Here, to Theodore’s surprise, the escort started to make camp by unloading the yaks and building a larger-than-usual fire of dried dung. Anywhere would have been a more appealing place than this, he thought. Surely they could have crossed the plain – it was still three hours till nightfall – and found somewhere better beyond it. The wind, which was full of fine, abrasive grit, slashed at them from erratic directions and set up vague hootings among the stones. They ate their meal early and then simply sat and waited for nightfall, but when Mrs Jones set out for a stroll towards the nearer cliffs the Lama immediately sent two of the escort to fetch her back.
‘There are fourteen devils in this place,’ he explained solemnly. ‘Within my protection you are safe, but beyond it they will cast you down and break your limbs, howling.’
Indeed at dusk he performed a ritual, circling round the camp with a weird, gliding step and stopping at four points to make an invocation which sounded like no language at all, but a mixture of whooping cries and sharp barks and a booming hum with bits of gabble threaded through. The escorts turned inwards towards the fire, shutting their eyes and stopping their ears while he performed, and as soon as he had finished rolled themselves in their blankets and lay still. Lung and Theodore copied them and Mrs Jones went to her tent, but Theodore spent longer than usual saying his prayers. Though he was praying to the emptiness which was all he had found for many days, it crossed his mind to ask that Mrs Jones should turn out not to be pregnant after all; but before the thought had formed itself into words he tried to erase it – there was something appalling about the idea of praying that a life should not exist.
Again he slept badly, and whenever he woke he saw the Lama sitting a little further up the hill, bolt upright, staring out across the mysterious plain, cross-legged and motionless, sentinel against the princes of the powers of the air and spiritual wickedness in high places. St Paul’s strange phrase repeated and repeated itself in Theodore’s muddled brain. He kept telling himself that these fourteen silly devils didn’t exist, and suppose they did, there was nothing a heathen priest could do to control them; but at the same time he knew quite well that he was scared, and that if the Lama hadn’t been there he would have been more scared still.
Early next morning they set about crossing the plain, and Theodore at once discovered why they hadn’t tried the previous afternoon. Night would certainly have caught them somewhere out in the middle. Each stone, though apparently just like all the others except in size – a flattish dark blue-grey oval, very smooth and veined with paler lines – seemed to have a life of its own. In places they lay loosely on beds of the sharp grit and it was possible to pick a way between them, but mostly they were many layers deep and one had to pace across them as if they were stepping-stones, never knowing whether they would stay firm or shift with one’s weight. All the while the stinging, buffeting wind came and went, seeming to strike at the exact moment when one was balancing for the next pace.
‘Don’t need no devils to cast us down round here,’ grumbled Mrs Jones. ‘This wind! We’ll be lucky if we get the horses across in one piece.’
Certainly, though the stones were trying enough for the humans, for the animals they were almost impossible. The yaks managed a little better than the horses, being more sure-footed, lower-slung, and readier to take a stumble, but even they had to be coaxed or prodded almost every yard. In the worst places the escort gathered all the bedding and laid it out, several layers thick, to make a pair of rafts. An animal could be led onto one of these, then the other one laid in front and when it was standing on that the first one could be taken round to make another short stretch of tolerable footing. Elsewhere the escort piled the larger stones together to make a rough causeway. There were stretches where the remains of previous causeways showed clearly, the results of earlier crossings by other travellers, and they used these where they could. But frequent repairs were necessary, as though something had come since they were made and started to tumble the stones into their normal loose ruin.
Lung was leading Rollo along one of these stretches of old causeway when a stone, apparently as stable as any other, tilted sideways under Rollo’s hoof. The movement was so sudden that to Theodore, following next behind, it looked as though the other end of the stone had been violently flipped up from below. The pony’s leg shot down as if into soft bog and through the beginnings of its squeal Theodore heard the bone snap. The Tibetans left their yaks and came crowding round, gabbling at each other as they tried to drag the struggling animal free. It squealed with fresh pain. Mrs Jones strode past Theodore with her gun under her arm, her face invisible beneath the veil. The click of the bolt stood out sharply through the clatter and scrape of hooves on stone. Theodore looked away. The shot rang out, clapped against the nearing cliffs and came back in echoes that sounded like laughter from stone lungs.
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.’