Talbot Mundy

Old-Ugly Face

Warsaw 2018

Contents

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

PART TWO

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

PART THREE

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

DEDICATION

TO COLLIER YOUNG–LEST DISTANCE DIM GOOD FELLOWSHIP

Our hearts know better than to envy men,
Still less their women, who by tongue and pen
With soulless ideology declare: “What dies
Is all we live for. Violence and lies,
Our high aims justify. The ends we seek
Are things, more things. The poor and weak,
Unnourished in the headlong race to pay
New debts to evil while we toil and pray
To politics for wealth–do they not, day by day
Receive, of our good charity, their bread?
Are we not wonderful?”

We are. We are. And yet …
There was a Voice that more than hinted how
By means more manly than we practice now
A wide world’s consciousness can lose its dread
Of drifting toward endless death:–instead
New visioned, may create a world at last
Worth loving for its future, not its past.

INTRODUCTION

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.–Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “Ulysses”

Set in Tibet, the story concerns a group of men and women who are vitally involved in an exciting situation in that forbidden land of towering mountain peaks and age-old secrets. The Dalai Lama had died, and the choice of a successor to the most influential position in Tibet is a matter of utmost concern to the agents of various foreign governments and to Tom Grayne, unofficially representing the United States, Andrew Gunning, his free-lance friend, and Elsa Burbage, in Tibet under unusual circumstances. Above all, the future of Tibet lies in the hands of the Most Reverend Lobsang Pun, known as Old Ugly-Face, a wrinkled, stout Tibetan prelate of uncertain age, a genuine mystic whose mission in life is to preserve the seeds of sanity in a world gone mad. Grayne and Gunning are both in love with Elsa, and out of this conflict between life-long friends arises a drama of absorbing interest–a drama intensified by international intrigue, treachery, unbelievable courage in the face of the greatest adversity, and the prodigious efforts of Old Ugly-Face to win control of the newly appointed Dalai Lama.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Things seemed vague that evening. Darjeeling felt as if it were somewhere over and beyond its own sensational horizon. The damp stone monastery walls had lost reality, as if thought were the substance and thing its shadow. Andrew Gunning strode along the white-walled passage, beneath flickering brass lamps, between pictures of Buddhist saints. The thin, worn carpet on the stone flags muted his heavy foot-fall into rhythmic thuds that pulsed like heartbeats, regular, and strong, but strangely detached, unreal. An outdoor man, sturdily built, he looked as if his passion were as strong as his muscles and equally under control. He looked obstinate, cautious, capable of proud and perhaps patient but swiftly vigorous anger. As a first impression that was accurate enough and no injustice done. But he was not a man who readily revealed himself to strangers. He could keep his thoughts to himself. Second and later impressions of him always left observers a bit puzzled.

He knocked on the ancient cedar door at the dark end of the passage and waited listening, exactly, and in the same mood as he would have listened for an animal’s cry in the forest, or for the telltale murmur of changing wind in the distance. Good ears, well shaped, not too tightly packed against a studious-looking head. A thatch of untidy tawny hair, inherited from some Viking ancestor who raided Britain before the Normans landed and who doubtless found Roman-Northumbrian wenches an agreeable change from the shrews of the Baltic night. American born. Unclannish. Habitually slightly parted lips. Well-bred narrow nostrils. Easy shoulders; a neck so strong that it looked careless. Sensible eyes. A plain man, therefore dangerous. Only simple people could predict what Andrew Gunning might do. Complicated people seldom understood what he had done or was doing at the moment.

Because the monastery was built centuries ago, in the days when Darjeeling was a fortress city of war-torn Sikkim, the deodar-cedar door was a foot thick. He had to knock twice. And because the rain splashed musically through an open window, and the monastery mood discouraged shouting, he was answered at last by the sound of a small bronze bell. An historic bell. Its temperate G would have gone lost in the thunder of camps or the hum of affairs. For fifty years, five hundred years ago, it had invited silence while a Wise Saint meditated on the mystery of man: whence, whither, why. A most excellent bell.

Andrew opened the door into a plain arrangement of ideas; the comfort of ideas in right relation to each other. A white-walled room, so nearly square that its size made no impression; it was good to be in, and that was enough. Two windows, one facing eternal snow, the Himalayas, the Roof of the World, Tibet; but that window was closed for the night by a shutter of cedar and curtained with woven wool from somewhere north of Tang La Ra. The other window, ten by two and iron-barred against the curiosity of innocence (the Tantric Buddhist monks are innocent, and consequently naughty), opened on the rain-splashed inner courtyard. There were glimpses through it of wet-bronze legged monks about their communal duties, with their skirts tucked into their girdles. Some of them were singing; merry-minded fellows, curiously indifferent to rain and icy wind, but venially sinfully inquisitive about the female occupant of Cell Eleven. They were only preserved from the cardinal sin of impudence by the all-seeing eye of Brother Overseer Lan-shi Ling who looked down on their labors from the covered gallery, reminding them, when necessary, that though the eye and the ear may sin, it is the soul which pays. O brothers, look ye neither to the right nor left. The path leads upward!

Elsa lay curled on a Scots plaid steamer rug that had been stained by travel. It was spread over big flat cushions stuffed with the swans-down that lies like wind-blown blossom on the shore of Lake Manasarowar–sacred wild swans and a sacred lake. The cushions were piled on a throne built of blocks of holy basalt from a mountain whose name no Tibetan will utter (lest the ever-watchful dugpas* should overhear and find and desecrate the mountain’s holiness).

That throne on which Elsa sprawled was really a guest bed reserved for visiting Lord Abbots who occasionally come, with secret news, and solemn meekness, but implacably critical zeal, to bestow their blessing on the monastery or to refuse approval, as the case may be. Hearts had been broken in that room, from that throne; personal destinies had crumbled in the calm impersonal fire of visiting Lord Abbots’ views of what is sinful and what isn’t. Centuries old though the monastery is, Elsa Burbage was the first woman ever to have crossed the threshold of the inner courtyard. She was well aware of that. At the moment it was almost the only excuse for self-confidence that she could use as a shield against despair. The eleventh chamber on the north side had been hers for a number of weeks. It was she who had named it Cell Eleven for luck and brevity. Its real name, all one word in Tibetan, is Countless-thousands–of–times–blessed –place–of–meditation–piously–reserved –for– wisdom-loving-holy-lamas-from-blessed-mountains-conferring-sanctity-and- merit-by-their-benevolent-presence. That, of course, is a far better name than Cell Eleven, but it takes too long to say.

Elsa smiled at Andrew Gunning, but she didn’t speak for a few moments. She and he had no need to toss words at each other. Kindness can be as irritating as pity. So can courtesy. Such formalities as unfriendly or suspicious people have to impose on themselves and each other had gone downwind months ago, blown by the bitter winds of Tibet and by the more subtle but even less merciful forces of human extremity. There remained a comradeship that speech could easily blaspheme but could neither enlarge nor explain.

Andrew sat down on a stone ledge near the open window. The ledge was covered with snow leopard skin, a comfortless upholstery; but Tibetans don’t care for physical comfort, don’t even know what it is; and snow leopard skin is a very valuable, so they say, provision against sly earth currents that intrude into a meditator’s thought and undo virtue, as the termites undo buildings in the dark. Andrew leaned his back against the whitewashed wall, and he didn’t say anything either. He just looked at Elsa, schooling himself not to feel sorry for her because he loathed the spiritual snobbery that drools that sort of insolence.

The glow from a charcoal brazier colored Elsa’s pale face and made her eyes, beneath the dark hair, look much bigger than they actually were; it made them gleam with unnatural light that suggested visions and dreams, like a cat’s eyes when it stares at the hearth. The effect of unreality was increased by the leap of candlelight and by the Tibetan paintings on silk that loomed amid a mystery of shadows on the white walls. It was Andrew who spoke first:

“Not so long ago, just for looking like that, they’d have burned you for a witch.”

“Burning sounds dreadful, but it must be soon over,” she answered. “Do you suppose it’s worse than feeling useless and disillusioned?”

He scowled suddenly and smiled slowly: “It’s the first time I’ve heard you use words like that.”

“I never felt quite like this before. Not quite like it.”

Andrew Cunning’s method was to kill out pity and to mask what sympathy he felt beneath brusqueness: “Feel like cracking?” he asked.

“It seems to have happened. I want to say what I mean. But I can’t. It’s as if I had been an insect all along without knowing it.”

Andrew looked as cautious, alert and careful as if he were still– hunting some animal of whose ways he was ignorant. He had a presentiment. He was going to be asked what he couldn’t answer, and told what he didn’t want to know. So he said what he did know:

“Life is a fight. The more sensitive you are, the worse it hurts. But you can’t cure man or horse with hard names. You have to think straight and know what you’re fighting about.”

“Andrew, I did it. I’ve done it. I lost. I said insect because insects wear their skeletons outside and their personalities inside. They’re armor- plated. But when they crack–”

“Then they grow a new shell or they die.”

“It isn’t so easy to just die and be done with it. Andrew, I’ve reached a jumping-off place, but there’s nowhere to jump to. I’m not complaining. I’m telling you because there’s no one else to tell. Even song doesn’t sound good any more. Tomorrow isn’t. There’s only a string of dried yesterdays.”

He showed his teeth in a friendly belligerent grin: “So it’s Andrew. You call me Andy when you think I’m stupid. Drew, when we’re talking on even terms. Andrew, when you need help. But it won’t work. I’m feeling the way you do, as near as a man can feel the way a woman does. I was in the chapel just now. Same ritual. Same monks, solemnity, beauty and all the rest of it. It felt as flat as canned stuff.”

“Then you do understand what I mean.”

“No. When you use a word like insect to explain your feelings– damned if I understand.”

“Drew, your inconsistencies hide something so strong that I’m almost afraid of it sometimes. I am now.”

“No call for you to be scared of me. Inconsistencies? What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. I’ve heard you use real bad language– Tibetan and English–that would make a Billingsgate fish-porter’s hair curl.”

“Maybe. But that was for tactical reasons, to get a pack-train moving or something of that sort. And besides, I’m not a woman.”

She laughed. “Drew, did anyone ever accuse you of being effeminate! Please, Andrew! What I meant is, that if you’ll raise that iron visor of yours and really listen, it would be such a comfort. But if that’s selfish, and you’d rather–”

“Talk away. I’m interested.”

“I want to talk to the real you.”

“Go ahead. Shoot. But don’t talk down to me. I hate that.”

“Down to you?”

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