As he turned at last, feeling that he had neither acknowledged the powers nor refuted them, his eye was caught by a movement. The arch through which he had entered the courtyard lay towards the mountain end of that side, and so far he had never really looked at the rest of it. Now he saw that it was mainly occupied by another temple, smaller and much more ornate than the one on whose steps he stood. There was a frivolous little dome and spike, also covered with gold; a pair of closed doors painted with red and orange and green demons; several banner-like streamers hanging from poles along the parapet; and two rows of large prayer-wheels on either side of the doors, the ones on the right still but the ones on the left twirling vigorously, though there was no monk near enough to have recently spun them. At roof-level, behind the banners on the left, a small windmill was turning, but on the right the sail of a similar mill pointed monotonously at the sky. It was something to look at, a change from Buddhas and idols, a mystery which reason might solve. Almost eagerly Theodore strode across the courtyard to inspect the mechanism.
It turned out to be as he had guessed. The windmill drove the prayer-wheels through a series of cords and pulleys. Each of the pulleys was itself a miniature prayer-wheel, but despite this there was something about the whole device which struck Theodore as oddly un-Tibetan. It was so ingeniously simple, and also efficient. With a very little adaptation it could have been made to do something useful. It was just the sort of thing Father might have invented, with its use of native techniques and western ideas to achieve something which neither could do alone.
The thought of Father shook him with an appalling, savage pang, as if the healing of the past weeks had been all suddenly ripped away, and the wound was yesterday’s. He stood dazed and sick, swaying to the steady tinkle of the prayer-wheels, thinking The Buddha did this to me. The Buddha did this to me. He shook his head violently, trying to drive the nonsense notion away, and for further distraction turned to climb the temple steps in order to cross and find out why the other set of wheels wasn’t turning. He was still dazed, and perhaps staggering slightly, for though he must have seen the monk come out of a small wicket in the main doors he still managed to bump into him. The monk appeared not to have noticed him till the collision.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ he muttered automatically.
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said the monk. ‘Ought to have been looking where I was going – not that I can very well these days.’
It took Theodore a moment or two to grasp that they had both spoken in English. The monk was peering at him with pale, opaque blue eyes. His head was quite bald, but a frizz of stiff white beard stood out all round a reddish-brown face. He was only an inch or two taller than Theodore, and looked as though nature had designed him to be plump, which he was not.
‘How d’ye do?’ he said. ‘Fine morning.’
He was smiling with great sweetness, almost eagerness, which contrasted with the snappy bark of his voice.
‘Yes, it’s lovely,’ said Theodore. ‘Uh, my name’s Theodore Tewker. I came here yesterday.’
‘Good. Good. Excellent. My name’s Achugla. Used to be Price-Evans.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Price-Evans.’
‘Major Price-Evans. Not that it matters. You’re American, by the sound of you. Care for a cup of tea? Come in. Come in.’
Without waiting to hear whether his invitation was accepted, the old man turned and led the way through the wicket. Theodore followed him into the near-dark, into the reek and richness, where the face of another Buddha gleamed half way to the roof. Left to himself Theodore would have backed out, but the monk who called himself Major Price-Evans was shuffling away to open a door into a small bright cell. Following him Theodore found that this was lit by a skylight. There was just room in it for a cot and shrine and a stove. The walls were covered with gaudy hangings, some of them showing pictures of the Buddha, others that might have been demons or might have been gods, and yet others which were merely patterns of huge letters.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ said the Major, waving a hand at the cot. ‘Come here to study under the Lama Amchi, have you? Sound a bit young for it – none of my business, of course.’
‘We came here by accident. The Lama Amchi helped us to escape from some brigands, and brought us here.’
‘If Lama Amchi’s in it, it’s not an accident.’
‘Anyway, I’m a Christian.’
‘Are you now? Good. Good. Excellent.’
The Major beamed at him as though this was the most interesting news he had heard in years, then turned to the stove and before Theodore could think of a polite way to stop him had ladled out two mugs of tea from the pot that stood murmuring there. The smell told Theodore what it was.
‘First-rate brew, this,’ said the Major happily. ‘Nothing like it for keeping you going in the mountains. Often strikes me that if we could have persuaded Thomas Atkins to drink the stuff we’d never have had all that trouble getting him to Kabul and back. Hey?’
‘I guess you’re right, sir,’ said Theodore, taking the copper mug. He had little idea what the Major was talking about, but there was a warmth, an eagerness, an innocence about the old man that made you want to please him. Even, it turned out, to the extent of drinking Tibetan tea and getting it down without gagging.
Meanwhile the Major talked. His story was difficult to follow because he rambled to and fro in time and space, and because the people and campaigns he had known forty years ago seemed no more and no less real than the pagan demons he now served. At one moment he would be talking about a miraculous fact achieved by some Lama, and the next he would have slid into an account of getting a famine train through southern India, only to find the people he had come to save lying dead in their tens of thousands round the railway head with the kites wheeling above the almost fleshless bodies. As far as Theodore could make out he had been a soldier in the British Army in India, an engineer concerned to build the bridges and roads for the campaigns of the British Empire.
He seemed to have dabbled in a lot of religions and superstitions but had gone on with his soldiering until something had happened . . . ‘Just came to me, me boy, like Paul on the road to Damascus – not so sudden as that, quite, didn’t fall off me horse or anything – been brewing up inside me for a long while without me knowing – but there I was, one week sitting at me desk, supervising me coolies, dining in mess, all that, and next week I’d chucked it all up and was tramping along a dusty red road, barefoot, with nothing in the world but me begging bowl.’ He seemed to have wandered right down into Ceylon, where he had finally been converted to Buddhism, and then come rambling back towards the hills, further and further, settling at last in this final cranny in Dong Pe. It didn’t seem to him at all extraordinary – nor had Theodore’s sudden greeting on the temple steps in a language he hadn’t spoken for twenty years, nor did anything else that had happened or could possibly happen. He was almost blind.