Peter Dickinson - Tulku

There was Tibetan tea. The only time Theodore attempted to drink this on the journey his mouth spat it back into the cup before he could will himself to swallow. The first taste was of half-rancid grease, disgusting but manageable; then, inside that – wrapped in it, so to speak – his tongue met scouring soap and sharp salt and a thick woody flavour like the bark of a tree. He looked up, flushing with shame, and saw the Lama watching him with an intense but unreadable stare.

‘I’m sorry,’ he stammered. ‘I couldn’t help it.’

‘It is a strong taste,’ said the old man. ‘You do not remember it, child?’

‘Tibetan tea notorious,’ said Lung in English. ‘Boil leaf long time. Put in salt, soda, sour butter.’

‘It is as well to acquire the taste,’ said the Lama mildly. ‘The drink is full of strength for those who travel in the mountains.’

He didn’t seem at all put out by Theodore’s ill manners, but oddly interested. Then he and Mrs Jones and Lung fell into bilingual small-talk about the tea ceremonies of different countries.

Yaks and tea were trivialities. There was a more important change, which Theodore sensed at once – had in fact sensed in the escort’s behaviour as they had prepared to haul the Lama across the ravine, the very first time he had seen the old man. Tibet was a priest-ruled country. Father had in a sense ruled the Settlement, but had done so as its first citizen, with the consent of his converts. He had been respected, and loved. But in Theodore’s eyes the escort, as well as the inhabitants of the flea-swarming farms where they billeted themselves each night, treated the old man as if he were in some way God. And this strong uncomfortable awe applied not only to the Lama but to everything. Wherever a stream ran near a village it drove at least one prayer-wheel, a tinkling device which at each turn was supposed to repeat the same meaningless syllables of devotion, inscribed on its rim. Prayer-flags – mere rags on sticks, like wash-day in the slums, Mrs Jones said – fluttered from the roofs of houses or in groves along hillsides, to perform the same function. Shrines – little box-like stone buildings, each with a fantastic bobbly spire ending in a crescent moon – dotted every slope. Monks stalked the roads.

Father had always pitied heathens, never hated them, even at their most superstitious. His anger and his hatred had been reserved for those Christians who had, in his eyes, been shown the truth and refused it. But despite himself Theodore couldn’t help a distrust and dislike which was almost hatred. The wheels and flags offended him most. Prayer was not like that. It was a thing which needed to be done each time afresh, with intense personal effort. And yet . . . and yet how different, really, were these meaningless devices, repeating their formulae without a mind behind them, from Theodore’s own useless attempts to pray?

Strangely, this very revulsion made him pray with greater earnestness, as well as with a new sense of frustration. In the valley of the lilies he had felt it would need only one more violent event to break the habit of prayer, but now that event had come and the habit was strengthened.

Perhaps it was the mountains which caused this change. They were, in themselves, the biggest change of all. The peak that had faced across the valley of the lilies had seemed colossal, but soon the party was moving through country where the outcrops and buttresses of the main mountains were larger than that; and the saddle they had crossed into the valley seemed low and easy now, compared with some of the passes they traversed. The ranges were split by immensely steep, thick-forested valleys, each with its rushing river at the bottom, and here and there a huddle of flat-roofed stone houses in a patch of tiny fields. In the valleys the tracks were often tolerable, sometimes even surfaced with logs laid side by side. But then the route would zigzag up to the bare slopes above the tree-line, higher and higher, until they were trailing among wastes where snow lay in crackling drifts between the wind-eroded boulders. Here the paths were usually invisible, except to their guides. Even Mrs Jones would look at some barrier – a cliff carved by frost and blizzard into vertical pleats and pillars, and lined with horizontal layers by the rock-strata – and shake her head, but the Tibetans would find a series of cracks and gullies and yard-wide ledges where only a few worn foot-holds showed that anyone had ever passed this way before. Theodore learnt to walk at these heights with a short-paced shuffle, drearily slow but not using one breath more than was needed of the sparse oxygen, one extra pump of his straining heart. He learnt that it was possible to sit at the midday rest with one’s head in the sun and one’s feet in shadow and suffer sunburn and frostbite at the same time. He learnt to trudge for hours with his eyes half-closed against the brilliant light, though the temptation was to gaze and gaze at the enormous, sharp-seen distances and the piercing colours.

But all these discomforts were overwhelmed by the sense of awe which the mountains imposed. It was no wonder that such a country had come to be ruled by priests who were almost gods. Even Mrs Jones, despite her restlessness at the slow pace of travel, and the feeling that the Lama, by pressing steadily on at that pace, was preventing her from exploring the valleys properly for plants – even she seemed to feel the solemnity of the mountains. They changed her, as they changed everything. Her personality, which in earlier days had been so elusive and at the same so enveloping, withdrew into itself a little. There was no less of it – supposing you could measure such things – but it seemed somehow more concentrated, and more coherent.

This was the change poor Lung took hardest. For some reason the hostility of the escort, never voiced, but expressed in glances, in an angle of the head or a gesture of the fingers, concentrated on him. The Lama, though carefully polite, never allowed him the curious and penetrating interest he often showed in Mrs Jones and Theodore. No doubt Lung could have borne this, and worse, if it had been possible for the idyll of the valley of the lilies to continue, however changed by the changed circumstances. But Theodore could see that the idyll was ended. Mrs Jones might spend whole stretches of the journey, or long hours in the evening, talking quietly with Lung, but they were lovers no more.

To his own astonishment this change filled Theodore with sadness. He should have been rejoicing at the end of the sinful affair, but now he knew what he ought to have known all along, that his own contentment in the valley was not simply a product of the peace and beauty of the place; it had been caused just as much by his companions’ happiness; he had been infected, so to speak, by their joy in each other; so now Lung’s loss was his.

He saw this with sudden sharpness on the second day of their journey, when during the midday halt he found Lung brooding beside a bleak upland lake, whose slaty waters and treeless shores seemed a world away from the brilliance and richness of the valley.

‘Changed, changed, all changed,’ muttered Lung.

‘Are you going to write a poem about it?’

‘No poems. Not any more.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Lung turned away with a noise that began as a laugh and ended as something like the cry of a fox.

On the fifth night they stayed not at a farm but at a monastery called Daparang, an erratic line of almost windowless slabs of building, punctuated by spired shrines and spread along a hillside. Here they were shown to a guest-room near the gate, and for once had some privacy and comfort. (The people in the farms were friendly, but almost as pestilential in their inquisitiveness as the fleas.) The Lama Amchi disappeared into the monastery, but later that evening brought another Lama, a very old man who was Abbot of Daparang, to drink tea in the guest-house. The Abbot spoke about three words, all Tibetan, in the hour he was there, and never took his eyes off Theodore.