Against the Day (149 page)

“I have also heard of a letter, in
the form of a poem,” he said carefully, “from a Tibetan scholarprince to his
father, who has died and been reborn in Shambhala
. . . .
”

The bookseller nodded. “That is the
Rigpa
Dzinpai Phonya,
or KnowledgeBearing Messenger, by Rimpung Ngawangjigdag,
1557. Directions for journeying to Shambhala are addressed by the author to a
Yogi, who is a sort of fictional character, though at the same time
real—a figure in a vision, and also Rinpungpa himself. I do know of a
variant currently for sale, which contains lines that do not appear in other
versions. Notably, ‘Even if you forget everything else,’ Rinpungpa instructs
the Yogi, ‘remember one thing—when you come to a fork in the road, take
it.’ Easy for him to say, of course, being two people at once. I could put you
in touch with the seller, if you were serious.”

   
“I’m
serious,” Halfcourt said. “But I don’t read Tibetan.”

Tariq shrugged in sympathy. “Translations
of these guides to Shambhala are usually into German—Grunwedel’s
Shambhalai
Lamyig,
of course
. . .
most
recently, three pages from Laufer’s volume of Uyghur Buddhist literature,
author unknown, supposedly thirteenth century, which all the Germans who come
through here seem to be carrying in their rucksacks.”

“I
suppose what I’m asking,” Halfcourt struggling not to give in to a strange
premonitory sense of exhilaration and sorrow he had been feeling for days, of
something gathering, “is, how practical are any of them, as directions to
finding a real place.”

The
bookseller nodded perhaps for longer than he had to. “It helps to be a
Buddhist, I’m told. And to have a general idea of the geography out here. It is
all but certain, for example, that one should be looking north of the
Taklamakan. Which does not narrow anything down much. But it is all I know
anyone to be agreed upon.

“I
am myself submissive to the way of the Prophet, very conventionally so I’m
afraid. But Shambhala—though it is all very interesting, I’m sure—”

By
now the city outside was saturated in shadow, the women gliding away in loose
robes and horsehair veils, the domes and minarets silent and unassailable
against unwishedfor depths of blue, the markets windruled and deserted, every
insane desert vision ever experienced out here, for just a moment, plausible.

here are places we fear, places we
dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too
late.

   
Kit
had always thought he would return somehow to the San Juans. It had never
entered his mind that his fate might be here, that here in Inner Asia would be
his bold fourteeners and desert snows, aboriginal horsemen, trailside saloons
and altogetherincomprehensible women, somehow most desirable whenever there was
other business, often deadly in nature, at hand.

It was not until he finally saw Lake
Baikal that he understood why it had been necessary to journey here, and why,
in the process of reaching it, penance, madness, and misdirection were
inescapable.

Prance had stayed back in Irkutsk,
pleading exhaustion, but Hassan was insistent that for a devout Buriat the
object of pilgrimage must be the great stone at the mouth of the Angara, where
the river flowed out of the lake.

“But that was only a cover story,”
Kit reminded him. “We aren’t Buriats, either of us.”

Hassan’s gaze was open but
unreadable. “We have nearly completed the journey.”

   
“And
the Prophet? The Doosra’s master? Shall I speak to him?”

   
“You
spoke to him,” said Hassan.

   
“When—”
Kit began, and in the instant, there was Baikal.

He had gazed into pure, small
mountain lakes in Colorado, unsoiled by mine tailings or town waste, and was
not surprised by the perfect clarity which had more than once taken him to the
verge of losing himself, to the dizzying possibility of falling into another
order of things. But this was like

looking into the heart of the Earth
itself as it was before there were eyes of any kind to look at it.

It
was a mile deep, so he’d been told by Auberon Halfcourt, and sheltered critters
unknown elsewhere in Creation. Trying to sail on it was dangerous and
unpredictable—winds rose in seconds, waves became small mountains. A
journey to it was not a holiday excursion. In some way he was certain of but had
not quite worked through, it was another of those locations like Mount Kailash,
or Tengri Khan, parts of a superterrestrial order included provisionally in
this lower, broken one. He felt swept now by a violent certitude. He had after
all taken the wrong path, allowed the day’s trivialities to engage
him—simply not worked hard enough to deserve to see this. His first
thought was that he must turn and go back to Kashgar, all the way back to the
great Gateway, and begin again. He looked around to tell Hassan, who he was
sure had already seen into his own thoughts. Hassan was of course no longer
there.

Back at the beginning
of their journey, though it lay only a short distance from Kashgar, near
the village of Mingyol, and could sometimes be seen from odd angles looming in
the distance, the great stone Arch known as the Tushuk Tash was considered
impossible actually to get to even by the local folks. A maze of slot canyons
lay in the way, too many of them ever to have been counted. All maps were
useless. Cartographers of different empires, notably the Russian, had been
driven to nervous collapse trying to record the country around the Tushuk Tash.
Some settled for embittered fantasy, others more conscientious left it blank.

When
Hassan had heard that Kit and Prance must begin their journey by first passing
beneath the great pierced rock, he had excused himself and gone off to pray,
aloof and morosely silent, as if the Doosra had sent him to accompany them as
some kind of punishment.

Some
spoke of the colossal gate as a precipice, a bridge, an earthen dam, a passage
between high rock walls
. . .
for
others it was not a feature of the landscape but something more abstract, a
religious examination, a cryptographic puzzle
.
. . .
Hassan had always known it as “the Prophet’s Gate,” bearing not
only the title but also the sanction of a Prophet who was understood to be not
only the Prophet Mahommed but another as well, dwelling far to the north, for
whom Hassan’s master the Doosra was the forerunner.

It had taken them all day. They went
into a gray region of deep ravines and

rock towers. Hassan led them without
error through the maze of canyons.

What earthly process could have
produced them was a mystery. With the sun at this angle, the Kara Tagh looked
like a stone city, broken into gray crystalline repetitions of city blocks and
buildings windowless as if inhabited by that which was past sight, past light,
past all need for distinguishing outside from in. Kit found he could not look
at this country directly for more than a minute or so—as if its ruling
spirits might properly demand obliquity of gaze as a condition of passage.

When
they came at last to stand before the Gate, it did not seem like a natural
formation but a structure of masonry, shaped stones fitted together without
mortar, like the Pyramids, long before recorded history would have begun. In
the distance, its peaks shimmering white, rose the Altai range, which their
route would take them past. Kit looked up—it was a perhaps fatal risk,
but he had to.

In
the stillluminous sky, the thing was immense—a thousand, maybe fifteen
hundred feet high, at least, flat across the top, and beneath that a great
sharply pointed Gothic arch of empty space. Huge, dark, unstable, always in
disintegration, shedding pieces of itself from so high up that by the time they
hit the ground they’d be invisible, followed by the whizzing sound of their
descent, for they fell faster than the local speed of sound
. . . .
At any moment a loose rock fragment
might fall too fast for Kit to hear before it slashed into him. Down here
everything was dark, but up there the gray conglomerate was being struck by the
final light of day to an unanswerable brilliance.

Hovering,
so high and stationary that at first she could have been mistaken for a flaw in
his field of vision, a golden eagle caught the rays and seemed to emit light of
her own. Among the Kirghiz these eagles were used for hunting, and needed two
men to handle them, being known to bring back the carcasses of antelopes and
even wolves. The longer she hung above him at her majestic altitude, the more
certain Kit became that this was a messenger.

The
Chinese remind us that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single
step, yet they keep curiously silent about the step itself, which too often
must be taken, as now, from inaccessible ground, if not indeed straight down
into an unmeasured abyss.

The
moment he passed through the Gate, Kit was not so much deafened as blinded by a
mighty release of sound—a great choral bellowing over the desert,
bringing, like a brief interruption of darkness in the daytime, a distinct view
now, in this dusk, of sunlit terrain, descending in a long gradient directly
ahead to a city whose name, though at the moment denied him, was known the
world over, vivid in these distances, bright yellow and orange, though soon
enough it would be absorbed into the same gray confusion of exitless ravines
and windshaped rock ascensions through which they had la

bored to get here and must again to
regain the Silk Road. Then the vision had faded, embers of a trailfire in the
measureless twilight.

   
Turning
to Hassan, “Did you see . . .”

   
“I
saw nothing, sir.” In Hassan’s face sympathy and a plea for silence.

   
“Heard
nothing?”

   
“It
will be night soon, sir.”

Throughout the journey
, then, Kit had dreamed of the moment he had stepped through the Gate.
Often the dream came just before dawn, after a lucid flight, high, æthereal,
blue, arriving at a set of ropes or steel cables suspended, bridgelike, over a
deep chasm. The only way to cross is faceskyward beneath the cables, hand over
hand using legs and feet as well, with the sheer and unmeasurable drop at his
back. The sunset is red, violent, complex, the sun itself the permanent core of
an explosion as yet unimagined. Somehow in this dream the Arch has been
replaced by Kit himself, a struggle he feels on waking in muscles and joints to
become the bridge, the arch, the crossingover. The last time he had the dream
was just before rolling in to Irkutsk on the TransSiberian. A voice he knew he
should recognize whispered, “You are released.” He began to fall into the great
chasm, and woke into the winecolored light of the railroad carriage, lamps
swaying, samovars at either end gasping and puffing like miniature steam
engines. The train was just pulling into the station.

After passing through
the Prophet’s Gate, they had proceeded along the southern foothills of
the Tian Shan, one Silk Road oasis to the next—Aksu, Kucha, Korla,
Karashahr, guiding on the otherworldly white pyramid of Khan Tengri, Lord of
the Sky, from which light poured, burst continually, illuminating even the
empty sky and transient clouds, past nephrite quarries where dustcovered
spectres moved chained together on their own effortful pilgrimage toward a cup
of water and a few hours’ sleep, through evening hailstorms that left the
desert blindingly snowcovered in the morning, pockets of green garnet sand
queerly aglow in the twilight, and sandstorms making it all but impossible to
breathe, turning the day black— for some of those it overtook, black
forever. By the time they arrived wayworn at the oasis of Turfan, beneath the
Flaming Mountains, redder than the Sangre de Cristos, Kit had begun to
understand that this space the Gate had opened to them was less geographic than
to be measured along axes of sorrow and loss.