There was little left but a few charred beams and piles of stone. Bits of plaster, some bearing signs of weathered paint, lay strewn about the landscape. A singled tattered prayer flag fluttered from a frayed yak-hair rope anchored to a cairn of stones. He set another stone on the cairn and positioned himself in the center of the ruins, pacing in an ever-widening circle as he tried to imagine the structure as it had been built, and how many monks had lived there. Once on Tumkot mountain, Gyalo had said, I dug out twenty fresh skulls.
The Lord of Death was indeed there, at least the shards of Yama. Shattered bits of bronze statuary and shards of ceramic lay around the clearing, heads and arms of the deity of death, mixed with those of protector demons. He shuddered as, too late, he spotted the clay torso of a tiny god under his descending boot and crushed it into a dozen pieces.
Shan found the altar in deep shadow, against the wall of the living mountain at the rear of the overhanging ledge. At the back of the little sheltered alcove were traces of paintings, now so faded as to be barely discernible. They were probably centuries old, dating to when the first emissaries of Buddhism had begun to cross the Himalayas.
Irregular slabs of rock, some scorched from fire, leaned against boulders on either side of the alcove to form makeshift walls. Along the back wall an old beam had been balanced on square stones for an altar, on which stood the surviving gods, a Compassionate Buddha in the center flanked by a score of bronze Yamas and lesser deities along with several less elegant plaster figures, crudely painted, the kind sold as souvenirs to tourists. The altar and nearly all the bronzes were encrusted with dust, each exposing an outline of naked wood underneath when he lifted it. The last Yama had scant dust on its surface, but dust underneath. It had been brought to the altar recently. None yet had holes in their base plates. He paused over a low, anomalous shadow at the back, and lit the hand light he had brought from the warehouse to investigate.
The shape was so alien that at first it did not register. Once it did he stared in mute confusion. It was a two-inch long, dirt-encrusted cross, with a small bearded figure entwined on it. With trepidation he lifted it. The back of the cross was clean, exposing tarnished silver, its shape pressed into the film of dust that had fallen from the rocks above.
He searched for the word, one he had learned from his father in their secret, illegal lessons during the reign of the Red Guard so many years earlier: crucifix. He stared at the image in wonder, then with even greater wonder at the deep outline it had left in the crust on the altar. It had been put there many, many years earlier, probably one of the first things deposited on the makeshift altar, never touched since. With unexpected guilt, he set the cross back exactly where it had been, pausing only to wipe the dirt from the Christ figure’s eyes.
He retreated, pacing uneasily around the ruins again, wary of the precipitous drop at the edge of the cliff, then retrieved his backpack, settled onto a flat boulder, and began scanning the mountain with binoculars he had borrowed from Tsipon’s depot. The shrine was on the long ridge that cradled Tumkot, curling out from the south, allowing him to look out over the sheer drop in front of him to the adjacent slopes, though still not high enough for him to be able to see the ice field that lay atop the imposing escarpment of the main mountain.
A family of goats walked single file up the far rock face, past a patch of blooming heather. A large bird of prey landed on a spine of rock over a grassy ledge. Far below, at the foot of the mountain, shepherds with dogs pressed a herd of sheep into the little hidden valley where he and Ama Apte had mourned with the dead mule. He looked back up at the top of the ridge and began systematically sweeping downward with his eyes, nursing his growing conviction that there must be a hidden trail over the top that the mule had descended, either with or closely followed by the murderer. He saw the patch of grass above where the mule had fallen, on a shelf less than a third of the way up the steep rock wall. No matter how sweet the grass, surely the affectionate old creature had not gone up from the valley after the long strenuous day, passing the village, passing the woman who so tenderly cared for him.
He watched a coasting raven, then the family of goats for a moment, comforted that the pace of natural life in the mountains continued despite the chaos below. Then he froze. The patch of heather the goats had passed was gone. He urgently searched the slope behind them, trying to follow the thread of shadow that marked their trail along the near vertical wall, then saw there were several threads, multiple trails, some leading up, some stretching along the flank of the escarpment, coursing around the ridge toward the Yama shrine.
When at last he found the speck of color it seemed to be impossibly distant from where he had first seen it. But then he realized the patch of color was running. For a frantic instant he thought that he might be watching a yeti, that the creature had seen him, was coming to attack him. Then the figure stopped and stepped onto a formation that jutted out from the wall and spread his arms. He stood there, motionless in the updraft, his red robe fluttering around him like some hovering bird, then he spun about and bounded cat-like to the next jutting rock, where he repeated the performance. The man wasn’t running to Shan, he was running for joy.
Shan glanced back at the shrine, knowing he risked missing the thief if he left, then trained his glasses on the trails in front of the monk, calculating that the man was making a circuit on the ridge, out to the end of the trails then back to the massif. Shan selected a prominent ledge half a mile away where the trails converged, then he too began to run.
When the man in the red robe reached him Shan was sitting at the outer edge of the shelf of rock that marked the intersection of the two main goat paths, his legs folded under him in the meditation position, gazing out over the valley below. He did not turn, did not move except to fold his hands into a ritual gesture, the earth-touching mudra, as he began a quiet mantra. The man approached, so close Shan feared he might try to shove him off the cliff, then stepped to his other side, touching him tentatively with the toe of a tattered high top boot before retreating to pace back and forth behind Shan.
As his movements slowed, Shan turned and extracted two objects, offering them on his palm to the man. The leathery, weatherbeaten face that looked back at him had deep, moist eyes that softened as they saw Shan’s offerings: a small cone of incense and a box of matches. Wordlessly the man lifted them from Shan’s palm, lit the incense, and set it on a little black patch of soot Shan had noticed when he sat down. Incense had been used there before.
As the Tibetan sat on the opposite side of the fragrant cone, he too extracted something, not the prayer beads Shan half expected, but a chillum, one of the deeply curved wooden smoking pipes traditional in the mountain tribes. He lit the pipe, returning the matches to Shan with a nod of thanks.
After several puffs on the pipe, the man opened and shut his mouth, then made a low rumbling sound in his throat. It was the way of many hermits Shan had encountered in Tibet. They often had to remember how to speak with other humans.
“You made a mudra,” the hermit finally said in a raspy voice. It was not an accusation but an expression of curiosity. “You spoke the mani mantra.” He puffed again on his pipe. “Do you think you are heard?”
Shan looked back over the mountains. “The way I reach the Buddha,” he said, “is the way the Buddha reaches me.” The words had been part of his first lesson with his old lama friend Gendun.