“Here.”
“Dawa Tsering?”
“Coming!”
“And the dog?”
Ommony whispered to Diana and she bayed once. Everybody laughed, including the Lama, who stood so upright that he could have passed for a young man until Samding came and stood beside him, when the contrast exposed the trickery of darkness.
The Lama spoke in low tones to a Tibetan, who repeated the order to others, and in a moment all the loads were on men’s heads. There was a prodigious number of them; men had arrived like ghosts, apparently from nowhere, and the discipline was perfect. Not a man spoke. There was no sound except for a grunt now and then and the rutching of heavily loaded bare feet on the paving stones; and not a woman yet in evidence except Maitraya’s actresses, who seemed too frightened to make a fuss, or too interested to be frightened; it was hard to tell which.
If there was another order given Ommony did not hear it. The procession started across the courtyard, in through the stable-door into which the Lama’s carriage had vanished when they first drove in that morning; some one opened the door from inside. The Lama stood in the courtyard watching, Samding beside him counting, and they two entered last, a dozen paces behind Ommony; and the moment they entered the echoing arch the door slammed shut at their backs.
One candle on an iron bracket showed the shadowy outlines of three carriages on the right, and three horses in stalls beyond that. The place seemed clean, with plenty of fresh air, and the stable-smell was not overpowering.
“Have you been here before?” asked Ommony.
“Not I,” said Dawa Tsering. “Maybe it is here he keeps the women! This is one of those places the police dare not look into lest men accuse them of committing sacrilege. In my next incarnation I will study to be a priest, because then I can laugh at the police instead of being inconvenienced by them.”