The Rose of Tibet (10 page)

‘I’ve been watching you, sahib,’ the boy said. ‘There was nothing to be done. There is a pass ahead of us, and then we go down to eleven thousand feet. I thought we could stay there till you got well.’

Houston looked at him with his hand on his heart, and licked his lips.

‘It means we have to climb another thousand feet to get to the pass, sahib, but you can ride the mule.’

‘Will my heart stand up to that?’

‘I don’t know. We’d better see how you are in the morning, sahib. Sit up for tonight. Like this.’

He arranged the bundles at Houston’s back, and Houston sat up for the night. He dozed off once or twice, and woke up, and called for Ringling to rub his back and arms in the numbing cold, and somehow got through it.

At five o’clock Ringling boiled a pan of snow for tea, and fed the mule, and they had a mess of tsampa (barley flour) in the tea that he had bought in the village. Houston was sick as soon as he had eaten and lay with his back against a boulder while Ringling packed the tent. But he did not feel as badly as he expected when he was levered to his feet.

The boy hoisted him on the mule, and Houston leaned back against his arm, breathing quickly in the freezing blackness.

‘What do you think, then, sahib?’

Houston said, ‘I don’t know. How far is it to this pass?’

‘About three hours. It should be light when we get there. We could be down to eleven thousand feet by midday, sahib. How is the heart?’

‘Not so bad,’ Houston said. He could feel it labouring away in his chest. He didn’t know what difference an extra thousand feet would make, but there was little effort in sitting on the mule.

‘You want to try, then?’

‘All right.’

The boy slapped the mule gently. They set off in the darkness for the pass.

I
T
had not snowed during the night, and it had still not begun at daybreak. At half past eight Ringling stopped to get his bearings while he could. There was a mildness in the air that he did not like. He thought that when the snow came there would be a lot of it.

He was by no means happy at the position. He knew his compass was a few points out, but he had made a rough correction and nothing that he could see tallied with the map. They had been trudging for three hours, and he thought they must have climbed well beyond fifteen thousand feet. There was still no sign of the pass. Even in the dark, the white, featureless hills had glimmered quite steeply on both sides. In the light he could see that one of them towered still thousands of feet above them.

He didn’t like the feel of the ground underfoot – he had gone up to his waist several times – and he didn’t like the look of Houston. He was slumped over the mule’s neck in a semi- stupor and his face was bluish. Above all, Ringling did not like the map.

He swore softly to himself, looking about him.

He heard Houston grunting, and levered him up again on the mule’s back. He said in his ear, ‘Not long now, sahib.’ Houston closed his eyes, but the boy saw he was still conscious.

He swore again. All would be well when they had lost a few thousand feet; but it was plain that for the moment he could not safely go up very much farther. He didn’t know what was for the best: to go on or to go back.

But since they had come so far, he thought they should try for another hour. Then if there was still no sign of the pass – back down again, quickly.

He slapped the mule, and they set off once more.

By half past nine, the summit was in sight, so they kept on till they reached it. It was after ten when they came out of the valley, and when he looked below him his heart sank like a stone. The ground sloped steeply, and went up again just as steeply: a series of ridges extended as far as he could see. He thought there might be a way out along the valley floor, but he did not like the look of the floor. There would be crevasses: it might even be one huge snow-bridged ravine.

He turned the mule round and they went back again right away. They went quickly, keeping to their own tracks, and by half past eleven had come to their camp of the previous night. Ringling did not stop. He ate a handful of dry tsampa, and butted the mule threateningly with his elbow when it turned its head to look at him. But presently he relented and gave the animal a handful, too, for it had carried the deadweight of Houston unprotestingly.

Houston himself did not need anything. He was unconscious.

They stopped for the day on a rock ledge at twelve thousand feet. Ringling thought they must have left Tibet, but did not know precisely or even care. He was exhausted and worried, and he hurried to get the tent up. Houston had fallen off the mule when they stopped, and was lying on his side, back and front already thickly encrusted with snow. It had started to snow at midday, and despite the rising wind and the cold had continued.

The tough black yak-hide tent bellied like a sail in the
freezing wind and it took him over ten minutes to erect. There was ice under the snow on the ledge, and he hammered in the metal pegs with the back of the axe, using the axe itself as a final retainer.

He dragged Houston inside and sat him up against his knee while he unpacked the bedding. His breathing was dry and rustling, and he thought he had better try to get some liquid into him. He put his own rolled sleeping bag and the bundles at his back and collected a pan of snow and set it to heat on the spirit stove. He had bought tea bricks in Walungchung Ghola and a large cake of yak butter, and he pared off half a handful of each and stirred them in the water. He poured tsampa in his own mug and a drop of arak in Houston’s, and took him in his arms and tried to get him to drink.

He thought he took some of it and that his breathing and colour improved a bit, but the failing light and rising wind made it hard to tell. There was a pinched look about the nose and lips that he did not like.

He took off Houston’s boots and rubbed his feet and put him in his sleeping bag and tied it up. He felt half frozen himself, and his tea was cold. He heated it again on the stove, and lit a lamp, and sat crouched on his bag, drinking the tea and watching Houston. The pitch of the wind outside threatened something more than a quick blow. He doubted if they would be moving again for two or three days. He wondered what he had let himself in for.

Houston’s coma lasted (Ringling told him) for two days. He was aware from time to time of the boy lifting him and rubbing him and of his mouth and throat protesting as hot liquid flowed into him, and of a creaking, aching constriction in his chest. And then quite suddenly he was aware of many things more: a small yellow lamp flickering on swaying black walls, a blast of cold air coming in from the grey-black slit in the wall, a thin monkey face with an anxious grin bending over him.

‘How you feel now, sahib?’

‘What’s happening?’

‘You’ve been ill a couple of days. We rested up in a blizzard.’

The boy turned away and reappeared with a mug and crouched down beside him.

‘Here, sahib, drink.’

There was tsampa in the tea, and he chewed it and began to feel sick immediately. The boy watched him.

‘How you feel, sahib?’

‘Not good.’

‘Try and swallow it. You’ll feel better soon.’

He knew he wouldn’t feel better soon, but he tried to swallow. The nausea seemed to come sweeping up from his boots, and he turned his head just in time. The vomit shot out in a warm stream and he heard the boy hissing anxiously as he held his heaving body. He fell back again weakly and wished it would all recede once more.

He said, ‘I’m sorry,’ with eyes closed.

The boy said nothing, but he felt the arm withdrawn. He opened his eyes presently. The boy was looking at him.

‘Where are we?’

‘I don’t know, sahib. The map was wrong.’

‘In Tibet?’

‘Maybe.’

He remembered wishing once before that the boy would take the grin off his face, and wondered again what in hell he found so funny. But then he saw that the boy grinned when he did not know what else to do, so he said, ‘Is the blizzard off now?’

‘Just finishing now, sahib.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Three o’clock. It’s the afternoon. You’ve got to eat something, sahib. You don’t eat, we can’t move. You’re very weak.’

‘All right.’

Houston closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the boy was bending over him with another mug of tea. He could feel the tsampa thick inside and forced himself to take it. He drank the lot and lay back again quickly, willing himself to keep it down. It turned and rumbled inside him, the rancid taste of the greasy butter rising in his throat. He kept his eyes tight shut and his mouth tight shut and imagined himself out
in the wind and the snow wanting nothing so much as to be in a sleeping bag with a mug of tea and tsampa and a fine big piece of stinking yak butter, and it worked for the best part of half an hour, until his stomach suddenly gave a single diabolical turn that seemed to squirt it at pressure out of his nose as well as his mouth before he had time to get his head up out of the bag.

The boy had been hovering, however, and almost jerked his head off getting the rubber bucket in position in time.

Houston opened his eyes again after a minute or two and found the boy carefully studying the contents of the bucket.

‘Very good, sahib. You kept some back.’

‘For a rainy day,’ Houston said.

He thought he was on the mend.

When he got back to England again in
1951
, Houston found he was ten days ‘slow’: he had kept a sort of check while he was away and he had in some way lost these days. He could account for three of them in the hospital at Chumbi, and for perhaps six more during the time he lived under the ground with the girl; but he thought he had probably lost one also on the outward journey. It seemed to him likely that while he was in a coma, Ringling, too, had gone to sleep for a complete day and had forgotten about it. (He saw him do this later.)

At all events he subsequently altered from
27
to
28
April the date when they set off again, allowing two clear weeks in the mountains before the next verifiable date (
12
May).

He did not take a very active part in events for most of these two weeks. He lay on the mule by day and wherever he was put at night, and just at the time when he recovered himself and could have taken his share of the chores, they ran out of food. This was not an important setback, but it was one that Ringling had to cope with alone. Houston stayed by himself in a cave for two days.

Having lost faith entirely in the map, Ringling was proceeding by instinct and his own mountain lore. They had gone back down the track to Walungchung Ghola until they had
found another, branching off to the west. This took them parallel with the frontier and around the Kang-la massif. They had Kang-la in sight for four days until they went high again themselves and lost it in the jungle of white peaks.

They went up to nineteen thousand feet, and although Houston felt dazed and headachy and was as weak as a child, he was able to retain most of his food and was not prostrated again.

Ringling had reckoned a week to get through the mountains (he could have done it in four days himself), and even though Houston was not eating his share, it was obvious that the food would not last.

They went off the track in a wild and desolate region to look for a cave (for the boy was nervous of showing the tent during the day), and when they found one, he installed Houston as comfortably as he could, and slept there the night himself and went off with the mule in the morning.

They had been travelling in a thick mist all the previous day, and it was still thick when he left. There was nothing to identify this bit of mountain from any other, and Houston wondered if he would ever see him again. But the boy turned up on the second day, at dusk, grinning, with the mule and food and news.

Below the mountain was a village called Shonyang, and he had been able to get his bearings there. By taking a lower road they could reach Yamdring in four days; it would take them six if they kept to the mountains. It was summer down below. The sun shone. The sky was blue, the barley stood green in the fields. There was also considerable excitement there. The governor of the province had himself just visited on a tour of inspection. He had inspected the fields and the roads and the jail. He had also inspected the police force, and had augmented it, and had in addition left a runner from his own staff with orders to return at once to Hodzo Dzong (Fort Hodzo, the capital of the province) if any strangers from the outside world should appear. Ringling had found considerable difficulty in buying food, for the governor’s directions had been taken as a general warning against all strangers.

‘Does that mean,’ Houston said, ‘we’re going to have trouble at Yamdring?’

‘I don’t know, sahib. Yamdring is a big place. There are always pilgrims and beggars there.’

‘Do you think they know I’m in the country?’

Ringling shrugged. ‘It’s a year of bad omen, sahib. They don’t want any strangers here. The next pass is Kotchin-la – a bad mountain. There are devils there and people are afraid.’

Houston saw the boy was not too happy himself at being so close to this bad mountain, for he enlarged once more on the felicities of the lower route. Houston thought they had better keep to the mountains all the same.

The boy accepted his decision with the most muted of grins, and turned in sombrely after he had eaten. Houston stayed awake quite a long time himself. His sickness and the days of wandering high above the clouds had made the warm world he had left behind him curiously remote. That the boy should have climbed down into it and returned again all in the space of three or four meals while he had lain with his thoughts in the bare and self-contained world of sleeping bag and spirit stove moved him strangely.

It was all going on down there still, another plane of existence, like a continuous film in some lower hall; he could almost feel the muffled vibrations coming up through the miles of rock to his stretched-out body lying solidly on the roof of this other world where the sun still shone and skies were blue and fields green, and the human termites went warmly and ceaselessly about their activities.

He went down after a while for a closer look himself, and found himself in Fitzmaurice Crescent, at night. He let himself into the flat and walked familiarly round it, opening doors and switching on lights. He remembered every corner of it. He remembered the smell of it. It made him restless again, the old lonely restlessness of summer, and he went out again, closing the door behind him, and walked down to the Kensington High Street. Crowds teemed on the pavements and he walked with them past the lighted windows of John Barker’s and Derry and Tom’s and Pontings. The Belisha beacons were winking, a long double line of them, not quite in phase. He saw it had been raining, for the road glistened. It was crowded with traffic. He didn’t know where he was walking and he didn’t want it to be night, so he made an effort and it was day.

He was in a boat, on a lake, and he thought it must be in Regent’s Park, for he had not been rowing with her anywhere else, and she was laughing at something he had said. He was laughing himself and he shipped the oars and took a breather, looking at her. She was very brown. She had been very brown at Roehampton, the day before. She wore a halter neck. She was wearing a new kind of lipstick, orangy. He could smell the sun on the water and on the boat and the not-unpleasant odour of his own sweat. The sky was high and blue and it was going to continue for days, and he had an idea she would be coming back to the flat with him. It was greenish, her dress, linen, with a freshly washed, ironed look, and he made up the colours in his mind that were needed to produce this shade, and at the same time imagined her ironing it, for some reason in a sunny room, early in the morning, standing very tall in a pair of slippers and her basic underwear, long-legged, girlish. His shoe-lace was undone, on the thwart, and she bent to tie it up for him, and he saw the division of her breasts down her dress, and felt the first breathless, needle-like stab; and from his frozen upper world savoured it again. But he knew how it continued and felt sad guilt and went away.