No. Friend of Nancy’s, isn’t he? I never saw him.”
“He isn’t dead,” said Elsa. “Not yet. Bulah Singh shot him, in the dark, near the Jesuit Mission, by mistake, thinking he was Morgan Lewis.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Can’t you see! You were seeing a moment ago. And now Morgan Lewis and Nancy Strong are both at the Mission, trying to save Father Patrick’s life. Dr. Lewis has extracted the bullet from Father Patrick’s lung.”
Andrew was silent. Suddenly he chuckled. “Well,” he said, “we can’t prove one word of it. So let’s not kid ourselves.”
The anticlimax fell like a wet blanket. “That seems to amuse you,” said Elsa. “But now, perhaps you can begin to understand what I meant when I said I hated clairvoyance. Sometimes one can see. Sometimes not. But one can never prove anything to the satisfaction of anyone except another clairvoyant; and only then if the clairvoyant can see what you see.”
“I’m not clairvoyant,” said Andrew. He sounded disgusted. Elsa didn’t know how to answer. It was no use arguing. She asked a question instead: “What actually are you — besides being an artist and — and — a skeptic? What else are you?”
“I’m an explorer.”
“Exploring what?”
Andrew was becoming irritated. He visibly summoned patience and spoke like a man on the witness stand:
“I believe the world we all live in is different from what it seems to our senses to be. I began with Huxley, who was my father’s high priest. I was weaned on Ingersoll, who had more religion in him than a carload of archbishops. And I’ve tried to follow Einstein into Relativity and all that stuff. I believe we exist in a kind of magnetic field. I’m trying to explore that. I’m convinced there’s something phony about time and space. It’s possible to get back of them and to know whatever’s going on, anywhere, any time. There — is that clear?”
“Perhaps we both mean the same thing,” said Elsa, “only we use different words.”
“I guess not,” he answered. “You’re clairvoyant.”
That hurt her to silence. He spoke as if clairvoyance was beneath his thought not beyond it: something viciously weak. It hurt all the more because she herself, until Nancy Strong showed otherwise, had thought clairvoyance a curse. She could hardly believe her ears when Andrew continued:
“I imagine Nancy Strong, and perhaps Lewis too, were thinking of us. In some way that I intend to find out, that united their field of thought with ours and we saw what they had experienced. Probably they saw what we’ve been doing. The same with Bulah Singh. Coming along behind us, hating us—”
Elsa objected: “Nancy and Dr. Lewis don’t hate us.”
“Probably not. But Bulah Singh does. So love and hate can’t have anything to do with it. The point is: Bulah Singh was thinking of you and me, wondering how the devil he could overtake us and outwit us. That coincided with our thought about him. Somehow that united our magnetic fields, to use a phrase for an unknown condition. So we were able to see what he had experienced. And he may have known what we’re thinking about.
But perhaps not. I’ve learned one or two tricks about keeping my thought covered.”
“So you’re not clairvoyant, are you, Andrew?”
“No, thank the Lord!” He spoke with condescension too faint for himself to detect. But she winced at it. “Clairvoyance,” he continued, “may be a kind of sensitiveness. Perhaps a form of nervousness. It seems to have made you suffer.”
Elsa rode to her own rescue. Even her tired pony felt the spiritual surge that was like a convert’s asseveration of new faith in the face of torment
“Andrew, I love clairvoyance! I wouldn’t exchange it for anything in this world!”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
“I would rather die than lose it!” She deliberately quoted Nancy Strong: “It’s the substance of things hoped for! It’s the evidence of things not seen!”
“You’ll quote the Pope next!”
“Your talk about magnetic fields is scientific cant — sheer piffle! Did you read it in a magazine off a news stand?”
“Say, see here—”
“It’s a smoke-screen! You exude it like a cuttlefish to save yourself from thought! Magnetic poppycock! Clairvoyance is evolution! It’s the proof of expansion of consciousness — a step forward! The reason why we saw what we did see was the same reason why Bulah Singh didn’t see it — couldn’t possibly have seen it! We’re clairvoyant. So is Nancy Strong. So is Morgan Lewis. Bulah Singh isn’t!”
Andrew stared, reappraising, himself feeling normal again but aware of Elsa’s new self-confidence. Her eyes glowed with passionate conviction.
“Have I been thoughtless?” he asked. “Have I said something that hurt? If so, I’m sorry. I beg pardon. I wouldn’t hurt you for worlds.”
“No! But if you thought me your equal, you’d fight! You’d fight to kill!”
“Me? Kill you? Elsa, you’re—”
“You’re not telling me, Andrew. I’m telling you. It isn’t being hit that hurts. You’ve seen me take it. And I’ve seen you take it. We’ve a right to respect each other. It’s being treated as an inferior that galls.”