mouth and nose. The others followed suit.
“I’ll go first,” whispered Christopher.
“Then William, then Lord Samdup. Then Chindamani. We’ll all carry lamps, and if anyone’s goes out they’re to say so immediately and get a fresh light from someone else. Make as little noise as possible. And close the hatch behind us.”
Peering into the hole with the help of his lamp a large one that Chindamani had found on a side altar Christopher made out the first few rungs of a wooden ladder.
They went down slowly. The ladder took them about ten feet below the floor of the gon-kang. When Christopher, William and Samdup reached the bottom, Chindamani tossed the more bulky baggage down to them before closing the hatchway and climbing down herself.
The darkness was absolute, a thing in itself, an object and not a mere absence of light. It seemed to breathe and live and grow stronger every moment. The light of their lamps was swallowed up in it and rendered flat and insubstantial. It clung to them like a dim halo, scarred and denatured by the all-encompassing blackness.
They were in a small stagnant chamber about fifteen feet by ten.
Against one wall, Christopher made out the shapes of lacquered chests and boxes. Beside them stood a huge, jewel-encrusted throne. He stepped across to a tall box ornamented with bright red peonies and lifted the lid. For a moment, it seemed as though the light thrown by his lamp had been shattered into a thousand fragments. Everywhere, tiny specks of coloured light danced in the darkness. Rubies, emeralds, diamonds and amethysts lay packed in the chest like pebbles on Brighton beach.
Christopher picked up a handful and let them trickle back through his fingers. They felt cold to the touch and curiously light, as though all their substance lay in colour and luminosity. The colours shifted and flew about, like the quick wings of hummingbirds in a forest glade, shimmering in a sudden ray of sunlight.
He picked up a second handful. They would need money for their journey. And after that, money to look after Chindamani and the boy. Out there, in what Christopher regarded as the real world, to be a representative of a goddess or an incarnation of the Maidari Buddha counted for nothing.
“Are you hungry?” It was Samdup’s voice, close beside him.
Christopher looked down and shook his head.
“No, my Lord,” he said.
“Are you thirsty?”
“No.”
“Then you have no need of them. There is food in our bags: we will not starve. There is snow: we will not go thirsty. If you take them, they will become a heavier burden than the whole of Dorjela.”
Christopher opened his fingers and the jewels dropped one by one back into the box. This time, for no real reason that he could see, they seemed trivial to him, like pieces of coloured paste or red and green candies for a greedy child. He closed the lid and raised his lamp again.
The walls were alive with paintings: among the usual gods and demons were vividly coloured mandalas and charms in the shape of lotus-flowers covered in fine writing. Little square flags printed with the image of a winged horse bearing a mystic jewel on its back had been hung at intervals; they were faded and tattered and covered in dust. Thick cobwebs hung everywhere, some ancient and tattered like prayer-flags, others clearly fresh.
They listened for the sound of something living, but the room was occupied only by inanimate objects. Christopher began to think that talk of a guardian was little more than a ploy to deter would-be thieves. But in that case, why had the story been kept so quiet?
In the wall opposite the spot where they had entered the room was the entrance to a broad tunnel. It had obviously not been used in some time: a thick, dusty spider’s web covered most of it.
“At least,” Christopher whispered, ‘we don’t have to make up our minds which way to go.”
Using the short sword, he swept away the web: it tumbled down, leaving the gaping opening free for them to pass through.
Christopher went ahead, holding his lamp out in front of him in his left hand while hefting the sword in his right, ready to strike out at the first signs of life. His heart pounded heavily in his chest:
he thought he could hear it echo off the walls of the tunnel. The stench was more pronounced here and seemed to be growing stronger all the time.
The passage was not quite high enough for Christopher to walk in un stooped but it was sufficiently wide to allow him to pass through without difficulty. He felt certain that they were already passing out of the monastery. The chill that pervaded the tunnel was unlike that in any of the passages they had come through on their way from Chindamani’s apartment. That had been icy, but tinged with a residual warmth that seemed to have seeped through the walls from the inhabited areas through which the tunnels passed. This was a fetid, uneasy chill, raw and bitter, as though nothing human had breathed the air down here for centuries.
Christopher’s foot touched something. Something hard and slightly brittle. He lowered the lamp slowly, trying to hold it at an angle in order to shed light on the ground in front of him.
He could not make it out at first. It seemed to be a bundle of some kind, about five feet long, angular in places, dirty and grey.
Then he held the light closer and all at once it became clear to him what it was ... or what it had been.
The small body had shrunk beyond all reason, as if something had sucked it dry over a long period. Nothing was left but dry skin stretched over old bones. Thin hands like talons clutched at the throat. The head was pulled back acutely, away from the body, as if death had been an agony. From head to foot, the corpse was covered in dust-laden strands of something like rotten fabric, similar to the cobwebs they had seen earlier. The whole thing resembled a cocoon, neatly packaged and left to dehydrate here in the tunnel. It had been down here a long time. Perhaps as long as five centuries. Christopher shuddered and lifted his lamp.
“What is it, Christopher?” Chindamani whispered.
“Why have you stopped?”
“It’s nothing. Just ... an obstruction in the tunnel. Keep to the right and you’ll be able to get by.”
He walked on, hesitant now, on the alert for whatever might be waiting further along the tunnel. Sonam’s guardian was slipping out of the mists of legend and growing into a thing of substance.
Behind him, he heard the others gasp as they caught sight of the obstruction.
The next body was a few yards further along. It had died in a seated position, propped against one wall. Its arms were thrust out in front of it, as thought fending off something coming out of the darkness. Like the other corpse, it was shrivelled and shrunken.
Pieces of leathery flesh, dark brown in colour, could be glimpsed beneath layers of the dusty fabric. It seemed to Christopher as though something had trussed it up and sucked it slowly dry.
“Who are they, Christopher?” Chindamani’s voice came from close behind him. She was standing, one arm around Samdup, looking down at the little corpse. The boy seemed disturbed, but not frightened. Christopher remembered that he had been brought up in a culture that had little fear of the paraphernalia of death.
Instead of Bo Peep and Humpty Dumpty, the walls of Samdup’s nursery would have been painted with dead flesh and mouldering bones. Instead of a teddy-bear, he would have been given a statue of Yama to place by his bedside.
“I think this one was a child,” he said. But it was only a guess, based on the corpse’s apparent height.
“It seems .. . more recent than the other. Less dusty.” He paused.
“There may be more. Do you want to go on?”
“Of course. We have no choice you said so yourself.”
About five yards after that, Christopher encountered a heavy web that all but blocked the tunnel. He swept it aside only to meet another and then another. Vast, heavy strands of cobwebs filled the air. The miasmatic odour was growing in intensity. Christopher was beginning to have a good idea what had trussed up the bodies they had found. But surely no ordinary spider could have sucked them dry as well.
All at once the tunnel ended and opened out into an area of undefined proportions. The light from Christopher’s lamp shed illumination over a limited radius, but as the children and Chindamani added their lights to his, the nature of their surroundings became gradually clear.
It was a chamber thick with spiders’ webs, huge structures of ancient manufacture that looped a fantastic tracery from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. The lamplight played complicated shadow-games among the interlacing cords and filaments. Some hung like hammocks, others billowed from the wall like grey lace curtains.
