Coromandel!

by John Masters

  Jason reined in. He had seen these ash-smeared figures from Manairuppu to Agra, but he had never before understood them. Now he thought he did understand, at least a little. It was a life of inward and outward contemplation. It was not his life, but it was nearer to it than any other he had known.

  He rode on thoughtfully. Yes, he could understand. He could live that life, exploring ever farther among dreams and visions. Then farther still--what would there be? Would dreams become thoughts, and thoughts, facts? Did they change their nature as you followed them? So that what you thought, was? Or perhaps came back on themselves? Or returned to God? He closed his eyes momentarily. There was a rare exhilaration in this contemplation, almost like danger, or temptation to a great evil.

  But supposing he turned his back on the world, one way or another, as either scholar or mystic, what would happen to Catherine? She and he had gone through many perils together. He thought back over their long journey. She was a woman of action. She was determined and forceful. She loved travelling and the smell of campfires and the stamping of the ponies in the hour before dawn, and dancing. ... He had used to like dancing. This was not her life.

  Tenderly, in his reverie, he touched her hair, and tenderly told her to go and leave him and find her happiness. He was not worthy of her. Nor was his life hers. He would sit under a peepul tree and explore in the mind. He would sit in a library and travel among books. Ishmael did not understand that he, Jason, had already exhausted the shallowness of desire and lust and action.

  But he loved her. He said it twice to himself: I love you. Yes, he loved her, but not with earthly desire. She must go and find her happiness. He rode along, bathed in a warm, satisfying glow of self-abnegation.

  Ishmael rode up alongside him, slapped him on the back, and cried, ‘What is the matter with you? I’m sure you need a purgative. There are a thousand things to see, and you moon along like a stuffed duck. Look, the hills! This is where the Ganges comes out into the plain.’

  Jason shook the reins, and smiled soulfully. ‘It is beautiful, Father,’ he said. ‘Tell me about it.’

  Catherine turned sharply towards him, and he smiled at her too; but of course she could not see. She could not know how much he loved her. Perhaps it was as well. When she set her mind on something she was like an elephant in persistence and strength.

  Next day they entered the foothills. In the plains the heat had been spread over the whole large horizon. Here in the river valley the hills enclosed it, the sun glowered overhead, and no air flowed, except that sometimes the cooler air above the river spread out so that a tendril of it lay across the path. When they came to such a place they stopped and stood for a minute, believing themselves cool, until Ishmael cried, ‘On!’

  Their horses plodded on and up the gradual rise of the rocky trail. The hills rose higher on either hand. One by one the heavy trees gave place to pines; the smell of hot resin filled their nostrils, and brittle pine needles crackled under the horses’ hoofs. Lone pines stood like sentries on the shoulders of the hills; the grey rock thrust up through the grass; the river began to make a sound of bells. Always the pilgrims, struggling towards the source of the holy river, climbed with them. Sometimes they recognized people they had passed farther back--a hillman now hurrying past, his energy doubled by the sight of snow; a rich man changing horses. Usually it was only the backs that they saw, the anonymous, dragging heels, the heavy load. Sometimes one turned to watch them go by, and then they saw the exhaustion, the illness, or the strength of that traveller--and always the shining hope, whether it was a man squatting against a pine while he smoked, or a woman bowed under her palsied son.

  Each day they lifted themselves a little higher. At any moment, round any corner, they might be given a single passing sight of far snow; or the mountains would stride from hiding at a pace as slow as their own. As the path climbed, far ahead they would see a slope of trees; then, hour by hour, the lesser hills fell back, the slope soared, shedding in turn trees, grass, and rock, until at last it stood out white and unencumbered against the sky; then, hour by hour, the hills closed in and ate away the sides of the mountain until they had altogether swallowed it.

  On the fourth night Jason shivered from the cold and spent the night huddled close against Catherine’s back. On the sixth day Ishmael bought blankets and long-skirted sheepskin coats from a Hindu store beside the trail. On the tenth day the river roared down beside them, all young and white and foaming, and that day every pilgrim on the road seemed to have left his weariness at the night’s camping-place and stepped out with the river’s power flowing in him.

  Jason said, ‘They are near the end now.’ And Ishmael answered, ‘Near the beginning. They are travelling backward, to the source!’

  Jason’s horse began to trot out, blowing jets of crystal air from its nostrils. It trotted over a pass; the wind blew strong in

  Jason’s face from sloping snowfields, and he saw in the distance, under the mountain wall, a huddle of stone buildings and a thousand rude tents.

  Ishmael said, ‘Badrinath!’

  Catherine cried, ‘The Castle of the Holy Men!’

  Jason examined the place thoughtfully as he rode forward. Perhaps it was here, or in some similar shrine, that his life would lie. A temple would be a good place to combine scholarship and contemplation. A balance must be struck. He had thought more about the mystic surveying the Himalaya, and decided that that life was not for him. The man who only thought did no good to anyone else, because he did not share his discoveries. Besides, there might not be enough inside himself to provide sufficient food for contemplation. What if, after examining it for a couple of years, he found he had reached the bottom of his soul, and there was nothing more there? Then what?

  No, he must put something in--ideas and facts he would find in books--and then contemplate, and then write books himself so that others could profit from his work. He might think about the world, for instance, and God and Man. And then write a history of the world!

  They reached the camping site. As soon as the tent was set up and the small fire lit--wood was scarce and expensive here, every faggot carried up the valley four days on the backs of the hillmen--Jason wandered away towards the temple.

  At the main entrance a priest greeted him impassively. Jason asked to be shown round. The priest said, ‘You may not see the sanctuary. The rest I can show you.’

  Jason said, ‘Please.’

  He followed the priest, speaking little, hardly listening while the priest rambled on about the uses of the various parts. Books he saw--yes, they had books here. And men at prayer. A priest writing--good! And idols. He wouldn’t like the idols. The priests were taking money for the idols. The pilgrims were paying the money. Not quite right; money was unnecessary, if not evil, in the contemplative life. Still, this was a stage closer to the goal he sought. Not a library, not a peepul tree, not a Hindu temple--something combining all those; but bigger, more glorious, more awful. He would go on looking and thinking. Soon he would find what he wanted, or it would find him.

  Outside again in the twilight, and having paid the priest, he saw Ishmael wandering round the temple, peering at the carvings. He did not want to talk with Ishmael just now, so he walked round the other way and returned to the tent.

  As he approached he heard low singing.

  Alas, my love you do me wrong

  To cast me off discourteously,

  And I have loved you so long,

  Delighting in your company.

  Greensleeves was all my joy,

  Greensleeves was my delight.

  Greensleeves was my hart of gold,

  And who but my lady Greensleeves?

  She was lying on a blanket in the mouth of the tent. She did not stop her song as he sat down, though she had heard him coming. She turned her face to him and sang softer, looking at him.

  She finished, and he said, ‘You have a beautiful voice.’

  It was not so beautiful--small and clear and true, tha
t was all. But he loved her with a pure, empyrean love, all passion and vileness purged, and all that she did was beautiful.

  She said, ‘Come and sit close to me. It’s cold round my back.’

  He moved over, and she lay back against him. It was warmer indeed then, and the dusk fell silently on the high snowfields, and a hundred fires twinkled, and the river sang beside them. She leaned her head against his chest. He stroked her hair, just as he had dreamed he would. Pure love flowed in his fingers, the love of a scholar, of a monk. They must part. They would turn, like angels, in mid-air, and, loving, go their ways.

  She said softly, ‘Don’t you love me yet?’

  He said, ‘Yes.’

  She turned her head and kissed his shoulder. Half muffled against him, she whispered, ‘I’m your wife, then.’

  Mechanically he stroked her hair, down the back of her neck. He remembered what she had said on the sand dunes by the pearlers’ cove. Now she would lie with him. Now he must not. Now he did not even want to. What hurt had he done, to how many women, by that act! There could be no lying with women in a world of the mind. He would say nothing now, but wait till a time and a circumstance came when he could tell her she was free of her promise.

  She said, ‘Ishmael won’t come back for a time yet. It’s dark.’

  He got up quickly. He could not resist this much longer. He said, ‘I love you--too much.’ He began to blow up the fire, puffing furiously until he felt his eyes starting from his head, until the nag of desire had gone.

  Catherine began to sing ‘Greensleeves’ again, and later Ishmael returned.

  The next day they set out for the Mana Pass and Tibet.

  Ishmael gripped with his knees and leaned back as the pony scrambled down the steep. One enormous plain lay behind them, and another, but a little smaller, in front. This land was all plain, split by ridges where the horses had to climb wearily up and carefully down. The Himalayan snows rose out of India a hundred miles back; nameless peaks glittered along the horizon in front. The air came thin into the lungs here, and in the shadow it was always cold. He felt better than he had for many years. Why didn’t he come to live up here? Or go off on such a wild journey every year? But that wasn’t the reason; it was the young people, the wonderful Jason and his wife. In some ways she was even more remarkable. She had no genius, as Jason had; but she had the wisdom. The young man would not be happy without her. That reminded him. He must talk alone with her and find out what was the matter with the boy.

  He screwed up his eyes against the glare and peered forward. He was looking for the black tents of nomads, for a caravan or a wall or crops--anything that would show the presence of other people besides themselves. They needed information about twin-peaked mountains. They needed butter and more of the ground barley called tsampa. The horses were thirsty and walked sadly, their jaws drooping open.

  But it was good up here on the high plateau. There were marmots beside the trail, and stone walls in the middle of a forty-mile plain, and on every stone the same inscription: Om mane padme hum--’O hail, the jewel in the lotus’; and, all day and every day, the howling wind; and swirling herds of the wild ass; and a long column of sheep, each hurrying, with a sack of salt or borax across its back, towards India; and men with fur caps turning their horses at full gallop beside an icy lake where the wind rippled the salt water and a thousand ducks whirred up from the reeds as they approached.

  That time--when he had cried, ‘The fur hats!’ and Catherine shouted, ‘Let’s catch up with them and speak to them!’--Jason had said, ‘We had better not. They may be bandits.’

  True enough, the old man thought. Tibet was full of bandits. But he thought Jason had said No because he did not want to continue the search for the mountain Meru and the treasure it might hide. He was more interested in the scholar’s tomb, but even there his enthusiasm seemed to have waned or been diverted.

  They had reached the level plain. Ishmael said, ‘Jason, ride on ahead, try and run down one of these hares.’

  Catherine said, ‘Yes, go on, Jason. I’m hungry! Go far, where I can see you galloping.’

  Jason hesitated, then cantered off. When he was half a mile ahead Ishmael said, ‘My daughter, I want to talk to you. That’s why--‘

  She said, ‘I know. What do you think he’s thinking of?’

  Ishmael adjusted the leather thong around his head. He kept his spectacles in place with it, for fear he might miss something if he had to stop to put them on. He said, ‘Why, Catherine, I don’t know. I had thought he might have told you.’

  She said, ‘He hasn’t. You would have noticed if you hadn’t been so intent on the country and the people and the scholar’s tomb.’ She spoke with unusual sharpness and Ishmael thought: Goodness me, she’s upset. It must be serious.

  She said, ‘I’m sorry, Father. But I am worried. He hasn’t told me, but I think I know what’s in his mind. He’s going to shut himself into a library or a temple or a mango grove, and leave the world.’

  Ishmael started. ‘Impossible!’ he cried. ‘Why, that would mean he’d leave you too.’ But, by Allah, the woman might be near the heart of the matter in spite of that. He thought of Jason’s recent actions in this light and said slowly, ‘It is not impossible. But it is folly. Did I not tell him, about doing and dreaming? I had thought he understood.’

  ‘So had I,’ she said, ‘but he didn’t. Or if he did he didn’t agree. But what can we do? He needs me, and I need him. Father, I love him.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Ishmael said. ‘I’ve been in love, even though I am sixty-nine.’ He spoke testily. Women--he had loved them every way it was possible to love them; and books; and the whirr of the sword unsheathing; and wine in the cup. The young were annoying sometimes, reminding you of the past.

  Now she said again, ‘I’m sorry, Father. I know you have been in love. That’s why I was so happy when Jason met you. I thought: Here is a man who can lead Jason the way he should go. Jason is of the world. It is not right for him to shut himself away from it. He only thinks it is because we--he and I--have seen so much killing and struggling for money and power. He is impressionable--very. I am sure he has sworn never to kill again. I don’t want him to kill without need, and there are people who must live by such a rule. But he’s not one of them. He’s a hunter. Do you remember how he missed that great pheasant below the Mana Pass, when you told him to try to kill it because we were hungry? He never missed before. And look there! Hasn’t he started a hare?’

  Ishmael looked ahead under shaded eyes. Jason’s horse galloped and turned across the plain half a mile in front. As he watched, the horse swung sharply, and Jason fell off.

  He cried, ‘He’s fallen!’

  She said, ‘Do you see? He’d rather kill himself than kill a hare.’

  Ishmael said, ‘I can’t believe it--neither that nor the other, that he is going to become a recluse. He is thinking--about you, about how to get enough money to buy a house, about what he is going to do with his life.’

  She said, ‘I do not think so.’

  Ishmael rode a long time in silence while the wind tugged fiercely at the skirts of his coat. By Allah, the boy needed a smart whipping! Or a fight--something to warm his blood, make it run hot and fast in his veins. Disgraceful to brood on solitude and the contemplative life while this young wife longed for him and was neglected! Passionate thighs that young woman had, and a hungry mouth, and a mind to travel beyond the physical ecstasies of love.

  He himself was in the way, of course. How could they make love, or even thrash out their problems with kisses to help at the difficult places, when he was there? No shady corners here, nothing but the enormous sweep of nothing. He’d better go out from camp a long way, say he was looking for stones or something, make it clear he would not return till midnight. Damnably cold for an old man at midnight. . .

  Catherine said, ‘I see something moving beyond Jason.’ Ishmael looked up. Fur hats! He wouldn’t be put off a second time. A good furious gall
op was just what he needed, to shake up his liver and clear his head. He beat his horse into a weary canter. His beard flew back all over his mouth and nostrils, and angrily he brushed it away so that he could shout, ‘Jason, fur hats! Catch them!’

  Jason wheeled alongside, shouting, ‘Father, come back! They may be bandits.’

  Ishmael yelled, ‘I don’t care. Come on!’

  The three men ahead had trotted out of the rocks where the plain met another ridge. They wore fur caps and carried long bows slung across their shoulders. Now they turned. All three unslung their bows, fitted arrows, and fired. The arrows whistled past Ishmael’s head and stuck, quivering, in the earth.

  Ishmael’s heart leaped, and the old scars tingled in his cheek. A fight! Better and better! He drew his sword, leaned low along his horse’s withers, and thundered on, shouting defiance. Another flight of arrows droned past him.

  He yelled, ‘Dogs! Pigs! I’m coming! Ishmael of Multan!’ He turned and shouted, ‘Draw your sword, boy!’ But Jason galloped alongside with one hand upraised in the sign of peace, and his sword bounced about, undrawn, in its scabbard.

  Two arrows sizzled by, but the third hit Ishmael’s horse in the chest. The horse screamed in sudden pain. The three bandits wheeled their ponies round; for a moment he saw the flat sunlight splash yellow on their brutish, terrified faces; then Jason cried, ‘We are men of peace! Do not be afraid.’ But the bandits fled.

  Catherine arrived at a gallop. Ishmael roared, ‘Men of peace? What do you mean? I’d have cut their damned heads off!’ Breathing hard, he dismounted, adjusted his spectacles, and pulled the arrow from his horse’s chest. It was a Tartar arrow. Very interesting. Now what wood might those fellows use for their bows?

  The bandits had disappeared round a shoulder of cliff. It was no good trying to catch them. Jason said, ‘I will clean your horse’s wound.’

  Ishmael said, ‘I’ll do it. We’d better camp here. That’s what those rascals were doing when we disturbed them.’ He noticed that the grass under the hill was darker, richer green than elsewhere. A stream trickled out of the hill a little farther on, and then ran eastward along the foot of the ridge. After a few yards it disappeared again into the fine loess soil.