Jake Atlas and the Quest for the Crystal Mountain

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  We pitched our two tents in torchlight, and Dad cooked dinner on a little gas stove. There was no wood for a campfire, which was a bummer because it was freezing. Even wrapped in our coats and cocooned in sleeping bags, we shivered. There was no wind, just a penetrating coldness seeping through the layers.

  Dad made some sort of stew, but my hands trembled so much I could barely hold the bowl. In the end Mum fed me like a toddler. She kept glancing at Dad and muttering “We weren’t prepared for this,” in a way that said “You didn’t prepare for this.”

  You might wonder why we weren’t in our tents, but there was a reason to stay outside, for a short time at least. Remember my dad mentioned the stars?

  It was the most amazing night sky ever. Away from lights, and high up where the air was clear, it was as if the entire universe was crammed above the valley. The night blazed with spirals and clusters, and the great smear of the Milky Way. As Mum and Dad planned our route to the monastery, Pan and I lay with our rucksacks as pillows. I’d never even seen a shooting star before, but that night we spotted dozens, silver scratches that caused us to point and gasp.

  “Think how meaningless we are right now,” Pan muttered. “We’re all just dust in space.”

  She always got deep at times like that. I knew what she meant, but I sometimes suspected she was quoting lyrics from one of her heavy metal bands.

  “Yeah, whatever, sis.”

  “I’m serious, Jake. Really, what’s the point in any of this? Our treasure hunts, beating the People of the Snake. In the cosmic scale of things, who really cares?”

  “Maybe try not to think about the cosmic scale of things?”

  “I just don’t know that it matters.”

  “OK, but if we’re gonna do something that doesn’t matter, it might as well be stopping an evil organization from hiding knowledge of a mass catastrophe that might kill millions. Better than watching YouTube videos of cats, right?”

  “Might kill millions, Jake. We don’t really know what this is all about. You’re so convinced that we’re right and the People of the Snake are wrong.”

  “Are you crazy? The Snake Lady tried to kill us. You remember that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I remember!”

  She punched me in the arm, hard enough to suggest she remembered that day more often than she’d like.

  “I’m not saying she’s nice,” she added. “It’s just… So far on this mission, we’ve ruined two of China’s most important archaeological sites. We may as well have taken a bulldozer to the Great Wall for the hat trick. And now we’re looking for a secret way into Mount Kailas, even though that’s against the religion of a billion people. Are we certain it’s all worth it?”

  “If that’s what it takes to stop her winning.”

  “Is that what this is all about to you? Beating the Snake Lady? What about the relics? What about saving the world?”

  I didn’t reply; she was being really annoying. What we were doing mattered, and the truth is I didn’t care about the things we destroyed along the way. I didn’t want to ruin them, but that was the price to pay to stop the People of the Snake. Ultimately, people would understand.

  Grumpy from the cold and the argument, I crawled into our tiny tent and curled up to sleep. Mum was on watch and Dad was on a sleep shift, snoring so loudly that any hunter within five valleys could have heard. Pan and I slept top-to-toe; my head was by the tent door and the biting cold. Muttering curses, I slid deeper into my sleeping bag and shivered myself to sleep.

  13

  I woke up.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Even half-asleep, I knew. It was that sixth sense I had for danger, a part of me that was always alert. I shifted up on my elbows, listening. Pan was asleep, sunken into her sleeping bag. I could still hear Dad snoring, but farther away now, where I guessed he’d fallen asleep on his watch.

  I grabbed my smart-goggles and slid them on.

  “Thermal,” I whispered.

  My view changed to a thermal map of my surroundings – a grey haze broken by glowing orange blobs of biological heat signatures: Pan beside me and Mum sleeping in her tent. A third blob at the edge of our camp was Dad napping through his watch, but there was a fourth too. Beyond the camp, something was moving down the side of the mountain. Something large. I lay stone-still, watching the shape crouch low and then continue its silent stalk towards us.

  “Pan,” I hissed.

  If I tried to wake her she might snap at me, and whoever was out there would hear us. The only advantage I had was that the person wasn’t being as sneaky as they thought.

  Think, Jake!

  Outside, the orange blob stopped again and moved again. If it was a hunter, they’d have night-vision goggles. I could dazzle the person with a torch beam to give me time to wake my parents.

  With a shaky hand I opened the tent. The sound of the zip was amplified by the night, so it seemed as if I was revving an engine.

  The orange blob continued its slow approach, now ten metres from the camp. Its heat signature was incredibly bright, as if the person wasn’t affected at all by the vicious cold.

  Fear filled me with an adrenaline rush. I slid my legs out of my sleeping bag and tried to get into a position where I could pounce from the tent…

  The orange blob was in the camp.

  It was going for my parents’ tent.

  I braced myself, tensing my legs, totally focused – and then burst from the tent, like a sprinter out of the starting blocks. Only, I tripped on my rucksack, so my charge became a stumble. I yelled “Torch!” and glimpsed bright, startled eyes reflecting in the whirling light as I tumbled to the ground. Rolling over, I swept my light in frantic circles around the campsite.

  I saw nothing, no one.

  “Thermal,” I rasped.

  I turned again and again, scanning the area. There was something high on the ridge, but probably just an animal; no one could have moved up the mountain that fast. So where was the invader?

  Dad staggered from his lookout, rubbing his eyes.

  “Someone was here,” I wheezed.

  “Where, Jake?”

  “Here. Right here.”

  Like me, he used his thermal camera to scan the mountains. “There’s nothing there. No one could have been here; it’s impossible.”

  “And yet there was,” Mum said.

  She slid from her tent, pulling on her coat. I was surprised she believed me so readily over Dad. Unless…

  “You saw it too?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know you were awake,” she said. “I only knew your father wasn’t.” She glared at Dad in a we’ll-talk-about-this-later sort of way. “But, yes, I saw the heat signature approach.”

  Pan was awake now too, her head poking from the tent. Her eyes were wide and full of fear. “So who was it? A hunter?”

  “It wasn’t moving like a hunter,” I muttered. “More like an animal. A bear, maybe?”

  Mum zipped up her coat and pulled a balaclava down over her face.

  “I’ll take the next watch.”

  There was no way she was letting Dad stay on lookout, although I don’t think she understood who, or what, had invaded our camp. She only knew what I knew: something was in the mountains. Something was out there in the dark, watching.

  14

  Well, I didn’t sleep much that night.

  By the time I crawled out of my tent, the sun was peeking over the top of the ridge, reaching into the valley and thawing the frost. My breath still came in clouds, but my fingers began to tingle, sensing the morning warmth, excited.

  Dad made porridge and we sat looking along the valley at the tangle of mountains beyond, and their gleaming white crowns. Breathing felt a little easier now, but that didn’t mean the lack of oxygen was no longer dangerous. Mum boiled water from a stream and insisted we drank a pint each as we broke camp.

  I won’t tell you loads about that day’s hike, other than that it was stupidly hard – up and over thre
e passes, and then down a crazy long valley – and that something about it wasn’t right.

  I couldn’t shake that creepy feeling from the night.

  Something was watching us.

  Mum was on full-alert mode all day. She’d trained us in military hand signals so we could react silently in danger, but I hadn’t memorized them like Pan, and kept getting them wrong. I’d drop to the ground when she warned us to freeze, or turn and run when she was signalling all-clear. Mum never saw anything anyway – just prayer flags flapping in the wind, or weird-shaped rocks. At times I wondered what she was looking for. Hunters? Or did she fear that something else had been in our camp the night before?

  We hiked all day as the sun wandered over the valley, stopping only for yak butter sandwiches, which were disgusting. The stuff stayed on my breath, so I tasted it again with each gasp as I trudged up and down the slopes. We fell over a lot and helped one another up. Dad was in charge of directions, but he barely looked at the map Takara had drawn. It seemed like he had an inbuilt compass. I told him that, but he replied, “No, Jake, I have an actual compass.”

  It was only as the sun began to sink again over the ridges that we caught our first glimpse of where we were headed.

  “Whoa,” Pan breathed.

  That about summed it up.

  The monasteries in Lhasa had been fairly ordinary white buildings. This one was white too, a dozen small square chambers, but they were not ordinary. They clung like bird nests to a cliff at the end of the valley, linked by rock ledges and rope bridges. The scene looked like something from a fantasy film, a place where sorcerers lived. It seemed impossible – how could those buildings stick to the mountainside? Did anyone live there?

  “Is that where Takara said they keep the Drak Terma?” I asked.

  Dad nodded, checking the map. “It’s a monastery called Yerpa Gompa. Very few people from outside Tibet have ever seen it. It is not exactly on the tourist trail.”

  “Yerpa Gompa,” Pan said. “What does that mean?”

  “A gompa is an isolated monastery, or a fort built to protect something.”

  “Protect what?” I asked.

  Dad shrugged. “Maybe we’ll find out.”

  15

  Black-headed gulls swooped through the last of the day’s light as we trekked up the path from the valley to the monastery of Yerpa Gompa. As we climbed we saw wooden stilts propping its chambers into the hillside, flagpoles and hanging banners, prayer wheels and chortens. Orange lights glowed from windows, silhouetting tiny shaven heads watching us approach.

  “Will they let us in?” Pan asked.

  “Of course,” Dad replied. “There are few things more important to a monk than hospitality.”

  “So they’ll show us the Drak Terma?”

  “Ah, that I can’t say. One of those more important things is secrecy.”

  The route to the monastery was so steep in places that we had to scramble on our hands and knees around slabs of rock etched with prayers. Higher up, lanterns lined the route, flickering and hissing cones of fire. They looked like gas lights.

  “Where’s the gas coming from?” Pan asked.

  Dad crouched to inspect one of the lanterns, felt the rocks around it, and peered up the cliff above the monastery chambers. “Must be from beneath this mountain,” he guessed. “Looks like they’ve tapped into a natural gas reserve. Clever.”

  A hollow blast echoed down the slope, a deep bass that caused the lanterns to tremble. It sounded like a monster had woken in its cave.

  “What was that?” Pan gasped.

  “A long horn,” Mum said.

  “Should we be worried?”

  “Not at all. They are welcoming us.”

  The path ended at a gateway painted in crazy colours, like school kids had decorated it for a class project. We were greeted by two crimson-robed monks in flip-flops. This was some of the toughest terrain in the world and they got around in flip-flops. And they couldn’t stop smiling.

  We returned the smiles, which wasn’t easy after that hike, and said “tashi delek” a lot. Prayer wheels tinkled gently in the wind as the monks draped prayer scarves over our heads and ushered us into Yerpa Gompa.

  They led us along a passage between two of the stone chambers, which were brightly lit by gas lanterns hanging from the ceiling. In one of the rooms, cross-legged monks were locked in a debate about something. From another came deep and continuous chanting, like the chugging of an engine. Between the buildings, I caught glimpses across the darkening valley. Was something out there in the shadows?

  The monks kept bowing and signalling for us to follow, and we bowed back and signalled that we were. It was all very friendly, but each time I tried to sneak a look through a window, one of them rushed back and pushed me along. They may have been welcoming, but they had secrets.

  They led us into a chamber with cushions on the floor and silk banners on the walls. I think I spotted a hatch in the ceiling, and an old wooden ladder fixed to the roof, but it was tricky to be sure because the room was thick with smoke from incense burners. We coughed as our lungs adjusted from the pure valley air.

  One of the monks lit the gas light on the ceiling, while the other gestured for us to take off our rucksacks and sit down. And then, oh God. I smelled it before it arrived, stronger even than the incense. Yak butter tea. It came on a tray carried by a monk only a little older than me, with a black buzz cut. He’d perfected his monk smile, and seemed especially pleased to see me and Pan. I guessed he didn’t meet many kids up here on the mountain.

  “Tenzin,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “My name Tenzin.”

  We smiled and told him our names.

  “Atlas,” he repeated. “Like book of the world.”

  He poured us cups of tea and hovered close with the pot, grinning and gesturing for us to drink. I remembered how Tibetan hospitality insists your cup is topped up after every sip. In the end I kept raising the cup to my lips and stopping, as if I’d just remembered something. Tenzin got in a bit of a muddle and eventually focused his efforts on the rest of my family.

  I think they’d each drunk three cups of Tenzin’s tea before another monk came in, bowing with his hands pressed together. This was an old guy, his face with the shape and wrinkles of a walnut, wearing thick-lensed glasses.

  “Welcome to our humble home,” he said, bowing again. “You are our honoured guests.”

  “It is our honour to be your guests,” Mum replied. “Are you the lama?”

  It seemed weird that Mum asked the guy if he was an animal, but later I learned that lama meant the head of a monastery. The man nodded, and there were more smiles and bows. Someone somewhere banged a drum.

  “Please, what brings you to Yerpa Gompa?” the lama asked.

  “We have come as your friends, seeking information.”

  “However we can help you, we shall. You are our honoured guests.”

  They went back and forth again over who was the most honoured, until the old monk finally sat opposite us.

  Dad looked to Mum, who nodded.

  “We wish to see the Drak Terma,” Dad said.

  The lama’s smile faltered, just slightly, at the edge. He noticed that Mum had finished her tea, and waved to Tenzin. Until then Tenzin had been eagle-sharp with the top-ups, but my dad’s statement threw him. He rushed to refill the cup, but his smile suddenly seemed forced, and his eyes flicked anxiously between us.

  “We have nothing but respect for your traditions,” Mum added. “We can only assure you that we would not be here were it not a matter of vital importance.”

  “May I ask what matter this is?” the lama asked.

  Mum told him everything: about us, the emerald tablets, Marjorie and the People of the Snake, the mysterious lost civilization and the clues that seemed to lead to Mount Kailas. It was a lot to take in. I’m not sure I would have believed it, but the old monk listened and nodded, and then sat thinking.

 
; “You have had quite a journey,” he said, finally.

  “Yes,” Dad agreed, “but it is not over yet. The organization we spoke of will not stop until they have destroyed everything. The only way we can stop them is to get to the end first, to save whatever we find from destruction and show the world. We cannot do that without the Drak Terma.”

  Gaslight reflected off the lama’s glasses. “The Drak Terma,” he said. “It is said to give a route to a secret in the heart of Mount Kailas. A pathway to the gods.”

  “We believe that it leads to the information we’re after,” Pan explained. “A Hall of Records hidden in the mountain.”

  “So you do not believe in the gods?” the monk asked.

  “We respect your beliefs,” Mum answered.

  “But you do not believe in gods?” he persisted.

  Why didn’t Mum lie? Why not tell the old guy that we totally believed in his gods, and we were here to protect them? That seemed to be what he wanted to hear. Instead Mum shook her head and sipped her tea.

  “We are historians. We respect the history of your faith.”

  “But you are not religious people?” the lama said. “You do not believe the legends of the gods, or the stories of the Crystal Mountain?”

  “No,” Dad admitted. “No, we do not.”

  “But the things you ask are things that can only be given to a holy person.”

  “We are hoping you will make an exception,” Mum said.

  The monk smiled again. “I understand. This is something on which I must think very deeply. You may remain here as our guests. I will ask for food to be brought, and more tea.”

  “You are very kind,” Mum replied. “We feel very honoured.”

  He was kind, but all this “honoured” stuff was getting a bit much. We wanted to see the Drak Terma, not to steal it. We’d be in and out of here in ten minutes if he let us have a look. I was about to tell him that, but Tenzin took the chance to fill up my tea even though I’d not had any, and blocked my view. Had he known I was about to argue and deliberately got in the way?