Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

When he reached the crest of the first ridge he lowered himself onto a rock, trying to push his mind into a place as quiet as the mountain meadow he sat in so he might make sense of what he had heard. His brief moments with Ming felt like a waking nightmare. Surely he had misunderstood, surely the urbane museum director had not been casually threatening the lives of the monks. No one in Lhadrung knew of the secret hermitage. No one, he realized with a pang, except Surya.

He had to find the monks, had to convince them to flee from the outsiders who had come to Lhadrung. But even as he looked toward the eastern peaks that surrounded Yerpa he knew they would never flee.

As he replayed the scene with McDowell and Ming he remembered the paper he had taken from McDowell’s car. It was in a Chinese font, printed from a computer, but it was a Tibetan document, filled with Tibetan place names and instructions for prayer. A neyig, he realized after reading it twice. The British woman was reading a pilgrim’s guide, one of the ancient books written to help pilgrims find important shrines and sites of spiritual power. Someone had gone to a great deal of work to translate one of the old books word for word. It was numbered at the bottom, Volume fourteen, page fifty-six. He read it once more, recognizing some of the names now. Kumbum. Sangke. They were hundreds of miles to the north. But this was volume fourteen, meaning someone had put huge effort into compiling and translating many of the old guides. If Ming was seeking old shrines in the mountains, the old pilgrim books would tell him how to find them, at least most of them. They would be in caves, in old Tibetan houses, in sheltered sites considered power places. Shan was not familiar with this part of the mountains, did not know many of the sacred places. But he did know one structure that had looked very old when he had found it in the night.

Half an hour later he was gazing down at the house whose outline he had seen in the darkness, a small stone structure with a grey tile roof, built into the side of the hill. Additions had been built into the ends of the house, one of pressed earth, one of plywood and timbers salvaged from a bigger building. Shan approached the house warily, remembering the dog he had heard in the night. Beyond the house was a small field of barley, outlined with rows of stones. A structure with hay beside it was clearly a stable, but a second structure was not for storing fodder as he would have expected. The small sturdy building was constructed entirely of stone, its roof consisting of thin stone slabs, its small chimney constructed of dry laid stone. He stepped toward the building, which looked even older than the house. There was no door, only an opening framed in aged timbers through which Shan saw a domed stone shape like an oven. In front of it was a device with a foot pedal, leather belts that drove a large, horizontal wooden wheel on top. It was a potting wheel and a kiln that had probably been used for centuries.

Sheep dung lay scattered across the small enclosure made of earthen walls in front of the stable, though there were no sheep to be seen. In the sheltered area between the stable and the house the earth had been compacted and a frame of timbers supported a tattered felt blanket, creating a makeshift porch. In the shade of the blanket was a line of clay jars, each covered with a cloth top tied with twine. It was the way Tibetans often stored butter and milk. Beyond the jars, on a square of homespun woolen, lay a mound of coarse salt. Near the doorway sat three small dronma, churns used to make buttered tea, and five feet beyond an iron cooking tripod held a kettle over a smoldering fire. Under the edge of the blanket awning thin clay tablets were lined up, perhaps a hundred of them, tsa-tsa, stamped with the images of saints, in the process of being painted.

The weathered plank door still hung ajar. Shan knocked on it once, called out, then stepped inside. The house’s single window illuminated a tidy central room, swept clean, the faint scent of incense lingering in the air. It was as if a gathering had been planned, then abandoned by the inhabitants. The pressed earth walls created an alcove that served as a shrine, holding an old cloth thankga and an altar on which were arrayed a painted ceramic statue of the Historical Buddha and the seven offering bowls of Tibetan tradition. He bent to study the thangka and statue. They were old, both extraordinary in their detail, the work of accomplished artists.

Opposite the altar, in the wing made of plywood and cardboard nailed onto timber posts, lay several sleeping pallets tied in rolls and more than a dozen heavy blankets. Only one pallet and one blanket lay open, recently used. He paced slowly along the walls, uneasy with his intrusion but unable to stop wondering about those who lived there and what had happened to them. Suspended on a pole over the rear wall of the main chamber was a large cloth, thin as a sheet, adorned with painted flowers which were all faded to shades of grey and brown. He paced along the wood planks of the floor, studying a small chest in one corner on which cooking implements were stacked, then stepped back to the flowered cloth and pulled it aside, exposing half a dozen deep shelves. The bottom shelves held household items, crockery and pots, long wooden spoons, a bowl of buttons.

On the shelf just below the top were several peche, traditional Tibetan books, their long loose leaves tied between two wooden end pieces with silk cords. Beside the peche were half a dozen other books bound in Western fashion, all in English. The Works of William Shakespeare. Great Poems of Britain. A novel by Graham Greene. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott. A surge of emotion washed through Shan as he ran a finger down the spine of the Ivanhoe. His father had read the book to Shan in secret, in a closet with his mother keeping watch, before the Red Guards had burned his father’s books. The novel, like all the other books, was many decades old. It was, he became certain as he examined the frontispiece depicting a straw-haired groom helping a knight with his armor, the same edition his father had read to him.

The only objects on the top shelf were a ceramic bust of a rosy-cheeked, plump Western woman wearing a crown and a large wooden case with a leather handle and brass latches. He looked back across the empty room toward the open door, then pulled the case down. Twenty inches wide and nearly ten inches deep, its brass fittings were as well polished as the walnut case itself. He set the case on the rough little table and stepped to the door. There was still no sign of anyone. He paced uneasily about the room, then returned to the table and quickly opened the case.

It was a porcelain tea set, packed in matted packing fibers, painted with patterns of blue and golden flowers. He lifted the delicate pot, studying it in confusion. Its long spout was painted with blooming vines, and a rosebud finial adorned the top of the lid. It was not Tibetan, nor Chinese. Staffordshire, it said on the bottom. Arrayed around the pot had been six matching cups and saucers. One cup, but not its saucer, was missing, leaving its shape in the packing material. He fingered the fibers and suddenly remembered the English word, because in the lessons his father had given him inside their locked closet they had laughed over the way it rolled off the tongue, and because his father had declared Shan a top pupil for mastering the difficult pronunciation. Excelsior.

He gently returned the pot to the case, closed it, and replaced it on its shelf. Stealing a glance at the doorway, he lifted the Walter Scott novel from its resting place again and leafed through its heavy white pages, pausing at its color plates of knights in armor and damsels with sad, distant expressions. The borders of the plates, but not the other pages, were stained with many fingerprints. Near the front was a small printed legend. Published in London, it said, 1886. Looking guiltily toward the door but unable to fight the emotions the book had triggered, he turned to the opening page. With an unexpected rush of excitement he read out loud, in a hesitant whisper at first, then louder, pausing to step to the door so he could read toward the sky.