Free The Rose of Tibet by Lionel Davidson Page B

bristle again, and he had an instinct to turn round and go back.
    He couldn’t quite bring himself to do that, and continued walking, and that was the last opportunity he had. He saw, without quite believing it, that they had got up and were coming towards him. He saw the clubs in their hands. He stopped and watched them, too petrified to turn and run, still trying to convince himself that they were watchmen. They came quite slowly, without any sound, and he saw their feet were bare. He put out his hand and tried to speak, and they leapt at him.
    He caught a numbing crack on the elbow and another on the side of his head and staggered, grunting. He tried to protect his head with one hand, but one of them had got behind him, and he felt another stunning blow. He found himself stumbling forwards and clutching at the man in front of him, and he grabbed at his white garment, still falling, and saw a bare foot beneath him, and stamped on it as hard as he could.
    He heard the thin soft cry of pain, ‘Aaaah …’ and thought the fellow went over, too. He was down himself, scrambling in the dirt, and then his ear exploded and, as he moved his hands, his eye also, a single great pink blossom of pain unfolding above his right eye as he slipped and slithered and tried to stop himself but finally fell into a lurching, bruised blackness.
    His unconsciousness was short and they were still there ashe came too, bending over him and going through his pockets. He heard someone grunting and coughing and realized it was himself, and they dropped the wallet quickly and looked at him, muttering. They straightened up, and he saw by the way they held the clubs what was coming and tried to twist away but failed and got them both in the pit of the stomach and heard the single drawn-out animal sound as the air went out of his body.
    He was over on his side, retching. He had not eaten for hours and only tea and gin and sour bile came up. He had to get his head out of it, and he struggled up on to his hands and knees, trembling. His forehead was icy with sweat and his arms would not support him properly. A dog came to sniff at him, and was soon joined by two others, and they found the patch of vomit, and he had to get away from that, and he was up, somehow, reeling and tottering in the alley.
    He must have turned into another alley, for at the end were lights, and he saw it was the square, and he stopped, leaning against the wall before going into it. He found his wallet in his hand and he dusted himself down with it. He straightened his tie and buttoned his jacket and smoothed his hair, and found it wet with vomit.
    He walked across the square as steadily as he could, and went into the hotel and up to his room.
    He ran the tap and plunged his head in the bowl several times till he thought he had got rid of the vomit. Then he changed out of his suit and put on a dressing-gown and had a look in his wallet and lay down on the bed.
    He heard eight o’clock strike from the Scottish mission church. Only an hour since the boy had first told him. Then nine o’clock struck, and ten. He lay there all night. The servant found him like that, still awake and in his dressing- gown, in the morning.
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    He thought that if they had taken all his money, he could explain it to himself. But they hadn’t done that; they had taken only the small notes; more in the nature of recompensing themselves for their trouble. He shied away for quite along time from the explanation that seemed to make most sense.
    There were so many new problems here that he thought he ought to proceed on the assumption that, right from the beginning, someone had made a mistake. He assumed first that it was the Tibetans.
    A party of four people had been found dead after an avalanche. The party had been wrongly identified as a party of missing British people. A message to that effect had gone off to Lhasa. When the error had been discovered, it had taken time to rectify. Communications were bad.