On the other hand, the Lama might be planning to disappear along the mysterious “Middle Way” that baffles all detection. If so, the dog and Dawa Tsering might be exceedingly useful in tracing him. If the offer to send Samding with a message were not a trick, it would at least acquaint the dog with Samding’s smell; and it might be that the Lama was ignorant about a trained dog’s hunting ability.
Finally, as the carriage dawdled through the sun-baked, thronging streets, Ommony reached the conclusion that he had been guided by intuition when he gave orders to Dawa Tsering. A man who has lived in a forest for the greater part of twenty years, and has studied native life and nature in the raw as methodically as Ommony had done, achieves a faith in intuition that persists in the face of much that is called evidence. He decided to carry on, at least one step farther, trusting again to intuition that assured him he was not in serious danger and wondering whether the Lama was not quite as puzzled as himself. He glanced at the Lama’s face, hoping to detect a trace of worry.
But the Lama was asleep. He was sleeping as serenely as a child, with his head drooped forward and his shoulders leaning back into the corner. Samding made a signal not to waken him.
The carriage dawdled on. The Lama stirred, glanced through the slats to find out where they were, and dozed away again. The streets grew narrower, and then broadened into unpaved roads that wandered between high walls and shuttered windows, in a part of Delhi that Ommony only knew by hearsay and from books. It was shabbily exclusive—drab—with plaster peeling from old-fashioned houses and an air of detachment from excitement in all forms. Here and there a Moslem minaret uprose above surrounding flat roofs, and trees peeped over the wall of a crowded cemetery. They were going northward, toward where the ruins of really ancient Delhi shelter thieves and jackals in impenetrable scrub and mounds of debris; a district where anything might happen and no official be a word the wiser.
Suddenly the carriage checked and turned between high walls into an alley with a gate at the farther end. The driver cried aloud with a voice like a prophet of despair announcing the end of all things; the double gate swung wide, not more than a yard in advance of the horse’s nose; paved stones rang underfoot; the gates slammed shut; and the Lama came to life, opening first one eye, then the other.
“All things end—even carriage rides,” he said in English, looking hard at Ommony. But Ommony was still of the opinion it was better to pretend he did not understand that language.
Somebody opened the carriage door from outside—a Tibetan, all smiles and benedictions, robed like a medieval monk—who chattered so fast in a northern dialect that Ommony could not make head or tail of it. Samding cut short the flow of speech by pushing past him, followed by Maitraya. Ommony got out next, his eyes blinded for the moment by sunlight off the white stone walls of a courtyard; and before he could take in the scene the carriage containing the Lama moved on again and disappeared through a gate under an arch in a barrack-like building; the gate was pulled shut after it by some one on the inside.
It was a four-square courtyard, dazzling white, paved with ancient stones, surrounded on three sides by a cloister supported on wooden posts, on to which tall narrow doors opened at unequal intervals. There was no attempt at ornament, but the place had a sort of stern dignity and looked as if it might originally have been a khan for northern travelers. The windows on the walls above the cloister roof were all shuttered with slatted blinds, and there were no human beings in evidence except Samding, Maitraya and the Tibetan who had opened the carriage door; but there were sounds of many voices coming from the shuttered window of a room that opened on the cloister.
Samding stood still, facing Ommony, silent, presumably waiting for the message he was to take. Ommony spoke to him in Urdu:
“Is this our destination? Or do we go elsewhere from here?”