They were as hot as if he had a terrible fever. Fearfully I reached up to touch his face—it was warm, but nothing like his hands. “My Lord,” I said.
“We can help him now,” Freds said softly. “You have to concentrate, harness the energy that’s always inside you. Every breath out you push away pride, anger, hatred, envy, sloth, stupidity. Every breath in, you take in Buddha’s spirit, the five wisdoms, everything good. When you’ve gotten clear and calm, imagine a golden lotus in your belly button… Okay? In that lotus you imagine the syllable ram, which means fire. Then you have to see a little seed of flame, the size of a goat dropping, appearing in the ram. Every breath after that is like a bellows, fanning that flame, which travels through the tsas in the body, the mystic nerves. Imagine this process in five stages. First, the uma tsa is seen as a hair of fire, up your spine more or less… Two, the nerve is as big around as your little finger… Three, it’s the size of an arm… Four, the body becomes the tsa itself and is perceived as a tube of fire… Five, the tsa engulfs the world, and you’re just one flame in a sea of fire.”
“My Lord.”
We sat there holding Kunga Norbu’s fiery hands, and I imagined myself a tube of fire: and the warmth poured into me—up my arms, through my torso—it even thawed my frozen butt, and my feet. I stared at Kunga Norbu, and he stared right through the wall of our cave to eternity, or wherever, his eyes glowing faintly in the candlelight. It was weird.
I don’t know how long this went on—it seemed endless, although I suppose it was no more than an hour or so. But then it broke off—Kunga’s hand cooled, and so did the rest of us. He blinked several times and shook his head. He spoke to Freds.
“Well,” Freds said. “That’s about as long as he can hold it, these days.”
“What?”
“Well…” He clucked his tongue regretfully. “It’s like this. Tulkus tend to lose their powers, over the course of several incarnations. It’s like they lose something in the process, every time, like when you keep making a tape from copies or whatever. There’s a name for it.”
“Transmission error,” I said.
“Right. Well, it gets them too. In fact you run into a lot of tulkus in Tibet who are complete morons. Kunga is better than that, but he is a bit like Paul Revere. A little light in the belfry, you know. A great lama, and a super guy, but not tremendously powerful at any of the mystic disciplines, anymore.”
“Too bad.”
“I know.”
I recalled Kunga’s fiery hands, their heat pronging into me. “So… he really is a tulku, isn’t he.”
“Oh yeah! Of course! And now he’s free of old Dorjee Lama, too—a lama in his own right, and nobody’s disciple. It must be a great feeling.”
“I bet. So how does it work, again, exactly?”
“Becoming a tulku?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s a matter of concentrating your mental powers. Tibetans believe that none of this is supernatural, but just a focusing of natural powers that we all have. Tulkus have gotten their psychic energies incredibly focused, and when you’re at that stage, you can leave your body whenever you want. Why if Kunga wanted to, he could die in about ten seconds.”
“Useful.”
“Yeah. So when they decide to go, they hop off into the Bardo. The Bardo is the other world, the world of spirit, and it’s a confusing place—talk about hallucinations! First a light like God’s camera flash goes off in your face. Then it’s just a bunch of colored paths, apparitions, everything. When Kunga describes it it’s really scary. Now if you’re just an ordinary spirit, then you can get disoriented, and be reborn as a slug or a game show host or anything . But if you stay focused, you’re reborn in the body you choose, and you go on from there.”
I nodded dully. I was tired, and cold, and the lack of oxygen was making me stupid and spacy; I couldn’t make any sense of Freds’s explanations, although it may be that that would have happened anywhere.
We sat there. Kunga hummed to himself. It got colder.
The candle guttered, then went out.
It was dark. It continued to get colder.
After a while there was nothing but the darkness, our breathing, and the cold. I couldn’t feel my butt or my legs below the knee. I knew I was waiting for something, but I had forgotten what it was. Freds stirred, started speaking Tibetan with Kunga. They seemed a long way away. They spoke to people I couldn’t see. For a while Freds jostled about, punching the sides of the cave. Kunga shouted out hoarsely, things like “Hak!” and “Phut!”
“What are you doing?” I roused myself to say.
“We’re fighting off demons,” Freds explained.
I was ready to conclude, by watching my companions, that lack of oxygen drove one nuts; but given who they were, I had to suspend judgement. It might not have been the oxygen.
Some indeterminate time later Freds started shoveling snow out the tunnel. “Casting out demons?” I inquired.
“No, trying to get warm. Want to try it?”
I didn’t have the energy to move.
Then he shook me from side to side, switched to English, told me stories. Story after story, in a dry, hoarse, frog’s voice. I didn’t understand any of them. I had to concentrate on fighting the cold. On breathing. Freds became agitated, he told me a story of Kunga’s, something about running across Tibet with a friend, a lung-gom-pa test of some kind, and the friend was wearing chains to keep from floating away entirely. Then something about running into a young husband at night, dropping the chains in a campfire… “The porters knew about lung-gom, and the next morning they must have tried to explain it to the British. Can you imagine it? Porters trying to explain these chains come out of nowhere… explaining they were used by people running across Tibet, to keep from going orbital? Man, those Brits must’ve thought they were invading Oz. Don’t you think so? Hey, George? George?… George?”
XVI
But finally the night passed, and I was still there.
We crawled out of our cave in the predawn light, and stamped our feet until some sensation came back into them, feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. “Good morning!” Kunga Norbu said to me politely. He was right about that. There were high cirrus clouds going pink above us, and an ocean of blue cloud far below in Nepal, with all the higher white peaks poking out of it like islands, and slowly turning pink themselves. I’ve never seen a more otherworldly sight; it was as if we had climbed out of our cave onto the side of another planet.
“Maybe we should just shoot down to the South Col and join those Indian Army guys,” Freds croaked. “I don’t much feel like going back up to the peak to get to the West Ridge.”
“You aren’t kidding,” I said.
So down the Southeast Ridge we went.
Now Peter Habeler, Messner’s partner on the first oxygenless ascent of Everest in 1979, plunged down this ridge from the summit to the South Col in one hour. He was worried about brain damage; my feeling is that the speed of his descent is evidence it had already occurred. We went as fast as we could, which was pretty alarmingly fast, and it still took us almost three hours. One step after another, down a steep snowy ridge. I refused to look at the severe drops to right and left. The clouds below were swelling up like the tide in the Bay of Fundy; our good weather was about to end.