Bones of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

As he approached his truck he saw two stone pillars matching those of Shiva’s drawing. They led to a little flat overlooking the vast landscape, beside a spring that bubbled up out of the ground, surrounded by more of the overgrown cairns and a jutting ledge that made a roof under which three or four people could have slept. It would have been a stopping place on the pilgrims’ path. It also had to be where the hail chaser would have sheltered when the hail had pelted down on the nearby convoy. Not just pilgrims had stopped there, for Shan found the faint traces of hoof prints. He turned and studied the landscape to the south, then lifted his binoculars, locating more gray blots on the land below. The distance was too great to make out specific structures, but he knew the pattern of the blots, and he realized he had looked at these same snowcapped peaks many times during his years behind razor wire. The gray blots were Tan’s prison camps. On the day of Yankay Namdol’s release the hail chaser had come in this direction, on horseback, with the young woman who released prayer flag kites over the dam construction site.

  Shan folded his legs into the meditation position and sat in the pilgrims’ flat, facing the high mountains, reciting first the mani mantra then the mantra Shiva had written at the bottom of his chart, a mantra that invoked the mountain deities. Eventually he rose, parked his truck off the road, and pulled his pack from the back seat. He emptied his water bottle from Yangkar and refilled it in the pilgrims’ spring, then proceeded up the trail. He might have driven another two or three miles, but this was the respectful approach, as a pilgrim trying to meet the mountain god on his own terms.

  He walked for nearly four hours, alternately contemplating the pilgrims who had trod the path for centuries before him or trying to fit together the pieces of the puzzle that somehow included the hail chaser, the snow hermit, Larung Gar, and the American archaeologist. At each cairn he encountered he followed the tradition of reciting the mani mantra and adding a stone. He often sensed having his old friend Lokesh at his side and recalled with a pang how when released from prison, they had naively vowed to spend a year walking pilgrims’ paths together. He and the old Tibetan had still been able to spend days off from time to time exploring and rehabilitating ancient pilgrim trails. Once, for a moment, he was sure he heard the old man’s joyful laugh, then realized it was just the chuckling call of a snow partridge sunning itself near the trail.

  The air had grown thin, and much cooler, when he crested a small ridge and looked down into a north-facing flat at the base of a huge rock formation from which four long spines protruded. He extracted Shiva’s chart and saw that the spines matched the talons of her garuda bird, the last in her sequence of landmarks. With a bit of imagination, he could see that the curving expanse of stone above the talons might be seen as the wings of a giant bird. The flat was shielded from the wind and opened onto a grove of thick junipers beyond which lay a long field of ragged rock outcroppings. A dozen paces past the talons the flat disappeared into the sky, its thin lip of shale hanging over a cliff that had to be hundreds of feet high. Two horses were tethered by a small spring that ran along the edge of the trees. Folded blankets were stacked by a smoldering fire pit, and at the back, just beyond the farthest talon, a length of heavy black felt had been draped across a rope strung between two trees to make a makeshift shelter, in which he could see a few pots and kettles. He studied Lhakpa’s map, realizing that he was at the opposite side of the rock field where he had chased the kite flyer.

  No one called out in challenge as he reached the fire pit. He circled the campfire then knelt at the little spring to rub water onto his face. Suddenly he heard a grunt, a rush of small feet, then something slammed into his hindquarters, sending him sprawling into the spring.

  “It requires real effort to accidentally find this camp,” came a simmering voice above him. He righted himself slowly, rising to his knees to find a young Tibetan woman with a wool cap pulled low over her head and a heavy shepherd’s staff raised in her hands. But it hadn’t been the staff that struck him. With a now joyful bleat Tara the goat charged him again, but this time to push her face against him, mouthing his jacket in her usual greeting.

  The woman relaxed her hold on the staff. “She acts like she knows you,” she said, question in her voice.

  “Animals like me,” Shan said, and slowly rose to his feet. “I was on the pilgrims’ path,” he offered. “Does it continue into the stone field?” He took a step toward the outcroppings.

  Tara, however, would not let him avoid her. She leapt up on her two back feet, nuzzling his belly.

  “No, she does know you,” the woman insisted, raising the staff again.

  Shan sighed and sat on a flat boulder, putting his hat beside him as he rubbed Tara’s head. “Can we perhaps start over?” he asked. “Yes. Last month Tara ate a pair of my shoes, then a shirt she pulled off my clothesline. And she seems to enjoy visiting the cells in my jail.”

  The woman stiffened, raising the club higher as she retreated toward the shadows, calling Tara. The goat looked at her with a curious expression but did not leave Shan. The Tibetan hesitated. “She trusts you,” she said in surprise.

  “I was there when you took Yankay away from his detention camp. I never liked those reeducation camps. Not really a prison, not really a school. Just one of those limbo hells where souls bide their time for life to begin again.”

  “We’ve done nothing wrong!” the woman snapped.

  “I am not your enemy,” Shan said.

  “You are Chinese! You admit you are a government officer!”

  “Officer seems too big a word for what I do. Just a lowly constable. And I am outside my jurisdiction.”

  “No,” came an amused voice from the shadows. “Shan is more like the Abbot of Yangkar. And the gods’ valley was always in the jurisdiction of Yangkar gompa.” Lhakpa emerged into the daylight.

  “He is a policeman, Uncle!” the woman pressed, alarm in her voice. “And there is no more gompa at Yangkar.”

  “No. The gompa remains, just harder to see than it once was. Shan is a policeman who opens his jail beds to half-frozen monks and helps paint the chorten in the town square, always ignoring the Mao at the other end.”

  “He was trying to deceive me when he arrived,” his niece pressed.

  “In Tibet a wise man learns to test new ground before revealing himself.” Lhakpa turned to Shan. “This is Jaya, my other niece.”

  “I can barely tell them apart.”

  Lhakpa laughed. “She is the human one, though I warn her often that she gets dangerously close to transmigration these days.”

  “As when she flies kites over bulldozers.”

  Jaya cocked her head at him. “It was you who followed me on the ridge that day.”

  “I thought it silly when she first suggested it,” Lhakpa said. “But it makes them hesitate when they find prayers mysteriously draped over equipment. I especially like the night flights. The director came out of his quarters one morning and prayer flags were all over the trees by his door. He was furious, cursed his security team for allowing it, but they said they were certain no one came close in the night. So they installed security cameras. They were even more disturbed when it happened again, and the cameras proved no one had set foot in his compound. Tibetan ghosts!”

  Shan chewed on Lhakpa’s words. Was the snow monk revealing that they had helpers secretly working in the valley below? “They have a drone now,” Shan warned. “One of those used by the army for battlefield reconnaissance. You won’t be able to hide in the outcroppings when they watch from above.”

  Lhakpa cast a worried glance toward the sky, no doubt realizing that their camp would be conspicuous from the sky.

  “Maybe the gods would send an eagle,” Jaya suggested. “Eagles don’t like drones.”

  “You have a relative who’s an eagle perhaps?” Shan asked. “I’ve always wondered, is that a lower- or a higher-level reincarnation?”

  Jaya gave him a dangerous smile, then began moving the blankets under the lean-to of
black cloth, which would look like just another shadow from above.

  “You’re not really a snow monk,” Shan said to Lhakpa.

  Lhakpa shrugged. “I think I have the heart of a snow monk, and I was looking forward to a few months wandering the remote peaks. But I was needed for the valley.”

  “For the valley or for its cavern?” Shan asked. “I saw heavily loaded yaks coming out of the mountains when I was climbing up.”

  As Lhakpa motioned Shan toward the lean-to, Jaya uttered an angry protest and stubbornly planted herself, arms akimbo, in front of it. “Uncle, no! We don’t know him well enough.”

  Lhakpa raised a palm to quiet her. “If he meant to do us harm, he would not have come as a pilgrim. He stopped to pray at each of the cairns. He had no idea anyone was watching, niece.”

  As Jaya reluctantly stepped aside, Lhakpa opened a flap in the back wall of the shelter and Shan discovered it was an entry into a wide, dry cavity created by a huge overhanging ledge that was obscured by the juniper trees. Crude shelves had been constructed of long flat slabs of slate set on smaller, squarish rocks. The entire hundred-foot stone wall at the back of the chamber was lined with the shelves and two-thirds of the shelves were full of artifacts.

  “The local herders say that Gekho’s cavern was used since the first man met the gods,” Lhakpa explained as he guided an awestruck Shan along the shelves. “There were many small chapels off the main tunnel of the cavern, and each chapel’s contents were kept together here, as the professor recovered them, with the more modern images, probably one or two hundred years old, at the shelf to the right, progressing to the oldest at the other end.” Among those more recent images Shan recognized exquisitely carved and cast representations of the Buddhas of the Three Times, the five peaceful meditational Buddhas sitting astride golden lotus flowers, then many of the twenty-one aspects of Mother Tara. He lingered for a moment at a particularly fierce-looking Red Tara, painfully recalling how Metok had invoked the protectress with his last breath. As they progressed along the shelves the images grew less familiar, many of them appearing to be angry demons and protector gods. The last images left on the shelves were a group of primitive figures that looked more like tigers than gods, frightening in aspect. Lhakpa pulled away a large piece of dark cloth. Under it were two intricately crafted figures, one of the blue mountain god and one of Yamantaka, the Lord of Death. Propped between the small statues were photographs of Professor Gangfen and a blond Western woman who had to be Natalie Pike.

  The grainy photos were from an instant camera, close-ups taking in only their subjects’ upper bodies, but Shan saw the joy in both their eyes as they held the same two figurines. There was sadness there too, for the only reason they had been collecting the treasures was because they knew the sacred cavern would be sacrificed in the building of Beijing’s dam.

  The woman who gazed out of the photo had Cato Pike’s intelligent-but-defiant blue eyes. She was in her mid-twenties, and her high cheekbones would have given most women an elegant beauty, but he could see from her smudged face, tangled hair, and dirt-stained clothing that she was not one much concerned about outward appearances.

  Professor Gangfen reminded Shan so much of his own father that he felt a pang as he studied the archaeologist’s image. Even without his wire-rimmed spectacles he would have looked the scholar. Shan imagined that the many pockets of the photographer’s vest he wore were filled with little brushes, dental picks, glassine envelopes, and other tools of his beloved trade. A pencil was lodged behind an ear, sticking out of shaggy salt-and-pepper hair. Like Natalie Pike, he had died an unsung hero, perhaps even more so than the American woman, for he had known that his government would severely punish him if they had discovered what he was doing. He had not only defied his government, he had given his life to save a vital history, to preserve the truth.

  “Shan,” Lhakpa urged, standing at the flap in the felt wall. Shan realized the Tibetan had been calling his name. Shan bowed his head respectfully to the images of the two dead archaeologists and rejoined the snow monk.

  “They must have gotten most of the artifacts out,” Shan observed as Lhakpa led him back to the campsite.

  “Three yak trains have already left. But even so, and including those still here, it is only part of the total. It wasn’t just one cavern shrine, there were tunnels and chambers deep in the mountain, an unexplored labyrinth of shrines. Just imagine all those people for all those centuries, carrying dim butter lamps for half a mile or more into the darkened corridors to reach the gods.”

  Lhakpa stepped across the camp into the shadows of the field of outcroppings with a summoning gesture to Shan, who retrieved his pack and followed. He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Jaya behind him.

  “I don’t understand how they could have taken so much out of the cavern without being spotted,” he said to the Tibetan woman as they caught up with Lhakpa.

  “There are friends below. There’s a Tibetan named Metok, a senior engineer, who helps sometimes. He had trucks and other equipment parked across the mouth of the cave at the end of the workdays before…” her voice trailed off.

  “Before the explosion,” Lhakpa finished. “He gave us cover that way, so we could move in and out of the cave at night without being seen. Metok took a great risk. He’s a good friend.”

  “Metok loved going inside,” Jaya explained. “He came back again, and again, each time more worried. He wanted us to give him our photos and inventory lists, so he could persuade the authorities to stop the project.” Jaya winced. “I asked him if he had somehow missed the fact that six thousand temples and monasteries had already been destroyed. Where was the big monastery at Yangkar, I asked him, or the one at Lhadrung? Where were the millions of artifacts already taken by the government? When Natalie told him that some of the artifacts here were truly ancient and showed that riders had likely come here from Scythia and Central Asia, that the standing stones were from those cultures, he said yes, that was his point, that the stones proved that this was a unique site, that it was so important it could be one of those heritage sites protected by the United Nations. But then just days later the standing stones were bulldozed, all signs of them destroyed. He never argued with us again, just asked how he could help. So I said move the trucks in front of the cave. He has a good soul, that Metok. The gods are in his heart. He thinks he might convince the government that the site is too unstable to continue the work, says he knows of maps in Golmud that show a fault line here that was left off the maps used by the Five Claws engineers. He was called away unexpectedly but before he left, he said he sent a friend named Sun to bring them back.”

  Shan looked away. Sun had abruptly gone to Golmud to retrieve maps, but there had been no maps with his baggage. He spoke no more until they emerged onto a field thick with grass and wildflowers. They were at one of the highest points overlooking the valley, a few hundred yards from the narrow pass where the dam was to be constructed, looking down at the frenzied construction activity at the bottom of the valley.

  It was Shan who broke the silence. “I pray you will not hate me for the news I must give you.” He sat on a ledge and motioned them to join him.

  “I was forced to witness an execution in Lhadrung town,” he said, his heart feeling like a cold stone. “I didn’t know about all this,” he said, gesturing to the huge work site below. “I just saw a man convicted of corruption, who had defiance in his eyes and a prayer in his heart.” He looked each of his companions in the eyes. “It was Metok Rentzig.”

  The color drained from Jaya’s face. “No! No, no, no!” she cried. “Impossible!”

  Lhakpa sank his face into his hands.

  “Impossible but true,” Shan said.

  “He was not corrupt!” Jaya said with a sob.

  “I know that now. He smuggled a note out. He said he was being held because he had seen the professor and Natalie Pike murdered. I know now that he meant that he was there when the cave was collapsed, and that whoever
directed it knew he was killing those inside.”

  Jaya wiped at her tears. “They killed Metok. The government murdered him.”

  “And his friend Sun died on the sky train. But it wasn’t the government, only certain people in the government,” Shan said, and gazed despairingly down at the construction. “We can’t stop this, but we can expose the truth,” he said.

  “For whom?” Jaya snapped. “No one in the government will care!”

  “For us. For Metok and his friend Sun. For Professor Gangfen and Natalie Pike. For Gekho.”

  Lhakpa shook his head as if disagreeing. “We have more chance of stopping the dam than finding the truth. Buddha’s blood, Shan, you’re talking about Public Security and a project led by Party officials from Beijing. The deputy director, that man Jiao, has a satellite phone. He talks with Beijing almost every day.”

  Shan decided not to ask how Lhakpa could possibly know that. “If you keep resisting, they’ll call out armed patrols.”

  “If they call out patrols,” Lhakpa said, heat entering his voice, “we keep resisting.” Jaya murmured her agreement, then whispered a mantra to the Mother Protector.

  “I’m going down,” Shan announced.

  “Bad timing. They’ve had a high-level visitor,” Lhakpa said, and pointed to the Five Claws office building. Shan made out the shape of a white utility vehicle parked between the flagpole and the director’s office.

  “Good. I’m not going down to see the director. I am happy for him to be distracted.”

  “Then wait,” Jaya said, and reached into her pack, extracting one of the lanyards with a security badge Shan had seen the workers wearing. She reminded Shan that there were usually spare hard hats in the bin by the mess hall, then had one question before he turned away. “What can you tell us about that drone?”

  * * *

  It was midafternoon by the time Shan reached the administrative compound at the bottom of the valley. He found a hat in the bin described by Jaya and a worker’s tunic hanging on a row of pegs inside the now-empty hall. He went as close to the headquarters office as he dared, wary of the guard now posted there, but near enough to see the nondescript white utility vehicle parked by the front door and the young Chinese driver slumped behind the wheel, asleep.