# Mirrikh, or, A Woman from Mars/Chapter 13

CHAPTER XIII.
AT PSAM-DAGONG.
“Yes, it was she.”
Walla Benjow was the name we came to know her by from that fearful night.
Fate had again thrown her in our path.
Now in these later days, when I have learned to believe in an all-wise protecting Providence, I feel certain it was foreordained that we should meet.
Three days passed. We were still at the guard house. At last the storm spent its fury and the sun rose upon a wondrous scene. As far as the eye could reach in every direction the whole face of the country lay buried under a covering of snow deeper than the height of an ordinary man.
Never have I viewed a grander sight. It was as though we had been raised above Nature and could look down with a calm and critical eye. Here we saw her exhibited on a ​scale extended to distances bounded only by the mighty barriers of the Himalayas. All was bold and colossal; deep mountain gorges, towering peaks, awful precipices and beetling crags all rounded off and changed into a thousand fantastic shapes by the whirl of the drifting snow.
It was a sight to make a man think of his own insignificance and God’s greatness, if, happily, by education or conviction he is able to comprehend what I do in some measure now, but did not then, the mighty mystery of the infinite; the loving Father who doeth all things and doeth all things well.
We stood on a rocky eminence about a hundred feet above the guard house, Dr. Philpot and I. Looking off we could see to an interminable distance on all sides, for we were at the very summit of the ridge, and our way lay down to the whitened plains below, where far, far in the distance, on the beginning of the next rise, we could faintly discern a cluster of low, square-built structures, with a gilded dome above them. This, our adept had informed us, was our destination—the lamasery of Psam-dagong.
“What a frightful country,” growled the Rev. Philpot as he and I were returning from our point of observation, shortly after daylight that morning. “Do you know, Wylde, it’s my humble opinion that we shall never succeed in reaching the lamasery. By Jove! I’d give something if we had Mirrikh’s levitating powers and could with one jump throw ourselves back into the big courtyard of the Nagkon Wat. Summer is what I’m sighing for now.”
“You don’t wish it any more than I do then,” I replied gloomily.
“I suppose nothing that either you or I could say would move Maurice in the least.”
“Nothing. He is completely under that man’s influence.”
“Wholly so. His individuality seems submerged in Mirrikh. Each day only adds to it. Why, he hasn’t even got eyes for that delightful creature you picked out of the snow storm, when a child could see that she is dead gone on him.”
“How absurd!” I replied tartly. “The girl is all sorrow over the loss of her father. Maurice is sympathetic by nature which attracts her toward him—that is all.”
He gave me a curious look—a look which set me to ​wondering if he possessed some small share of the adept’s powers and could read the thoughts then uppermost in my mind.
“Nothing absurd about it,” he answered, digging his heel into the thick crust which now covered the snow everywhere. “I’m no fool, Wylde. No man has studied the fair sex more carefully than I have. Let me tell you a secret. The girl is in love!”
“With Maurice?”
“With Maurice.”
“Don’t talk ridiculous nonsense, Doctor!”
“Ta, ta! Don’t you get mad, my boy, for we can’t afford to quarrel. By Jove! I guess we’d better drop the subject; though, if I chose, I could add a corollory to my problem—but I won’t.”
I gave him a look, but he had turned his head away and was lightly humming an air from La Grande Duchesse.”
“You fool,” I thought. “You had better take care!”
But my thought did not refer to the Doctor. On the contray, its reference was wholly to myself.
“We won’t talk any more about it,” I said quietly enough. “The question we are most interested in now is the crust. Is it strong enough to bear us? Are we going to start to-day or remain housed till another storm catches us.”
“Here comes old double face!” exclaimed the Doctor. “He’s running the whole business. Let him decide.”
It was Mr. Mirrikh. As we rounded a projecting corner of the overhanging ledge, we saw him approaching. His face was bare, for he had abandoned the mask the day we left Zhad-uan, there being no particular advantage in wearing it for our benefit, and I am sure it must have been a nuisance at the best.
Had he heard?
There was no reason why he should not have heard, for he was close upon us. I gave the Doctor a nudge of warning, but too late. Still if he heard he showed it by no sign.
“Good morning, Wylde; good morning, Doctor!” he shouted. “Glorious morning, is it not? The rain last night has done the work for us. Almost never rains at this season in Thibet, so we may take it as quite a miracle. There is now nothing to hinder us from making a start.”
“How long will it take us to reach the lamasery?” I inquired by way of answer.
​“That depends. If the crust continues to bear the mules all the way, we can make splendid time—I should think a day and a night ought to do it.”
“Camping on the snow,” groaned the Doctor.
“I fear so. When I passed here before it was summer, and I remember no inn, not even a guard house, in fact, until we reached this point.”
“In which case we may as well make the best of Ah Schow’s breakfast,” I added, for the adept had turned back with us and we were now near the door of the guard house, before which Maurice was pacing up and down, smoking his pipe on an empty stomach, as I had begged him in vain not to do at least a hundred times.
After that we all went in and sat down around the bowl of smoking tsamba and a few trifles of our own in the way of canned goods to help it out.
There were four of us now, besides Ah Schow, when before there had been only three.
The fourth was Walla Benjow, the girl we had taken from the storm.
And the fifth—the father?
Dead, and lying in the shallow grave, which we, with immense difficulty, had managed to dig in a sheltered spot behind the guard house wall.
I remember, and with a shudder, even now, just how he looked when we brought him in and placed him on the k’ang. His head hung down, his arms seemed glued to his sides, his face was as white as wax, and the half open eyes glassy, with little icicles hanging from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth.
But I do not think he was dead then; at least the Doctor assured us he was not, and once, I will swear, I saw his eyes roll upward and fix themselves on me with a ghastly stare.
He must have ceased to suffer though, long before that, for he was frozen stiff when we found him. Old blood flows slowly—this man’s had ceased to circulate within a few minutes after we laid him on the k’ang, although we all did what we could for him; even the Doctor, roused to sympathy, exercising all his skill, which was by no means slight.
What a singular procession we must have formed when Philpot opened the door and we filed into the room.
Mr. Mirrikh, whose strength was stupendous, carried the ​girl in his arms and showed no sign of fatigue, while Maurice and I were staggering with the father between us, almost winded, hardly able to get him along.
I could write pages about it all, but where would be the use? Enough has been written already to answer all practical purposes; matters of graver import await, and I must hasten on.
We buried the father, but we saved the daughter. Saved her for what?
Merciful God! I cannot think of it without a shudder. But I anticipate and must return.
She suffered much, poor child. Her frozen limbs and hands were but the lightest of it. Her grief for her father was pitiful to see.
Did she recall us?
She did, and from the first. Some time elapsed before we could question her; there was the weeping to be over with, and hunger had to be satisfied, of course. We got to it at last.
Her’s was a strange story. It ran thus:
Walla Benjow was the daughter of a tribe which inhabits the southern slope of the Kuen-lun mountains, a region far to the north of where we were, into which no European has ever set foot. As different from the Thibetans as they are from the Tartars who surround them, these people have dwelt in their mountain homes from time immemorial—even their name, which I am not going to give, is unknown to the civilized world.
At an early age this girl had been stolen from her parents and carried south, ultimately reaching Mandalay, where by a singular combination of circumstances she had fallen into the hands of an American merchant, a Mr. Julius Archer, whom I have since learned was a Philadelphian, long established in business at Mandalay.
You see I took particular pains to investigate this matter afterward and had the satisfaction of proving the entire truth of Walla’s claim, which was that she had lived ten years with the Archers; at the first as nurse to their children, later as companion. Fortunately or otherwise, Madam Archer conceived a violent fancy for her, and went to considerable trouble to educate the girl, and I must admit that she succeeded admirably, for Walla could not only read and write English, but had been instructed in other branches, ​and—but enough. I cannot dwell on this matter in detail. Sufficient to add that Mrs. Archer died, and Walla, at the age of eighteen, found herself adrift. What might have been her fate God alone knows, had she not one day run against her father in the bazaar!
To the girl it seemed amazing and it was so in very truth, for the distance between Mandalay and the Kuen-lun country is over a thousand miles. Yet this was a small part of the journey the old man had undertaken, travelling always on foot and alone. For years he had been a wanderer and for what? Simply that he might find his daughter, the child of his old age, and take her back with him to the mountain home where her mother lay in an untimely grave; with even that better than living mad, as she had lived from the hour her daughter disappeared.
This was all, except that Walla’s heart was tender and her joy at seeing her father great.
Together they started on the long journey back to the Kuen-lun, the old man still in his character of an itinerant trader, Walla as his companion. For safety she resumed the native dress—or rather undress, and swore by her father’s gods, whom I fancy she had never wholly forgotten, not to speak to any man by the way but to pass as a mute, for such in Siam and Cambodia are treated with peculiar respect.
The incident of our meeting had been brought about by an injudicious display by the old man of a handful of gold—his all.
Somehow the rough wood cutters gained the idea that he had more concealed and undertook to beat the poor girl until he should give it up. Luckily we saved her then and, as she told me afterward, she would have spoken but for fear that her father might be detained—the one thing they dreaded most.
After that they toiled on, moving steadily northward, braving a thousand perils before they reached Thibet. Furthermore we learned that the reason we had not encountered them on our road was because they had approached the mountains by way of a town to the west of Zhad-uan.
And yet, reader, if you could have seen Walla Benjow as I saw her that night in the guard house, in her Chinese dress with the dirty sheepskin wrapped about her, with her ​nose frozen and her large eyes red and inflamed from excessive weeping, you would have wondered at it.
At what?
Well, here goes—I may as well make a clean breast of it. Remember I had seen her before and almost in pura naturalibus. I was in love with the “China girl” as the Doctor liked to call her—that was all.
Walla! Walla! Ah! how much power the mere mention of your name had to move me then! But one word in self-justification and then on to other matters. Even the Rev. Philpot admitted that never in all his wanderings had he seen beauty equal to Walla Benjow’s, and that is saying a great deal.
As for the character of the poor child I need only say here that she was all affection and most gentle in her manners. Still I never dreamed of the intensity of passion of which she was capable, and I am sure Maurice didn’t; furthermore—but I have said too much already. Let what remains develope itself.
Ten o’clock that morning saw us on the road again. Walla accompanied us, of course, for we had promised to do what we could to send her on to her relatives in the Kuen-lun country.
I remember how I fought against my feelings all that day. How amazed I was at myself for even permitting them to arise within me; I who had married and suffered; I who had sworn that no woman’s face should ever again cause me a minute’s thought. Do not be amazed when I confess the nature of those disturbing sentiments for the Doctor has already hinted at it.
Jealousy! Just think of it. I was jealous of Maurice.
“Ha! ha!” sneered Philpot, as he caught me looking toward them on one occasion when they were riding double on Maurice’s mule. “Ha! ha! You’re a fine philosopher, you are! Didn’t you tell me you’d had enough of the women? Can’t you see that those big eyes ain’t turning your way? Be as I am, man! I wouldn’t waste a moment’s thought on the prettiest piece of femininity that ever stepped.”
I turned on him then and administered a scathing rebuke. Heavens! I wished most devoutly I could echo his sentiments before we saw the great gate that admitted us to the lamasery of Psam-dagong.
It was just at sundown. The thermometer must have ​been far below zero. We had enjoyed snow, rain, almost spring-like warmth and piercing cold all in the space of a few short days.
For hours we had seen the lonely group of buildings standing before us on the foothills of a mountain chain whose height far exceeded the range we had just crossed.
Nowhere else, not even in the Far West have I seen distances so deceptive. In that clear atmosphere twenty miles is nothing to the eye. Take it all in all we accomplished the journey with surprising ease as I came to know later; nevertheless our sufferings were intense.
Picture to yourself two broad ravines, one filled with large trees, the other horrible in its desolation, between which lay a narrow tongue of sloping land extending back toward the snow-clad peaks, which towered above us to stupendous heights.
It was on this projection that the lamasery of Psam-dagong stood, a cluster of square, white dwellings, flat roofed, with one pretty tower a little off the centre, rising above them, gilded and glittering with a thousand colors in the setting sun.
Once a famous shrine, the lamasery of Psam-dagong, about a century ago, became practically deserted, the Tale Lama at Lh’asa having so ordered it. Why this was I propose to explain in the chapters which follow, and need only add here that when I was at Psam-dagong it was little better than a mass of ruins, presided over by one old lama, of whom more anon.
But I am rambling on about these matters which, though of the highest interest to us at the time, are really quite immaterial in comparison with what follows. Let me break the spell by recording the end of our long journey at once.
Our ascent from the plains below was discovered by those in the lamasery, and upon reaching the gates we found ourselves challenged by a young lama of the yellow order, who bowed low before us.
“Peace be unto you, my lords lamas!” he said, in that subdued tone which one sometimes observes among Catholic devotees, “may your days be days of happiness and your nights be nights of peaceful sleep. What is your business at the holy house of Psam-dagong?”
I do not know what answer Mr. Mirrikh made him, for he spoke in Hindustanee, and Ah Schow, who translated the ​lama’s greeting knowing nothing of that tongue, remained silent.
Not that it matters. What is more to the point his answer was evidently acceptable, for the young lama threw the gates open and we rode into a wide enclosure.
At last we were at Psam-dagong.