Free The Rose of Tibet by Lionel Davidson

that?
    Three days’ march from Yamdring.
    Three days from
16
October … . It was all very thin, very circumstantial. But still, Houston thought, he might have narrowed down the details a bit.
    He wrote in his notebook: ‘ In view of all the above, the logical deduction must be that the party was overwhelmed on or about
19
October on the Portha-la pass, some thirty-six miles from Yamdring on the road to Gysung .’ He appended the names of his informants and got them to make their marks.
    He returned to Kalimpong tired and depressed. He had been away just over two months now, and had spent in all nearly six hundred pounds. He thought he had got as far as he was going to get; and that unless the Tibetan government showed some rapid signs of cooperation he might as well go home.
    He asked at the reception desk if there was anything for him.
    ‘Nothing, sahib.’
    All right , Houston said to himself. Enough was enough. He would have a bath and a drink and pay one final call on the Tibetan representative. Then away on the morning bus.
    He had the bath, and the drink, and a few more after it, and went reluctantly out into the square. He had left it a bit late for the Tibetans. No use after seven o’clock, Michaelson had said. It was getting on for that, the lamps going on above the stalls. He was sick of the place suddenly, sick of all the places, sick of himself. But he walked across the square, andcontinued walking stolidly even when a small brown bombshell erupted at his side.
    ‘Oh, sahib, you are back!’
    ‘Hello, me lad,’ Houston said, glad at least in a melancholy way that someone cared whether he was in this place or that.
    ‘When you come back, sahib?’
    ‘An hour or two ago.’
    ‘I look for you. My brother is back, sahib. You come and see him now.’
    ‘Not just now. Later, Bozeling.’
    ‘Now, sahib, now! Ringling has seen them, the ones you seek.’
    ‘Which ones?’
    ‘The dead ones, sahib.’
    Houston felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
    He said, ‘Which dead ones?’
    ‘The English ones, sahib. They marched one day with the caravan.’
    ‘When was this?’
    ‘In December, sahib.’
    Houston stopped. He felt himself rooted to the spot in the bustling, draughty square. He said stupidly, ‘In December? He couldn’t have. They died in October.’
    ‘Yes, sahib, he did. Come now. You come with me.’
    Houston remembered the moment with peculiar clarity in later years. The clock on the Scottish mission church had boomed seven as he stood there, and he remembered thinking, Well, I’ve had the little sodling for tonight, anyway. Then he walked with the boy to his home.

CHAPTER THREE
1
    I T was a dark and malodorous shack, lit by oil lamps and with a dung fire burning in a rudimentary grate. Bozeling vanished as soon as they were inside, and Houston found himself alone in the smoky fug of the room, until the boy’smother appeared suddenly, a small plump woman with gold ear-rings, a glossy middle-parting and a long skirt and bodice, and fussed around him, talking half in English and half in Sherpali, as she fetched him a chair and a cup of tea and sat him as far from the reeking fire as was possible.
    Her elder son was sleeping, she said; he usually slept for two whole days on returning from a trip. The sahib would forgive her English; her son’s, on the other hand, was excellent; he had climbed often with the British. Soon the sahib would be able to enjoy a fine conversation with him.
    Houston sat and smiled and nodded to her, afraid almost to open his mouth for the sickness rising in his throat. A terrible nausea had come sweeping over him in the last few minutes, whether from the shock or the airless hovel he could not tell. But he managed to get the tea down; and presently there were sounds-off and Bozeling appeared with his brother.
    Sherpa Ringling was a youth of 17 , slim, small, and with the agreeable monkey face of his young brother. Houston saw the lines of fatigue in the thin