The Golden Apple of Shangri-La Read Free

and purposes, ready to fly, the monks from the lamasery poised at the mooring ropes anchored to stone blocks.
    â€œIt will work,” said Jamyang.
    Rowena looked sidelong at the Tibetan sandwiched between her and Reed in the cramped cockpit. “You’ve done this before?”
    He looked at her and blinked his heavy-lidded eyes. “No. Of course not.”
    â€œThen how do you know it will work?”
    Jamyang shrugged, the furs on his shoulders rising and falling. “Why would it not?”
    She sighed. “Then let us go.”
    Jamyang raised his hand in signal to the monks below and while four of them began to loosen the mooring ropes, another group bearing torches moved in at the four corners of the wooden frame around the dirigible’s helium balloon and simultaneously touched the flames to long threads hanging from the bases of the tubes that had been fixed to the skeleton. As each one fizzed into life, Rowena bit her lip. This was madness. But the Skylady was free of her moorings and drifting slowly up in the thin air.
    â€œWhat bearing, Jamyang?” she said.
    He pointed to the north-east and Rowena released the shaft-brake, the propellers creaking into life and driving the ‘stat forward, away from the imposing sight of the Tashi Lhunpo monastery. She brought it around to fix on Jamyang’s bearing, tapping the altimeter on the instrument panel. The mountain fell sharply away beneath them, but much higher peaks were rising up in the distance.
    â€œWe’re already at five thousand feet,” she said. “Which is about as high as the Skylady goes. How long before we get your extra lift , Jamyang?”
    He scrutinized the bleak, mountainous landscape in front of them, then glanced through the side-window at the slowly-burning fuse. “I anticipate it will happen just in time, Miss Fanshawe.”
    *   *   *
    Just in time couldn’t come soon enough for Rowena Fanshawe. The Himalayas were a harsh, unforgiving landscape, and she couldn’t conceive of Von Karloff and his crew trying to scale these peaks on foot. The mountains ahead of them had come progressively closer in the four hours they had been airborne, and the true scale of them was only now becoming apparent. They obliterated the sunlight, casting the whole valley beneath them in shadow, and Rowena tried to estimate their height using their current bearing and altitude. When she came up with a figure that was at least four times that of the Skylady ’s maximum lift, she stopped trying to calculate it.
    â€œHow long until we hit the side of that mountain?” asked Reed.
    â€œYou’re being awfully blasé about this,” she said through gritted teeth.
    â€œThat’s because I have ultimate faith in Jamyang.”
    Rowena didn’t say that’s very good of you as you didn’t even know him until last night but instead made a swift estimation and said, “Perhaps twenty minutes, maybe half an hour if I kill the engines. Just enough time to turn around. But if we don’t do it now…”
    â€œNo need,” said Jamyang, looking over her shoulder through the side window. “I think the fuses are about ready.”
    â€œWhat exactly is in those tubes, Jamyang?”
    â€œGunpowder,” he just had time to say, then there were four sudden screaming noises, so close together as to form one unholy cacophony, and the Skylady suddenly lurched forwards and upwards, some invisible force pinning Rowena in the leather pilot’s seat as the wall of the mountain—now so close she could make out cracks and crevices in the rock—flew past as though a cine film of the sort they showed on summer nights in Hyde Park played at the wrong speed. Rowena forced her head to move to the right and she cursed as she saw flames. But the ‘stat wasn’t on fire—at least, not yet. The tubes the monks had screwed to the dirigible frame were spitting