... 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.
CHAPTER XI
CITY OF THE FALCON
Dawn gave birth to a day that for Trent and Dana Charteris was surcharged with expectancy and apprehension. Ridges broke up the horizon, hiding the country beyond, as though fate and nature had conspired to preclude until the last moment a view of Shingtse-lunpo. Before another night they should be within the walls of the city.
Just before noon they rode over a crest and saw a high tchorten, or rock pyramid. Yak-hair tents were pitched at its base, and a band of men, mounted on white ponies and carrying yellow-pennoned lances, clattered across the valley to meet them.