Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

Shan realized that he had unconsciously dropped to his knees. "I guess," he said, still in wonder, "I am doing this." And he touched the ground with his forehead, the way a pilgrim might on first seeing the holy building.

Most of the old yaks had their own names for it, or were fond of reciting the many appelations given the structure in Tibetan literature. The Seat of Supreme Being. The Jewel in the Crown. The Sublime Fortress. Buddha's Gate. One of the younger monks had proudly reported that in a Western magazine he had seen the Potala listed as one of the wonders of the world. The old yaks had all smiled politely at the news. Now Shan knew what they had all been thinking: The Potala wasn't of this world.

Maybe five years before he could have visited Lhasa and seen the structure as a tourist might, as a massive stone castle, impressive for its size and age and historic role as the Buddhist Vatican. But Shan had not seen it five years ago, and now he could see it only through the eyes of those who told the winter tales.

An ancient priest, the same who had gone out into the snow to die the year before, had first visited it in 1931, when the Thirteenth Dalai Lama was still in residence and again two years later when the salt-dried body of the old ruler was interred in a solid silver chorten in the Red Palace of the Potala. It had been the Thirteenth who warned on his deathbed that soon all Tibetans would be enslaved and would have to endure endless days of suffering. Later the same priest had been fortunate enough to be assigned to the library of the Potala. It contained the original plans of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama, who had started construction of the Potala in 1645 and asked that his death be concealed so that it would not interfere with the work. The old yak had described the plans in detail to his awed, shivering audience at the 404th. Richly worked walls of stone, cedar, and teak joined by hand without a single nail created a thousand rooms over thirteen floors that once held the hundredfold shrines. Only in the third retelling of the tale had Shan understood that the reference was not merely figurative. The Great Fifth's palace for Buddha contained a hundred times a hundred shrines, ten thousand altars, and on them sat two hundred thousand statues of deities. As he gazed on the huge walls Shan remembered the monk telling them they had been built for eternity. Maybe he was right- later Shan had learned that the exterior walls, in some places thirty feet thick, had been strengthened for the ages by pouring molten copper inside them.

Much later, in the Tibetan year of the Earth Mouse, 1949, Choje had visited the same library. Seven thousand volumes of scripture he had seen there, most of them one-of-a-kind manuscripts dating back centuries. Some, he explained in a childlike tone of awe, had been written on palm leaves brought from India a thousand years earlier. In a special collection of illuminated manuscripts, which Choje spent ten months studying, there were two thousand volumes in which the lines of scripture were written in alternating inks made of powdered gold, silver, copper, turquoise, coral, and conch shell. For the Red Guards who invaded the Potala during the Cultural Revolution, nothing had symbolized the Four Olds better than these manuscripts. They had made a public display of destroying the volumes on the temple grounds, ripping many into pieces which were sent for use in Red Guard latrines.

Rebecca Fowler's hand on his arm brought Shan back. "Tyler should go instead," she repeated.

"Piece of cake," Kincaid agreed with a gleam of mischief. "Been to the Ministry of Ag before. They'll probably recognize me. Kowtow to the big American investor."

Shan nodded reluctantly, then stood and handed Fowler the canvas bag he had brought with him. "Give this to your friend Jansen."

"What is it?"

"From the cave. One of the gold skulls. I asked for it as evidence."

Kincaid looked at him uncertainly.

"I didn't say for evidence of what," Shan continued.

Kincaid's eyes widened. "Son of a bitch," he said with a grin. "Son of a bitch." He accepted the bag eagerly and glanced inside.

Shan pulled out an envelope. "These are the resumes of Director Hu's geologic exploration staff. I thought it might be of interest."

"Resumes?" Kincaid asked.

"Hu has eight staff members assigned to find new mineral deposits. Six of them were transferred last year by Wen Li at the request of Hu."

"But Wen is Religious Affairs."

Shan nodded. "The six have no geology training. They are archaeologists and anthropologists."

Kincaid stared at the envelope in confusion, then comprehension lit his eyes. "Shit! His mineral exploration- it's all about looting. He's not looking for mines," Tyler exclaimed to Fowler, "he's looking for caves! Shrine caves. Wait till Jansen sees this!" With a huge grin he grabbed Shan's hand and shook it, hard. "Be careful, man," he said awkwardly, glancing up at Fowler's amused face and turning back to Shan. "Really. I mean it."

The American paused and solemnly reached into his shirt to pull out a white cloth that had been hidden there. It was a silk khata scarf, a prayer scarf, that the American had been wearing around his neck. "Here," Kincaid said. "It's my good luck charm. Keeps me alive when I climb."

"I can't," Shan said uncomfortably. "This is not for-"

"Please," Kincaid persisted. "I want you to have it. For protection. I don't want you getting caught. You're one of us."

Shan accepted the khata with a blush of embarrassment, then joined the flow of pedestrians, praying the faded army coat he had brought from Lhadrung would persuade any onlooker that he was nothing but a straggling soldier who had hitched a ride.

But as he rounded the corner toward the center of the city, the Sublime Fortress was there again. Lokesh had been there, too, Shan remembered, first as a young student who, by excelling at his exams, won the honor of scraping the candle grease from Potala altars. The memories of that first visit, spent in the darkness of the lower floors, had been almost entirely aural. Lokesh related that he had constantly heard the tingle of tsingha cymbals but never in a month's stay had he been able to locate its source among the maze of rooms. There had been the high-pitched jaling horns blown at the opening of special rituals and the melodious vajre bells rung to call monks to the services that seemed to begin every few minutes somewhere in the complex. Finally there had been the twelve-foot long dungchen horns, so deep they were like a groan of the earth, and so resonant that Lokesh insisted that their echoes rolled about the lower floors for hours after being blown.

As Shan approached the museum the hairs on the back of his neck stood, the skin tingled. He made two slow circuits around the building, lingering in a throng watching a chess game on the first circuit, moving to a bus stop queue after the second. It was a very small Tibetan man who was following him, wearing a blue worker's jacket and carrying a cabbage. His long, limber arms and sharp restless eyes belied his slow, feeble carriage. Shan tested the tail by rapidly walking down the street three blocks, then sitting on a bench. The man followed on the opposite side, lingering at a vegetable stall while Shan pretended to read a newspaper gleaned from a trash can. Shan watched until he was certain the stalker was alone. Public Security operated tails with teams of at least three.

Chiding himself for not considering that Jansen's office could be watched, he found a public washroom where he removed his coat. Outside, he climbed aboard a bus and got out at the first stop. He switched to a second bus, watching with his ears around his eyes, as a Beijing instructor had once described, meaning watching with every sense, sensing the rhythm of the crowd so he could see where the rhythm broke, watching the way every pedestrian watched the others. It was the ones who ignored the others who were the ones to fear.