Patrick O’Brian 3-Book Adventure Collection: The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean, The Unknown Shore. Patrick O’Brian
Williams, the wife of one of my colleagues. But perhaps it would be as well to restrain Olaf’s zeal at present. Derrick, will you take a chain and lead him to the yaks? He will have to spend the night out, poor fellow; but it is all in the common cause. And by the way, ask him to be so good as to provide himself with a short tail, will you? I mentioned, in passing, that he had one, in the course of my remarks. Perhaps he had better let it show a little in the morning – but discreetly, you understand?’
Sullivan’s fears were baseless. In the first light of the morning the village notables, all strong-minded females, gathered outside the house with their attendant husbands and a train of yaks. All the difficulties that had plagued them for so many days suddenly vanished: the barley was found to be threshed, men could be spared, food was abundant, the missing yaks were found, the Professor’s Tibetan was understood and several men remembered scraps of Mongol or Chinese.
Before the sun was well up the expedition was on its way again. The black looks of the men were gone, replaced by an anxious friendliness: they pressed little gifts on all the members of the party except Olaf, whom they regarded with unfeigned horror. He was obliged to walk forty yards behind the others, and whenever he approached nearer, the Tibetan guides thundered on a gong that they carried with them for the purpose, and blew on shrill-voiced horns, waving their prayer-wheels at the same time. He was obliged to be fed at a great distance from the fire, and after some days of this he became very melancholy and low in his spirits. He complained of the inconvenience of his tail, but when the Professor assured him that he would be reinstated as a human being when the new moon appeared he grew less despondent, and watched the waning moon with the keenest attention.
Their route led on and on, always to the west: it was never a marked road, except where it entered the villages, but the Tibetans followed it as though it had a pavement on either side. Up and down they went, sometimes ploughing knee-deep through the snow at fifteen thousand feet and more, sometimes panting in the heat of an enclosed valley roasting in the sun. They had game in abundance, and they dried many pounds of lean meat against emergencies to come. As the days went by they shortened Olaf’s tail inch by inch, and when the new moon showed a silvery sickle over the gleaming mountains that hemmed them in, he was allowed to put it away altogether. The Tibetans, with some misgivings, admitted him to the fireside again; but they would never sit near him if they could avoid it.
They had one bad snow-storm that caught them in one of the high passes and delayed them for two days. Olaf built one of his snow houses, but the Tibetans would have none of his monstrous practices, and huddled motionless against their shaggy beasts, who stood, quite unconcerned, while the snow covered them.
It was after this storm that they first met a great herd of yaks being brought down from the summer pastures: the next day they met two more, and they understood the herdsmen to say the early winter was coming on apace. ‘We must hurry,’ said Sullivan, with a round, seafaring oath, as he tried to urge his stolid yak to a speed greater than a crawl. ‘If only those half-witted omadhauns had let us go, we would be a hundred miles farther on by now.’
But the yaks would not be hurried: they kept to their invariable sluggish plod whatever happened, and if they were vexed with pulling, pushing or with blows they would dig all four feet in, close their large eyes and become absolutely immovable. Only when they smelt a snow-leopard – which was not rare when they were just above the snowline – would they run, and then, as often as not, they ran in the wrong direction.
But they were patient, incredibly hardy and enduring creatures, and wonderfully sure-footed. Only once did one ever fall, and that was at the ford of the river a little before the first Red-Hat monastery. The river was swollen, the load was badly tied, and the yak went down: nothing was lost except, by great bad luck, one single heavy little box that contained most of what ammunition they had not abandoned in their dreadful days above Hukutu. They dived for it in the freezing water, but it was at the bottom of a whirlpool, and they had to give it up. They were reduced now to a very few rounds apiece, and Sullivan gave the order that no one was to shoot except Ross, who could be relied upon never to waste a single shot.
They got by the first dangerous strip of country, however, with no difficulty at all, and although a week later at the second they saw what they took to be a party of lamas in the distance, they had no unpleasant encounters. The weather was holding up, and they were making good distance every day.
Their detour to pass the second lamasery had been arranged, by two forced marches, to coincide with the full moon, and it was wholly successful: they rejoined their road exactly where they meant, and followed a winding river – still clear and unfrozen – as they pushed on to Thyondze. But once the full moon began to wane, Olaf became an object of horror to the guides. He was made to keep a great way off, and this time, as the road was clear along the river-side, he elected to walk in front. Sometimes Derrick and Chingiz walked with him for company, although the Tibetans often urged them not to take the risk, and on the first day that they struck their road again, all three of them had been walking well ahead of the main party when Derrick remembered that he had left the barley-cakes and the dried meat that they were to eat at midday. He ran back to his yak. Sullivan was saying to the Professor, ‘We shall not be able to pass the third Red-Hat lamasery at Thyondze with the full moon: but I am not sure that it would not be better altogether to get by on a darker night. They tell me that there is a road so clear that we cannot miss it, and it turns so sharply to the left that we shall be out of sight of the monastery well before dawn – hullo, what’s that?’ He broke off and pointed to the river. Bobbing down towards them on the broad and rapid stream there was something floating: it came nearer, and they saw that it was a tall felt hat, a red Tibetan hat.
‘I hope some poor fellow has not fallen in,’ said the Professor.
Sullivan was already running along the bank up the stream. He turned a corner where the rocks cut out the view and saw Olaf and Chingiz coming back. In a few moments he had reached them, and Olaf said, ‘Ay didn’t mean no harm, Cap’n, but this guy wouldn’t let us pass, and the other guy fetched me a bang with his stick. It was on that bridge along for’ard,’ he said, pointing to a rough log crossing on the river.
It appeared that they had meant to cross the river and that on the bridge they had met two men. The first, a tall man with a sword, had started to shout at them in a loud, hectoring voice and had barred their way. Olaf had listened for a while, and had then tried to edge past. The tall man had drawn his sword, the shorter one had hit Olaf with his staff, and Chingiz had whipped his keen dagger through the tall man’s ribs. The tall man had fallen into the water, and the second had ran off.
‘Well, it’s no good swearing now,’ said Sullivan, running back to the yaks. ‘Professor,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m afraid we have killed a Red-Hat lama. We shall have to get out of this as quickly as we possibly can. Their monastery is some way behind us, and we may be able to get past Thyondze before they catch us up. If not, we must take the valley that the abbot marked as closed. Please find out all you can about it from the guides.’
‘As I remember from the map,’ said the Professor, ‘we should see the opening of that valley on our left quite soon.’
‘Yes. It is behind that mountain there. I am going forward to reconnoitre, and I will ask Ross to drop back as a rear-guard. In the meantime, please keep everything moving as fast as possible – no halts for food, no pitching camp tonight. I will take Olaf with me: he will only upset the Tibetans here. If anything happens, fire three shots, but only if it is absolutely necessary. We have not a round to spare.’
He vanished up the river at a long, loping run, accompanied by Olaf. The Professor walked up and down the line, urging the sluggards along and talking to the Tibetans. He had received the news with the utmost steadiness: he had changed a great deal since their first encounter with Shun Chi.
For a long time nothing happened, but in the afternoon they heard, faintly in the distance, the blaring of horns and the throbbing of a drum. Then, in the evening, they saw a file of men scrambling along the high ridge to their right: they were moving with incredible rapidity over the rocks towards Thyondze.
Sullivan came back in the moonlight, exhausted but with good news. ‘I have seen the valley,’ he said,