Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Ten minutes later they were all on the other side, making tea, after Corbett showed them how to use the small gas stove the army had provided. As Dawa sorted what extra dry clothes she could find for Shan, Ko, and Lokesh, Yao began studying the chamber with his lamp. The pool carved a long half oval into the room, whose curving back wall had two stairways cut in the living stone, leading to passages extending to the east and west.

“The circular tunnel,” Yao said as Shan joined him. “We are inside your mandala.” He looked back at the black pool. “Surely pilgrims weren’t expected to enter that way.”

“There were many ways,” Lokesh said in a solemn voice. “But each was a test. You read the guide. Be terrified or do not continue. Surely there were pilgrims who needed to come through the water, may even have been told by the lamas here they must do so. The heart of the world is not to be easily attained. Here is where your life is left behind,” he said, repeating the words of the pilgrim guide.

“What do you mean, the heart of the world?” Yao asked.

“The mandala is a form of the universe. The essence of the world.” He gazed at Yao with an expression of sudden curiosity.

Yao frowned. “You mean a model of the universe,” the inspector said uncertainly. “A pretend place.”

“No,” Lokesh readily replied. “The opposite. More real than real.” He saw the confusion on Yao’s face and shrugged. “Outside, the universe can be difficult to see. But here-” he gestured toward the walls, which seemed alive with color and shapes, “it is within the reach of your arms.”

Dawa pushed against Lokesh, her hand reaching up to hold his arm, staring uneasily at the walls.

“Acala, Tamdin, the gatekeepers,” Lokesh said, speaking to two of the images in a happy, nostalgic tone, as if greeting old friends. He moved slowly along the wall, pausing at a vivid painting of a figure holding a staff, surrounded by flames, a mongoose in his hand. “The king of the north,” he explained, passing his palm over the surface, as Shan had seen Gendun do at the Stone Tower. When he stopped there was a new glow in his eyes. He rubbed his palms together then leaned toward Shan. “There have been prayers,” he whispered.

Shan stared at him, but before he could press the old Tibetan to explain Lokesh stepped beyond the tunnel, to the wall directly opposite the underwater entrance, raising his light. An inscription was painted in gold over a painting of the Historical Buddha. “Does one who has immersed himself in the stream that flows to enlightenment,” Lokesh read, “say of himself I have entered the stream?” He looked back with a grin. It was a familiar line, taken from the ancient Diamond Sutra.

“Is every writing to be a riddle?” Yao demanded in a frustrated tone. “And why here?” he added, echoing Shan’s own thought.

“The answer to the riddle is no,” Shan said slowly. “Because having conscious thought of being in the stream means you have not attained the selfless state of enlightenment.”

“So we must not recognize the water,” Corbett said in a new, eager voice, as if warming to the game. He paced along the pool. “And if the water wasn’t here, what? We’d be dry,” he mused. “We’d be warmer.” He paused and examined the room again. “We’d be able to look up and make sense of that,” he said, shining his light on the ceiling.

The ceiling was uneven, each side curving sharply inward to meet at the center, as if being folded along a long, even seam, each side visible only to those who stood directly beneath it. On the side where Corbett and Shan stood it had been painted with half of a white snow lion, with a turquoise mane, its mouth open in a traditional pose, a ferocious expression that somehow looked more like a laugh than a roar, one paw raised and bent, a tiny monk cradled in it.

“Half a lion,” Yao called from the opposite side, “a garland of skulls wrapped around its front leg.”

There was a wrathful lion protector on the ceiling, one side of its body painted on each half of the segmented ceiling.

After studying the chamber another quarter hour, finding no other riddle, no other way to interpret the words from the old sutra, they ventured into the western tunnel. Yao counted paces as they moved, pausing often to add to the rough map he was drawing in his pad. Their progress was slow. The inner wall was lined with chapels, many tiny, no more than six feet wide, some twice as long, each filled with dazzling paintings, some with altars lined with small figures of saints, aspects of the Buddha in bronze, copper, silver, and gold.

Lokesh lingered, refusing to be rushed as he visited the chapels. Shan and Yao found him sitting in the third one, before a hanging thangka of protector demons, Liya standing beside him. “Someone’s been here,” she said, and pointed to a tiny column of ash, the remains of an incense stick extending from a stone holder on the altar.

“It could have been long ago,” Yao said.

“No. You can smell it,” Liya said. “It’s fresh. And a butter lamp.”

“But I told you,” Lokesh said, “Gendun has been here. He knows how to bring the deities back.”

“I didn’t think … Alone in the caves…” Liya began, then with a shudder seemed to accept Lokesh’s words.

After they examined the first six chapels, Corbett protested that it would take hours to study all the art. “If the corridor follows the pattern of a circle,” he said, “then if some of us go ahead we can’t get lost, or separated for long.”

Yao agreed. “If we find nothing in an hour, we leave,” the inspector warned as he took a step down the tunnel. “This is not an archaeological expedition. We are seeking criminals.”

Archaeological criminals, Shan almost reminded him as he glanced at Lokesh, engrossed in a painting, then followed Yao. Had Surya found his way inside the mandala palace, he wondered. Had Shan somehow betrayed the old Tibetans by bringing outsiders into the ancient temple? One moment he was eagerly looking for Gendun, the next worried about what would happen if Yao and Corbett stumbled upon the old lama. Or the Mountain Buddha.

When they reached the rock debris of the collapsed western gate Shan aimed his light toward the ceiling at the right corner, where they had found the watching eye on the far side of the collapsed rock. He saw now that the eye had been one of over two dozen painted in a line below a blackness that marked where the slab had fallen out of the ceiling to block the stair corridor. Beneath the watching eyes was a huge mural of a fierce protector deity, wearing a garland of skulls. It was an image Shan had seen often before-except for one small figure, hanging over the shoulder of the wrathful deity, a small white lion holding a lotus blossom. He pointed it out to Yao.

“Could be a signature of the artist,” Yao suggested.

“Tibetan artists almost never signed their works in any manner. It could be a sign, part of the trail the old ones left for pilgrims.” Shan aimed his light at the other painted deities. Several had similar lions at their shoulders.

Suddenly Yao switched off his light and pushed Shan’s arm down. “Listen!”

Shan extinguished his light. Someone was coming out of one of the chapels they had passed, using an electric light covered with a cloth, perhaps a shirttail. Shan felt Yao push him sideways, realized the inspector intended for them to flank the intruder, one on either side.

The figure approached slowly, sometimes crouching, sometimes turning about as if wary of being followed. Even when he stood from his crouches he did not fully straighten, Shan saw, for he held something heavy in the crook of one arm.

From down the passage a jubilant voice called out. “Blessed Buddha!”