THE LAMA’S HOME.
When Ommony recovered consciousness it was some time before he was sure
he was not dreaming. There was no sense of stability. The universe
appeared to sway beneath him, and the sky, when he opened his eyes at
last, swung like a compass-card. He closed his eyes, heard voices, and
presently discovered he was in a stretcher being borne on men’s heads.
When he opened his eyes again the first thing he saw was Diana looking
down at him from a rock. She barked when he moved his hand.
It was a very rough stretcher made of poles and hide. His feet were
loosely tied to it and a rope was passed over his breast, but he could
get his hands under the rope, and its purpose was explained when the
stretcher became tilted at an acute angle and he rode for a while with
his feet pointed at the sky. On either hand were sloping limestone
cliffs and he was being carried up a dry watercourse between them.
He felt no impulse to ask questions, but was curious about his own
condition. He recalled rather vividly a time, ten years ago, when he was
carried to an operating room. When the stretcher returned to the
horizontal and he cautiously tested each muscle, he discovered that his
leg-sinews were so stiff that he could hardly bear to move them. Then he
remembered; every step of the climb up that titanic stairway came back
to him like a nightmare.
He craned his neck looking for the _sirdar_, but failed to discover him.
He could not see the stretcher-bearers, but there were eight Ahbors
walking behind, ready to relieve them—hairy, savage-looking men,
possessed of that air of deliberate indifference that usually hides
extreme fanaticism; their eyes were large, like those of deer, and the
hair came close up to their cheek-bones. They all had weapons; two were
armed with bow and arrows; but no two weapons were alike, and no two
were dressed exactly alike.
Presently the path began to follow the edge of a cliff five or six
thousand feet above a river—undoubtedly from its size the
Brahmaputra—that galloped and plunged among rocks in the bed of a
valley on the left hand. Incredible, enormous mountains leaned against
the sky in every direction, suggesting barrenness and storms, but the
valley lay golden and green in the sunlight, patched with the vivid
green of corn-fields, dotted with grazing cattle and with the dark-brown
roofs of villages. It looked like an exceedingly rich valley, and well
populated.
After a mile or two of gorgeous vistas the track turned to the right and
passed between miles of tumbled ruins, whose limestone blocks, weighing
tons apiece, had turned to every imaginable hue of green, gray, brown
and yellow. Blue and red flowers were growing in the crevices, and trees
had forced themselves between tremendous paving stones that now lay
tilted with their edges to the sky. Ommony untied the rope across his
breast and sat up to observe the ruins, laying both hands on his thighs
to ease their aching; and presently he gasped—forgot the agony.
The track passed between two monolithic columns more enormous than the
grandest ones at Thebes, and emerged on the rim of a natural
amphitheater, whose terraced sides descended for about two thousand feet
to where a torrent of green and white water rushed from a cave-mouth and
plunged into a fissure in the limestone opposite. The air was full of
the noise of water and the song of birds, intoxicating with the scent of
flowers and vivid with their color.
Every terrace was a wilderness of flowers and shade-trees, strewn with
bowlders that broke up the regularity, and connected one with another by
paths and bridges of natural limestone where streams gushed from the
fern-draped rock and fell in cascades to the torrent in the midst. There
was an atmosphere of sunlit peace.
Above the topmost terrace, occupying about a third of the circumference,
were buildings in the Chinese style; the roofs were carved with dragons
and the rear walls appeared to be built into the cliff, which rose for a
thousand feet to a sheer wall of crags, whose jagged edges pierced the
sky.
There were no human beings in evidence, but smoke was rising from
several of the buildings, which all had an air of being lived in. The
track, which was paved now with limestone flags, led under an arch in
the midst of the largest building. The arch turned out to be the opening
of a tunnel, twenty feet high at lowest and as many wide, that pierced
the mountain for more than a hundred yards, making two sharp turns where
it crossed caverns and followed natural fissures in the limestone before
it emerged on the edge of a sheer ravine, overlooking another valley
that appeared to approach the gorge of the Brahmaputra at an angle of
nearly forty-five.
Away in the distance, like a roaring curtain, emerald green and diamond
white, blown in the wind, the Tsangpo River, half a mile wide, tumbled
down a precipice between two outflung spurs that looked like the legs of
a seated giant. The falls were leagues away, and yet their roar came
down-wind like the thunder of creation. Below them, incalculably far
below the summit, the rising spray formed a dazzling rainbow; and where,
below the falls, the Tsangpo became the Brahmaputra, there were
rock-staked rapids more than two miles wide that threw columns of white
water fifty feet in air, so that the rocks looked like leviathans at
war.
The path led up the side of the ravine, curved around a projecting
shoulder, and entered another tunnel, which emerged at the end of fifty
yards into a natural cavern. There the bearers set the stretcher down
and two of them offered to help Ommony up a long flight of steps hewn
from the limestone rock. However, he managed to walk unaided and Diana
followed him through a great gap in the wall into what was evidently the
basement of a building.
There he was met by a brown-robed monk—not an Ahbor, a Tibetan—who
smiled but made no remark and led him up winding stairways between thick
masonry walls to a gallery that overhung the valley from a height which
made the senses reel. It was the upper of two galleries that ran along
the face of a building backed against a cliff; doors and small windows
opened all the way along it, but the Tibetan led around the far corner,
where the wooden planking came to an end at a stone platform and there
was one solitary door admitting to a room about thirty feet by twenty,
that had a window facing the tremendous Tsango-po Falls.
It was in all respects a comfortable room, with a fireplace at one end
and a bright fire burning. On either side of the fireplace there were
shelves stacked with European books in several languages. The stone
floor was covered with a heavy Chinese rug. There was no glass in the
window, but there were heavy shutters to exclude wind and rain, as well
as silken Chinese curtains.
The monk went away and returned presently with a pitcher of milk and
some peculiar cakes that tasted as if made from a mixture of flour and
nut-meat, raised with butter. He signed to Ommony to eat and, when he
had finished, took the pitcher and plate away again.
Ommony warmed his legs at the fire, rubbed them to reduce the stiffness,
and chose a book at random—Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_; it was
well thumbed. He sat down in a chair before the fire to read, regarding
the book as no more incomprehensible than his own predicament and likely
to keep his mind off profitless conjecture. He was too tired to think
about his own problem—too sore in every muscle to consider sleep. One
fact was clear: he had been admitted to the Ahbor Valley, and there must
be some reason for it. For the time being, that was enough—that, and
the comforting sense that all motion had ceased and he could sit still
within four walls that shut off the stunning hugeness of the scenery. He
had no geographical curiosity—was not qualified in any event to make a
map that would be of any real value, and was not sure it would be
courteous to try to do it. People who don’t invade other people’s
countries have a right to their own privacy. Besides, he was quite sure
he could never retrace the way into the valley, and doubtful whether he
could find a way out of it, except down that thundering river. He was
absolutely at the Lama’s mercy, and entirely sure the Lama was a man of
superb benevolence, if nothing else.
Finding he could not make head or tail of Kant in the original German
(he spent ten minutes trying to find the subject of one verb) he laid
the book down and began to wonder whether this was the place in which
his sister and Jack Terry had died. Time vanished. Thought took him back
to the days when he had sent for his sister Elsa, then seventeen, to
come to India and keep house for him. He frowned, blaming himself for
having been the cause of all she suffered. They had had so much in
common, and he had understood so well her craving for knowledge that is
not in any of the text-books, that he had tacitly encouraged her to make
acquaintances which his better judgment should have warned him to keep
out of her reach. He wondered just to what extent a man is justified in
guiding or obstructing a younger sister’s explorations into unknown
realms of thought—knew that he himself would resent any
leading-rein—knew, nevertheless, that he felt guilty of having
neglected to protect his sister until protection and precaution were too
late. He had done his best then, but—
“Dammit, are we or aren’t we free agents?” he asked aloud, staring at
the fire; and then he heard Diana’s tail beating the Chinese rug. It
sounded as if the dog were laughing at him! He turned his head
sharply—and saw the Lama standing in the doorway.
“We are free—to _become_ agents of whatever power we wish,” said the
Lama, smiling. “Don’t get up, my son. I know how thighs ache after a
climb up the stairs of the Temple of Stars. The _sirdar_ does not know
the other entrance to the valley.”
“Where is he?” asked Ommony, staring. He was not particularly interested
in the _sirdar_. A suggestion as to who and what the Lama might be, had
occurred to him suddenly. He was sparring for time to follow up that
thought.
“He returned,” said the Lama, sitting on a chair before the fire,
betraying an inclination to tuck his legs up under him but resisting it.
“The Ahbors would have killed him if he passed beyond the opening. They
would have killed _you_—if it were not for Diana the dog. My son, you
wonder why I left you in Darjiling? There were seven reasons; of which
the first is that I have no right to lead you out of your environment;
and the second, that you _have_ the right to make your own decision. The
third reason was that these Ahbors guard their valley very strictly; it
is their valley; they also have their rights. The fourth reason was,
that an excuse must be presented to the Ahbors for admitting you. The
fifth, that I alone could do that. The sixth, that I must make the
excuse in advance of your coming, since they would not listen unless
given time to consider the matter. And the seventh reason was, that it
was fitting you should learn _why_ this has been kept from you for
twenty years, before you learn as much of the secret as I can show you.
Behind each of those seven reasons are seven more beyond your
comprehension. You spoke with Miss Sanburn?” Ommony nodded. Suspicion
was approaching certainty. He wondered that the thought had not occurred
to him long before.
“Where is the _chela_—Samding—Elsa Terry—my niece?” he asked. There
is no foretelling which emotion will come uppermost. He felt a bit
humiliated. It annoyed him to think he had lived for two months in
almost constant association with his sister’s child and had never
guessed it; annoyed him more to think that the Lama should not have
trusted him from the beginning; most of all that he had not guessed the
Lama’s identity. He felt almost sure that he had guessed right at last.
Nothing but a western dread of seeming foolish restrained him from
guessing aloud.
But the Lama read his thoughts, and answered the unspoken question first
in his own way, his bright old eyes twinkling amid the wrinkles.
“Those who are trustworthy, my son, eventually prove it—always, and it
is only they to whom secrets should be told. It is not enough that a man
shall say, ‘Lo, I am this, or I am that.’ Nor is it enough that other
men shall say the same of him. Some men are trustworthy in some
respects, and not in others. He who trusts, and is betrayed, is
answerable to his own soul.—Do you think it would have been _fair_ to
trust you with the secret of my _chela_?” he asked suddenly.
Ommony side-stepped the question by asking another:
“Why do you call her San-fun-ho?”
“It is her name. It was I who gave it to her. She accepted it, when she
was old enough to understand its meaning. Do you know Chinese? The word
means ‘Possessor of the three qualities,’ but its inner meanings are
many: righteousness, virtuous action, purity, benevolence, moral
conduct, ingenuousness, knowledge, endurance, music—and all the
qualities that lie behind those terms.”
“You think she has _all_ of them?” Ommony asked. His voice held a hint
of sarcasm. He intended that it should.
“My son, we all have them,” said the Lama. “But she is the first
_ordinary_ mortal I have known, who could _express them_.”
Ommony pricked his ears at the word “ordinary.”
“You _know_—you have _seen_ the Masters?” he demanded.
The Lama blinked, but otherwise ignored the question, exactly as every
one Ommony had asked, who was likely to know, always had avoided it.
There is a legend about mysterious “Mahatmas,”[43] whom all the East
believes in, but whom none from the West has ever met (and talked much
about afterward).
“No man ever had such a _chela_,” said the Lama, changing the subject
and betraying the first hint of personal emotion Ommony had ever noticed
in him.
“_Are you one of the Masters?_” Ommony demanded, sitting bolt-upright,
studying the old man’s face.
But the Lama laughed, his wrinkles dancing with amusement.
“My son, that is a childish question,” he said after a moment. “If a man
were to tell you he is one of the Masters, he would be a liar and a
boaster; because it must be evident to any one who thinks, that the more
a man knows, the more surely he knows there are greater ones than
himself. He is a Master, whose teaching you accept. But if he should
tell you there is none superior to himself, it would be wise to look for
another Master!”
But Ommony felt more sure than ever. He knew that Pythagoras, for
instance, and Appolonius, and scores of others had gone to India for
their teaching. For twenty years he had kept ears and eyes alert for a
clue that might lead him to one of the preservers of the ancient wisdom,
who are said to mingle with the crowd unrecognized and to choose to whom
they will impart their secrets. He had met self-styled Gurus by the
dozen—a perfect host of more or less obvious charlatans—some
self-deceived dabblers in the occult, whose motives might be more or
less respectable—but never a one, unless this man, whose speech and
conduct had appeared to him consistent with his idea of what a real
Mahatma might be.
“Hannah Sanburn told me,” he said slowly, “that there are individuals to
whom you go for advice. Did she tell the truth?”
“She received that truth from my lips,” said the Lama, nodding.
“Are _they_ the Masters?”
“The Masters are only discoverable to those, who in former lives have
earned the right to discover them,” the Lama answered. “There is a
Higher Law that governs these things. It is the Law of Evolution. We
evolve from one state to another, life after life, being born into such
surroundings as provide us with the proper opportunity. It was not by
accident, my son, that San-fun-ho was brought into the Ahbor Valley to
be born.”
“Do the Masters live here?”
“No,” said the Lama, smiling again.
“Then what is the particular advantage of the Ahbor Valley?”
“My son, I do not rule the Universe! It was not my province to arrange
the stars! There is no place, no circumstance that does not have
particular advantages. The Ahbor Valley is more suitable to some than to
others, but I am not the one who selects those who shall come here.”
“Who does?”
“There is a law that governs it, just as there is a law that rules the
stars, and a law that obliges one to be born rich and another poor. When
did cause begin? And when shall effect cease? Can you answer that?”
“At any rate, _you_ were the cause of _my_ coming here,” said Ommony.
“Nay, my son! No more than I was the cause of your coming into the
world. If I should have caused you to come here, I should be responsible
for all the consequences; and I do not know what those might be. I have
_permitted_ you to come here. I have removed some difficulties.”
“Why?”
“Because I sought to remove other difficulties from the path of some one
else, and it seemed to me possible that you might be the one who can
assist. Remember: it was not I who caused you to resign your position
under the Indian Government; not I who appointed you a Trustee at
Tilgaun; nor I who invited you to disguise yourself as a Bhat-Brahman.
Have I ever given you advice on any of those matters?”
“No,” Ommony admitted. “But you have corresponded with me ever since
Marmaduke died, and if your letters weren’t educative, what were they?”
“Evocative!” the Lama answered. “Shall I show you the copies of all the
letters I have written to you? I believe you will not find one word in
them that might evoke from you anything except your higher nature, nor
one word that you could twist into inducement to do this, or to do that.
I have taught you nothing. You have tried to understand my letters, and
have found a guiding force within yourself. I am not your guide.”
“Well then—why the interest in me?” Ommony retorted.
“My son, you are immensely interesting. You were forced on my attention.
I have _my_ work to do, and I have nearly finished it.”
The old man paused, and suddenly he seemed so old and tired that all his
previous exertions—night-long rides on camel-back, two months of
journeying in the heat of the Indian plains, patient control of a
dramatic company, and (not least) the return across the mountains to his
home—appeared incredible. For a moment sadness seemed to overwhelm him.
Then he smiled, and as if his will shone through the cloud and warmed
the worn-out flesh, he threw off fifty years.
“For what purpose are we in the world?” he asked. “The purpose lies in
front of each of us. It is never more than one step in advance, and
whither it leads, who knows? It is the best that we can do at any moment
that is required of us. A tree should grow. Water should run. A
shoemaker should make shoes. A musician should make music. A teller of
tales should tell them. Eyes are to see with. Ears are for hearing. Each
man’s own environment is his own universe, and he the master or the
victim of it in exactly the degree by which he governs or is governed by
himself. Could you have patience with me, if I should tell a
little—just a little of my own experience?”
“Good God!” said Ommony. “I’d rather hear it than find a fortune! Ears
are to hear with!” he added, grinning, settling himself back into the
chair to listen.
“Some men listen to the wrong sound,” said the Lama. “It is good to
listen carefully, and to speak only after much thought. I will not tell
more than is required to make a certain matter clear. Thereafter, you
must use your own judgment, my son.”
-----
[43] The legend persists; mocked by the missionaries and denied by
governments, but believed, nevertheless, by multitudes of ignorant
people and by an increasing number of thoughtful investigators. There is
much vague rumor and some corroborated detail, but whoever really knows
the facts is silent.
I have conversed with many priests; and some were honest men,
and some were not, but three things none of them could answer:
if their God is all-wise, what does it matter if men are
foolish? And if they can imagine and define their God, must he
not be smaller than their own imaginations? Furthermore, if
their God is omnipotent, why does he need priests and ritual?
From the Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup.