Mysterium

by Susan Froderberg

  As reward to the porters for having carried the punishing loads through a most tortuous portion of trail, Adams suggests the sahibs offer to buy a goat from the bhakrawallas to be butchered for dinner. The others agree. Sara considers this a sacrifice of the highest kind, and insists upon being witness to the killing. The herders would prefer to slaughter in their manner, quietly, among themselves, but they allow the girl to stand and watch them slit the goat’s throat, taking her observance as blessing, as she is their Sarasvati.

  One of the herders comes up from behind the goat and straddles it between withers and hip. Sara sees the glint of the knife blade, sees it like a silvery fish tumbling through a stream. A bright line of blood at the throat yaws open like a bawling mouth. The animal collapses into a mute heap, eyes gaped as the light in the orbs flames out. The shepherds huddle and crouch and begin the work of stripping the hide and sectioning the bones and the flesh, and now Sara can see no more.

  From her perch of rock above, the panther scans the human bustle. She vaults boulder to boulder until she is down by the river again. She leaps up onto a limb of a fir tree, and from this place waits for her prey to stray from the flock. She is patient and ready, posed like a sphinx on a pedestal. She breathes contentedly, air vibrating in her glottis, the night dilating as the day begins to constrict. The cat’s silky ebony coat conceals her body in the dim light. Her nose ticks to catch a scent: an approaching goat. She flattens her ears back to the sound of the under-hoof cracking of branches. The hair stands in hackles along her spine. She rises onto her haunches, sights before the pounce, and the act is carried out nearly silently. Her razored fangs gouge deep into the animal’s neck, piercing the jugular in an instant. She grounds herself with her hind legs, caging the goat with stance and weight as it wrenches and buckles just once, withers to loin to rump, its legs giving a final twitch. Any fleeting deathly frenzy is drowned in the wild laughter of the river and the flurry of slaughter back at the camp. The panther feeds off the flesh hungrily, the goat’s heart still beating its useless last beats. What cannot be devoured now will be concealed for later. She uses her forepaws to cover the carcass, scratching up a litter of sticks and leaves. She backs away, studies the cache with clever yellow eyes, her breathing a metered hissing. Then she turns, and like a dancer exiting the stage, she slinks away back to the cave, to her lair that is hidden there.

  Sara lowers her head, recites a blessing before biting into the meat.

  “I believe,” Professor Troy says, his mouth full of tender brisket, “the custom of prayer before a meal likely originated in animal sacrifice.”

  “You could well be right,” Adams says, reaching for more.

  “As Buddhists, we honor all things,” says Karma. He tosses his bones into the fire, and holds his empty plate out to the man who sits closest to the roasted goat. “Yes, please,” he says.

  * * *

  NEW TENT assignments were made given Hillary’s departure, the groupings determined by the party’s leader: here on, the Carsons would share a tent with Doctor Reddy and himself. In the second tent would be bedded Professor Troy and daughter Sara and Devin Reddy. This seemed to make perfect sense, and no one, as Adams would say, groused about it.

  But worn out as they are after a grueling day, Vida and Reddy have trouble sleeping. They are each too aware of the other, the familiarity of that body next to him or her at rest: the resistance or give of an arm or a hip, the manner of breathing, the scent, the heat, a shift. They lie supine, mindful of what was, of what is and what isn’t; their eyes open to the shaded hatches and stipples of the tent in the surrounding dimness. Wilder sleeps on one side of his wife turned away from her, his face toward the nylon wall, his coarse respiring broken by an occasional burst of dry cough. Reddy lies next to Vida on her opposite side. Adams is flat on his back beside Reddy next to the door of the tent, the Bostonian’s palate vibrating rhythmically, a commotion broken intermittently by snuffling animal sounds coming from the profundity of his slumber. Reddy pokes Adams with an elbow, provoking him to roll over, his breathing quieting to an even purr. Vida reaches an arm out of her sleeping bag, touches Reddy to thank him and to apologize too for her temper at the start of the day. He takes her hand and squeezes it gently, holds it a moment before letting go. Then they close their eyes to the deepening of the night that binds them, favoring the promise and the bounty of sleep.

  * * *

  THE SHEPHERDS wake before daybreak to decamp without haste, eager to get back across the river again, rattled by the panther’s plunder and kill the night prior. The men throw their hands up in blame and resignation, then herd the goats on in a sullen and slow-coming dawn; hooves scraping over stone, satchels of grain flapping over ribs and withers, watery lumps dumped along the pathway. An unearthly light above cleaves through a thin line of overcast sky.

  Once the party is safely to the other side of the water all ascend steadily, relieved to be making their way out of this horrible gorge. There is a settling in of pace and deep breathing, the rhythmical clinking of bootsteps in loose stone, the Sanctuary now only a day’s foray away; release from this hell within sight. Three hours later they are already a thousand feet above the river, and here the misstep occurs, an off-beat footfall and slide in the talus, a jarring familiar sound, and in an instant one of the porters is calling out, the voice echoing through the vast hollow in his tumble and reel, a terrible wailing scaled and dimmed until it is no longer at all. Gone like a flame blown out. Everyone stands at the brink in the awful silence looking into the gloom below. The other porters release their tumplines and park their loads on the path. Many collapse to the ground, sit with heads cradled in their hands, eyes drawn to the dark earth, to the crawling things beneath their feet.

  The sahibs and Sherpas look down over the cliff, jaws hung loose. They look for words. Then Karma claps his hands together and urges the porters to rise. He commands them. He is sirdar. He orders them moving again. There is nothing else here to do.

  The party tramps on through a shroud of mist. Everyone feels more heavily laden. The river below turns a crazed churn in the distance, and no wind or air moves through the haze. They labor through a bramble of thorn scrub, a hellish odor of cinder and tar reeking out of the sodden earth, the grade steepening and seeming to cline on endlessly. The porters wear a look of despondency, as does every footslogger, but it is the porters who hold their heads as they weep, the porters who wave their arms about, and now the porters who stop and release their tumplines. They deposit their cartons and bundles right where they stand, along the steep and narrow path. They refuse to go on. They have had enough. The bhakrawallas do their best to scoot the goats along, but even the animals have turned skittish; their horned noggins bob and loll, the rolling orbs of their eyes bulge white.

  Adams advises the party to take another line entirely. Best to move lower at this point, not higher. But the porters have parked themselves on the trail, and here they sit and rest against their loads, chary, despaired, layered in their raggedy tweeds and fringed shawls and army fatigues. They moan and whimper and mutter to themselves. One of them begins to wail. Karma presses the heels of his hands to his temples, affixing the yellow tabs. He says he must go ahead, scout out the trail. Pasang will accompany him on his reconnaissance, but Mingma and the sahibs are to remain with the porters. Pasang follows the sirdar as ordered. The herders stop with their goats on a ledge of grass above the others. They smoke. They talk softly. They watch the head Sherpa and his aide disappear into a congealed mist that clings to the cliff.

  The trail the group is perched on is narrow, and no one gets up or moves about much. Adams sits, knees to his chest, gaze fixed on the cliff wall ahead. Professor Troy takes the journal and pen from his pack and begins to scribble his thoughts down; so fastidious is he about the day’s entries. Sara sketches the sight she sees across the ravine in her sketchbook, penciling filaments of water cascading from out of the towering walls, an empty aerie of twigs and debris tucked into the ri
fts between. Wilder fiddles with the rock in his pocket as he talks tactics with Devin. Vida has curled up into herself and sits sideways on the path with her body tipped into a scoop of the cliff, her leg muscles trembling, a taste like rust in her mouth. She will not look down.

  Adams sits nearest to Sara. “You must speak to the head porter,” he says. “Tell him the most tortuous part of the Gorge has been gotten through. Tell him the porters must believe me. They must trust me. Trust us.” She puts her sketchbook back in the pack and gets up and wends her way through the legs asplay on the narrow trail, clinging to the rocky wall. She crouches down to talk to the head porter. She speaks kindly, reassuringly. A few of the other porters put their faces into their hands and shake their heads. They have already decided to go back. They will find a secure place to abandon their loads.

  Adams leans out to shout something when Karma’s voice cuts him short, the call echoing out loud through the Gorge. “Sahib! Sahib!” The squatters turn to see the sirdar Sherpa moving along the ledge toward the others, Pasang close behind, both approaching with eyes cast toward the ground. Now Adams expects to hear the worst. It is his fault, all of this. They have lost a man. He has lost the way. Weakened in his age, he has forsaken them all.

  “Please,” Karma says. He touches the yellow patches beside his eyes. “We have seen way from here,” he says.

  People mutter words of relief. There are heaving sighs, a whimpering, a cough, someone crying.

  “Trail difficult only one place. We go down to river once more, but we not cross. The path go up this side river. Not steep to begin.” Karma raises a flat hand laterally and cuts the air upwise in front of him. “Way go up straight and we be out. There we place fix lines.”

  The sahibs nod. Adams and Troy decide the porters must be paid more, despite assurance of the route. Sara appeals to the porters in Hindi. They agree to go on, despite looks of reluctance among them. They stoop, position their tumplines, stand with their loads. Then they follow the sahibs and move on along the ledge. By late afternoon the party is down to the river again, a place where the water rockets out of a sharp notch in the cliff and thunders past. Sara stands transfixed, watching the swell and seethe, following with her eye a foaming white droplet that breaks out from the surge and mass and goes lobbing high into the air, a droplet pitched out into an arc faultless and true. “Only nature performs such acts of perfection,” she says, her words swept away in the thunder of the torrent. She keeps her eye on the freed droplet, watching as it lands heavily, silently, without pause, without splash, where it is borne into the rushing waters to become one with the body from which it was sprung.

  Karma and Adams walk along the river’s banks until they reach a large overhang in the rock wall, the sand nearly dry in the lee. They agree to make an early camp in the cliff’s alcove, far enough away from the boister of the river, better protected from the rain. Eat, sleep, drink tea, make a fire, allow the porters to do their grieving. The loss of the man has shaken everyone, and all could use the rest. The porters and herders move past the sahibs and continue along the river, up through a boulder garden and back into a woods of rhododendron and fir where they stake claim to several small caves.

  Wilder brings the hood up over his head and wanders off into a drizzling rain while the others set up and settle into camp. He ducks under the limbs of a dying pine, its core eaten through with ants, entering a copse of thick underbrush and rotting beech. His feet make loud sucking noises in the mud. He pauses, looks about to make certain his privacy, and sees from out of the bushes a creeping army of leeches moving toward his feet, several of the fat worms cobra’ing up out of the mire to reach him. Any need to squat is stifled. He searches for a footpath of some kind, a way around, a way out. Warty toads with spiny crowns jounce about like little horned demons in the leaves. All around are standing snags and fallen logs in various states of rot; fungus erupting on dead stumps like a skin disease; a tar-like resin bubbling out from the scaly bark of a pine. He realizes he is standing amid a microcosm of mysterious plant and animal life in forms grossly primitive. Feed and excrete, growth and decay, life and death: all ends of a single spectrum. He makes a trumpet out of his backside. Then he bends down to examine a piece of dead wood covered over with a slimy-headed mold, the brain-shaped mass expanding and contracting, as if the fungus were breathing.

  “It is a living thing.”

  Wilder bolts up, bawling out loudly as if deranged.

  “It is a most simple form of life,” the man behind him says.

  “You scared the fucking holy bejeezus out of me.” Wilder stands with balled fists, knuckles colorless with fright, looking at a bareheaded man wrapped in a crimson robe seated against a tree who smiles at him casually. The man motions with fingers to his lips. Wilder is not sure what the gesture means: Do not speak, or something to eat?

  “Where in God’s hell did you come from?” Wilder says.

  “Hell?” the man says.

  “Tibet?”

  The man puts a finger back to his lips as if to silence what was said.

  “What are you, a monk or something?”

  The man smiles his smile again. He reaches beneath his robe and nonchalantly plucks a leech from his shin, flicks the worm off into the leaves. Then he moves from his seat at the base of the tree, picks up his wooden stave, refits the robe over his shoulder, and begins to walk away. He wears Indian army-issue tennis shoes and thick cotton socks. He is bald as the palm of a hand; head shaved and scalp gleaming. Wilder stands watching him as he moves away, thinking the man, without another word, will go on toward wherever it is he is going. India, of course. Probably on his way to see the Dalai Lama.

  “Thanks for scaring the shit out of me,” Wilder says.

  The monk turns to Wilder, nods. “Allow me to make you tea,” he says, opening his hand, gesturing toward a lichened block of dark rock within an undercliff. Wilder steps forward, sees an opening grotto’d into the basalt. He stoops and follows the monk inside. The cave is lit by a single candle set into a sill of the rock wall. There is a thin rug spread out on the hard mud floor, a pallet rolled out to serve as bedding and seating. The monk sinks to his knees onto the pallet, and pats the empty place across from him. Wilder sits. He stifles a cough as he watches the monk light another candle. On the mud floor, within a circle of stone and ash, he prepares a small fire.

  “What about the smoke?” Wilder says. This time he can’t hold back his cough. The monk points up, and Wilder sees behind and above him a bore of misty light coming through the soffit of rock. The smoke of the fire hugs the wall and goes spiraling up and out the rocky chimney hole. The monk puts a small pot onto the embering coals. He reaches behind him for a metal bottle and pours water out of it into the pot. From a fold in his crimson robe he pulls out a packet, puts his fingers into the packet and brings out a pinch of aromatic leaves. He sprinkles the tea leaves into the water.

  “You running away or something?” Wilder says.

  The monk shakes his head. “I am going,” he says. Smiling, he takes from the copious folds of his robe a small tin can. He reaches back into the crimson pleats and retrieves a folding army knife.

  “What else have you got in there?”

  “All that I should need,” the monk says.

  He stabs two holes into the lid of the tin, pours thick milk in the pot.

  “Where’s your sugar bowl and teacups at?” Wilder says.

  The monk reaches into his robe, brings forth a cup. “For you, for me.”

  “You been in the mountains long?”

  “Two months only.”

  “How do you manage alone?”

  “Many kind people. Kind people everywhere.”

  “Huh,” Wilder says. “How come I never meet such people?”

  “Your eyes perhaps bad.” The monk offers the tea to Wilder. Wilder takes a sip, and gives it back to the monk. They drink in this manner until the cup is empty, then the monk picks the pot up and pours more tea.

/>   “Where is it you travel to?” the monk says.

  “Mount Mysterium.”

  “Ah, Sarasvati.” The monk passes him the teacup again.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why? You lose something up there?”

  Wilder’s laugh erupts into a hacking cough. He clears his throat. “I’ve got stuff in my pockets too.” He pulls out the black stone he has carried from home. “Orgonite,” he says. “The real thing.” He nods.

  The monk takes eyeglasses out of the folds of his robe and examines the stone carefully. He shrugs, hands the thing back to Wilder. “It not real.”

  “What do you mean, not real?”

  “Not real stone.”

  “There’s quartz crystal in it, that’s real, and some metal shavings mixed in. The fiberglass resin is just to hold it together.”

  The monk smiles.

  “There’s power in it.”

  The monk looks at him. “Magic power?”

  “Metaphysical,” he says. He passes the monk the teacup without looking up. “Some very smart people have described it.”

  The monk takes a sip of tea.

  “You put various stones and magnets together and you get powerful reactions. You can capture a part of the energy flow of the universe.”

  The monk holds the teacup out for Wilder to take.

  “Orgone is everywhere about us. It’s massless, like ether. The problem is to gather it and channel its living energy. It can cure diseases.”

  “You are ill?”

  Wilder coughs. “No.”

  “Then why you need this?” The monk laughs.

  “All right, I’ll stop trying to convince you.” Wilder puts the stone back into his pants pocket. He takes a sip of tea. Then he pulls out from his coat pocket the photograph of Lucas. “This is my brother,” Wilder says.