Jowa's head shot up. "There's a lake, a shrine lake, an oracle lake, a few miles from here. I saw it once from a distance, with an old hunter. He said it froze much later than others, that deities must live in it because it always shined like a diamond."
* * *
They walked in silence for hours, through the high barren landscape, wary of any sound, dashing for cover even at a sudden roar of wind, fearful that it could be a plane or helicopter. Their paths were the trails of wild goats, their landmarks distant peaks that Jowa frequently stopped to study, as if he were mentally triangulating their postion. The purba led them around a valley where a small herd of antelope ran, then passed over a saddle of rock and began climbing a long ridge, always climbing, jogging along the bare places without cover, stopping twice to add rocks to the cairns built at high points as offerings to the mountain deities. A raven flew over them for an hour, watching them closely, circling back, roosting from time to time as if waiting for them. Bajys, whom Shan always kept in front of him, stopped often to stare at the creature, as if somehow he recognized it.
They went higher, over another pass, then up a steep trail of switchbacks. Shan found himself gasping for oxygen for the first time since acclimating to the Tibetan altitude years earlier. They found a stream of blue glacier melt and drank long. Jowa remained squatting by the stream. "I was wondering," he said to Shan, "did you tell Lokesh where the waterkeeper is?"
Shan rose and looked at the purba. "He listened while I spoke about it," he recounted slowly, then saw the concern in Jowa's eyes and understood. Gendun and Lokesh might try to find the waterkeeper, a link to the lost boy. Shan closed his eyes and fought the image in his mind's eye. If the lama decided Glory Camp was where he needed to be, he would walk right up to the wire, walk right up to the knobs and Prosecutor Xu.
Before they left Bajys had collected a dozen stones and built a small cairn, a tribute to the deity who lived in the mountain they climbed. It was to gain merit, Shan realized, part of atoning for losing Khitai. Bajys started down the path as he finished, but Jowa and Shan lingered, each adding several stones himself, sharing, Shan knew, the same silent fear of Lokesh and Gendun being captured at Glory Camp.
The further they climbed, the greater became Shan's sense of entering a different world. Bajys seemed to sense it too. He hung back, trying to let Shan pass him, to let him linger behind, but Shan pushed him on. A snow squall passed over them, obscuring Jowa but leaving his tracks outlined in white for them to follow.
"If Jowa is wrong," Bajys said as Shan caught up with him, sounding suddenly very confident, "we will die in the cold that dwells this high." They had a single blanket for the three of them, only a small pouch of cold tsampa to eat, and nowhere was there sign of fuel for a fire.
Abruptly the sky cleared into a deep, brilliant cobalt.
Looking below, Shan saw that the snow had not stopped but that they had simply climbed above the storm.
They walked for another hour, over another ridge, then found Jowa waiting for them at the top of a small ledge that overlooked an extraordinary valley. They stood at the northern head of a mile-long expanse of gravel and dried grass that dropped between two long, massive rock walls with such perfect symmetry that they gave the impression of two monoliths that had once towered at the north end of the valley but that had been pushed over to shield the valley. Between them at the far end was a lake, still and clear, a piece of sky fallen to earth. The walls dropped at nearly identical angles toward the lake, each lined near its top with a tier of snow so perfectly straight that it seemed a baker had frosted them. Surprisingly, despite the cold and altitude, a few gnarled junipers grew at the edge of the water. And at the end of the valley, there was nothing but air. The world simply fell away past the strip of land that defined the end of the valley. In the far distance mountains could be seen, hugged by mist, but between the far peaks and the valley was only sky. Shan remembered stepping above the snow squall. It was as if they had arrived in a land that floated in the clouds.
"I thought this would be the place," Jowa said, with worry in his eyes. They would have no time to return to the shelter of Senge Drak before nightfall.
Shan moved to his side and looked down the face of the ledge they stood on. Three hundred feet below, past a series of ledges that jutted out like giant steps from the cliff face, there was a row of rocks. No, he saw, not a row, but a wall of rocks.
The silence was broken by a sudden hollow tapping sound from nearby, so loud it made him jump. A raven called as if in reply, and Shan looked up to see the large black bird land on a rock thirty feet away. Somehow he knew that it was the same bird that had followed them.
Jowa grabbed his arm, and Shan turned to follow his gaze toward Bajys, who had dropped to his knees by a flat rock that was immersed in the shadows. Bajys wore a look of wonder, the way Lokesh sometimes looked when his eyes saw between worlds. Shan took a hesitant step forward.
It was a rock, only a rock, or rather a large roundish boulder on top of a flat rock. But the rock had a smile on it.
They heard the hollow tapping again, louder, and it made Bajys crouch down, as if cowering. Shan drew closer, and the smile in the rock grew larger. Bajys wasn't cowering, he realized. The dropka was bowing.
A grey arm extended out of the boulder, holding the bottom of a short wooden staff, and as the base of the staff hit the rock they heard the tapping sound again. The raven spoke and hopped closer.
Shan knelt, then Jowa knelt, and as they watched, the boulder seemed to inch forward, its smile growing still bigger.
"Ai yi!" Bajys gasped.
The darkness above the smile stirred and two eyes appeared.
It was a man, an ancient man wrapped in a grey sheepskin cloak and a conical cap of the same material, shaped to cover the back of his neck and to hang low over his eyes, so that they were obscured when his head was bent. The eyes studied each of the three men in turn, sparkling with energy. The man tapped his staff again.
"After the snow my stick always rings," he said with amazement in his eyes, and he tapped it again for sheer pleasure. His voice was hoarse and slow, as if long out of practice. His skin was grey parchment, his fingers long and gnarled, as though made of jointed pebbles.
Shan looked at Bajys and Jowa. The Tibetans seemed overpowered by the old man.
The man's head drifted up and his eyes fluttered closed for a moment. "When the wind stops," he whispered, "listen to the water. You can hear it shimmering."
"We are looking for the gompa," Shan said with a quiver in his voice.
The man's head cocked to one side, and he laughed, a deep laugh that ended with a series of wheezing sounds. Then he abruptly rose, as if he had been pulled up by some unseen force. He stepped between Shan and Jowa and stopped, looking at the raven. The bird cocked its head at the man, turned toward the lake, and disappeared, not flying but jumping over the side of the ledge.
The man laughed again, stepped into a patch of shadow, and, incredibly, began to shrink.
Bajys gasped, then rose and stepped forward as if he might help the stranger. But the man had disappeared into the rock.
"A sorcerer," Bajys gasped.
"No," Shan said with slow realization. "Stairs."
They moved into the shadows and found a narrow set of steps, carved into the living rock and worn hollow in the center from centuries of use. Bajys darted forward and disappeared down into the shadows. Jowa and Shan exchanged an uneasy glance and followed.
It wasn't a cave they entered, as Shan had expected, but a dimly lit room of stone and mortar walls built against the cliff face. The light of a single butter lamp lit the room, below a long thangka of a brilliant blue Buddha. The Primordial Buddha, it was called— the Buddha of Pure Awareness. A brazier, laced with cobwebs, stood near the base of the rock steps. The wall opposite the rock face and the wall at the far end of the room each had a single heavy wooden door. Shan tried the nearest one. It opened slowly, with a groan of its iron hinges, into a chamber lit by a window that looked out over the valley.
From two wooden pegs driven into the mortar a rod was suspended, holding the remnants of an old jute sack over the stone window casement. There were cushions along the wall. On one cushion sat a small bow, like that he had used at Senge Drak. Though obscured with dust Shan could see that several cushions were made of silk, richly embroidered with shapes of conches, fish, lotus flowers, and other sacred symbols. It had the feel of a small
dukhang
, a monastic assembly hall, where lessons might have been given.
He stood silently as Jowa walked along the walls, feeling the reverence that permeated the chamber. "I think you have found it," Shan suggested. "One of the Yakde's gompas."
A small bronze Buddha, no more than eight inches high, had been placed on a stool near the window, facing the valley, as if to let him see the water that looked like sky. Or perhaps, Shan thought, so he could keep watch.
Jowa stood by the little Buddha. It, too, was covered with dust. He took the tail of his shirt and wiped clean not the Buddha but the stool around it, the way a monk would clean an altar without disturbing its sacred objects. When he was done he looked up at the door and back to Shan, both men realizing in the same moment that Bajys had not joined them.
They stepped back into the first chamber, then opened the second door. It opened silently into a dim passage. They followed it past half a dozen meditation cells and then descended another set of ancient stone stairs. The mountain, Shan realized, as he studied the steps and stone of the passage, did indeed descend in a series of huge stairlike ledges. What he had seen from the top had been the rock slab roofs of the structures built on those ledges.
A door at the bottom of the second set of stairs opened into a long passage, much warmer, its air hinting of incense and butter and the slightly acrid smell that came from braziers fueled by dried chips of animal dung. They passed more cells and opened a heavy timber door with ornate iron work, stepping into a large room that was brightly lit by two windows, one sealed with a frame of panes made of blown glass, uneven and bubbled, the other covered with a piece of transparent plastic sheeting that rattled in the wind.
There were half a dozen men in the room, all in faded maroon robes, seated in a circle around a large smoldering brazier. Several held the long rectangular leaves that came from pecha texts, and they appeared to have been reading to one another. One of them, now shorn of his cap and cloak, was the ancient man with the parchment complexion from above. Bajys, to Shan's surprise, was serving the monks tea, as if he were hosting them, as if he were a novice of the gompa, a familiar of the household.
Carpets, threadbare in spots, were laid on the floor, overlapping so that none of the stone floor was exposed. The walls were panelled in fragrant wood.
As Shan stepped forward, the men stared at him with wide-eyed expressions of curiosity. A bald man several years older than Shan but clearly the youngest of the group glanced at the back wall where clothing hung on pegs. The slight movement of his eyes confirmed Shan's suspicion that the monks were unlicensed. When Chinese came, the monks put on the clothes of peasants.
Jowa exchanged a glance with Shan. He had seen it too. The last gompa Shan had visited had a banner over its gate that read
Buddhism Must Resonate with Chinese Socialism.
It had been raised by the Democratic Management Committee of the gompa, the body appointed by the Bureau of Religious Affairs to supervise the gompa's affairs. Committee members, carefully screened by political officers before being appointed by the government, were responsible, among other things, for assuring that all monks signed certificates promising not to take part in political activity.
The tension in the room broke as Bajys stepped forward with tea for Shan and Jowa, and they silently sat with the monks in their circle. This gompa had no Democratic Management Committee, no political certificates, no licenses for its monks. If discovered by the government its residents would be arrested and sentenced to hard labor. Some monks, like Jowa, walked away from their gompas instead of signing political certificates and applying for Beijing's permission. Shan knew many who had signed, strong, devoted teachers who argued that a piece of Chinese paper made no difference, and others who insisted that no one could ever be the same after signing, that the act was like a dark stone cast into the waters of their serenity, rippling outward, changing forever the face of their inner god.
As he surveyed the circle of monks a realization warmed his heart. Although these monks had been warned about Chinese and wearing robes, he knew by looking in their faces that they had no first-hand experience with licenses or government bureaucrats who pressed monks to report what their companions prayed for. Only the youngest of the monks had hesitated and looked at the peasant clothing. The monks in the circle were like the untamed, feral animals of the changtang, untouched and pure. A species near extinction.
The monks sat quietly, smiling radiantly at their visitors. "Welcome to Raven's Nest gompa," the bald monk said.
