The Five Fakirs of Faizabad (22 page)

U
ntil John learned to understand all the wolf’s different barks and whines — John even had to put up with a few nips on the hand and the leg when Rakshasas thought he was being particularly obtuse — communication between the two was difficult. Of course, understanding what Rakshasas was saying was easy when John was able to enter the wolf’s body as a spirit, but the boy djinn could hardly do that while he was flying the carpet. This made navigation difficult as only Rakshasas knew how to get to Shamba-la in Tibet.

So John chalked a drawing of a compass on the carpet and, from time to time, he would show Rakshasas the army compass he held in his hand or tell him the bearing, whereupon the wolf would bark an affirmative, whine a negative, or place his paw on the chalk circle according to the direction his nose told him that they should fly in.

And in this way they flew from Colorado to Lhasa in Tibet, west to east, crossing the Pacific Ocean and then
mainland China — a distance of seven thousand five hundred miles.

John had never been to Tibet before and, but for the wolf’s lack of speech, Rakshasas would certainly have told his young friend something of the beautiful country in which they were soon to arrive. He would have told him that Tibet is the highest region on Earth, with an average elevation of sixteen thousand feet, and that it had been an independent country until the People’s Republic of China had invaded it in 1950. He would also have told him that ever since then the Communist Chinese had cruelly tyrannized the Tibetan people and that the true leader of Tibet, a holy man of great wisdom and presence called the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was forced to live in exile.

Almost certainly, Rakshasas would also have told John that Tibet had a large population of wolves, which were black and the most prominent predator in the country, accounting for 60 percent of all livestock losses. Black Tibetan wolves — known locally as
chanko nagpo
— were considered bolder and more aggressive than their paler European cousins, which was why they probably killed more people than all of Tibet’s tigers, leopards, and bears put together.

This would have been quite a lot of information for John to have been told about wolves, but then it must also be remembered that Mr. Rakshasas was now a wolf and that there is no subject a wolf finds more interesting than other wolves, except perhaps its next meal — even a wolf like Rakshasas who had formerly been a djinn.

Anyway, John didn’t know any of these interesting facts about Tibet or wolves, but he guessed they had almost reached their destination when they came in sight of a snow-covered mountain range shrouded in clouds, which was so high, so ethereal, so inaccessible it looked like a holiday home for the gods. The air tasted unusually pure and John thought it was as if the hyper-real blue sky had been scrubbed clean by some celestial housekeeper. He had never seen anything quite so beautiful. But it was cold — very cold — and John felt glad of the thick fur coat he was wearing and hugged Rakshasas close to him for extra warmth.

Hundreds of feet below them was a vast and — apart from a very long river that turned out to be a railway line — featureless green valley.

The wolf whined and wrestled itself away from under John’s arm, and took up a position on the flying carpet like an English pointer, which is a breed of dog developed as a bird dog. With his tail held straight out behind him, one paw raised, and his muzzle aimed directly ahead as if indicating the probable direction of a quail or a pheasant, Rakshasas barked a couple of times and looked ahead, his back almost as straight as the railway line below, until he was certain that John understood where the wolf was directing him to fly the carpet.

“You want me to follow the railway line?” said John. “Is that it?”

Rakshasas barked.

“All the way to those high mountains?”

Rakshasas barked again, licked John’s hand in approval, and sat down next to him.

“I guess they’re the Himalayas.”

The sky was so bright that John was obliged to put on a pair of UV-protected sunglasses.

“When were you last here, in Tibet?” John asked the wolf.

Rakshasas stretched out his paw and scratched the carpet once; then he scratched it nine times; then he scratched it another three times, before scratching it again another four times.

“One-nine-three-four.” John frowned. “You mean 1934?”

Rakshasas barked and licked John’s hand again. “I forgot you were so old,” said John. “I mean, before you died and got yourself reincarnated.”

Rakshasas pointed his muzzle at the sky and howled. “You sound like you’ve missed this place,” said John. Rakshasas barked.

“It is very beautiful,” admitted John.

Nearing the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, Rakshasas jumped up onto his hind legs and jerked his nose at the sky.

“We go up now?”

The wolf barked again and lay down.

They flew onward and upward until John’s frozen ears started to pop and his billowing breath began to grow short. At the top of a sheer rock face several thousand feet high, he found a dust-bowl plateau surrounded by a ring of small
peaks that was home to two enormous freshwater lakes. John might have counted twenty-one of these peaks, but he was too busy being amazed at the size of the mountain at their center. This was shaped like a pyramid but so very much larger: The Great Pyramid of Cheops would have occupied only the snow-covered peak of this huge mountain, and even though he was a djinn, John suddenly felt extremely small.

“What is this place?” he whispered in awe of the gemlike mountain to which Rakshasas had brought him. “It’s not Everest. But it looks every bit as high and, if anything, those four walls look even more difficult to climb.” He shivered involuntarily.

Rakshasas pressed his muzzle at the back of John’s neck and pushed him down.

“You want me to go down?” said John. “To land?” Rakshasas barked.

John nodded. “You’re right. Already I can feel that cold mountain air beginning to get into the marrow of my bones. If I don’t warm up right now, I won’t have any djinn power left for the journey ahead. From now on the only heat I’m going to get I’ll have to make myself.”

Rakshasas barked again.

John landed the carpet smoothly and stood up. The plateau was empty, with no human presence or habitation. Another planet couldn’t have felt less deserted. Even the air — sparkling with crystals of moisture, as if someone had tried to saw through a diamond, or sprinkled fairy dust over everything — seemed utterly unearthly. John couldn’t explain it, but he felt like it had just snowed on Christmas morning.

“This place is really magical,” he said.

While Rakshasas found a dead rabbit and ate it, John put on some extra winter clothing: two pairs of woolen long johns, a woolen T-shirt, a zip-up merino jersey, a woolen shirt, a pair of down-filled overtrousers, a goose-down vest, a pair of Baffin Island boots, a balaclava, huge furry mittens on a string, and a fur hat. With his fur coat on, John looked like a short, fat bear, but he found he walked more like a penguin. Quickly, he made a fire and toasted himself beside it. And when John felt djinn power strong in him again, he slipped out of his body and into that of Rakshasas.

“What is this place?” he asked the wolf, vicariously enjoying the taste of rank rabbit meat.

“This is Kailash, the holy mountain,” explained Rakshasas. “It’s the earthly manifestation of the celestial Mount Meru that Hindus believe to be the spiritual center of the universe and the home of the supreme god, Lord Shiva. Kailash means ‘crystal’ in Sanskrit, which is perhaps because the mountain looks like an uncut diamond.”

“It’s weird,” said John. “You’d think that with a mountain that size some of the world’s mountaineers would be here to climb it. And that there’d be some sort of base camp here. Like at Mount Everest. But there isn’t. There’s nothing.”

“Sure, Mount Kailash is forbidden to climbers and explorers,” said Rakshasas. “And there have been no climbing attempts. But you are right to compare it to Mount
Everest. And here I must tell you its first great secret, which you must promise never to reveal to anyone.”

“Of course,” said John. “I can keep a secret.”

“Kailash is actually much higher than Everest,” said Rakshasas.

“What? You’re kidding.”

“It hides its true height. Sure, Everest is a mere pimple at twenty-nine thousand feet. Kailash is more like forty. Now that’s what I call a mountain.”

“How does a mountain do that? Hide itself?”

“This is no ordinary mountain, John. There is much that is hidden here and must remain so. Forbidden or not, the place would still be full of climbers if the news ever got out that this was actually the highest mountain in the world.”

“Yes, I can imagine it would,” agreed John.

“Even pilgrimages are banned by the Chinese, who are afraid of Mount Kailash,” explained Rakshasas. “They may be Communists, but they are very superstitious. According to all the religious traditions that revere this mountain, to set foot on it is a great blasphemy. And anyone who dares to do so will die in the process.”

“That’s a comforting thought,” said John.

“Fortunately, we’re not actually going to set foot on it,” said Rakshasas.

“What? Then why are we here?”

“There is only one way into Shamba-la that I know of,” said Rakshasas. “And it is not to be found by climbing. I
doubt that any climber could ever get there. You’ve heard of the expression ‘blue sky thinking’?”

“Yes, of course,” said John. “I think it means the kind of thinking that’s not in touch with reality.”

“This is where that expression originates from,” said Rakshasas. “When you look at the north face of Kailash, especially close up, it is so large and the rock so hard and shiny that it seems to reflect the very sky. Indeed, there are some who say it looks like the sky itself.”

“Don’t say what I think you’re going to say,” said John.

“You must fly the carpet straight into the north face of the mountain at a low spot where the snow looks like cloud and the rock most looks like the sky,” said Rakshasas. “At least that’s what I did before.”

John groaned. “That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”

“And if you are sufficiently courageous, you will discover that the rock is not rock at all, but sky.” “And if I am not?”

“Sure, then you will fly into solid rock and we’ll both be killed.”

“How will I know where to aim for?”

“You must aim at what you consider to be the bluest part of the north face,” said Rakshasas. “Although this changes according to the time of day and the weather. This part of the north face is called Milarepa’s Window. But in truth, your aim is not so important as your state of mind, John. To some extent this is an exercise in mind over matter.”

“Blue sky thinking.”

“Precisely.”

“So why do I need to fly at speed? Couldn’t I just ascend slowly until I found this window?”

“From time to time there is a very strong current of air that emanates from this part of the rock face,” explained Rakshasas. “Like the blowhole of a whale. If you were not moving at speed, you would be blown off the carpet.”

“It all sounds very hazardous,” said John. “Isn’t there some kind of mountain route?”

“There is, but I simply don’t know where that is,” said Rakshasas. “Or if I did, I’ve forgotten. It was 1934 when I was last here, after all. Believe me, there’s a lot that gets forgotten in seventy-odd years. Besides, the land route is every bit as dangerous. Perhaps more so.”

“What am I doing here?” said John. “I should be in school.”

“Quite apart from the difficulty of the route,” continued Rakshasas, “and the obvious blasphemy that a good djinn should always seek to avoid, there are many wild animals.”

“When this is all over and I’m not dead, I’m just going to stay home and do my homework and watch TV. Really.”

“Anyway, the land route would take many weeks and poor Mr. Groanin does not have many days, let alone many weeks.”

“Point taken,” said John. “In which case, we’d better get moving. The sun will be setting soon and we can’t afford to wait another day to identify this Milarepa’s Window you spoke of.”

“One more thing,” said Rakshasas. “If and when we see the Lamasery — that’s a monastery for the lamas who live up
there — let me do the talking. It’s hoping they’ll remember me, so I am.”

“How are you going to do that?” asked John. “You’re a wolf.”

“There’s more than one way to talk to one of these lama fellows,” said Rakshasas. “You’ll see.” “I sure hope so,” said John.

He slipped out of the wolf’s body and back into his own, whereupon he spent several minutes retching onto the ground, so strong was the taste of rank rabbit meat in his mouth. (This is an occupational hazard for all djinn following an animal transformation.)

When he was recovered, John sat down on the carpet again and, with Rakshasas sitting beside him, he took off, flying as fast as he could and aiming squarely for a center spot on the north face of Kailash where the rock seemed bluest. But try as he might, John could hardly imagine that suddenly the rock was just going to transform itself into air. He’d seen a lot of strange and wonderful things since discovering that he was a djinn, but solid rock that had the power to change its shape and mass wasn’t one of them.

Increasing speed, they rapidly neared the huge rock face. Thousands of feet below them lay the immense plateau. Thousands of feet above them rose the forbidding north face of Kailash. And the nearer they got, the less John thought that any climber alive could ever have scaled it. Kailash made an ascent of the north wall of the Eiger or the south face of Annapurna look like a stroll in the park.

The sacred mountain now filled his whole field of vision. Ahead of him, everywhere he looked there was just the blue mountain and more blue mountain. And for the first time John began to understand how Mount Kailash could have been mistaken for the sky. The snow hugged the rock surface like thin cirrus clouds reflecting the blue sky against the silver granite rock face.