Shan paused and picked up a round rock. “Here,” he said, pointing to a spot a third of the way down, “is New Mexico. And here,” he moved his finger to the opposite side, “is where we are standing. Her sense of geography is peculiar.”
Hostene said, “She calls her project the crown jewel of her career. Every professor dreams of rewriting history.” Then the Navajo said, after pausing as if to gauge Shan’s reaction, “She is proving that the Tibetan and Navajo people are fruits of the same tree. Long-lost cousins.”
It started, Hostene explained, in a Santa Fe gallery that sold antique art from around the world. “She saw an old blanket there. Abigail was sketching its faded symbols for her work on Tibetan Buddhism when the shopkeeper told her it was actually Navajo, from a very early period. When she argued with him, he urged her to check it out at the Navajo college. I knew many of the professors so I drove her there. It took us half an hour to get past the entrance gate, where there was a map of the college, which had been built in a series of interrelated circles to reflect traditional beliefs about our peoples’ relationship with the holy ones. She photographed the map, saying it matched the structure of a monastery she knew in Tibet and the structure used in many Tibetan mandalas. Six months later she was in Lhasa, learning the language, studying the temples there. That was nearly three years ago, about the time I retired.
“She started with what she termed the empirical data. Scientific studies of linguistic patterns, DNA strains, dental patterns, earwax, geologic evidence from the ice ages.”
“Earwax?”
Hostene grinned. “I’ve heard it all so many times I could recite it in my sleep. There are two types of earwax, wet and dry. Europeans and Africans almost always have the wet type. People with dry wax are found in pockets all over Asia, especially in cold climates. You can trace population drift by following the groups of peoples with dry earwax in North America.”
“Including the Navajo,” Shan suggested.
“Including all Native Americans. That’s what she calls the macro evidence. The same patterns exist for sweat glands. Tibetans and Navajos sweat far less than the average person of European descent.”
Shan found himself liking the old Navajo, whose quiet yet energetic demeanor reminded him of Lokesh. “So she persuaded you and won you over to her theory?”
“Not at first. When she mentioned things like sweat glands I reminded her it was just another Asian versus European thing, and almost everyone agrees that the American Indians came across the Bering Strait from Asia. No, at first it had more to do with my promise to my sister on her deathbed to watch over Abigail. I know no one who is smarter than Abigail about the things you can learn in libraries. But she is not always so street-smart-about people, about bureaucrats, about the real world. And she has the spirit of a lion. She will never wade first, she always jumps into the deepest water.”
As they finally approached the murder scene Hostene grew quiet. He squatted by the fire pit just as Shan had done earlier, fingering the plastic rubble left from the burnt sleeping bag, then with a grim expression paced along the brown-stained grass.
“We had a tent,” he said, “but we slept in the open most nights. We would talk about the stars.”
“She was with you that night?”
Hostene nodded. “But she was restless. When the moon was bright she would go off and sit on a high ledge, sometimes all night long. Or she would leave before dawn to get the best light to photograph a painting up on the slope. She was troubled about the mountain, she was worried she wouldn’t be able to unlock its secrets before we had to leave.”
“Why this mountain?” Shan asked. “What made it worth the risk?”
Neither man had mentioned the gap in Hostene’s story. No westerner would ever have been granted a travel permit to the region, and no American would ever have been given official permission to conduct research that validated the ethnic or genetic identity of Tibetans as independent of the Han Chinese. His presence was surely as illegal as that of the miners.
Hostene was silent so long that Shan decided he had not heard the question.
“She spent months demonstrating similarities between the root words of the Athabascan language that Navajo is based on and the Tibetan language, even recording native Tibetans and Navajos reading the same passages. She confirmed that the timing of migrations across the Bering Strait were consistent with evidence of dispersions of people from central Asia. Then suddenly it was all about religion.” He paused, squatted, and with a finger drew a figure in the dirt, a three-part line, with an arm extending to the right at the top and to the left at the bottom, with a matching line set perpendicular to it. “Centuries before Hitler perverted the sign, my people were using this in religious ceremonies, in what we call dry paintings, sacred sandpaintings.”
Shan, on one knee, felt someone hovering behind him.
“And for centuries,” a weary but excited voice observed, “the Tibetans have used such a sign.”
Lokesh had followed them. He knelt and drew an identical swastika beside Hostene’s. “In sandpaintings, and elsewhere. It is a symbol for eternity, a sign used for good fortune.” He did not look at Shan.
Hostene responded with a solemn nod. “So we learned. We have sacred mountains that are home to our Holy People. Tibetans have mountains that are the residence of deities. She says the land gods are the oldest, because people who live in high mountain lands have to explain lightning and thunder. The structure of beliefs around the oldest deities would have the best chances of showing connections between our peoples, Abigail decided. And those beliefs far predated the Buddhist’s arrival in Tibet.”
Hostene put a finger in the dirt below the swastikas they had drawn. “Many of my people today draw this shape as we have done. But Abigail traced the earliest references, on old pots and on old pet-roglyphs. She thinks our people used to draw it this way.” He drew another swatiska, this one left facing, turning counterclockwise.
“That,” Lokesh declared, a sense of wonder in his voice, “is the way the oldest ones drew it in Tibet. The Bon people.” He was referring to people with an animist religion who had lived in Tibet long before Buddhism was brought to Tibet from India.
Hostene, nodding, continued. “The paths to our sacred mountains have markings and signs that have been there for centuries, and she wanted to look for parallel markings in Tibet and connect the myths that accompanied them, to trace them back to some common origin. But all the signs she could find had been defaced or destroyed. Sometimes the mountains themselves had been leveled. Then Professor Ma told us he had heard of a place that had never been touched, with very old deity paintings, on a mountain sacred to the Bon.” The Navajo’s gaze drifted toward Lokesh, who was staring at the summit of the mountain.
After a moment Hostene edged around the little grove, then asked Yangke to tell him where he had been found unconscious. He was kneeling at the rock wall when Shan reached him, studying the paintings drawn in blood.
“We stayed up late that night watching a meteor shower,” the Navajo explained in a sorrowful tone. “Our guide showed us a constellation that he said was the Mother Protector of his people. He said when she saw stars shoot out of the constellation his mother always cried out in joy, then quickly recited a mantra.”
“Tashi,” came a mournful whisper behind them. “Tashi the shepherd.”
“Tashi the guide and camp cook,” Hostene said. “Tashi the truck driver. You knew him?” he asked Yangke.
Yangke caught Shan’s accusing gaze and quickly looked away, his face reddening. “It didn’t seem important that you knew,” he said.
“He was originally from Drango,” Shan suggested.
“I told you, I didn’t see the bodies,” Yangke said. “I wasn’t sure he was one of the victims. Until now.”
This was why the shepherd in Dolma’s house had been so nervous about who had died, Shan realized. One of those who had been murdered had been of the village, but not from the village.