The Devil's Guard, page 6
Let your thought dwell on this for a while, since the tree of meditation beareth wholesome fruit and he whose duty is to teach should set examples, though he know the answers, yet withholding them:
Chapter Five—Painless Parker Ramsden, and the tale told by the Devil's spies, Tsang-Mondrong and Tsang-Yang.
The dogs bark when the caravan moves on. The dogs fight when the caravan has gone. The caravan proceedeth, and the dogs lick, each his own wounds, in the dust.—From The Book Of The Sayings of Tsiang Samdup.
We Trundled the barrow all night along the road that follows the Sind Valley, startled by shadows that leaped at us out of the darkness, and by night—prowling scavenger dogs that yelped and ran. It does not take much to scare people who are on the run, and Rait's mysterious warning of nerve-racking experiences had filled us with foreboding.
Long before morning our prisoner came to his senses and announced the fact by shouting at the top of his lungs, but Narayan Singh prodded his ribs a few times with a sharp stick and he took the hint, lying still after that until we came to a halt at daybreak.
That Ladakh Road is used by countless peasants, some of whom would have been sure to take exception to the rubber-tired barrow. It was neither in keeping with our guise of honest merchants nor in any way suited to the nature of the road ahead. We looked like prosperous men, who could well afford horses or porters, but we were likely to be reported as thieves escaping with our loot unless we got rid of the barrow and invented a likely story to account for our loads by the wayside. So we removed the wheels and dumped the barrow into a stream, where the reeds concealed it. Then Grim and Narayan Singh took off their shoes and made scores of naked footprints in the dust, while I took Tsang-yang in hand.
The Tibetan assumed an air of indifference, chafing his wrists where the cords had hurt him a bit and obeying without comment when I told him to stand in front of me. Not knowing much about Tibetans yet, I mistook the attitude for one of sullen, watchful waiting.
"You think you will appeal to the first passers-by," I said. "If so, we will accuse you of being a bandit—one of many who attacked us in the night and made our porters ran away. We will say we captured you by hitting you over the head, showing the bruise on your head, in proof of it. And if you deny it, we will add that the bandits ran off with our women, and the first peasants who come along will beat you half to death. Do you like the prospect?"
"What do you wish?" he asked, turning up his thumbs. Suddenly he put his tongue out at me—a slobbery, big tongue that looked almost too big to withdraw. I was minded to hit him to teach him manners, but Chullunder Ghose came to his rescue, having watched with deliberate interest, as he sat with his shoes off, chafing tired feet.
"Don't hit! That is Tibetan abjectness of white flag, belly upward, all four feet in air! He is law of heredity functioning! He is product of bad food, blizzards and religion!"
The babu was right. Veneer had peeled off. The Tibetan had relapsed into the savagery of the State of Kam, where nature in the raw and superstition in authority present men with facts they must accept and suffer under or else perish. The monastery monks might whip him again now without risk of reprisals. Rightly handled he was ready to submit to anything—although how long the relapse would last might be another question.
"Remember!" I warned. "If I catch you speaking to a stranger I shall simply say you are a woman-stealer and you will be beaten to death."
It was Grim's suggestion that I should bully him while Chullunder Ghose should pretend to pity him: a sort of third degree that might induce him to confide in one of us.
So I made him gather fuel for our breakfast fire, calling him a dog who would eat at each meal twice what his labor was worth. Chullunder Ghose, outpouring mock compassion, called him "little Kam-kin" and inquired whether he liked chapaties burned on both sides or only on one.
Chullunder Ghose believes himself an expert at chapatti making, but as we did not want to unpack the loads the only tools he had were a spoon and an upturned biscuit-tin, whose solder melted, letting the flat cakes fall into the smoky fire.
However, we had eaten after a fashion when the first of the peasantry came in sight—sixteen or eighteen men in single file on their way to the magistrate's court in Srinagar. The five in the lead were mounted on half-starved ponies; they were principals in a lawsuit and continued on their way, refusing to have anything to do with us, but the others were merely going as spectators and were eager to stop and listen to any form of entertainment. We told them how our porters had all run away and left us when we were attacked by bandits.
They believed the story, because there were the marks of many footprints in the road and because the police patrol was known to have returned to Srinagar the day before, thus officially opening the season for highway robberies. When we suggested they should carry our loads toward the nearest village they refused pointblank— then sat down to discuss the matter, bent on discovering exactly how grave our predicament might be before setting a price on their services.
We were utterly at their mercy. If we had offered them a high price we might have aroused suspicion that we were fugitives from justice; yet we did not dare let them proceed on their way and tell all Srinagar about us.
However, at the end of fifteen minutes' talking it occurred to one of them to ask exactly who we were, and he began with me (I suppose, because I was the biggest). That gave Chullunder Ghose his opportunity. He described me as a great physician gifted with powers of divination and possessed of infallible remedies for curing barrenness of acres, camels, cows and wives.
"He is puller of teeth, being known as Painless Parker—which is Greek word meaning altruist. He is setter of bones. He is increaser of longevity. He cured the King of the United States of leprosy. The Crown Prince of Switzerland conferred on him the Order of the Garter for healing him of so-called Republican Tendencies, which is a terrible disease. The Emperor of France offered him his only daughter in marriage, on condition he should live in the Louvre, which honor he refused, however, on account of insufficiency of palace furnishings. He is now on his way to cure the gallstones of a chieftain of Ladakh by means of magic poultices."
Before he had finished his nonsense every one of them felt symptoms of disease, which, after silent diagnosis and much frowning, I proceeded to treat with equally imaginary remedies produced out of an ancient Chinese tea-chest Benjamin had given me. There were Chinese pictures on the inside of the lid, quite easily mistaken for a gallery of Buddhist saints, and although these villagers were far from being Buddhists they were none the less impressed with a sense of my sanctity and mistook the taste of Worcestershire Sauce for the semi-divine flavor of Tantrist drugs. Grim made them avert their eyes in silence while I mixed the stuff with whisky and Narayan Singh chanted a mantra, of which neither he nor I nor any one could guess the meaning.
Then, when they had all been dosed, and had rubbed their stomachs and felt wonderfully better, they bethought them of their village headman, who had abscess of the jaw. No sooner thought than acted on: they seized our loads—except the biggest, naturally, which Grim compelled Tsang-yang to carry to prevent his civilized veneer from filming over him again—and hurried toward their village, chattering like children, with their heads too full of my wizardry to remember our tale of the midnight hold-up.
Even if they had remembered it, the danger of their telling tales about us for the present had entirely vanished. I was their treasure trove, and they proposed to keep me to themselves until my usefulness was squeezed out to the last drop; tales of a mighty magician who could heal all manner of diseases were likely, they knew well, to bring too swift investigation from a health department whose officials believed in such heresies as cleanliness and vaccination—and who were known to be extremely jealous of genuine thaumaturgists.
So, though we passed at least two hundred peasants on our way, their questions were not answered, and the merely mild interest we aroused was likely to be forgotten long before those dawdlers reached the shops of Srinagar.
At the end of four or five hours' walking we reached a filthy village, where the headman lay groaning in agony in a dark stone hut, under a thatched roof where the rats were nesting; and I had to operate on him at once before a breathless audience that filled the room. I would have funked it if Grim had not been there, but Grim is afraid of nothing except fear itself, and he stood at my elbow, urging me in whispers.
"He'll die anyhow if you don't do something. His whole system is being poisoned by the abscess. You may kill him, or it may be your lucky day—and his! Go to it."
Whoever has managed mining camps a hundred miles or so from rail-head has incidentally performed all manner of minor operations as often as not without any proper instrument or a drum-and-fife band to drown the victim's yells. So I was not quite green at the business. Benjamin had supplied me with the very latest thing in forceps.
At the risk of poisoning the man I drowned his pain with half-a- syringeful of local anesthetic, gave that time to work, and pulled out all the teeth on one side of his head. One molar broke and I had to fish for it, but when I had done the poor wretch was alive and grateful; he offered me three chickens and a month-old calf (born too late in the year to be likely to live) and beat his only son on the shoulders with a carved Kashmiri stool for not making me a suitable obeisance.
That was naturally not the whole of it; success involves responsibility, and Chullunder Ghose had advertised me much too well. My next patient was a woman with shriveled breasts, whose son had died a quarter of a century ago, and who now demanded an elixir to renew her youth. I gave her a full dose of Worcestershire Sauce and whisky, and Grim told her to eat two handfuls of sugar by the light of the next new moon, which she must see over her left shoulder without thinking of her age; if she dared to think about her age the remedy would fail, but otherwise she would have twins within twelve months.
She might have had twins there and then, so far as my standing went in that community. Men who would have dreaded a genuine doctor's visit more than the plague began to try to force presents on me and to beg for stuff that should make their wives bear children. I was busy lancing boils and dosing more or less imaginary stomach-aches all afternoon, and when night came there was nothing for it but to accept the headman's hospitality.
By that time I would have given almost anything for the privilege of speech, and that infernal rascal Chullunder Ghose, enjoying my predicament, did his utmost to make me miserable, telling tales about me that would have made Munchhausen blush. He explained my silence by saying that my power to heal depended on it; a great hermit had conferred the magic on me on condition that I should not speak to any one for thirty years, of which nineteen had still to run. Tsang-yang, he said, had to be silent, too, because he was my chela, who was going to be taught how to pull teeth after ten years' apprenticeship, provided he did not speak one word in all that time; for each word that he should speak until then, one month would be added to his sentence.
The villagers mischievously did their best to ruin Tsang-yang's prospects by inducing him to talk, but Narayan Singh sat next to him, growling threats of mayhem into his ear. The Tibetan was still under the spell of that half-religious, half-climatic consciousness of being licked and though, as we discovered later, he had another motive for submitting to us, it was the Sikh's threats just then that appealed to his imagination and made him obedient.
We slept in the headman's bug-infested hut—an honor that we only conferred on him after he had promised to supply us with as many porters as we needed. We had hard work to keep him to his word, because he wanted us to stay and hold another clinic, for the honor it would do his village, but we got off, about two hours after dawn, behind a string of men who sadly lacked enthusiasm now that they knew there was nothing more to be had from us.
They dawdled, and delay was likely to prove fatal, since a chill wind from the northwest hinted at falling snow and, far ahead of us, we caught rare glimpses of the mountain peaks through a curtain of grayish cloud. It might mean death if storms should overtake us in the Zogi-la, but if we could hurry through the pass before the first heavy storm the drifts would close the door to India behind us.
So where the road branched off toward a village where the ponies were supposed to be waiting, we divided forces, paying the porters and sending them home. We left Chullunder Ghose, who was foot-sore, along with Narayan Singh to guard the loads, while Grim and I went off with Tsang-yang to find the ponies. The trail wound around the shoulders of hills and crossed valley bottoms where the brooks spread into swamps, so we lost the way twice, but arrived at the village, dog-tired, shortly after sunset—only to discover that the villagers had mistaken Benjamin's instructions and had sent all twelve animals to await us at a village half-a-day's march farther along the Ladakh Road.
After a lot of arguing the headman agreed to send for the ponies and have them brought back along the road toward us the following morning; then we returned, along a trail that had been difficult to find by daylight. Well for us that we had brought Tsang-yang! Tibetans all see marvelously in the dark. His hardly human-looking eyes picked out the landmarks he had only seen once, from the opposite direction; and his awkward-looking legs, that looked slouchy and weak when the going was moderately level, swung along now over rise and descent at a speed that was nearly too much for us.
We began to feel faith in the man, he took such pains to guide us and did it so cheerfully. Grim has a way of gaining the affection of most savages, less by what he says and does, than by being what he is; they simply take to him. Tsang-yang had begun to behave toward him like a stray dog adopting a master, and I believe that if nothing unexpected had happened to corrupt him again he might have turned into a faithful servant.
But the unexpected did happen. Near midnight Tsang-yang came to a stand at last between two rounded boulders, and Grim and I felt sure he had lost the way, neither of us recognizing the looming cliff on one side nor the echoing gorge along which the wind went whistling beneath us. But when we began to speak Tsang-yang gestured for silence, and presently we heard the unmistakable voice of Chullunder Ghose.
"Am apogee of ignorance . . . . Not knowing who I am, can't say . . . . Have no proof of identity . . . . Have lost myself . . . . . This man beside me is the devil . . . . No need, therefore, to go to him; you have come to him, . . . You may remain here and freeze, same as me . . . . Recognize you? . . . I no longer recognize myself . . . . Am mystically minded meditator much confused by philosophic thinking . . . . Otherwise, why do you think I would sit here in chilly wind on heap of merchandise, like Krishna on a dung-hill?"
I crept through the dark and Grim followed. Presently I made out our fat babu's shape, huddled in a shawl, with Narayan Singh sitting bolt-upright beside him. Facing them a man stood leaning on what seemed to be a rifle with an old-fashioned three-edged bayonet fixed; he looked like a policeman in a khaki uniform. To be skewered by a bayonet is no amusement, so I crawled in the darkest shadow until I reached Narayan Singh and whispered to him from behind.
Chullunder Ghose gulped at the sound of my voice—almost screamed with terror; but Narayan Singh, without looking at me, shot forward like a statue come to life and rushed the man in khaki, who raised his weapon to defend himself. It turned out to be only a long stick. In another second he was down under Narayan Singh with a knee on his chest and his right arm twisted into helplessness.
I struck a match and held it close to him. He was Tsang-Mondrong, whom we thought we had left safely cared for in the Delhi jail!
Tsang-yang, mortally afraid and sheltering himself behind our pile of loads, urged us to kill him at once.
"He is a devil! He will tell you, lies! He will betray you!"
But the worst of it was that Tsang-yang's semi-western air of independence was beginning to return. He was afraid, but fear had made a man of him again. He even threatened us. He swore that unless we should kill Tsang-Mondrong he would run away himself and warn the police that we were on our way to Tibet.
"Give me a weapon. You hold him, and let me kill him," he suggested. We stood them both in front of us and sat down with our backs against the loads. Neither man offered to try to escape; they were both too tired. Each seemed to suspect the other, and Tsang-Mondrong answered our questions readily enough at first, because he feared Tsang-yang might answer them otherwise.
He told us he had been released from Delhi jail by the order of some visiting official who considered he had been condemned without sufficient evidence. He had started after us without an hour's delay, following clues left purposely by Tsang-yang.
Tsang-yang promptly denied that he had left such clue.
"A dog he is! Like a dog be smelled the trail!"
But at that Tsang-Mondrong flew at him, calling him an eight-faced liar, and we had to separate them, fighting like a pair of windmills.
As soon as he recovered breath Tsang-Mondrong admitted frankly that he had not expected to overtake us much this side of Leh, in Ladakh, and added that he had come slowly because he was sick from the food they had given him in jail. He did not turn uncommunicative until I asked him whether he had known Rait. He denied it, and his expression and attitude changed instantly.
"No, you didn't know him!" said Chullunder Ghose. "Like damn-fool you thought you could steal from him! But he having kicked you in belly, I bet you remember him!"
"How did you come to possess Rait's wallet!" Grim demanded.
Tsang-Mondrong promptly denied ever having seen the wallet. Tsang- yang, probably imagining that he himself had lost it in the scuffle in the warehouse at Srinagar, and moved by some spirit of lying for the sake of lying, swore that he, too, knew nothing about any wallet; whereat Tsang-Mondrong began cursing him in voluble Tibetan and we had to separate them once more.
Narayan Singh went and stood between them to keep them from flying at each other's throats, and Tsang-Mondrong swore there was a lot of money in the wallet, the amount increasing as conviction grew that Tsang-yang had made away with it. The transfer of possession, it appeared, had been a very simple matter: the jail officials had taken it from Tsang-Mondrong, who claimed that it was not his property, so after a perfunctory examination it was sealed and, at Tsang-Mondrong's request, given to Tsang-yang on his release, a week later, for delivery to its rightful owner. However, Tsang- Mondrong refused to say why he had wished Tsang-yang to have it.
