by Tom Martin
‘Look, Anton,’ Jack was saying, as if he was hoping by a frank appeal that he could persuade the wraith to change his story, to admit he had been lying all along. ‘Let’s think of it like this. You got lost and ill and some shamans found you – that part of your story I accept. You saw them using the tortoise shell and your mind wove this extraordinary tale, to make up for the fact that you never made it to Shangri-La, that you never did see the Book of Dzyan. But even you know that is ridiculous. You want to try again because you never even got there.’
‘No, I was there. That’s certain enough to me. I spoke to the King and I saw the shamans using the tortoise shell, using nature herself to construct hexagrams. The King of Shangri-La spoke the truth and the Oracle is the Book of Dzyan. The world turns according to her writ. Empires rise and fall, peoples are awakened from their slumbers by the kings of Shangri-La and set to work, to achieve great things that they could never understand,’ said Herzog, his voice so frail now that they had to lean forward to hear him.
‘But why do you want to return to that barbaric place?’ interrupted Nancy.
‘Because I understand now. As soon as I saw the tortoise shell I understood. It is my destiny. I was afraid when I saw the King on the parapet, the prisoner, the sacrifice. I was terrified, and in my weakness I could only think of saving my small human self, my insignificant person. But when those people saved me, I realized the truth. I must return. I must accept my allotted role. In the end it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. And a King does not choose to become King; he is appointed – by forces greater than himself. And Nancy, this is the other matter, as decreed by the Oracle. You must come with me; you are to be my Queen. Together we will plunge the world into the greatest war that has ever been known, and from the flames of our destruction will be born the superman and he will rise up like a phoenix to rule over the purified races of mankind. Come with me. The Götterdämmerung draws near.’
Nancy recoiled, horrified by his words.
‘You really are crazy,’ said Jack angrily.
And Nancy too, though she understood something of the force of the Oracle, though she was prepared to believe almost anything, so strange had her journey been, finally agreed with Jack: that Herzog’s reason had cracked under the strain. That he was rambling insanely in the darkness.
‘You are ignorant, Jack, and you will always deny what you do not comprehend,’ Herzog was saying, in a furious whisper. ‘Leave me here. They will come for me from Shangri-La, just as the King predicted. They will come and get me. You will see. They will come.’
‘Insane,’ said Jack after a long silence. ‘This is all insane.’ Then suddenly he stirred himself. ‘Come on. We have to go. The Chinese army could get here any moment. Jen, what are you going to do?’
Jen was silent, as if for the first time since they’d met he wasn’t sure what he would do. Ever since Herzog had begun his story, Jen had been shrinking further and further away from him, as if he was shunning the real implications of his story. Though he had wanted the Book of Dzyan, thought Nancy, he seemed repelled by the journey Herzog had taken, by precisely what possessing this book might entail. Now he was immobile, mute, as if Herzog had turned him to stone.
‘Jen, please!’ said Jack, more urgently. ‘We’ve lingered here too long.’
Slowly, with a great effort, Jen raised his head.
‘Yes, you are right. We must go. I must return to Beijing and consult with my Brotherhood. In the light of this new information my quest for the Book of Dzyan seems superfluous. Everything I have suffered has been in vain. We have had it all along.’
‘Jen, get a grip,’ said Jack in a hoarse whisper. ‘Herzog is completely deranged.’
‘You are wrong, Jack. I fear that Herzog speaks the truth. My presence here is proof itself: it was the Oracle that brought me here today, that took me to Litang gompa and led me into the forest. At every turn I consulted it. As much as it makes me sick to say it, at every turn I followed its command.’
Jack almost growled at him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Coincidences. You would have come anyway. These are the tall tales of an opium eater . . . you should ignore everything he’s said and come with us.’
Nancy was crouching over the body of Anton Herzog, oblivious to their disagreement.
‘What do we do with him?’
Jack didn’t answer and didn’t even look at her. They had passed an entire night listening to Herzog, it seemed, and now it was morning. She hadn’t noticed the time. And now she looked again at the ruined man before her. His face had collapsed, his eyes were shut tightly, as if he was in grave pain. His mouth moved but no sound came.
‘Will he live?’ she said to Jack urgently, desperate for him to say something.
Jack shook his head. ‘Not if we move him. And if we leave him . . .’ He left her to draw her own conclusions.
Tears began to form in Nancy’s eyes; she tried to fight them back. Jack put his hand on her shoulder.
‘He is not in pain. The opium will see to that.’
Jen was sorting through his backpack, making ready for his own journey. Suddenly he turned to Nancy and said, ‘Wait, Nancy, I have one last idea. Do you have a copy of the Oracle?’
‘Yes.’
She hitched her bag off her shoulder and took out the book and lay it on the dusty path. It emanated a living energy – a dark energy. She could feel Jack behind her, taut with exasperation. But she continued nonetheless.
‘Have you got a coin?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
Jen raised himself on to one knee and delved a coin out of his pocket. She looked at him apprehensively.
‘And the question?’
Jen held her gaze for a second, then he looked down at the book and placing his hand on its cover he said, first in Chinese and then in English, ‘Oracle, is there any truth in the story of Anton Herzog: is it true that you are the Book of Dzyan?’
Nancy took a deep breath and began to flick the coin. As she did so, Jen registered the results in the sand with his fingertip. When she had thrown the coin six times, the hexagram was assembled. All colour drained from Jen’s face. In a flat voice empty of strength he said, ‘Sun at the top. Tui at the bottom. Empty is the centre.’
With fear in her eyes she asked, ‘Do you know what hexagram it is – without looking at the book?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, scrutinizing her with an almost angry expression.
Her voice cracking with emotion, she beseeched him, ‘Tell me, please.’
‘It’s Chung Fu. Inner Truth.’ Jen’s lips curled in fear.
Before Nancy could say anything he spoke again, in a voice filled with anguish, ‘It means that Anton Herzog speaks the truth. It means that Shangri-La does exist and that the Oracle is the Book of Dzyan.’
Jen turned away, immersed in his own thoughts. For a minute all was silence, then finally, as if breaking a magic spell, Jack leaned forward and brushed his hand over the sand, erasing the hexagram altogether. He placed a hand on each of their shoulders and said in a whisper, ‘Come on. It’s time to go.’
54
The fires and the lanterns of the Chinese soldiers who were coming for Anton Herzog twinkled below and in the far distance, down the dark valley, Nancy could see the eerie orange glow of Metok, the last outpost of Tibet before the Indian border.
‘You must continue up this path,’ Jen said in the darkness. ‘I am going in the other direction, to the Gobi, to consult with my Brotherhood, to bring them the terrible news. Get some sleep once you have crossed the pass, and then continue over the plateau and you will come to a tribe of salt traders. They will take you to the Indian border, where the Yarlang Tsangpo goes over the falls. There is a path there, a steep hard path, but you will make it. It will take you through the mountains to the banks of the Brahmaputra; follow the Holy River and you will find human habitations soon enough. Do you have any gold?’
‘I have some Renmenbi,’ said Jack.
�
��That’s no good up there.’ Swiftly, Jen unbuttoned his jacket. He tore at the inner lining and produced a single hoop of gold.
‘Here. Take this. It weighs three ounces. Give it to the leader of the salt-trading clan and give him these as well.’
He produced some small pieces of card.
‘They are photos of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They are illegal in Tibet, as Herzog said, they are greatly prized, and it should stop the salt traders robbing you. Now, if I could take some of your tsampa and water, then I think we are all ready to part company.’
Jack nodded his thanks.
‘I will repay you the gold, if I can find you,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry about that. You saved my life. Just get going and don’t look back.’
Nancy was still in shock, only half taking in the conversation.
‘And Herzog?’
Jen was silent, but it was a silence that spoke volumes. Then he said, slowly, ‘I will administer him one more pipe. We will leave him with a full pipe as well. There is nothing more anyone can do. We cannot possibly move him, and if we stay longer we will all be captured or killed.’
Amongst the three of them, there was an unspoken sense of relief that they had no choice but to abandon the dying Anton Herzog. He would never return to Delhi to recover, he would never be able to mount a second expedition and return to Shangri-La, if indeed it existed. He would die alone, and thus his spell would be broken once and for all, and by turning their backs on him they would banish his awful truth and ensure that free will triumphed; his ghastly and fantastic conspiracy was nothing more than a nightmare. Yet it was awful, nonetheless, to leave him, and Nancy stood for a moment looking down at the husk of Anton Herzog: a legendary journalist, and brilliant scholar, who would now die – crazy and alone, somewhere in this treacherous land. And she turned away, weeping bitterly, into the savage jungle. Far off, the low drone of an aircraft could be heard. It was time to go. With a last farewell, Jen walked away along the path and then they turned and began the final ascent.
Nancy could not hold back her tears. They flowed freely as she clambered along the path. She had travelled so far and learned so much, and for what? To abandon the man she had sought for so long? And perhaps Herzog had spoken the truth after all – perhaps their lives were nothing more than a puppeteer’s sham? Jack Adams never consulted the Oracle, he remained immune from its schemes – but she had felt its power – the power of an amoral conditioning force that Herzog had described, some presence which was directing them all, to an end they could not hope to understand.
She was hungry and cold, and there was nothing left of her but muscle and bones. And at that moment, she wanted no part of the world; she wanted to withdraw from human society. It was a ghastly merry-go-round, a monstrous charade controlled by devils and demons; happiness was another word for selfishness and that was the real truth of the world. Sobbing and panting for breath, she put her head down and dragged her weary limbs along the pass. Behind her in the cave, lying there, perhaps already now dead, was this man – sage or madman – the man whose life had somehow been intertwined with hers – Anton Herzog.
Epilogue
New York
The salt traders had been there as Jen had promised, camped on the wind-blasted plateau in their yakskin yurts, their animals foraging through the thin blanket of snow, their feral children running wild like dogs. They had been suspicious and hostile at first, and Nancy saw that she and Jack were a strange sight, two raggedly dressed Westerners, silent in their confusion. Yet, with the cards and the gold as offerings, they soon found the traders welcoming enough. They were taken into the chieftain’s tent, a smoke-filled teepee where human forms sprawled in the darkness. The chieftain, a ferocious-looking man with a cutlass and pistol stuffed into his belt, had accepted their gifts and allotted two young men and one animal to take them to the border and guide them to the path that descended through a dark chasm, down into the foothills of the Himalayas and out onto the sundrenched banks of the Brahmaputra.
And as Jen had predicted, the going was hard but, eventually, they came across the first village and within twelve hours, thanks to lifts from farmers and lorry-drivers, they found themselves standing on a railway platform, at a distant provincial railway station on the furthest fringes of the Indian state of Sikkim, waiting for the local service that would pass them down the line of the great Indian railway network until, after a further thirty-six hours of crowded travel, they would finally be deposited at Delhi Central Station, bleary-eyed and disbelieving.
That had been six months ago now and Nancy Kelly had left India far behind. Later, she had learned from Krishna that the Indian police had abandoned the search for Herzog. The Chinese government said that they had assumed he was dead, though they claimed no body was ever found. His bones were still probably being picked over by the Himalayan griffin vultures, after his own anonymous sky burial in the mouth of the Cave of the Magicians. Charges of spying were forgotten about rather than officially dropped, but the police had informed Nancy that she was free to leave.
All that remained for her to do was to contact Maya. She spent a tortured morning working out what to say and finally wrote that she had made it to Tibet and found Herzog there. He was dying, she wrote, he died before her eyes. Maya should now take the will to a lawyer and she would be given money, to bring up their child. She paused before she wrote the final line, and then she committed herself. ‘Anton Herzog,’ she wrote, ‘died speaking your name. His last word was “Maya.”’ It was a white lie, though a lie none the less, but what was the point in upsetting her, in saying that she had seen him on his deathbed and that not once had he mentioned her?
She caught the first flight she could back to America, gazing out of the plane’s window as it taxied down the runway in the blazing Delhi sunshine, wondering how different her life in India might have been, had it not been for Anton Herzog.
Ultimately, she could not fathom what had happened to her at all, but she could not throw off the suspicion that she had come close to discerning an awful truth, a truth which had ravaged the frame of Herzog, once he had perceived it. She envied Jack his outlook on life, his absolute refusal to engage even in the merest thought that Herzog could have been telling any kind of truth. But either way, even for her, the mysteries and the implications, whether correct or not, were simply too great to be factored into a single human’s life. She and Jack had agreed to keep quiet about their journey, and most of all to tell no one that they had found Anton Herzog. She had hoped that in going to Tibet she would find the greatest story of her life, and in one sense – the profoundest sense – she had. Yet during their journey back into India, soul-searching and raking over their shared experience in the cave, they had realized that no one would believe them and that no one for a minute would understand. The greatest story of her entire life would never see the light of day.
She bade Jack farewell on the platform at Delhi station and promised to wire the money to his account. For a time they stared in silence at each other on the station concourse, amid the constant motion of the crowds. Then Jack squeezed her hand and kissed her on the cheek.
‘Don’t think about what he said. None of it was true. The fact that he died up there proves that. The fact that we left shows we have free will. If the Oracle is a prophet then it lies.’
And then Jack was gone, back to his world of antique traders, old bones and long hot Delhi nights. She watched him walking away, and saw him shaking his head, as if he was trying to banish the memories of what he had seen.
Her heart ached as she saw him go; in some ways she had begun to fall in love with him; in other circumstances, it should surely have all led to an affair, a romance of some sort. But she was not being reasonable. He was bound up with everything she had seen, this seismic experience she had endured, and she couldn’t figure it out. They both needed to escape from everything that had occurred, and they could only do that alone.
Nancy had returned
to New York: to Brooklyn and the leafy streets of Park Slope; to her friends; to the cafés and bookstores she knew so well. Spring had come, the flowers were out in Central Park. She had been offered leave but refused it, afraid of spending long hours on her own, preferring to accept a post as a desk editor. She sank with relief into the cosy rituals of daily deadlines, the morning editorial meeting, the mounting frenzy as the paper was put to bed, drinks parties, dinners with contacts, the reassuring activities around her. Gradually, she began to put the strange experience behind her, or if not behind her, then at least she found that frequently she was not thinking about it, that there had been hours and then even later days when she had not really considered it. Somehow she buried it. She understood that this was the only way she could return to any sort of normality: Herzog’s worldview, his story in the cave, his dream, his nightmare, his world where demons and masters controlled mankind’s destiny, had to be buried under the mounting noise and activity of ordinary life. And morbid though it was to dwell on the fact, she was relieved that Herzog was dead. He was wrong, or mad as Jack put it. He hadn’t been rescued by monks from Shangri-La and he had never fulfilled the destiny that he thought he had been promised by the Oracle. And this was what made it easier to view Herzog’s account as an aberrant way of looking and thinking about the world, and his story of reaching Shangri-La and discovering the truth about the Oracle as a fantasy.
And then one late summer’s day, the phone rang. It was seven a.m., she was at home in bed, gratefully re-established in her old routine, listening to the radio and just thinking about getting up. She picked up, wondering why it couldn’t wait until she arrived at work, and then she heard a voice so familiar, so significant to her, that her hands began to tremble.
