The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (25 page)

Holmes listened intently to the Minister’s every word. Despite his fatigue and reluctance to undertake any arduous assignments, he found that he was most intrigued. He had thought of a long trip to a quiet corner of the world where he could recover and plan the demise of his remaining enemies in the Moriarty gang. Why not Tibet? The suggested journey not only fit his plan to avoid his enemies for a time, but it promised to be a mission of the greatest interest. It also gave him an official disguise, invaluable to him at this dangerous juncture in his life. He therefore did not hesitate.

“I agree to the mission, Your Lordship, but I shall need immediate assistance. I should say, immodestly perhaps, that for a variety of reasons my knowledge of some aspects of Tibet is already considerable, and I shall not bore you with the many reasons why that is so. I do nothing of this kind, however, without the most painstaking preparation, preparation which, under circumstances such as those which may befall me during the mission—conceivably matters of life and death—must reach to the most minute detail.”

The minister smiled when he heard Holmes’s acceptance, and in answer to his last words replied: “Easily done, my dear Holmes, far more easily done than you would have thought. First, accept this portfolio. It contains official copies of the treaty to be signed, copies of the charge to Manning as well as the details of his mission and itinerary, and secret exchanges concerning Tibet between ourselves and the Chinese.”

As he spoke, he handed Holmes a large folder containing the official papers.

“Enclosed also is what I trust you will find to be more than adequate compensation for your efforts and for your expenses to Lhasa and return. There are also your personal documents identifying you as the Norwegian naturalist Hallvard Sigerson. And now, let us proceed to the adjoining chamber.”

They moved to the next room, one smaller than the library but also lined with books. It was the second minister who spoke at this time. “Thanks again to your brother Mycroft, Mr. Holmes, we were able to locate our meeting in this villa, the home of Count Giancarlo Possenza d’Este, one of Italy’s greatest explorers and scholars of the Orient, and a good friend, I might add, of Mycroft’s and mine from the Diogenes Club in London. It was in anticipation of your assent to the mission that his estate was chosen for our meeting. He himself is absent from Italy, but he has consented to full use of his collections. This room contains substantial resources in several languages on the history and peoples of Tibet and adjacent areas. There is, in my judgement, no better collection anywhere. In your stay, an active brain such as yours should be able to absorb and retain as much as it needs. Notice, too, that these drawers contain detailed maps, the best now available, on Tibet and on Lhasa itself. We have made arrangements for you to live here until your departure from Italy. Berolini has already seen to the removal of your bags from your
pensione,
so you needn’t return there at all. You will have, in all, six weeks here. You will travel then to Naples, and thence to Brindisi, where you will board a ship for Bombay. Once there, you must seek advice from the Indian Government—the Viceroy himself will be in charge of your mission—as to how to proceed and what the best route to Lhasa will be at the time of your arrival. Best of luck to you, my dear fellow, and I earnestly hope for your safety and success.”

They shook Holmes’s hand vigorously as they departed.

“I was left alone, Watson, elated at the prospect of my new adventure but still feeling the exhaustion of the previous days. By this time it was almost eleven and I decided to retire. A knock at the door came just as this thought occurred to me, and one of the servants appeared and showed me to my quarters. A heavy fatigue enveloped me, and I went smoothly into the first real sleep since the death of Moriarty.”

The following days were for Holmes, as he recalled them for me, a vigorous assay into the Oriental literature on Tibet and its neighbours. Each day he spent long hours poring over old histories and maps, taking notes, memorising routes, passes, and altitudes. Since he was to travel in the guise of a Scandinavian explorer and naturalist, he made certain of his familiarity with what was known of Himalayan flora and fauna. He studied not only Hooker but also, and not without a certain irony, the works of his remaining chief enemy, Colonel Moran, who had spent long years in the Himalayas. At night, he learned the peculiar script and studied the language. He read the classic accounts of the Catholic missionaries such as Orazio della Penna and Le Père Huc. By all these accounts, the journey to Tibet was considered to be a most dangerous one, and it was in this last text of Huc that he read of the curious misadventures of the first Englishman to visit Tibet, a certain Clement Moorcroft, who was, according to the good friar’s account, killed by bandits as he attempted his return from Lhasa. Not an appealing precedent, he thought. Danger lurked everywhere for the casual traveller, and accounts of more recent visitors did not differ in this judgement.

It was the more recent accounts, however, that provided much of what he needed to understand present conditions in the country. There was what appeared to be a most complicated political situation. The Grand Lama, the titular ruler of the country, was still a young boy in his minority, and the power of his office was wielded by a regent, one Getong Tsarong. Little was known of the latter except that he was the most feared individual in Tibet, known for his ruthless methods and great cruelties. His power seemed to be diminishing, however, for in addition, there now lived in the Potala itself, the residence of the Grand Lama, this strange presence who bore the name of Dorjieff or Dorjiloff, the deadly agent alluded to by the ministers from London. In strategic but temporary collusion with him was the Japanese Yamamoto. The two appeared bent on wresting control of Tibet from the Tibetans themselves and dividing it between their respective governments. How long it would be before the interests of these two powers diverged into open conflict rather than remain in the cooperation that they now professed depended largely on the cleverness of our own policy. Holmes was indeed walking right into the Great Game in Central Asia.

“I had tangled with both these agents earlier, though we never met face-to-face,” said Holmes, relating to me what he knew of them from earlier adventures. “Dorjiloff was a man well into his fifties by now, but his origins were mysterious. He himself claimed to be of Mongolian Buriat origin, born in Siberia east of Lake Baikal at a place called Azochozki. His youth was misspent, and he soon ran afoul of the Tsarist police. He was arrested for murder and petty larceny and sent to a labour camp in the Urals. From there he escaped and came to London, where I first became aware of him. You may recall the unresolved murder of Sir Samuel Soames, Watson.”

“Indeed, I do. Soames was a wealthy merchant of Liverpool, who was stabbed to death by a street thief . . . in Russell Square, if I remember correctly.”

“Excellent, Watson. It was no street thief who perpetrated the crime, of course, and I traced the murder to a secret society of Russian agents operating in London, of which Dorjiloff was a prominent member. Unfortunately, he avoided my net and escaped to New York, where he engaged in forgery. He eventually made his way to San Francisco, then Shanghai. From there he returned to Russia and hid in a Buddhist monastery at Urga, where he convinced the ignorant monks of his religious propensities and began the study of the Buddhist religion. Following his ordination, he left Russia and travelled in Mongolia. He took the Tibetan name of Ghomang Lopzang, and arriving at last in Tibet, he entered the Drepung monastery as an authority on metaphysics and philosophy. During his stay he went often to Lhasa, where began to exercise great influence over the Regent and thereby upon the child who was the Grand Lama. Undetected by the Russian authorities, he returned to Moscow, where he became influential as a religious teacher. He came to the attention of the superstitious Tsar himself, who brought him to the Russian palace, where he exerted a strong influence. In both the Russia and Tibet, he soon became known as Dorjieff, or Dorjiloff, a strange Russified Tibetan name that means “Man of the Thunder Bolt.”

I marvelled at Holmes’ account and the wealth of detail that he commanded about his enemies even after so many years.

“Of Yamamoto I learned little more than I already knew,” he continued. “I had come across his name in the Tokyo Police Reports, where he was described as a petty thief who had fled Japan and settled in Shanghai. There, because of his knowledge of Chinese, he became a secret agent of the Japanese in China. From thief to secret agent is an ever more common path to success. He was married for a time to a Tibetan woman whom he met in Canton. Becoming one of the only Japanese to know both Chinese and Tibetan he caught the eye of high officials in the Imperial Court, who sent him to Lhasa as the leader of a trade mission. For several years, he and Dorjiloff had worked in concert against our interests, each manoeuvering for a position of advantage, and it was with them that my major confrontations would undoubtedly begin.”

Holmes interrupted his account briefly as he sifted through the facts that poured forth from his brain. “So much for my two adversaries, Watson. I won’t bore you further. Let it suffice to say that by now Lhasa presented sufficient criminal interest for me to wish to go even without the secret mission that had been given to me. The chief goal was to find Manning, or to learn what had happened to him. I hoped to find him still alive, for I doubted that the Tibetans would risk killing or imprisoning a British envoy, unless, that is, someone such as Dorjiloff forced the issue or killed him himself. Such an act would bring direct intervention of the Viceroy, and whatever Dorjiloff’s desires in this respect, my researches indicated that the Tibetan Government itself appeared to me to be one whose character was, if anything, restrained. The old Regent still wielded considerable power and influence, and it was with him I wished to deal, if I could get near him. He apparently received almost no one these days and remained in the Potala, where he dictated the life of Tibet.”

Holmes stopped his account of his researches there. Those days in Florence he still remembers as amongst the happiest and most carefree of his existence, for he had no lack of servants, and no task save the one at hand. He emerged from the long days of study fully confident that he knew what he had to know to accomplish the mission. He had become in a short time what he could only call an Orientalist.

True to the minister’s promise, after those days of relentless study, Holmes was taken to the central station in Florence, where he boarded a train for Naples. There he switched to another that took him overnight to Brindisi, where he boarded the small American freighter, the SS
Downes-Porter
, in the early morning, bound that very evening for Alexandria and then Bombay.

The trip was uneventful, and Holmes spent the long idle hours imposed upon him in further study of the notes and documents he had with him. Among them were several photographs of Manning, Yamamoto, and Dorjiloff. He studied them intently, committing to memory every detail. He also had photographs of the Grand Lama and his family. The Regent, as far as Holmes could ascertain, had circumvented all known attempts to photograph him, and Count d’Este had registered none in his collections. One of the family photographs, however, contained a figure who, Holmes was fairly certain, was the regent Getong Tsarong. The photograph showed a tall, rather gaunt man standing next to the child chosen to become the Grand Lama. He wore thick glasses, his hair in a braid tied round his head. The picture was faded and improperly focussed, and Holmes found his features most curious. Another document which he perused constantly was a detailed map of the city of Lhasa, one that he had put together himself from the maps in the Italian collection. So well, however, did he memorise the streets and so vivid had the monuments of the city become, that he felt by the time he had come to the end of his sea voyage that he had already walked through even its back alleys. He also had made detailed diagrams of the Potala, both its outer ramparts and its inner corridors and rooms, which he also committed to memory. It was this kind of knowledge—become almost instinctive, so well had he drilled himself on it—that would give him the ability to move quickly in dangerous circumstances.

“We docked in Bombay just over three weeks after our departure from Italy,” he continued. “By this time, I was in despair over the ship’s food, the enforced rest, and the small talk of the few uninteresting passengers. I was delighted therefore when we first glimpsed the Bombay harbour in the early morning mists. It was my first taste of the Orient, Watson, but I must say that initial delight soon passed into disappointment. Architecturally, in its grandiose public monuments, Bombay attempted to be another London, but succeeded only in being one drab and run-down, a metropolis totally misplaced in the tropical climate of western India, filled with teeming millions living in the streets trying to survive the vicissitudes of an indifferent fate. The rains had been heavy and the city was soaked through. The air was wet and reeked of humankind and its myriad activities, and I found myself eager to leave on my mission.”

Holmes’s first task was to meet with officials of Government, but they were at once unhelpful and unconcerned. What appeared as a grave problem in London impressed no one in Bombay as urgent. Indeed, Lhasa seemed farther from Bombay than it was from London. In addition, the Viceroy himself had been called out of India unexpectedly and was on his way to Burma to tend to a crisis in Rangoon and was therefore unreachable. If Holmes was to keep to his schedule, therefore, he would have to pick his own route and travel to Lhasa on his own. Out of several routes that he had studied, he chose one of the shorter ones, and the very one taken by Manning. This was the one through the western Himalayas that leads directly to the Tibetan plateau. From there, he would follow an eastern route to the sacred city of Lhasa. And so boarding a train to Pathankot in the Punjab, and from there with a guide and a group of porters, he began the ascent, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, to the Kulu Valley, thence to Spiti and Zanskar. It was in Zanskar that he was most fortunate to meet a group of Kashmiri traders who were on their way to the holy city. They invited him to join their caravan.