trapped in religious superstition, ruled by monks, and yet Tibet is rumored to be a land of astonishing magical powers. Tibet’s technology is primitive, its history is poorly understood, but its religious and mental magic is intriguing.”
“We’re going to make names for ourselves as scholars,” Diels predicted. “We’re going to learn what they know.”
“Over the centuries, few Europeans have penetrated this region. I myself have been on its edges with two expeditions, one financed by an American millionaire named Benjamin Hood. The Russian monk Agvan Dorjiev studied in Lhasa. Germany’s Baron von Ungern-Sternberg fought the Communists for the White Russians in Mongolia, and heard tales there. The Pole Ferdinand Ossendowski served with the baron and wrote of wonders he’d seen. Nicholas Roerich led an expedition through Tibet a decade ago, bearing a wish-granting gem entrusted to him by the League of Nations. He hoped to return it to a secret underground kingdom called Shambhala, but never found it. All these explorers brought back curious legends of fabulous ancient kingdoms that were repositories of wisdom and power, ruled by a King of the World, or Dark Lord. Tibetan tradition holds that the armies of secret Shambhala shall someday ride forth to redeem the world. Some Westerners believe that the Shambhalans were refugees from Atlantis and built a hidden city to preserve ancient knowledge.”
“Does your old friend Hood know all this?” asked Eckells. “Do we have to worry about the American?”
“He’s not my friend. He’s a playboy, looking for things to occupy his time in New York. Don’t worry about Hood.” There was an edge to Raeder’s voice, but the others had already taken note of his moodiness and temper. They knew better than to ask more.
“David-Neel saw monks levitate and move from place to place at supernatural speeds,” Hans Diels volunteered instead. “Roerich saw a mysterious oval spheroid speeding across the Asian skies in 1927. It was immense and instantly changed direction, but had no discernible power source.”
“Superior to any aircraft now in existence,” Raeder agreed. “We’re not traveling ten thousand miles for yak dung, my friends.”
They laughed.
“Some of the philosophers behind National Socialism have interpreted these legends and reports,” Raeder went on. “The American Madame Blavatsky, the Austrian Rudolf Steiner, the British medium Alice Bailey, Germany’s Thule Society-all have contributed. If you’ve paid attention in SS seminars, you know their theories of Atlantis, Hyperborea, and Thule. Theosophy, Ariosophy, and other new scientific disciplines have established the history of race conflict and the origins of us Aryans. This is the new German science.”
They nodded.
“Blavatsky herself posited three principles: that God’s instrument is an electrospiritual force that embodies the laws of nature, that creation is a cycle of destruction and rebirth, and that all is unified-the soul and the material, the tiny and the great. Manipulating this unity, she preached, is the secret of supernatural power. Our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler himself studied her philosophy and incorporated its teachings into National Socialism. We sail with a rich philosophic tradition.”
“ Heil Hitler,” Eckells breathed quietly, like a prayer.
“Our ancestors from the north may have branched to Tibet. One of our tasks is to determine if this is true. Wilhelm here will search for racial evidence with his calipers.”
“Just so he doesn’t measure me,” Muller growled. He thought the head measuring was anthropologic nonsense. Julius had little use for the social sciences.
“Yes, don’t let him practice one of his plaster masks on you,” said Diels, who’d tried it. “It’s like being suffocated.”
“Such a discovery in itself would be enough to garner us all global fame,” Raeder went on. “It would reunify the Aryan and prove to skeptics that Germany’s racial theories are true. Julius will add to our understanding of the physics of the earth, and Hans its human history. Franz will bring back movie footage of ceremonies never witnessed by Western man.”
“If all goes well,” Eckells amended.
“But there’s more at stake here than that. We’ve all heard of the strange theories of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr. A universe of the vast and the small, ruled by laws very different from what we perceive in everyday life. Some physicists think these ideas hint at strange and wicked new powers at the level of the atom.”
“But that’s Jewish science,” Kranz objected.
“Even a Jew might stumble on a truth. And we must never let the Jew have a monopoly on a new kind of power. We true Germans are far ahead of them, I think. Haushofer founded the Vril Society two decades ago to search for the power source that stories attribute to Shambhala.”
“What’s Vril?” Muller asked. “I don’t remember this from my physics texts.”
“A convenient name, taken from an old novel, of what the Reichsfuhrer thinks may be a very real power source. These ancients understood the natural world in ways we’ve forgotten, and found a way to tap fundamental energies far more powerful than gunpowder or gasoline. This power can be directed by the mind to build or destroy. It is power that may still exist in fabulous cities that, many writers and thinkers believe, lay hidden under the surface of the earth-cities that are the origin of the idea of hell, perhaps.”
Diels took a swig of schnapps. “You’re taking us to hell, Kurt?”
“Or heaven. Somewhere may be hidden the most fabulous city since the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. A new El Dorado! Not because of gold but because of power. The ignorant would call what travelers have sought ‘magic,’ but it’s in fact simply a spiritually higher mastery of science and the cosmos. It restores man from a plaything of physics, a victim, to its central mover. We become not pawns but kings. Not mortals but gods. We become not the product of creation, but its manipulator. Has not our Fuhrer demonstrated this kind of ‘magic’ already? Hitler is destined to be the true King of the World, and our mission is to help him. This is both a religious expedition, gentlemen, and a scientific one. We’re being sent to find, essentially, supernatural powers-powers that our Aryan ancestors once possessed and ruled with, but which have been lost for millennia.”
“But how were they lost?”
“We don’t know. Perhaps they were deliberately hidden, to await reemergence of a fit people like us of the Third Reich.” The first Reich was the heroic prehistoric world of Aryan god-men, the Germans knew. The second has been the chaos of history caused by the cursed philosophies of Jew and Christian. Now they were at the dawn of the third, the Reich of National Socialism. “We, gentlemen, are the apostles, the knights, the angels, who may bring the greatest secret in history back to the Fatherland. If we do, Germany conquers all, easily and completely. And then our species’ evolutionary destiny can truly begin, unpolluted by human vermin.”
“We’re going to steal this Vril from the monks of Tibet?” Muller tried to clarify.
“Not steal. Re-find. Tibetans are sunk in ignorance and poverty. They’ve forgotten their own genius. We’re going to plumb their legends to find if the legends of our ancestors are true, and learn where Vril is hidden. Tibet will be our new ally, on the flank of Russia, China, and British India alike.” He took his own swig. “Never has so small a group of men been given the possibility of achieving so much.”
“But how will we find what no one else has?”
“Reichsfuhrer Himmler has been researching these legends. He’s found maps that date from the Middle Ages and the time of Frederick Barbarossa. We’ll combine those clues with what the Tibetans know.”
“Barbarossa!”
“There’s evidence Barbarossa was interested in these mysteries himself. And belief that he may have left us a key.”
“What key?”
“I’ll reveal that to you when the time comes.”
“And if we fail?” asked Diels. “What if there’s no Shambhala and no Vril?”
Raeder looked at them seriously. “In that case, we might have to consider never returning to Germany. That is not a message the Reichsfuhrer cares to hear.”
9
The Skagit River Valley, United States
