The Forbidden Temple by Patrick Woodhead Read Free Book Online Page A

search of a ‘mighty river gorge’. On first inspection of the hand-drawn map at the front of the book, Luca immediately realised that Bailey’s seemingly random route put him about fifty kilometres east of Makalu.
    The prose was typically Edwardian, slightly pompous and emotionally stilted, but within a few pages Luca had been sucked into Bailey’s account. In 1913 he and another officer called Morshead had worked their way up and across the Indo-Tibetan border to reach a fabled waterfall in the heart of a river gorge. The journey sounded difficult as well as clandestine. There were jungles with trees a hundred feet high, mountain passes and murderous Abor tribesmen to negotiate. Luca was amused at the classic British stoicism and how they kept stiffening their upper lip to ‘muddle their way through’.
    After escaping from one village under a hail of arrows and spears, the pair recouped in the dense jungle. Morshead had been hit no less than eleven times, with Bailey’s only further comment on this being a terse:
‘What a sanguine reminder it was of how hard it is to kill a man in sound health.’
    Luca’s smile faded suddenly. God, what had happened to explorers nowadays? One dose of malaria, or a toe lost to frostbite, and they called in the helicopters. In the old days, explorers would disappear from the face of the earth for years. And they literally did disappear. They weren’t calling in every five minutes from a satellite phone or updating their website with the latest news. These menstruck off into the wilderness, alone and utterly cut off from the rest of the world. They pioneered the trails. They drew the maps.
    Somehow life today had become so tepid. It took such an effort to actually get away from anything familiar that escape itself became the point of the expedition, rather than any discovery that might arise from it.
    Something was catching the corner of his eye. Luca looked up to see that his mobile was flashing silently on the desk. Picking it up, he saw that it was his father calling. With a sigh, he put it down again. He must have heard the news that he was back – either that or it was a lucky guess. Then again, his father always did have a sixth sense for that kind of thing.
    Turning his phone face downwards, Luca exhaled before looking down at the book again.
    Despite a tantalising reference to ‘that vast, unmapped region east of Makalu’, there seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary about the mountains Bailey and his companion had gone hiking through. A few pages later, Luca was skimming through the explorers’ experiences with a more benign tribe, the Monpa, when he nearly missed a brief diary extract:
    The local Monpa describe the Tsangpo river gorge as a ‘beyul’. After much vague discussion with the chief, we discovered this term to mean some sort of highly sacred sanctuary, but from what it was impossible to discern. On further discussion we were told that there are many such sanctuaries throughout Tibet, hidden in the most in-accessible regions.
    We enquired as to the whereabouts of these other sacred places and only after much cajoling (and nearly half our supply ofexpedition gin) did the little fellow let on. Drawing a picture of a lotus flower in the dirt, he described a group of mountains, formed into a circle. At their centre, another mountain, which is supposedly the gateway to some sacred place.
    Rather amusingly, when asked where the ring of mountains was, he replied that it had been made invisible by a great sorcerer. He claimed that one had to use the wisdom from a book called the Kalak Tantra to see inside it, but as with all these things, the Tibetan villagers’ penchant for the mystic is seemingly endless. It really is quite impossible to get things clear.
    We decided to stick to the matter in hand and concentrate on getting into our own river gorge ‘beyul’.
    Luca looked up from the page, his mouth suddenly dry. These were
his
mountains. They had to be.
    So