There was nothing he could say to that. She was right: he knew why.
“Very well,” he replied.
“We’ll go together. We can’t afford to wait here any longer they’ll already be looking for us everywhere.
I don’t know what’s down beneath this hatch. It may be nothing;
it may be something more dangerous than anything Zamyatin and his men have to offer. But we’ve no choice. If we’re going out, this is the only way left open to us.”
He turned to Samdup and spoke to him directly for the first time.
“What about you, Samdup? Do you feel up to this?”
The boy did not answer at once. He looked back at Christopher with an unsettling seriousness in his eyes. Since his discovery as a trulku and his installation here at Dorje-la, he had never really been treated as a child. He had clearly recovered his composure quickly since the scene in Chindamani’s room.
“You should not call me “Samdup”,” he said finally.
“My proper name is Dorje Samdup Rinpoche. You may call me Samdup Rinpoche or, if you prefer, Lord Samdup. Only those who are very close to me may call me by my given name alone. And you must use the proper verbal forms at all times when addressing me.”
There was that in the boy’s look and tone of voice that endowed his words with an adult seriousness few British children of his age could possibly have emulated. Christopher felt thoroughly rebuked.
“I’m sorry .. . my Lord,” he said.
“There are many things I have to learn.”
“Don’t worry,” the boy said.
“I will teach you. As for leaving here - I don’t think we have much time to waste.”
Christopher said nothing. The die was cast. They were going into the passages beneath the gon-kang. He bent down and lifted the ring of the hatch in his right hand.
The hatch was heavy. It came up slowly, without a sound.
There was nothing below but darkness, black, clammy, and cold.
A stale smell rose out of the pit, or perhaps it was a mixture of smells, not quite identifiable in themselves, not quite reducible to ordinary odours. It was an evil stench and it clung to the nostrils with grim tenacity. Chindamani turned her face away and made a brief gagging sound. Christopher pulled his heavy scarf up over his mouth and nose. The others followed suit.
“I’ll go first,” whispered Christopher.
“Then William, then Lord Samdup. Then Chindamani. We’ll all carry lamps, and if anyone’s goes out they’re to say so immediately and get a fresh light from someone else. Make as little noise as possible. And close the hatch behind us.”
Peering into the hole with the help of his lamp a large one that Chindamani had found on a side altar Christopher made out the first few rungs of a wooden ladder.
They went down slowly. The ladder took them about ten feet below the floor of the gon-kang. When Christopher, William and Samdup reached the bottom, Chindamani tossed the more bulky baggage down to them before closing the hatchway and climbing down herself.
The darkness was absolute, a thing in itself, an object and not a mere absence of light. It seemed to breathe and live and grow stronger every moment. The light of their lamps was swallowed up in it and rendered flat and insubstantial. It clung to them like a dim halo, scarred and denatured by the all-encompassing blackness.
They were in a small stagnant chamber about fifteen feet by ten.
Against one wall, Christopher made out the shapes of lacquered chests and boxes. Beside them stood a huge, jewel-encrusted throne. He stepped across to a tall box ornamented with bright red peonies and lifted the lid. For a moment, it seemed as though the light thrown by his lamp had been shattered into a thousand fragments. Everywhere, tiny specks of coloured light danced in the darkness. Rubies, emeralds, diamonds and amethysts lay packed in the chest like pebbles on Brighton beach.
Christopher picked up a handful and let them trickle back through his fingers. They felt cold to the touch and curiously light, as though all their substance lay in colour and luminosity. The colours shifted and flew about, like the quick wings of hummingbirds in a forest glade, shimmering in a sudden ray of sunlight.
He picked up a second handful. They would need money for their journey. And after that, money to look after Chindamani and the boy. Out there, in what Christopher regarded as the real world, to be a representative of a goddess or an incarnation of the Maidari Buddha counted for nothing.
“Are you hungry?” It was Samdup’s voice, close beside him.
Christopher looked down and shook his head.
“No, my Lord,” he said.
“Are you thirsty?”
“No.”
“Then you have no need of them. There is food in our bags: we will not starve. There is snow: we will not go thirsty. If you take them, they will become a heavier burden than the whole of Dorjela.”
Christopher opened his fingers and the jewels dropped one by one back into the box. This time, for no real reason that he could see, they seemed trivial to him, like pieces of coloured paste or red and green candies for a greedy child. He closed the lid and raised his lamp again.
The walls were alive with paintings: among the usual gods and demons were vividly coloured mandalas and charms in the shape of lotus-flowers covered in fine writing. Little square flags printed with the image of a winged horse bearing a mystic jewel on its back had been hung at intervals; they were faded and tattered and covered in dust. Thick cobwebs hung everywhere, some ancient and tattered like prayer-flags, others clearly fresh.
They listened for the sound of something living, but the room was occupied only by inanimate objects. Christopher began to think that talk of a guardian was little more than a ploy to deter would-be thieves. But in that case, why had the story been kept so quiet?
In the wall opposite the spot where they had entered the room was the entrance to a broad tunnel. It had obviously not been used in some time: a thick, dusty spider’s web covered most of it.
“At least,” Christopher whispered, ‘we don’t have to make up our minds which way to go.”
Using the short sword, he swept away the web: it tumbled down, leaving the gaping opening free for them to pass through.
Christopher went ahead, holding his lamp out in front of him in his left hand while hefting the sword in his right, ready to strike out at the first signs of life. His heart pounded heavily in his chest:
he thought he could hear it echo off the walls of the tunnel. The stench was more pronounced here and seemed to be growing stronger all the time.
The passage was not quite high enough for Christopher to walk in un stooped but it was sufficiently wide to allow him to pass through without difficulty. He felt certain that they were already passing out of the monastery. The chill that pervaded the tunnel was unlike that in any of the passages they had come through on their way from Chindamani’s apartment. That had been icy, but tinged with a residual warmth that seemed to have seeped through the walls from the inhabited areas through which the tunnels passed. This was a fetid, uneasy chill, raw and bitter, as though nothing human had breathed the air down here for centuries.
Christopher’s foot touched something. Something hard and slightly brittle. He lowered the lamp slowly, trying to hold it at an angle in order to shed light on the ground in front of him.
He could not make it out at first. It seemed to be a bundle of some kind, about five feet long, angular in places, dirty and grey.
Then he held the light closer and all at once it became clear to him what it was ... or what it had been.