Authors: James Hilton
“It might be about a month from now. Probably not more than two months.”
“Or three, four, or five months,” broke in Mallinson hotly. “And you think we’re going to wait here for this convoy or caravan or whatever it is to take us God knows where at some completely vague time in the distant future?”
“I think, sir, the phrase ‘distant future’ is hardly appropriate. Unless something unforeseen occurs, the period of waiting should not be longer than I have said.”
“But
two months
! Two months in this place! It’s preposterous! Conway, you surely can’t contemplate it! Why, two weeks would be the limit!”
Chang gathered his gown about him in a little gesture of finality. “I am sorry. I did not wish to offend. The lamasery continues to offer all of you its utmost hospitality for as long as you have the misfortune to remain. I can say no more.”
“You don’t need to,” retorted Mallinson furiously. “And if you think you’ve got the whip hand over us, you’ll soon find you’re damn well mistaken! We’ll get all the porters we want, don’t worry. You can bow and scrape and say what you like—”
Conway laid a restraining hand on his arm. Mallinson in a temper presented a child-like spectacle; he was apt to say anything that came into his head, regardless alike of point and decorum. Conway thought it readily forgivable in one so constituted and circumstanced, but he feared it might affront the more delicate susceptibilities of a Chinese. Fortunately Chang had ushered himself out, with admirable tact, in good time to escape the worst.
T
HEY SPENT THE REST
of the morning discussing the matter. It was certainly a shock for four persons who in the ordinary course should have been luxuriating in the clubs and mission houses of Peshawar, to find themselves faced instead with the prospect of two months in a Tibetan monastery. But it was in the nature of things that the initial shock of their arrival should have left them with slender reserves either of indignation or astonishment; even Mallinson, after his first outburst, subsided into a mood of half-bewildered fatalism. “I’m past arguing about it, Conway,” he said, puffing at a cigarette with nervous irritability. “You know how I feel. I’ve said all along that there’s something queer about this business. It’s crooked. I’d like to be out of it this minute.”
“I don’t blame you for that,” replied Conway. “Unfortunately, it’s not a question of what any of us would like, but of what we’ve all got to put up with. Frankly, if these people say they won’t or can’t supply us with the necessary porters, there’s nothing for it but to wait till the other fellows come. I’m sorry to admit that we’re so helpless in the matter, but I’m afraid it’s the truth.”
“You mean we’ve got to stay here for two months?”
“I don’t see what else we can do.”
Mallinson flicked his cigarette ash with a gesture of forced nonchalance. “All right, then. Two months it is. And now let’s all shout hooray about it.”
Conway went on: “I don’t see why it should be much worse than two months in any other isolated part of the world. People in our jobs are used to being sent to odd places, I think I can say that of us all. Of course, it’s bad for those of us who have friends and relatives. Personally, I’m fortunate in that respect, I can’t think of any one who’ll worry over me acutely, and my work, whatever it might have been, can easily be done by somebody else.”
He turned to the others as if inviting them to state their own cases. Mallinson proffered no information, but Conway knew roughly how he was situated. He had parents and a girl in England; it made things hard.
Barnard, on the other hand, accepted the position with what Conway had learned to regard as an habitual good humor. “Well, I guess I’m pretty lucky, for that matter, two months in the penitentiary won’t kill me. As for the folks in my home town, they won’t bat an eye. I’ve always been a bad letter writer.”
“You forget that our names will be in the papers,” Conway reminded him. “We shall all be posted missing, and people will naturally assume the worst.”
Barnard looked startled for the moment; then he replied, with a slight grin: “Oh, yes, that’s true, but it don’t affect me, I assure you.”
Conway was glad it didn’t, though the matter remained a little puzzling. He turned to Miss Brinklow who till then had been remarkably silent; she had not offered any opinion during the interview with Chang. He imagined that she too might have comparatively few personal worries. She said brightly: “As Mr. Barnard says, two months here is nothing to make a fuss about. It’s all the same, wherever one is, when one’s in the Lord’s service. Providence has sent me here. I regard it as a call.”
Conway thought the attitude a very convenient one, in the circumstances. “I’m sure,” he said encouragingly, “you’ll find your mission society pleased with you when you
do
return. You’ll be able to give much useful information. We’ll all of us have had an experience, for that matter. That should be a small consolation.”
The talk then became general. Conway was rather surprised at the ease with which Barnard and Miss Brinklow had accommodated themselves to the new prospect. He was relieved, however, as well; it left him with only one disgruntled person to deal with. Yet even Mallinson, after the strain of all the arguing, was experiencing a reaction; he was still perturbed, but more willing to look at the brighter side of things. “Heaven knows what we shall find to do with ourselves,” he exclaimed, but the mere fact of making such a remark showed that he was trying to reconcile himself.
“The first rule must be to avoid getting on each others nerves,” replied Conway. “Happily, the place seems big enough, and by no means overpopulated. Except for servants, we’ve only seen one of its inhabitants so far.”
Barnard could find another reason for optimism. “We won’t starve, at any fate, if our meals up to now are a fair sample. You know, Conway, this place isn’t run without plenty of hard cash. Those baths, for instance, they cost real money. And I can’t see that anybody earns anything here, unless those chaps in the valley have jobs, and even then, they wouldn’t produce enough for export. I’d like to know if they work any minerals.”
“The whole place is a confounded mystery,” responded Mallinson. “I dare say they’ve got pots of money hidden away, like the Jesuits. As for the baths, probably some millionaire supporter presented them. Anyhow, it won’t worry me, once I get away. I must say, though, the view
is
rather good, in its way. Fine winter sport center if it were in the right spot. I wonder if one could get any skiing on some of those slopes up yonder?”
Conway gave him a searching and slightly amused glance. “Yesterday, when I found some edelweiss, you reminded me that I wasn’t in the Alps. I think it’s my turn to say the same thing now. I wouldn’t advise you to try any of your Wengen-Scheidegg tricks in this part of the world.”
“I don’t suppose anybody here has ever seen a ski-jump.”
“Or even an ice-hockey match,” responded Conway banteringly. “You might try to raise some teams. What about ‘Gentlemen
v.
Lamas’?”
“It would certainly teach them to play the game,” Miss Brinklow put in with sparkling seriousness.
Adequate comment upon this might have been difficult, but there was no necessity, since lunch was about to be served and its character and promptness combined to make an agreeable impression. Afterwards, when Chang entered, there was small disposition to continue the squabble. With great tactfulness the Chinese assumed that he was still on good terms with everybody, and the four exiles allowed the assumption to stand. Indeed, when he suggested that they might care to be shown a little more of the lamasery buildings, and that if so, he would be pleased to act as guide, the offer was readily accepted. “Why, surely,” said Barnard. “We may as well give the place the once-over while we’re here. I reckon it’ll be a long time before any of us pay a second visit.”
Miss Brinklow struck a more thought-giving note. “When we left Baskul in that aeroplane I’m sure I never dreamed we should ever get to a place like this,” she murmured as they all moved off under Chang’s escort.
“And we don’t know yet why we have,” answered Mallinson unforgetfully.
CONWAY HAD NO RACE
or color prejudice, and it was an affectation for him to pretend, as he sometimes did in clubs and first-class railway carriages, that he set any particular store on the “whiteness” of a lobster-red face under a topee. It saved trouble to let it be so assumed, especially in India, and Conway was a conscientious trouble-saver. But in China it had been less necessary; he had had many Chinese friends, and it had never occurred to him to treat them as inferiors. Hence, in his intercourse with Chang, he was sufficiently unpreoccupied to see in him a mannered old gentleman who might not be entirely trustworthy, but who was certainly of high intelligence. Mallinson, on the other hand, tended to regard him through the bars of an imaginary cage; Miss Brinklow was sharp and sprightly, as with the heathen in his blindness; while Barnard’s wise-cracking
bonhomie
was of the kind he would have cultivated with a butler.
Meanwhile the grand tour of Shangri-La was interesting enough to transcend these attitudes. It was not the first monastic institution Conway had inspected, but it was easily the largest and, apart from its situation, the most remarkable. The mere procession through rooms and courtyards was an afternoon’s exercise, though he was aware of many apartments passed by, indeed, of whole buildings into which Chang did not offer admission. The party were shown enough, however, to confirm the impressions each one of them had formed already. Barnard was more certain than ever that the lamas were rich; Miss Brinklow discovered abundant evidence that they were immoral. Mallinson, after the first novelty had worn off, found himself no less fatigued than on many sight-seeing excursions at lower altitudes; the lamas, he feared, were not likely to be his heroes.
Conway alone submitted to a rich and growing enchantment. It was not so much any individual thing that attracted him as the gradual revelation of elegance, of modest and impeccable taste, of harmony so fragrant that it seemed to gratify the eye without arresting it. Only indeed by a conscious effort did he recall himself from the artist’s mood to the connoisseur’s, and then he recognized treasures that museums and millionaires alike would have bargained for, exquisite pearl blue Sung ceramics, paintings in tinted inks preserved for more than a thousand years, lacquers in which the cold and lovely detail of fairyland was not so much depicted as orchestrated. A world of incomparable refinements still fingered tremulously in porcelain and varnish, yielding an instant of emotion before its dissolution into purest thought. There was no boastfulness, no striving after effect, no concentrated attack upon the feelings of the beholder. These delicate perfections had an air of having fluttered into existence like petals from a flower. They would have maddened a collector, but Conway did not collect; he lacked both money and the acquisitive instinct. His liking for Chinese art was an affair of the mind; in a world of increasing noise and hugeness, he turned in private to gentle, precise, and miniature things. And as he passed through room after room, a certain pathos touched him remotely at the thought of Karakal’s piled immensity over against such fragile charms.
The lamasery, however, had more to offer than a display of Chinoiserie. One of its features, for instance, was a very delightful library, lofty and spacious, and containing a multitude of books so retiringly housed in bays and alcoves that the whole atmosphere was more of wisdom than of learning, of good manners rather than seriousness. Conway, during a rapid glance at some of the shelves, found much to astonish him; the world’s best literature was there, it seemed, as well as a great deal of abstruse and curious stuff that he could not appraise. Volumes in English, French, German, and Russian abounded, and there were vast quantities of Chinese and other Eastern scripts. A section which interested him particularly was devoted to Tibetiana, if it might be so called; he noticed several rarities, among them the
Novo Descubrimento de grao catayo ou dos Regos de Tibet
, by Antonio de Andrada (Lisbon, 1626); Athanasius Kircher’s
China
(Antwerp, 1667); Thevenot’s
Voyage à la Chine des Pères Grueber et d’Orville;
and Beligatti’s
Relazione Inedita di un Viaggio al Tibet
. He was examining the last named when he noticed Chang’s eyes fixed on him in suave curiosity. “You are a scholar, perhaps?” came the enquiry.
Conway found it hard to reply. His period of donhood at Oxford gave him some right to assent, but he knew that the word, though the highest of compliments from a Chinese, had yet a faintly priggish sound for English ears, and chiefly out of consideration for his companions he demurred to it. He said: “I enjoy reading, of course, but my work during recent years hasn’t supplied many opportunities for the studious life.”
“Yet you wish for it?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say all that, but I’m certainly aware of its attractions.”
Mallinson, who had picked up a book, interrupted: “Here’s something for your studious life, Conway. It’s a map of the country.”
“We have a collection of several hundreds,” said Chang. “They are all open to your inspection, but perhaps I can save you trouble in one respect. You will not find Shangri-La marked on any.”
“Curious,” Conway made comment. “I wonder why?”
“There is a very good reason, but I am afraid that is all I can say.”
Conway smiled, but Mallinson looked peevish again. “Still piling up the mystery,” he said. “So far we haven’t seen much that any one need bother to conceal.”
Suddenly Miss Brinklow came to life out of a mute preoccupation. “Aren’t you going to show us the lamas at work?” she fluted, in the tone which one felt had intimidated many a Cook’s man. One felt, too, that her mind was probably full of hazy visions of native handicrafts, prayer-mat weaving, or something picturesquely primitive that she could talk about when she got home. She had an extraordinary knack of never seeming very much surprised, yet of always seeming very slightly indignant, a combination of fixities which was not in the least disturbed by Chang’s response: “I am sorry to say it is impossible. The lamas are never, or perhaps I should say only very rarely, seen by those outside the lamahood.”