3
Looking back upon the journey to Shingtse-lunpo, Trent saw it in a series of pictures—the days painted with vivid, glaring pigments, the nights pasteled in blended hues. It was not the Tibet of his imagination, the Tibet of drear, waterless stretches shut in by bastioned mountains, unscalable, snow-helmeted guards. True, for two days after the passing of the Chino-Tibetan divide and the Mekong (they were swung across this great river, at a giddy height, on a rope bridge) bleak ranges lifted themselves in heaps of purple and dun, crowned with flame as the sun gilded their snowy ramparts; but after that the ground was mildly undulating—nullahs and hills and thin forests.
The fourth day marked their entrance into a country of little vegetation, a world of dull tints—those lifeless shades of brown found in a camel's coat. The earth was sterile; even the sky seemed unyielding, an aching womb of light. Fine dust settled upon the body and in the nostrils and throat.
Of people they saw comparatively little. The villages generally consisted of a huddle of houses close to a spur of ground, upon the highest point of which a lamasery perched, like a lämmergier hovering over mulch and decay. The lamas, Trent learned, were of the Yellow Cap Order—a sullen, suspicious lot.
Trent tried, whenever it was practicable, to avoid human beings; he was not so much afraid of the penetrability of his own disguise as that of the girl. The caravans they encountered now and then—strings of men and mules and yaks—were a constant dread to him; not the Tibetans (they were a careless, friendly type, these men and women of Kham), but the priests who usually accompanied them. In every instance the lamas inquired through Kee Meng the destination of the pack-train.
The wind was usually chilling, except at midday when the earth quivered behind a brassy curtain of mirage and the glare of sunlight on quartz-like rocks was blinding. Sunset—a phenomenon of Tibet—was a source of never-ending wonder to both Trent and Dana Charteris. It flared in five distinct bars, like a crimson aurora, and died away when dusk swept a mauve brush across the west. Nightfall brought bitter winds. Stars glittered coldly, points of whitest flame; and when the moon came out it glistened like an icy planet reeling through space.
Trent grew to trust Kee Meng and his comrades—to a degree. It was a common occurrence for him to catch one or the other stealing from the provisions, and more than once he discovered gold and turquoise ornaments filched from a temple in some village where they remained overnight. Twice Trent's electric pocket-lamp disappeared, only to be found each time among the possessions of Kee Meng, who burned with a steady passion to own it. Trent maintained rigid discipline over his quartet of genial young brigands, who would have been impossible to rule otherwise; and whereas they learned he was master of the caravan and to be obeyed at all times, he could not tear down the walls of instinct which generations of hung-hu-tzee ancestors had fixed so immovably in them.
... The journey wove into a tapestry of monotonous colors stretching over a loom of many days, and through it all, like a silver thread, ran his association with Dana Charteris. His every chord of feeling responded to the age-old symphony of a woman unfolding to a man (the glorious hymn of the universe).... He knew there were times, after he had wrapped himself in his blanket for the night, that she wept from sheer exhaustion, tortured physically by the hard travel and mentally by the ever-present portent of danger which the very atmosphere seemed to speak. But not once did he see evidence of it, nor did she complain. After a day of riding, himself sweaty and caked with dust, his every sinew strained to the utmost, the moral effect of her presence was a narcotic.
Despite the discomforts and the uncertainty of what lay ahead, something serene came to him out of the silence. He saw it in the girl's eyes, too—this intangible thing that the far spaces breed in the hearts of men and that lies slumbering until they have returned to civilization, where, in the midst of crowded, suffocating cities, it awakens suddenly, drawing them back to the trackless wastes they once had hated and cursed. The intense light on the hills; the glow of firelight in the dusk; the cry of a wolf wavering through the night—they were the small incidents that would cling to the memory and, later, seem the salient features of a weird, fascinating scroll of recollections.
Green-roofed temples and whitewashed lamaseries daily became more numerous. They squatted on every eminence and were habited by crimson-togaed monks—hundreds of men and boys who rattled prayer-wheels and muttered "Om mani Padme hums" before greasy idols. The presence of women in those lamaist communities ceased to be a novelty; rather, a question. They were not unlovely, in their loose garments and turquoise-studded bandeaus, but their instinctive hostility toward any form of ablution disqualified them from meeting Western standards of beauty.
Thus the journey wore on, and thus, on the evening of the seventh day, they camped on the edge of a marshy lake, within view of scarped hills behind which Shingtse-lunpo, the mysterious, lay.