Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (19 page)

He paused to see the effect of his speech on Sherlock Holmes, who, unperturbed as ever, looked straight back at him with calm dignity.

‘You do not believe me? Maybe a demonstration would be in order. I owe you that, at least. You threw me into that chasm … and, well, I am a man who believes in returning favours.’

He raised his hands, his fingers forming strange
mudras
or occult gestures. It may have been my overwrought imagination but I distinctively felt some energy move across the room. The lamps flickered, and I felt a strange sensation in the pit of my belly, as if a hand had grabbed me there. The two soldiers may have felt something too, for I clearly heard both of them suck in their breath in audible gasps.

The effect on Mr Holmes was alarming. His eyes grew wide with terror. His mouth opened to emit a sharp scream, which ended in a low, frantic gurgle. His body swayed forward, his hands stretched out, flailing wildly, as if he was balancing for dear life on the edge of something terrifying. I was certain that he was being subjected to some kind of powerful mesmeric force that actually made him see and experience falling over a precipice. I am not inexperienced with this strange force, having once been unhappily subjected to a seance by Lurgan
¹
, back in Simla — but I need not go into that now. But the suddenness and overwhelming force of this present phenomenon was beyond the bounds of anything imaginable. Slowly Mr Holmes seemed to lose his balance, and with a great cry fell forward onto the floor. In spite of the armed guards, who had their weapons trained on me, I rushed forward to assist my stricken friend.

Just at that moment the sharp report of rifle-fire broke into the room. What in heaven’s name was going on out there? Had the Chinese soldiers commenced firing on the mob? Professor Moriarty dropped his hands and turned his head in the direction of the fusillade. He barked an order to a guard. ‘You! Go to the front quickly and ask His Excellency the Amban what is going on. Report back immediately’

I was tending to Mr Holmes and trying desperately to resuscitate him. I was very gratified to note that he was not deceased or even critically incapacitated. He was breathing heavily, gasping sometimes, but, feeling my hands on his shoulder, he opened his eyes. For just a brief moment he appeared somewhat bewildered — a state I had never seen him in before — but his indomitable strength of character quickly reasserted itself and his eyes resumed their normal alert and intelligent quality. I helped him to a chair.

‘You have recovered, Holmes?’ gloated Moriarty. ‘Good. Very good. Pathetic as your mental powers are when compared to mine, they never fail to astonish me. Any other man would be a gibbering wreck by now. But I should not have expected anything less from the great Sherlock Holmes.’

A few more bursts of gunfire echoed outside. Moriarty drew aside the curtain from the window beside him and peered out.

‘Don’t expect your dirty Thibetan friends to save you,’ he said, turning around and facing us again. ‘A few more volleys from the guard’s rifles and they will all take to their heels. “A whiff of grapeshot” Eh! … “A whiff of grapeshot”. Bonaparte knew how to deal with rabble.’ The Professor bent forward over the desk and glared at Holmes with manic eyes.’… and he knew power; crude as his notions of it may have been, he knew how it had to be wielded — with force and ruthlessness!’

‘Brag and Bounce,’ I thought to myself. The blighter’s conceit was really insufferable. I could not help but offer a refutation, though I regretted it the moment I did.

‘Yet, if I may be permitted a historical retrospective,’ said I, delicately,‘the Corsican brute ended his life as a wretched prisoner of His Sovereign Majesty, King George the Third.’

‘Yes, fool,’ he turned to me with a snarl. ‘He failed because his powers were only those of the intellect, of military stratagems and political plots. Great as such an intelligence may seem to a dolt like you, they are as nought against the power of the primordial mind. But perhaps my demonstration on Holmes did not convince you. Perhaps you would like one yourself?’

Before I could offer a polite refusal he held up his right hand and pinched his index finger and thumb together. Although I was about ten feet away from that dreadful man, I distinctly felt something tweaking my nose — and hard! I nearly jumped out of my bally skin.

‘Does this quite convince you now, my fat Hindu friend? Or perhaps a little more pressure would reinforce the salutary effect of this lesson.’

‘Yeow! Ow! Ow!’ I could not but help yell out. ‘Eduff! I dink I am abdolutely codvinced. Yeow!’

He did not release my nose immediately, dam’ his eyes, but held on even more firmly for a few moments more, before finally letting go after a last savage tweak.

‘Yeow!’

While I rubbed my poor nose, Moriarty leaned back on his chair and resumed his boasting speech.

‘Awesome as the force I have just demonstrated may seem to you, it is nevertheless subject to the laws of nature and the cosmos, and thus inherently limited. Others, though only a few, possess such powers as mine. But there is a way to increase its strength — a hundred fold, a thousand fold — and I have, at long last, found the way.’

He raised a finger. As if at a command the scroll on the desk unrolled itself and lay flat on the surface.

‘And this will lead me to it.’ He pointed to the circular geometrical painting, its colours gleaming like living rainbows under his deathly white finger. ‘And only I will be the master of it. This time none of those weak-minded lamas with their tiresome pieties will be permitted to come between me and my destiny.’

As Moriarty ended his mad diatribe, the yelling of the mob outside became distinctively louder; suddenly the window on his side, behind the guard, exploded, as a rock smashed through it and flew into the room. By Jove! The demonstrators were shying missiles in retaliation to the shooting. The guard turned around in surprise.

Mr Holmes did not hesitate to seize this opportune moment. He leaped forward and fisted the cad soundly on the side of his head. It was a well-executed and powerful blow — obviously Sherlock Holmes was fully versed in the manly art of pugilism —for the guard was effectively incapacitated by that single cuff.

The speed of my own reflexes were not very much behind those of Mr Holmes. My many experiences in various ticklish situations had honed my reactions to a fine edge; and anyhow, fear is always a powerful goad to speedy action. Such is the tremendous galvanic force of the trained human reflex, that before I had even conceived a thought of assailing my foes, my fingers were already curling around the base of the shining lampion on the small table by my side. And before Moriarty could have any idea of what I was up to, I had picked it up and hurled it straight at him.

Unfortunately, I missed. I was a good three feet off the mark. The lamp flewpast the villain and struck the wall behind, and fell broken on the floor. He didn’t even flinch, just looked directiy at me with those terrifying eyes. I was, I will admit, a trifle abashed by this turn of events.

‘I should opine that the damaged article was not particularly valuable … ‘ I said, rather sheepishly.

‘Silence, fool!’ he snarled, the veins on his bulging forehead twisting and jerking in an appalling fashion.‘Did you think to save your miserable skin by such a pitiful trick?’

He raised his hands as if to deliver another one of his horrible spells, while I stood there helpless as a frog before a cobra. But then I noticed a flickering glow behind him, and suddenly the Professor was jumping about, screaming like a lunatic. The glow became brighter to reveal the flames devouring the edge of his robe and the carpeted floor, where the oil from the broken lamp had spilled and ignited.

‘But quick man,’ Holmes shouted. ‘Run!’

I did not hesitate but made straight for the door, followed by Sherlock Holmes. I came to the ante-chamber and would have carried on running through the front door — and into goodness knows what other dangers — but was opportunely seized by the shoulders by Mr Holmes’s strong hand and propelled to the window by which we had earlier effected ingress, and quickly bundled out through it. Without pausing for thought or circumspection, I sped on through the courtyard, once colliding with and overturning a pile of boxes, till I reached the back wall, where I frantically searched for the small door.

‘Here, Hurree,’ whispered Holmes, opening the small barred door. Oh, blessed relief.

We got to the other side with no further problems. We ran through the alleyway and up to the front of the inn where Kintup was waiting for us with our ponies. We rode swiftly away from that awful place, the drumming of our horses’ hooves drowning the dying clamour of the mob.

1. Lurgan’s power of mesmerism is described by Kipling in
Kim.
Lurgan hypnotises the eponymous hero into seeing a shattered water jug becoming whole again.

20

To the Trans-Himalayas

A hot, satisfying repast of yak-tail soup and
momos
awaited us on our return to the Jewel Park. I gratefully tucked in. Food has always been a great solace to me in moments of difficulties and upset nerves, but Sherlock Holmes waved away the steaming dishes. It was one of his peculiarities that in his more intense moments he would permit himself no food — sometimes even starving himself for days during an investigation.
¹

‘At present I cannot spare energy and nerve for digestion,’ he said to the Lama Yonten, who seemed to understand and approve of Mr Holmes’s abstinence, for he immediately ordered the waiters not to bother him further. Certain Buddhist and Hindu teachings consider the custom of fasting to be a great spur to the intellect. Mr Holmes though, was the first instance I had come across of a European practising this.

Instead he drew a cigarette from his case and, lighting it, related to the anxious Lama our adventures of the evening. The Lama Yonten was, predictably, horrified with the way everything had gone wrong, and how we had only managed to escape from the clutches of the Dark One by the skin of our teeth.

‘Merciful Tara. This is terrible. It was unforgivable of me to allow you to put your lives at such risk.’

‘You must not upset yourself over it, Reverend Sir,’ said Holmes reassuringly. ‘When all’s said and done, we did manage to come out of it without too much damage.’

‘Not quite, Mr Holmes. I just received word from Tsering that two men were wounded by the firing from the Chinese legation —though not mortally so — thanks be to the Buddha. But far more serious is the matter of your exposure to the Dark One, or Moriarty, as you know him. The Amban is bound to lodge a serious complaint to the Regent about unauthorised foreigners in the city.’

‘With our
locus standi
in this country fast becoming a questionable one,’ said Holmes, ‘it is vital that we act swiftly.’

‘The Regent will also lose no time in pressing charges of treason against me,’ said the Lama Yonten mournfully. The Lama’s melancholia was infectious and even dampened somewhat the tremendous
joie de vivre
I was experiencing from having survived that terrifying encounter with Moriarty. The Lama’s low spirits also reminded me of the original purpose of our mission — and its failure.

‘Oh! Dash it all!’ I exclaimed, disgusted with myself. ‘After all the trepidation and bother, and I did not even think to appropriate the bally scroll before fleeing the scene.’

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, old fellow,’ said Holmes, ‘I nearly forgot too, in all that excitement.’

‘You have it!’ I cried with joy.

He pulled out the scroll from the pouch of his heavy robe. ‘Yes. We have not yet met our Waterloo, Hurree — if I may resume Moriarty’s Napoleonic analogy — but this is our Marengo, for it began in defeat and ended in victory.’

He pushed the empty dishes on the table to one side, and, unrolling the scroll carefully, laid it flaton the surface of the table. He then methodically examined it with his magnifying lens.

The painting, on sized cotton, was about one and a half feet by two, but its rich brocade border brought it up to the measurements that Mr Holmes had mentioned earlier. The design of the
mandala
itself was exactly the same as others of the Kalachakra tantra that I had seen before, though the colours on this one were appreciably deeper, probably due to its great age.

‘It has obviously been hung for a very long time,’ commented Holmes, without looking up from his lens.

‘Well, it has been there on the chapel wall,’ said the Lama, ‘ever since I can remember. And I entered the service of His Holiness’s

former sacred body as a boy.’

‘… the design on the brocade,’ observed Holmes’ ‘has become distorted by the stretching of the vertical weave in the material — the cumulative effect of time and gravity. Now let us see what we have on the other side.’

He turned the scroll over carefully. On the back of the painting were a number of lines of Thibetan writing in the uniform
uchen
print. It stated briefly, just as the young Grand Lama had told us, that the painting had been commissioned by the first Grand Lama after his meeting with the ‘Messenger,’ and his journey to Shambala; followed by the date and the seal of the Grand Lama. Below this were seventeen lines of verse. Thefirst seven lines were a kind of benediction, while the remaining lines formed the actual poem, seemingly a description of the various parts of the
mandala
structure, but mixed with strange instructions. A queer rigmarole, with something of the flavourof a nursery rhyme. These seventeen lines were written in the cursive
umay
script, clearly penned with the angular nibbed bamboo peri that Thibetan calligraphers were wont to use. As I remarked at an earlier instance, Mr Holmes was unfamiliar with this script, and he now requested the Lama Yonten to read it to him. The Lama adjusted his spectacles and, bending over to peer at the scroll on the table, read the following lines in his high, sing-song voice:

Om Svastil

Reverence to thee, Buddhas of the Three Ages and Protector of all Creatures.

O, assembled Gurus and Warriors of Shambala.

Out of your great compassion show us the true path.

When wandering through the delusion of samsara guide

us on to the true path.

Facing the sacred direction

Turning always in the path of the Dharma Wheel

Circle thrice the Mountain of Fire

Twice the Adamantine Walls

Proceeding once around the Eight Cemeteries

And Once the Sacred Lotus Fence,

Stand before the Walls of the Celestial City.

Then from the Southern Gate turn to the East

Enter the inner-most palace from the Northern portals

And sit victorious on the Vajra throne. EE - TI!

‘It is a lot of gobbledegook,’ said I, when the Lama had finished.

‘Nay, not necessarily so, Babuji,’ objected the Lama Yonten. ‘The occult sciences have always used inscrutable and symbolic language to safeguard secret knowledge and prevent its revelation to the profane.’

‘So you think, Sir, that this has some hidden meaning?’ I asked.

‘Verily, though it be hidden from me.’

‘And from anyone else, too, I should jolly well think,’ said I, scratching my head absolutely mystified.

Sherlock Holmes absent-mindedly sipped a cup of Chinese tea — the only refreshment he had partaken of that day — and once again lit the unsavoury pipe which was the companion of his deepest meditations.

‘I wonder …’ said he, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. ‘Perhaps there are points that have escaped your Spencerian intellect. Let us consider the problem in the light of pure reason. The common denominator in the various pieces of our puzzle —the Grand Lama’s proposed retreat, the Ice Temple, the
mandala
painting, and this cryptic verse — is some kind of connection to Shambala. That is our point of departure.’

‘A somewhat broad one, Sir,’ said I doubtfully.

‘Well, let us see, then, if we can narrow it. As I focus my mind upon the verse, it seems rather less impenetrable. In spite of its cryptic nature, it is not too difficult to see that what we have here is a set of instructions.’

‘It is a guide to Shambala!’ I cried triumphantly.

‘A guide?’

‘I mean it is a description of the route to that place. We have the legend that the first Grand Lama may have travelled there. Probably he recorded the route of his journey.’

‘Humm. Any other reasons for thinking so?’

‘Well, there are also certain words in the message which provide indications of it being some kind of travel itinerary. We have the word …umm “Proceed” in the twelfth line. Then … let me see … aah … “direction” … in the eighth and ninth lines. There are also the many references to “Mountains” and “Walls” and a “City.”’

‘Good Hurree, good! But not, if I may say so, quite good enough. There are difficulties with your theory. Consider just the tenth and eleventh lines … “Circle thrice the mountain of Fire, Twice the Adamantine Walls”… and others like it. Even if we were to assume that such places did exist, just going round and round them would not get us anywhere.’

‘We’d be going around in circles,’ I admitted, a trifle abashedly.

‘Exactly There are just too many references to circles in this message to make it possible that it is a physical description of a route to some actual destination.’

‘You are right, Mr Holmes,’ said the Lama Yonten.‘The message is probably symbolic. The circle, or the wheel, is the omniscient symbol of the essential principles of our faith; of cause and effect, of birth and death, indeed of the entire cycle of existence itself. Perhaps the message is nothing more than that — just a religious discourse couched in recondite metaphysical terms.’

‘That really won’t do, Your Reverence,’ said Holmes, shaking his head. ‘It hardly stands to reason that a man of Moriarty’s unregenerate nature should take such trouble to steal a religious tract. No. The message definitely conceals something of great material advantage to the Professor. His own words seem to indicate that he is seeking some tremendous source of power.’

‘But exactly what, Mr Holmes?’ I demanded.

‘There is an appalling directness about your questions, Hurree.’ said Holmes, shaking his pipe at me. ‘They come at me like bullets.’

‘I am sorry, Sir, I did not mean …’

Holmes waved away my apologies. ‘The answer to your question lies in the Ice Temple. I really do not think we can form any further conclusions without paying a visit to the place.’

‘Well, Mr Holmes,’ said the Lama, ‘we shall be there in a week, when His Holiness goes there on his retreat. That is if the Regent doesn’t have me arrested first and the visit stopped.’

‘Then the sooner we get to the temple the better,’ said Holmes crisply. ‘Is it possible for the Grand Lama’s travel plans to be advanced?’

‘That would go against tradition,’ protested the Lama. ‘The date for His Holiness’s departure has been especially chosen by the State Astrologer.’

‘Well, Sir,’ replied Holmes, a trifle brutally, ‘you will have to choose between flying in the face of tradition or seeing the end of everything you have worked for, not least, the life of your master.’

The Lama Yonten was silent for sometime, head bowed low, his hand turning the beads of his rosary with soft regular clicks. Finally he sat up and said resignedly at Sherlock Holmes. ‘You are, of course, right, Mr Holmes. When shall we leave?’

‘The sooner the better. We must not forget that Moriarty may be making a trip of his own to the temple, if he has not been too affected by tonight’s mishap. Do you think it would be possible for His Holiness to start tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow,’ the Lama Yonten wailed. ‘That is impossible.’

But of course, it wasn’t.

Next day at dusk a small cavalcade of riders departed inconspicuously from the rear gate of the outer walls of the Jewel Park, by the deserted shores of the Kyichu River. Only a few water fowls (Tib.
damcha)
watched the passing of the line of men and horses. I rode alongside Mr Holmes, just behind the Grand Lama and the Lama Yonten. Tsering, Kintup and ten Thibetan soldiers rode ahead. Our company had been kept small on Mr Holmes’s insistence, he very correctly feeling that anything larger would adversely affect our speed, and, more critically, the secrecy of our expedition.

The young Grand Lama, far from objecting to Holmes’s precipitous decision, had been tremendously enthusiastic about it and had refused to pay any attention to the Chief Secretary’s many doubts. The Lama Yonten, to give him his due, soon recovered from his initial worries and quickly got down to making all the necessary preparations for our expedition — which were considerable. We could not just ‘rough it’ as the Grand Lama himself was travelling with us, and proper tents, provisions and bedding had to be arranged. But it was all very efficiently accomplished before the appointed hour of our departure.

The Ice Temple of Shambala was about a hundred miles north of Lhassa — three days’ hard riding. It was located, quite uniquely, under a huge mass of trapped glacial ice, squeezed between a deep rift in the Trans-Himalayan range. The Thibetans called this mountain chain Nyenchen-thang-lha after the ancient (preBuddhist) mountain god who held court there. Normally this temple was buried under the glacier, even the entrance being entirely sealed off by a massive wall of ice. But for some hitherto undiscovered reason, this front cliff of ice melts and breaks away once in about half a century, permitting entry to the temple. The Thibetans believe that the ice wall opens at the time that the gods of Thibet consider it propitious for a Grand Lama to assume the throne of the country, and that it has unfailingly opened (though there is no scientific evidence for this) for every incarnation of the Grand Lama — though the last three were prevented from visiting it at the prescribed time. Hence their tragically short lives, and the evil times in the country.

There is a definite limit to the period that the Ice Temple is accessible. About three to four weeks after the initial opening, the glacier begins to move once again and gradually seals the entrance to the Temple, keeping it sacrosanct until the time that another incarnation of the Grand Lama should be ready to sit on the Lion Throne of Thibet.

No convincing scientific explanation has ever been offered for this
lusus naturae,
though its existence has been reported by certain Russian explorers. My own view on the subject is, I believe, so far unique — if I may be pardoned the term — though I do not insist that it is necessarily the only correct one. The reader may take it as a mere theory; but a theory formulated by an intelligent and empirical observer.