The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes - Jamyang Norbu [113]
I travelled south, following the course of the Bramhaputra river, to the beautiful Valley of the Full Moon, to Mr Holmes's monastery, situated on a picturesque hillside covered with aromatic juniper trees. I stayed with him for a week learning much about ... let us just say, many things. He had decided to stay a year more in Thibet to complete his studies. But after that he would return to England3 to finish his task of destroying Moriarty's criminal empire and removing his baleful influence once and for all from the cities of Europe. Only on the conclusion of this task would he finally return to Thibet.
'I have my orders,' said Holmes, 'and I must obey.' He did not elaborate about who had given those orders, and I did not ask.
The last sight of my dear friend will remain forever vivid in my mind. Attired in wine-red monastic robes, tall and imposing, he stood before a copse of dwarf pines by the monastery gate, accompanied by his disciples, who bowed low when I mounted my pony and rode away. Mr Holmes raised his right hand to bid me farewell and to give me his blessings. I never saw him again.
It has always been a dispiriting thing for me to leave the solitude and purity of the mountains and return to the real world, though this time my unique discoveries ensured that the world would greet me with medals, awards, appointments and all the other trappings of its respect and honour. Yet even in my new life of prosperity and prominence I have never forgotten the wise words of Sherlock Holmes — surely engraved in my heart as if on granite — reminding me of the sorrows and follies of this world, and man's inhumanity to man.
Just yesterday evening, I sent away my private carriage and driver, and walked home from the Great Eastern Hotel after the annual dinner of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, where I had been invited to speak on Himalayan exploration to a group of sleek, well-fed gentlemen and their bored overdressed wives. Outside the hotel, hordes of starving children scrambled for leftover food from the hotel's garbage bins. I distributed what money I had on me amongst them. Then I turned away and walked through the dark back-streets.
It was a clear and moonless night. Once again I found myself looking up north, in the direction of the far Himalayas, at a sky blazing with stars ... sic itur a mons ad astra ... to paraphrase Virgil ...
But enough, I weary the reader with my unrelenting cacoethes scribindi. Let the tale now end.
1. The ultimate political authority in China at the time was really in the hands of the empress dowager, Cixi, the ruthless, power-hungry, cunning, and treacherous aunt of the figure-head emperor, Guangxu, who languished in palace seclusion — on her orders.
2. Hurree was very prescient here. The thirteenth Dalai Lama not only survived a number of subsequent plots, but even after an exile to Mongolia and another to India, eventually succeeded in throwing out all Chinese influence and power in Tibet. He declared the independence of his nation on the eighth day of the first month of the Water-Ox year (1913). Besides making important reforms in the government and the church, he created a modern army that further defeated Chinese forces on the eastern frontier of Tibet, and gradually