At one end was an altar, gilded and most marvelously carved, backed by an image of Chenresi. All the altar furniture was golden, and the monastery’s pride—the book named Zab-choes-zhi-khro-gongs-pa-rang-groel-las-bar-dohi-thoes-grol- chen-mo[[38]]—lay in the midst on a golden plate before Chenresi’s image.
Dim music began and a chant, long grown familiar—that hymn to Manjusri that had thrilled so many audiences—and at last through the layering incense Ommony could make out the forms of the Lama and Samding. The chela was holding the fragment of jade in both hands and was walking solemnly toward the altar, where the Abbot and the Lama waited to receive him.
The drumming of the rain on roof-tiles ceased. One shaft of sunlight, beaming through a narrow window, shone on the jade as the chela laid it on the altar, making it glow with green internal fire. The radongs roared. The hymn changed to a chant of triumph, swelling in grand chords that shook the roof-beams. But Ommony hardly heard it. Something else, as the chela, almost exactly underneath him, moved into the beam of sunlight, held his whole attention.
“Well, I’ll be blowed!” he muttered. He rubbed his eyes, made sure they were not lying to him by glancing at the image of Chenresi and at the rows of monks’ heads, then stared again. “May I be damned, if—”
He looked at Diana, crouching in the gallery beside him, her head full of information that lacked only power of speech.
“I suppose if you could talk, Di, you’d lose your other gifts,” he muttered. Then he whistled softly to himself.
Not for a fortune and a hundred years of life would he let up now! Let the Ahbor country be as savage as the fringe of Dante’s hell, as inaccessible as Heaven, and as far away as righteousness, he would go there, if he must die for it!
“Di, old lady, this is the grandest scent you ever laid nose on! Mum’s the word. I’ll take a feather out of your cap!”
The service no longer interested him. He did not wait to see what they did with the piece of jade—no longer cared a rap about it. He was almost drunk with new excitement and a mystery compared to which the jade was mere mechanics—a mystery half-unraveled that set his brain galloping in wild conjecture, so wild that he kicked himself and laughed.
“Maybe I’m mad. They say India gets us all sooner or later.” But he knew he was not mad. He knew he had strength enough and sense enough to hold his tongue and to keep on the trail with every sharpened faculty he had. He was itching now to get to Tilgaun, partly because that was midway to the Ahbor country, but for another reason that made him laugh because he knew he held a secret key that would unlock more secrets.