CHAPTER V
Aswe descended into the bleak oblivion of the gorges below, we suddenly found ourselves in a world of deepening dark, though it was hardly three in the afternoon. It was due to the long shadows of the tall summits under which we moved. We hastened our pace, and the cold air goaded us on. As soon as we had descended about a thousand feet and more it grew warmer by comparison, but as night came on apace the temperature dropped anew and drove us to seek shelter in a friendly Lamasery. We reached that particularseraiwhere the Lamas, Buddhist monks, most generously offered us hospitality. They spoke to us only as they had occasion in serving us with supper and in escorting us to our rooms. They spend their evenings in meditation.
We had three small cells cut out of the side of a hill, in front of which was a patch of grassy lawn railed off at the outer edges. By the light of the lanthorns we carried, we found that we had only straw mattresses in our stone cells. However, the night passed quickly, for we were so tired that we slept like children in their mothers' arms. About four o'clock next morning I heard many footsteps that roused me completely from sleep. I got out of bed and went in their direction, and soon I discerned bright lights. By climbing down and then up a series of high steps, I reached the central chapel of the Lamasery—a vast cave under an overhanging rock, and open on three sides. There, before me stood eight Lamas with lanthorns which they quietly put away as they then sat down to meditate, their legs crossed under them. The dim light fell on their tawny faces and blue robes, and revealed on their countenances only peace and love.
Presently their leader said to me in Hindusthani: "It has been our practice for centuries to pray for all who sleep. At this hour of the night even the insomnia-stricken person finds oblivion and since men when they sleep can not possess their conscious thoughts, we pray that Eternal Compassion may purify them, so that when they awake in the morning they will begin their day with thoughts that are pure, kind and brave. Will you meditate with us?"
I agreed readily. We sat praying for compassion for all mankind. Even to this day when I awake early I think of those Buddhist monks in the Himalayas praying for the cleansing of the thoughts of all men and women still asleep.
The day broke soon enough. I found that we were sitting in a cleft of a mountain, and at our feet lay a precipice sheer and stark. The tinkling of silver bells rose softly in the sunlit air, bells upon bells, silver and golden, chimed gently and filled the air with their sweet music: it was the monks' greeting to the harbinger of light. The sun rose as a clarion cry of triumph—of Light over darkness, and of Life over Death.
Below I met Radja and Ghond at breakfast. It was then that a monk who served us said: "Your pigeon came here for shelter yesterday." He gave a description of Gay-Neck, accurate even to the nature of his nose wattle, its size and colour. Ghond asked: "How do you know we seek a pigeon?" The flat-faced Lama, without even turning an eyelash, said in a matter of fact tone: "I can read your thoughts." Radja questioned with eagerness: "How can you read our thoughts?"
The monk answered: "If you pray to Eternal Compassion for four hours a day for the happiness of all that live, in the course of a dozen years He gives you the power to read some people's thoughts, especially the thoughts of those who come here.... Your pigeon we fed and healed of his fear when he took shelter with us."
"Healed of fear, my Lord!" I exclaimed.
The Lama affirmed most simply: "Yes, he was deeply frightened. So I took him in my hands and stroked his head and told him not to be afraid, then yestermorn I let him go. No harm will come to him."
"Can you give your reason for saying so, my Lord?" asked Ghond politely.
The man of God replied to him thus: "You must know, O Jewel amongst hunters, that no animal, nor any man, is attacked and killed by an enemy until the latter succeeds in frightening him. I have seen even rabbits escape hounds and foxes when they kept themselves free of fear. Fear clouds one's wits and paralyses one's nerve. He who allows himself to be frightened lets himself be killed."
"But how do you heal a bird of fear, my Lord?"
To that question of Radja's the holy one answered: "If you are without fear and you keep not only your thoughts pure but also your sleep untainted of any fear-laden dreams for months, then whatever you touch will become utterly fearless. Your pigeon now is without fear for I who held him in my hand have not been afraid in thought, deed and dream for nearly twenty years. At present your pet bird is safe: no harm will come to him."
By the calm conviction in his words, spoken without emphasis, I felt that in truth Gay-Neck was safe and in order to lose no more time, I said farewell to the devotees of Buddha and started south. Let me say that I firmly believe that the Lamas were right. If you pray for other people every morning you can enable them to begin their day with thoughts of purity, courage and love.
Now we dropped rapidly towards Dentam. Our journey lay through places that grew hotter and more familiar. No more did we see the rhododendrons. The autumn that further up had touched the leaves of trees with crimson, gold, cerise, and copper was not so advanced here. The cherry trees still bore their fruits; the moss had grown on trees thickly, and the wind had blown on them the pollen of orchids, large as the palm of your hand, blossoming in purple and scarlet. Many white daturas perspired with dewdrops in the steaming heat of the sun. The trees began to appear taller and terrible. Bamboos soared upwards like sky-piercing minarets. Creepers thick as pythons beset our path. The buzzing of the cicada grew insistent and unbearable, and jays jabbered in the woods. Now and then a flock of green parrots flung their emerald glory in the face of the sun, then vanished. Insects multiplied. Mammoth butterflies, velvety black, swarmed from blossom to blossom, and innumerable small birds preyed on numberless buzzing flies. We were stung with the sharpest stings of worms, and now and then we had to wait to let pass a serpent that crossed our path. Were it not for the practised eyes of Ghond who knew which way the animals came and went, we would have been killed ten times over by a snake or a bison. Sometimes Ghond would put his ear to the ground and listen. After several minutes he would say: "Ahead of us bisons are coming. Let us wait till they pass." And soon enough we would hear their sharp hoofs moving through the undergrowth with a sinister noise as if a vast scythe were cutting, cutting, cutting the very ground from under our feet. Yet we pressed on, stopping for half an hour for lunch. At last we reached the borders of Sikkim, whose small valley glimmered with ripening red millet, green oranges and golden bananas, set against hillsides glittering with marigolds above which softly shone the violets.
Just then we came to a sight that I shall never forget. At our feet on the narrow caravan road the air burnt in iridescence: the heat was so great that it vibrated with colours. Hardly had we gone a few yards when like a thunderclap rose a vast flock of Himalayan pheasants; then they flew into the jungle, their wings burning like peacocks' plumes in the warm air. We kept on moving. In another couple of minutes flew up another flock, but these were mud-coloured birds. In my perplexity I asked Ghond for an explanation.
He said: "Do you not see, O beloved of felicity, the caravan that passed here was loaded with millet? One of their sacks had a hole in it. A few handfuls of millet leaked out on the road before the sack was sewn up. Later on arrived these birds and fed themselves here. We came upon them suddenly and frightened them to flight."
"But, O Diadem of Wisdom," I asked, "why do the males look so gorgeous and why are the females mud-coloured? Is nature always partial to the male?"
Ghond made the following explanation. "It is said that mother Nature has given all birds the colours that hide them from their enemies. But do you not see that those pheasants are so full of splendour that they can be sighted and killed even by a blind man?"
Radja exclaimed: "Can they?"
Ghond answered: "O, wary beyond thy years, no! The real reason is that they live on trees and do not come down before the earth is very hot. In this hot India of ours the air two inches above the ground is so burning that it quivers with a thousand colours; and the plumage of the pheasant is similar. When we look at them we do not see birds, but the many-coloured air which camouflages them completely. We almost walked on them a few moments ago, thinking them but a part of the road at our feet."
"That I comprehend," resumed Radja reverently. "But why did the female look mud-coloured and why did they not fly away with the male?"
Ghond answered without hesitation. "When the enemy approaches and takes them by surprise, the male flies up to face the enemy's bullets though without thought of chivalry. The females' wings are not so good. Besides she, being of the colour of the earth, opens her wings to shelter her babies under them, then lies flat on the ground, completely melting away her identity into that colour scheme. After the enemy goes away in quest of the corpses of their already slaughtered husbands, the females run away with their babies into the nearest thicket.... And if it is not too late in the year, and if their grown-up babies are not with them, the mother birds singly flop to the ground and lie there, making the gesture of protecting their young. Self-sacrifice becomes a habit with them, and habitually they put forth their wings whether they have any young ones with them or not. That is what they were doing when we came upon them, then suddenly they realized that they were without anyone to protect, and as we still kept on coming down upon them they took to flight, poor fliers though they are."
With the approach of dusk we took shelter in the house of a Sikkimese nobleman whose son was a friend of ours. There we found further traces of Gay-Neck, who had been to their house many times before, and so when he reached the familiar place on his latest visit he had eaten millet seeds, drunk water and taken his bath. Also, he had preened his wings and left two small azure feathers which my friend had preserved for the sake of their colouring. When I saw them my heart leapt in joy, and that night I slept in utter peace and contentment. There was another reason for sleeping well, for Ghond had told us to rest deeply, as after the following day's march, we were to spend the night in the jungle.
The next night when we sat on that tree top in the deep jungle, often did I think of the home of my Sikkimese friend and its comforts.
Imagine yourself marching all day, then spending the night on a vast banyan tree in the very heart of a dangerous forest! It took us a little over half an hour to find that tree, for banyans do not often grow in high altitudes, and also the same reason that made us choose the banyan made us look for a very large one of its kind—it would be of no use to us if it were slender enough for an elephant to break down by walking backwards against it! That is how the pachyderm destroys some very stout trees. We looked for something tall and so stout that no elephant could reach its upper branches with his trunk and not even two tuskers could break it by pushing against it with their double weight.
With enormously long reach he almost touched the top of the tree.
With enormously long reach he almost touched the top of the tree.
With enormously long reach he almost touched the top of the tree.
At last we found a tree to our liking. Radja stood on Ghond's shoulder and I on Radja's, until we reached branches as thick as a man's torso. I climbed and sat on one of them and from it let down our rope ladder which we always carried in the jungle for emergencies such as the present one. Radja climbed up and sat near me, then Ghond ascended the branch and sat between us. Now we saw that below us where Ghond had stood it had not only grown dark as the heart of a coal mine but there glowed two green lights set very close to one another. We knew too well whose they were. Ghond exclaimed jovially: "Had I been delayed down there two extra minutes the striped fellow would have killed me."
Seeing that his prey had escaped him, the tiger gave a thunderous yell, scourging the air like a curse. At once a tense silence fell and smothered all the noises of insects and little beasts and it descended further and deeper until it sank into the earth and seemed to grip the very roots of the trees.
We made ourselves secure on our perch and Ghond passed the extremely flexible rope ladder around his waist, then Radja's, then mine, fastening the rest of it around the main trunk of the tree. We tested it by letting it bear the weight of one of us at a time. This precaution was taken for the purpose of preventing a sleep-stricken member of our group from slipping down to the floor of the jungle, for after all, in sleep the body relaxes so that it falls like a stone. Finally, Ghond arranged his arms for pillows for our heads when slumber came.
Now that we had taken all the necessary precautions we concentrated our attention on what was happening below. The tiger had vanished from under our tree. The insects had resumed their song, which was again and again stilled for a few seconds as huge shapes fell from far off trees with soft thuds. Those were leopards and panthers who had slept on the trees all day and were now leaping down to hunt at night.
When they had gone the frogs croaked, insects buzzed continually and owls hooted. Noise, like a diamond, opened its million facets. Sounds leapt at one's hearing like the dart of sunlight into unprotected eyes. A boar passed, cracking and breaking all before him. Soon the frogs stopped croaking, and way down on the floor of the jungle we heard the tall grass and other undergrowth rise like a hay-cock, then with a sigh fall back. That soft sinister sigh like the curling up of spindrift drew nearer and nearer, then ... it slowly passed our tree. Oh! what a relief. It was a constrictor going to the water hole. We stayed on our tree-top as still as its bark—Ghond was afraid that our breathing might betray our position to the terrible python.
A few minutes later we heard one or two snappings of small twigs almost as faint as a man cracking his fingers. It was a stag whose antlers had got caught in some vines and he was snapping them to get himself freed. Hardly had he passed when the jungle grew very tense with expectation. Sounds began to die down. Out of the ten or a dozen different noises that we had heard all at once, there now remained only three: the insects' tick tack tock, the short wail of the stag—no doubt the constrictor was strangling him near the water hole—and the wind overhead. Now the elephants were coming. Hatis (elephants), about fifty in a herd, came and played around the place below us. The squeal of the females, the grunt of the males, and the run run run of the babies filled the air.
I do not remember what happened next, for I had dozed off into a sort of waking sleep, and in that condition I heard myself talking pigeon-language to Gay-Neck. I was experiencing a deep confusion of sleep and dream. Someone shook and roused me. To my utter amazement Ghond whispered "I cannot hold you any more. Wake up! Mischief is abroad. A mad elephant has been left behind. The straggler is bent on harm. We are not high enough to be altogether out of the reach of his trunk, and if he raises it far enough he will scent our presence. Wild elephants hate and fear man and once he gets our odour he may stay about here all day in order to find out where we are. Rouse thy vigilance, lad. Draw the blade of alertness before the enemy strikes."
There was no mistake about that elephant. In the pale light of early dawn I could discern a sort of hillock darkly moving about under our tree. He was going from tree to tree and snapping off a few succulent twigs that autumn had not yet blighted. He seemed greedy and bent on gorging himself with those delicacies, rare for the time of the year. In about half an hour he performed a strange trick, putting his fore feet on the bole of a thick tree, and swinging up his trunk. It gave him the appearance of a far-spreading mammoth; with that enormously long reach he almost touched the top of the tree and twisted the most delectable branches off its boughs. After having denuded it of its good twigs he came to a tree next to ours, and there did the same thing. Now he found a slender tree which he pulled down with his trunk, and placed his forefeet on the poor bent thing and broke it with a crash under his own weight. He ate all that he could of that one. While he was breakfasting thus, his rampage frightened the birds and monkeys, who flew in the air or ran from tree to tree jabbering in terror. Then the elephant put his feet on the stump of the broken tree and reached up into ours until he touched the branch on which we sat. Hardly had he done so when he squealed, for the odour of man all beasts fear, and swiftly withdrew his trunk. After grunting and complaining to himself he put up his trunk again very near Ghond's face. Just then Ghond sneezed almost into the elephant's nostrils. That struck panic into the latter's heart; he felt beleaguered by men. Trumpeting and squealing like a frightened fiend, he dashed through the jungle, breaking and smashing everything before him. Again the parrots, thick as green sails, flew in the sky. Monkeys screamed and raced from tree to tree. Boars and stags stampeded on the floors of the jungle. For a while the din and tumult reigned unchecked. We had to wait some time before we dared to descend from our perch in order to resume our homeward journey.
Late that day we reached home after being carried on horseback by a caravan which we were fortunate enough to meet. All three of us were dead tired, but we forgot our fatigue when we beheld Gay-Neck in his nest in our house at Dentam. Oh, what joy! That evening before I went to sleep I thought of the calm quiet assurance of the Lama who said: "Your bird is safe."