Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Lokesh smiled. "There are many paths," he said, with a satisfied tone. Many paths to enlightenment, he meant. Traditional Tibetan Buddhists, no matter which of the major orders of Buddhism they worshiped with, always conducted themselves clockwise along a kora circuit. It was part of the tradition, meaning part of the reverence to be shown.

But there was another faith in Tibet, older than Buddhism, based on animism. The Bon faith, though it had been largely subsumed into Buddhism and followed most of its teachings, still had its distinctive practices; one of which was that kora pilgrims walked counterclockwise.

"We should have known," Shan said, answering his own question. It might explain much, especially why the farmers of Yapchi clung so fervently to their hopes for the stone eye and their land deity, why they had been so forlorn for four generations over its fate.

As Shan and Lokesh started the clockwise circuit, Lokesh began quietly reciting one of his pilgrim's verses. Minutes later they heard footfalls behind them and turned to see Winslow running to catch up. He extended the bottle he kept for water, now empty. "I need attainment." He grinned. "Boy, do I need attainment."

Two hours later they had completed three-quarters of the path and stood at the drup-chu shrine on the slope above the gompa, Winslow filling the water bottle after each of them knelt and drank deeply from the tiny spring of sacred water. Shan and Lokesh had passed many pleasant hours at such springs in their travels, pursuing Lokesh's burning interest in understanding the particular reason each of the springs was special. Lokesh was fond of pointing out that just understanding such reasons would tell much of the story of Tibet. Like many, he believed the land was not sacred just because devout Buddhists had inhabited it for so many centuries. The land drew them to such springs, Lokesh often declared, and every spring had a tale not just of the devout Buddhists who had identified it, usually centuries earlier, but of the ancients who had come before. At a spring in central Tibet that had been surrounded by crushed rock and gravel amid what were otherwise slopes of solid granite, Lokesh had decided that thousands of years earlier, when air deities traveled in the form of giants, the giants had favored the spring and crushed the earth by landing beside it so often.

As they rested by the spring Winslow scanned the Plain of Flowers with his lenses.

"Have you decided what they were doing, why oil geologists would be out on the Plain of Flowers?" Shan asked.

Winslow didn't lower the binoculars, just shook his head slightly. "The oil concession ends at the Qinghai border, at least five miles north of here," he said and glanced back at Shan. Dremu had found empty cans of American food, on the far side of the plain, even farther from the concession.

"Why would she leave a vest and sleeping bag?" Shan wondered out loud.

"I don't know," the American said in a hollow voice. "Maybe the thing that attacked Padme found her, too. Maybe it's not sure who has the stone eye, and it's just attacking anyone on the northern trails." He packed his binoculars and knelt at the spring a moment, dipping in his cupped hand once more. He studied the water in his palm, lifted it and emptied it over his head. He closed his eyes and let the water drip down his head, and when he opened his eyes Shan saw a flash of deep emotion. Desperation, he thought, or profound sadness.

"There was a letter from her, to her mother, in the company files," Winslow said abruptly, as if the water had freed the memory. "Her manager showed it to me, he hadn't mailed it because he wasn't sure if it would be too painful, their not knowing for sure about her. He said the company instructed him to open it, to see if she had been suicidal. Her mother is a professor in Minnesota. They talk about things in their letters, I guess." Winslow stared into the water, or past it, as if he were speaking to something below, at the underground source of the sacred water.

"I mean big things. She said she wished all of her assignments could be in Tibet, that although the Chinese wouldn't say so, Qinghai Province was really Tibet, that people in the mountains were teaching her things. She said she loved Tibet but was hating what the company was doing to the land. That Tibetans told her that the most important thing for maintaining the human life force was connection to the land, and that the world had become divided between people whose lives were severed from that life force and people who lived close to the land. That those who lived close to the land had a sacred duty to protect the life force." Winslow looked up from the water. "And she worked for an oil company." Something like pain seemed to cross his face again, as though the paradox had been deeply troubling him.

"At the end of the letter she said that some Tibetans had told her that a geologist was really like a special kind of monk who studied the behavior of land deities." Winslow looked back into the dark patch where the spring emerged from the earth, as if waiting for such a spirit to emerge and explain. "She said her Tibetan friends wanted to take her to hidden lands." He turned to look at Lokesh. "What did she mean?"

Lokesh needed no time to consider his reply. "A bayal. They meant a bayal. It means hidden land. Some people believe there are hidden portals to special lands, like heavens, where deities roam freely." He glanced at Shan. Some people. Like the followers of Bon who lived at Yapchi. Lokesh sighed, then stood and stepped with a deliberate pace to a low pile of rocks ten feet from the spring. Although Shan expected him to add a rock to the pile, Lokesh began pulling the pile apart, until he had exposed a square of solid granite, two feet to the side. "There was a little chorten here," he said in an urgent, awed voice, as if the memory had just washed over him.

"A shrine with a relic underneath, the foot bone of an old hermit who had walked all over Tibet collecting herbs, more than five hundred years ago." He stared at the square stone and the way it was encrusted with lichens that joined it to the ground. "The Tibetans who did this," he said excitedly, meaning those who had been forced to destroy the gompa, "didn't move this base, didn't move the relic." Lokesh looked up with a hopeful gleam. "We would sit here for lessons sometimes, and the lamas would explain how the spring was connected to the center of the earth. They would wash herbs in this water and send clay jars of it to healers all over Tibet. I remember listening for hours here while Chigu Rinpoche taught us how the power of plants came from the power of the earth and their power to heal came from the ways they connected humans back to the earth."

Winslow stepped to the slab, knelt reverently by Lokesh, his eyes wide with wonder. "I read somewhere that doctors say they could heal anything if they just knew how the human animal evolved, how to trace the human body back to where it rose up out of the mud. Because everything we're made of came from the earth." When he looked up at Shan his eyes held a strange fervor. "It's a different way of saying the same thing, isn't it?" He placed his fingertips near the lichen of the rock, but not on it, as though it were too holy for him to touch. Then he looked up sheepishly and began helping Lokesh to replace the stones, not in a pile, but in a square, like the base of a chorten.

After they had laid the first layer of stones Lokesh paused and picked a sprig of the plant that grew around the stone slab, looking at it quizzically. "Chigu Rinpoche said that the whole function of the healers was to translate the power of the earth into the life force of the human."

Winslow studied Lokesh a long time, then slowly picked up a rock and continued building the little stack of rocks as Shan began carrying more stones from the slope above them.