Sleepily she smiled back at him and shifted comfortably.
‘I must be dreaming,’ she said.
‘Trust your dreams,’ said the swami. ‘In them you will see the way to eternity. But now we must go find your clothes.’
He helped her out of the tunnel of undergrowth, took off his threadbare robe, and wrapped it around her for the sake of modesty.
Swift glanced anxiously at the big silverback yeti now sitting calmly beside Boyd’s broken body and pressed herself close to the swami’s back.
‘My brother will not harm you while I am here.’ The swami glanced sadly at Boyd’s body. ‘Nevertheless, your friend... I am very sorry.’
‘He was no friend of mine.’
‘A leaf does not turn brown and die without the whole tree knowing.’
The swami led her through the trees and across the clearing to where the satellite lay. The yeti followed meekly, at a short distance, like some sort of bodyguard.
‘Ever since it landed here, I have been expecting someone to come,’ said the swami. ‘Such is the way of the world. I must confess, I have been dreading this moment.’
‘That was Boyd. The dead man. Not me. He came for the satellite. I came to find out about the yeti.’
‘And they led you to the same place.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I meant no harm. I only wanted to know about the yeti.’
Swift collected her protective underwear and unhurriedly put it on, for she still felt as warm as if she had come straight out of a sauna bath.
‘As an object of intellectual interest, I think my brother is not much more than an abstraction to you. But to my soul, he is an object of joy. To the enlightened man he is a thing of truth and beauty, a window through which one may gaze in wonder at the universe.’
The yeti sat down at the swami’s feet and allowed the holy man to stroke him with careless affection.
‘You keep calling him your brother,’ remarked Swift, climbing back into her SCE suit. For all the many facts about the yeti’s blood chemistry that Lincoln Warner had told her, she still felt that she understood very little about this extraordinary creature. She remembered something the swami had said the first time. How he had warned her about looking for ancestors and family trees. ‘Fruit may fall into your lap,’ he had said. ‘You may be nourished by it. But do not be surprised if the branch breaks off in your hand.’ Clearly the swami knew more about the yeti than he had said. Perhaps he even knew all there was to know.
‘We are like the pillars of a temple. We stand close together, but not too close together, otherwise the temple would collapse.’
‘Just how close are we? The DNA says he’s very close.’
‘The world is not atoms,’ said the swami. ‘The way to understand this world and its creation cannot be achieved by studying it from the point of view of destruction. The atoms are not important. Only in the One and in the Whole is there love. This is the greatest truth of all and the first seed of the soul.’
Swift handed him back his robe. He drew it about his scrawny shoulders with an apparent indifference to the cold that Swift could now understand, for she had felt it herself. He helped her fasten her backpack life-support system as if he had done it many times before.
‘But what is the truth about the yeti? How did he come to be here? Why—’
‘Who knows the truth?’ He giggled in a way that reminded her of a newsreel she had once seen about the Maharishi. ‘Who can tell how and when this world and ourselves came into being? But what is certain is that the gods are later than the beginning. So who knows where any of us comes from? Only the God in the highest heaven perhaps. Or perhaps not.’
‘I don’t believe in God,’ said Swift.
‘You cannot know God by solving puzzles.’
‘Then will you tell me what you know about the yeti, not about God?’
‘They are the same thing. Life itself is a temple and a religion. What I do know and what I can tell you is born of the knowledge that if one only sees the diversity of things, with all their distinctions and divisions, then one has imperfect knowledge. Great are the questions you ask of the world. But since you only know a little, I will tell you more.
‘The yeti is more man than animal, but the animal is his innocence. The innocence that man has lost.
‘According to one of my predecessors, his own grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather many times over told him, whoever he was, that yetis were once abundant in these mountains. Indeed there were as many yetis as there were men. But as the men grew clever they became resentful of the yeti, for while they toiled, the yeti did nothing. What was more, the yeti were forever stealing tsampa, which is barley mixed with water and spices, and still the staple diet in this part of the world. Sometimes this was the only food people could get. Worse, they sometimes took meat, which is even scarcer than barley in these mountains.
‘So it was that the men decided to kill all the yetis. First they left poisoned tsampa on the hills for them to eat. Many yetis died. And for years afterwards yetis were hunted and killed. The heads, the hands, and the feet of many yetis were taken to be used in religious rituals. Some ancient religions even venerate these relics as holy objects, for they believe that yetis contain the souls of men. And in a way, they are not so far from the truth as I have told it to you.’
After that, the swami was silent for a while and refused to answer any more of Swift’s questions except to confirm that a female yeti and her infant were safely returned to the hidden valley. Talk of poisoned barley had reminded Swift of why she had followed Boyd, and now she said, ‘The satellite contains a radioisotope,’ she said. ‘A kind of poison. Boyd planned to destroy the satellite with explosives, which would have spread poison over the whole valley. All the yetis would have died. Not to mention you, swami.’
‘What is death but lying naked in the wind?’
He smiled and held up his hands.
‘If only men thought of God as much as they think of themselves, who would not attain liberation? There is a tradition in these mountains. A great religious tradition. A puzzle, if you like. There are those who call people like me the Concealed Lords and say that we worship the yeti. Some say that we are Buddhists. Some that we were here before the Lamas. The truth is sadly rather more prosaic. Merely that there have always been people like me — the religion matters not — guardians who understand the yeti and seek to protect them from the outside world. But lately this has become very hard. Every year more and more tourists come to the mountains.
‘I had thought that the yetis could stay undisturbed on this holy mountain where no men are allowed to go. For many years it has been a forbidden place. The Sherpas have respected that. But things have been hard for them. There has been no money, and so they have brought you here, where you wanted to go. Well, let us hope that man will be kind to the yeti, although I can see no cause for optimism since men are so unkind to each other, as well as to other apes. The yeti himself only attacks man because he has learned to fear man. Really, he is quite gentle.’
The swami sat down on the ground and pulled the yeti’s ear with affection.
‘But you must tell me what I must do, to prevent this poison you have described.’