Free The Ninth Buddha by Daniel Easterman Page A

coolies, 70,000 mules, 3,451 yaks, and six unhappy camels and moved up the Chumbi valley in force.
    Christopher still remembered the journey: the freezing cold, the misery of the foot-soldiers unaccustomed to the winds and the altitude, skin sticking to gun-metal in the frost, men tearing skin from their lips with frozen spoons, the sudden deaths, men and baggage plunging from narrow ledges into the abyss.   Above all, he remembered the insanity of Christmas Day, when the men had been served plum pudding and turkey, and the officers had tried to drink frozen champagne.
    But the real madness had begun outside Gyantse.   Tibetan troops carrying muzzle-loading guns and broadswords, and wearing charms to turn aside British bullets, had advanced against men armed with modern rifles and machine guns.   Christopher would never forget the massacre that followed.   In four minutes, seven hundred Tibetans lay dead on the battlefield, dozens more were screaming in pain.   The expedition took Gyantse and moved on unopposed to Lhasa, where it arrived in August 1904.   The Dalai Lama had fled in the meantime to Urga in Mongolia to take refuge with the Living Buddha there, and the Regent was forced in his absence to sign a peace treaty with Britain on very unfavorable terms.
    “Don’t remember you,” Norbhu Dzasa said.
    “I was much younger then,” answered Christopher, ‘and of no importance.
    We would not have been introduced.”
    Norbhu Dzasa sighed.
    “Younger then, too,” he said.   Their eyes met for a moment, but the tsong-chi gave nothing away.   That, as he interpreted it, was his job: to give nothing away.   He was very good at it.
    Tea arrived quickly.   It was served in ornamental cups of jade decorated with silver.   Norbhu’s man had brewed it in the kitchen from semi-fermented tea bricks imported from Yunnan, mixing it in a wooden churn with boiling water, salt, wood-ash soda, and dri-butter.   It was more a soup than tea, but Tibetans drank it in vast quantities forty Or fifty cups a day was not at all unusual.
    Christopher could tell at once from the way he quaffed his first cupful that Norbhu Dzasa was a record-breaker even in Tibetan terms.
    Norbhu had been tsong-chi at Kalimpong for seven years now and was doing very nicely out of it.   He could afford to drink tea in urnfuls if he wanted to.   His greatest fear was to be recalled to Lhasa prematurely, that is, before he had stashed away enough rupees to ensure a comfortable future for himself and, above all, his children.   He was over sixty now, though he could not be sure exactly how old he was.   His mother thought he had been born in the year of the Fire Serpent in the Fourteenth Cycle, which would have made him sixty-three.   But his father had been equally sure he had been born in the Wood Hare year, which would make him all of sixty-five.
    “What I do for you, Wylam-la?”   asked the little tsong-chi as he poured himself a second cup of the thick, pinkish beverage.
    Christopher hesitated.   He felt he had got off to a bad start with Norbhu Dzasa by referring to the Younghusband expedition.   In the end, the British had gained the respect of the Tibetans they had looted no temples, raped no women, and withdrawn their forces at the earliest possible opportunity but the memory of the more than seven hundred dead and the profound sense of vulnerability that the expedition had created in their minds lingered even now.
    The problem about the present business was that Christopher could not mention the real reason for his visit.   There was ample evidence that the Mongol Agent, Mishig, had been contacted by Tsewong.   But it was always possible that the Tibetan tsong-chi might also be involved.   For all they knew, he might have been the person responsible for transmitting Zamyatin’s message to the Mongol.   The tsong-chi’s residence lay between the mountains and the spot where Tsewong was supposed to have been found.   The monk