Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  We were in haste to be off because the grain for the ponies was running short, so we left before I had fully recovered, starting one morning as soon as daylight had crept midway down into the valley over which the ledge in front of the cave mouth hung like an eagle’s eerie. The old hermit stowed a dozen grains of barley in his cheek and led the way on foot without a word of comment, netting such a pace as gave the loaded ponies hard work to keep up with him, scrambling as they had to, up and down a narrow trail that would have made even mountain sheep look to their laurels.

  Above us the ice hung from the ledges. Beneath us more often than not was a drop of a sheer half a mile through an amethyst void to the rocks in the bed of a frozen water course. At times the loaded ponies had to lean outward over a precipice to the point where equilibrium almost vanished in order to feel their way around a projecting spur. Wherever the trail was level for a few yards there was ice or frozen snow as slippery as glass, and we grew used to riding with a left leg over nothing while the pony picked his way along the loose rim of infinity.

  To have found that trail with the aid of a map and instruments would have been a task to baffle survey engineers. The way the hermit followed it, not hesitating except to pause, leaning into the wind on some naked crag upreared against the sky to let us overtake him, was a miracle as great as any I have witnessed. There were places where we had to lift the ponies in the bight of a sling around their rumps, all four of us hauling together and the ponies digging toes into whatever cracks their scrambling hoofs could find. The hermit never lent a hand but merely stood and watched us scornfully.

  He looked more than ever scornful when we called a halt for a meal and to rest the animals — he sticking his tongue in his cheek to transfer one lone grain of roasted barley, which he chewed for as long as it took me to eat a substantial meal of canned army rations.

  Whoever mapped out stages on that secret route was, like our hermit guide, a seven-league booted individual. Or possibly the gods, to whom Chullunder Ghose attributed all circumstances that he did not understand, had set the distances — forgetful that mere humans and their ponies had to crawl like tired ants over mountains from one valley to the next. It was dusk, and the gorges were purple with echoing gloom when we sighted a smoke among crags on a ledge in the distance. It was pitch dark, starless, with the bellies of black clouds descending on us in a noise of volleying wind, when we rode at last into a great, wide, slot-shaped cavern mouth, from which a maze of passages led into a limestone mountain.

  Here we were met by a woman who looked like a man, with a leather shirt hiding her dry dugs and a mass of wind-blown gray hair framing a face like a fury’s. The sinews of her naked, bronzed legs were like whipcord and the muscles of her arms looked capable of war with the rocks for weapons. Yet she was as peaceful as she seemed belligerent.

  Her age was beyond guessing, though she moved with the agility of youth, swinging herself from the loins as she strode down a passage in front of us, whirling a torch made of resinous wood. She had nothing to say. Our old guide found his tongue and interrupted the gestures she made with the flaring torch, she standing at the entrance of a cave where he explained we were to leave the ponies. There was no light in there, but she followed, after we had felt our way in darkness over horse dung ages old, and when we began off-loading the ponies she passed her torch to our hermit guide and lent a hand so masterfully that Chullunder Ghose stood back and watched her.

  Then she spoke at last in vowelly, musical Pashtu, mocking the babu, calling him “fat Chenresi.”

  “Mother of a million virgins,” he retorted, “I, who have known many women, marvel! I will be Chenresi and remain forever, if you will be high priestess and do all the hard work!”

  She seemed to have taken a sudden fancy to him, flashing smiles that showed astonishingly perfect yellow teeth. But when she smiled she looked a thousand years old, because her face broke into deep, criss-crossed wrinkles, that all vanished when the smile was gone.

  She resumed her torch and led the way out of the cave when we had fed the ponies, taking no notice of our guide except to nod to him when he turned to the left in the passage and went off alone toward the entrance.

  We could hear that the storm had burst. There was a din among the crags outside as if whole mountains were being torn up by the wind. No siege guns ever made more cannonade than that. Hail like the rattle of musketry shattered itself into glassy splinters on the cavern threshold; and through a fissure in the rock wall the wind screamed like the artillery shells in Flanders. Yet our old guide walked toward the entrance as if nothing in the world were wrong.

  Grim remonstrated, hesitating when the woman beckoned to us with the torch to follow her.

  “You will let him go out into that?” he objected.

  She laughed, with a flash of her eye teeth that suggested scorn. “Does duty cease because of wind and snow?” she asked. “And are you in authority here?”

  She led along the passage past a dozen openings that echoed to the tumult of the storm, then turned a hairpin corner suddenly and began to descend stairs hewn out of the rock — enormous stairs, each six or eight feet from front to rear, irregularly spaced.

  Presently she beat the torch out and we saw a dim light down below us and a long way off. Its dimness was peculiar, suggesting an electric arc light seen through milky mist, and there were strange shapes like the branches of trees in a nightmare forest that kept changing, and changing their color too, as we drew nearer.

  I was last. Grim, next to the woman, felt his way with hand on the wall, we treading in his footsteps because the edges of the stairs were shadowy and irregular.

  “By gad — ice!” he called back. And then: “No — stalactites!”

  It was growing noticeably warmer as we kept descending into light that steadily increased. And presently the sound of voices came toward us, like the far-off murmur of a crowd, reminding me of the dull roar at a race course when the race is on and the crowd leans staring down the course.

  But when we turned a sudden corner between gleaming stalactites the scene resembled nothing I had ever seen or expect to see again. Down three steps was a gallery of solid stalagmite that overhung an oval cavern, whose walls, floor, domed roof and a maze of feathery, fantastic columns all were opal-colored, gleaming in the light reflected from a dozen braziers and from a log fire set nearly in the midst.

  Around the fire a dozen men were seated, talking and as dignified as owls. It was their quiet voices that had come rumbling up the stairway like the clamor of a crowd. Three or four of them appeared to be Tibetans but the others were of various Eastern races, and they were of all ages from about forty years old upward.

  There was not one visible inch of all that cavern uncovered by calcium carbonate that had percolated through the limestone roof for countless centuries and finally ceased dripping, leaving the cavern dry and lovelier than fairy land. It looked like a lacquer of mother o’ pearl, for there was color in the stuff — rose, blue, green, yellow — blending into iridescence as it caught reflected firelight.

  At the end of the cavern facing us, in a shallow domed recess proportioned perfectly to the dimensions of the cavern, sat three images that had been carved out of the rock. Those, too, were covered with the lacquer-like ooze, as evenly and perfectly as if the overlay were done by hand. The images were double life size, squatting cross-legged in the Buddhist attitude of meditation, and the one in the center suggested Chenresi — in the way that the moon, perhaps, suggests an arc light.

  The perfection of that carving was so marvelous (the figure in the midst particularly) that neither Grim nor I could take our eyes off it. It seemed almost to breathe, as if the artist’s hand had caught the unseen spirit with the flesh and fashioned its resemblance in the stone. Calm, dignified, benevolent, aware of all immensity, it meditated on man’s relation to the universe; and those on either side sat comprehending what the central image thought.

  There was so much wisdom symbolized on
the central figure’s face, and so much alert intelligence on the faces of the other two, that the impulse was to creep toward them silently and sit and listen. None of us spoke for I don’t know how many minutes, although the men around the fire continued talking, their voices booming and rumbling.

  “They can’t be Buddhist carvings,” Grim said at last. “It took a hundred thousand years to form this stuff.”

  He touched the stalagmitic covering of the gallery with his finger. It was as smooth as if hand polished. The woman laughed, perhaps at our amazement, and beckoned us to follow her down hewn steps, covered with the same smooth, ice-hard lacquer, to the cavern floor. They were slippery; and it was clear that once they had been worn in ruts by human feet. But by some unguessable alchemy the ruts had been refilled with the stalagmitic stuff, restoring the perfect squareness of the hewn blocks.

  None took the slightest notice of us as the woman led the way across the floor toward those images. The men who sat around the fire continued talking. Nor did she appear to feel much reverence for the images. She approached them with an air of amusement, pointing at the one in the midst, then turning to laugh at Chullunder Ghose.

  “Fat Chenresi!” she exclaimed.

  Barring that our babu had a full week’s growth of curling, coarse, black whiskers, the superficial likeness was amazing, even to the broad, strong shoulders and the well filled paunch. There was the same majestic forehead, the same contemplative calmness of the eyes, the full, well-rounded head and width between the ears. The babu had it all, except the costume and the dignity.

  He laughed, uncomfortably conscious of the difference, and tried to hide confusion with a jest:

  “Yes, I sat for the portrait. Does it do me justice?”

  Grim touched the woman’s arm. “But is that Chenresi?” he demanded. He had been examining the image. The surface of the stone had cracked with age, the way dry cheese does, and the stalagmitic substance had come later, filling the cracks and preserving the whole.

  “Are you your grandfather?” she retorted. Then she pointed at the oldest man who sat a little apart from the others within the circle of the firelight. “Ask him,” she suggested.

  She led the way toward the fire, we following in a rather diffident group since we seemed to be interrupting earnest conversation that was no concern of ours. But that oldest man looked up and glanced at us as if he knew why we had come, and who we were.

  “Have they washed! Have they eaten!” he asked in Pashtu. The woman made no answer but beckoned us to follow her to an opening under the gallery by which we had entered. It was a natural break in the wall of the cavern that had been trimmed into a keyhole arch shape and then subsequently covered with the pearly stalagmitic stuff. It led into a cave in which one lamp was burning above a deep trough through which about two feet of water flowed. The sides of the cave were moist from the warmth of the water, which was slightly more than body heat.

  We got into that trough and wallowed. It was the first bath we had had for weeks. The feel of good clean water on my healing wounds was like a taste of paradise, and the water was faintly sulfurous, which may or may not be advised in the medical text books as a remedy for stabs and saddle sores, but which made me feel as if my injuries had never happened.

  There was room for us all in the trough and to spare; there would have been room for another half-dozen of us; and we fooled and splashed like youngsters until the woman’s voice drew our attention to the fact that somebody had mentioned food. It was then, but not until then, that we realized that she had stood and watched us all the time, leaning with one hand on the keyhole arch by which we entered.

  Grim called her “mother,” I suppose to restore his self-possession, and since we never learned her name the title stuck to her, she accepting it without comment, and adopting the role more or less. For instance, she came and examined my wounds, making me keep turning in the lamp-light, and then she had satisfied herself she went and brought washed gauzy stuff for bandages which she tore into strips and helped me to tie on. She also brought some fleeces to be used as towels, laughing because we had to put on filthy clothing over clean skins.

  Then she led us to another cave, gloomy, and full of sound because the wind was whistling through a tunnel overhead. There was hot boiled barley ready for us in enameled iron bowls, with iron spoons that looked like shovels; and tea in the Tibetan style, containing salt, and butter made from yak milk, which is not so bad when you are used to it. The while we ate she watched us as if eating were a loathsome ritual indulged in only by the ignorant. Nevertheless, she brought us second helpings from some sort of pantry at the end of a dark passage, where a man’s voice like an ogre’s greeted her each time she entered.

  When we had eaten our fill at last she led us back to the main cavern, where the group was still in conversation around the blazing fire. She gestured at the fire and grinned at us.

  “Wood — wood — we shall need wood in the morning!” she remarked. “Snow — snow — snow — you will have to dig for it!”

  The oldest man, whose mat was a little apart from the others, rebuked her for the speech and motioned to us to be seated in a group together on his right hand where there was a wide gap in the circle. So we sat down on the polished floor, which was neither warm nor comfortable— “like a missionary’s heaven,” as Grim whispered through the corner of his mouth. But the woman fetched the fleeces on which we had dried ourselves, so we squatted on those and felt less like paupers at a rich man’s entertainment.

  “You are welcome,” said he who had rebuked the woman, and the softly voweled Hindi that he used suggested even more than friendliness. He was another who had the gift of putting strangers instantly at ease.

  I have called him the oldest man in that strange gathering, and so undoubtedly he was. But under scrutiny his face had the appearance of undying youth. There were no wrinkles; his short neat beard was black and so was as much of his hair as we could see under the edge of his brown turban. His teeth were regular, well kept and white. He sat bolt-upright, bearing his weight from the loins with the grace of an athlete. His hands were strong, firm, young looking and, though obviously used to exercise, well kept, with clean, unbroken nails.

  He wore a gold bead necklace tucked into the bosom of a brown smock, and a ring on his middle finger like those that Rao Singh and Lhaten wore. His cloak was of dark-brown homespun, unembroidered. He had noticeably brown eyes, large and well spaced. It was only they, on scrutiny, that hinted at his age; they looked so much too wise to be a young man’s.

  Yet — if one looked away from him, and looked back suddenly, one wondered that a man so old as he could sit up straight and talk — or even live! There was age, not skin-deep, on his surface, like an eggshell only more transparent; and within was not exactly youth but a maturity that had refused to grow old.

  “You like this place?” he asked. “You wonder at it?” And we all made affirmations of amazement — asinine remarks, attempting to find adjectives that should describe the indescribable, like four fool tourists looking at the Taj Mahal. Grim was the first to begin to talk sense:

  “When I asked just now whether that is an image of Chenresi, I was asked in return whether I am my own grandfather. Would you care to explain?”

  The man smiled. “They call you Jimgrim, I am told. Men give you a good reputation. I am not surprised at that. Chenresi, as known nowadays, is a Lamaistic legend — to all intents and purposes a god who is worshiped by ignorant monks. What you see over there is the symbol that men carved, quite a number of thousands of years before Gautama taught certain spiritual truths. From that original men took the pattern for Chenresi’s image, continually multiplying copies of it, each more imperfect than the last, and finally forgetting the very existence of the original.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him how he knew Grim’s name, but before I could speak he himself asked a question, which I answered before Grim could get a word in.

  “Why are you he
re!” he demanded.

  “We are on our way to rescue a man named Rait, who is in the hands of people who have been described to us as dugpas,” I said, “but we don’t know where he is nor how to get to him.”

  Some of the younger men who sat within the zone of firelight laughed at that, in the way that schoolboys snicker in class when a newcomer makes a mistake. He looked at them one by one and they grew immediately silent.

  “If he were on the moon would you try to rescue him?”

  “But he isn’t on the moon,” I objected.

  “And moreover, I am good at killing dugpas,” said Narayan Singh.

  “My son, that is the dugpa fallacy,” he answered, giving the Sikh a friendly look. “Dugpas seek to smother thought by killing those who dare to think. Do you think you can cause crime to cease by killing dugpas?”

  “I can reduce the number of those who practice black arts,” the Sikh retorted.

  “As, for instance, you would lengthen day by killing those who stay awake at night?”

  Chullunder Ghose began to scratch his stomach — the invariable prelude to a poser.

  “Yes,” he said, “but do we let men who have dangerous diseases walk at large? How shall we protect ourselves?”

  “You avoid disease by living in accordance with the laws of health, which are beginning to be slightly understood. And if you live otherwise you are at the mercy of those agencies that spread disease, whether you are aware of them or not. In the same way, you are at the mercy of dugpas unless you live in such a way that dugpas cannot possibly manipulate your thought.”

  “Father of Conundrums! How shall one learn to do that?” wondered Grim.

  There was a chuckle all round the circle, and then silence. He whom Grim addressed as Father of Conundrums stared into the fire and seemed to search for phrases that might mean something to men unused to his philosophy, until the woman threw fuel on the embers with a crash that startled us and summoned him from reverie.