‘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.
Above the main buildings the cliff was pocked with the mouths of caves, and below lay a huddle of small squat huts and exotic shrines. The whole site faced east and was already deep in the shade of the mountain behind it, so the faint glow of lights at many of the windows added to the sense of a huge, mysterious life born out of the very mountain.
‘I have been to Lhasa and seen the great Potala,’ intoned the Lama in his clanging Mandarin. ‘I have travelled in India and seen the mighty shrines of that land. I have seen even the sea. But in all this world of illusion I have seen no illusion that can compare with Dong Pe.’
11
FOR ONLY THE second time since the destruction of the Settlement Theodore was suddenly convinced that his prayers were being listened to. Once, at the top of that far-away rock pillar, when he had tried to pray for Mrs Jones; and now, here, in the guest-house below the gates of Dong Pe monastery, with the bitter mountain air fingering his shoulder-blades as he knelt on the rug beside his cot, while his lips moved as usual through the automatic phrases and his mind roamed helplessly.
He had been thinking, as it happened, about Lung. Two images had floated side by side into his head – that last morning in the valley, Lung lying with his head in Mrs Jones’s lap, drifting in love; and his arrival at the guest-house last night, snarling with sulky suspicion. Theodore liked Lung; at the start of the journey he had seemed at least half-absurd, but slowly Theodore had discovered some of what Mrs Jones had seen in him: humour and intelligence, and a kind of exulting innocence which he occasionally let gleam from behind the fastidious façade. But Theodore, despite that liking, had not been able to grasp the depth and strength of Lung’s love for Mrs Jones, and so had found it hard to bear the apparently childish fits of sulks that had followed its ending. Now, in his half-dreamy state, self-hypnotized by the empty repetition of words, he found himself laying the two images side by side, the exultation and the misery, as if they were two pieces of cloth he was comparing. He was swept with a wave of sympathy for poor Lung, as sudden and powerful as the scent of honeysuckle come upon at dusk.