Jowa, to Shan's surprise, spoke first. "We are sorry for the intrusion," he said. "We came about the Yakde Lama."
To a man, the monks nodded and kept smiling.
"He lived here," the bald monk said. "He's coming back."
Jowa threw a triumphant glance toward Shan, then looked back at the bald monk. "The boy Khitai? He lived here?"
The monks looked at each other in confusion.
"The Yakde," the bald monk said with a shrug, as if not understanding Jowa's questions. "He would sit and meditate in the middle of herds of wild antelope," the man said in a bright tone. "He wrote a teaching on it. We have it, in his own writing. That was the Second. The Fourth remembered and came to borrow it, and he took it to Lhasa to show the Dalai Lama."
The Second Yakde, Shan quickly calculated, would have lived at least three centuries earlier.
Jowa did not press. He did something truly remarkable. He looked at the bald man and smiled— a serene smile, a monk's smile.
"The Ninth," Shan said after a few moments. "Did the Ninth come here?"
"Once," the monk said. "He spent some months here and wrote a teaching about what we do here. The Souls of Changtang Mountains, he called it."
Shan's mind raced. He should ask about Lau, about the waterkeeper. But his heart had another question. "Did the Yakde go south, beyond Lhasa?" he heard himself ask. "To a place called Lhadrung?"
The bald monk readily nodded. The man must be the
kenpo
, Shan decided, the abbot of the Raven's Nest. "The Third did, and the Fifth. To a hermitage, deep in a mountain. And the last time an army came," the abbot said, "men arrived from Lhasa. Wise men. They said, send your young monks away, to hide. Some went to that mountain place. The dropka brought horses and some of their children. They were going to fight this new army, the dropka said, and their children needed a place to go until the war was over." The abbot sighed and sipped his tea. "The next year we got a letter from one of our monks. They rode for weeks," he recounted, "only at night. Near a city there was great fighting, terrible bloodshed, and the invaders shot cannons into the mountains where our people were. In the end," he said slowly, "three of our monks arrived in the Lhadrung hiding place and two of the children. A young boy and a girl."
What had Gendun said— that he saw the Kunlun with a stranger's eyes but that he knew it in his heart? When he was young, his parents had given him to monks who took him away.
A bell sounded from down another corridor, and the monks handed their pages to the abbot and rose. Jowa stepped eagerly to the shelves, gazing upon the pechas, row after row of sutras and teachings. As the abbot arranged the pages into a stack and slipped them into a silk cover, he starting explaining details of the collection to Jowa.
Shan wandered down the corridor. A door to a room at the end was ajar. Bajys was inside, squatting before a long thangka that hung on the back wall of the room, an elaborate image of a man, not one of the Buddha forms, not even one of the many prominent teachers whom Shan had learned to recognize in such paintings. The floor of the room held a carpet far richer than those he had seen elsewhere in the gompa. Indeed, the entire room was appointed in a style far more elegant than elsewhere in the gompa. A robe with bright embroidery hung on one wall. A bronze figure of a lama, possibly the ancient teacher Guru Rinpoche, sat prominently on a table by the door.
"What is it?" Shan asked, not understanding anything Bajys had done since arriving at the gompa.
Bajys just smiled, the first smile Shan had ever seen on his face. There was a low wooden platform bed against the far wall. Bajys bent to straighten the bedding, then picked up a small bronze dorje, the small scepterlike object of Buddha ritual, on the table beside the bed and carefully wiped away its dust. He looked at Shan with surprise in his eyes, as if Shan had failed to see something important, something obvious to Bajys. He took Shan's elbow and guided him to the place where he had been squatting and nodded at the thangka.
Bajys had never been there before, Shan knew. He had not known about the gompa. But he had recognized the figure in the ancient painting.
"His eyes," Bajys said a tone of awe.
Then, with a catch in his breath, Shan understood. It was the Yakde. Bajys was looking at the boy lama in another body and had recognized him.
"It's his room," someone said over his shoulder. It was the bald monk, the abbot. "The room for when the Yakde visits."
Bajys looked at both men with a small, confused smile, then looked at the dorje in his hands, as if not understanding how it got there.
"How did you know to come here?" Shan asked Bajys. He had not had time to explore the entire structure. Something had guided him to the room. "You were never here before. But you knew it was his room."
"It was just the place I was going to," Bajys began, struggling for words. "I couldn't know," he said, looking at the dorje as he turned it over and over in his hands. The dorje was called the diamond vehicle by many Buddhists, symbolizing the anchor of enlightenment, the indestructible power of Buddhahood. "My eyes didn't know," he said in a tone of awe, as if perhaps the dorje had called him. "But my feet did." He looked up, clearly pained by his inability to understand what had happened but unable to stop grinning.
The abbot took Shan down one more flight of stairs, past a storeroom that held baskets of grain and dried dung. Shan paused at the door to the room, and saw that only a tenth of the space was utilized. From pegs on one wall hung huge coils of ropes. He remembered what Batu had said at the lama's field, that Khitai had told him old men came sometimes to fix the flag on the huge rock tower. Shan followed his guide onto a long terrace that was covered by the ledge above but open on three sides, supported only by pillars of mortared stones. Along the inside wall was a long line of mounted keg-sized cylinders of bronze and wood— prayer wheels. At the far end stood a large four-legged brazier, for burning fragrant offerings. Below, on the valley floor, Shan saw the wall of rocks he had noticed from above, and he realized that it was an old corral. The Raven's Nest hung above the corral, clinging to the side of the mountain, separated from the valley floor by a precipitous drop of at least two hundred feet.
"It must be a difficult thing, to be the abbot of such a place," Shan said.
"I'm sorry?"
"Your job. To be responsible—"
The man smiled shyly. "But I am not the abbot," he said in a tone of apology. "I am just the abbot's assistant. While the abbot is away I do his job."
"Away?"
"On the other side of the mountains."
Shan stared at the brilliant waters. Maybe it was true. They brought visions of truth. "How long ago?"
"Not long. Five, maybe six years. But he's in good health. A nun came once and told us."
"What," Shan asked slowly, "what exactly did the nun do?"
"Gave us the message. No letter. She said a letter would be dangerous. She brought a dried flower, that's how we knew. Rinpoche likes to meditate on flowers. She smiled a great deal and gave us incense and bricks of tea and asked to go to the Yakde's room. She offered prayers there for a long time, and then she climbed down and sat by the oracle lake. She said she had always heard about this place, from her teachers, and she was glad to have seen it before she died. Then she asked for messages to the abbot from each of us and memorized our names and our messages. She said mostly she had come because the abbot was worried about us."
Lau had been there. Lau had sat in front of the thankga and no doubt had recognized the eyes as Bajys had. She had sat by the oracle waters after she had delivered the message from the abbot of the Raven's Nest, the waterkeeper who sat in Glory Camp. Shan vividly remembered the old lama's serene face and the dried flower in his fingers.
"Sometimes," Shan suggested, "sometimes you have other visitors."
"Herders come," the monk said, pointing out the narrow trail that followed the left side of the valley. "They bring grain and new blankets, sometimes. The herders have always kept the gompa alive. They say they can't bring their children for training anymore. But they bring us food." He looked toward a small ledge on the rock face fifty feet away. It held a nest. Three ravens sat there, all watching the two men intently. "Except, one day, the ravens were very scared, and one of the cloud riders came. Loud, like thunder."
Shan closed his eyes. "What did they want?"
"Up on his rock, Rinpoche, our old one, was rejoicing. He said there were some Buddhas who flew like that. But the rest of us saw that they were just Chinese."
"They came to find you?"
"Not really. They paid us no attention at first. We watched from here for a long time as they worked by the lake. Then I put on the clothing of a herder and went down to the valley, and they met me. The man in charge said he knew we were illegal monks. He said that bad Chinese would arrest us, but that they were good Chinese and were our friends. He and his friends came back to the gompa and we offered them tea, and they gave us boxes of sweet biscuits. They asked about us, about who our leaders were, about our sect."
"You mean they were scientists?" Shan asked in confusion. "Professors?"
The monk was watching another group of ravens, flying in circles over the lake as if engaged in some aerial dance. Shan repeated the question.
"Not scientists," he said, still watching the birds. "Builders."
"I don't understand."
He turned back to Shan, puzzled, apparently trying to find words. "Wait here," he said and trotted back to the door, leaving Shan alone.
Shan looked out over the valley with an unexpected contentment. The Raven's Nest was so high, and the horizon so distant, that the clouds seemed to be moving below them, across the mouth of the valley. The place seemed disconnected from the planet, its remoteness a quality unto itself, as if a piece of the world had indeed broken off into the wind, unaffected by time, unaffected by the world below.
But then the assistant abbot appeared, with a satisfied smile, and in his hands was a red nylon jacket and on the breast of the jacket, where he pointed, was a gold emblem of a man and a woman reaching over an oil derrick, a sheep, and a tractor in a field.
Shan felt as though he had been kicked in the belly. He turned away for a moment, fighting a sudden flood of dismay and fear, the emotions of defeat. The world had found the Raven's Nest after all.
"It's a strong coat. We all got one," the monk said in a consoling tone, as if trying to convince Shan not to be worried. "When Rinpoche goes on top this winter he can wear it."
"When they came," Shan said with a sigh, "did they give names?"
The assistant abbot shrugged. "Our Mandarin is poor, I'm afraid. The one in charge smoked many cigarettes, and we couldn't see his eyes because he wore glasses that were very dark. He asked questions about the lake."
Shan looked out over the shimmering waters. "What about it? What kind of questions?"
"When did it freeze, how deep is it, did we drink the water ourselves, where were the sources of the streams that replenished it."
"You said he worked at the lake, before you went to talk. What did they do?"
"I don't know. Maybe they prayed. Maybe they drank some. It is a holy lake, it has been holy for as long as people remember, even before the teachings of Buddha arrived."
"And his questions, how did you answer them?"
"It is always replenished, because it has no bottom. And of course we drink the water, even in winter when we melt its ice. It freezes much later than other lakes."
"Because it is protected," Shan said, "because it is exposed to the south and heat is radiated from the huge walls."
"No," the monk said with a patient smile. "Because the mountain deities bathe in it."
Shan nodded. "And that is all he asked?"
The assistant abbot stared out into the sky. "He wanted to know about the animals in the ranges here. I told him the land below is thick with antelope and wild yak, that the mountains have wild goats and lynx and snow leopard. He wanted to know how many people could sleep in the gompa. He said workers might come to help us, and afterward important people might stay here sometimes."
"Help you?"
"Build things, I think."
"Did they come back after that?"
"Twice. Once to take many buckets of water out of the lake. Once to take many photographs. They brought us more of the sweet biscuits that the old ones like."
"Did you wear your robes when he came those times?"
"No. He asked us not to. He said it could be dangerous for now, that we couldn't trust every Chinese. But he gave me great hope."
"You mean because they are coming to—" To what? Shan wondered. To shoot animals, doubtlessly, but not just that. Not if workers needed to come first. "To build?"
