He came to these conclusions erratically, with many moments when he had almost persuaded himself that the opposite was true, or that he had not seen things which he knew he had seen, or that he had never heard Mrs Jones laugh to her lover in the dark – that it had all been a dream. He even wondered whether he was going mad. His own reactions to the knowledge troubled him almost as much as the knowledge itself. Here was an outright breaking of one of the Commandments, and he knew that what he ought to have felt was a mixture of pity and horror – pity for the sinners, horror for the deed. These emotions were there, but if he was honest with himself they were not his main emotions. He could summon them up if he concentrated, but as soon as he relaxed his will they disappeared in a storm of other emotions – a sense of betrayal, a curious jealousy at being left out of the secret, a slightly squeamish but inquisitive surprise that it was possible for two people so far apart in age to feel like that about each other, shame at his own cowardice in not denouncing them, in continuing to travel with them, in (to be honest) still wanting their company and their liking. What they were doing was wrong – wicked – but it did not feel like that. They were so happy, and Mrs Jones at least seemed to want Theodore to share in their happiness. In fact, when she tried to make him join in one of her songs and he rebuffed her, smiling thinly and shaking his head, he felt as if it was he who was doing wrong. It was like uprooting some cheerful little flower because it happens to be a weed.
By this time the nature of the terrain had altered. All morning the line of mountain below the snow-peaks had been losing its blue-purple vagueness and acquiring shape, ceasing to be a wall and becoming a series of steep spurs and screens, like the beginnings of roots round the bole of an enormous tree. Soon the real climbing would begin, though it was many miles still to the peaks. There was no track that Theodore could see, but the path on P’iu-Chun’s map followed the line of the enormous gorge for a while, then swung away, doubled back and reached it again at a lake, right up among the mountains.
‘Here’s where Mr What’s-is-name’s poor road begins,’ said Mrs Jones, almost eagerly, as if welcoming the challenge.
‘No way through,’ said Lung, shading his eyes like a hunter and scanning the whole line of mountains.
‘Hark to old eagle-eye!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Now look here. See where that shoulder sticks out? The gorge runs in south of that, and I ’spect it is where it is ’cause it comes out through a crack in the mountains and there’s no way through that side, so we got to get up behind the shoulder from the other side, and from the way he’s drawn it it ain’t no use heading straight up, we got to start out along that next spur there, and even that’s not going to be much of a party.’
She was right. After the days of easy travelling the journey slowed to an endless-seeming trudge across slant shale and scree, resting every hour and lucky to do two miles between rests, leading the horses almost all the way, seldom daring to look up from the ground for fear that a careless step would begin a hundred-foot slither, perhaps to a sheer cliff edge. The wind whipped savagely off the mountains, relaxed, and came again in buffeting gusts from unpredictable directions.
They camped that night on a slant platform of coarse grass, and almost had their tents washed away when a thunderstorm boiled up all round them in the small hours. Rollo cut a knee, wrestling with his tether in the panic, so they had to redistribute the loads, treating poor Sir Nigel as a common pack-horse. Next day they barely made ten miles, but reached at last the point where the spur they had been climbing rooted into the main mass of the rampart, and up this mass they crawled slantwise for the next two days. Around the middle of the second day they met three men – copper-skinned, fur-booted, smiling – leading a train of loaded yaks down the barely visible path and gossiped with them for a while in shreds of Mandarin. Yes, this was the road to the lake. No, no-one would stop them. So few people used this path that there was no real border. But yes, somewhere beyond lay Tibet.
Next morning they climbed the last few miles to the saddle and crossed the invisible border. It was icy cold. Patches of stale snow lay all along the level, and barely a blade of grass or other vegetation showed among the loose-lying rubble and gravel between. On either side the slopes curved up, harsh rock and loose boulders merging into the true snow-fields, never melting even in the height of summer. Mrs Jones made sure, despite the cold, that where the gentle-seeming sun beat down on them their skin was covered all the time. ‘Surprising how it can burn you at this height,’ she said. ‘All blisters I was once, up in the Andes. And don’t you go staring at them snow-fields or you’ll have a headache you’ll never forget.’
So, muffled against scorching as much as freezing, they trudged across the pass, with the horses gasping all the time at the poor, thin air. At last, after weary hours, they halted and stood gazing down at a long gash of a valley slanting into the tumbled mountains. The crack that had opened and let the river through was here more than a gorge. On its far side the cliffs rose almost perpendicular, but on this side it was as though half the mountain had been scooped away to create this valley. At their feet the path wriggled down a plunging bare slope until, thousands of feet below them, it came to the trees. Even from this height Theodore could see that it was nothing like the clogged and rotting forest where they had met the Black Lolo, but a pure stand of flat-topped pines with almost blue needles and a pinkish glimmer of trunks beneath. And thousands more feet below the trees lay the lake, so dark blue it was almost black, reflecting the tremendous cliff beyond.
‘This sacred place,’ said Lung in English.
‘You been here before, then?’ said Mrs Jones, mockingly.
‘I feel excellent ghosts.’
‘Let’s hope not. Now we’ll get a move on, so we can camp down among them trees, with a bit of luck find a clearing where the horses can forage, poor things, or they won’t be no use to us, not after what we been through these last few days.’
She hitched up her skirt and coaxed Albert, too tired and starved now to make trouble, down the first stretch of path.
It took them half the afternoon to reach the tree-line, but all the time the air became warmer and stronger, and sweeter too as the faint smell of the pines drifted towards them. And then, with their calves aching from the downward slope, they were among the trees, walking on pine-needles instead of rock and seeing on either side the pillars of the trees rising to the blue-green roof. There was some undergrowth – rhododendrons and trails of yellow-flowered clematis, but the whole impression was of almost ordered space, of mottled shadow and deep silence.
Still the slope plunged down, with the path twisting back and forth between the trees but heading generally west along the valley. They were beginning to look for a place to camp when Mrs Jones halted and handed her reins to Theodore before darting upwards into the wood. About twenty yards from the path she dropped to her knees in a nook between two glossy green mounds of rhododendron. She stayed quite still for more than a minute, just as if absorbed in sudden prayer, but her body hid whatever she was looking at until she rose and backed slowly away, still staring, still unmistakably worshipping. What she had found was a single lily-plant, a stem about three feet high fringed along its length with insignificant down-curled leaves, and at the top five trumpets of intense pale yellow, amid the shadowy browns and greens and blues of the wood a colour as sharp as the call of a bird.
She came back to the path shaking her head slowly from side to side. There was a shiver in her voice which Theodore hadn’t heard before.