Peter Dickinson - Tulku

The Tibetans dragged the pony’s body a few yards to one side and began to pile a heap of stones over it. The Lama turned to the cliffs and intoned a few short sentences in Tibetan.

‘The old ones have taken their sacrifice,’ he said in Mandarin. ‘We will have no more trouble.’

Indeed from that moment the causeway became wider and better-built, leading them in twenty minutes out on to a sound track which climbed across a long slope of thin-grassed soil and bare rock and disappeared round a buttress of brown cliff. By now it was well into the afternoon, so they fed the weary horses and yaks and improvised a hurried meal for themselves.

‘We’re getting somewhere near,’ said Mrs Jones in a low voice to Theodore while Lung was still with the horses. ‘Soon as the old boy’s finished his hobson-jobson, ask him how much further, and while you’re doing that see if you can ask him, natural like, if there isn’t an easier way than this. If I find he’s right, what he said about me, I’m getting back to civilization double quick, where there’s proper doctors. But don’t let him see that’s what you’re on about.’

The Lama was standing at the end of the causeway, arms raised, crying aloud in a series of wailing repetitive phrases as though he were preaching or singing to the stones; sometimes in a pause between the phrases the distorted echo of his voice came whining back, as though the stones were answering. When he had finished he turned to Theodore and answered both his questions without being asked.

‘We are in the territory of Dong Pe,’ he said, smiling like a host welcoming expected guests. ‘This night I shall sleep in my own house. I am sorry that the journey has seemed so difficult, but the old ones who dwell round the stone lake are our guardians as much as our tormentors. This is the only path to Dong Pe, and close though we are to the border I do not think that even the Chinese could drag cannons across here.’

‘Cannon?’ asked Theodore.

‘When I was a young man I walked all across the mountains and plains, both to seek wild and waste places in which to perform my spiritual exercises and also to visit monasteries and learn from their teachers. I went to the great monastery at Nachuga, in the far west, a place famous for learning and for its many shrines, but I did not stay there long because I found that the monks had begun to quarrel among themselves, and all learning was forgotten in the arguments. The summer after I left, this argument broke into fighting and the Abbot drove his opponents out of Nachuga. They, however, journeyed to Lhasa and complained to the Dalai Lama. Now in those days the Chinese had much influence in Lhasa, and they persuaded the Dalai Lama that the time had come to break the power and independence of Nachuga, so he sent a message to the Abbot ordering him to restore the rebel monks and reform the monastery according to their wishes. Naturally the Abbot refused. Then, with Chinese help, soldiers came from Lhasa, bringing cannons, and they bombarded Nachuga until most of its rooms and shrines were rubble. It was a poor inheritance those rebel monks came into . . . But with the help of the old ones I will see that this does not happen at Dong Pe. Come now. We will ride these last few miles, so that the Mother of the Tulku shall see Dong Pe in daylight.’

‘We’ve only got three horses now.’

‘The Chinese can follow with the yaks.’

Lung did not like this arrangement at all, but in the end he accepted it, scowling. Theodore perceived suddenly that Lung was aware that something was being hidden from him, something which Mrs Jones and the Lama and Theodore knew. This would have been wounding enough if they had merely been companions, but for poor Lung, already half-sick with the ending of his idyll, it must have seemed a sign like the ending of love itself.

While they were redistributing the horse-loads among the yaks, Theodore saw Mrs Jones, standing alone a little to one side, holding Sir Nigel’s head. Her veil as usual hid her face, but again he noticed how her stance had changed, an imperceptible slackening in the line of her spine and shoulders that showed deep inward thought, and, he guessed, an echo of Lung’s unhappiness. He could almost feel her fear and uncertainty. This was so unlike her that without thought he led Bessie across towards her. She turned her head to look at him, stiffening her stance as she did so.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he muttered.

She reached out an arm, took him by the shoulder and drew him close against her side, holding him there while the wind flapped her cloak round him in swirling folds.

‘Let’s hope,’ she whispered.

Beyond the stone lake the track was better than any they had travelled for many days, sometimes steep but always reasonably smooth, twisting its way around rock outcrops that covered all the long slope between the two pincer-like ranges that ringed the stone lake. The Lama rode Albert, sitting sideways across his haunches like a peasant and seeming to control him as easily as Mrs Jones controlled Sir Nigel, without visible signal or command. He hurried them on, apparently impatient for the first time in the whole journey, though the horses gasped and stumbled with the steadily increasing height until Mrs Jones insisted on dismounting and leading Sir Nigel up the steeper stretches. Once or twice, looking over his shoulder, Theodore caught a glimpse of the yak-train, already ant-like with distance, and beyond that the stone lake, which from this height seemed to glimmer and shift as if it were indeed a lake of water.

At last the ground levelled and the track swung east, dipped, and began to sidle steeply down along the far side of the right-hand range. Now below them opened another precipitous valley, wider than most they had seen and splitting into several side-valleys. Beyond it stood a single massive peak, not rising to any dramatic points but topped by a long smooth snow-ridge which made the whole slab seem solemn and tremendous.

‘Now that’s something,’ said Mrs Jones in an awed voice.

‘In our language it is called the Dome of Purest Light,’ said the Lama. ‘Its contemplation brings self-knowledge. Tell the Mother of the Tulku that henceforth she shall gaze on it every day.’

‘I wish he wouldn’t keep calling me that,’ grumbled Mrs Jones, who had learnt by now to recognize those particular syllables. ‘Counting chickens, that is.’

They rode on down the twisting track. All along its length the little shrines sprouted on every small level, like a field of weird stone fungi. Slowly the snows of the great mountain changed their colour and the shadows on it, which had been a brighter blue than the sky, darkened and grew as the sun westered. There were pinks and golds among the glittering white, and the depths below were already heavy with dusk, when the track reached a point where it seemed about to lance out over empty space. The Lama rode unhesitatingly to this dead end and swung out of sight round a pillar of sheer rock. Theodore followed Mrs Jones round the bend and reined to a halt beside her. All three sat perfectly still, as if transfixed by the shock of vision. Then the Lama flung out his arm in a wide gesture.

‘Dong Pe,’ he said.

Mrs Jones and Theodore sat and stared.

The buttress they had just rounded had concealed the way in which the dark cleft of the valley widened suddenly to an enormous bowl ringed by the towering ice ramparts, flanked with steep forests and floored with little meadows. The Lama was not pointing at any of that, but at the mountainside ahead. There, clinging like the hive of wild bees to what seemed almost vertical cliff, was the monastery. Its walls were white. Many of the roofs were flat; others were shallow curves of hummocky tiles, ending in wide-spreading eaves. In several places the roof-line erupted into pyramids topped with spiky onion-domes, and the largest of these, near the middle, seemed to be covered with a dull yellow metal. The monastery spread apparently endlessly along the cliff, as if it had grown there, section by section, wherever a ledge or cranny gave the builders foot-hold. The flat roofs and the sharp lines of buttresses and the heavy-lintelled deep-set windows along the upper storeys made this growth seem more like that of a crystal, which increases by angles and facets, than that of a plant.