The Devil's Guard, page 17
"It is the fault of your karma," [11] said Rao Singh. "You have merit."
"What is merit to me, if I have no hope?" the babu answered. "Sri Rao Singh Bahadur, I despise a merit that is useless!"
"Put it to use then."
"Will you help us?" Grim asked suddenly.
There was another pause while Rao Singh looked steadily at Grim's eyes.
"Better to be a dupe," he said at last, "than to put to a test him on whose help you rely. If I should say I shall help you, then you might say afterward that I have not helped, because you know nothing about the methods I would use. The surgeon's knife helps, but the victim cries out bitterly. And if I should say I would help you, would you not try to take advantage of the promise? That is human nature. You would certainly rely on me instead of using all your own ability—whereas it is only when you have put forth absolutely all your own ability that I can help you in the least."
Grim seemed to have at least an inkling who this extraordinary individual was, but I only knew he was Lhaten's guru, which was shallow information. India is full of gurus who amount to nothing— teachers of penny philosophy based on superstition and tradition learned at second-hand from mistranslated text books. True, he spoke English perfectly, and without any of the phrases that the ordinary gurus use to veil their ignorance. He did not show off. He was neither arrogant nor too persuasive. Still—
"Will you help us to rescue Rait?" I asked.
"No," he said, and that blunt answer did more to convince me he was somebody than if he had spent hours explaining to me who he was and why I should show him respect.
"Do you know where Rait is?" I demanded, but he did not answer that question.
"Listen," I said. "Rait writes he is in a dungeon undergoing torture. If it is true you came to keep me from dying of knife wounds, why can't you at least help me to rescue that poor fellow from much worse than physical torture?"
"Are you sure Rait wrote?" he asked.
"I have his letter."
I was wrong. Grim had both Rait's letters. He produced them, holding them toward the firelight.
"Why not burn them?" Rao Singh suggested.
Again there was at least a minute's silence. The old hermit, who seemed to read silence as other men understand speech, leaned forward and put fuel on the fire. Grim folded the letters, in doubt what to do with them.
"Why burn them?" I asked.
Rao Singh, without moving his head, contrived in some way to summon Lhaten from the gloom behind him.
"Tell why," he ordered.
"Because he has suggested that you should," said Lhaten. "Also because evil communications are a link that dugpas use too easily. As disease seeks dirt, malevolence—"
"You have already told too much," said Rao Singh, and Lhaten retired to the gloom where he became invisible.
"If I burn them—" Grim began.
"You will do so on your own responsibility. I make no bargains," Rao Singh interrupted.
Chullunder Ghose began to plead with Grim to burn them, throwing a handkerchief from hand to hand—a way he had when he was more than usually nervous.
"Sahib, you don't know what great things hinge on little ones sometimes! A little flea from a rat's tail carries plague. The color of—"
He ceased because he saw Grim was not listening. In his own mind, in his own way, Grim was working out the problem for himself. He glanced at me at last. I nodded, always choosing to agree with him and back him to the finish when he works his eyebrows that way. I have known him to decide wrongly—possibly more times than I could count offhand; but half the fun of life, to my mind, lies in going the whole distance when you give a man your confidence. Mistakes don't matter; it is arguing about them that rots friendship.
Grim burned the letters, poking them into the fire with a stick.
"Why did you do it?" Rao Singh asked.
"They were of no use, and I want to see what will happen next," Grim answered. "Ramsden and I are determined to rescue Rait. Those two letters can't make any difference."
"No?"
Rao Singh stood up, and Lhaten held his cloak for him to find his way into the sleeves. Then he turned his back to us and Lhaten buttoned it, but that may have been a move to mask an exchange of whispers.
Grim and the others, the hermit included, all rose to their feet, but I had to sit still, being too weak to rise without help. Rao Singh came and looked at me, smiling, and I noticed that his clothing smelled of sandalwood. His hands and face were as clean as if he had come that minute from the bath.
"You all but escaped out of that prison of yours," he said. "Obstinate? I never knew a man so obstinate! Until I learned how strong your friendship is for Jimgrim I was at a loss how to challenge your will."
"Why did you go to the trouble?" I asked.
"Lhaten summoned me—accepting the responsibility," he added, glancing at his chela.
"If there is anything I can do," I said, "at any time to—"
He interrupted with a gesture of fierce distaste. Then suddenly he laughed, as if remembering I could not understand his point of view.
"You have established claim on me enough," he said. "A gift might increase it altogether too much. You will not need me again, I think. Stay here until your strength returns."
Then he went with a wave of his hand to the hermit, who behaved like some old janitor in attendance on a gods' ambassador, dividing his emotions equally between scorn for us and pride at having sheltered such a visitor.
With his back toward the entrance, the hermit spoke:
"What has any of you done that you should have this honor?"
Chapter Fifteen—In which Jimgrim makes no bolder claim than that he and his friends are savages.
How many tongues are spoken in the world! And how many secret orders have their signs of recognition? None the less, I have observed that when two of a kind meet they invariably recognize each other, even though they have no spoken word in common. As a horseman knows a good horse and a true dog knows a huntsman, so a guru recognizes him in whom the seeds of Wisdom are awake.—From The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsang Samdup
I don't pretend to know what method had been used to snatch me out of death's gate. Grim's version of it was that Lhaten came unexpectedly and after he had pulled all my bandages off and examined the wounds, Rao Singh came unannounced.
Rao Singh, after hardly a glance at me, had asked to have the loads piled so as to make a sort of inner chamber; and behind that barrier he and Lhaten worked over me for half-an-hour; but in what way they had worked, none knew.
I do know that from that hour my recovery began, and it was rapid. There was a new sensation of vitality—the sort of feeling that a man has on an early summer morning after a good night's sleep. Nothing—not even pain and stiffness—could convince me I was in the slightest danger of relapse and my friends had hard work to keep me from taking too much exercise, until Narayan Singh at last pronounced an ultimatum.
"Sahib," he said, "when we wrestled at Benjamin's yon had the best of it. By the five vows of a Sikh and on my honor, I shall take my vengeance now unless you lie still!"
And now it appeared that the secret route into Tibet was not entirely free from toll, although the lousy old hermit refused even to look at money or to help himself from our provisions. Day after day I was left alone with him while my friends, armed with hatchets, took the ponies down into a near-by valley to cut tamarisk for firewood, which they brought into a cave near by for the hermit's future use. That seemed to be the customary task imposed on all rare visitors who used the secret trail, and in return we were entitled to be guided as far as the next, else undiscoverable, halting place. There was no fixed minimum of fuel to be cut, nor any limit to the quantity, so my companions filled the storage cave, the hermit neither thanking them nor appearing to take the slightest interest.
He himself lived on infinitesimal rations of barley which he roasted on an old iron shovel and ate cold, counting it grain by grain. He appeared disgusted at our appetites, and at his rate of consumption he had enough barley stored in two sacks to last him an immeasurable time. But he had none to spare for our ponies, nor would he tell us where we might obtain any. In fact, he would tell us nothing, except that he was ready to act guide whenever we should choose to move on, his conversation being limited to that and to assertions that Tibetan lamas were a lot of frauds. He appeared to believe we were going to Lhassa, and to regard us as a pack of fools for that sufficient reason.
During the ten days that we occupied his cave I never saw him pray or do anything that suggested a religious exercise. He would sit by the hour on a rock, well sheltered from the wind outside the entrance of the cave, his red-rimmed eyes fixed on the sky-line and an expression on his face as if he were listening to sounds that none of us could hear. He appeared to have no regular hours for "listening in" (if that is what he did). Sometimes he got up from his litter of dry moss and branches in the middle of the night when a gale was raging, and sat on his rock until dawn. At other times, when he was cooking barley or carrying firewood from the storage cave, he would suddenly drop what he was doing, as if he had heard a signal, and would hurry to the rock and sit there motionless, perhaps for a few minutes, or for hours.
Yet his hearing was not particularly keen. If anything, he seemed inclined to deafness, due to the terrific pressure of the wind and perhaps, too, to accumulations in his ears of wax and extraneous filth. And it did not seem to make the slightest difference to him how much noise we made when he was concentrating on his strange task. We could sit around the rock, laughing and talking within two yards, without disturbing him in the least.
We were in haste to be off because the grain for the ponies was running short, so we left before I had fully recovered, starting one morning as soon as daylight had crept midway down into the valley over which the ledge in front of the cave mouth hung like an eagle's eerie. The old hermit stowed a dozen grains of barley in his cheek and led the way on foot without a word of comment, netting such a pace as gave the loaded ponies hard work to keep up with him, scrambling as they had to, up and down a narrow trail that would have made even mountain sheep look to their laurels.
Above us the ice hung from the ledges. Beneath us more often than not was a drop of a sheer half a mile through an amethyst void to the rocks in the bed of a frozen water course. At times the loaded ponies had to lean outward over a precipice to the point where equilibrium almost vanished in order to feel their way around a projecting spur. Wherever the trail was level for a few yards there was ice or frozen snow as slippery as glass, and we grew used to riding with a left leg over nothing while the pony picked his way along the loose rim of infinity.
To have found that trail with the aid of a map and instruments would have been a task to baffle survey engineers. The way the hermit followed it, not hesitating except to pause, leaning into the wind on some naked crag upreared against the sky to let us overtake him, was a miracle as great as any I have witnessed. There were places where we had to lift the ponies in the bight of a sling around their rumps, all four of us hauling together and the ponies digging toes into whatever cracks their scrambling hoofs could find. The hermit never lent a hand but merely stood and watched us scornfully.
He looked more than ever scornful when we called a halt for a meal and to rest the animals—he sticking his tongue in his cheek to transfer one lone grain of roasted barley, which he chewed for as long as it took me to eat a substantial meal of canned army rations.
Whoever mapped out stages on that secret route was, like our hermit guide, a seven-league booted individual. Or possibly the gods, to whom Chullunder Ghose attributed all circumstances that he did not understand, had set the distances—forgetful that mere humans and their ponies had to crawl like tired ants over mountains from one valley to the next. It was dusk, and the gorges were purple with echoing gloom when we sighted a smoke among crags on a ledge in the distance. It was pitch dark, starless, with the bellies of black clouds descending on us in a noise of volleying wind, when we rode at last into a great, wide, slot-shaped cavern mouth, from which a maze of passages led into a limestone mountain.
Here we were met by a woman who looked like a man, with a leather shirt hiding her dry dugs and a mass of wind-blown gray hair framing a face like a fury's. The sinews of her naked, bronzed legs were like whipcord and the muscles of her arms looked capable of war with the rocks for weapons. Yet she was as peaceful as she seemed belligerent.
Her age was beyond guessing, though she moved with the agility of youth, swinging herself from the loins as she strode down a passage in front of us, whirling a torch made of resinous wood. She had nothing to say. Our old guide found his tongue and interrupted the gestures she made with the flaring torch, she standing at the entrance of a cave where he explained we were to leave the ponies. There was no light in there, but she followed, after we had felt our way in darkness over horse dung ages old, and when we began off-loading the ponies she passed her torch to our hermit guide and lent a hand so masterfully that Chullunder Ghose stood back and watched her.
Then she spoke at last in vowelly, musical Pushtu, mocking the babu, calling him "fat Chenresi."
"Mother of a million virgins," he retorted, "I, who have known many women, marvel! I will be Chenresi and remain forever, if you will be high priestess and do all the hard work!"
She seemed to have taken a sudden fancy to him, flashing smiles that showed astonishingly perfect yellow teeth. But when she smiled she looked a thousand years old, because her face broke into deep, criss-crossed wrinkles, that all vanished when the smile was gone.
She resumed her torch and led the way out of the cave when we had fed the ponies, taking no notice of our guide except to nod to him when he turned to the left in the passage and went off alone toward the entrance.
We could hear that the storm had burst. There was a din among the crags outside as if whole mountains were being torn up by the wind. No siege guns ever made more cannonade than that. Hail like the rattle of musketry shattered itself into glassy splinters on the cavern threshold; and through a fissure in the rock wall the wind screamed like the artillery shells in Flanders. Yet our old guide walked toward the entrance as if nothing in the world were wrong.
Grim remonstrated, hesitating when the woman beckoned to us with the torch to follow her.
"You will let him go out into that?" he objected.
She laughed, with a flash of her eye teeth that suggested scorn. "Does duty cease because of wind and snow?" she asked. "And are you in authority here?"
She led along the passage past a dozen openings that echoed to the tumult of the storm, then turned a hairpin corner suddenly and began to descend stairs hewn out of the rock—enormous stairs, each six or eight feet from front to rear, irregularly spaced.
Presently she beat the torch out and we saw a dim light down below us and a long way off. Its dimness was peculiar, suggesting an electric arc light seen through milky mist, and there were strange shapes like the branches of trees in a nightmare forest that kept changing, and changing their color too, as we drew nearer.
I was last. Grim, next to the woman, felt his way with hand on the wall, we treading in his footsteps because the edges of the stairs were shadowy and irregular.
"By gad—ice!" he called back. And then: "No—stalactites!"
It was growing noticeably warmer as we kept descending into light that steadily increased. And presently the sound of voices came toward us, like the far-off murmur of a crowd, reminding me of the dull roar at a race course when the race is on and the crowd leans staring down the course.
But when we turned a sudden corner between gleaming stalactites the scene resembled nothing I had ever seen or expect to see again. Down three steps was a gallery of solid stalagmite that overhung an oval cavern, whose walls, floor, domed roof and a maze of feathery, fantastic columns all were opal-colored, gleaming in the light reflected from a dozen braziers and from a log fire set nearly in the midst.
Around the fire a dozen men were seated, talking and as dignified as owls. It was their quiet voices that had come rumbling up the stairway like the clamor of a crowd. Three or four of them appeared to be Tibetans but the others were of various Eastern races, and they were of all ages from about forty years old upward.
There was not one visible inch of all that cavern uncovered by calcium carbonate that had percolated through the limestone roof for countless centuries and finally ceased dripping, leaving the cavern dry and lovelier than fairy land. It looked like a lacquer of mother o' pearl, for there was color in the stuff—rose, blue, green, yellow—blending into iridescence as it caught reflected firelight.
At the end of the cavern facing us, in a shallow domed recess proportioned perfectly to the dimensions of the cavern, sat three images that had been carved out of the rock. Those, too, were covered with the lacquer-like ooze, as evenly and perfectly as if the overlay were done by hand. The images were double life size, squatting cross-legged in the Buddhist attitude of meditation, and the one in the center suggested Chenresi—in the way that the moon, perhaps, suggests an arc light.
The perfection of that carving was so marvelous (the figure in the midst particularly) that neither Grim nor I could take our eyes off it. It seemed almost to breathe, as if the artist's hand had caught the unseen spirit with the flesh and fashioned its resemblance in the stone. Calm, dignified, benevolent, aware of all immensity, it meditated on man's relation to the universe; and those on either side sat comprehending what the central image thought.
