“I love you. That’s enough. Wherever you go, I’ll follow you. I swear.”
She bowed her head and put her arms around his waist. In the darkness outside, an owl swooped low across a frosted field in search of mice.
They set off the next day on ponies supplied by the abbot of Gharoling. He had wanted to send a monk with them as guide, but Chindamani had vetoed his suggestion for reasons not altogether clear to Christopher. He, for his part, was entirely happy to be alone with her. Her downcast mood of the previous evening had passed, and she smiled at him often while they packed the ponies with the provisions they would need.
The abbot accompanied them to the gates of the monastery, Christopher sensed in his manner a calmness and a self-possession he had not encountered previously in a lama. It was as if every gesture he made, every word he spoke was intended to convey the simplest of messages: that everything is transient, and even the greatest concerns will soon pass into insignificance.
“Travel in easy stages,” he advised them.
“Rest when you are tired. Do not drive your animals hard. Be easy with yourselves and the road will be easy with you.”
They thanked him and turned to leave. As they passed through the gates and started down the hill, a small processions of monks wound its way past them, carrying what seemed to be a human figure wrapped in a white sheet.
“What’s happening?” Christopher asked.
“Is it a burial?”
Chindamani nodded, sober again.
“It’s the hermit,” she said.
“They found him dead last night. He had not taken the food they left him for six days.” She paused.
“He died on the day after we arrived.”
The monks passed by reciting a slow dirge, heading towards a secluded area high on the hillside, where the gomchen’s emaciated remains would be cut into food for vultures. A cloud passed over the sky and threw a shadow across the valley of Gharoling.
Tibet moved past beneath their feet, a carpet of grass and barren soil and rock that sometimes erupted in patterns of broken ice or bright mountain rivulets. At times they rode, at others they walked, leading their ponies by their bridles. They had named the animals Pip and Squeak, after the little dog and penguin whose adventures William followed every day in the Daily Mirror. To Chindamani, who had never seen a cartoon or a newspaper, much less a penguin, the names were little more than pee-ling eccentricities.
The ponies were indifferent to names, English or Tibetan, and simply got on with the job of plodding along the road. That was what life was about, after all: plodding and eating and sleeping.
It was not all that different for the two humans, except that they at least could choose when to move and when to halt, when to eat and when to sleep. They avoided all major towns, preferring not to draw official attention to Christopher’s presence. The abbot of Gharoling had given Chindamani a letter bearing his seal, and this they used from time to time to secure them lodging. They stayed in tasam houses caravanserais where they could find fodder for their animals and shelter for themselves or in small monasteries where Chindamani’s letter secured them more than just a bed for the night.
Wherever she went, Chindamani was received with respect, even reverence. Christopher was an appendage to her holiness as the incarnation of Tara and a lifetime’s inexperience of the world outside Dorje-la made it impossible for her to act as though she were an ordinary mortal. With Christopher she could be herself or at least, that part of herself that she reserved from others but to everyone else she showed only her incarnation al face.
They travelled ever northwards and a little to the east, heading for the Great Wall and the border with Inner Mongolia. They passed to the west of Shigatse, following the course of the Tsangpo.
On their right, at the foot of Mount Dromari lay the red walls and golden roofs of Tashilhunpo Monastery, the seat of the Panchen Lama. On Chindamani’s instructions, they hurried past, eager to leave Tashilhunpo behind.
Six days later, they passed through Yanbanchen, where a road struck east for Lhasa and Peak Potala. Just outside the town, an official stopped them- and began to question Christopher. But Chindamani interrupted him sharply. The abbot’s letter was again produced and the official wilted visibly. They did not stop again until Pip and Squeak were about to drop and Yanbanchen was far behind.
After Shigatse, the going was hard: steep ridges, dark ravines and furious mountain streams blocked their path again and again.
They found numerous villages and monasteries, but the mountains through which they rode were bare and forbidding, cleft by narrow gorges whose walls towered above them, blotting out the sunlight.
Each day the world was reborn for Chindamani. The simplest things held her attention as though they were miracles. And in their fashion they were, for her at least. She had come from a world of un melting snow and ice into a land of changes, where sun and shadows played complicated games with grass and rocks and shimmering lakes, and where sudden openings in the hills revealed clear vistas stretching for mile after unexpected mile. She had never seen so clearly or so far.
She saw men and women as though for the first time. So many faces, so many styles of dress, so many occupations: she had never guessed that such variety existed.
“Is the whole world like this, Ka-ris?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Every part of it is different. This is only a little part.”
Her eyes grew large.
“And where you came from ... is it not like this?”
He shook his head again. How could he explain? He thought of the London underground, of motor cars and trains and the tall chimneys of factories. Of the multitudes on the streets and in the omnibuses, tumbling like bees in a hive after a thousand different honeys, each without taste or savour. Of churches hung with military flags and cluttered with dead soldiers’ monuments. Of polluted streams and scarred hillsides and black palls of smoke choking the sky. She would consider all those a lurid kind of madness. And yet beneath them there lay a deeper malaise that he thought she would be unable to understand. But when he thought again, he suspected she would understand it only too well.
“There’s a place called Scotland,” he said.
“I went there once for a holiday with my aunt Tabitha. To a place called the Kyle of Lochalsh. This is very like it.”
She smiled.
“Perhaps we can go there together some day,” she said.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Perhaps.”
Several times a whole day would pass when they rode together in silence, neither speaking, each wrapped in thought. Spring winds blew across empty plains almost without respite, forcing them to bend across the necks of the ponies, blinded and chilled to the bone. They passed frozen lakes and rivers in which patches of ice still lay, thick and scarred by the winds.
There were mists, white and cold and clinging, through which they and their ponies passed like ghosts. Chindamani’s black hair gleamed with bright droplets of half-frozen air. Christopher watched her ride ahead of him, a dim figure passing from visibility to invisibility and back again. The edges of their world were blurred. Nothing was defined: not speech, not thought, not memory. They walked or rode in a silence of their own making, apart from the world, travellers without a destination, voyagers through a timeless, formless space.
Everywhere they saw signs of faith, reminders of the presence of the gods: prayer-flags and chortens, long mam-walls, and once, two pilgrims making their way across the freezing ground, prostrating themselves full length time after time.
“Where are they going?” Christopher asked.
“To thejokhang,” she said.
“The great temple at Lhasa. They are going there to pay respect to Jovo Rinpoche.”
Christopher looked puzzled.
“It’s a great statue of the Lord Buddha when he was a child,” she explained.
