TOPIC: Tatters of the King

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The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel
The poshest hotel in Bombay; with its grand edifice and marble interior it caters almost exclusively for Europeans. Your guide, Siva, dutifully presents himself. He sports a perpetual smile, is good-natured and eager to please. Siva’s first task is to secure reservations on the next train across country to Benares. It departs Bombay in two days.

The Stranger and the Yellow Sign
Next morning, you decide to wander the city and secure a few items for your travels, including native clothes. In the bustling marketplace Blossett spies the yellow sign daubed on a wall. When you ask about it you suddenly feel that many eyes in the marketplace that previously ignored you are now watching intently. Clancy sees a familiar figure amongst the throng of merchants and shoppers. The Stranger with his pallid mask strides purposefully toward him. When Clancy warns the rest of the investigators they all turn to see – but the Stranger is no longer there.

The Train North
Monday 20th January. Away from the first class carriage the train is overcrowded, even the roof space is utilised. Siva evicts a family of Indians who have set themselves up in you first class berth. Your journey takes in an uneventful 800 miles of mostly flat and dry land and lasts for four days. The train stops at several towns, but at smaller settlements it merely slows down to allow passengers to jump on or off as it moves.

Benares
Thursday 24th January. Benares displays none of the cosmopolitan attributes of Bombay. As the train reaches the outskirts of this holy city it begins to slow. Outside an angry mob is shouting and throwing stones at the train. Your window is smashed. Crazed men climb aboard and assault staff and passengers. Stevenson knocks two would-be assailants off the train as they try to climb in through a broken window. One of them had a henna tattoo of the yellow sign on his hand.

Two Kings
King tussles with another pair of assailants in the aisle of the first class carriage. Piper takes a more non-nonsense approach and discharges his revolver – twice! Luckily he misses. The carriage is filled with gun smoke. King knocks one assailant senseless. The crazy man has a sudden look of bewilderment on his face. Gone are the hate-filled eyes and violent wrath. The poor man simply has no idea what he is doing aboard the train. The last thing he recalls is a preacher in the street flaunting a maddening sign and talking about a king stepping down to earth.

A Night in the City
The train reaches Benares station. You are conveyed to a hotel. It’s not the Taj Mahal Palace but it’ll suffice. Enquires discover that a party of Europenas passed through Benares about three months prior and took a train to Nautanwa, close to the Nepalese border. Next morning you purchase a few supplies and tickets to Nautanwa – 200 miles north - a day’s train ride.

More to follow

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Nautanwa
At Nautanwa, the climate is very different from south and central India. More temperate and the surrounding land is verdant. If Siva is feeling far-from-home and out of his comfort zone, he refuses to let it show. If you intend to enter Nepal you’ll need another guide; Siva knows nothing of Nepal’s lands, peoples or culture.

Jigme Rinzing
Siva finds a guide named Jigme Rinzing. Jigme speaks no English. Siva translates. Jigme looks and dresses very different to the Indian people. He is native Nepalese. He is a merchant come to Nautanwa to trade for goods that he’ll take back to Nepal to sell or barter. Give him a day to complete his business and he’ll lead you to the Kali Gandaki valley. You’ll need a lot of supplies but has several employees in his caravan that will act as porters.

Nepal Border Crossing
The walk to the border takes several hours. Europeans unused to trekking across rugged country soon suffer tired legs, aching feet and blisters. You watch as Jigme’s caravan passes through the official border crossing (with all your supplies and belongings), while you skirt around to a woodland that allows you to cross into Nepal unchallenged.

Day One
Having departed Nautanwa in India in the morning, you reach the town of Butwal in Nepal by evening. The landscape has been dominated by woodlands and arable farms. The track is a pedestrian dirt road. Wheeled transport is a rarity here. You spend the night in what Europeans might call an inn with a courtyard. Despite being outsiders, you draw nothing more than a few curious looks. You acquire Nepalese chubas and hats to wear from here-on.

Day Two
Sunday 27th January 1930. Butwal to Tansing. The countryside closes in and you follow a gorge that rises steeply. You pass farms with terraced rice paddies. Tansing comprises a cobbled main street flanked by four-storey brick buildings with tiled roofs. Away from the main street buildings become more tumble-down. The village is characterised by wooden totems of strange design and the clank of metalwork shops.

Day Three and Day Four
Towards Pokhara. This leg of your journey is long and requires you to spend your first night under the stars before reaching Pokhara on Tuesday 28th Jan. Pokhara is the most populace town you’ve seen in Nepal. You spend a day of rest here. Jigme off-loads the first batch of his goods at the local bazaar. You enquire about Europeans passing through this way in recent weeks.

Chumpo
You are introduced to a man named Yangser Chumpo. Siva translates for you. Chumpo professes to have led a party of Italians up the Kali Gandaki to Mustang. They were headed to to a place called Drakmar, which they would have reached at the beginning of last November. Drakmar is in the mountains, above the monastery at Te. Te is near the village of Kag. Chumpo says he didn’t take the Italians all the way to Te, because the valley and caves there are full of black ghosts and demons.

Not coming home tonight now as everything gone to pot so won't be there tonight alas

Ah shit man. You will have to tell us the tale next week.

Sorry cultists, can t make it tonight

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Day Five to Eight
Departing Pokhara you ascend to a height of 8,000ft over the next four days along a trail through terraced rock and verdant, misty forest until you reach the village of Gora Pani. This is as far as Jigme and his caravan will travel. He recommends a friend named Tsewan Pemba to Siva who will guide you further. Pemba is Tibetan in culture as are the few porters he manages to scrape together. It’s clear there’s not enough porters to carry everything. You decide to concentrate on equipment over provisions and will rely on bartering for fresh food along the trail.

Day Nine to Fourteen
On the day you set out from Gora Pani you reach the Kali Gandaki Gorge. The scenery is stunning. Stevenson begins to struggle with the thin air, experiencing headaches and dizziness. The party slows its pace a little. Following the river valley, settlements are sparse but those you pass are at first stone-built in the fashion of the lowlands, and then timber-built as you ascend higher until finally you reach the small town of Kag. At Kag buildings are in the Tibetan style: squat, almost square, thick stone with tiny windows and painted in red or white.

Barter Items
Locals in Kag press around you. One villager waves a book for barter. Stevenson swaps candles for an Italian-Hindi dictionary. A successful transaction prompts the villager to produce more items. Stevenson swaps a portable gas cooker for a diary and a box of 6.5mm carbine ammunition. The diary is written in Italian; it is that of Carlo Schippone.

Schippone’s Diary
Blossett translates. The diary details the expedition of Quarrie, Anzalone, Delnegro and Schippone from their departure from Italy to disturbing events at Drakmar. Some of the entries include: Day 18: I can't sleep....will we find Drakmar?....will we be killed by Chaugnar Faugn and the Tsotsawa?....Day 75: We have found it…….the tall cliffs and valley floor are painted red and there are caves all around…. Day 76: …there is script on the walls with drawings……a creature watches us from the shadows……our guide left us in the night……human bones……jaws…..stripped by human teeth…there is a deep regular noise….I struck him down…he took so long to fall…..what have you done……what have I done, what have I done, what have I done……?

Stories at Tayen
Day fifteen you reach Tayen (11,000ft) the going is hard. You struggle to draw air into your lungs; dizziness, nausea, disorientation, aching limbs. You hear local stories of a stranger at the monastery at Te. He walked in from the mountains. He is touched by the gods. The young boy who fetches food for the lama and his monks hasn’t been seen for weeks. You listen too to tales of ghosts and the demoness Balmo stalking the mountains above Te. Nobody goes there. Pemba and his porters become frightened. They refuse to go further. Siva too has travelled as far as he can. Tomorrow, when you set off for the monastery, Siva will remain in Tayen. He will await your return.

The Monastery at Te
From Tayen, the steady ascent up the mountain is arduous. In the thin air the icy wind picks up quickly. You are exhausted and suffering the effects of the altitude when you see a single stone building ahead. It sits on a ledge in a boulder-strewn landscape of ochre clay earth and rock. A man appears in the only doorway. Even at this distance, and despite his rugged and weather-worn look, you recognise the man from his photo – Carlo Schippone. He levels a carbine and fires. Even at extreme range he hits first Blosset and then Piper. Stevenson pulls Blossett behind cover. Blossett is lucky to be alive. Schippone closes the distance, heedless of safety. Piper shoots. Schippone falls and his dark blood stains the ochre earth.

Recovering at Te
Inside the monastery, you discover the decomposing bodies of the monks and the boy; laid out shoulder-to-shoulder in their dormitory. Clancy tends to the wounds of Blossett and Piper. You spend two days at Te to recover. Dreams of alien vistas, black voids, wheeling byakhees and figures in white masks and yellow robes disturb your nights. When ready to leave, in varying states of ill-health, you set out once more – this time to find Drakmar.

Days Nineteen and Twenty
Suffering aching limbs and drained by exposure and mountain sickness you continue onwards and upwards. Your breath is taken by the frosty air and the wind bites deep. The sky is colourless and the landscape of rock and scree is all of a monotone grey. You feel small and insignificant in an utterly alien and desolate place, far from any civilisation. Just as despair is setting in you crest a low rise and below you is a valley filled with colour. The valley floor is dotted with broken chortens in faded blacks, reds and whites and the backdrop is a huge cliff-face some 200ft high and stretching away for miles to either side. The cliff is painted red and dotted with the black apertures of cave mouths. You can hear a dull thud that repeats every few minutes…like a slow, heavy heartbeat.

Drakmar
It is the afternoon of Friday 14th February 1930. Over the last twenty days you have walked over a hundred miles from the Indian border and ascended over 16,000ft into the Himalayas. Here you stand, at Drakmar in Tsang, on the threshold of the Plateau of Leng.