month.” He also left a more detailed sealed message at the British Trade Agency, for Frazer to transmit to London by a more secure route. It was to let the folks at home know how young Christopher was getting on in distant India, and it asked Winterpole to get Delhi CID moving on an investigation of Carpenter and the Knox Homes.
Before leaving, Christopher transformed himself. Shivering, he stripped to the skin and daubed himself liberally with a mixture made from the walnut juice and iodine. When the dark stain had dried, he dressed again, putting on heavy clothes suitable for the conditions ahead. Over these, he draped an ensemble of evil smelling rags and much-patched cast-offs that Lhaten had dredged up from somewhere unspeakable. Christopher had not asked where he preferred not to know. The hair-dye worked well enough for something labelled: “Phatak’s World- Renouned Hare-die and Restore, Effektive against Greyness of He’d, Baldiness, and Skalp Itchingness.” There was enough left in the bottle for a touch-up every week or so provided Christopher’s hair hadn’t all fallen out by then. The last touch was the most difficult: he squeezed a few drops of lemon directly into his eyes. It stung like hell, but when he was able to look in the mirror again, he could tell that his eyes had lost most of their blueness and were now dark enough to match his skin and hair.
They travelled as far as they could that night, to be well away from Kalimpong by morning. Their first destination was Namchi, about seven miles to the north-west. In the darkness, without sign or token, they passed over the border between British India and Sikkim. Christopher knew that more than a physical frontier had been crossed. The mountains that lay ahead were in the mind as much as in nature.
They passed Namchi soon after midnight. It was a collection of bamboo houses, silent, unguarded, sleeping. Christopher could not tell how Lhaten found his way in the darkness. The path went upwards, sometimes steeply, across damp meadows and once through a patch of forest. The forest would grow thicker later on, before they left the treeline and entered the pass country.
On Lhaten’s advice, they made camp about three miles from Namchi. Christopher felt wide awake and wanted to go on, but Lhaten insisted they rest.
“You will be tired tomorrow, and we still have a long way to go before we leave the villages behind. Even if you can’t sleep, you should rest. I’m going to sleep. I’ve had a tiring day .. . and I know what’s ahead.”
It was as if Lhaten had shed a false skin since leaving Kalimpong. There, he had been obsequious, almost servile, constantly calling Christopher ‘sahib’ and behaving in all respects as a member of a subject race should behave towards his master. The further they moved away from the town, however, the more some innate sense of independence asserted itself in him. He used the word sahib far less frequently and with increasing irony coupled, perhaps, with a little affection. Christopher still wondered why the boy had volunteered to act as guide to a murder suspect. But it was evident from the start that he had not been boasting when he said he had done this sort of thing before.
Christopher made an effort to sleep, but he managed nothing more than a fitful doze, out of which he would start from time to time to hear Lhaten breathing evenly beside him. The ground was hard and the air bitterly cold. It would soon warm up during the day, but that was no comfort now. For Christopher, the images of the day before were still too close and fresh to shut out from his thoughts.
The sky turned hazily purple, then scarlet and gold, as the sun returned above the hills of Bhutan. Lhaten woke with the light. He wanted to make good progress today, to get as far away as possible from the beaten track. At a distance, the pee-ling might pass as a Nepali traveller, but he did not want the disguise put to the test close up. Apart from anything, Christopher’s height would draw unwelcome attention. And there was nothing they could do about that.
At Damtung, the road forked. On their left, a path led to the Buddhist monastery of Pemayangtse, and on the right a broader road began to descend toward the River Tista. This was the main road to Gantok, the Sikkimese capital.
“We’ve got to take the Gantok road, sahib. No choice. If you’re seen, leave the talking to me. I’ll say you’re dumb.”
The descent was steep. At the bottom, the Tista ran high, still swollen from recent rains. It was a large river, but it had the tight violence of a mountain stream churning through steep gorges.
They bypassed the villages of Temi and Tarko, like men in a hurry, eager to get to Gantok by market day. The heat became unbearable. By noon, they were walking stripped to the waist. The cold of the night was like a dream or a distant memory.
All around them, the dark, humid jungle closed in with suffocating intimacy. It touched them as they passed, with fingers of damp green leaves and tendrils that hung from moss-covered boughs, snake-like and slimy to the touch. Giant ferns struggled for space with bamboos and palms. Vines and creepers twisted themselves round everything in sight. Orchids grew in profusion, white grave flowers heavy with a drugged and sickly scent. In the shadows, bright-patterned snakes glided through tangled and rotten undergrowth. The air was moist and heavy and full of corruption. They breathed it reluctantly, like men in a place they know to be full of contagion.
Here in the forest, life and death were inextricable: things died and rotted and provided food for the profusion of new life that sprang up everywhere. Life seethed around them, hot and green and restless. There was a fever upon everything: insects, flowers, birds, snakes, animals all were burning with it.
Once, Christopher saw a horde of butterflies quivering in a sunbeam close to the ground. Their wings caught fire: reds and blues and yellows spun like fragments of stained glass in a dark cathedral. But when he approached more closely, he saw that they had battened on the decaying body of a small animal, on which they seemed to be feeding in some fashion. On another occasion, Lhaten showed him an isolated flower of great beauty, a scarlet jewel hanging from a long branch: and above it, secreted in darkness, spun about the flower’s stem, was a thick spider’s web in which dying insects, attracted by the red petals, struggled helplessly.
From the beginning, they were plagued by leeches. Like short, thin earthworms, the little creatures dropped on them at every available opportunity, insinuating themselves through the narrowest of apertures until they reached the naked flesh they so coveted.
Once there, they would suck blood until sated. It was useless to pull them off- if they snapped, the mouth would remain intact, if torn away, they would leave a suppurating wound. Every few miles, Lhaten and Christopher would stop and apply small bags of salt dipped in water and the leeches would shrivel and fall away.
For much of the time, they walked in silence. The heat and the stifling air made speech a luxury. There were bright-plum aged birds to speak for them, and frogs and monkeys and all the chattering denizens of their greenhouse world. The jungle itself wove a spell over them, sucking words from their tongues as the leeches sucked blood from their veins.
But at night when they stopped to sleep, they would whisper in the darkness while beasts of prey stalked their victims and the ripe flowers gave up their perfumes to the night.
“Did you fight in the war, sahib? In the Great War? Did you see tanks and aeroplanes?”
“No, Lhaten. I saw none of those things. I was here in India.
There were spies, German spies. They wanted to bring the war here, to take India away from us.”
“From you. They wanted to take India from you.”
“Yes, of course. But not to give back to the Indians. They wanted it for themselves. There would have been a German Raj.”
“Would that have made a difference?”
Christopher pondered. For the British, yes; of course. But for the Indians? Or Nepalese like Lhaten? He would have liked to say “Yes’ to that as well, but he felt no conviction and could not say it.
“Did you catch Germans in India?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill them?”
“Some of them. The rest were put in prison.”
“Because they wanted to conquer India?”
“Yes.”
“Like the British?”
“Yes.”
In the darkness, something moved. An inarticulate cry was followed by the fluttering of wings. Predators and victims came and went in an intricate night-time game.
On the third day, they stumbled across the ruins of a temple in a weed-choked clearing. Ivy worshipped the fallen images of Shiva and Vishnu after its own fashion, with slow and intimate fingers.
