The Devil's Guard, page 10
However, I believe the hint the vultures gave us saved our lives by spurring us on to greater effort, although Mordecai's tale was sufficient for me; I was determined not to let that brave Jew beat me in persistence. Besides, I knew the Zogi-la was probably merely child's play to the work before us in the higher passes; the knowledge that what he is doing now is not the most difficult part of his job, encourages a man.
Snow began falling again by the ton, but that made the surface less slippery. Also the wind lessened, which made it easier to breathe and in many ways reduced the odds against us. However, we were still not through the pass, and the ponies were utterly foundered, at sunset; the game little brutes gave up the fight, and three or four of them lay down. So we dug them a hole in the snow, blanketed and fed them, and then dug another deep hole for ourselves, covering it with the ground sheets of the tents. We had no fuel, so we had to eat frozen canned stuff, but the ponies fared well on the barley they had worked so hard to bring.
All that night long—the two snow-leopards yowled around us, making sleep impossible, and we had to take turns to sit up in the wind with a rifle or they would have rushed in and killed one of the ponies. We fired frequently, but always missed them. They were more invisible than ghosts, and their system was as ruthless as the climate, keeping man and horse awake and nervous until we should grow too weak to defend ourselves. Our Tibetans were much more afraid of the leopards than we were, probably because they knew more of the habits of the brutes; but superstition added to their fear, and Tsang-Mondrong, used though he was to guiding hunting parties, was the worse of the two.
"They are incarnations of the souls of lamas who forsook the true religion and pursued black arts," he told us with an air of knowing the exact facts. He even told us the names of the lamas. "And as they robbed and misled men's souls, so now they seek our bodies. If they catch us, we will be as they are leopards in the next life! If a man should die of a sickness, or be slain by a man, then it is safe to throw his body to the dogs and vultures, who will merely eat it and the soul goes free; but if he is slain by an animal he becomes an animal. And all creatures crave company, which is why those leopards seek to slay us men, hoping to add to the number of leopards."
When morning came with dazzling sunlight on the snow, we found we were within three-quarters of a mile of safety on the uplands of the Dras Plateau, where the snow lies less than a foot deep all winter long because of the terrific wind. Three hours' struggle brought us out into the open, and though we were still followed at a distance by the leopards all the vultures flew away.
And now luck turned our way again. In the place where we rested the ponies, to the leeward of a huge rock, we found quantities of yak-dung, which is the almost universal fuel of the country; so we had a hot meal with tea and Chullunder Ghose began to recover his strength.
Our problem now was how to pass through Leh without being discovered by any one who might warn the authorities. The door to India was shut behind us, and the handful of military police who guard Ladakh and Baltistan were almost certainly in winter quarters; but there was no way of avoiding Leh, which is a scattering village of about three thousand inhabitants, half-hidden in a valley where converging routes from Tibet meet.
From the Zogi-la to Leh the road follows the line of the Dras drainage by easy gradients, turns near the Indus and then leads nearly straight to the town between parallel, yellowish ranges. Night marches are almost impossible, and by daylight it is hopeless to try to escape observation.
Tsang-Mondrong and Tsang-yang were our chief perplexity. They had worked well with the ponies, and we were willing to take them with us into Tibet if there were any reasonable prospect of their not betraying us; but our arrival in Leh would be sure to arouse curiosity, and to expect those two men not to answer questions in a way that would bring us to the notice of the authorities was to expect altogether too much of them.
Grim solved the riddle, although Chullunder Ghose suggested the key. Our fat babu was full of all kinds of fears since the Zogi-la upset his nerve and spurred an always keen imagination.
"Tsang-yang and Tsang-Mondrong will say we killed Mordecai!" he prophesied. "They will furthermore say that we killed that Tibetan whom we came on in the pass. That means winter in prison—and I assure you, there are bugs in Ladakh! And while we languish amid the bugs, those Tibetans who were pursuing Mordecai will poison our food! I vote we camp here for a long time and observe what happens!"
Grim questioned our Tibetans narrowly, to find out what they knew about Mordecai, and, discovering their ignorance of everything except that he had come through the Zogi-la by night and died in our tent, he told them about the monks who had hunted Mordecai out of Tibet and now were wintering in Leh.
The effect was surprising. If it had been possible they would have left us there and have turned back through the Zogi-la to India. They appeared more afraid of those monks than they had been of the leopards in the night, and each in turn put Grim through a course of questioning to find out whether they could trust us not to hand them over to the monks.
"Jimgrim, they will not believe the Jew is dead. They will say we met him in the pass and helped him on his journey."
"Rot!" Grim answered. "That isn't what you're afraid of. Come on now, tell the truth and perhaps we'll help you."
There was nothing to tell, apparently, except that they were scared out of their wits, they themselves being ex-monks who knew the rigors of monastic discipline. They assured us they were not at all afraid of any Tibetan government officials we might meet
"But monks—that is different. They govern themselves. Some monks are fiercer than others."
"Why are you afraid of these monks in particular?"
They refused to say. But there was no doubt of the fear; their eyes betrayed it. They begged us to pretend they were our Hindu servants—anything rather than admit they were Tibetans or had ever been in Tibet.
They simply would not hear of being left in Leh.
"Those monks would murder us!"
They promised service, secrecy, fidelity to death if we would only take them along with us and help them to avoid the men who had been hunting Mordecai; but at the end of an hour's talk we were as much in the dark as ever as to why they should fear that particular party and yet not be afraid to enter Tibet with us. They would not even say which monastery they supposed the monks were from.
However, into Leh we had to go; and there we had to stay at least one night, in order to replenish our stock of barley for the ponies and to add to our own provisions, since the Tibetans meant two extra mouths to feed. The puzzle was, how to find Mordecai's friend without knowing his name and without informing the whole of Leh of our arrival.
We decided to pretend we were a party of merchants on our way home, intending to winter in Leh until the snow should leave the passes in the spring; and Grim, since he could speak Tibetan, went on ahead, alone, to try to find the Ladakhi who had befriended Mordecai. We followed by leisurely stages (if fighting the wind of Ladakh can come under the heading of leisure), so Grim reached Leh a whole day's march ahead of us. We arrived at nightfall purposely and found him waiting for us beside the road, in the gloom under a clump of twisted tamarisks. There were no greetings, no conversation; almost before we came within hail he mounted his pony and rode slowly ahead, and if we had not recognized the pony we might have doubted he was Grim. Light snow was falling—prelude to a blizzard—and the lights of the Leh houses made the town look like a Christmas card. Except for the rarified atmosphere and the sensation of being up among the clouds, it might have been a New England village seen through the murk of a wintry night.
Mordecai's friend's house stood near the northern outskirts of Leh, in a hollow between two spurs of a rock-littered mountain. There were a few poplar and willow trees around it that gave it a prosperous, civilized appearance but the house itself looked capable of being held against uncivilized marauders, having very few windows facing outward and they extremely small, with heavy iron bars. There was a tower, too, from which rifle fire could sweep the approaches, but the planted trees suggested there had not been much need in recent years to defend the place against assault. In fact, all Leh looks peaceful.
A narrow gate was opened for us that led into a spacious yard all littered up with yak-dung and the junk accumulations of a lifetime. Along two sides of the yard were sheds, in which we stabled the ponies alongside cows, yaks, goats, and mules.
Our host, Sidiki ben Mahommed, came and introduced himself by the light of a hurricane lantern—a rather undersized, lean, active- looking man with bright brown eyes and a brown beard turning gray. He bulked big in his yak-skin overcoat, with a fur cap down over his ears, but when he took them off inside the house the contrast made him seem even smaller than he was. In our honor (I believe) he put on spectacles, which gave him an air of the schoolmaster; there was nothing whatever the matter with his eyes, which appraised us critically and without concealment. In turn we all appraised him, and were disappointed. Mordecai's account of him had led us to expect a very different type of man.
The room he had brought us into was a large one, heavily beamed and ceilinged with hewn planks. At one end was a cast-iron stove and at the other a rough stone fireplace big enough to have roasted a sheep whole above the blazing lumps of tamarisk root. Along the whole of one side, about eight feet above the floor, there ran a gallery whose railing was concealed by costly rugs. Sidiki ben Mahommed clearly was a man of substance.
There was a phonograph with an enormous rack of records, and an old-fashioned upright piano which must have cost him a fortune to bring all the way from India. Most of the rest of the furniture looked as if it might have been bought at a sale of some dead Englishman's effects; there was a cushioned lounge, for instance, set before the fireplace, big enough to seat four people comfortably. Costly rugs were spread, in places two, and even three deep, on the rough-hewn floor. The only things in bad taste in the room were two chromographs—one of Queen Victoria with an absurd crown that made one wonder how she balanced it, and the other of Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar with a cast in his eye and a saber about twice too big for him.
"There is something in me of Lord Roberts—something in me of Queen Victoria," he remarked. "For the One I was an interpreter. From the other I learned dignity, when I saw her at her Jubilee in London."
He treated our Tibetans with contempt, motioning them toward a mat near the cast-iron stove, on which they went and sat obediently. Not much was said by any one until two servants in extremely dirty clothes had brought in quantities of curried sheep and an enormous kettle of tea, stewed with butter and salt over a yak-dung fire, which gave it an allegedly exquisite flavor. Our party, including our host, ate at a long table in mid-room, seated on benches, but our Tibetans were served over in the corner by themselves, and when the meal was finished, one of the servants led them outside to a room across the yard. They went without remonstrance, looking rather sheepish and ashamed.
Then we sat down in front of the fire, a little conscious of being watched by women from between the rugs that hung from the gallery railing, our host laughing as he told how Grim had found him.
"Ah, subtlety! How I do love subtlety!" he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together. "I have made my own fortune by subtlety. This Mister Jimgrim says he had no plan at all until he reached Leh. He did not even know my name. So what did he do but look for the Tibetans who had been hunting Mordecai. They have made their winter quarters in a little monastery near here and were easy to find. He went to them just after sunset, with his face covered, saying his name is Tsang-Mondrong and himself a spy in the pay of the Lhassa Government. Hee-hee! They invited him into the monastery but he told them he must first learn who has sheltered the chiling Rait. Understand, these people think that Mordecai and Rait were one and the same person. So they directed him to my house and told him he should murder me. To that he said `no,' he must first uncover a plot by certain other chilings to enter Tibet in the spring, and if I should be murdered there would be no way of uncovering the plot; he suggested it might be better for him to approach me and pretend friendship, possibly even obtaining lodging at my house in order to spy on me. They believed him! Can you imagine that? Furthermore, he made them promise not to interfere with me or with himself. A man who can do that could make a woman reasonable!"
"Easy," said Grim. "There's a colony of Ladakhi Moslems in Lhassa. I told them that among those you have influential friends who have the ear of the Dalai Lama. That scared them. The Dalai Lama doesn't stand for the kind of game they're playing. Besides, they're lazy. They don't know Mordecai is dead, or that their own party got caught and frozen in the Zogi-la. They've lost enthusiasm and they're having a nice easy time. They were tickled to bits to have me take the business off their hands. "
Sidiki ben Mahommed nodded. "There will be bastards in Leh a year from now," he prophesied, seeming to take malicious satisfaction in the thought.
He was rather a mean little man, whose chief determination seemed to be to make a handsome profit for himself whatever else might happen. He was at some pains to explain to us that Mordecai had paid him well. Altruism was an abstraction that he regarded with respect, perhaps, but from a most respectful distance.
Narayan Singh asked him gruffly, "Will you help us into Tibet? Do you suppose you can?"
"I have known quite a number of men who have entered Tibet," he answered, "many more than you imagine. You have only heard of the explorers, some of whom returned and wrote books. I have never written books, but I am sixty years old, and I have seen, or known of, nearly a hundred Europeans who have found their way in. Very few returned. Most of them were looking for Sham-bha-la. Half a dozen may have found it but I think all the others perished. The bones of some are very likely in that hole under the cavern into which they threw Mordecai after they thought they had killed him.
"You see this furniture? I bought it from an Englishman in Srinagar, who threw up his pension and everything and set out in search of Sham-bha-la. I helped him to enter Tibet but I never heard of him again. "I, myself, searched for Sham-bha-la for eleven years. I am perhaps a little wiser than I was, but it may be I am only lazy and afraid. At any rate, it seems to me a waste of energy to try to learn what is beyond my understanding. I don't even understand my own religion. How shall I understand that of individuals whose thinking is said to comprehend all religions and philosophies and all the problems of the human race?
"You believe that such people exist, or you would hardly risk your lives to look for them in Tibet. I assure you, I know they exist; but I also assure you that you will seriously risk your lives if you set out to find them. I am sure that Sham-bha-la exists, but I have no notion where. However, you are not the kind of men who will desist because of anything that I say. How much will you pay me if I help you?"
"Nothing," said Grim—so downrightly that Sidiki ben Mahommed blinked.
Presently Narayan Singh broke silence:
"Are you blind that you could not find Sham-bha-la, though you say you searched eleven years? Or is the place a lie?" he asked.
"I know a man who knows exactly where it is," Sidiki ben Mahommed answered. "I could introduce you to him, but if he knew I had demanded money from you he would have nothing to do with you or me. He is in Leh. I spoke this afternoon with him. He has said he will visit my house tonight. But he will take care to appear to you to be a very ordinary person if you should let him suppose I had offered to sell you his services. I am sorry I made that suggestion. I should have served you first and then have trusted to your generosity."
"Is he the man you mentioned to me as 'the Chela?' " Grim asked.
Sidiki ben Mahommed nodded.
"Good!" exclaimed Nayaran Singh. "Let him come.
I will soon tell you whether he lies or not. There are chelas— and then again chelas."
For fifteen minutes after that we sat still, watching the tree roots crackling on the hearth while from the gallery above us came the hardly audible whispering of women and the occasional loud creaking of a board as some one moved.
Somewhere up there in the gallery was the "new, young wife" who, according to Mordecai's story, had been beaten until you could hear her yell a mile away, for having tried to poison him.
Chapter Nine—Lhaten.
Silence! And above all, silence! Only the irresolute and crafty need to publish their alleged intentions; and the wise do not so. For a friend, if he in truth be such, will give you credit for a proper motive and an honorable aim, assisting how he may when he perceives his opportunity. Yet few know who their friends are; and a false friend is a devil in disguise. Not many devils have the courage to come openly, but this is certain: they are devils, and if they know what you intend they will prevent you.—From The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup
Suddenly and almost silently there came into the room a man of middle stature, who had nothing much remarkable about him at the first glance except that he seemed personally clean—a rare thing in those altitudes. (Our host, for instance, did not look as if he had washed himself for at least a week or two.)
The visitor stood before us in a plain clean smock of dark-yellow homespun, baggy linen trousers and felt slippers. The opening of his smock and the edges of the sleeves were trimmed with beads, but he wore no other ornament, except a gold ring, intricately carved, that covered a whole joint of the middle finger of his right band.
Our host introduced him by the Tibetan name of Lhaten, but he did not look like a Tibetan, for one reason because his eyes were bright blue. He had carefully combed black hair falling nearly to his shoulders, a high forehead, a straight nose, and a smile that suggested that to him, life was a rather comic sort of tragedy. He seemed to exude vitality, and he had the manners of a well- bred cosmopolitan.
