"O Arnold Trent, I could cry for sheer joy!" whispered the girl. "Can't you feel the night singing in your veins? Tibet! To think I should ever reach it!"
Trent's throat tightened, and the wind sang one word—Tibet! Tibet!—over and over in his ears. He rode on, so flooded with awe, with an overwhelming sense of majesty, that it was impossible to speak. Presently the girl, obeying an impulse, tore off her turban. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, and the wind caught truant strands and made sport of them.
Through the night they traveled; traveled until the high walls broke up into lower ridges and ravines; until the moon rolled over the peaks and into oblivion, and the stars passed, as tapers that grow dim and die. The gorge opened its mouth into a valley that lay between green, snow-tipped mountains. With dawn they came to a halt, and the muleteers set up the shelters. The girl, tired from the long ride, fell asleep almost instantly, but Trent sat in front of his tent for nearly an hour, smoking and gazing into the haze of ruddy gold that hid the City of the Falcon.
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.