Beautiful Ghosts (24 page)

But the vast majority of the cairns were smaller, more recent, though none less than decades old.

“The battlefield,” Shan said. “They spoke of a terrible battle in the mountains.”

“Living so close to the dead,” Lokesh said with a reverent whisper as he gazed back in the direction of the ragyapa village, “you would be brushed by many spirits. It would be like a wound.” He stood and stroked the top of a cairn. “Maybe you would have to keep the wound open, always, because of the scar that would grow over your spirit.”

Shan remembered the hollow but wise expressions of the ragyapa, even the children. They had chosen to keep the wound open, for the honor of being brushed by many spirits.

Shan saw that Lokesh had found something new. Tucked into a cleft in a ledge wall was a statue, a finely detailed image of the Future Buddha, serenely gazing over the battlefield. No, Shan saw, it had not been inserted into the cleft, it had been carved from the living stone. The workmanship was masterful, the inscription of the mantra carved into the base so fine it seemed as though it had been left with a brush.

“Zhoka,” Lokesh said.

They stared at the beautiful Buddha a long time. It was a work that belonged in a temple, or a museum, not in such a high, lonely place where living eyes almost never saw it. But Shan somehow knew Lokesh was right. It was not for the living. The monks of Zhoka had given it to the dead.

“I don’t understand what they are doing, those two policemen,” Lokesh said after a long silence.

“Trying to find the thieves,” Shan said, confused.

“Surely taking such things of beauty is a sin,” Lokesh said, “but I don’t see how the government can help. Policemen are supposed to be concerned about crime. It is far easier to punish a crime than to resolve the sin.”

For the first time Shan realized that Lokesh, too, was investigating in his own way. The battered statue with Atso, the deity paintings in the old tower, the disturbance in the harmony of the durtro, these were the clues he followed. Lokesh was on the track of godkillers, not to punish but to resolve their sin. The old Tibetan pointed to a rock formation at the side and walked toward it. A stick had been jammed into the rocks, and a makeshift prayer flag hung from it, a piece of cloth ripped from a garment, inscribed in soot. Below it, in the shadows of the rocks, were the remains of a recent fire. Shan squatted and studied the ground. Several people had been there recently, wearing the soft-soled boots of Tibetans.

In another hour the southern trail began to sharply ascend, and after two more hours of hard climbing they found themselves on a wide, high plain framed on the south and west by the distant snowcapped Himalayas. The broad, arid plateau was unlike any land Shan had ever seen. It was strewn with high spires of rock and narrow flat-topped buttes, twenty or thirty of the structures, some hundreds of feet tall, scattered across the plain. Like cairns, giant cairns arranged by the gods.

“It’s like the end of the earth,” Corbett said.

The wind suddenly found them, a cold, battering wind that seemed to want to push back down the trail, off the plateau.

“We have no food. There’s no water. We have to go back now,” Yao muttered. “We can’t sleep up here. I must be in Lhadrung, I have to call Beijing.”

“No. There are places that seek people out,” Lokesh said in a level voice, echoing the words of the ragyapa woman. “We are being pushed toward what must be done. It is just stripping us of what holds us back. Your money. Your map. Your radio. Your food.”

“My camera,” Corbett added. “My evidence kit.”

“This is no place for thieves,” Yao snapped.

Shan surveyed the rugged terrain they had crossed. He, too, had reasons to go back. Ming was still searching for a monk. Gendun was still somewhere at Zhoka, while the godkillers stalked the hills.

“No one could live in such a forsaken place.” Yao said, then paused, looking at Lokesh, who was quickly walking toward a long ledge a hundred feet away.

Shan followed his gaze and stared, disbelieving. “Someone did,” he said, and trotted to Lokesh. Words were carved into the rock in front of the old Tibetan, an inscription facing the barren, brutal plateau, not far from where their trail had entered.

“What does it say?” Corbett asked, over Shan’s shoulder.

“Study Only the Absolute,” Shan translated, glancing at Lokesh with a strange thrill of discovery.

The sudden appearance of the words seemed to take all protest out of Yao. They walked slowly along the edge of the plain. After several hundred yards Corbett pointed to an eye, two feet wide, painted on a high rockface. Soon after they passed a long slab of rock with the eight sacred symbols carved along its edge. Suddenly Corbett stopped, hand in the air, pointing. “She looks so lifelike,” he said in a whisper.

Fifty feet away in the deep shadow of a huge pillar of stone was a statue of a woman wrapped in a blanket staring out over the plain. Dawa gazed a moment, uttered a little cry, and bolted forward. As Shan followed the figure slowly moved, opening its arms to embrace the girl.

The woman who sat so still in a grey hat and a grey blanket was Liya and not Liya. She seemed stiff, unwelcoming, and acknowledged them only with a small, reluctant nod. “The brown wind will come soon,” she said impassively. “You cannot be on the plain then.” She took Dawa’s hand and began walking up a worn path that wound around a series of ledges and natural pillars.

As the others followed, Shan paused to survey the plain again. The wind had indeed increased, and a low cloud of dust had risen along the floor at the far end so that the monoliths there seemed to be floating in an eerie brown fog. Now that the deities had gotten them there they seemed loath to let them leave.

They moved down the tortuous narrow path for several minutes, stepping through a short tunnel then over a narrow channel cut into the rock to emerge into a landscape like none Shan had ever seen. It seemed as if great square blocks had been cut out of the high steep ridge, each nearly a hundred yards wide, perhaps half as deep, and fifty feet high, creating a series of four giant steps leading to the top of the ridge. The tiers of rock had sprouted juniper and hemlock trees, and houses made of stone and wood. The houses were built along the mountain walls, connected by stairs carved along a small stream that cascaded down the ledges. At the base a small wooden waterwheel caught the water as it tumbled into a pool at the base of the ridge. People could be seen on every level—not many, not enough to populate all the houses. Some stared at the newcomers suspiciously. Most glanced at them and went about their labors, as if they had been expected.

Half a dozen of the inhabitants gathered behind Liya, as if they expected her to protect them. “What do you call this place?” he heard Yao ask.

“Bumpari Dzong,”
Liya said, in a voice full of warning. “It is a very old place. They say before people lived here, gods did.”

Bumpari Dzong. It meant Treasure Vase Mountain Fortress. The old blind woman had referred to Lodi’s home as Treasure Vase, Shan remembered, the traditional place where spiritual treasures were stored.

Lokesh rubbed his palms together, seemingly delighted at her response. As Shan stepped to his side he began pointing, low sounds of pleasure coming from his throat, at two women pressing wool between two wet blankets, the first step in felt-making. Then to a small wooden frame loom where an elegant rug was being created. And a woman crushing plant stems with a stone pestle, making incense in the old style. They were things, Shan realized, Lokesh had probably not seen for years, for decades even, things from his childhood he may have assumed were lost forever.

The extraordinary terraced settlement was indeed living in a different century. The houses, the implements, the reverent relief carvings on the rock walls, even the homespun and embroidered clothing of most of the inhabitants could have been from the eighteenth century or earlier. But as he studied the inhabitants, Shan saw that the young woman sitting at the loom wore an expensive gold watch, and a teenage boy who worked at the waterwheel had stylish running shoes on his feet.

Corbett pulled on Shan’s sleeve. “The entrance path,” he said.

Shan turned to see a team of yak straining, pulling a huge slab of stone with braided leather ropes down the stone channel they had stepped across, sealing the tunnel that led to the village. Beside it a dark, compact man stood like a sentry, holding a musket. The man did not look like the others in the village. Shan suspected he was from across the border, from Nepal, probably of the Gurka people. In his wide belt was a curved blade, and what looked like an automatic pistol.

Liya ushered them toward a small clearing under a half circle of juniper trees growing at the base of the cliff that defined the western wall of the settlement. Vines grew up the cliff, and peeking through an opening in the vines was an animated, excited face carved in the stone, the laughing countenance of a Tibetan saint. Inside a ring of mortared stones a fire burned, a kettle on its grill of iron bars. Others arrived as the tea was being churned, one of them a middle-aged woman in a red embroidered dress, who brought a copper teapot which she filled from the kettle, then from a pouch at her waist dropped in several green tea leaves. She poured the green tea into four matching white cups—for Shan, Yao, Corbett, and herself—as the other Tibetans silently accepted bowls of traditional buttered tea. They sat in a circle, studying their visitors with expectant faces.

“We have waited long,” the woman in the red dress said in a warm tone. “Welcome to our village.” She spoke the words two times, once in Mandarin, once in English. As she sipped her cup the sun broke out of the cloud cover, washing the little clearing in a brilliant light.

“Your eyes!” Dawa blurted out, pointing at the woman. “What is wrong?” Then she paused and looked to Corbett and back at the woman. “They are like his! Like a goserpa’s,” she said.

Blue. The woman’s eyes were blue. Shan studied the other villagers, some of whose faces were obscured by hats. More than half of those he could see had blue eyes. They had found the blue men who lived in the south.

“Yes,” the older woman said, and handed the girl a wooden bowl of shelled walnuts. “A wonderful man lived here many years ago, an Inchi teacher. He was the grandfather and great-grandfather to most who live here today. He came from England a hundred years ago.”

The words caused Corbett’s head to snap toward the woman. “British?” the American asked.

The woman nodded. “In the Wood Dragon Year, hundreds of British came to Tibet. Many became good friends of our country. And more,” she added with a mischievous glint, then refilled their cups.

She was referring to the Younghusband expedition, Shan realized, in which Great Britain, reacting to exaggerated reports that Russia was establishing a military foothold in Tibet, had sent troops to force political and trading links with Lhasa. The year had been 1904.

“They came as soldiers,” she said. “Ready to do war. But for many the real fighting they did was inside themselves. They had not known about Tibet, about Tibetans.”

Shan searched his memory, recalling Western history books he had read with his father. There had been a few small battles, with heavy casualties among the Tibetans, who fought with charms and muskets against Maxim machine guns. The British had surprised the Tibetans by giving medical aid to the wounded Tibetans. The Tibetans had surprised the British by using the Buddhist scriptures as guidelines for negotiations. After leaving Tibet, Colonel Younghusband, the expedition leader, had been a changed man. He formed a new council for world religions, and spent his life working for global peace.

“You are our guests,” the woman said. “You may wash,” she said, pointing to a stone trough by the pond. “You may explore our world. We ask only that you respect the mourners,” she added, gesturing toward a small structure beyond the junipers that had the appearance of a temple. Two braziers flanked the door, each emitting a column of smoke. “And that you will not go to the top level, where there are sacred things. Later we will share food.”

Shan studied Liya as the woman spoke. Her face was clouded with worry, and she looked away when she met Shan’s gaze.

Dawa pulled Corbett toward the pond. Lokesh started up the path to the next level, where gardens of flowering shrubs led to a long elegant timber frame building.

Liya stepped toward the temple, as if to avoid Shan, who watched, sipping tea as the circle around the fire dispersed. He studied the strange, beguiling landscape, his gaze settling on a cottage at the opposite end of the first level, a sturdy wooden building with a gracefully sloping wooden shingled roof and a narrow porch on which were suspended a large prayer wheel and several flower boxes, spilling blue and red blossoms down the porch railing.

As he stepped onto the porch of the cottage, Shan found himself touching the exquisitely worked copper prayer wheel, turning it as he walked by. At the end of the porch was an old rocking chair, its rockers worn thin from long use.

The interior of the building, like everything else he had seen in the terraced village, had been constructed with great skill and attention to detail. Beams were tightly joined with precisely fitted mortice and tenon joints, and carved with climbing vines. Stained and varnished planks of wood had been joined to form wainscotting that rose four feet from the floor along the walls of the main chamber, with smooth white plaster above. On one wall hung a small Union Jack flag over shelves of Western books, on another a dozen framed photographs were hung over a simple stone fireplace. On the other two walls hung several cloth thangkas, one above a small wooden altar with a bronze Buddha. The chamber had the air of a small, intimate museum. Shan investigated the doors that led out of the room. The first chamber held a simple wooden-framed bed covered with a thick down quilt, framed drawings on the walls. The second room was a small kitchen, the third another bedroom with two wooden beds, a shelf over the farthest holding an array of compact electronic devices. A floorboard creaked and Shan returned to the main chamber to find Yao staring at the British flag, Liya at his side.