Worse, the other men had grumbled. Muller was disapproving. “What did you do to her, Kurt? Look at her, she’s a whipped dog.”
“She’s pretending.”
“Why do you get a woman and we don’t?” complained Eckells.
“Take her yourself for all I care.” But he would kill Franz if he did, and somehow the man knew it.
“I’m not taking anyone. I just say there should be women for all of us, or no women at all.”
“Yes, we need a guide, not a concubine,” grumbled Muller.
“And I need a geophysicist, not a nanny.” He scowled at them. “All right, she asked me for it but from now on she sleeps alone. She’s only here because she has maps and clues. We brought her for National Socialism, comrades. She stays until we find Shambhala.”
Keyuri hiked in the center of their file. She’d acquiesced to her new destiny with the curious fatalism of the Asiatic. She didn’t seem terribly surprised that Raeder had successfully ambushed the British, nor that he would drive their vehicles to ruin without hesitation, nor that he’d bridged a chasm no normal person could cross. That was who Kurt Raeder was. Had she actually been waiting for him to return, a secret she withheld not only from her nunnery and Reting but from herself? Did a flicker of attraction still exist? Kurt still thought it possible, but she hid all signs of it. Was indifference her way of punishing him for what happened before? Had her study of the old books infected her with the same lust the Nazis had: to find Shambhala and harness its powers? Was she, the Buddhist nun, as greedy as any of them?
Yes, that was it. Raeder didn’t believe anyone could shed longing, no matter what religion they claimed. Longing was what humans were, one convoluted mass of longings. People were defined by desire. Keyuri could pretend to spiritual superiority until the sun went cold, but her soul was still his. He’d caught her eyeing the death’s-head insignia, the blue gleam of weapon barrels, the hard forearms of his company of SS knights. She was secretly fascinated, he was sure of it. Serenity was a facade.
He was determined to see some kind of final lust in her eyes, a desire for something, before he had her murdered.
So they marched. The utter emptiness of the land had begun to strike the Germans as eerie. There was desolate beauty, of course. Much of their route led by lakes three miles high, backed by snowcapped peaks one to two miles higher. The water ranged from indigo to the iridescent green of a hummingbird’s neck, as if the plateau were a succession of watercolor cups. The sky remained deep and clear, as roofless as outer space. Everything was immense, shrinking their party to insignificance. The other Germans whispered. Did the Tibetan woman hope to lose them in this wilderness? Would it swallow the Reich’s finest as the Reting had warned it had swallowed all who sought Shambhala before them? Were they being led astray?
No, Raeder assured. The Tibetans were as curious about the legends as the Germans were. They’d work together until the inevitable betrayals at the end.
There were no trees at this altitude, and the grass, brown and desiccated at the end of the season, was sparse on the stony ground. As they marched, the blue and brown snouts of bulldozing glaciers came more sharply into focus, descending from the sea of peaks ahead. Clouds clung to the summits, casting gray shadow. The explorers drank from pothole lakes that had a fringe of ice on the shore, and woke in pup tents that each morning had a coating of frost. There was no wood or dung for fires. Their fuel for cooking was dangerously low.
Then the ground heaved up into the hills Keyuri had pointed to and they climbed upward, the air thinner, the wind more shrill. Early snow puffed. The men wrapped scarves over their beards, their eyes pinched into narrow slits. Keyuri coughed but never complained.
“Is this the Kunlun?” Muller asked Keyuri.
“This is only its porch.”
They trudged up on old snow patches until there was no more up and they were on a summit of shrieking wind and stinging flakes.
“Kurt, where’s Shambhala?” Kranz gasped.
“There.”
The setting sun broke through to their left. They could see ahead for a hundred miles. Another vast, frigid basin, a desert dotted with frozen lakes, stretched before them. Beyond were higher mountains yet, icy, mist- shrouded, implacable.
Raeder pointed. “The Kunlun?”
Keyuri nodded.
“Come. Let’s get down into the basin as far as we can before nightfall.”
They made eight more miles and camped.
When he roused them at dawn their clothes were stiff. Their only liquid water was what they’d kept in canteens close to their chests. They shuddered as they ate cold food, ice mountains behind them, ice mountains ahead.
And marched on.
Then they came to the disappearing river.
A milky glacial stream ran from the mountains, seeming to emerge from nothing-a wall of cliffs far ahead-and sink into nothing. It fanned out onto the stony plain in a braid of channels, getting smaller instead of bigger as it poured from its source. It was obviously seeping into the ground. Its last tendrils disappeared in a bed of rocks. As they hiked upriver along its bank toward the Kunlun range, the flow paradoxically grew stronger.
“It’s very peculiar,” said Muller. “Following this feels like walking backward in time. Who ever heard of a river bigger at its source than downstream?”
“There’re no tributaries to feed,” said Keyuri. “The plateau drinks it. I’m guessing that in winter, when the source glaciers stop melting, it disappears entirely. But this is what the legends talk of, a river without end. I thought they meant endless, perhaps circular, but instead they meant it never reaches the sea.”
The running water cheered the Germans up. Before, the immensity seemed too quiet, except for the ceaseless sigh of the wind. Now they walked beside the chuckling sound of a glacial stream, familiar from their treks in the Alps and Himalayas.
The longer they followed the river toward these highest mountains, however, the more forbidding their goal became. The Kunlun loomed white, storm-whipped, forbidding. There was no valley or pass promising entry. Glaciers ended like gray palisades, their leaning snouts cracked and leaning. Huge moraines of gravel ran out on the plateau like tongues. Plants were shriveled and stunted. It was the Ice Age. The stream itself sprung improbably from a wall of black cliffs, which made no sense at all.
Then they topped a small hillock next to the now-roaring river, foaming tan with glacial slurry, and saw where the water was coming from.
There was a vertical cleft in a cliff that Muller estimated at two thousand feet high, as if some giant had split the wall with an ax. This canyon was no wider than a room, its walls sheer as a castle’s, and it was from this narrow gate that the stream erupted, shooting into the air like a fire hose before falling a hundred feet to the plain they stood on. There was no obvious way up this waterfall to the canyon, and certainly no way through the canyon to whatever the source was. The roaring river filled the cleft from wall to wall, its mist coating the slit with a rime of ice.
They stood, dismayed.
“This can’t be right,” Raeder told Keyuri.
She looked baffled as well. “But everything else is as the stories describe. A river that becomes a gate. Beyond it, the legends say, is a valley nestled from all storms. And from there, an entrance to Shambhala.”
“It’s a trap,” Muller muttered.
“A trap is something you can get into,” Diels disagreed. “This we can’t even enter.”
“But what a sight, eh?” said Kranz. “Have you ever seen a canyon so narrow? This is more sheer than that gorge! Made from an earthquake, perhaps? Or a lightning bolt. Franz, you must get some pictures.”
Their cameraman was already setting up his equipment. “Look, you can see a glimpse of white beyond it,” he said. “There’s a glacier in there I think, giving birth to this river. This will excite the geographic societies.”
Raeder was studying the wall with his binoculars. The cliffs soared up to precipitous slopes of snow that went into the clouds, the white mantle scarred by avalanche tracks. At the crests, wind blew the snow into sharp cornices, their edges swirling away like smoke. “We’ve no ability to get over the mountains,” he said. “If there’s a valley in there, it’s guarded like a fortress by this canyon gate.”
