Coromandel! (44 page)

‘Yes.’

‘
Quae visa, vera; quae non, veriora
--“What you see is true; what you do not see is more true.” ‘

Jason considered the statement carefully. It was a good statement, true to what he felt and what he had experienced. Written on the map like that, it might mean many things. It might be a warning not to take the map seriously. It might imply that it was better to look at the map and think of the treasure than to go and find it. Then the map would be true after a fashion, but not as true as the treasure shining and glittering in an imagined cave on a non-existent mountain. Or suppose there really was a treasure--and you saw it. Then the other, what was not seen, would be the imagined things beyond the treasure--the farther mountains, your wonderings about the man who amassed that treasure and carried it up the mountain. Or . . .

He gave up. With Ishmael to teach him and Catherine to guide him, he was content. He said, ‘First we must follow the map to the end. I knew there was something I had to tell you. From my room up there, the Lama’s room . . .’ He described the twin-peaked mountain he had seen on the north-western horizon.

‘There are many mountains with two peaks,’ she said cheerfully. ‘This may be ours, or Ishmael’s, or neither.’

‘Or both!’ he said, and then the door rattled, feet shuffled outside, and voices murmured.

Jason started up. ‘The monks! God’s blood! We should have escaped while we could. They’ll kill me for what I did last night. Those damned pigeons!’

She said, ‘I don’t think so. They believe it is wicked to take life.’

‘Except people’s, probably,’ Jason said gloomily. He unbolted the door and stepped out, blinking in the strong light, Catherine’s hand in his.

Ishmael was there, his face twisted into a ferocious frown and his eyes sparkling, and the three abbots, and about a hundred monks. Eleven dead pigeons lay in a row, feet up, in front of the Abbot Tendong.

Jason said, ‘Hello, Ishmael. Are they angry?’

Ishmael said, ‘The abbot wants to know if you killed these pigeons, and whether you lay with the lady last night.’

Jason said, ‘I did.’

Ishmael said, ‘They will believe you if you say you didn’t. Tendong loves you as much as I do. They need a Lama.’

Jason said, ‘Thank you, Father.’ Ishmael was giving him another chance, now that he was sober and that Catherine might be presumed to have taken the edge off his earthly appetites. Old Tendong looked very tired. The long search would have to begin again. Tsaparang Gompa towered above him, and up there was the Lama’s terrace. The pigeons cooed and fluted.

He said, ‘Tell him I’m sorry, Father. I am not the Twentieth.’ Ishmael spoke. The old abbot’s shoulders shrank. He held up his hand, and Jason saw that he was crying. Ishmael said, ‘You must give back the Lama’s robe.’

Jason said, ‘It is in the quarter here. I left the hat in the monastery.’

The huge monk who had been his proctor stepped forward, laid down the rest of Jason’s belongings, and went into the quarter. He returned with the robe folded carefully over his arm. Another monk gathered up the dead pigeons. Tendong turned away. The abbots and monks formed a procession behind him, the robe and the pigeons in front. The trumpets sounded, the inner door of Tsaparang opened, and the procession wound through and out of sight. The door closed.

Jason cried, ‘Load up, saddle up, as quickly as we can. Father, buy food from the women outside the gate!’

Ishmael cried, ‘Almost ready now, my son. See what Tendong gave me as a present.’ He held up a beautifully-painted Wheel of Life.

Jason said, ‘They gave me something better still--two presents. Catherine--and myself, for her to find a use for!’

Catherine laughed, and they set off.

They breasted the last pass and stood a moment to let the panting horses gain strength for the descent. Heavy tendrils of vapour blew round them; a few snowflakes drifted gently down. A slate-coloured lake lay in the plain below, and, beyond it, the twin-peaked mountain. Clouds hung like curtains round the lower part of the mountain, and it did not seem high. A wand of icy light passed over it and made it, in that wilderness, a magic mountain.

Ishmael said, ‘Meru! Let us hurry on.’

The clouds boiled up, and they began to scramble on down towards the lake. The snow fell steadily now, blown into their faces by a north wind. When they reached the lake they and their horses were draped in snow, and all the ground was white. Jason dismounted and tested the water of the lake. It was bitter. He remounted, and they trotted on. Catherine said, ‘We must find shelter soon. It is evening.’

They rode along a level shore between the lake and the low bluff on its western side. After an hour a tiny stream crossed their path, flowing black across the snow from the bluff to the lake. Again Jason dismounted. He said, ‘Fresh.’ They turned left and groped through the blizzard towards the bluff. They rode up and down and soon found a place where a ridge of rock protected them from the north wind and a cleft in the ridge made an overhang that was almost a cave. They hobbled the horses, made a rude shelter from their blankets and coats, and huddled inside it.

Ishmael said, ‘Children, I’m hungry. I’d like a good pot of tea now. Even Tibetan tea would taste good--even with rich tsampa in it and rancid butter floating half-melted on top.’

Jason said, ‘I’d like a Multani pilau like the one you gave us in Agra, with some of the Lama’s brandy, mulled and spiced.’ He felt warm and cheerful. The weather would improve soon--tomorrow or the next day--and the end of the map lay so close there beyond the lake. He could not see the lake any more, nor the reeds by its shore, though they were only fifty yards away. The snow fell silently, and it was not very cold yet.

He opened one of the saddlebags and got out a sack of tsampa. He said, ‘But today we have a rare treat for dinner--tsampa, snow, and butter.’ He found the biggest bowl and mixed the mess into it for all of them to share.

‘Eat up,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Tomorrow we shall start searching round the shores of the lake for the tomb of the scholar. Do you have any notion which side it will be, Father? It is a big lake, and we do not have much food.’

Ishmael choked on a piece of tsampa. Snow lay thick in the folds of his turban and sprinkled his beard, where the henna dye had begun to fade, with brighter strands of white. When he had recovered himself he said, ‘No, boy, let’s go up the mountain first. There may not be time to do both. Your cave is more important than my tomb.’

‘But we’ve told you about the Latin on the map,’ Jason said. ‘We must find the tomb first, because that is more likely to exist.’

Ishmael succumbed to another fit of coughing, and his face went purple. Catherine beat his back anxiously until he wheezed, ‘All right, now. Mmm. There’s something I ought to tell you about that. Ought to have told you before, really. You see, the ambassador who wrote that diary was something of a practical joker. I was the favourite object of his jokes. A coarse fellow, but I liked him. He’s dead now, may his soul rest in peace. I started out twenty years ago to find this same tomb. Got as far as Badrinath. Then a message reached me from the ambassador. He’d retired by then. He’d invented the whole story.’

‘But why?’ Jason asked, puzzled.

Ishmael took off his kulla and turban, all in one piece, and irritably beat the snow off them. He said, ‘Because he thought I’d like to believe it. I did, too. I was never so miserable as when the emperor made him send to tell me he’d made it up.
Quae visa, vera
. . . what was the rest of that?’

Jason said, ‘And then you wanted to go so much that you persuaded yourself it was true after all and came with us?’

‘No, boy!’ Ishmael roared. ‘I’m not a lunatic. Once I knew it was false, I knew. Your Voy had more sense. He didn’t tell you.’

Catherine bent over and kissed him quickly on the cheek. She said, ‘There! We love you, Father. Do you think we ought not to go any farther, then, so that we can be sure of believing the map for the rest of our lives?’

‘No,’ Ishmael said. ‘That’s being a coward. We must go on as soon as the weather clears. One thing is certain--this mountain is not Meru. The legends say that Meru is much higher than this. Look, I think it’s going to clear.’

They twisted round. The snow had stopped, and the clouds were rising fast. Soon the twin peaks of the mountain appeared, very close across the bitter lake.

At dawn of the second day they left their next camp, on the shoulder of the mountain, left the hobbled horses to find what grazing they could among the rocks, and began to climb. Jason hummed ‘Greensleeves’; Catherine hummed with him; Ishmael saved his breath.

They struggled up, at first across loose shale, then to rock, then to fields of sloping snow. According to the map, the treasure was hidden in a cave on the eastern peak. After two hours they came to the saddle where the mountain split. They faced the bare rock ridge leading up the eastern slope.

The western peak rose beside them, receding in distance as it climbed. They came to the base of the clouds, trudged on upward, and were alone on their mountain with the wet stones clinking under their boots. Jason sang aloud, and the swirling vapour echoed his song.

Ishmael said, ‘Go slower, my boy. I’m not as young as I ought to be.’

Suddenly there was no more mountain. Jason said, ‘We must look for the cave. “Forty-eight paces below the eastern peak, towards the north.” ‘ He began to walk north, counting aloud.

At forty-eight paces, his heart beating fast and the mist thick in his lungs, he stopped.

If there was a cave here, he could not see it. It was almost impossible, from the shape of the mountain and the pattern of the rocks, that there could be a cave, certainly not one large enough to hide a considerable treasure.

He sat down slowly on the wet stones.

No cave, no treasure, no tomb. In fact, nothing. Yet he was smiling. Exhilaration enwrapped him like a--like the Golden Fleece! And he had found nothing and should have felt nothing but disappointment.

So that was it. The Golden Fleece was inside you rather than at the end of any road or map. A great discovery! He supposed some lucky people were born knowing that. He laughed. It was more exciting to be unlucky, to undergo the adventures of the journey.

Catherine and Ishmael groped towards him, looming up like giants out of the mist. He said cheerfully, ‘Nothing.’

Catherine whispered, ‘Jason! Father! Look!’

The cloud blew thick about them in strange and thinning patterns, now rushing up with a current of wayward air, now whirling in ghostly circles, swooping downward, blowing into their faces, standing dense and vaguely translucent over the mountain.

Jason peered in the direction of her pointing hand. ‘I saw something,’ she insisted, ‘Far away, or I wouldn’t have seen it so sharply. It was black and gold.’

‘The treasure?’ Ishmael cried, jumping to his feet with such force that his turban flew off.

‘No. There, there!’

Jason saw a nearby cone of black rock, momentarily sharp among the drifting cloud. He said, ‘That’s the western peak.’

‘No,’ she cried. ‘I can see that. Higher, farther to the left.’

Jason looked, and saw.

A pyramid of black and gold hung in the sky immeasurably far to the north-west. It fell steeper to the left than to the right, and a plume of snow trailed from its peak, like a pennant across the horizon. The face of the pyramid was all black, for the snow could not lie there, so steeply did it fall into the clouds at its feet, but the sun poured gold on to the sides of it.

The clouds began to rise with unbelievable rapidity from the base of the distant pyramid. They soon tarnished its gold and, after half an hour, hid it altogether.

The three waited a long time, but the vision did not come back to them.

Jason got up. He wished almost that he had not seen the distant mountain. Now he would never forget it. Nor would he ever be able to reach its base, let alone climb to its summit.

Ishmael wiped his spectacles free of mist and put on his turban. He said, ‘That must be Meru. So your map is still true! We have not reached the end of it.’

‘We never will,’ Jason said. ‘Did you see that tangle of snow and ice between here and Meru? Not even a goat could find a footing there.’

‘We might. You might!’ Ishmael said. ‘If not you, then your son, your grandson--someone you’ve never heard of, any more than the first person to draw your map had heard of you. You must make a map, boy, a better map. Make it and keep it. One day someone will reach Meru. You must leave wonders for other people as well as using the wonders others have left for you.’

Catherine said, ‘We had better start down now.’

They started down, going very slowly in the cloud. Jason said, ‘I still don’t know what I am to be. I thought somehow there’d be a sign here. I’ve been travelling so long.’

Ishmael went more slowly yet, using what little breath he had in urgent question and answer. ‘Could you see Meru from your home in England, where you began?’

‘No.’

‘Or from Coromandel?’

‘No.’

‘Or from the topmost roofs of Tsaparang Gompa, even?’

‘No.’

‘No. You had to struggle to the summit of this twin-peaked mountain. And what have you learned here?’

Jason said, ‘I don’t know. Except that I am content.’ Ishmael gasped triumphantly. ‘That’s--what--you’ve--learned!’ Then his breath gave out.

But Jason thought: It’s more than being content. I am excited. Soon we’ll all be back in Agra. I don’t know what will become of me nor what I will do, except that I will live my life and find it wonderful. I may be an equerry in the household of the poet-empress. I can set myself to explaining the English to the emperor, or the emperor to the English. I can find out why the Hindus, who are so wise, worship foolish idols. I can be a scholar or a general or a merchant or a physician, or all of those at once. I can make maps and write books! Whatever happens, people will find me easy to deceive--God be praised--because I want to believe, because I know now that the magic mountain is always the one beyond the one you have climbed, the coast of Coromandel is always over the horizon. If it were not so, magic would be at an end and a man could only dream, or only do--but never both.