questions. There was soup and tsampa and a small pot of tea. He ate slowly and automatically, chewing and swallowing the balls of roasted barley without enjoyment. When he had finished eating, he lifted the cover from the teacup. As he raised the pot to pour, his eye caught sight of something white pressed into the cup.
It was a sheet of paper, folded several times and pushed firmly down. Christopher took it out and unfolded it. It was covered in Tibetan writing, in an elegant Umay hand. At the bottom was a small diagram, a series of intersecting lines that lacked any obvious pattern.
He took the sheet across to the table by the bed, where the lamp was burning. His knowledge of written Tibetan was limited, but with a little effort he was able to decipher most of the text:
I am told you speak our language. But I do not know if you can read it
also. I can only write and hope that you will be able to read this. If
you
cannot read it, I will have to find a way to send someone to you; but that may be difficult. The trapa who brings your food does not know that I had this message placed in your cup: do not speak of it to him.
I am told you are the father of the child who was brought here from the land of the pee-lings. I am told other things, but I do not know whether to believe them.
You are in danger in Dorje-la. Be careful at all times. I want to help you, but I too must be careful. I cannot come to you, so you must come to me. Tonight, your door will be unlocked. When you find it open, follow the map I have drawn below. It will lead you to the gon-kang.
I shall be waiting for you there. But take care that no-one sees you leave.
There was no signature. He re-read the letter several times, making sure he had understood it. Now that he knew the diagram was meant to be a map, he thought he could make some sense of it, even though he could not relate the rooms and corridors it showed to places he had actually seen.
He stood up and went to the door. It was still locked. He sighed and went back to the bed, feeling restless now that a possibility for action had at last presented itself. Who had sent him the message?
He knew no-one in Dorje-la. And why should one of the monks want to help him, a stranger?
Several times over the next few hours he went to the door and tried it. It was always locked, and he began to think that the mysterious letter-writer had been unable to carry out his plan. The last service of the day was sung, the monks returned to their cells for the night, and a profound silence settled on Dorje-la at last.
About an hour later, he heard a low fumbling sound at his door.
He got up and advanced cautiously to it. Silence. He reached out a hand and tried the handle. It turned without resistance.
Quickly, he found his lamp and stepped outside. He was in a long corridor: at the far end, a single butter- lamp burned. There was no-one in sight. AH around him, he could feel the monastery sleeping. It was freezing in the corridor.
Consulting the map, he set off slowly to his right, down to where the corridor joined another. The second corridor stretched away into shadow. There were lamps at intervals, faint offerings to the surrounding gloom. In the dim light from his own lamp, the painted walls seemed half alive, seething with a dark, tormented movement. Everywhere, red predominated. Faces appeared for a moment out of the darkness, then vanished again. Hands moved.
Bared teeth grinned. Skeletons danced.
Imperceptibly, a sense of deep antiquity began to impress itself on Christopher as he padded deeper into the sleeping monastery.
He could see, if only imperfectly, how the character of the regions through which he passed was undergoing a gradual change. Like geological strata, the individual sections of the gompa showed clearly how they had been built up, a little at a time. The further he penetrated, the more a primitive quality revealed itself to him in the paintings and carvings. Chinese influence gave way to Indian and Indian to what Christopher recognized as early Tibetan. He could feel growing in him a sense of trepidation. This was like no monastery in which he had ever set foot before.
The final corridor ended in a low door on either side of which the images of guardian deities had been painted. Two torches burned in brackets half-way up the wall. This was an ancient part of the monastery, perhaps a thousand years old.
He stood at the entrance to the gon-kang, the darkest and most forbidden place in any gompa. Christopher had only ever heard descriptions of such places from Tibetan friends, but he had at no time been allowed to set foot in one. They were dark places, narrow crypt-chapels where the masks for the sacred dances were kept.
This was the ritual abode of theyi-dam, the tutelary deities, whose black statues watched over the monastery and its inhabitants. It was the seat of the sacred horror at the heart of Tibetan religion.
Christopher hesitated at the door, oddly frightened at the prospect of entering. He had no reason to be frightened: there was only darkness inside, darkness and strange gods in whom he did not believe. But something made him hesitate before finally putting his hand to the door and pushing.
It was unlocked. Immediately behind lay a second door bearing the brightly painted face of a yi-dam. Red, staring eyes confronted him like living coals. The light of his lamp flickered and shone on old paint and flecks of gold leaf. He pushed open the second door.
Darkness visible, darkness like velvet pressing against his eyes, darkness palpable and entranced. Here, night was permanent. It had never been truly broken, it would go on forever. A strong smell of old butter filled the stale, lightless air. It was like entering a tomb.
Christopher held up his lamp. From the ceiling near the entrance hung the stuffed car cases of several animals a bear, a yak, a wild dog. These ancient, rotting things were an integral part of every gon-kang, as much an element in the place’s dark mystery as the figures of the gods on the altar. Christopher felt his skin crawl with disgust as he passed underneath, crouching low to avoid contact with the mouldering fur hanging loosely from the poorly preserved cadavers. They had been hanging there for God only knew how long, and would go on hanging in the same places until they finally decomposed and fell apart. Generations of spiders had added a thick outer carapace of their own to the mildewed fur. Dusty cobwebs brushed Christopher’s cheeks as he went through.
It was old. He knew as soon as he was inside that the gon-kang was an ancient place, older than the monastery, half as old as the mountains themselves. It was a cave, low and dark and dedicated from the beginning of time to the most hidden mysteries. The dance-masks hung by thick ropes from the ceiling to Christopher’s right, images of death and madness, painted long ago and set here in the darkness with the grim guardians of the monastery. Once or twice a year, they would be taken out and worn in the ritual dances. They would turn and turn to the sound of drums and flutes, like the naked girl Christopher had seen in the orphanage, her face a mask hiding the dull terror beneath. The faces of the masks were grotesque and larger than life the malign features of gods and demi-gods and demons, faces that would transform a dancing monk to an immortal being and a man to a god for a day.
Near the masks, set against the wall, were piles of old armour spears and swords and breastplates, hauberks and crested helmets, Chinese lances and pointed Tartar hats. It was ancient armour, rusted and useless for the most part, kept there as a symbol of sudden death, weapons for the old gods to wield in their battle against the forces of evil.
Standing before the rear wall were the statues of the yi-dam deities, their many arms and heads swathed in old strips of cloth placed there as offerings. Yamantaka, horned and bull-headed and festooned with a coronet of human skulls, leered out of the darkness. In the flickering shadows, the black figures seemed to move, as though they too were dancing in their eternal night.
Filled with a foreboding he could neither understand nor master, Christopher went closer.
Something moved that was not a shadow. Christopher shrank back, holding his lamp out in front of him. Before the altar at the back of the room, facing theyi-dam, sat a dark figure. As Christopher watched, the figure moved again, prostrating briefly in front of the gods before resuming a seated position. It was a monk, wrapped up against the bitter cold, engaged in meditation. He did not appear to have noticed the light from Christopher’s lamp or heard him enter Christopher was uncertain what to do next. He guessed this must be the monk who had written the letter, but now he was about to confront him, he felt suddenly wary. Was this perhaps nothing more than an elaborate trap, set by Zamyatin or Tsarong Rinpoche? He had, after all, just violated the monastery’s innermost sanctum. Had that been the intention all along to provide someone with an adequate justification for his death?
