The Devil's Guard, page 7
But by that time Tsang-yang was in a white-hot rage; the other had struck him under the breastbone besides calling him a thief; the mixture of agony and indignation drove the whole story of the wallet spluttering out of him.
"Tsang-Mondrong is a snake whose liver crawls with lice! He followed Rait sahib across the border, beyond Gyangtse, to the land of U. [1] There he approached him, offering his services as guide. The chiling, [2] knowing who he was, could not help but accept, since otherwise Tsang- Mondrong would have instantly betrayed him. All this was told me in the jail in Delhi, by Tsang-Mondrong, who is an eater of eggs and a drinker of milk and a tobacco-smoker [3] among other vices that he has!
"Tsang-Mondrong said the chiling Rait made two or three attempts to poison him. But it was doubtless he who tried to poison the chiling. Watching, he saw the chiling bury a wallet under a little pyramid of stones on which all passers-by hang prayer flags—such a cairn as exist in Tibet by the hundred-thousand. Thereafter the chiling set a mark on the side of the cliff, and beneath that under a flat stone, he put a written message, saying where the wallet had been hidden.
"The chiling, who was cunningly disguised, went forward with his more than twelve mule loads of matches and silk and indigo; and that day, and the next, Tsang-Mondrong—whose soul shall inhabit a she-dog in his next life—had no opportunity to turn back and un-dig the wallet; but on the third night thereafter he did so. All this he told me in the Delhi jail. But I have never seen the wallet."
In the pause that followed that profound misstatement Chullunder Ghose tried to break Tsang-Mondrong's silence.
"Son of purity and virtue," he demanded, "why in the name of Chenresi and all your buttery deities did you not at once betray the chiling, seeing that you now had proof against him?"
But before Tsang-Mondrong could answer, Tsang-yang resumed the tale:
"He could not! The chiling had vanished as if the earth had swallowed him! Tsang-Mondrong, whose brains are a chicken's entrails, hoped to extort much money before finally betraying him. But the chiling had vanished, and Tsang-Mondrong said to himself, `If I tell such a tale I shall be mocked and beaten, for who would believe it?' But now that he had the wallet he understood that one should follow before long, for whom the chiling had left that message; so he returned to Darjiling to act guide for officers on shooting expeditions, meaning to keep his eyes wide open. All these things he told me in the jail, but I have never seen the wallet, which, moreover, had no money in it. He is a black-souled devil's offspring and a liar, whose oath is no good. I swear I have not seen the wallet."
"Why, then, did he send you in pursuit of us!" I asked.
"Because he wished to follow you, and because to betray you on this side of the border would not be so profitable as on the other side, where he can first extort money from you by threats, and then arrange to have you robbed, before betraying you to the authorities."
"Sin-scorning pilgrim of the inner way—adorer of Chenresi, tell me," said Chullunder Ghose, "why did Tsang-Mondrong give the wallet to you?"
Tsang-yang was about to deny again that he had ever seen the wallet, but Tsang-Mondrong found speech at last and burst out with denunciation.
"Why? Because this Tsang-yang is a renegade monk, who knows too much about the insides of religion to be honest! He is a driver of hard bargains. May his soul be separated from his body! He refused to have anything to do with you or me unless I gave him the wallet as security."
"And do you still propose to come with us?" Grim asked him.
The man nodded.
"Why?"
"Because I must find the chiling Rait. And because I know all about you, Jimgrim. You, too, are looking for that chiling, and men say you always succeed in everything you attempt."
"Why do you want to find the chiling Rait?"
"I want to see his soul torn from his body!"
"He is not known as Rait in Tibet, is he?"
"No, but as Lung-tok."
"How do you suppose he disappeared? Do you think he was murdered?"
"Not he! That chiling ragyaba[4] is far too cunning! He buried the wallet with no other purpose than to get rid of me—may dogs devour him! It is clear to me now that he let me see him bury it, well knowing I would return and dig it up, but he took care I shouldn't slip away from him to do that until the third night following. So by the time I had gone all that long way back to get the wallet, and had turned again to follow him, he had had plenty of time to disappear; but how he disappeared, with all those mules and three servants, I know not. And now another thing is clear to me: that chiling is a crafty reader of men's minds! He knew that having lost him I would return to Darjiling and watch for whoever should follow; thus he thought that the wallet might probably fall into your hands, learned sirs, he thinking I would behave to you as I did to him, offering my services."
"You may go. You may go and betray us," said Grim. "One word from you to the authorities in Srinagar and they'll send mounted men to bring us back."
"Nay, Jimgrim! You are more cunning than the chiling Rait! You would give me the slip just as he did, I come with you. If you pay me well enough I will be your friend and not betray you."
"Rait, you say, calls himself Lung-tok. What if I find him?" Grim asked.
Tsang-Mondrong's hideous face transformed itself into a horror that even the darkness could not hide. It was hatred, naked and determined. But he made no answer.
Chapter Six—The fanged jaws of the Zogi-la.
I, too, strove for many things that fools can win and wise men weary of; until I asked of my inner self—what goods are worth the getting? Because strength was in me, and I would not waste such substance as I had. And the answer, which came like the sap to the limbs of a tree, from within not without, was, Seek manhood; and if riches help thee, use them: or if poverty assist thee, use that; but be sure thy goal is manhood and naught else. For all things shall depart from thee, like flesh from off thy bones, when death comes, but thy manhood is thy soul's robe, shielding it from shame.—From The Book Of The Sayings of Tsiang Samdup.
Men are not rational when they have made their minds up; if they were, nothing would ever get accomplished, because there would be too many reasons for not taking the next step forward. But we like to pretend we are rational, since self-conceit is half the art of being happy. We four actually held a conference, out of earshot of the two Tibetans, to decide whether we should continue to try to do what we were wholly bent on doing!
Last words being weightiest, Grim told Chullunder Ghose to speak first.
"Damn foolishness is all right if persisted in," said the babu. "It is being half-clever and half-foolish that gets people into trouble. In foolishness, it is the biggest fool who wins—and there are a lot of slippery places between here and Tibet; let us sample same, and something may turn up."
Narayan Singh spoke next, and we all knew what he would say, although he worded it unexpectedly:
"Do we wish to die in bed? If so, why did we start on this adventure?"
I merely said it would be safer to take the two Tibetans with us than to leave them to work mischief at our rear. Being four to their two we could probably manage them, and they would be useful to help pack and lead the ponies.
Grim said "All right," and that ended the discussion.
We breakfasted beside the road and concealed ourselves and the loads in a gorge out of sight of passing villagers until nearly noon when the ponies came. The sight of those sturdy little rascals, bred in Tibetan wilderness and toughened by experience of packwork on the mountain trails, made even our two Tibetans good-humored; in their anxiety to show us how well they could manage a pack-saddle they forgot to quarrel. Then a strange thing happened.
The ponies had come down the pass toward us with drooping heads and an end-of-a-journey look about them. The moment three or four of them were loaded and we turned them all toward the mountains they began to kick and squeal like colts. Our two Tibetans began singing. There was a chill wind and the far-off mountain tops looked gray and gloomy, but the spirits of the whole party rose like mercury in a thermometer; nor did they fall again until we turned aside into a valley to find the empty store shed and await the heavier loads that Benjamin's agents had promised to send by porter.
There we waited a whole day in abject gloom, and twice we had to separate Tsang-Mondrong and Tsang-yang, who snarled at each other like cat and dog, each urging us at intervals to kill the other one and be done with a rogue who would certainly murder us otherwise. The only time they left off quarreling was when Chullunder Ghose tried to question them about the mysterious evil hinted at by Benjamin and by Rait in his letter to me; they lapsed then into a mutually supporting silence, glancing at each other, staring at us open-mouthed, pretending not to understand the questions, which they were obviously unwilling or afraid to answer.
But when the porters came at last and we had loaded all the ponies and turned northward toward the dreaded Zogi-la, everybody's spirits rose again. The ponies kicked and squealed and the Tibetans sang; Chullunder Ghose laughed at the blisters that tortured his fat feet; we all felt that, storm or no storm, we would fight our way across the pass by some means.
The road from Srinagar to Leh winds for two hundred miles through the grandest scenery on earth—a well-made road with bridges over all the streams. Each height revealed new heights beyond us, only to be reached by crossing valleys gouged out of the rock by bawling streams and glaciers, long vanished, that had left their worn and littered boulders on the slopes. The ponies were lightly loaded and we might have ridden, but we proposed to get ourselves in good condition and to reserve the ponies' strength for the terrific struggle later on, so we did the thirty miles a day on foot, making the fat drip off Chullunder Ghose in spite of the raw wind.
But our determination to save the ponies had an unforeseen result. It made our Tsang-yang and Tsang-Mondrong almost friendly, since it gave them a grievance in common. The Tibetans have a proverb that they quote at you perpetually on the trail:
"If a horse will not carry you uphill, he is no horse; if you will not walk down-hill, you are no man."
They were determined to ride uphill and used every possible trick to circumvent us, making the ponies stray in order to be told to go and catch them, and take their time about it, and come along behind us riding on top of a load when we were out of sight beyond a rise. It did not matter how many times we knocked them off a pony; they were always on again at the first chance, and what they regarded as an insult to their manhood brought them more and more together making common cause against us.
Chullunder Ghose did his best to keep on friendly terms with Tsang-yang, pretending to try to persuade Grim and me to let the fellow ride for pity's sake; and I bullied him unmercifully, hoping that might lead him to confide in the babu. But the only result was that the two Tibetans pitied each other and loathed us more and more. They began to talk together much more than we relished.
So to find out what they were discussing we made new arrangements for the night. We had two tents and hitherto, in order to keep them apart, Grim and I had slept in one tent with one of them, while the other shared the smaller tent with Narayan Singh and Chullunder Ghose. Now we put the two of them to sleep together, while we four used the larger tent, and in the night Grim crept out to the smaller tent to listen.
They were discussing whether or not to betray us to the authorities at Leh. Each seemed afraid that the other might do that in any event, or else that some accident would make us known to the authorities, in which case the chance of getting a reward for our betrayal, as well as the equally tempting chance of robbing us later on, would vanish into thin air.
Nevertheless, they both seemed to prefer to help us to cross the forbidden border into Tibet, where we would be entirely at their mercy, but though they swore long rituals of oaths, neither man could quite persuade himself to trust the other.
Next morning Chullunder Ghose reopened the quarrel between them by regaling Tsang-yang with tales that he said Tsang-Mondrong had told of him.
"Yesterday, he told me, you were turned out of the Dre-pung Monastery for having put poison in your abbot's food, and also because it was discovered you ate chicken meat and eggs, smoked tobacco, and were the father of nine illegitimate children."
"Then he told of me only the half of what is true about himself!" said Tsang-yang, and for a day or two there was a reassuring state of enmity between them.
But thirty miles a day soon lays the leagues behind, and they buried their enmity once more as we approached the Zogi-la Pass, leaning into wind that nearly tore the skin off us. For a whole day before we reached it we could feel the imminence of snow, and the fact that we had passed no travelers coming southward augured small prospect of our finding the pass open. The whole horizon was gray with clouds; the ever-increasing wind, howling along lonely gorges, made our eyes water so that we could hardly see the way, and already, at a height of about eleven thousand feet, Chullunder Ghose was suffering from cold and dizziness.
Our two Tibetans appeared to dread the passes more than we did, having had experience. The nearer we came to the Zogi-la the more they urged us not to make haste, arguing it would be wiser to camp on some wind-swept level where the snow would not lie, and there to await the first storm, than to be caught in the midst of the pass in a blizzard with the wind against us. But their argument only aroused our suspicion; if it should happen that they knew we were being followed, they would naturally try to delay our march and prevent us from putting the snow-filled pass between us and pursuit.
And besides, there was the psychology of delay to reckon with. Whether or not, as they said, it would be easier to cross over the drifted snow than to fight our way through against a storm, there was no doubt that to postpone the crossing of your Rubicon is bad generalship. Difficulties tackled and overcome at the start encourage you to greater effort later on; a policy of waiting for the early difficulties to resolve themselves rots determination.
But when we camped one evening, within two hundred paces of the entrance of the pass, snow had already begun to fall and the wind was howling through the gorge with such force that we could hardly pitch camp on the only level place beside the road where there was any shelter. It was impossible to drive pegs, so we weighted the tent down with rocks and used most of our loads for a wind-break. Then we blanketed the ponies, fed them extravagantly in a hollow fifty yards away, and turned in, all in one tent.
The others fell asleep at once, but I was restless. The howling wind filled me with a strange foreboding of calamity; and it was cold, although we were huddled close together and I lay under a yak-skin overcoat. For another thing, I lay between the two Tibetans and the laced tent-opening, and I had not yet grown used to their disgusting body smell. On high elevations Tibetans almost never clean themselves (although they adopt more agreeable habits when they travel in India); our two were half-ripe, so to speak: cleanliness was giving place to filth and the two smells blended sickeningly. One way and another my senses were all nervously alert.
I could hear the driven snowflakes spattering against the tight-blown canvas and felt, with my hand, the drift creep swiftly up the tent-side, until the rocks that held it down were buried. The wind shrieked as if all Tibet's hosts of devils had been loosed to wreak havoc in the Zogi-la, blast following blast, with short, ominous lulls when it sounded as if an army, wheeled transport and all, were struggling through the snow.
In one of those brief moments when the wind drew breath and the frozen snow fell downward instead of driving nearly parallel with the ground, I thought I heard a man's voice shouting. I tried to peer out of the tent but could see noting. I could not even see the falling snow. We had put out our lantern because it made the air in that confined space almost unbreathable.
There came another blast of wind that shrieked like a million voices, so, believing I must have been mistaken, I drew in my head; but as I fumbled with the lacing of the flap I heard the cry repeated. Even then I was not sure it was not imagination, since I knew my nerves were all on edge; I did not care to wake the others, who would probably lose a whole night's sleep if I should set them speculating about a false alarm. I was fully clothed, with my boots on, so I groped for the yak-hair overcoat, pulled on a leather cap with ear-flaps (something like an aviator's) and crawled out under the tent-flap.
For several minutes my senses reeled before the storm. I could not even see the outline of the tent two yards away, although the change in the sound of the wind as it struck the slanted canvas was easily distinguishable. The whole earth seemed to be swaying over an unseen chasm is which chaos yelled and thundered. Then, suddenly, there came another of those awful pauses, and I nearly fell, because I had been leaning against the pressure of the wind. Before I could recover balance, and before the storm burst along the pass again, I heard the cry repeated.
It did not sound like a cry for help; it was more defiant than that, but the note was desperate. I shouted an answer as loud as I could but could hardly hear my own voice; the storm snatched it and hurried it off to nowhere; the men in the tent did not hear it at all. Nevertheless, the cry of a man had reached me through a pair of leather ear-pads, so it must have come from the direction of the pass and I began to try to make my way toward it.
There was nothing to give direction but the wind, but by keeping that full in my face, so that the sharp snow stung my eyes, I was able to move forward very slowly without much risk of falling into the ravine that, I knew, flanked the road on the left-hand side. I went almost inch by inch, minded to lie down and wait for morning if the shifting wind or my own inexperience of snow should make me lose sense of direction.
