Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"They're lost now, you know," Lokesh said in a small voice. "Some of them are lost forever." His voice shook, and he looked up to Shan as if asking why. "Gone," he said, his voice cracking with emotion.

The songs were lost, Lokesh meant. Because the lamas who had memorized them had been killed, with no chance to teach them to another generation.

"Why here?" Shan asked after a moment. "You came to this particular spot."

Lokesh looked up with a sad smile. "There was a lama here, named Chigu. A hundred and five when I last saw him. He had been abbot for many years but had left office when he was seventy-five to spend all his time meditating and making medicines. There was a small courtyard here, with wisteria vines"- Lokesh paused and pointed in the direction of the reconstructed buildings- "where he taught the drying and chopping of herbs and roots. There were big cleavers, and sometimes students lost fingers." Lokesh paused again. He was adrift in a flood of memory. "Each summer he and I would go out on the plain, only the two of us, walking on game trails, for a week at a time. We gathered herbs and prayed and at night stared at the heavens. There were places high up on flat rocks where we sat, where you could see nothing of the earth, only the heavens, so that we called it sitting in the sky. He told me things his own teacher had told him. His teacher had been one hundred fifteen when he died, in 1903, the Water Hare Year. Chigu Rinpoche told me things from his lips that his teacher had told him from his lips, of things he experienced in the years of the Eighth Dalai Lama," Lokesh said, wonder in his eyes now. The Eighth Dalai Lama had died in the eighteenth century. "To sit in the night, in the wilderness, and to be connected to the years of the Eighth by a chain of only two tongues, it burned something into my soul," he said, looking into the patch of empty earth before him. "This is where he lived, these are the chambers where I would come to meet him when arriving each summer." The last words choked in his throat as Lokesh was overcome with emotion.

They sat a long time, silent, listening to the wind. Shan let his awareness float, experiencing the holy place, thinking more than once that he heard the deep, spine-pinching sound of a mantra recited by monks in assembly. He closed his eyes and imagined the smell of fragrant juniper burning in a samkang, one of the ceremonial braziers that would have been scattered across the grounds of such a gompa, then became aware that he was alone and stirred back to full wakefulness to see Lokesh walking slowly toward the three restored structures.

Five minutes later Shan caught up with his friend, standing inside the small three-sided courtyard formed by the buildings, wearing his lopsided grin. Shan had not imagined the scent of juniper. A four-foot-high, four-legged iron samkang sat at the open end of the courtyard, juniper smoldering inside it. Under the overhanging roof of the center building was mounted a keg-sized prayer wheel crafted of copper and silver. A young Tibetan girl, no more than six, her cheeks smeared with red doja cream, stood at the wheel, turning it with a solemn expression. The building had a heavy door of expertly joined wood, painted a dark ochre enamel. As Shan watched, Lokesh gave the door a tentative push and stepped inside. He followed him into a small assembly room, a dhakang, lined with smooth flag stones and containing three tattered old thangkas, cloth paintings, depicting scenes from the life of the revered teacher Guru Rinpoche. One of the paintings was ripped and crudely sewn back together. Another was so faded the images were almost impossible to discern.

Shan thought of the barren land surrounding the ruins. Small as the buildings were, their erection had constituted a mammoth task. Every board, every stone flag, every nail had to have been brought in, from outside, from down in the world, probably from one of the towns on the northern highway, if not farther.

They explored the two adjacent buildings and found one to be a gonkang shrine, for a protector deity, the other a small lhakang, a chapel. Both structures were built with the same fine attention to detail as the dhakang. In the chapel was an altar made of split logs, bearing an eight-inch-high bronze statue of the Compassionate Buddha and the seven traditional offering bowls, all different, all carved of wood except one of chipped porcelain. At the back of the gonkang was a half-completed statue of Tara, the protectress deity, one of her hands resting on a lotus blossom. Wood chips were on the floor beside it, and a mallet and several chisels lay on a nearby bench. Shan remembered the man who had been brought from the building by the boy when they had arrived. The caretaker.

As they left the building they discovered a new visitor. Tenzin was standing in the smoke of the samkang, his eyes closed, as if trying to be washed by the purifying smoke. They watched as his eyes opened and he stepped toward the child, who showed signs of exhaustion. With a gentle motion of his hand Tenzin offered to take over, and the tall silent Tibetan took up the repetitive motion as the girl stepped away with a grateful nod, not letting the wheel miss a single rotation. Shan and Lokesh had passed by a remote house in western Tibet where an old man and his wife turned a similar prayer wheel, salvaged from a ruined gompa, spinning it in four hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day. They had been doing so for ten years because, they solemnly explained, when they had turned the wheel for twenty years the deities would become so pleased they would bring the Dalai Lama back to Tibet.

Lokesh touched Shan's arm and nudged him away, around a corner of the building, so as not to disturb Tenzin. They left him spinning the wheel, the girl sitting against the wall of the lhakang, the solemn Tibetan exchanging a tiny smile with her.

The sheep of the caravan were lying contentedly along the bank of the small stream that flowed through the juniper grove, watched over by the mastiffs and Anya, sitting beside Winslow, who lay napping in the thick grass. They found the Yapchi villagers by the small house built against the wall, standing by the open door with bowls of tea. To Shan's great relief the monk was sitting upright on a straw pallet inside the simple structure, a bowl in his hands, attended by Nyma and the caretaker, who stood with his back to Shan, speaking in low, gentle tones as Nyma washed the monk's wounds.

Shan turned and silently stepped out of the doorway and around the corner of the house, where he found Lhandro on a roughhewn bench set against the wall studying his map. As he approached the rongpa Nyma rushed around the corner. "It was him!" she cried. "That dobdob! He says he was meditating when a huge man appeared, a crazy man dressed like a demon, with blackened cheeks. He began beating him for no reason with his long staff, and threw fire at him." The nun stared at Shan with a confused, frightened expression.

Lhandro called out to one of the Yapchi men, who darted to one of the horses and rode away. Even here, in the wild, remote Plain of Flowers, they needed to guard the chenyi stone.

"How would he know?" Lhandro asked. "That demon follows the eye as if it speaks to him."

Not follow, Shan thought. The dobdob had come from the hermitage to the Plain of Flowers ahead of them, as though he had known they would come this way. Had he caused the avalanche that blocked the pass, to be sure they would detour across the plain? Had he attacked the monk and burned the plain in an effort to stop them, or slow them? Or had he been waiting and felt the need to slake his appetite by attacking another of the devout?

"Lokesh said a dobdob enforces virtue," Nyma said in a low voice, as if scared of being overheard. "But this one attacks the virtuous. It's like he's the opposite of a dobdob, or some dobdob crazed with evil."