Kingdom (21 page)

The Abbot’s deputy looked sceptical.

‘And you left everything – your job – you say you are a journalist?’

‘It is my job to travel and research stories. I never planned to be away this long. Besides, my past life is trivial, it is nothing more than preparation for this final journey. I don’t care what they think – this is the end. I don’t give a damn about the newspaper, I don’t give a damn about my former life.’

‘You were travelling alone?’

‘No. I was travelling with a terton, a lama by the name of Thupten Jinpa. I had hired him to aid me in finding the gate. I had decided against sherpas, so we were carrying our own supplies. I have studied the Tantric practices, I can survive on a handful of tsampa a day, even when undertaking strenuous exercise . . .’

The white man paused to cough violently again. He is dying, thought the Abbot’s deputy. He thought this quite calmly, and wondered how much longer this shattered body could remain alive. Perhaps only until his story is told, he thought. Perhaps then, he will journey to the Bar Thodal. He would never make it into the Caves, he would never survive the descent.

‘We descended into the Tsangpo valley,’ the man was saying in a low voice. ‘We crossed the river by the metal cable just below Litang monastery – your monastery. We did not want to draw attention to ourselves so we avoided contact with your monks and headed through the jungle, navigating by the surrounding peaks. Finally, we reached our first destination: a small abandoned hermitage two days’ walk from Litang gompa. It was our plan to undergo the Tantric practice of metok chulen. You are familiar with it?’

‘No. I know of it but our order does not permit its use.’

‘Well, it is good for purifying the mind, and Terton Jinpa was convinced it would show us the way to the hidden path that my father spoke of. The hermitage was nothing more than four stone walls with a roof that just managed to keep out the rain. It was situated on a small hill, surrounded by fields of rhododendrons that eventually gave way to the vegetation of the forest. Just in front of the hut was a small patch of earth, where one could meditate with a fine view over the surrounding fields and into the edges of the lush forest. Terton Jinpa began by making a paste from crushed flower petals. His recipe used eighteen different species of wild flowers, some of them unique to Pemako valley and all containing rare phyto-chemicals that stimulate particular elements of the brain or body.

‘We fasted for twenty-one days, during which time we ate nothing and only drank one cup of water a day, infused with the terton’s flower extract. By the fifth day I thought that I was going to die. My head was aching as if it was being crushed in a vice and my eyes were throbbing in their sockets. My tongue seemed to be glued to the roof of my mouth; my cheeks stuck to my gums. We could barely lift our limbs, and simply sat cross-legged outside the hermitage day and night, unless it rained, in which case we would retreat into the dark of the hut. When I closed my eyes all I could see, hear and feel was water; the rolling waves of an endless freshwater ocean. By the fifteenth day, a strange transformation came over me. All the pain began to subside. At first it was replaced by a feeling of fatigue and light-headedness, but then that too passed and I felt as if my mind had expanded to take in the entire valley. When I opened my eyes and looked at the multicoloured butterflies and birds that moved from flower to flower in front of the hermitage, I felt as if I was floating with them and sucking the nectar from among the petals of the wildly beautiful orchids. When I saw the deadly green and red diamond vipers crawl past me on the ground, I was not afraid. I felt as if I was at peace with the snakes and they would do me no harm. The monkeys came up to us and gently stroked us, and once a jaguar appeared from the forest and crossed the field and licked my cheek. The metok chulen was successful, we had left our bodies behind and entered the valley.

‘On the twenty-first day, I awoke and the terton had prepared flower tea, into which he mixed a very small amount of tsampa. I hardly wanted to take it, so keen was I to maintain my state of blissful union with the surrounding nature, but he pressed it on to me and insisted that I drain every last drop. We then collected our meagre belongings and without exchanging a word set off in a direction that both was and was not of our choosing. Even though we stuck to no path but gently meandered through the jungle, we never once hesitated and we never once turned back or changed our course. Some other instinct or intelligence led us on our way.

‘This went on for three days, with brief pauses every five hours or so for more flower tea and tsampa. Finally on the evening of the third day we had climbed out of the forest and were scrambling along a scree path towards a pass that we had not noticed before and which was not marked on any of the lamas’ maps. The path seemed to go on for ever and in my weakened state, not having eaten now for almost a month, I became delirious and was barely able to put one foot in front of another. It was then that disaster struck. The terton, who was just ahead of me on the path, slipped on the scree and in a second vanished from sight down the side of a gorge. In a state of acute despair, I came a hair’s breadth from throwing myself after him. Somehow, I managed to retain the last vestiges of my senses and step by step I picked a tortuous path down to the bottom of the gorge. The terton was dead.’

Anton Herzog had paused. If he was expecting a reaction from the Abbot’s deputy, none came. There was just the rain and the background noise of the forest: the animals hooting, the birds calling from their perches in the branches. The Abbot’s deputy was staring in horror and confusion at the man before him. He did not know what to think; he certainly could find nothing to say. After a minute’s silence, Herzog began again.

‘Starved and with my sensitivities heightened by the disciplines of recent weeks, I stood for a long time at the bottom of this gorge, wailing my grief. Somehow, I managed to drag the terton’s body into the sunlight of the scree slope. There, in the cool, crystalline air of the mountains, I prepared his corpse for sky-burial. I was so weakened I could barely do this, even though I had an Indian army knife. Once I had chopped him up and the beastly griffin vultures had massed and were impatiently awaiting their feast, I retired to a rock higher up the hill and lay down in terrible exhaustion.

‘In this state I must have lain for two days and two nights, wrapped in a yak’s-wool coat, a chuba, starved to the point of madness. With no more flower tea to maintain my psychic functions, my mind and body began to shut down. Gazing up into the darkness, I floated over the Himalayas and visited the stars and the moon. I journeyed with the terton to the abyss and saw the sea of eternity below. I was slipping from this realm and I began to feel that this would not be so grave, that I had far to travel . . .

‘And then, a hand touched my shoulder. When I managed to focus my weary eyes I saw a Chinese man, of sixty or so years. He was speaking to me and pressing a water bottle to my lips. It contained a sweet liquid that warmed me to the core. Revived a little, I sat up and discovered that this man was accompanied by several sherpas. He himself travelled in a curtained chair, carried by four of the sherpas. He spoke to me in Chinese, and when I explained where I was from he addressed me in precise and perfectly accented English. “Welcome. You are very lucky. We only pass this way once every ten years. We have little need of contact with the outside world. You must come with us to our lamasery and we will help you to regain your strength.”

I could scarcely believe my ears. I was indeed lucky. But I had questions. “I am most grateful for your offer and willing to accept it. But perhaps you can help me? Am I far from Shangri-La? Is that the name of you lamasery?’

‘No,’ said the Chinese man. ‘You are not far. Stay with us. You will find our hospitality to be most generous.’

‘I could hardly contain my joy. In my father’s tale of his own visit, he had described how he had been invited to visit Shangri-La by an old Chinese man who spoke beautiful English. So, not only had I been saved from death but I suspected I was about to be led into the heart of the sacred kingdom. The coyness of the Chinese man as to whether or not Shangri-La was the name of his lamasery did not surprise me at all; it was all quite in keeping with the mythology of the place.

‘He helped me into his chair, and for the next five hours he walked beside me whilst the sherpas climbed ever higher up until finally, eventually, we crossed over the pass and the path began to descend steeply . . .’

Now a thickset monk had stepped over to the side of the Abbot’s deputy and was whispering in his ear. Herzog heard a rustling, like leaves, as the monks conferred. And in the jungle, something was stirring; he felt it deeply. A force, something was coming for him. He knew they would find him; it was simply a matter of time. He had no fear. There was little he could do now; the time when he might have exerted some control over events had long gone. Something urgent was being said. Though Herzog could not lift his head to see it, the Abbot’s deputy was looking anxious, and now he said, ‘We cannot stay here any longer. There are dark tidings; we have to leave at once. We are taking you to safety.’

‘To safety?’ asked Herzog, with hope in his voice.

‘Yes. To the holy city of Agarthi. But we must leave at once.’

With that the Abbot’s deputy gave an order and the entire company of monks sprang to their feet. The youngest monks lifted Herzog on his stretcher once more; he felt his head tipping backwards, and then the familiar rolling motion began again. Aloft, he thought, drifting like a leaf in the wind, or bark on a storm-lashed sea. And below him, his face set grimly, the old lama began to lead the sodden and bedraggled collection of monks through the darkness of the night, through the cloying embrace of the ever-moving forest.

‘Chomolongma! Chomolongma!’

The shouting woke Nancy with a start. She could not recall when she had dozed off – she remembered the take-off and for some time she had watched Hussein and the co-pilot as the plane rose through the night towards the Himalayas and Tibet. Then her jetlag had overwhelmed her, and now she had no idea how much time had passed. She saw the co-pilot grinning at her and pointing at the window with his gloved hand. Khaled Hussein was nowhere to be seen. The sun was up and for a moment, because of the way the sunlight was being refracted through the glass of the windscreen, Nancy couldn’t see anything but the crystalline blue of the sky. She rubbed her bleary eyes and twisted her neck from side to side and then leaned forward to take in the view.

‘Chomolongma! Mother Goddess of the Universe!’ the co-pilot said.

It was the most breathtaking sight she had ever seen. Level with the aeroplane, off to the right, was the most enormous and beautiful white mountain.

‘Mount Everest?’

The pilot made the thumbs-up sign. The snow-covered slopes of the mountain rose up to a crinkled peak that looked like a fabulous Arabian headdress, pleated and folded to hide the modesty of the Goddess’s face. Below, an infinite distance further down, a river curled like an azure necklace around the mountain’s base. In all directions, snowy peaks extended towards the horizon – like a thousand worshippers reaching upwards to touch the Heavens, thought Nancy. The vastness of the mountain suggested a realm completely beyond the human, something scarcely comprehensible to the brain. She glanced briefly to her side and saw that Jack Adams was awake – he was staring down at the seemingly endless depths of the valleys below. In a low voice, he said, ‘It reminds me of something Anton once said: “Hell is the mould for heaven.” The way the valleys are like the mountains except upside down.’

Nancy stared in wonder at the bottomless crevasses and ravines that opened up in all directions below. It was true; they looked like plaster of Paris moulds she had played with as a child. The valleys were the mirror image of the mountains, she thought, or their natural opposite. Yin and Yang. Occasionally, she could pick out an alpine valley, a splash of emerald green in the white and grey of the massive mountains.

‘Such a beautiful hell, though, just as lovely as heaven,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t mind which one I ended up in.’

She peered forwards so that she could almost look straight down: were those tiny dwellings that she could see, clinging to the green slopes of a valley? Half to herself, she said:

‘I wonder what the people who live down there know of us. I bet they’re happier than we are.’

Jack laughed, and she imagined he was once more mocking her for her ignorance. But then he said, ‘Now that really sounds like Anton. I’ve heard him going on about the perfect isolation of the valleys – how people who lived here would be able to survive anything, even nuclear war and the end of civilization. He thought that these valleys were the best hiding places that you could ever dream of.’

‘Have they all been surveyed?’

‘No. Far from it. It’s an impossible task. They can’t even be surveyed from the air. Who knows what is down there? I know sherpas who swear on their souls that there are other mountains higher than Everest and that there are kingdoms and peoples that we know nothing about. And the lamas take it as historical fact that some of the valleys were used as refuges during the last Ice Age. The seeds of civilization have been kept alive here many times over, while the rest of the world has frozen or burnt . . .’

Nancy laughed nervously, struggling to process what he was saying.

‘Now who’s sounding like Anton?’

Just then, the co-pilot motioned with his right hand down towards a gorge that splintered at the base of the great mountain.

‘Lhasa – Gongkar airport!’

The plane banked in a graceful arc, turning towards the gorge.

On the tarmac at the airport, 12,000 feet above sea level, Jack and Hussein were talking earnestly to a pair of Chinese soldiers. Nancy waited by the aeroplane steps, breathing the thin, cold Himalayan air for the first time. The purity of the atmosphere seemed to heighten the brilliance of the light, so that she squinted in the glare. Two hundred yards away, a fuel truck trundled slowly across the tarmac towards a waiting plane. Everything was swimming in this clear, blinding light. It made Nancy feel ecstatic and at the same time slightly dizzy.