The Rose of Tibet

by Lionel Davidson

  He thought he took some of it and that his breathing and colour improved a bit, but the failing light and rising wind made it hard to tell. There was a pinched look about the nose and lips that he did not like.

  He took off Houston’s boots and rubbed his feet and put him in his sleeping bag and tied it up. He felt half frozen himself, and his tea was cold. He heated it again on the stove, and lit a lamp, and sat crouched on his bag, drinking the tea and watching Houston. The pitch of the wind outside threatened something more than a quick blow. He doubted if they would be moving again for two or three days. He wondered what he had let himself in for.

  2

  Houston’s coma lasted (Ringling told him) for two days. He was aware from time to time of the boy lifting him and rubbing him and of his mouth and throat protesting as hot liquid flowed into him, and of a creaking, aching constriction in his chest. And then quite suddenly he was aware of many things more: a small yellow lamp flickering on swaying black walls, a blast of cold air coming in from the grey-black slit in the wall, a thin monkey face with an anxious grin bending over him.

  ‘How you feel now, sahib?’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘You’ve been ill a couple of days. We rested up in a blizzard.’

  The boy turned away and reappeared with a mug and crouched down beside him.

  ‘Here, sahib, drink.’

  There was tsampa in the tea, and he chewed it and began to feel sick immediately. The boy watched him.

  ‘How you feel, sahib?’

  ‘Not good.’

  ‘Try and swallow it. You’ll feel better soon.’

  He knew he wouldn’t feel better soon, but he tried to swallow. The nausea seemed to come sweeping up from his boots, and he turned his head just in time. The vomit shot out in a warm stream and he heard the boy hissing anxiously as he held his heaving body. He fell back again weakly and wished it would all recede once more.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry,’ with eyes closed.

  The boy said nothing, but he felt the arm withdrawn. He opened his eyes presently. The boy was looking at him.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘I don’t know, sahib. The map was wrong.’

  ‘In Tibet?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He remembered wishing once before that the boy would take the grin off his face, and wondered again what in hell he found so funny. But then he saw that the boy grinned when he did not know what else to do, so he said, ‘Is the blizzard off now?’

  ‘Just finishing now, sahib.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Three o’clock. It’s the afternoon. You’ve got to eat something, sahib. You don’t eat, we can’t move. You’re very weak.’

  ‘All right.’

  Houston closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the boy was bending over him with another mug of tea. He could feel the tsampa thick inside and forced himself to take it. He drank the lot and lay back again quickly, willing himself to keep it down. It turned and rumbled inside him, the rancid taste of the greasy butter rising in his throat. He kept his eyes tight shut and his mouth tight shut and imagined himself out in the wind and the snow wanting nothing so much as to be in a sleeping bag with a mug of tea and tsampa and a fine big piece of stinking yak butter, and it worked for the best part of half an hour, until his stomach suddenly gave a single diabolical turn that seemed to squirt it at pressure out of his nose as well as his mouth before he had time to get his head up out of the bag.

  The boy had been hovering, however, and almost jerked his head off getting the rubber bucket in position in time.

  Houston opened his eyes again after a minute or two and found the boy carefully studying the contents of the bucket.

  ‘Very good, sahib. You kept some back.’

  ‘For a rainy day,’ Houston said.

  He thought he was on the mend.

  3

  When he got back to England again in 1951, Houston found he was ten days ‘slow’: he had kept a sort of check while he was away and he had in some way lost these days. He could account for three of them in the hospital at Chumbi, and for perhaps six more during the time he lived under the ground with the girl; but he thought he had probably lost one also on the outward journey. It seemed to him likely that while he was in a coma, Ringling, too, had gone to sleep for a complete day and had forgotten about it. (He saw him do this later.)

  At all events he subsequently altered from 27 to 28 April the date when they set off again, allowing two clear weeks in the mountains before the next verifiable date (12 May).

  He did not take a very active part in events for most of these two weeks. He lay on the mule by day and wherever he was put at night, and just at the time when he recovered himself and could have taken his share of the chores, they ran out of food. This was not an important setback, but it was one that Ringling had to cope with alone. Houston stayed by himself in a cave for two days.

  Having lost faith entirely in the map, Ringling was proceeding by instinct and his own mountain lore. They had gone back down the track to Walungchung Ghola until they had found another, branching off to the west. This took them parallel with the frontier and around the Kang-la massif. They had Kang-la in sight for four days until they went high again themselves and lost it in the jungle of white peaks.

  They went up to nineteen thousand feet, and although Houston felt dazed and headachy and was as weak as a child, he was able to retain most of his food and was not prostrated again.

  Ringling had reckoned a week to get through the mountains (he could have done it in four days himself), and even though Houston was not eating his share, it was obvious that the food would not last.

  They went off the track in a wild and desolate region to look for a cave (for the boy was nervous of showing the tent during the day), and when they found one, he installed Houston as comfortably as he could, and slept there the night himself and went off with the mule in the morning.

  They had been travelling in a thick mist all the previous day, and it was still thick when he left. There was nothing to identify this bit of mountain from any other, and Houston wondered if he would ever see him again. But the boy turned up on the second day, at dusk, grinning, with the mule and food and news.

  Below the mountain was a village called Shonyang, and he had been able to get his bearings there. By taking a lower road they could reach Yamdring in four days; it would take them six if they kept to the mountains. It was summer down below. The sun shone. The sky was blue, the barley stood green in the fields. There was also considerable excitement there. The governor of the province had himself just visited on a tour of inspection. He had inspected the fields and the roads and the jail. He had also inspected the police force, and had augmented it, and had in addition left a runner from his own staff with orders to return at once to Hodzo Dzong (Fort Hodzo, the capital of the province) if any strangers from the outside world should appear. Ringling had found considerable difficulty in buying food, for the governor’s directions had been taken as a general warning against all strangers.

  ‘Does that mean,’ Houston said, ‘we’re going to have trouble at Yamdring?’

  ‘I don’t know, sahib. Yamdring is a big place. There are always pilgrims and beggars there.’

  ‘Do you think they know I’m in the country?’

  Ringling shrugged. ‘It’s a year of bad omen, sahib. They don’t want any strangers here. The next pass is Kotchin-la – a bad mountain. There are devils there and people are afraid.’

  Houston saw the boy was not too happy himself at being so close to this bad mountain, for he enlarged once more on the felicities of the lower route. Houston thought they had better keep to the mountains all the same.

  The boy accepted his decision with the most muted of grins, and turned in sombrely after he had eaten. Houston stayed awake quite a long time himself. His sickness and the days of wandering high above the clouds had made the warm world he had left behind him curiously remote. That the bo
y should have climbed down into it and returned again all in the space of three or four meals while he had lain with his thoughts in the bare and self-contained world of sleeping bag and spirit stove moved him strangely.

  It was all going on down there still, another plane of existence, like a continuous film in some lower hall; he could almost feel the muffled vibrations coming up through the miles of rock to his stretched-out body lying solidly on the roof of this other world where the sun still shone and skies were blue and fields green, and the human termites went warmly and ceaselessly about their activities.

  He went down after a while for a closer look himself, and found himself in Fitzmaurice Crescent, at night. He let himself into the flat and walked familiarly round it, opening doors and switching on lights. He remembered every corner of it. He remembered the smell of it. It made him restless again, the old lonely restlessness of summer, and he went out again, closing the door behind him, and walked down to the Kensington High Street. Crowds teemed on the pavements and he walked with them past the lighted windows of John Barker’s and Derry and Tom’s and Pontings. The Belisha beacons were winking, a long double line of them, not quite in phase. He saw it had been raining, for the road glistened. It was crowded with traffic. He didn’t know where he was walking and he didn’t want it to be night, so he made an effort and it was day.

  He was in a boat, on a lake, and he thought it must be in Regent’s Park, for he had not been rowing with her anywhere else, and she was laughing at something he had said. He was laughing himself and he shipped the oars and took a breather, looking at her. She was very brown. She had been very brown at Roehampton, the day before. She wore a halter neck. She was wearing a new kind of lipstick, orangy. He could smell the sun on the water and on the boat and the not-unpleasant odour of his own sweat. The sky was high and blue and it was going to continue for days, and he had an idea she would be coming back to the flat with him. It was greenish, her dress, linen, with a freshly washed, ironed look, and he made up the colours in his mind that were needed to produce this shade, and at the same time imagined her ironing it, for some reason in a sunny room, early in the morning, standing very tall in a pair of slippers and her basic underwear, long-legged, girlish. His shoe-lace was undone, on the thwart, and she bent to tie it up for him, and he saw the division of her breasts down her dress, and felt the first breathless, needle-like stab; and from his frozen upper world savoured it again. But he knew how it continued and felt sad guilt and went away.

  He went to a door and opened it, and switched on the light. She said, behind him, Who did you expect to find in your bedroom? He said Fairies, and led her into the living-room. He made to take her coat, but she was huddling into the fur collar, and he said, You’re the chilliest person I know. And she said, That’s why I need so much warming up, wonder boy. He thought this was the first time she had come to the flat. She said, You lured me up for coffee – I suppose I have to make it. He said, If you’re able, and she looked at him sideways in that curious way. Oh, I’m able, wonder boy. Able and willing.

  He remembered with certainty that this was the first time, because of his excitement. He was a little tight and the girl, too, and he went up behind her in the kitchen, and put his arms round her. She said, Hey, what about this coffee. And he said, What about it. And she said, as his hands moved, Yes, what about it, but more as a comment than a question, and they went in the living-room. He had switched the light off as he came out, but he had put on the electric fire. There was an area of soft radiance before the fire, and he went exploring there in it. He explored her thoroughly, and her teeth glinted up at him as she smiled in the rosy light of the fire, the pair of them breathless and writhing through the long thrilling minutes. And here surely was nothing but pleasure, each of them dilated in passionate enjoyment of the other, a limited relationship that gave only pleasure.

  But he knew that it didn’t and that it wasn’t, for he was betraying and probably she was betraying, and beyond the firelight there was bitterness and pain; so he left them to it and came back. He thought you couldn’t isolate pleasant bits of the jigsaw, for the pleasure was relative and none of the pieces particularly meaningful or worthwhile unless the pattern was worthwhile. He didn’t think he had managed to find a worthwhile pattern; and he didn’t know now that he wanted one.

  Lying on the roof, he had the clearest sensation of the trampling confusion in the hall below; the milling specks darting this way and that on forgotten errands, stopping to make love, to build structures and take them down, to make rules and change them, creating new devices to make the errand easier, and trying at each performance to discover what the errand was.

  He saw how easy it was in this high place to find objectivity, and he knew he didn’t want to get lost again in the stifling confusion below. He thought: to remain in this high world of calm mist and freezing stillness; and was presently aware that it was neither calm nor still. Ringling was shaking him violently in the bag.

  ‘The wind is coming up, sahib. We better move now.’

  He turned out, bleakly. It was four o’clock in the morning. The wind sucked and moaned like a vacuum cleaner at the mouth of the cave. The small lamp was lit and the boy had the spirit stove going. Houston was shrivelled in the sudden deathly cold, and he pulled on his boots and his quilted jacket, stumbling about in the dim light of the cave. He rinsed out his mouth with melted snow and rolled up his bedding and sat huddled on it while he drank his tea and tsampa.

  The boy had kicked the mule into life and was feeding it. He went silently about his tasks, serious and unsmiling. He scoured out the mugs with snow and packed them, and the cooking utensils, and the bedding, and strapped everything on the reluctant animal.

  He said, ‘We have to move fast, sahib, or we get stuck on Kotchin-la. It’s better if you walk.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You feel strong enough to walk?’

  ‘I said all right.’

  The boy looked so small and pinched and harassed that he wanted to apologize for his curtness, but Ringling merely turned away, tight-lipped, and began pummelling the mule with hatred, crying ‘Hoya! Hoya!’ until it moved, and the opportunity was gone.

  Houston put on his goggles and followed, into howling blackness.

  4

  Apart from the blizzard, when he had lain unconscious, there had been no high winds since they had entered Tibet. Houston had no idea what to expect. It hit him like the sea, a terrific icy buffet that knocked him instantly off his feet. He was not sure if he was on his back or his front, the blackness in the first moments so intense, the ocean of pressure so solid all around that he seemed to be in another element. He couldn’t breathe and the freezing current, rushing past his muffled ears, was like the sound of trombones. He floundered and was on his knees, and off them again, two or three times, before he felt the arm pulling him. He was gasping, his mouth full of the suffocating wind, and he bored into the wind and the steady vibration of sound, and found he was boring into the mule, his face pressed hard into its hairy stomach. The boy was holding him there, roaring in his ear.

  ‘Head down, sahib. Keep double. It will be easier soon.’

  He nodded his head, too shocked to speak.

  ‘Easier when we get to the track… . Head down into it… .’

  He nodded again and the boy shook his arm and they turned and went head down into it.

  He had scarcely used his legs for days; they felt like a marionette’s. But he leaned into the wind, and found the way to breathe, head tucked into his chin, and one leg followed the other, and he supposed they were moving.

  He lost all idea of time and direction, concentrating grimly on the reciprocating machine-like movement of his legs and the unbelievable roar of sound; and presently fell into a fantasy in which he was a part of the sound, the essential timekeeping part, and it became important that he should not stop, for if he stopped the sound would stop and all would stop.

  He had an idea after a while that it w
as trying to pull away from him, and he worked hard to control it. But it went, tugging and wrenching, screaming into a higher key as it worked first a quarter, and a half, and then a full turn behind him, so that he had to lean backwards with all his weight against it; and he emerged from the fantasy and saw that they were on the track and that it was the track and not the wind that had turned, and that day was dawning.

  They were in a wide gorge between rock walls and the funnelled sound had risen higher in pitch like fifes and trumpets. The air was full of flying particles, snow and ice torn from rock, that broke ceaselessly against their heads and backs. Below the knee, all was lost in spray, the whole snow floor of the gorge shifting before the wind so that everything, the glimpsed boulders, the laden mule, themselves, seemed to be bobbing and dipping fantastically in a river of ice. It was a scene of such desolation in the dirty grey light that all vitality left him. He thought they must have been going four or five hours. He was deathly tired.

  He caught Ringling’s arm, but the boy merely looked at him and away. Houston saw that beneath the big goggles the boy’s face had become smaller and more pointed, shrivelled by hours of wind into the semblance of a fox’s mask. It looked somehow wild and self-protecting.

  It had been their custom to stop every hour or two for tea and tsampa, but it didn’t look now as if they would stop at all. Houston saw that the boy’s mouth was working as he walked, and thought he might be praying.

  He knew that prayer could not sustain him, and, suddenly, that he was unable to take another step, and stopped to tell him so; but as he stopped felt a sudden diminution of all his energy and found himself falling backwards, into the wind. He seemed to be falling for some moments, quite gently, but quite powerless to stop himself, and lay there in the shifting spray of snow hearing the wind scream past his ears and feeling only blessed relief at the rest. The boy was bending over him, lips still moving, and he could hear the words now. ‘Om mani padme hum… . Om mani padme hum …’ over and over again, the invocation against evil, ‘Hail jewel in the lotus’.