Escape from the Land of Snows Read Online Free Page A

penetrating brown eyes and a confident expression. He walked up to the abbot, took the rosary in his tiny hands, and said, “I want that.”
    The words seemed to echo in the room. The attendants turned to look at the boy. Ketsing Rimpoche smiled and said, “If you guess who I am, you can definitely have it.”
    “You are a lama of Sera,” said the boy.
    Ketsing Rimpoche nodded. “And who is this?” He pointed to the government official with him.
    The boy turned to look. “That is Lobsang Tsewang,” the boy said. Then he remarked that the other two visitors were from Sera Monastery. Each answer was correct. Packed into the tiny room,the men who’d come a thousand miles to find the next Dalai Lama shot glances at one another. They felt themselves to be on the verge of one of the central miracles of their faith, the return of Chenrizi to earth, a thing of almost inexpressible joyfulness.
    The party stayed the night at the young boy’s house. Ketsing Rimpoche played with him but asked him no further questions. The next morning, when the party was leaving, Lhamo Thondup burst from the front door and ran after the group from Lhasa, crying that he wanted to go with them. The search party could console the weeping boy only by telling him they would return soon.
    Back at the monastery, Ketsing Rimpoche sent a messenger off with a telegram to the authorities in Lhasa, telling them (in prearranged code) of their discovery of a promising candidate. The messenger set off for Sining, where the message would be relayed through India and China and finally back to Lhasa, along Tibet’s only telegraph line. Four weeks later, the reply arrived: “The young Takster boy sounds very interesting,” it read. “We have high hopes for him.” Ketsing Rimpoche was instructed to continue the examination.
    As the abbot departed for Takster for the second time, the entire search party of forty men went with him. The monks blew on their conch shells, the sound of the Dharma’s constant victory over ignorance, always a favorable omen. Along the way, the party met a young Chinese man ferrying wood to his home by donkey and asked him the way to the boy’s house. The man told them to take the lower of two possible paths to their destination, and soon they came to a clearing that they recognized as the spot where the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had stopped briefly while traveling through the area decades before. It was a minor landmark in the spiritual map of Tibet, but the excitement of the search party increased. It was as if a string of portents were leading them onward to Lhamo Thondup.
    When the forty dignitaries tramped down into their enclosed yard, Diki Tsering and her husband knew that their youngest boy was destined for something greater than a life as an Amdo farmer. They suspected he’d been marked as a high lama. Already, one of Lhamo Thondup’s older brothers had been recognized as the reincarnation of another holy man. And the search party’s appearance came as a relief: their little boy had been tormenting them ever since Ketsing Rimpoche had left, wanting to know when the abbot would return and asking his mother to brew her best tea and cook a special meal so that the abbot and his companions would be happy when they arrived. The boy had even piled some of his possessions on the kitchen table and told his bewildered mother, “I’m packing to go to Lhasa.” But they didn’t dream that the dignitaries were there to find the next Dalai Lama.
    Ketsing Rimpoche, now dressed in his abbot’s robes, presented the boy’s father and mother with presents and requested to see Lhamo Thondup alone. The pair showed the abbot and his attendants to their bedroom, and the search party placed a long wooden table across the bed. On it, Ketsing Rimpoche laid the items he’d brought from Lhasa for just such an occasion: two black rosaries, two yellow rosaries, two
damaru
hand drums, and two walking sticks. One item of each pair had belonged to the