The next thing she knew, it was morning.
They were given broad bowls of warm water to wash in, and then led outside to a courtyard bright with high-altitude sunshine. The snowy crowns of the Kunlun Mountains soared above the nunnery roof. Vultures, majestic from a distance, wheeled through the vault of heaven.
“Sky burial,” Sam whispered as she watched them. “Traditional Tibetan practice is to dismember the dead and put them on a rack for the vultures to devour. It’s considered divine recycling.”
“It seems appropriate here,” Rominy said. “Like letting them go to the sky through the birds. There’s more sky here than in Seattle, Sam. Closer sky.”
“You’re beginning to see why I stayed.”
She wondered if Jake minded that she was talking more to Sam. The guide’s questions, while uncomfortable, had made her feel he cared. Her boyfriend didn’t seem to notice. It would have been selfishly satisfying if he had, but Jake seemed a million miles away with his thoughts. He dreamed of lost cities.
A hooded woman, head bent, was cross-legged on the paving, and they were directed to sit on the stones before her. The Americans awkwardly crossed their legs, several nuns in a semicircle behind. Then the central figure lifted her head, hood falling away. Like the others, her skull was close-cropped, its iron-gray hinting at her age. Her face was lined but kindly, a regal grandmother’s face, with the high cheekbones and deep-set eyes of her people.
“My name is Amrita,” she said in accented but fluent English. “You have come many miles to the Closed Door.”
“You speak our language?” Jake asked in surprise.
“We cared for an American generations ago and decided others might eventually be back. Your return has been foretold. The American taught us some of her tongue, and we’re not entirely isolated. I was educated in Lhasa and Beijing.”
“She? So it was Beth Calloway and not Benjamin Hood?” Rominy asked.
“Yes.”
“But where was my great-grandfather?”
“Shambhala. We never met him.”
This was disturbing news.
“Then Shambhala is really here?” Jake leaned forward.
“Where is here, Mr. Barrow? Yes, we looked at your identity while you were sleeping. Is paradise a place or a state of mind? Is the journey to reach it an outward one or inward?”
He sat back, disappointed. “I know you’re on a spiritual journey, but we’re on a physical one. Rominy’s great-grandfather and, it appears, her great-grandmother, came here and saw something. We climbed to where we thought Shambhala might be and found only a lake. If it doesn’t exist, so be it. But I want to know if it existed for real, not just in fable.”
“Your definition of reality and mine are not the same.” She looked at them closely, but not unkindly, in turn. “But I’ll show you another door to satisfy your curiosity. The real Closed Door may or may not open. It may or may not give you what you need to find.”
“Sometimes not finding is as important as finding,” Rominy said. “You need things to end.”
“Yes, beginning and endings. The Western goal, the Eastern illusion. Come.”
They entered the temple again, butter lamps flickering, the air tanged with incense and smoke, the Buddha vast and hazy as a dream. Amrita led them around the statue. At the back of the temple was an ancient black iron door set in a wall of stone. It looked crudely hammered but immensely strong. From her cloak she took a ring of big, medieval-looking keys and inserted one in the lock. It wouldn’t turn.
She addressed Jake. “This is the first Closed Door, Mr. Barrow. We never have occasion to open it, and so the lock is rusty. Do you have strong fingers?”
“Strong enough to get me this far.” He wrenched, there was a grind and a clunk, and the metal door was pulled open, squealing on its hinges. Even though the temple itself was chilly, the air that wafted out at them was noticeably colder and moist. Their breath fogged.
“We’ve been the gatekeepers for two hundred generations. But what we guard is very different now. Do you have electric torches?”
“Yes.”
“Then descend.” She looked at Jake. “Be careful what you seek.”
“I don’t seek it for myself.”
They stepped forward. On the other side of the door, stairs hewn out of mountain rock led downward in a spiral, like a castle tower. It was utterly dark below.
“I must close the door behind you to keep out the draft,” Amrita said. “Knock when you wish to return.” And with that the iron door swung shut, shutting with a booming clang. They jumped.
“Well, that’s cozy,” Sam muttered. “This feels like Frankenstein’s castle, and she’s Frau Blucher.”
“You’re a very skeptical guide, Sam,” Jake said.
“Lapsed. Converts turned doubters are the worst. I came for enlightenment and got statuary and yak tea. I think I’m homesick.”
“I’m paying you enough to get you home.”
“And you hired me to take you as far from it as we can get.”
“Well, I trust her,” Rominy said.
“You trust everyone,” said Sam.
They crept down, their flashlights providing a fan of light. In places they passed lovely carvings in the surrounding stone: a graceful script reminiscent of Tibetan-“It’s not the same,” Sam informed them-entwined with flowers, beasts, strange machines, and large-headed people in flowing robes. The bas-relief gave a three-dimensional quality so that the plants seemed to be blossoming from rock.
“These carvings weren’t done by nuns,” Jake said. “Shambhala is real.”
“So who did do them?” Sam asked.
“Ancients or aliens who knew more than we do. Don’t you think? I like the vines and trees. The Greeks believed we began as happy plants and devolved into our unhappy animal and human form, getting farther from the divine as we did so. The farther back you went, the better things were, they thought. The SS who came to Tibet thought that, too, that the distant past wasn’t something we escaped but a paradise of adventure and power we’d lost.”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “An ancestral vegetable sounds even worse than an ancestral monkey.”
“There’s something peaceful in being a carrot,” Rominy said.
“Not on a salad bar.”
Then the walls would get plain again.
Suddenly one wall disappeared, and the Americans found themselves on an exposed stair at the side of a huge shaft a hundred feet across. It rose higher than their flashlight beams could probe. There were dark openings on the other side, and bats fluttered when Jake banged the edge of his flashlight on stone.
“Ventilation shaft,” he guessed. “Bats means there has to be an opening above. This was for Shambhala, my friends.”
“It’s huge,” said Rominy.
“Which means Shambhala was huge.”
“I smell water,” Sam said. “We’re going to hit your lake, Barrow.”
They carefully wound down the shaft, the staircase having no railing to keep them from falling. Then it wormed into the mountain again. A horizontal passageway ran on into darkness like the shaft of a mine. More stairs continued down.
“Down first,” said Jake.
The stairs ended a hundred steps farther at water, dark and still. There was no landing. The steps just continued into the deep.
“It’s the lake,” Jake confirmed. “He drowned Shambhala.”
“ Who drowned it?” Rominy asked.
“Your great-grandpa.”
“But why?”
He shook his head. “Who knows?”