The Rose of Tibet (9 page)

He heard a soft snore from the other sleeping bag, and eased himself more blissfully into his own. His arms still twitched from the strain of the rope across the river, and the bones of his backside were bruised from the saddle. Houston moved gently on them; honourable scars, he thought.

That was the first night.

Ringling roused him at five the next morning, and he got up immediately. He had already been half awake; despite his intense fatigue he had slept only fitfully. It was grey and misty, the grass wet, the water, fifty yards away, invisible. He washed in the bucket and rinsed out his mouth, and they breakfasted on the remainder of the meat and a few rings of dried apple.

The boy packed everything while Houston attended to the needs of nature and by half past five they were awheel again. His backside was acutely tender and every inch of his frame seemed to creak, but once he had settled himself in position, he got on well enough. There was a certain fascination in bicycling through the mist at this hour in this high place; as last night, he was keenly aware of his geographical location and hungry to pile on mileage. He was also eager to see what kind of country they were in. They had climbed steadily since leaving the river valley, and he thought they were climbing now; he had become so accustomed to the pressure on the pedals that he could not tell precisely.

‘How high up are we, Ringling?’

‘About eight thousand feet, sahib. How did you sleep?’

‘Not too well. Why?’

He thought the boy looked a shade moody, but he only said, ‘We don’t go so far today. When the mist rises you’ll see mountains, sahib. Arnalang on the right and Kanchenjunga ahead.’

‘Kanchenjunga,’ Houston said with satisfaction. ‘How far into Nepal are we going?’

‘Only ten miles today.’

‘You’re not bothered about being seen so near the border?’

‘Not up here, sahib. People come and go from Sikkim to Nepal. Getting in from India is the problem.’

The mist began lifting at nine o’clock, but so slowly that Houston was disappointed by what he saw. The mountains were a vague jumble of hazy white peaks, with the slightly higher peak of Kanchenjunga. By eleven, however, the mist had lifted entirely. The sun shone from a high blue sky, and the hazy teeth of the mountains became sharp; first white, then pink, then gold, then white again. Houston’s heart sang, watching these fantastic ramparts, as they cycled slowly towards them.

They were riding uphill on springy turf, but frequently dismounted when the going became too steep. They crossed four small rivers, all by log bridge, and stopped to eat in the small valley of the last of them. It was covered with rhododendron, just breaking into flower, pink, red and yellow, and the air was drowsy with flying insects. Houston lay on his
back, aching but profoundly satisfied with his situation. They had climbed another thousand feet. They must have put on easily twenty miles. He lit a cigarette, but felt somewhat sick from his exertions and threw it away half smoked.

He saw the boy looking at him rather carefully.

‘You want to rest longer, sahib?’

‘No. I’m ready when you are.’

‘Right.’

They joined up with a beaten track after an hour or two, and continued along it, passing occasional men with mules, until a few miles from the Nepal frontier, when the boy again cautiously turned off. They entered Nepal by way of two enormous hills, the last of which again broke Houston’s zest for the journey. He was exhausted and irritable when they made camp, but again soon recovered himself after washing and eating.

‘How high now, Ringling?’

‘It’s hard to say, sahib,’ the boy said, studying the map. ‘We’ve gone up and down. Over ten thousand feet.’

‘And how many miles for the day?’

‘About thirty-five.’

‘It’s surely more than that. We were going at it for nearly twelve hours.’

‘We walked a lot of hills, sahib. I didn’t want to tire you.’

He had caught the boy looking at him a bit closely once or twice, so he had said nothing and got on with his meal. He hadn’t much of an appetite and he didn’t feel like a cigarette tonight. He thought he had probably done a bit too much and that they had gone farther than the boy calculated. He turned in as soon as they had eaten.

Again, he slept very badly, tossing and turning most of the night, and he was glad to be up in the morning.

‘How far today?’ he said heavily, when they had started again.

‘Oh, just Walungchung, sahib – fifteen miles.’

‘Walungchung. Is that the place where we get the mule?’

‘Yes, sahib. We change clothes there also. It’s colder.’

‘Does that mean we climb to get at it?’

‘An easy climb, sahib. There is only one bad bit.’

They walked steadily uphill along the track for most of the
morning, passing an occasional group of men with mules, and arrived at the ‘bad bit’ at midday.

They had entered a rocky defile, and went along it for half a mile until it ended in a steep incline of loose shale. Beyond the shale was a rock wall, forty or fifty feet high, almost vertical and with rough steps cut in it.

A small caravan was there before them, and they waited in the narrow, hot defile, until men and mules had gone up. The mules went slowly, slipping and halting on the shifting slope. Two men climbed the rock wall with ropes; these were attached to the mules’ packs, and the animals went up the wall half pulled and half shoved, one at a time.

Ringling had told him to keep quiet when people were around, and he did so, watching the operation with misgiving. They waited nearly an hour before they could begin themselves. The sun was almost overhead and hot on the shale. Every two steps Houston took he slipped back one. He stopped frequently, sweating and panting, aching in every limb.

It took him half an hour to negotiate the slope and he was almost all in when they came to the rock wall. Ringling had a rope in his pack and he lashed the two bicycles together and went up first. Houston followed, holding the machines away from the wall. The steps were steep, and the muscles in his legs jumping, and once or twice he had to stop, half fainting, to hang on to the bicycles.

It was after two when they finished, and they had not yet eaten. They went off the track into a patch of scrub and Houston lay on the ground.

‘Eat something, sahib.’

‘I don’t want anything.’

‘You’ve done very well. Drink some tea, at least. You’ll need it.’

‘How much farther have we got to go?’

‘Two, three hours. It’s up a small hill all the way. We can rest here for a while.’

They rested an hour and got moving again. Ringling’s small hill turned out to be a slogging, precipitous hell that lasted all of three hours. It was beginning to get dark when they got to the top, but far below, in a valley, they could see the village. They coasted down to it.

They reached Walungchung Ghola in fifteen minutes, and rode through the village to make camp a mile or two outside. The long freewheeling ride and the excitement of seeing a human settlement again restored Houston’s spirits; his tiredness fell away and he quite gaily helped the boy to fetch water. The plan was to sell the bicycles and buy a mule, a tent and food, and as Ringling was anxious to transact this business while the market was still active they merely washed and had a mug of tea before he set off.

Houston took leave of his own bicycle with pleasure. He had conceived a violent dislike for it. He hated its shape and smell and feel. There were something brutish and unpleasant about the broad flat pedals. He detested the handlegrips and even more the merciless saddle. Most of all he resented its weight. He didn’t think he had ever in his life loathed an inanimate object more than this one, and the idea of being free of it, of being able to walk on his own and to stop when he felt like it, was so liberating that he began to whistle quite chirpily.

The camp, all the same, was somewhat rudimentary without the bicycles; the two bundles and the haversack lay in a disconsolate small heap. He unpacked the sleeping bags and fetched more water for tea and opened the last tin of meat.

Walungchung Ghola is at an altitude of
10
,
500
feet, well within the tree-line, but the last sizeable village before the lifeless rock barrier of the Himalayan plateau. The air was brisk and Houston was cold in his shorts and bush jacket. He got out one of the padded jerkins and a pair of the long woollen stockings that Ringling had brought, and put them on, and sat on his sleeping bag, looking about him.

They had passed Kanchenjunga on their right during the day, and now ahead lay an unbroken line of mountains. In the darkening evening they had moved closer, and he felt he could almost touch them; the solid, bluish ramparts of Tibet.

He smiled in the half light, not at all weary or aching now but conscious only of a feeling of utter astonishment. On foot and on bicycle he had dragged himself to within the shadow of these ramparts. In two days more, he would be over them and into the mythical land. He didn’t doubt now that he could do it, or that he would. One did not have to be an explorer or a mountaineer, or very strong, or even very brave. One
went each day as far as one could, and recovered, and went on again the next day. He thought he had got the hang of it now, and that he could cope with whatever might befall; and he wondered what would befall him beyond the blue mountains.

He thought of Lister-Lawrence in his office in Calcutta, and wondered how he would deal with his non-appearance; and of Lesley Sellers, coping no doubt with new and pleasurable complications in her flat in Maida Vale, and of Glynis with her little drunk husband in Fulham. He thought also of Stahl in Wardour Street, and of Oliphant, moving about now in the familiar sanity of his flat in Baron’s Court, and he shook his head in the dusk. They had all played a part in bringing him to this place; he could feel them quite close to him in the dusk.

He thought he had a sudden lightning flash of the pattern beneath this affair, and of his place in it at the moment, and of its continuation, but it went before he could grasp it; he sat for quite a long time in the lingering half-light trying to find the warm disturbed place in his mind.

Of all the moments of his journey, this was the one that Houston later remembered the best: the vision of himself sitting there on his sleeping bag beneath the ramparts of Tibet, with, all around him, the world disappearing into darkness, and the impression that he had glimpsed a destiny that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but merely inevitable.

He was already sick then from the altitude but did not know it.   

They spent the next night twelve miles away in a cave at the foot of the mountains, and were up in the darkness at four o’clock to begin the ascent. By three o’clock they had climbed
2
,
500
feet, and were in Tibet.

That was
22
April
1950
.

A study of the relevant map section today (General Staff Geographical Section, Series
4646
, Sheets NG and NG
45
) shows clearly enough the route taken by Houston on his outward journey.

It was not a route Ringling had ever taken before, but it seemed to him to have many attractions. It was short (only seventy-eight miles from Darjeeling to Walungchung Ghola), it neatly shaved off a corner of protected Sikkim, and it placed them at a point in Nepal where they had little to fear from border police. Also it led in a direct line to Yamdring.

It was not until they had crossed the Tibetan border that he had any doubts about it.

They had crossed the border at a point twelve miles northeast of Walungchung Ghola (that is, fifteen miles west of the
88
th meridian); this route as G S G S
4646
N G indicates leads directly to the series of impassable ridges shown as Contour
18
. Ringling, however, did not have G S G S
4646
N G. He had the map Houston had bought in Darjeeling. This was a section of an earlier survey (Hind
5000
T B T
14
) and instead of Contour
18
it showed merely rising ground broken by an unnamed pass at
15
,
000
feet.

This was the pass they were making for.    

Houston realized something was wrong with him at eight o’clock. They had pitched the tent on a bit of level ground between boulders at
14
,
000
feet. Ringling had turned in as soon as they had eaten, and had gone to sleep immediately. Houston lay listening to him. He was numb with cold and his head ached. His chest ached also. It had been giving him trouble since early afternoon. He thought he had strained it during the climb, and presently tried to sit up to get into a more comfortable position.

He found he couldn’t move.

He lay wincing in the darkness, alarmed at the fire that leapt in his chest. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his breathing. He waited for the pain to subside before cautiously trying again.

This time he gasped out loud, and lay back, breathing very quickly. His chest was tight and constricted as if someone was sitting on it.

He managed to work his arm out of the bag after a minute or two, and shook Ringling beside him. The boy came awake immediately.

‘What is it, sahib?’

‘Get me up, will you? I can’t move.’

The boy came out of the bag fast and switched on a torch and hoisted him up. ‘Where is the pain, sahib?’

‘In my chest.’

The boy studied him silently in the torchlight.

‘I think I wrenched it,’ Houston said with difficulty. ‘During the climb.’

‘It’s the altitude, sahib.’

‘No, it isn’t that… . It just came on me.’

‘You’ve been sick for days. It’s your heart,’ the boy said, moodily.

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘It won’t let you sleep or eat. It’s going too fast. It’s getting tired.’

The moment he said it, Houston knew it was so. He could feel it now, unpleasantly swollen, and pumping heavily. It seemed to fill his chest.