The Rose of Tibet

by Lionel Davidson

  For three days Houston sat and sketched continuously in his head; but by the fourth felt impatience and a need for action growing in him, and he shook himself out of the dreamlike state that sun and idleness and the rich visual experiences had induced, and saw that it was time that he took control himself.

  He had walked for miles by the lakeside each evening with the boy, to shave himself and hear his news, and the news had not been particularly encouraging. It was not that Ringling was idle, but rather that he was by nature credulous and a lover of mystery for its own sake, and he had fallen into a line of inquiry that was becoming steadily more oblique. In addition, he was having to drink to pursue it; Houston found his hiccuping gaiety a continuing annoyance.

  He walked with him again on the fourth evening and listened to the latest budget with a sinking heart. It was of the same kind: a record of petty detail that supported a rumour that a party of Europeans was living in the monastery. But the boy had not found anyone who had actually seen the party, and none of the stories seemed particularly relevant.

  He said at last, ‘Well, Ringling, what are we going to do about this? We’re getting absolutely nowhere.’

  ‘There’s the half-crown, Houtson, sir,’ Ringling said reproachfully: this had been the very latest item. ‘Don’t forget the half-crown, sir.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten it,’ Houston said, and ground his teeth a little. ‘It’s very interesting. I was very glad to hear it. But it isn’t very useful as proof. There were twenty or thirty English people here last year. Any number of English half- crowns might be circulating in the village as curiosities.’

  ‘Ah,’ the boy said; he had not thought of this.

  Houston looked away across the lake. It had occurred to him earlier what might be done; he didn’t know quite how to put it.

  After some moments, silent but for the boy’s hiccuping, he said, ‘Well, been catching the eye of any of these priestesses on your travels?’

  ‘No, sir, not this time,’ the boy said, grinning broadly.

  ‘Have you ever?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. Many times. Many times in the past. They like me.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Ringling told him in what way, giggling a little in the dusk.

  ‘How did you get in there?’

  ‘Oh, there are ways, Houtson.’

  ‘I’d have thought you were too young for that.’

  ‘No, sir. Not too young. They like young men.’

  ‘Even boys of 17?’

  ‘Better than old monks of 70,’ the boy said scornfully, and listed some of the limitations of this age-group.

  ‘H’m,’ Houston said.

  ‘It’s true, sir. I don’t tell you lies.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘I don’t know. Thirty. Thirty-five. She loved it.’

  Houston took a breath. ‘How about trying her again, then?’ he said.

  ‘Trying her again?’ The boy hiccuped faintly in the dusk.

  ‘This time.’

  ‘During the festival?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘During the festival …’ the boy said, sobering rapidly. ‘It’s very difficult during the festival. I don’t know if I can. They’re not supposed to do it during the festival.’

  ‘They’re not supposed to do it any time.’

  ‘There are so many guards now.’

  ‘I see,’ Houston said.

  ‘But any other time I could. I could do it easily!’

  ‘All right,’ Houston said. ‘You’ll have to do it another time, then, won’t you? When you’re a bit older,’ he added.

  Ringling helped with the issue of tsampa next day. The young priestess came round with a mule doling out the tsampa from panniers on the mule’s back. She gave to each beggar and blessed him as he ate, and heard his thanks to the monkey for sustaining him at this season.

  She waited some time with each one, and the mule waited with her. Ringling waited with the mule. He held open the panniers for her to get the scoop in, and when one set of panniers was finished, staggered out with fresh ones. The priestess was a tall young woman, broader than Ringling and stronger than him, but she let him do these jobs for her, and at the end gravely blessed him. Ringling clasped his hands while she did this, but Houston saw that despite his humility and the woman’s priestly calm, both of them were regarding each other with a certain interest.

  The boy went off to pursue his inquiries in the village without returning to the mendicant line. But he returned in the afternoon, and Houston caught his eye. The boy winked.

  He woke up in the night to hear someone using the bucket, and thought it was Ringling, back already. But it was not Ringling. It was the woman, and she settled back again with a little sigh. Houston sighed himself, and prepared to wait.

  He had to wait a long time.

  He heard a dog bark in the street, and was instantly alert. A couple of minutes later the latch clinked and the boy shuffled into the room.

  He said softly, ‘Ringling,’ and heard the boy coming across. He sat up on the palliasse. ‘Did you get in?’

  ‘Of course. She loved it!’ the boy said in his ear.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They’re there, Houtson. They’re in the monastery, all four of them. One is mad. I tell you in the morning.’

  5

  They had cooked the story up between them, and it had worked. Ringling had told her that Houston was his uncle and that he had given up work to bring him here to beg, as a penance. He had also told her that he had been a porter with the European party of last year, and that one of the Europeans owed him money, and that he had heard this man was still here.

  ‘She believed it?’

  ‘She believed it. She will take me to see him.’

  ‘How can she do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir, but she will. It’s a secret between us. You are not supposed to claim money for work while on a penance, so she won’t tell anybody, sir. She likes me,’ he said proudly. ‘You’re quite sure she’s actually seen them. She’s seen them herself, not just heard about them?’

  ‘Seen them, sir. She sees them every day. They are in the third monastery. They play with a ball in a courtyard there – all except the one who is mad.’

  ‘Which one is mad?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How do you mean mad? What way mad?’

  ‘She didn’t say, sir.’

  ‘All right,’ Houston said. ‘Let’s just hope you’re lucky tonight. You can find out then.’

  ‘Luck,’ the boy said scornfully. ‘It’s not a matter of luck, Houtson. She will do whatever I say. She will do anything for me.’

  But it was a matter of luck; for the priestess didn’t do what he said. She came up instead with another idea, that had the merit of not involving her in any infraction of the rules, and she presented it to Ringling as an alternative.

  The following day was the last of the festival and would be celebrated with a Benediction. The abbess herself would be pronouncing this, and every soul in the monastery, and as many as could manage from outside it, would be crowding into the lower hall to hear her. It was the one day of the year when an outsider could slip in and roam at will in the upper monasteries.

  ‘What do you say, sir?’ Ringling said, smiling. ‘She’ll take me tonight if I want, but this way we could both go. We could go right up there and have half an hour alone with them. What you think, Houtson, sir?’

  Houston paused before replying. It had been a long time. It had been the best part of a year. And there had been difficulties and complications almost every day of it. But he couldn’t for the life of him see any insuperable complications now. There was a certain inevitability about the way everything was shaping that seemed to augur only success.

  He said quietly, ‘All right. We’ll do that.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the boy said, grinning. ‘So tonight I don’t need to worry.’

  ‘Only about your health,’ Houst
on said.

  That was how matters stood on the last day of the spring festival at Yamdring; which was also the last day that Houston could have saved himself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1

  THE Spring Festival of the Monkey at Yamdring has a recorded history of 850 years; the Second Festival rather less – it was initiated only by the Third Body, an abbess of legendary high spirits, in her sixtieth year. Since both festivals were prophesied to come to an end in 1960 (a doom almost certainly accomplished by the Chinese under the Obscene Rites article of their Rectification Laws, 1959) increasing numbers of people had taken to participating in them; a fact which accounted for the large crowds while Houston was there.

  Allowing for the way of life and the happy ambivalence of the people with regard to their priests and their religion, Houston was not able to find anything shockingly obscene about the spring rites himself, although some features of the later ones upset him a bit. By that time, of course, he was rather more intimately involved.

  The twin ceremonies that ended the spring festival, the Courtship and the Benediction, took place before nine o’clock in the morning (the Courtship, by tradition, ‘before the sun has found the shrine’). Because it was important for them to be among the first in the courtyard, Houston and the boy turned out at half past five, but even at this hour found the tenement ominously abustle. In the narrow corridors, doors were opening and shutting as the sleepy inmates tumbled irritably out. In the backyard, a half-naked crowd of them besieged the pump, splashing and scrubbing briskly in the chilly morning.

  Houston had slept badly and was sick in the stomach with excitement. The boy had not slept at all; he had barely had time to get in, and was whey-faced with exhaustion. Houston looked at him, and nodded. They left right away, without washing.

  It was grey and somewhat misty in the street, and there was a curious hollow moaning in the air that Houston had heard in his room; he saw the reason when they arrived at the lakeside. A number of monks stood on a balcony of the topmost monastery blowing horns in the direction of the shrine.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘They call to the monkey,’ the boy said softly. ‘The abbess will go to him later.’

  There was an extraordinary eeriness and solemnity about the calling of the horns in the valley that was disturbing and oppressive in the leaden morning, and Houston did not inquire further. He saw that none of the groups of people now streaming to the monastery looked across to the shrine or even up at the monks: they hurried head-down like harried wraiths along the lakeside.

  The guards were out in strength in the courtyard, but executing their duties, Houston noticed, not only in a manner more gentle than he had ever seen, but also in almost total silence. The monastery gates were locked, and the area round them kept clear. The people assembled quietly where they were bidden. The beggars were not being allowed to take up station today: they had been shepherded into a line on the upper flight of steps, and Houston and the boy took up their places and waited in silence.

  Within half an hour, the courtyard, the two flights of steps, the little jetty, were entirely filled, except for a central aisle that had been kept open, and Houston looked down upon a remarkable spectacle. Below him, some fifty or sixty thousand people stood and waited. They waited with their backs to the lake, gazing up at the monastery and listening in awed silence to the horns invoking their ancient ancestor on his mist-bound island. There were some hundreds of children in the crowd, babies even; all as unnaturally hushed and immobile as their elders.

  It was now a little after half past six, and the mist had begun to lift off the water. Suddenly, with a final concerted blast, the horns stopped. In the same moment the chanting began in the monastery. From the crowd arose a vast sigh like a single exhaled breath, and all at once the people seemed to come alive. They smiled, they craned; a slow creep forward began. Houston turned to the monastery and saw that the gates were being opened.

  They were opened from the inside, very slowly, and a man stepped out. He was a tall, lean man, a monk, with a ravaged, wasted face and glittering eyes.

  (This was the Lama Rine, Abbot of Yamdring, and his face was wasted because he had fasted a full seven days to sharpen his perception and enable him to identify the more readily an incarnation he was expecting. But Houston did not, of course, at the time, know this.)

  He stepped out on to the terrace above the steps and stood breathing deeply for a few moments, gazing about him with violent and affronted eyes. Then he clasped his hands to the crowd and addressed them with a single incantation.

  The crowd chanted a reply to the incantation.

  He incanted again.

  The crowd replied again.

  The lama glanced about him for a moment and began to walk down the steps. He walked slowly, enunciating loudly and clearly a four-word chant, which swelled presently as the procession emerged behind him.

  Houston had never in his life seen anything like this procession, and despite his preoccupations, found himself lost in the fascination of it. All thousand of the priestesses seemed to be participating. They walked in twos, the first twenty in green robes instead of orange and wearing on their heads tall spires of golden ornaments which tinkled and jangled as they moved. They carried prayer wheels in one hand and silk flags in the other, which, as Houston watched, began to flutter in the breeze that sprang up at that moment from the lake.

  The slender column of gold spires flowed down the steps and crossed the courtyard with astonishing grace and beauty; and presently monks followed, forty couples of them, swinging golden censers and deepening the shrill chant of the women. Houston saw that the middle four carried between them, suspended from thin chains, a large salver of beaten gold. There was a sparkling of dull green stones on the salver that he thought must be rough emeralds, and the crowd bowed as the salver passed. But their eyes remained on the monastery, and after the second body of women had passed, he saw why.

  A woman came out. She was enormously fat and enormously imposing in green robes and a vast tricorn head-dress. She was also enormously out of breath. She stood on the terrace staring about her, and panting hard.

  At sight of her, there was an extraordinary transformation in the crowd; in a twinkling all faces had turned black. With incredulity Houston looked again, and realized he was seeing merely the tops of heads. The crowd had bowed deeply; it was sinking to its feet.

  He felt the boy’s hand plucking at him, and he sank down himself, and in the presence of the she-devil felt the hairs rising at the back of his neck. But he looked up presently and saw he was mistaken. For the woman in the tricorn was not the she-devil. She had stepped aside; she had sunk, gasping, to her own knees. Another procession was issuing from the monastery.

  It was a small procession. There was just a single palanquin, supported on the shoulders of eight monks. A devil sat in the palanquin. She sat up straight in green robes, with her legs crossed and her hands clasped before her, her terrible face staring straight ahead. The devil’s face was all of gold, with pointed ears and a leering mouth, and empty slits for eyes, and polished emeralds for eyeballs.

  The gooseflesh had come and gone quickly, and Houston looked hard as the palanquin went by him, and saw the white of an eye glimmering from behind the emerald. He saw also that the devil’s face was not on securely; it shook slightly with the motion of the palanquin.

  The fat priestess in the tricorn laboured to her feet and brought up the rear of the procession; and that for the moment seemed to be the end of it.

  A wave of hilarity swept over the crowd as they stumbled to their feet and fell, laughing, against each other. Houston moved gladly from one stiff leg to the other, stamping to restore the circulation in the cool morning.

  The mist had quite lifted from the island, and the leaders seemed already to have arrived. He saw the green and gold thread swaying towards the shrine. He had heard something of the procedure: the entire procession would walk round the monkey,
and then leave the abbess alone with him. She would commune with her once and only husband, in the terms of their courtship, and then return to give his benediction.

  He thought, in the general murmuring, that he might chance a word in the boy’s ear, and he whispered, ‘How long before they bring her back?’

  The boy looked round him nervously, and muttered ‘They don’t bring her. She comes herself.’

  ‘She walks back?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘She just appears. She appears in the monastery.’

  ‘How?’

  The boy didn’t know how, for it was an annual miracle. He was too nervous to say another word with the crowds hemming in on all sides, and merely shook his head.

  The she-devil certainly did not seem to be expected again. The crowd chattered and craned quite gaily as the abbot, the priestesses, the monks, and finally the empty palanquin returned and entered the monastery.

  Houston was left to ponder.

  Two monks came out presently, and called to the officer of the guard, and he saw they were discussing arrangements for the admission of the crowd. It seemed that the beggars were to be allowed in first, and one of the monks came over and shifted them up a step, and was then joined by his colleague, who carried, Houston noticed suddenly, a large wood-bound book in one hand and a writing brush and ink-horn in the other.

  There was no reason as yet for his stomach to turn over at sight of these implements; and he could cite it later as a useful instance of the premonitory faculty at work, for it did so. It turned over and over, and every nerve in his body cried out to him to turn and lose himself in the crowd. But he did not do this. For he saw that the boy, far from sharing his apprehension, was actually laughing. He was laughing quite heartily, and the monks were laughing, and the beggars were laughing too.