‘This path go into Tibet,’ said Lung.
‘Now ain’t that a rum do! Just what I been wanting all along. I hope you don’t mind, gentlemen both.’
‘You go. I go,’ said Lung.
‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones, smug as a well-fed cat. ‘Now we’ll give the horses a bite and a rest and get on as far south as we can. If there’s a moon like what there was last night, it’ll be good as daylight.’
That night’s march was the first part of a stage which lasted another five days. On the first afternoon it took them several hours to find a way across a dry ravine, but after that they rode south until on the second morning they reached the colossal gorge which they had last seen soon after they had left the forest. Here they turned west once more. All this time they saw no travellers, and only once, through the binoculars, a group of nomads herding a vast flock of browny-orange sheep.
Now, visibly, march after march, the mountains came nearer and at the same time looked ever more impassable. From a distance it had been easy to imagine clefts in the wall beneath the glittering rim, but at closer range the rock face showed no gap. It reached out of sight to north and south and at its nearest was still purple-blue with distance; to Theodore it seemed an impossible barrier, but Mrs Jones was not at all daunted. Indeed her spirits increased as the mountains neared and she sang and talked all day long, to Theodore, to Lung, to Sir Nigel if she felt like that. It was as if in her eyes the journey west was more than a haphazard line of escape, a running away. She was moving towards. Beyond the mountain rampart something marvellous was waiting for her, calling to her, drawing her on; and everything else that had happened – the Boxers, P’iu-Chun, even the ambush in the forest – was part of this pattern. The light persistent wind plucked at the folds of her riding-cloak as if trying to hurry her on.
On the fourth afternoon Theodore was riding alone, thinking about Father. He had deliberately let himself fall behind, because Mrs Jones was behaving in a manner which made her company uncomfortable. She was, to put it bluntly, flirting with Lung. Her excuse was a song she had chosen to sing:
‘The boy I love sits up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking down at me . . .’
She had thrown back her veil and was continually glancing sideways at Lung from under her enormous lashes, and the poor young man was taking her behaviour at least half-seriously, laughing, but always with a certain embarrassment. Theodore had come to like Lung considerably; there was an inner dignity and pride in him, hidden at first under shyness and uncertainty but becoming steadily more noticeable as they rode across the grasslands. It was unfair of Mrs Jones to tease him like this in Theodore’s presence, so Theodore dropped back out of earshot.
As he watched the pair riding ahead, he wondered how Father would have reacted in his place. Of course Mrs Jones wouldn’t have behaved the same way with Father there – or would she? Father would certainly have reproved her, bluntly but without arrogance. He would have disliked her treatment of Lung quite as much as her general impropriety and would have said so. Ought Theodore to have done the same? No – he wasn’t Father. Father was . . .
It was strange to be thinking of Father like this, as it were from the outside. Father had been a wonderful man, good and clever and kind, but his personality had been so strong that it filled the Settlement. You breathed and ate and drank Father. Sometimes he was a cliff towering above you; at other times you swam in the lake of his love. But all the time you were somehow inside him, as the unhatched bird is in its shell; and now Theodore was outside, looking back down the vista of travelled days to where Father was dwindling, just as the limestone pillars of the plateau had dwindled with the miles.
Theodore was only very vaguely aware that this sense of dwindling and distancing was a symptom of the wound in his life beginning to heal; in fact his main reaction was one of guilt at the sense of ease and freedom he had been feeling for the last few days, and for a while he actually tried to open the wound up, to bring Father nearer by working himself back into a state of shock and agony at the destruction of the Settlement and his own casting-out. But at the same time he knew in his heart that this wouldn’t do. It was a lie, and Father had always taught him that unless you were truthful with yourself you couldn’t be truthful with anyone else.
He was distracted from this train of thought by an absurd piece of behaviour by the pair ahead. For a moment he thought that Lung had been stung by some insect, from the way he was wriggling about; but then it became clear that the Chinese was attempting to kneel on Rollo’s haunches, and having achieved that, to rise to his feet. He actually made it, and stood for two or three seconds, arms outstretched like a circus performer, while Mrs Jones applauded. Then he lost his balance and half-slid, half-jumped to the ground. Theodore would have thought that the pair of them were drunk if he hadn’t heard Mrs Jones complaining the night before that Lung had forgotten to buy any wine in the village in the hollow. He smiled at their childish antics, and decided that it was not his business to judge them.
This decision, though sensible, turned out harder to stick to than he would have guessed. The nights on the plateau were very sharp. If the air was still they would wake in the morning to find the miles of grass all white with frozen dew; and any wind that swept down from the mountains was like the breath of an ice-giant that can turn all living things to stone. They would halt near dusk, pitch the two little tents, feed and water the horses, then cook a meal on the portable stove and go to bed. Despite the cold Lung had taken to sleeping in the open, saying that he slept better that way. The tethered horses were their sentries.
However hard the ground, Theodore normally slept till dawn, and if he dreamed the images were lost beneath many layers of slumber. That night, though, he chose his sleeping-place carelessly and woke at an unguessable hour with his left leg completely numb where a lump of stone had pressed into a nerve. As he turned to ease it he groaned, still half asleep, and then he was wide awake, conscious that something had responded to his groan. There had been a noise and it had stopped. There was no wind. He listened till he heard a horse fidget, and knew at once that it had not been that. Now he was tense. Wild animal? Wolf? Bear? The men from the forest? No – the horses would be making more noise. Slowly he relaxed, and as he edged towards sleep once more his mind recreated the sound he had heard. It had been a laugh, very quiet, ending in whispered words. Not one voice, but two.
He was asleep before he worked out what it meant, and in the morning had forgotten the incident until they were loading the horses and Lung said something to Mrs Jones, out of Theodore’s earshot, and she laughed.
Even so, they had been travelling for some hours before he decided that he knew for certain that Lung and Mrs Jones were lovers. (Adulterers was the word he used in his mind.) After the first chill little shock – more unease than shock – at the memory of the laugh in the night, he had told himself that he must be mistaken. He was, in fact, instantly ashamed of his own nasty-mindedness. But then, as he noticed the behaviour of the other two to each other he became amazed at himself for not having noticed it earlier. It was as though they were talking, in glance and tone and gesture, a secret language to which he had hitherto been deaf; now he could hear it, though he still couldn’t understand the words. He remembered a sentence of Mrs Jones’s, bitten short, just after she had first seen their pursuers. He remembered their clowning the previous day, almost puppy-like in its spontaneous happiness. He remembered that first night on the plateau when he had fallen asleep in the cave and had been carried down those difficult steps to the tent . . . that was when it had started, he was vividly sure.