Finally, thank you, Barbara and Helena, for putting up with the chaos that finally came to order. Love may not conquer all, but happily it conquers us.
BOOK ONE
DISCOVERY
It is easy to go down into Hell...; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air – there's the rub....
– VIRGIL, Aeneid
1
IKE
The Himalayas,
Tibet Autonomous Region
1988
In the beginning was the word. Or words.
Whatever these were.
They kept their lights turned off. The exhausted trekkers huddled in the dark cave and faced the peculiar writing. Scrawled with a twig, possibly, dipped in liquid radium or some other radioactive paint, the fluorescent pictographs floated in the black recesses. Ike let them savor the distraction. None of them seemed quite ready to focus on the storm beating against the mountainside outside.
With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind and their yak herders in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food, Ike was relieved to have shelter of any kind. He was still pretending for them that this was part of their trip. In fact they were off the map. He'd never heard of this hole-in- the-wall hideout. Nor seen glow-in-the-dark caveman graffiti.
'Runes,' gushed a knowing female voice. 'Sacred runes left by a wandering monk.' The alien calligraphy glowed with soft violet light in the cave's cold bowels. The luminous hieroglyphics reminded Ike of his old dorm wall with its black-light posters. All he needed was a lash of Hendrix plundering Dylan's anthem, say, and a whiff of plump Hawaiian red sinsemilla. Anything to vanquish the howl of awful wind. Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl...
'Those are no runes,' said a man. 'It's Bonpo.' A Brooklyn beat, the accent meant Owen. Ike had nine clients here, only two of them male. They were easy to keep straight.
'Bonpo!' one of the women barked at Owen. The coven seemed to take collective delight in savaging Owen and Bernard, the other man. Ike had been spared so far. They treated him as a harmless Himalayan hillbilly. Fine with him.
'But the Bonpo were pre-Buddhist,' the woman expounded.
The women were mostly Buddhist students from a New Age university. These things mattered very much to them.
Their goal was – or had been – Mount Kailash, the pyramidal giant just east of the Indian border. 'A Canterbury Tale for the World Pilgrim' was how he'd advertised the trip. A kor – a Tibetan walkabout – to and around the holiest mountain in the world. Eight thousand per head, incense included. The problem was, somewhere along the trail he'd managed to misplace the mountain. It galled him. They were lost. Beginning at dawn today, the sky had changed from blue to milky gray. The herders had quietly bolted with the yaks. He had yet to announce that their tents and food were history. The first sloppy snowflakes had started kissing their Gore-Tex hoods just an hour ago, and Ike had taken this cave for shelter. It was a good call. He was the only one who knew it, but they were now about to get sodomized by an old-fashioned Himalayan tempest.
Ike felt his jacket being tugged to one side, and knew it would be Kora, wanting a private word. 'How bad is it?' she whispered. Depending on the hour and day, Kora was his lover, base-camp shotgun, or business associate. Of late, it was a challenge
estimating which came first for her, the business of adventure or the adventure of business. Either way, their little trekking company was no longer charming to her.
Ike saw no reason to front-load it with negatives. 'We've got a great cave,' he said.
'Gee.'
'We're still in the black, head-count-wise.'
'The itinerary's in ruins. We were behind as it was.'
'We're fine. We'll take it out of the Siddhartha's Birthplace segment.' He kept the worry out of his voice, but for once his sixth sense, or whatever it was, had come up short, and that bothered him. 'Besides, getting a little lost will give them bragging rights.'
'They don't want bragging rights. They want schedule. You don't know these people. They're not your friends. We'll get sued if they don't make their Thai Air flight on the nineteenth.'
'These are the mountains,' said Ike. 'They'll understand.' People forgot. Up here, it was a mistake to take even your next breath for granted.
'No, Ike. They won't understand. They have real jobs. Real obligations. Families.' That was the rub. Again. Kora wanted more from life. She wanted more from her pathless Pathfinder.
'I'm doing the best I can,' Ike said.
Outside, the storm went on horsewhipping the cave mouth. Barely May, it wasn't supposed to be this way. There should have been plenty of time to get his bunch to, around, and back from Kailash. The bane of mountaineers, the monsoon normally didn't spill across the mountains this far north. But as a former Everester himself, Ike should have known better than to believe in rain shadows or in schedules. Or in luck. They were in for it this time. The snow would seal their pass shut until late August. That meant he was going to have to buy space on a Chinese truck and shuttle them home via Lhasa – and that came out of his land costs. He tried calculating in his head, but their quarrel overcame him.
'You do know what I mean by Bonpo,' a woman said. Nineteen days into the trip, and Ike still couldn't link their spirit nicknames with the names in their passports. One woman, was it Ethel or Winifred, now preferred Green Tara, mother deity of Tibet. A pert Doris Day look-alike swore she was special friends with the Dalai Lama. For weeks now Ike had been listening to them celebrate the life of cavewomen. Well, he thought, here's your cave, ladies. Slum away.
They were sure his name – Dwight David Crockett – was an invention like their own. Nothing could convince them he wasn't one of them, a dabbler in past lives. One evening around a campfire in northern Nepal, he'd regaled them with tales of Andrew Jackson, pirates on the Mississippi, and his own legendary death at the Alamo. He'd meant it as a joke, but only Kora got it.
'You should know perfectly well,' the woman went on, 'there was no written language in Tibet before the late fifth century.'
'No written language that we know about,' Owen said.
'Next you'll be saying this is Yeti language.'
It had been like this for days. You'd think they'd run out of air. But the higher they went, the more they argued.
'This is what we get for pandering to civilians,' Kora muttered to Ike. Civilians was her catch-all: eco-tourists, pantheist charlatans, trust funders, the overeducated. She was a street girl at heart.
'They're not so bad,' he said. 'They're just looking for a way into Oz, same as us.'
'Civilians.'
Ike sighed. At times like this, he questioned his self-imposed exile. Living apart from the world was not easy. There was a price to be paid for choosing the less-traveled road. Little things, bigger ones. He was no longer that rosy-cheeked lad
who had come with the Peace Corps. He still had the cheekbones and cowled brow and careless mane. But a dermatologist on one of his treks had advised him to stay out of the high-altitude sun before his face
