Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

They walked ever upward. Snowflakes swirled about them sometimes, even though the sky overhead was bright blue. Twice Anya's crooked gait caused her to slip, and pebbles spilled over the edge of the narrow trail, dropping downward for what seemed an impossibly long time.

The trail constantly changed in width and direction, sometimes dwindling to little more than a gap between walls where a wild sheep might just squeeze through. Now it disappeared altogether at a nearly vertical wall of rock. Chemi continued, pulling herself upward with meager hand-holds, jumping from one outcropping to the next, guided by nothing more than an occasional worn spot in the rocks that may have been caused by sheep leaping at the same point, over the course of centuries. Winslow stopped often, drinking, twice taking his pills. They passed fields of snow, and once a brilliant white bird burst out of a crevasse.

"Christ," Winslow repeated often, sometimes when he was pausing to press his palms against his temples, at other times when he stopped to consult his map. "Fifteen damned thousand feet," he reported in disbelief, but did not complain when Chemi took them still higher. Every five minutes he had to stop, panting heavily, to catch his breath. He answered Shan's anxious glances by grinning and shaking his head, then moving on with a spurt of energy as though to prove his vigor. They were on the long unprotected trail where they had seen the bharal, a path no more than thirty inches wide, above a thousand-foot drop, when the American stopped and leaned against the wall of rock. Anya, closest to him, turned back and put her hand in Winslow's as Shan inched closer.

"It's all right," he heard the girl say, softly, in the voice she used with the sheep, "hold my hand and the yak bracelet will protect us both." The American turned toward Shan, his head sagging, his eyes rolling as if he were dizzy. Anya squeezed his hand hard, as though to remind him she was with him, and the American straightened. With a sober expression he let the girl lead him onward.

They were two-thirds of the way along the treacherous, unprotected goat trail when Chemi moaned and threw up a hand. They all froze as she cupped her ears toward the north and slowly began backing up. Moments later they heard it, too, a harsh metallic thumping that was rapidly growing louder.

"Helicopter!" Winslow shouted, and suddenly Anya was pulling him toward a shadow in the rock face. Not a shadow, Shan saw, as first the girl and then the American turned sideways and stepped inside it. It was a narrow cleft in the rock, perhaps big enough to hide them all until the helicopter passed. It was why Chemi was backing up, he realized, because she, too, had seen the cleft. The thumping grew much louder, and Chemi turned and began running along the narrow trail. Tenzin paused at the cleft, helping Lokesh inside, then disappeared himself as Shan approached the shadow.

Shan waited a moment, until Chemi was only thirty feet away, then the noise of the machine drove him inside. He could see none of his companions, even though they had entered the cleft only moments before. His eyes adjusting to the dim light, he saw that the gap was more than a split in the rock- it was a narrow winding passage that led steeply upward. He followed a small trail, worn from the hooves of mountain creatures. After fifteen feet he discovered that he was inside a narrow fissure in the cap of the mountain, with walls that opened near the peak hundreds of feet overhead.

"It wasn't military," a voice said behind him. Chemi was there, looking out into the daylight as she spoke. "And it was low, below the trail, like it was searching the ridges where the bombs went off."

Shan took another step forward. There was still no sign of his friends.

"Did they fall?" Chemi asked in alarm. "They can't just disappear."

A shaft of sunlight lit the ground thirty feet in front of them. He stepped toward it uneasily as Chemi called out Anya's name. There was no reply. There was no sound at all. No wind blew in the chasm. No bird flew. No water fell. Chemi pulled his sleeve and pointed with alarm toward the pool of light which lit a wide crack in the floor. They stepped to the edge of the crack. It seemed to have no bottom. He kicked a pebble over the side and heard nothing.

"One of them could have slipped in and the others fell trying to help," Chemi said in a tight voice. "A place like that, they would just fall," she added, as though the chasm would have no bottom.

Shan stepped back without thinking, as though recoiling from the thought.

"They're gone," Chemi moaned, and she looked up mournfully toward the patch of sky at the top of the chasm.

Shan steadied himself by holding onto a pillar of rock. After a moment he realized his fingers were touching striations in the rock. He bent and blew into the tiny cracks, packed with dust, then pulled out his water bottle and poured some of the liquid over the pillar. Instantly the cracks took on definition, darker lines against the grey surface. They were Tibetan script, intricately carved into the pillar. Remember this, he read, we are made of nothing but light. It was a version of an ancient teaching, that the essence of life is luminosity, meaning awareness.

He looked up from the pillar in confusion. Beyond the pool of light the trail curved away toward a darker patch of shadow. He heard a small sound, the murmur of an animal, and ventured along the curve toward the darkness, following the trail up a short embankment beside which lay a row of small rocks on the ground. They were strangely smooth and flat, appearing as if they had been melted and folded. He knelt beside one and touched it. It wasn't rock, but dust he touched, dust the color of the rock. He lifted the object, still puzzled, and froze as he saw that it was a dust encrusted piece of cloth. It was a lungta, a prayer flag, made of silk, once red, painted with the mani mantra and a small horse. The dust fell away in flakes under his fingers, like a layer of ice, and he wondered, awed, how many decades it might have taken in the windless chasm for such a crust to accumulate. Not decades, more likely centuries. The flag had been sewn onto a strand of yak-hair rope, expertly woven, that had rotted away at each end. He looked at the line of tiny mounds, each another encrusted lungta. They pointed to the pillar with the writing. They had been tied to the pillar, he suspected, and affixed to the wall beyond him, in the darkest part of the shadow; not to flap conspicuously in the sky, but perhaps, in another age, to guide visitors. He turned and stepped further into the shadow, toward the wall where the line of flags would have ended. The darkest point was where two walls came together. There was something like a shadow inside the shadow. And the animal sound again.

He stepped into the blackest part of the shadow and found himself in the narrow entrance of a cave, which he followed, Chemi a step behind, feeling with his hands for eight feet as it curved sharply. Dim light appeared ahead of him, and suddenly he stumbled, nearly falling over Anya, who sat on the stone floor, murmuring softly in the detached voice he had heard her use for her animal songs. Beyond her stood the American, his electric lantern in his hand, shaking his head as he stared at the wall in front of him. Only Lokesh moved. The old Tibetan was circling the chamber they had discovered, uttering syllables of glee, his eyes shining with excitement. On a rock ledge that ran along the far end of the cavern, twenty feet from Shan, sat over two dozen elongated objects, in four stacks, each capped top and bottom with wooden slabs and bound together with cloth and strips of silk. The caps on those on top of each stack were made of rosewood, and carved with intricate patterns, some of flowers and leaves, others of wild animals.