From the Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup.
CHAPTER XII
“ALL THINGS END—EVEN CARRIAGE RIDES.”
The heat inside the carriage was stifling. No breeze came through the slats that formed the sides, but they had the advantage that one could see out, and sufficient light streamed through to show the Lama’s face distinctly at close quarters. The Lama sat perched on the rear seat with Samding beside him, both of them cross-legged like Buddhas, but the front seat was as narrow as a knife-board, and in the space between there was hardly room for Ommony’s and Maitraya’s legs. Faces were so close that the utmost exercise of polite manners could hardly have prevented staring, and Ommony took full advantage of it.
But the Lama seemed unconscious of being looked at, making no effort to avoid Ommony’s eyes, although Samding kept his face averted and stared between the slats at the crowd on the sidewalks. The Lama’s eyes were motionless, fixed on vacancy somewhere through Ommony’s head and beyond it; they were blue eyes, not brown as might have been expected—blue aging into gray—the color of the northern sky on windy afternoons.
The horse clop-clopped along the paved street leisurely, the clink of a loose shoe adding a tantalizing punctuation to the rhythm, and a huge blow-fly buzzed disgustingly until it settled at last on the Lama’s nose.
“That is not the right place,” he remarked then in excellent English, and with a surprisingly deft motion of his right hand slapped the fly out through the slats. He smiled at Ommony, who pretended not to understand him; for the most important thing at the moment seemed to be to discover whether or not the Lama had guessed his identity and, if not, to preserve the secret as long as possible. From a pouch at his waist that Benjamin had thoughtfully provided he produced pan[[26]] and began to chew it—an offensive habit that he hated, but one that every Brahman practises. The Lama spoke again, this time in Urdu:
“Flies,” he said, in a voice as if he were teaching school, “are like evil thoughts that seem to come from nowhere. Kill them, and others come. They must be kept out, and their source looked for and destroyed.”
“It is news to me,” said Ommony, in his best Bhat-Brahman tone of voice, “that people from Tibet know the laws of sanitation. Now I have studied them, for I lean to the modern view of things. Flies breed in dunghills and rotten meat, from larvæ that devour the solids therein contained.”
“Even as sin breeds in a man’s mind from curiosity that devours virtue,” said the Lama. He did not smile, but there was an inflection in his voice that suggested he had thought of smiling. Ommony improvised a perfectly good Brahman answer: