present, the past, seasons, rain and heat, making it barely possible to distinguish between day and night. Voices, the sound of footsteps, the least little cough produced a subtle echo like the diffuse hubbub of a river or the rumble of an underground tremor. Swallows, which I at first mistook for bats, flew to and fro through the air around me, skimming my hair with the tips of their wings, some coming very close to crashing into the glass walls, lit up like a palace of memories in that amphitheatre of eternal printing plates.
It was only when I climbed the long, steep staircase at the centre of the stupa and reached the shelving up a bamboo ladder that I found the first personal touch from Tumchooq: numbers traced in curcuma formed a lustrous bronze embellishment to each sacred plate, probably an inventory system, numbers in a familiar hand, like those I saw long ago in the greengrocers written in chalk on the price boards, or in pencil in the shop’s accounts book. Seeing the particular care Tumchooq had taken over the top floor, I realised that this had been the focus of his attention, towards which all of his efforts—and even his suffering—had converged over the years. A filigreed wooden frame hung on the lintel over the doorway and written in golden capitals on a blue background was the word “Jataka”—the sacred works relating Buddha’s previous lives, which constitute one of the most significant bodies of sutras in the Pali language, and whose narrative style and content, according to Paul d’Ampère, come closest to the Tumchooq text on the torn scroll.
There were very many engraved plates there, with labels indicating their titles and giving summaries in Pali and Burmese, which—to my great regret—I couldn’t decipher. Some of the labels were accompanied by a simple illustration (the archivist’s whim or instructions to illiterate monks?), often drawings of the animals in whose form the future Buddha was incarnated: buffalo, lion, elephant, ass, horse, camel, stag, tiger and lots of birds—partridge, blue tit, sparrow, dove, stork, turtledove, etc. The creator of these pictures seemed to have a predilection for the grey parrot, and I then remembered that his father had told him these birds were the most eminent living linguists on the planet: the silky grey of their plumage, their black beaks, the red tuft crowning their heads, and most of all the incredibly human look in their eyes; I knew he’d been thinking of his father as he drew those birds.
As with the house, there was no furniture, except for a hammock in faded fabric hanging between the shelves, and its thick ropes had carved the furrows of passing time in the beam it was attached to. In places the worn rope held by only a few twisted, muddled, blackened fibres, while the woven rush matting over the floor had been flattened beneath the master’s feet. How many times did he walk up and down in one night of insomnia? Thousands? Inspired by a desire to know, I counted the engraved plates, first on that floor, then, going from one level to another, in the whole stupa: the total figure, insofar as my estimate could be accurate, was in the region of two hundred thousand, without counting the damaged plates, icons, matrices and wood engravings piled up in great sacks in the basement. Considering the average sutra comprises thirty pages, and therefore thirty engraved plates—a hypothesis reached after some deliberation—I reckoned Tumchooq must have examined seven thousand texts of the Buddhist canon through his watchmakers glasses. Day and night, summer and winter, year after year, his eyesight must have deteriorated, clouded, been ruined as he worked exhaustively through the monastery’s incalculable collection, probably without ever achieving the goal he had set himself eleven years earlier beside his fathers grave: to find the integral text of the torn scroll, in whatever language he could.
I felt intuitively that his trip to Japan was all part of this interminable quest, his unfinished project, like a step in a new direction, perhaps even the last. That sutra which was believed lost for ever could resurface out of nowhere at any moment and against all expectations—in the antique book markets of Kyoto, in the cellars of a Japanese military library or religious institution. I wondered whether, in his obsessive search for the sutra, this man who was used to living and managing on so little and who, like his father, was first and foremost an adventurer, I