Reluctantly, he led her down from the outcropping, whose grass was destined to go unmoistened by their mingled dew. She was reassigning her hair to the turban as they walked, and frequently stumbled, on the uneven ground. She was thick-thighed, broad-hipped, and heavy-breasted, but so slender of waist that a snail with a limp could circle her beltline in two minutes flat; in short, she manifested the Indian ideal of the woman built for physical satisfaction, and while Alobar had developed slightly different standards, he could not help but watch wide-eyed as this turbulent culture of flesh fought to gain control over its barbaric frontiers (bouncing breasts, swinging buttocks) and consolidate into an integrated empire as it slipped and slid down the hillside.
Much as the departure of daylight had turned the mountains into violet silhouettes, so had the departure of inner peace silhouetted Alobar against the overcast of his frustration. He was in such a funk that when he fetched a dish of buttered barley to the rockpile outside the gatehouse, where the “boy” Kudra waited, he completely missed the significance of the pennyroyal that she sprinkled on her food.
Alobar took his simple meal with the lamas, as was his custom. After dinner, with Fosco's assistance, he found Kudra a place to sleep in the stable.
“I apologize,” Alobar said, “but this is the way women are regarded around here.”
“I am used to that,” said Kudra. “The way you regard women, however, is more of a novelty to me.” She squeezed his hand. “Come back when the moon is above the stable,” she whispered.
Alobar went outside and walked around in the Himalayan night, the dark at the top of the stairs. The thin, crisp air vibrated like a hive with the chants of the lamas. White stars pimpled the atmosphere. It was easy to imagine that the stars were bees, that they were the source of the ubiquitous lama-buzz. It was easy to imagine that the pale crescent moon was the beekeeper's paddle, dipping into the hum and honey.
The nightful of chanting was soothing to him in the way that the sound of a turning screw would one day be soothing to men at sea. In those days, boats were only as noisy as the winds that drove them, and there were no sailors in the Himalayas, of course; there were not even leafy trees that could unfurl flotillas of little sails, as green as mermaids' curtains. Himalayan winds blew snow-flakes about, and grass seed and panda hairs and the serious, droning vowels of lamas.
Alobar had, himself, learned a chant. The abbot had given him the syllables personally. The chant transported him to a place inside himself impervious to gales or breezes, a place as unruffled as the abbot's shaved noggin, as smooth as Buddha's belly. That night, however, he felt more inclined to sing that little ditty he had made up long ago, the one that went: The world is round-o, round-o. . Obviously, it was the dusky widow who was reviving in him those old sensations.
Kudra had awakened him from a long sleep. No, that was false, he hadn't been asleep at Samye, he had been in a state of heightened awareness, but there is a sense in which awareness can be as stagnating as sloth. His stay at the lamasery had become a rut, a tranquil, nourishing, educational rut that had done him little harm and much good, but a rut, nonetheless; his wheel was stuck in a ditch of light, so to speak, and he felt an overpowering urge to steer in the direction of darkness. If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn't it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?
In any event, Alobar had lost his calm satisfaction only to gain a kind of anxious, electric joy. Whether it was a temporary state, tied to the licentious yearning that Kudra had reawakened in him, or whether it signaled the end of his serene years as Samye's token pagan, he could not ascertain. What he did know was that the lunar rooster was crowing on the stable lintel now, and that, inside, the fugitive widow had some need or other of him.
It is said that when a man is anticipating sexual activity, his whiskers grow at an accelerated rate. Alobar might have to stop and shave before we reach the end of this paragraph. Before the last of the chanting dies out behind the high walls and the condensed breath of a dozing yak momentarily fogs the page.
Having finished a bath in a pony trough, Kudra was debating whether or not she should squirm back into her nephew's clothes. There was a chill in the May night that had set her to shivering, but the prospect of pulling those soiled, unfeminine garments over her glistening brown body was less inviting than goose bumps. Besides, Alobar would only undress her again, would he not?
She was resigned to having him mount her. She would have preferred to postpone, if not avoid it — with so many things to sort out in the head, the body must be regarded as a distraction — but he was as bent on carnal embrace as a pilgrim was bent on the Ganges. To see him again would be to roll around with him, and she simply must see him.
He is overwhelmingly exiting, she thought. Then she added, Not in any sexual way, of course. He excited her because he was as damned as she was, yet had no regrets. He actually made damnation seem attractive. She had heard of men who rejected the gods, who professed not to believe, but here was a believer who refused to grovel, a man who stood up to Shiva, to Buddha, to the gods of his own race, whoever they might be, who stood right up to them and demanded an accounting for a system in which pleasure must be paid for with pain, a system in which the only triumph over suffering was hard-won oblivion, a system that offered its captive audience little choice in matters concerning duration of performance.
The Brahmans could explain away such complaints; she was well acquainted with their explanations, and, furthermore, she believed that they were right; she just wasn't in the market for theological justifications, not anymore. She was a sinner now, and her options were these: she could repent and pay the certain price, or she could cast her lot with this handsome heretic and see where it might lead. Oh, did she call him “handsome"? She didn't mean to say that, although he wasn't bad to look at, now that she'd mentioned it. It didn't bother her that he was over sixty, he was fit and youthful, and besides, Hindu women customarily were paired with older men. Not that she had any notion of being paired with him, you understand.
Perhaps the gods were sympathetic to Alobar's demands. Perhaps they were considering alterations in the divine order of things. Perhaps it was a mistake, an oversight, that human beings had been granted short, unhappy lives, only the error had never been corrected because no one had ever openly complained before. No thunderbolt, in any case, had struck Alobar down. Another thought occurred to her, then, and it stacked goose bumps upon her goose bumps. Had Alobar been spared out of indifference? What if the gods had not even noticed his rebellion?
For the moment, it didn't matter. What mattered was that she was caught up in something large and important, or so it seemed. She felt that she had embarked on an adventure far greater than the merchandising trip that she'd taken with her father, that wondrous journey that had erected a towered city on the scrubby plane of her brain and spoiled her for a life of normal, sedentary wifehood for all time.
Pale moonlight was seeping over the stable eaves and puddling on the surface of the pony trough. Alobar's arrival was imminent. Good, she could inquire further about those Bandaloopers, the magic that they practiced, and the secrets that they knew. That was why she had invited him back, for that and for no other reason. Let it be known.
Suddenly, he walked through the door, catching her unaware, not even dressed yet. Kudra recalled later that he had rushed up to her, although the ponies, the moon, and the trough water remembered it another way. At any rate, there was no denying that she was in his arms, that her tongue was sliding about in his mouth, and that her hand was groping for something perpendicular — praise Kali — in the general vicinity of his groin.