“Then I asked him what he knew about Tibetan lamaseries – he’d been in the country several times – and he gave me just the usual accounts that one can read in all the books. They weren’t beautiful places, he assured me, and the monks in them were generally corrupt and dirty. ‘Do they live long?’ I asked, and he said, yes, they often did, if they didn’t die of some filthy disease. Then I went boldly to the point and asked if he’d ever heard legends of extreme longevity among the lamas. ‘Heaps of them,’ he answered: ‘it’s one of the stock yarns you hear everywhere, but you can’t verify them. You’re told that some foul-looking creature has been walled up in a cell for a hundred years, and he certainly looks as if he might have been, but of course you can’t demand his birth certificate.’ I asked him if he thought they had any occult or medicinal way of prolonging life or preserving youth, and he said they were supposed to have a great deal of very curious knowledge about such things, but he suspected that if you came to look into it, it was rather like the Indian rope trick – always something that somebody else had seen. He did say, however, that the lamas appeared to have odd powers of bodily control. ‘I’ve watched them,’ he said, ‘sitting by the edge of a frozen lake, stark naked, with a temperature below zero and in a tearing wind, while their servants break the ice and wrap sheets round them that have been dipped in the water. They do this a dozen times or more, and the lamas dry the sheets on their own bodies. Keeping warm by will-power, so one imagines, though that’s a poor sort of explanation.’”
Rutherford helped himself to more drink. “But of course, as my American friend admitted, all that had nothing much to do with longevity. It merely showed that the lamas had somber tastes in self-discipline… So there we were, and probably you’ll agree with me that all the evidence, so far, was less than you’d hang a dog on.”
I said it was certainly inconclusive, and asked if the names “Karakal” and “Shangri-La” had meant anything to the American.
“Not a thing – I tried him with them. After I’d gone on questioning him for a time, he said: ‘Frankly, I’m not keen on monasteries – indeed, I once told a fellow I met in Tibet that if I went out of my way at all, it would be to avoid them, not pay them a visit.’ That chance remark of his gave me a curious idea, and I asked him when this meeting in Tibet had taken place. ‘Oh, a long time ago,’ he answered, ‘before the War – in nineteen-eleven, I think it was.’ I badgered him for further details, and he gave them, as well as he could remember. It seemed that he’d been traveling then for some American geographical society, with several colleagues, porters, and so on – in fact, a pukka expedition. Somewhere near the Kuen-Luns he met this other man, a Chinese who was being carried in a chair by native bearers. The fellow turned out to speak English quite well, and strongly recommended them to visit a certain lamasery in the neighborhood – he even offered to be the guide there. The American said they hadn’t time and weren’t interested, and that was that.” Rutherford went on, after an interval: “I don’t suggest that it means a great deal. When a man tries to remember a casual incident that happened twenty years ago, you can’t build too much on it. But it offers an attractive speculation.”
“Yes, though if a well-equipped expedition had accepted the invitation, I don’t see how they could have been detained at the lamasery against their will.”
“Oh, quite. And perhaps it wasn’t Shangri-La at all.”
We thought it over, but it seemed too hazy for argument, and I went on to ask if there had been any discoveries at Baskul.
“Baskul was hopeless, and Peshawar was worse. Nobody could tell me anything, except that the kidnaping of the aeroplane did undoubtedly take place. They weren’t keen even to admit that – it’s an episode they’re not proud of.”
“And nothing was heard of the plane afterwards?”
“Not a word or a rumor, or of its four passengers either. I verified, however, that it was capable of climbing high enough to cross the ranges. I also tried to trace that fellow Barnard, but I found his past history so mysterious that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he really were Chalmers Bryant, as Conway said. After all, Bryant’s complete disappearance in the midst of the big hue and cry was rather amazing.”
“Did you try to find anything about the actual kidnaper?”
“I did. But again it was hopeless. The Air Force man whom the fellow had knocked out and impersonated had since been killed, so one promising line of enquiry was closed. I even wrote to a friend of mine in America who runs an aviation school, asking if he had had any Tibetan pupils lately, but his reply was prompt and disappointing. He said he couldn’t differentiate Tibetans from Chinese, and he had had about fifty of the latter – all training to fight the Japs. Not much chance there, you see. But I did make one rather quaint discovery – and which I could have made just as easily without leaving London. There was a German professor at Jena about the middle of the last century who took to globe-trotting and visited Tibet in 1887. He never came back, and there was some story about him having been drowned in fording a river. His name was Friedrich Meister.”
“Good heavens – one of the names Conway mentioned!”
“Yes – though it may only have been coincidence. It doesn’t prove the whole story, by any means, because the Jena fellow was born in 1845. Nothing very exciting about that.”
“But it’s odd,” I said.
“Oh, yes, it’s odd enough.”
“Did you succeed in tracing any of the others?”
“No. It’s a pity I hadn’t a longer list to work on. I couldn’t find any record of a pupil of Chopin’s called Briac, though of course that doesn’t prove that there wasn’t one. Conway was pretty sparing with his names, when you come to think about it – out of fifty-odd lamas supposed to be on the premises he only gave us one or two. Perrault and Henschell, by the way, proved equally impossible to trace.”