Текст книги "Bone Mountain"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 36 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

The man stood. It was Gang, the Chinese caretaker of Rapjung. He looked ragged, and exhausted, his hand also still bandaged from his burns. He offered no challenge, and said nothing as Shan stepped past him to look at the rocks below.

A man sat with the big drum, pounding it with two sticks with leather pads at the end, watching the valley with a wild gleam in his eyes. Shan slid down the side of the rock and had sat by the drum before the man noticed him. The pounding faltered, then stopped.

"It's Shan," Dremu said, as if someone else was there. The Golok's mouth hung open and he looked at the rocks above him.

"You found them," Shan observed. "The drum and the eye."

Dremu nodded soberly. "This is what we needed, when I was in the mountains with my father all those years ago."

"I think you lied when you said you were taken by the venture work gang," Shan said. "Those two Goloks tried to steal from us."

Dremu seemed to shrink. He hunched his shoulders forward and wrapped both arms around the drum as if he were going to fall. "That was before," he muttered.

"Before what?"

The Golok just hugged the drum, looking at Shan's feet. "They're not my friends," he said after a long silence. "They are wild, like leopards. At first I thought if we worked together we could make enough money for the next winter. It was okay when we just stole from the oil company. But when they met me here and said they were going to steal from the Yapchi farmers I tried to stop them. They beat me and took everything I had, even my horse."

Shan reached into his pocket and pulled out the leather pouch, the lapis bracelet, and the knife with the spoon, and placed them one by one on the rock in front of Dremu. The Golok stared at them, then with a reverent expression picked up the pouch. "I had nothing left but the rags on my back. That was before…"

Before what? Shan almost asked again, but somehow he knew the answer. Dremu meant before the deity began speaking to him through the drum.

There was movement around the edge of the high rocks, and Gang approached them, supported by his son. In Gang's bandaged hand, extended toward Shan, was the chenyi stone.

"This man," Dremu said, "was almost dead. First I found his family looking for him, crying, thinking they had lost him forever, thinking he had gone to kill you. Then we found him, beating the drum, looking crazy, not able to talk. By then the drum was drumming him." Dremu looked at Shan uncertainly. "I couldn't… I didn't…"

"You did well," Shan offered. "You kept the deity."

Gang pushed his son away and stumbled toward Shan. He held out the stone in both hands, appealing to Shan with his exhausted, glazed eyes, and was wracked by a sob. He began crying, convulsing with tears, able to control himself only enough to step forward and drop the chenyi stone into Shan's hands.

Shan gazed at the stone, then surveyed the chaos in the valley below. He felt empty, drained, uncertain where to go, what more he could do. After a long time he raised Gang's hand in his own and returned the stone to him. Then Shan picked up the two drumsticks, exchanged a solemn look with Dremu, and began pounding the deity drum.

Chapter Nineteen

Dremu stared in disbelief, twisting his head from side to side as if to better see Shan. A smile gradually broke across his weary face and he showed Shan how to make the quick one-two beat, the heart sound. They watched, the drum pounding, the children laughing, as more derrick workers jumped off, splashing, into the huge puddle of water that was growing around their machine. Shan watched his hands pounding the drumskin without conscious effort, and found himself drifting to a place he did not recognize, watching his hands as though they belonged to someone else. He had heard of monks in old Tibet using such sounds, not just in ritual but in meditation exercises. The throbbing of the drum became the throbbing of his own heart and the echo that came back to him seemed to come not from across the valley but from somewhere else, a faraway place where something huge was stirring to the sound, rolling over as though to awaken, the way a mountain sometimes rolls over.

It was as if one of Lokesh's karma storms was roiling the valley, as if everything that could happen was happening, changing too fast to be understood, too sudden for the pain of it all to be fully sensed. He could not stop beating the drum. The drum was beating him.

He lost track of time, but eventually became aware of Gang standing close to him, staring with his head cocked, his eyes not bitter or angry, only empty and pleading. Shan handed him the sticks and stepped back. An hour or more had gone by. The speaking platform below was empty, and the dignitaries were gathered at the tables, having their banquet as though unaware of the water that still flooded their derrick or, more likely, unconcerned, because they knew the water would soon recede and the derrick would resume drilling.

The derrick itself was empty, and the muddy pond at its base was perhaps three hundred feet across. But the waters seemed to have stopped flowing. A new pond had appeared at the end of the valley, where Jenkins had built a rough levee by bulldozing the surface soil of the barley fields into a long, low bank.

Shan studied Gang, who seemed to have drifted to the same place the drum had taken each of them before. His eyes lost their focus. His hands gripped the drumsticks despite his still-healing burns, gripped so tightly his knuckles were white, as if he wasn't holding sticks but a lifeline. The embittered Han had attacked Shan, he knew now, had attacked him and taken the eye.

But why? Because he thought Shan had not earned the right to return the eye? Because he simply could not believe there could be another Han who was virtuous? More likely, because he had spent most of his life trying to redeem himself, to prove himself to the Tibetans, then seen the most visible proof, his reconstructed shrines, go up in flames.

Shan wandered to the valley floor, mingled with the workers who still seemed to be running everywhere with shovels and hoes. A truck sped by carrying logs from the camp stockpile. Soldiers in mud-caked uniforms jogged toward the base camp and were being herded into two troop trucks that waited below the derrick. Shan watched as the first of the trucks sped away, racing through the camp and out of the valley.

"Too late to beat the knobs," Shan heard someone say with an air of amusement. A broad-shouldered Tibetan in grease-stained coveralls stood ten feet away, speaking to no one in particular.

Shan ventured closer to the man. "Those knobs already left?" he asked.

"Their prize isn't the oil well," the man observed in a bitter voice. "For them a hundred resisters will beat an oil well every time."

Shan closed his eyes and fought down a wave of fear. There was a meadow somewhere; a small, high meadow where Tibetans waited for Jokar, where they expected to find new strength in resisting Beijing– a leader who could be respected like no other, who would become a new symbol, a modern-day Siddhi. Somo and many of the purbas must be going there now, waiting for Gyalo to bring Jokar. Some of the purbas had guns.

When he reached the trees on the far side of the valley, Shan ran. He did not know where the meadow was. All he could do was go up, east toward the highest spines of the huge mountain, praying he would see a sign or meet Tibetans on the way who might lead him to Jokar. He jogged until his side raged with pain then stumbled into a stream.

As he knelt in the water, he looked about, gasping. The distant drumming from Yapchi began to seem hollow, and he began to hear it as a sound of frustration, not hope. No deity had come, no compassion had been found. And now, he thought as he splashed the frigid water on his face, when the soldiers or knobs found Jokar at a secret rally against Beijing, they would show no mercy.

"Lokesh!" he heard someone shout, again and again, until he realized it was himself. No matter how urgently he wanted to find Jokar, another part of him was still desperately thinking of Lokesh, who would soon begin hobbling toward Beijing, where he would be killed or imprisoned.

He launched himself out of the water, following one goat path, then another, always seeking the paths that would take him still higher. An hour passed, then another, and he began to recognize trails. He had circled far below Larkin's birthing water cave and was climbing again, near where Chemi had brought them over the mountain on their first day in Qinghai. Rounding an outcropping, he froze. A huge black drong stood in a clearing a hundred feet away, staring warily at him. But then he took a step forward and saw the red ribbons in its neck hair, some of which Shan and Anya had tied.

"Jampa," he called softly, and stepped to the animal's side. Why was the yak here, and alone?

Then with a chill he saw craters in front of the yak. Jampa's large black eyes seemed to be studying the craters, and for a terrible moment Shan thought Gyalo and Jokar had been attacked. But then he recognized the terrain. There were three craters, evenly spaced, in a straight line, and directly above them towered the snowcapped pinnacle of Yapchi Mountain. It was where they had first met Zhu, where the seismic charges had killed a flock of birds.

Shan stroked the yak's neck and surveyed the landscape. The high meadow where the Tibetans waited for Jokar must be near. The yak must have delivered Jokar and wandered away. But there was no sign of anyone, no sound of equipment, no shouting from soldiers, no cracking of rifles. Nothing but the wind. And two geese flying high over the ridge, toward the south, over the massive backbone of the mountain, toward the sacred salt lake. He watched the geese until they were out of sight, then walked along the edge of the clearing. A tapering rock column, perhaps twenty feet high, rose from the northern edge, and on its base was a shadow of the mani mantra, the vaguest remains of words painted there many decades before. Like a signpost in a way, or a greeting. As he touched the ancient script he thought of the Rapjung lamas. They had come across the mountain to Yapchi for herbs, to debate with the Chinese monks. Yapchi Valley, as isolated as it seemed from the south, was even more cut off from the north, and so had become part of Rapjung's flock, a garden of herbs in a way for the lamas. And the Tibetans on this side of the mountain had inscribed a greeting to the lamas who came down to them. All that had ended on a terrible day a century earlier.

He paced around the windworn column of rock. At its narrow top, incredibly, was a remnant of a prayer flag, a piece of red cloth. He wandered back along the clearing, still searching, climbing up the slope for a view of the top of the column, now two hundred feet away, and of the secret meadow that must lie beyond. As the top came into view he stared disbelieving. It was not a prayer flag.

"Gyalo!" he called out. The monk was on the column, sitting lotus fashion, staring forlornly at the sky. Shan called repeatedly as he jogged back toward the clearing, but the monk gave no sign of hearing. Jampa himself seemed unconcerned about Gyalo. Yet the yak did seem concerned about something. The great beast was at the south end of the clearing now, and Shan thought he recognized sadness on its face. He walked to it, stroking its neck again, trying to understand.

Gyalo and Jampa had come here, but no farther. They had been bound for the high, hidden meadow, for those who waited for Jokar to sit on the rock called the chair of Siddhi. Jokar, perhaps Winslow, had been with them but now were gone. The monk and yak did not seem upset or alarmed, just sad and puzzled. The yak's huge, liquid eyes gazed at Shan expectantly then, facing the high spine of the mountain it made a loud sound. Not a bellow, or a snort, but a loud wailing cut short by an intake of breath, like a sob.

Shan gazed at the yak, at the forlorn monk on the column of rock, then began running up the treacherous goat trail.

The sun was low in the western sky, washing the vast rock wall with a thin rose color by the time Shan found the narrow cleft in the rock where they had taken refuge from the helicopter the day they had first crossed Yapchi Mountain. Inside the cleft the stillness was like that of an ancient temple. No wind blew. No bird called. The dim light was the only evidence of the outside world.

He followed the wall on the left into deepening shadows, past the little stone pillar with dust encrusted prayer flags, until suddenly he heard a wet, hissing sound. He froze, studying the shadows, until he made out two legs stretched across the path in front of him. It was Winslow.

The American was so weak he seemed to have trouble raising his head to greet Shan. "Dammit, Shan, you have… to learn…" The American's words were punctuated with ragged gasps. He sounded as though he were suffocating, "… to stop investigating."

Shan reached along Winslow's legs to the side pocket where he carried his electric light. As Shan switched it on his heart sank. A pink froth oozed out of Winslow's mouth, and was dripping onto his shirt. He stared at the American. There was no time for talk. He frantically searched the other pockets of the American's pants until he found his pill bottle. It was empty.

"Took… the last one four hours ago," Winslow gasped. "He had to come. I wasn't going to let him try it alone. I carried him the first mile. Almost didn't make it. Old Jokar…" Winslow seemed to be forcing himself to smile, but the effort ended in a grimace. A wet, rasping rattle came from his chest. "He had to help me sometimes, let me hold on to his staff. I helped him, he helped me. We couldn't have made it without each other," the American said in a tone of wonder. He moaned, and tried to raise his hand to his head, but failed. "My head… I never knew it could hurt like this…" His eyes fluttered open and shut several times.

Shan wiped the froth from Winslow's face. It meant pulmonary edema. His lungs were filling with fluid. The head pain meant cerebral edema.

"We have to get you down," Shan said. His words came out in choking breaths. There was nothing to be done for Winslow, except descend the mountain, on the tiny, treacherous goat trail, in the dark.

Winslow seemed to struggle to keep his eyes open. "Go… check on Jokar."

Shan glanced up at the darkest part of the shadows ahead, which marked the entrance to the cave. "Jokar would want you to go down."

Something touched Shan's hand. Winslow's fingers, grasping Shan's. He had the strength of a baby. The only thing that broke the silence was the American's wet, labored breathing.

Winslow's fingers trembled. "What's that sound?" he gasped. "Like wind."

There was no sound, no movement except the American's labored breathing. More of the pink froth dribbled down his chin. "I'm beginning to understand it," Winslow whispered. "This whole impermanence thing. It's a gift, like the old lamas said."

The words hung in the air like a prayer.

"I will get you down," Shan insisted, choking down his helplessness.

"Not a chance," Winslow said in a strangely serene voice. "Not on that path. I would just kill us both. Hell I can't even stand, let alone walk. You try to carry me, we both fall."

Shan followed Winslow's eyes to the top of the mountain, visible at the top of the huge fissure. It was illuminated in a brilliant golden light cast by the setting sun, as if they were in a tunnel that led upward to the heavens.

"Jokar knew before," Winslow gasped. "I mean he knew before coming up here. He knew that day he touched me."

Shan remembered the haunted look the lama had when he laid his hands on the American that day at the hermitage.

"I understand now," Winslow said in his weak, croaking voice. "Everything has been about leaving it all behind, hasn't it?"

Shan stood and pulled on Winslow's arm to lift him. The American, much heavier than Shan, barely moved. He stared at Winslow. The American had given up on his job, given up his passport, given up his possessions, given up his grief for his wife, given up everything that came before, the clutter of his life below. It was true. Since the day Shan had met him, when he had been defying death by riding the yak, the American had been leaving everything behind.

"I think you… should go check on Jokar. Take the light. Then we can go down, no problem."

Shan reluctantly stepped over the American's legs "We are going down that path. We can just crawl a little at a time. You'll be better when we descend."

"I'll be better. You win," the American whispered, and his fingers made a tiny motion that seemed to be a gesture toward the cave.

Inside there was a musty odor of incense that had not been there before, but the chamber was empty and no incense burned. Shan stepped to the healing thangkas and looked briefly at each one, trying to calm himself. At the long thangka where the collection of dorjes lay, a new one sat beside the sandalwood dorje, one of bronze, burnished with decades of rubbing. Nearby, leaning against the wall, was something else. A long wooden staff, as worn and weathered as the dorje. On the ledge beside the dorje he saw two small dust-encrusted shapes he had not noticed before. He reached out for one, shaking away the dust. It was a small bone, perfectly shaped. Shan cleaned the second. It seemed to be a rock, until he realized how light it was. He studied the objects again and discovered he had been wrong. The rock was a carefully crafted piece of bone. And the bone was an exquisitely carved stone.

Shan pulled aside the thankga, releasing a stronger smell of incense. As he expected, there was a tunnel behind the old painting. He followed it at a sharp downward angle for nearly a minute before it leveled into a low, broad chamber. A second large thankga hung at one of the sides: a representation, not of the Medicine Buddha, but of a fierce protector demon, Rahula, a wrathful deity with several heads and a serpent body instead of legs.

Shan grasped the gau around his neck then stepped behind the thangka. To the right a long wide ledge, three feet high, ran the length of the narrow, forty-foot-long room, as straight and square as a bench. To the left, at the center of the wall, was a small altar of polished, deftly fitted wood, with a sixteen-inch golden Buddha, behind the traditional seven offering bowls. He slowly approached the altar. The four bowls that were meant to hold water were dry and crusted with dust. A single stick of incense and the stub of a candle burned beside the bowls on a polished stone tray. On either side of the altar were several large clay jars, some nearly two feet high, filled with dried herbs.

He stood in front of the Buddha, still clutching his gau tightly, and stared at it a moment before turning to face the lamas. He counted fifteen of them sitting on the long ledge then moved to the far end where the row started with a figure in a robe of coarse sackcloth, a stone bowl for mixing herbs at his side, his hands folded neatly on his legs around a string of coral beads. Not his hands exactly, but the bones of his fingers and the shriveled parchment-like skin that covered them. The man's head, little more than a skull covered with the same parchment, tilted back in a slight grin. One of the first of the lama healers, who had probably come to sit inside the mountain three or four hundred years before. Shan walked slowly along the wise old men. Some wore brocade robes and had gold urns at their sides, although most wore the robes of simple monks. At the foot of one lay a stack of wood blocks for printing a teaching.

Then the line ended, near the entrance, and he was gazing into Jokar's face. The old lama was struggling no longer. He had come home. He had finished what he had set out to do when he left India. That's all it was, Shan knew now, with a strange, sad warmth. There had been no conspiracy. He had never intended to lead the Tibetans in resistance or stir up political controversy. There had been no motive other than to find closure to a long life well lived, to leave his bones in honored company, to give his bones to the mountain they all cherished.

Jokar wore a serene smile on his face, which was so peaceful he seemed only to be in slumber. Shan touched the lama's hand, wrapped around his rosary. The warmth had left it, but it was not yet cold. The lama's other hand was resting on the leg of the shriveled man beside him, a figure with short white hair and a small wooden mixing bowl cradled in his lap. Jokar had known him. Lokesh had known him, too. Shan's old friend had recognized the sandalwood dorje in the antechamber as that of his old teacher, Chigu.

He gazed back on the tomb. It had probably been only an hour since Jokar had placed the candle on the altar and lit the stick of incense. The lama had climbed onto the long stone bench with his colleagues, clasped his beads, and the leg of his old friend, then drifted away for the last time. Inside Yapchi Mountain treasures were buried, Dremu had said.

Shan used the last of his water to reverently fill the offering bowls on the altar, before he suddenly remembered the American. He paused by Jokar a moment, then walked, backwards, to the thangka, climbed back to the entrance chamber and stepped outside, into the dusk. Winslow was nowhere to be seen.

He searched frantically with the electric light, first at the deep crevasse beyond the stone pillar, then outside, on the path. There was no sign of the American anywhere. He must have dragged himself down the treacherous path, to make sure Shan would not risk his own life in trying to help him. The trail was empty but dim, with no more than a hundred yards visible in either direction. He stepped down the trail several yards, then peered over the edge with the light. Nothing was visible, nothing but blackness. It was nearly a thousand feet to the bottom.

Returning to the cleft, he extinguished the light and studied the sky. Stars were appearing overhead, and below. A wind blew, and he realized his cheek was suddenly cold and wet. He wiped away a tear then stepped back into the cleft and began searching every corner, every indentation in the rock wall.

Five minutes later he saw the tip of a boot, above his head, jutting out from a long, high crack in the rockface that ended a few feet off the ground with a flat rock like a shelf, looking out over the entrance to the cave. Shan pulled himself halfway up the rock and lit the shelf with the flashlight. Winslow was sitting on the small shelf, the rock wall pressing against each shoulder.

"We must go now," he called out urgently, but the American was studying the shadows beyond Shan's shoulder and seemed not to hear. Shan scrambled up the rock and reached out to wipe the froth from the American's face again, then pulled back with a shudder. The froth was cold. Winslow's eyes, still open, had gone beyond seeing.

He dropped to the American's side. A long wracking sob shook Shan's body. So many times Shan had wanted Winslow to return to his embassy, so many opportunities had come and gone for the American to find safety. Just a phone call, just a word at the Golmud base, just a request to Jenkins at the oil camp. He could have escaped. But each time he had chosen to stay.

After a moment Shan realized there was a bundle on Winslow's legs, wrapped in black cloth. And over the cloth, clenched in the American's hand, was a note. Shan gently lifted the paper out of the lifeless fingers. It was nearly illegible. The American had written it at the very end, in English, with trembling fingers, in the dark. Shan studied it for several minutes before he could decipher the words.

By all that's holy, leave me here to watch over them. Tell no one but Melissa. Let the others wonder, my last little joke on the world. It's not so bad, Shan. I think I'm getting the hang of this impermanence thing. This is where I belong this time. Every lama needs a cowboy.

Shan sat a long time, fighting the dark, hollow thing he felt inside. Death was an old acquaintance. Death didn't scare him, it just intimidated him, it made him feel so unprepared, so incomplete, so wasteful of what his Tibetan friends called the precious human incarnation.

He sat until the dark thing lifted from his heart, until he could bear to look into Winslow's eyes, until it seemed they were just friends silently watching the night fall. He studied the American once more, read the note again, and he knew that in his own way Winslow had found what he had been looking for.

At last he rose, pulled the bundle from Winslow's lap, crossed the American's lifeless hands over his legs, and pushed his eyelids closed. He hesitated a moment, then searched the American's pockets to find the tiny pouch of salt prepared by Jokar. He placed the pouch in Winslow's hand, closed his fingers around the true earth, then climbed down.

Winslow had realized what was behind the long thangka, where Jokar was going. He wanted to watch over the old ones. He wanted to stay by all that's holy.

Shan found himself wandering back inside the mountain with the bundle Winslow had been holding when he died, the bundle taken from Padme's satchel, switched by the American for the accounts that had proven Khodrak's lies. He felt as though he were being led, walking like a blind man toward the tomb chamber to deliver the bundle. It was Winslow's spirit, Lokesh would have said, asking Shan to show him the way to the lamas, to deliver a final offering. In that moment Shan would not have disagreed.

On the altar the candle still flickered, almost at the end of its wick. He set the book at the bottom of the ledge, studying the lamas again. The flickering light seemed to give movement to the faces of the old men.

"He decided not to leave you," Shan whispered to Jokar. "That American, he came far," he added, remembering the lama's words to Winslow at the mixing ledge. Afterwards Winslow, shaken by the lama, had told Shan of his dream, of flying through the air with Jokar. Maybe that's where they were now, floating over the mountain, laughing at the surprise they had dealt those below. Shan thought of the two geese he had seen soaring over the mountain.

"It's such a perfect place to finish," a deep, disembodied voice observed suddenly.

Shan gasped and stepped backwards, as though struck, his heart racing as he gaped at Jokar.

Then a tall, gaunt figure stepped through the door, his face so weary, his eyes so wide, so much emotion on his features, it took Shan took a moment before he recognized Tenzin.

The abbot of Sangchi pulled a candle from his pocket and silently stepped to the altar to light it from the dying wick of the one already there. Placing the candle on the altar, he turned and surveyed the figures on the ledge. "You found the chair," he whispered in an awed voice, and slowly walked down the line of dead lamas, pausing before each one, his lips moving in silent prayer, until he reached the far end, the oldest of the old ones, the one with the grinning skull and the sackcloth robe.

"What do you mean?" Shan asked as Tenzin studied the oldest of the dead lamas.

"Siddhi was the first," Tenzin replied, "the first teacher at Rapjung. Lepka told me something at the mixing ledge, after he heard those purbas talking about Jokar as a leader of rebellion. He said the purbas misunderstood, that Siddhi was a teacher who embraced the Medicine Buddha, that he didn't organize the people to fight the Mongols, he organized groups to be missionaries among the Mongols, to spread the way of compassion." He looked back at Shan. "Jokar would never allow his name to be used for violent means. When he said he would take the chair of Siddhi, this is what he meant."

The chair of Siddhi. They were standing before the chair of Siddhi, and Siddhi's descendants, the chair of the gentle old men who had spent their entire lives keeping humans connected to the earth inside them.

Tenzin dropped to his knees, then lowered his chest to the floor, prostrating himself, praying with his mouth an inch from the floor. After more than a minute he rose and gently kissed the edge of the ancient sackcloth. Then he rose and repeated the action in front of each of the remaining figures, until he joined Shan in front of Jokar.

"The purbas said we would just go north," Tenzin said quietly, staring at Jokar's split, tattered black canvas shoes. "They said they had it all planned. I would escape through Russia and go on to America, where people would give me a house and ask me to give speeches sometimes." Self-revulsion echoed in his words. A single tear rolled down his cheek. "The stone eye was my cover. A party of purbas stealing north, escorting me would eventually be noticed. But the eye, traveling with ordinary Tibetans…," Tenzin glanced at Shan, "… that man Tiger said with them I could go north and no one would suspect.

"I never planned to take those papers from Lin. Drakte had taken me there, Drakte had stayed at my side all that week during the Serenity conference, wearing a monk's robe, keeping me safe from all the howlers, making sure I did nothing to inadvertently reveal my intention. That Khodrak kept coming up to me, saying he was the most fervent supporter of the Campaign, that he thought it was the work of genius. He must have known about my being in his district because he saw Drakte with Chao that night." Tenzin fell silent a moment and stared at the lamas. "That report was there on Lin's desk when Drakte and I went for the stone and I began reading it. The month before, Religious Affairs had given me a speech to read before a youth congress in Lhasa. I told those youths that there were no Tibetans in slave labor camps, that such stories were made up by the Dalai Cult to poison the minds of Tibetans. Then there was the paper in Lin's office, proving me wrong. I just kept reading that paper as Drakte pulled at me, when we had the eye in our mop bucket and we were supposed to flee. Finally, to get me to leave, he told me to keep it. He said, what did I expect, it was what the purbas had been telling me."