Blood of the Reich (24 page)

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.”

“And if we can’t get in, no one else can either,” said Muller. “We’re chasing a myth about an inaccessible place, I think. That’s why Tibetans could invent stories about it. A valley with no entry? Why not pretend a secret kingdom lies within? Who will contradict you?”

“Wait,” said Raeder. His binoculars aimed at the canyon. “There’s a path, maybe, or at least a ledge. Here, take a look.” He handed the binoculars to their geophysicist.

“You can’t be serious,” said Muller, focusing. “What path?”

“There’s a ledge in that canyon twenty feet above that rushing stream. Too narrow for most animals, I’m guessing, and maybe too narrow for us. If we fall into the water and don’t drown, we go straight over the falls. It looks ludicrous, and yet it doesn’t appear to end. The ledge goes on into the shadows, as if it were hewn.”

“You want us to follow
that
?” Kranz said, taking his turn through the binoculars. “It’s suicide, I think. That
is
a trap.”

“Or a test,” said Raeder. “If Shambhala was easy, it would have been found long ago, no? We need to at least get up there and see if it’s really a trail, and what might lie on the other side.”

“And then what?”

“We leave our extra equipment and sidle our way in there. If we fall, we die. But if we turn back now—if we return to the
Reichsführer
and say yes, we saw something promising, something that fit the legends, but prudently turned back—then I think we die anyway.”

Eckells nodded. “The Fatherland does not permit failure.”

23

Summer Palace, Lhasa, Tibet

October 2, 1938

S
o much for Agent Hale’s diplomatic letters of introduction. Since his arrival in Lhasa, Benjamin Hood had been kept prisoner in a gilded cage, a meditation pavilion with a pagoda roof. His jail was a serene retreat built on a stone island in a rectangular pond on the summer palace grounds of the Dalai Lama. No one could approach his flowery Eden without permission, nor could he could leave it. Soldiers guarded the bridge. It was a claustrophobic paradise, the terrace girded with a carved stone railing. Ducks and swans floated in the green pool, and trees turning golden with the fading year showered the water with leaves the color of bright coins.

Hood had demanded an audience with the Reting Rinpoche and been denied. He’d demanded release and been ignored. He’d demanded an explanation and been met with the Buddhist chant:
Om mani padme hum.
It was a mantra open to endless interpretation, but in general called its practitioner to the correct path. Which path was that?

From one corner of his little island he could see past the trees to the winter palace called the Potala on its spectacular hill, its golden roofs as remote as heaven. Was Kurt Raeder up there, laughing at him? What had happened to Beth Calloway? Flown the coop, he assumed. Did his museum or government even care where he was? The lack of all communication was maddening.

So it was with cautious relief that he heard the thump of drums and the guttural moan of the
dugchen
, the Tibetan long trumpets, so huge that they had to be rested on the ground. It was like a growl from the bowels of the earth. Some kind of monkish procession was coming toward him, a ribbon of scarlet and purple.

From another direction a file of Tibetan soldiers trotted up, rifles ready, and took up position around the perimeter of the lagoon where Hood was kept. They wore pith helmets and British field uniforms with puttees. Another file of ceremonial archers in long robes drew up on either side of the gravel path that led to the stone bridge, as handsome and taut as their bows. Between their ranks came the aristocracy of Lhasa, stately as a wedding procession.

A single robed figure with high peaked cap detached himself from the column and walked forward, the soldiers snapping to attention. He brought no escort, carried no weapon, and seemed to have no fear of the American. So why was Hood being held?

The man approached slowly, as if not to spook a wary animal. In his hands was a white silk scarf, a
khata
, of greeting.

“I am the Reting Rinpoche, the regent of Tibet, who rules in the name of the Dalai Lama before His Holiness comes of age,” the man said. He bowed, and held forth the scarf. “I welcome you to our kingdom.”

Alerted to this custom by Beth, Hood dipped his head to take the cloth. He offered his own flying scarf to the regent. It was smudged, but Reting took no notice.

“It’s a pleasure to at last make your acquaintance,” Hood said carefully.

“I apologize for your incarceration, but I’m afraid it’s necessary. Events needed time to occur before we could have this meeting. We’ve made you as comfortable as possible.”

“Comfortable but anxious. I’m Benjamin Hood of the American Museum of Natural History, and I’ve come here to warn you.”

“Yes, we’ve been expecting you.”

“Expecting me?”

“The scarves signify peace.” Reting gestured toward the pavilion. “Should we sit and enjoy it?”

Clearly, Tibetans preferred to take their time. The two men retreated to rest in the shade. The small, brilliantly colored army on the other side of the pond waited stiffly.

“You’ve come very far,” the Reting began.

“I’ve been sent by my government on a diplomatic mission . . .”

“I know all about your mission, Dr. Hood.”

“But how? I haven’t been able to speak to anyone.”

“Word of your approach came to the British legation from their counterparts in Hong Kong two days before you arrived. I myself spoke to the English authorities on a wireless set that a German delegation thoughtfully gave me as a present. As you might imagine, what the British had to say about you, and the Germans, differed a great deal from what Herr Kurt Raeder,
Untersturmführer
of the SS, told me.”

Hood was taken aback. The Tibet he’d seen in his previous travels had been technologically backward and preoccupied with religion. He’d expected complacency and lassitude in the Potala, not a wireless. Yet the young regent seemed calm and knowledgeable, not a naive potentate easily manipulated by the West.

“You know about Kurt Raeder?”

“I’ve conferred with him.”

“Where is he?”

“Searching, I presume, for the ancient powers of Shambhala in the Kunlun Mountains, far to the north and west. He’s promised to share anything he finds with my government.” The Reting smiled, as if he’d made a joke.

“Do you know what kind of a man Raeder is?”

“More than you think. I’ve had the remarkable counsel of a young nun who knows about Shambhala, Raeder, and you.”

“Me?”

“Her name is Keyuri Lin.” He waited for the American’s reaction.

My God, what’s going on here?
Hood made no attempt to mask his confusion. “She’s alive?”

“Very much so.”

“She serves you?”

“She serves her religion. But, yes, she’s a patriot of Tibet.”

“Is she why I’m being held captive?”

“Oh no. She’s why you’re going to be let go.”

“I can see her?”

“Not unless you can find Kurt Raeder.”

“What do you mean?”

“Keyuri is with him.”

Hood’s face fell. “Not again.”

“By her choice, not just his. But not for the reason you think.”

“I’m confused. I came to warn you about Raeder . . .”