Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Grim made a gesture toward the woman: “Is our guide not known to you?”

  “Oh, yes.” He pursed his lips and looked ashamed of mentioning a woman. “But the Higher Law attends to whether guides succeed or not. They who die, die. They who do not die, may approach. This is a sacred place.”

  He began looking at Chullunder Ghose again.

  “Do you mean, you try to kill whoever comes this way?” Grim demanded.

  He answered impatiently, as if he thought the question stupid:

  “It is death that kills. Are you not here? Of what are you complaining?”

  Still staring at Chullunder Ghose he gave a curt command and some of his monks began leading our ponies into a shed backed against the cliff on one side of the courtyard. I went in with them to make sure that the ponies were off-loaded properly and to see what could be done about obtaining barley. It took time to bargain with the monks for grain, and when I came out the courtyard was empty, except for the old woman, who pointed toward a door that faced me. I opened it and walked unannounced into a square room in which an image of Chenresi squatted at the farther end. The walls were bare of ornament but all the roof beams were extravagantly carved, and at the side of the room on the right of the image was a low, carved wooden divan on which the ruler of the monastery sat surrounded by a dozen of his followers.

  Facing him on a mat on the floor Chullunder Ghose sat between Grim and Narayan Singh. Our babu looked embarrassed. The Sikh was scowling. Grim wore his poker expression, which signifies nothing except that he is thinking like a clock behind it. Nobody took any notice of me, so I sat down on a small rug near the door where I could watch proceedings.

  The lama in the yellow robe who ruled the place was talking in a vain didactic voice intended to impress the monks who stood around him, as undoubtedly it did. But the dialect he used was more like the Ladakhi than Tibetan, and I was able to piece together most of the conversation.

  “That woman said,’The Lord Chenresi is a visitor.’ She is a woman. There are devils in her. But if it were untrue she would not have dared to say it. It is therefore true.”

  “I am flesh and blood, and I am hungry,” Chullunder Ghose answered.

  “The Lord Buddha also fasted, so that is no argument,” the lama retorted. “You wish not to be recognized, and it is possible that you yourself don’t know what great one is incarnate in you. Nevertheless, I recognize the Lord Chenresi. It appears to me that he has chosen a very inferior body, doubtless for his own good reasons. Discipline is needed — penances — instruction and self-mortification, that the spirit may prevail over the flesh. I know. I am wise in these matters. It is no use your denying it. How is the new Living Buddha chosen when the Living Buddha dies? Does he not reincarnate into the offspring of a peasant woman very often? But are they deceived whose task it is to find and recognize him? And the child, in whom the Living Buddha is incarnate, is he not like other children? Does he not need discipline and teaching? Must the body not be brought into subjection with the help of learned counselors, in order that the spirit may prevail over the corruption of the flesh, and wisdom pour forth? What has brought you here? You say, you seek a certain Lung-tok who is held fast in a dungeon. Allegory! All our books are filled with allegories. I am learned in interpretation. That is the voice of the spirit, seeking to release humanity from bondage on the Wheel of Life! Hither you came, because the spirit in you guided. Here you shall find refuge while the flesh melts and the spirit shines through.”

  Poor Chullunder Ghose suppressed a shudder and the vanity that lingered with him until then began to wilt. He glanced at Grim, but Grim stared straight in front of him — listening — thinking. On Narayan Singh’s face there began to flicker the resemblance of a smile as if he saw the full significance of our babu’s dilemma and was pitiless.

  I think Grim whispered then, but it is very hard to tell what he is doing when he sits with that expression on his face. He can speak without moving his lips and, like ventriloquists, he has the knack of making your own eye deceive you.

  At any rate, Chullunder Ghose’s vanity returned, but with a hundredfold effectiveness because he had assumed it now and was acting a part, whereas before he had been merely flattered by the identification of himself as the abiding place of an incarnate god. Besides, his wits were working, spurred by that threat of penances and education.

  “Priest,” he answered, “who are you to speak to me with arrogance! It is the flesh that speaks. Your spirit would forbid such insolence unless your inner ears were deaf. Shame on you! Ignorant monk that you are, shall you teach such as me?”

  Never a mouse amid the skirts of maiden aunts created such a fuss as that speech did! The ruler of the monastery (he was far below the rank of abbot) had not wit enough to hide the half-hysteria that seized him. He sat blowing out his cheeks and kept his prayer wheel going.

  The other monks were simply fanatics, reduced by superstition and necessity to a state of ignorant and cunningly enforced submission to the lama’s will. It staggered them to hear him rebuked and to see him unable to answer. Some leered, as if they hoped the bonds of discipline were broken. Others looked frightened. They were torn between allegiance to their chief and superstition.

  Grim probably whispered again, although I did not see his lips move. Our babu rose to the occasion.

  “Do you expect me to reveal myself to mere monks?” he demanded. “Do you think I would favor such ears as theirs with what I might possibly say to you alone?”

  The question worked like magic. He in yellow was himself again. He turned on the men around him and rebuked them furiously. His mildest epithet was “worms in a dog’s entrails,” and the mildest threat was “insects you shall be dung-beetles!” He decreed half-rations for a month. He ordered midnight penances. They ran from him before he should order worse things; and when they had left the room by an inner door he went to make sure none was listening outside. Slamming the door again he strode back to his seat, with his prayer wheel like a jester’s bauble whirling in his right hand.

  “Now,” he said, “speak!”

  I admired him at last, in a way. He abandoned hypocrisy. With his hands laid on his thighs and an expression on his face of “now or never,” he defied us, tacitly admitting that he did not believe a word that he had said about Chenresi being incarnated in the babu.

  It was Grim who answered, looking up like some chela answering his guru: “It is for you to speak first.”

  “You are foreigners!” The lama put scorn into the word, and something more than the suggestion of a threat.

  “We are entitled to use this route,” Grim answered.

  “Here I am the custodian!” The lama blew his cheeks out, tossed his hands palms upward and then slapped his thighs, implying, without wasting words on it, that he was sitting there to bargain, not to argue about rights of way.

  I opened the door an inch or two and looked for our gray-haired guide, but she had vanished. The courtyard was empty. I shut the door again.

  “I am a lama,” said the man in yellow. “It is lamas who identify incarnate Buddhas. If I say the Lord Chenresi is among us, some will listen. Some of high rank will confirm my word. It is a good thing for religion to have manifestations — which have been scarce of late, and men are not so respectful as they used to be. Also, it is a long way from Lhasa to this monastery. There can be a rumor sent forth, that will take hold and excite, arousing the hope of people, of whom many will be monks. So that they who will be sent from Lhasa to investigate will not dare to deny the story, knowing how much safer it is to deceive men than to undeceive them.”

  “There is no deception about you,” said Grim. “You are a rascal.”

  “Not so. There have lately been rumors of new Living Buddhas, but the plots failed because the wrong men managed them and the conspirators were too near Lhasa. I am far off — and the right man.”

  He pursed his lips. In that mood he looked capable of emulating Genghis Khan and it was hard to re
member he was the same hysterical incompetent who had been panic-stricken when rebuked before his monks. Suddenly, like a bolt out of the blue, he gave us actual news of Rait.

  “What is this that you seek!” he demanded. “Some chiling who has been imprisoned? Well: they who hold him are expecting you, and if they catch you — Pfouff!”

  He blew out his cheeks again and slapped his thighs.

  “As it happens,” he went on, “those are the very ones who would accept the Lord Chenresi. They are individuals who know that there are no hairs on a fish. They are not fools. They are powerful. Some of them are my friends, though I do wear yellow.”

  “What do you propose?” Grim asked him.

  He pointed at Chullunder Ghose, whose face turned liver color with the dread that seized him. Humor, vanity and courage were all gone and his jaw trembled as he stammered out a protest:

  “I will not have greatness thrust on me! I—”

  “Give him to me, and I will get your chiling for you!”

  Grim held his tongue. Chullunder Ghose eyed Grim as a criminal looks at the jury when they file in to announce their verdict. Narayan Singh spoke:

  “I say no to it! Aye, by my honor I say no to it!”

  Grim snapped three English words at him:

  “Who asked you?”

  Stung by the snub Narayan Singh muttered and glared at the babu. Grim made a proposal to the lama:

  “If you know where the man we seek is hidden, tell me, and we four will make our own terms with his captors.”

  “Atcha! Bohut atcha!” said Narayan Singh.

  CHAPTER XIX. The Yellow Lama

  And forget not this: that outward semblance of authority is not a necessary symptom of its essence. There are men in high place who have no authority at all beyond what indolence confers because the indolence of many is the opportunity of one. Such men lead multitudes astray.

  — from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup

  THAT yellow lama was an incarnation of a paradox, whatever our babu might be. He seemed to deduce from Grim’s speech that we were on better than nodding terms with the black art experts whose prisoner Rait was, or was supposed to be.

  “Chiling,” he said, forcing his voice, which was inclined to waver from so many mixed emotions, “you came here with a White Lodge guide. You go to a Black Lodge destination?”

  “Will you do what I asked?” Grim demanded.

  “I question how you came not knowing how to find the way hence,” said the lama.

  It appeared to me we were as good as prisoners, unless we chose to use our firearms and bolt for it down that zig-zag trail. At almost any part of it they could easily drop boulders on us; and if, on utterly leg-weary ponies, we should manage to escape the monks, there would remain the impossible task of finding our own way forward or backward before our scant remaining store of barley and canned rations was exhausted. However, Grim put another interpretation on it:

  “We are your guests,” he remarked.

  “Ah!” said the lama slyly, “but you said you wish to go to Jalung- dzong.”

  Grim’s eyebrow twitched. That was our first intimation of the name of the place where Rait might be. But Grim put a doubtful face on it:

  “You are trying to deceive us as to where the man is.”

  “There is a devil in you,” said the lama, wetting his lips with a tongue that licked out swiftly like a snake’s.

  He began studying Chullunder Ghose again. Then, rolling his tongue in his mouth a time or two, he presently propounded terms.

  “I shall send you to Jalung-dzong, provided you leave that one here. Let them give you the chiling. I shall let them appoint this a place of pilgrimage. Crowds may come and see the living Lord Chenresi. That will arouse religious fervor, which brings crowds into subjection. For me there will be perquisites. For them power, which is all they crave. That one,” he said, nodding at the babu, “shall have adulation and a life of ease. You may take your chiling and return to where you came from. You agree?”

  Grim did not answer. The lama began to look furious, swaying himself to and fro — glanced at me, as if a thought occurred to him of appealing to me to manage Grim — abandoned that, and played a trump card suddenly.

  “You are spies!” he said, curling his lip.

  “Yes, we certainly are,” Grim retorted.

  Chullunder Ghose gasped. Narayan Singh moved almost imperceptibly, his right hand drawing nearer to the pistol hidden underneath his coat. I held my breath. If there is anywhere on earth where a denounced spy is in danger it is on the frontier of Tibet. But our emotions were as nothing to the lama’s, whose eyes nearly bulged from his head. A spy, who calmly boasted he was one, was something new in his experience.

  For a second I thought he would summon his monks. Most Lamaistic monasteries have their fighting complement — the more degraded ones particularly. Known as dok-dokpas they belong to the lowest rank of the fraternity. Too lazy or indifferent to memorize the ancient texts, they are not qualified to attain merit in that way, so they acquire it second-hand, fighting and brawling to preserve their betters from the necessity to fight. Perhaps the sudden movement of Narayan Singh’s right hand toward his weapon, or, it may be, the look of confidence on Grim’s face, made him change his mind.

  “Did they send you to spy on me!” he asked.

  Grim did not answer.

  The lama got up suddenly and left the room by the inner door through which his monks went when he drove them out. Chullunder Ghose seized Grim’s arm.

  “Let us go! Let us go now — swiftly!” he insisted.

  Before Grim could answer the lama returned followed by a monk in black robes with a sheepskin jacket over them. He looked like a stage assassin. His ferocity, and the care he took to show it, verged on the ridiculous. He rolled his eyes, folded his arms, and snorted as if the very air he breathed offended him; and he eyed us one by one like a butcher considering sheep. When the lama sat he stood behind him glaring at us.

  “If I had known it was they who wanted that chiling who is held at Jalung- dzong, they should have had him long ago,” said the lama.

  He appeared to have recovered self-possession, but he drooped his eyelids. He had a false card up his sleeve.

  “This monk,” he said, “has often been to Jalung-dzong, and he will go now, though the way is difficult in winter. He will bear my message, which the monks of Jalung-dzong will not reject. So when you reach a certain place beyond the Tsang-po River you shall find the chiling. You may take him. Do what you will. If I had known they wanted him released I would have seen to it long ago.

  “You mean the monks at Jalung-dzong will release Rait at your order?”

  “At my request,” he corrected, pursing his lips.

  “Then why not have him brought here?” Grim asked.

  Instantly he went into another of his fits of nervousness. (He must have been a problem for the monks who had to get along with him!) He began swaying on his seat, trying to suppress the hysteria that seemed to seize him whenever his will was opposed.

  “I won’t have him here! I won’t have anything to do with him!” he exploded. “This is my monastery. It is I who say what shall be and what shall not be. It is enough for you that he is to be taken to a certain place, and that I shall give you a guide to that place. What more do you want?”

  “Nothing,” said Grim, “unless your generosity provides a meal for visitors.”

  “It cooks.”

  He snorted and left the room again, the stage-assassin following, and for a while we sat there with a sense of being spied on, although there was nothing to indicate that we were watched. The feeling was so intense that none of us spoke; we sat and searched the walls for an eye-hole with an eye behind it.

  After a while Grim got up and opened the outer door.

  “Bad medicine!” he remarked to me. “You sit there, Rammy old top. We’ve got into the wrong pew somehow. I’ll explore.”

  He took Narayan Singh and le
ft Chullunder Ghose with me. The babu and I sat listening, convinced we were watched, yet unable to determine where the eyes were. It was probably five minutes before the inner door began to creak and opened gradually. Suddenly a woman stepped inside, shut the door quickly behind her and bolted it.

  Some of the Tibetan monasteries are not notorious for morality, nor had our friend in yellow impressed me with the odor of his sanctity; the marvel was not that a woman was there, but that such a female as the one who leaned against the bolted door and leered at us should have been able to play paramour.

  Her mouth was like a gash made with a knife. She was a Tibetan, and of no high rank, which is to say that she was oily, covered with a thick veneer of dirt, and pig-eyed. But she had been told, and she believed that she was charming; and she set to work to charm Chullunder Ghose and me. It felt like being ogled by Lilith, the she-monster who seduced our father Adam, before Eve turned up to make him our respected ancestor.

  For the sake of the proprieties we smiled, since there are no worse manners than to air one’s prejudices in a foreign land, nor anything, in any place, more dangerous than manners inappropriate to the occasion (as the moralists discover now and then, who make long faces at the mistresses of kings). I, personally, am a blunderer with women, but Chullunder Ghose is a Lothario. He arose to the occasion.

  “Priestess of immaculate maternity, we squirm!” he said. “This babu is beside himself.” To me, in English he remarked: “No safety in numbers, Rammy sahib. Polyandry is polite custom hereabouts!”

  She beamed on him and came a little nearer, he ridiculously conquering an impulse to run, shrinking and then turning the involuntary movement into over-acted thrills of ecstasy.

  “Chenresi!” she giggled and pointed a thumb at him.

  “Krishna! Could my wife but see this!” he exploded.

  The woman mistook that for a compliment and sidled closer. She was coy, no other word for it — coy, with a kind of spiderish determination underneath the “luck-covering” as they call dirt in Tibet.