Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

As Padme led his party back into the gompa grounds, Shan lingered in the shadows beside the purba truck, a new hat pulled low over his eyes. He became aware of an old man staring at the truck, a white-haired Tibetan with a leathery face that bore the scars and wrinkles of a long hard life. The man sat forty feet away, his back against a small mound of felt blankets left beside a dropka yurt. Shan realized that not only had the man been there for hours, he had seen him on another day, operating a sewing machine at the gompa gate the first time Shan had visited Norbu. He saw the man's fingers working, two fingers moving in and out by his knee. It could have been a nervous gesture. It could have been a request for someone to approach, by a man who did not know how otherwise to ask. Shan pulled his hat tight and with small, tentative steps ventured near the old man.

The Tibetan nodded as Shan reached him, and Shan hesitantly sat beside him. There were spies everywhere, Somo had warned. Sometimes monks were found to be working for Public Security. Even older Tibetans were coerced into becoming informants by promises of leniency for loved ones in prison. "They say you came from a Chinese bayal to help us," the man said in a strong but hoarse voice.

A Chinese hidden land. The man meant that people didn't come to help from the normal Chinese world. Perhaps it was true, Shan thought. A bayal known as the gulag. "I would like to find a way to help," Shan confirmed.

The man looked about and produced a folded piece of paper from inside his dirt-encrusted chuba. "I used to work at First House," he announced with a proud smile that showed half his teeth to be missing. "Not a monk, but as a carpenter. Once there was beautiful wood growing on those slopes. Sometimes people still come and ask me to make things. Simple things. A table, a chair, a stool. But paper to draw patterns and designs on is always scarce. A man from the kitchens wanted an altar built for his mother, and asked me to draw it for him, so he could buy the wood. He brought this to draw on, when that Padme left it on a table one night."

It was an oversized sheet, a map, Shan saw, a map drawn by an expert hand, or perhaps traced from a printed map. The old man extended a gnarled finger at several notations. "Second House," he explained, pointing to Norbu, at the bottom of the sheet. "First House and Metoktang," he said. He was indicating the Plain of Flowers and Rapjung. The place names were shown, only in Chinese.

"I read and write Chinese," the man said. "Those men at the gompa like to laugh at me, and I just play along. Fools are always to be pitied. Even that man in the kitchens doesn't know I read Chinese. None of them know I studied at the gompa school, with teachers who said we must learn how to live with the Chinese." The man gave a wheezing laugh and gestured back at the map. "If you wish to understand Second House, this is all you need," he announced.

Shan gazed at him uncertainly, then glanced at the newspaper shed, remembering the defiant words secretly written on the board, and went back to making sense of the other marks on the paper. There was a legend that said Sterilized, depicted with an X drawn inside a circle. There was such an X on the far northwest corner of the Plain of Flowers, marked with a date, ten days earlier. There were at least fifteen more such marks on the adjoining lands, with dates, all within the past two months. On Rapjung gompa itself there was such a mark, Sterilized, with a date nine days before. He recalled Larkin's report of a monk and a doctor in the mountains, carrying kerosene. Then suddenly he understood, and felt strangely weak.

"May the gods be victorious," the old carpenter said softly as Shan rose to take the map to the meeting by the truck, where he quickly explained it to the purbas, farmers, and herders at the same time.

"But there is nothing out there," a middle-aged dropka pointed out, confusion on his leathery face. "Nothing but wilderness. Nothing that could be used against us."

"The howlers would call them olds," Shan said, and he saw several of the Tibetans cringe. "Old herbal beds once used by the lamas. Holy sites used by the lamas from Rapjung. That is what Padme is destroying. We took him to Rapjung and he destroyed the buildings there." He paused as Lhandro explained the terrible night at Rapjung when the reconstruction had been reduced to ashes. They had been wrong about the dobdob, Shan knew now. The dobdob must have stopped Padme, beaten him because he had found the monk trying to burn the herbs. He remembered Padme's reaction when he had seen the reconstructed shrines at the old gompa. He had read reports, Padme had said. He meant Public Security and howler reports. It meant the dobdob was trying to stop the howlers, trying to stop the destruction of the herbs. The dobdob, protector of the virtuous, must have been Jokar's companion, the one they had seen in the meadow with Jokar, the one who was now missing.

Gyalo stepped forward to explain what he had seen inside Norbu. Finally Nyma stood up and quietly asked how many knew Drakte. Nearly every hand went up. By the time she had quietly finished explaining that Drakte had been killed trying to help, there were no more arguments from the farmers and herders. They rose with grim determination and broke into groups as the purbas began explaining their plan.

The special medical team was still at Norbu, its technicians looking fatigued as they wandered out among the Tibetans. It meant that the manhunt for the medicine lama had not stopped, and was staying in the area. Why, Shan wondered? What evidence about Jokar kept them at the gompa? Surely if they had known his destination they would have not wasted so many weeks tracking him in the mountains from India.

Less than an hour after the letter was delivered, Tibetans began forming a line at the gate, some of them holding their abdomens, two purbas wearing arms in slings. The guard would not let them inside. They waited patiently, nearly an hour, before one of the men in the light blue uniforms noticed them and instructed the sentry to allow the sick Tibetans to enter, not noticing the single Han among them, wearing a dirty bandage on his hand and his new broad-brimmed hat pulled low around his forehead.

When he arrived at the rear of the compound, Shan was relieved to find none of the discipline he had seen on his first visit. A rope had been strung along on portable wooden posts outside the makeshift clinic, to shepherd the sick into a line. The medical team worked through the first few patients quickly, with an absent air, giving all of them some form of medication. Those released from the doctors milled about the rear of the compound, speaking with those in line, marveling over the large prayer wheel, even admiring the huge pile of yak dung, apparently untouched since Gyalo had left.

Shan and Nyma drifted away from the line and wandered toward the stable where they had been trapped on their first visit. They stopped at the stable and confirming that no one was watching, stepped into the adjacent structure as Shan slipped off his bandage. The low, decrepit wooden building was old, perhaps older than the stable. Its meditation cells, three on either side, and two at the back, were musty, the air stale. Shan remembered Gyalo saying that the gompa had only a third the number of monks it had been built for.

Of all the human-built places Shan had experienced in the extraordinary lands of Tibet none moved him more than the simple wooden cells he sometimes, rarely, discovered in the country's remote regions, in the few structures remaining from earlier centuries. Here men and women had sat through the centuries, engaged in exactly the same pursuit, with the same feelings, the same yearning for awareness that Shan and his Tibetan friends felt. He had awkwardly described to Gendun one of his first encounters with such a cell as visiting a time machine, for somehow he had sensed the presence of monks who had sat there, three or four hundred years before. But no, Gendun had said, not a time machine, for that implied too much difference between us and them, as if the centuries changed those who sought awareness. It was a bridge, he said, a way of stepping beyond time, eliminating time, reaching for the same plane of awareness that enlightened beings inhabited, without regard to time. He paused, remembering Gendun's words, and for an instant wanted nothing more than to sit and meditate in one of the cells.