The Lotus and the Wind (32 page)

He set out again, and on the second day began the ascent to the Mintaka. From a deep gorge the trail scrambled up to the side of a cliff, climbed on trestles over dizzy gorges, where through the rotting planks the eye could follow the four-thousand-foot fall of the precipice, and climbed again.

He moved up slowly with the trail, every minute his breath coming thinner into his lungs. The lammergeiers coasted level with him along the cliff. He heard the whir of the wind under their wings until as he ascended they fell away below him and he looked down on them, and the sun touched the white marks on top of their wings as they glided across the screes and corries and the black gulfs. The mountains rose with him, the greater forcing above the lesser until near the pass they stood around him like the jagged towers of a city.

At last, his lungs tight and his head aching with sudden, bitter twinges, he stood on the rockstrewn pass. He sat down slowly, and the pony hung its head. The near mountains thrust up in white pyramids, in cathedrals of ice and rock supported by flying buttress-ridges ten miles long. Beyond them the peaks and glaciers of the Karakoram spread like a frozen army to the horizon.

Men came. The cries of the caravaneers sounded far and faint in the thin air, then the wind took the sounds and whipped them away over the void. He huddled into his sheepskin coat, got up, stamped his feet, and prepared to move on. Already the wind, made of something thinner than air, had penetrated coat and clothes and skin and flesh, into the marrow of his bones. He waited, swinging his arms, for the caravan to come up out of China. The leaders struggled abreast of him. The first man picked up a stone, threw it on a cairn beside the trail, and struggled on with a word muttered in surprised, cautious greeting to the lonely figure on the pass. Others came on behind him, the loaded horses stopping every third pace, but coming on. The men drove long nails fixed on sticks into the horses’ muzzles so that the animals could drag more of the icy air into their bursting lungs. The blood frothed and bubbled out through their nostrils. One after another the men came, looked sideways at him from under the heavy hoods of their coats, did not pause, and went on down into India.

Robin took his pony’s bridle and tugged. The pony would not budge. A stone rolled noisily down the path on the Indian side, behind him, and he turned his head. There was a man, leading a horse.

Jagbir halted, facing him; He was fine-drawn but otherwise as he had always been--a short, bulky figure in the trappings of a Hazara hillman. Robin saw in his face that he wanted more than anything in the world to stand to attention and give his number, rank, and name, and the information that he was reporting himself fit for duty--
Ursath bais, Ruffaman Jagbir Pun, hazir ayo ra kam ko laik chha.

Robin said angrily, ‘Who told you to follow me? I didn’t say I wanted you with me, did I?’

Jagbir did not answer, nor did his eyes show any sign of hurt. Robin stared at him for a minute, then said, ‘All right. We’ve got to get on.’

‘Yes, Lord Khussro.’

Half-way down the long descent, while the horses stepped delicately and stretched down their necks to sniff the blood spattering the rocks, Robin said fretfully, ‘I’m sorry, my friend. You know I can’t give you anything but disappointment.’ Jagbir shrugged his shoulders and asked, ‘How far is the post?’

When he judged they were perhaps a couple of miles from the first Chinese frontier guards Robin led the way into a narrow cut between huge boulders at the right of the trail. They dismounted, fed the horses, tied them to big stones, and sat down together. Robin said, ‘How are we going to get past them?’

‘Why don’t we go out that way?’ Jagbir lifted his head and pointed with his chin to the west. There, over intervening ridges, they saw a rolling plain. The sun shone into their eyes as they looked, and made the short grass of the plain a mottled golden yellow.

‘The Russian Empire,’ Robin said. ‘Here--the Chinese Empire. The other side of the Mintaka--the British Empire. I know the Russians keep quite a large detachment of Cossacks over there.’

Jagbir thought, his brow wrinkling painfully. At length he said, ‘We must go on then. The Chinese soldiers will be inside their hut before midnight. I do not expect they will have any discipline.’

They ate some hard cheese and curds compressed in a muslin bag, scraping them out with their fingers and washing them down with water burning cold from the stream beside the trail. No travellers passed in either direction. The dark came, the stars burst out, the North Star flared over the empty pamirs. They waited beside the drooping ponies. At eleven o’clock they mounted and urged the ponies at a walk down the trail. They trusted to a light wind to blow away the click and clatter of hoofs on the stones. At last the path turned sharply right, the dim silhouettes of the flanking hills stood back, bowing lower, sweeping in a bow to the earth, and ushered them on to the high plain. Close at hand a hut crouched beneath the ridge. A chink of light shone under its door. The acrid smell of burning yak dung drifted to them from an invisible chimney.

In the hut a horse suddenly whinnied. While Robin stared breathlessly into the darkness Jagbir leaned forward and seized the muzzles of both ponies, Robin’s and his own, pressing his fingers in fiercely. The ponies whickered but did not neigh or whinny. No one came out of the hut.

The Taghdumbash Pamir spread ahead of them, a dim expanse of blue shadow and flat blue-green highlights under the stars. They passed the post, bore left, and walked the horses steadily out on to the pamir. After twenty miles they would come to Paik and the larger Chinese post there. When they had ridden for two hours Jagbir said, ‘We will not reach Paik to-night. We might get near it, but we have to get around too. They will want to see our passes?’

‘Yes.’

‘We had better ride till first light, then lie up. Move again before dark, so we can have a look at Paik.’

In the first pale green light of dawn they turned right and headed towards the mountains. The ponies walked among yellow and white and red flowers. The land rose, tilting up at first in a straight, smooth line like an inclined table, featureless and shelterless under the grass and the flowers, then in transverse ridge and furrow to the foot of the mountain wall. In one such fold they slid to the ground and picketed the horses. Jagbir slept while Robin stood guard. Early in the afternoon, when the sun had warmed them and they had both slept and were hungry, they ate together. Then, leaving the horses, they walked slowly to the brow of the ridge, a hundred feet off, whence they could see a wide stretch of the plain. They lay down side by side, and Jagbir said, ‘There are many flocks on the pamir, but the nearest is five or six miles off--there. It has one herder, a boy with a rifle. A Kirghiz, I suppose. Where are we going, lord?’

‘The Farghana. Six hundred miles.’

Robin noticed that Jagbir was lying on an ant’s nest. While he spoke the rifleman had been slowly digging his hand into the nest. The ants rushed about, and he let them crawl on to his palm and up his arm. They did not bite him, and he took no further notice of them as they scurried in hundreds all over him.

Robin said, ‘After we’ve done our business we’ve got to get back to India again. It will be late September at the earliest. They would have made you a naik when you got back to the regiment, for what you’ve done already. Now, they’ll be angry, court martial you perhaps. And I--’ he watched the ants in Jagbir’s hand--’I don’t care the way you care.’

‘I am your
sathi
, your
choro
,’ Jagbir said, using the Gurkhali words that mean ‘comrade,’ and ‘son.’ ‘The heart is small without
sathi
and
choro
and women.’

Robin said, ‘Cannot a woman also be a
sathi
?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘They are different. One can leave a
sathi
for a woman’s sake, but a woman cannot be a
sathi
. They do not understand, and we do not understand.’

‘Very well. There are many who would not agree with you. But I do not understand either woman or comrade or son. Listen. Part of the Farghana, which is like a province, the Russians hold, and part the Chinese hold. The big town, which is in the Russian part, is called Andijan. They grow good horses in the Farghana. We are going to see the horses and find out if they are in any way connected with the Russian plans to invade India.’

‘Will those two, the man and the woman, be there?’

Robin hesitated before answering. ‘I think he will be. The woman--yes, I suppose so. I don’t know.’

‘If we see them,’ Jagbir said, ‘we should kill her at once. Otherwise we will never return from this country to our own.’

‘And the man? Should we kill him?’

Jagbir shook his body carefully, then his arm alone. The ants dropped to the ground and scurried back to their disturbed nest, Jagbir said, ‘Yes,’ backed down until his head was below the crest, and walked alone to the horses.

Robin scanned the silent vastness of the pamir, then the flower that was in his hand, then the ants, and began to sob, his chest heaving in soundless spasms.

The man Robin was talking to, a middle-aged prosperous-seeming merchant of Andijan in the Farghana, said curiously, ‘We haven’t seen many of your kind up here this year, or last year for that matter. There used to be twenty for each one there is now. Have our horses deteriorated?’

Robin shrugged. ‘Trading’s easier in other places, that’s all. The Russians are making it difficult for a man to move about. It’s examinations, questions, octroi, browbeating, all the way from Balkh northward.’

‘Ah!’ the other agreed. ‘Our new masters are a funny lot. Suspicious.’

‘Your horses are as good as ever,’ Robin continued earnestly, knowing the intense pride of every Andijani in his country and its horses. ‘They’re better. But they’re not easy to buy even when we get here.’

He knew that was true because he had tried. He and Jagbir had ridden out two and three days’ march in every direction from Andijan, making inquiries about horses. The horses were there, roaming the rich plain in herds, each herd under a pair of herdsmen, but, except for a few old screws, they were not for sale. The herdsmen always said they were already sold but were to be kept here until wanted. They knew no more. They were only paid employees of others.

So now, back in Andijan, Robin tried to find out who was buying the horses and why, having bought, they were not taking possession. That meant they must be paying a monthly retainer to cover the cost of looking after the horses. This Andijani merchant was the sort of man who might easily own horses as a sideline--but he was not giving any information away. To Robin’s remark he replied only, ‘No, it’s not easy. Someone’s buying them up. It might be the Russians, except that they are importing Mongolian ponies here, as if our Farghana mares needed any but the weight of a Farghana stallion on their backs!’

‘Those Mongolian ponies are good doers and hard goers,’ Robin said, sipping his tea.

‘Yes,’ the merchant admitted grudgingly. He eyed Robin cautiously. ‘Of course it might be the Russians all the same. They’re up to something here. But they act through so many intermediaries even in the simplest business that it’s difficult to know for certain. What if a brother of the Khan of Khokand buys my horses?--“If,” I said. Can
I
ask what he wants them for? Can
I
cross-examine him if he buys the whole lot and says he’ll pay my price next spring, but I’m to look after them until then? Why, if the Russians want to buy a sack of rice in this town, first they send the police to spy out the land, then they get someone’s brother’s wife’s uncle’s sister’s son to make an offer for a dozen silkworms.’

Robin was satisfied. The Andijani dared not talk freely, but he had given a good hint. The next step was more difficult. The horses were here, but where were the Russians? Where was Muralev? Unless he came across something more exact in the next few days he’d have to go on to Tashkent, where there was a Russian political agent, and see what he could find out.

He and the Andijani were still talking desultorily an hour later, drinking their tenth cups of tea, when Robin heard shots from the west. The eating-house where they sat lay on the outskirts of town. The shooting came closer. A cloud of dust rose over the dry fields, and soon he saw animals under the dust. Five minutes more and they took shape as small men on galloping horses. The men were wrapped in sheepskin coats and wore big sheepskin hats with ear-flaps, though it was a hot, sunny day. They carried short carbines, which they fired into the air as they came. The shaggy ponies galloped with ridiculously short strides through the crops, while the riders whooped and waved their carbines above their heads.

‘Ai-ai-ai-ai-yeee!’
The riders swirled into the street, fired a couple more shots apiece into the air, and flung themselves to the ground. After a shouted argument they tethered the ten ponies and came towards the eating-house. Robin glanced quickly around to see if Jagbir had come back. The rifleman had gone off on his own in the morning and would report here before dark. But he was nowhere in sight. The strangers rolled on like small, square-built ships. If they had come to arrest him there was little that he could do about it.

Sweat and grease shone on the men’s flat faces. Their heavy felt boots padded on the steps of the eating-house. Each carried a long knife as well as the short, modern carbine. In the entrance they stopped, and their leader called imperiously in a strange tongue. The proprietor, who had come out at the shooting and now stood apprehensively a yard behind Robin’s mat, said, ‘I--I don’t understand.’

They gabbled furiously at him. The merchant leaned towards Robin and muttered, ‘They want kumiz--fermented mare’s milk--lots of it, and meat. Kumiz, in the name of Allah, and we make fine wine and brandy here!’

The proprietor waved his hands helplessly, backing into the room as the others surged forward. Their leader bellowed cheerfully in vilely distorted Turki, ‘Kumiz! Meat! Not care what meat. Horse, sheep, camel! Meat!’ A thick smell of grease, horse, sweat-soaked wool, and old dirt made the air pungent in the room. The merchant whispered, ‘We would be wise to leave now, I think.’