Beautiful Ghosts (37 page)

Shan still didn’t fully understand what Zhoka had been. Perhaps that was the greatest mystery, the one that would explain all else. It was a place of great history, of deep magic, of saints and deities, connected even to a faraway emperor in a faraway time, a place the old Tibetans would die to protect.

“I went into every meditation cell I could find,” Lokesh said suddenly. “I descended into every hole, hoping it was a tunnel. I found many old paintings, some of images I had never seen before. We have seen only a tiny part of what was meant to be.”

“But the passages leading farther inside are all collapsed,” Shan said.

“Yes. I found some small tunnels leading to shrines but the shrines led nowhere else. They were all places of preparation. For somewhere else.”

Corbett appeared, with a bowl of tea for each. After he drank, Lokesh looked up, and rubbed his eyes, as if just coming awake. “I found the beginning place for pilgrims. Come.” He did not elaborate but climbed down and began briskly walking to a ruin nearly fifty yards away, as the others followed. Shan had taken the huge pile of rubble to be a collapsed hall. But the hall was not fully collapsed and Lokesh had found a narrow passage inside.

They climbed down a narrow flight of stairs and entered a chamber inhabited by demons. Every inch of the surviving walls and ceiling had been painted with the images of wrathful protector demons. Yao, carrying his small pack, produced his copy of the pilgrim’s guide and leafed through the pages. “Newcomers may only enter the earth temple through the garden of the demons who watch over it, to all sides and the sky above.”

Yao looked up from his reading for a moment and seemed to lock his gaze with that of a blue demon above him. “Here is where you leave your life behind, for only by doing so may you attain the heaven beyond. Be terrified, or do not continue to the four gates. Become pure or you will not know which is heaven and which is hell. Be always a pilgrim or you will be blind to what you seek.”

“The pilgrim meditated on the demons to become pure,” Shan explained.

“And then descended to the four gates of the mandala,” Lokesh said.

“But there were only two gates,” a voice said from the shadows behind them. The beam of Corbett’s light found Liya, who sat against the wall. The side of her face was bruised, a line of dried blood where the skin on her cheek had been split. As Dawa ran and embraced her she extended her hand as if to ward off any aid. “I’m not really hurt. They jumped me, those same two. I scratched the big one on the cheek when he grabbed me. He hit me and I ran.” She straightened and looked at Shan. “Two gates, only two stairways down.”

Lokesh reached into a pocket and extracted a stone. “I found this by that waterfall. I think it had fallen from above, where it is all shadow now.” He handed Shan a small piece of rock, no more than two inches long.

Shan rolled it over in his palm, looking inquiringly at Lokesh, then studied it closely. One side was painted green. Shan and the old Tibetan exchanged a knowing smile, then Shan gestured for the others to follow him outside, showing them how the entrance to the tunnel was lined up with the end of the collapsed hall. “Probably it was all one structure, so from the time of entering to greet the demons the pilgrim had the sense of being inside the earth.” He squatted at the top of the stairs and made a circle in the soil.

“One of the basic symbols in Tibetan tradition is the circle, the fundamental shape of the mandala,” he explained. “Symbolism was used throughout the construction of gompas, incorporated into the architecture. Several old gompas had central structures built on the scheme of a mandala, three or four stories high, creating three-dimensional mandalas to represent sacred mountains and the ascent to Mount Meru, the center of the universe, the summit of heaven.”

“But everything here was destroyed,” Corbett observed. “Even if there had been a mandala palace, the army leveled it.”

“If you were trying to reach the earth deities, if you were taming the demons who lived in the earth, where would you put your mandala? In the earth,” Shan suggested, and pointed toward the tunnel that led down to the fresco room and drew a line at the base of the circle on the ground, and another at the top, representing the collapsed tunnel on the opposite side of the ruins, then asked for Corbett’s compass. “These tunnels are on an east-west axis.” He demonstrated his point using the compass. Traditionally a mandala had four gates, aligned in the cardinal directions, each associated with complex symbols, each represented by a separate color. “The arrangement of the gates would depend on the deity at the center.” Shan cast a look of inquiry toward Lokesh. “If the earth is to be tamed then it must be the Lord of the Thunderbolt.” Lokesh nodded. “Then the east gate will be white, the south yellow, and the west red. And here,” Shan said, marking a point in the circle halfway between the east and west, “is the waterfall with the old writing on the wall. The green wall. Marking the north gate.”

“But there is no gate, no other sign of a mandala,” Yao protested.

“Somehow it is the way inside the sacred mountain mandala,” Shan said. “Carved out of rock, incorporating natural features like the underground stream. It is the palace of the artists, the place the amban referred to, the place of secrets. There will be three or four levels, in concentric circles, each smaller than the one below.”

But it did not feel like heaven as they stepped through the dimly lit fresco room, packs on their backs, half an hour later. Dawa, who had found Surya there, covered with blood, buried her head in Corbett’s shoulder. Yao had found an old staff and held it like a weapon, keeping behind Ko, as if he expected the youth to flee at any moment.

Shan paused, Liya at his side, shining the light on the patterns of blood on the wall. “Lodi made these shapes,” he said, “as he lay dying. On the top he wrote about the cave of the Mountain God.”

The words had a strange effect on Liya. She clamped her hand on his arm as if in warning and glanced around as if to see who else might have heard, then shot him an angry glance.

“Where is it?” Shan pressed. “Where is the Mountain God, the golden Buddha?”

“That has nothing to do with the stolen art, nothing to do with dead emperors,” Liya said, her voice full of warning.

“People will die if you try to liberate the prisoners,” Shan said in a desperate whisper. “Many people.”

“People will die if we don’t,” she shot back.

As Liya turned to step away Shan touched her arm. “Wait,” he said, and pointed to the long oval with the circle inside, and the square inside the circle, then reached into his pocket. “Something occurred to me when we were climbing the mountains yesterday.” He pulled out the dzi bead Liya had given him at Bumpari and extended it, fingers on each end. “He collected these beads, and each has a set of symbols.”

Liya’s gaze did not leave the drawing. “You’re right!” she exclaimed. “He drew it like a bead! A square means access to earth, a circle access to heaven. An earth door inside a heaven door,” she said in a perplexed tone.

“Was he trying to tell you how to get inside?”

“No,” Liya replied. “He did not know the way in, none of us do, only that the palace exists and must be saved.”

“Then perhaps he was explaining how to find the Mountain Buddha,” Shan ventured, watching Liya turn away as if she feared revealing something by her reaction. “Or saying someone else had found a way in.” He left Liya staring at the drawing with pain in her eyes.

Five minutes later, at the side of the frigid channel, Shan borrowed the staff and stepped into the stream at the base of the falls, one end of the rope tied to his waist as Corbett held the other end. He probed the waterfall with the stick, each time hitting solid rock five feet behind the cascade. He tried the base of the falls, behind the rock bed of the stream, and could find no bottom. There was a deep pool directly under the falls.

As he reached the far side he extracted the small lantern from his pocket and studied the faded images. He saw now that there was a small painting above the old writing he had seen before, two robed figures seated on top of a mountain. One wore the conical hat of a teacher.

“Life,” a familiar voice rasped behind him. Lokesh was there, nearly knee deep in the frigid water, pointing to the faded letters, one hand on the safety rope. “And nature,” he added, pointing to another. He paused, studying the images of the lama and student, then a soft laugh escaped his lips. “He asks the novice a teaching riddle.”

“What is the nature of life,” Shan said. As he turned to call out to the others, explaining the words, he saw that Lokesh had released his grip on the guide rope and was staring at the base of the falls, into the blackness of the pool, his eyes suddenly serene, his mouth turned upward in a grin.

“We know the nature of life,” the old Tibetan said and leaned forward until the water began to pour onto his crown.

“No!” Shan shouted, and lunged to grab his friend.

But it was too late. Lokesh, grinning, spread out his arms and let himself drop forward, into the falls, disappearing into the black pool. The nature of life was a man falling into a well, his eyes wide open.

C
HAPTER
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WELVE

“He’s killed himself!” Liya gasped. “The waterfall will trap him at the bottom!” There was no thrashing, no sign of Lokesh beneath the black surface of the water.

The terrible stillness left by her words was broken by a flurry of movement to Shan’s side. Ko grabbed the light from Corbett’s hand, shoved Yao against the wall, and leapt into the water, exactly where Lokesh had disappeared.

Shan stared in horror, vaguely aware of Corbett cursing, of Dawa crying. Then he dropped the pack from his back, stripped off his coat, and stepped into the water. He did not look back, just clenched his light tightly and dropped into the waterfall.

The churning, frigid water wrenched his body, driving him down, deeper into the blackness. The pool seemed to have no bottom, no side after he left the narrow chute where he had jumped. He pushed with his legs, fought to move through the water with his one free hand, the other aiming the light to find something ahead. But there was nothing. Lokesh and Ko, both of whom had worn more clothing, might still be sinking, falling through the blackness until their lungs burst, until there was no chance of ever rising again. The old land gods, a voice moaned in his head. Lokesh had gone to meet the ancient land gods, who would never give him, or Ko, back. Then he realized his own lungs were screaming. He pushed upward, fighting the coldness, struggling against his panic, and broke into a dark chamber, gasping its cold air, fearful at first that the blackness below would pull him down again, then fearful of the strange sobbing he heard.

He swam toward a tiny light, collided with a black rock wall, and pulled himself up onto the wall. The sobbing was closer. He wiped his eyes, trying to make out the dim shapes before him. It was Lokesh and Ko. But they weren’t sobbing, they were laughing. They had taken off their shoes and were wringing water from their socks.

Ko saw him first, his amused expression instantly changing to a scowl.

“Welcome to the real Zhoka,” Lokesh exclaimed, and shined his light on the walls.

A minute later, Shan was back in the tunnel, excitedly explaining their discovery. “It is the north gate,” he confirmed. “The chamber is full of paintings and words.” He quickly described how a wall had been cleverly built across the pool by the ancient builders, to give the appearance of the falls cascading down a natural rock face, leaving a chute in the center for those pilgrims who could answer the old teaching riddle.

“I can’t swim,” Liya said in a low moan as she began to grasp Shan’s meaning.

“It isn’t really swimming,” Shan said. “You just fall and move toward the lights. Lokesh and Ko will shine their lights in the water. We just need to protect the gear.”

Corbett began emptying the packs, and produced rope and two heavy plastic bags that had been packed as ground covers. As he began lining the packs with the bags Shan stopped him. “Your clothes. The water is freezing. Keep room for your clothes, so you will have dry ones to put on.”

Yao looked at him, aghast.

“Swim in your underclothes,” Shan said. “It’s dark, no one will see. Follow the light.”

Corbett, grinning, tossed two tee shirts for Dawa and Liya to wear, then finished repacking and extracted a long length of rope, explaining he would go first with the rope tied to his waist, Yao holding the other end, so Dawa and Liya could follow the rope, then they could pull the packs through from the other side.

Ten minutes later they were all on the other side, making tea, after Corbett showed them how to use the small gas stove the army had provided. As Dawa sorted what extra dry clothes she could find for Shan, Ko, and Lokesh, Yao began studying the chamber with his lamp. The pool carved a long half oval into the room, whose curving back wall had two stairways cut in the living stone, leading to passages extending to the east and west.

“The circular tunnel,” Yao said as Shan joined him. “We are inside your mandala.” He looked back at the black pool. “Surely pilgrims weren’t expected to enter that way.”

“There were many ways,” Lokesh said in a solemn voice. “But each was a test. You read the guide. Be terrified or do not continue. Surely there were pilgrims who needed to come through the water, may even have been told by the lamas here they must do so. The heart of the world is not to be easily attained. Here is where your life is left behind,” he said, repeating the words of the pilgrim guide.

“What do you mean, the heart of the world?” Yao asked.

“The mandala is a form of the universe. The essence of the world.” He gazed at Yao with an expression of sudden curiosity.

Yao frowned. “You mean a model of the universe,” the inspector said uncertainly. “A pretend place.”

“No,” Lokesh readily replied. “The opposite. More real than real.” He saw the confusion on Yao’s face and shrugged. “Outside, the universe can be difficult to see. But here—” he gestured toward the walls, which seemed alive with color and shapes, “it is within the reach of your arms.”