Free A Smile in the Mind's Eye by Lawrence Durrell

young girls from Paris. There were also one or two silly-billies aged sixteen whose epithets began and ended with vachement chouette and who expressed the sort of excitement with the service that one might over a fine performance by a company of actors. Particularly the part of the service where the priest launches into a sort of marionette dance of the hands and wrists. Then there was an Australian who apparently found some special virtue in whirling a prayer-wheel as he ate – he looked like a mentally deficient pot-boy. ‘You can buy electric ones now,’ I told him. ‘They run off a torch battery.’ He looked at me with unfeigned disgust. I could almost here him whisper to himself: ‘Mechanized Buddhism! What next?’ Later I saw him in the library immersed in a translation of the Mahamudra still absently twirling his propitiatory wheel. May a Tibetan demon fly away with him!
    There was a very heavy frost and the milky light offered no promise of sun. Moreover trouble lay ahead for me – engine trouble. In cleaning up my little car, scraping off the ice and checking the heater, I realized that a vital part had worked loose and would have to be replaced or the thread would bite off. It was most vexatious; but if I left her there to freeze away to death I might have to wait for spring before I could move her! And the old chateau was miles from Autun where I might presume upon a technical sophistication to supply the missing part. I thought then that towards evening I would limp back along the road to Autun in the hope of mending the breech. It gave me the day for contacts and studies, and I used it to the full. The library was good and much in demand. There were a number of good lectures listed and almost continuous Tibetan classes with professors of whose proficiency one could have no doubt. The whole thing was organized effortlessly and well and clearly there was some master-brain behind the enterprise. But by late afternoon I felt it wiser to take advantage of the light and stalk back in all precariousness to Autun. This I did, and arrived only to find everything closed against the approaching weekend and the only decent garage in the place out of spares. They would have to be sent down from Paris, which would take a night; but with the coming strike on the railways … So went my Tibetan New Year. A draughty night in a cold hotel in Autun did nothing to assuage my irritation. Yet, in another sense, I felt that I had seen what I had come to see – the functioning of the abbey and the general state of instruction prevailing in it. The thing was serious. Tibet was here to stay, so to speak. I wondered if perhaps instead of going back to Kagu Ling as I had intended I should not head away down south; the weather reports were so uncompromisingly gloomy that my concern was pardonable. Snow, ice, floods … The spare did not arrive till late on Monday, and the car was not put right until Tuesday morn – by now the Tibetan dignitaries would have taken to the air like swans, heading back to India where the founder seminaries were situated. Yes, I would sneak home.
    The autoroute was lashed with wind and rain, and the traffic on it – many heavy trailers, few private cars – set up chains of spray as if they had been heavy motor boats in a choppy sea. One good souse from their back wheels and one had to slow down and set the wipers to work at speed. And the wind swung me about like a pendulum. It was really hard and disagreeable driving and I felt half dead with fatigue. I thought I would climb off the autoroute and down into a valley but I did not want to land myself in a flood area so I waited until I saw the turn-off for Orange signalled; this part of the land I knew well, and it is rarely flooded. So it proved to be, and I felt I might manage to rest my weary limbs in Avignon for a night before rolling back home across the garrigues. I knew that the Rhone was danger-high but