what I taught you? How can you have strayed so far from what you once were?”
Christopher felt a deep chill take hold of him. He was afraid. He was dreadfully afraid. His whole body shook with the beginnings of this fear. The shadows shifted about the abbot and his throne, ancient shadows, thin things that moved like hungry ghosts. Lights flickered. The room seemed full of voices whispering to him voices from his past, voices from long ago, voices of the dead. He remembered the crucifix he had found in Cormac’s desk, its sharp edges digging into his flesh.
“Who are you?” Christopher asked in a voice made dry by fear.
The old man came forward into the light. Slowly, the shadows gave up their hold on him. He had dwelt so long in them and they so long in him, but now, for a brief moment, they parted and returned him living to the light. He stood up, a frail old man in saffron robes, and stepped down from the dais on which his throne was set. Slowly, he came towards Christopher, taller than he had appeared seated on the cushions. He came right up to Christopher and knelt down in front of him, his face only inches away from his.
“Who are you?” whispered Christopher again. The fear was a living thing that struggled in him, threshing about in his chest like a caged animal or a bird or a butterfly.
“Don’t you know me, Christopher?” The abbot’s voice was low and gentle. It did not strike Christopher at first that these last words were spoken not in Tibetan but in English.
The world shattered.
“Do you not .. .”
The fragments crumbled to dust and were scattered.
‘.. . remember me .. .”
A wind howled in Christopher’s head. The world was a void filled with the dust of the world that had been. He heard his mother’s voice, calling him:
‘.. . Christopher.”
And his sister’s voice, in the long days of summer, running after him on a sunlit lawn:
‘.. . Christopher.”
And Elizabeth, her arms stretched out in pain, her eyes distended, dying:
‘.. . Christopher.”
And at the end, his father’s voice, in the centre of the void,
reassembling the dust, refashioning the world:
‘.. . Christopher? Don’t you remember me, Christopher?”
They stood by the last of the chortens together. Christopher’s father had opened shutters in the wall so that they could see out across the pass. For a long time, neither man spoke. The sun had moved, and from its new position it carved patterns of light and darkness on dim white peaks and snow-filled gullies. Apart from shadows, nothing moved. The whole world was still and silent.
“That’s Everest,” said the old man suddenly, pointing south and west, as a father will point something out to his child.
“The Tibetans call it Chomolungma, the Goddess Mother of the Earth.”
He paused while Christopher located the peak to which he had pointed. Fragments of cloud covered all but the last extremity of the great mountain, dwarfed by distance.
“And that’s Makalu,” he answered, pointing a little further south.
“Chamlang, Lhotse you can see them all from here if the air is clear. Sometimes I stand in this spot for hours watching them. I never grow tired of this view. Never. I can still remember the first time I saw it.” He fell silent again, thinking of the past.
Christopher shivered.
“Are you cold?” his father asked.
He nodded and the old man closed the shutter, confining them inside the chorten hall once more.
“This was my last body,” Christopher’s father said, brushing his hand against the burnished metal of the tomb.
“I don’t understand,” said Christopher. Would even two and two make four again, or black and white combine to make grey?
“Surely you understand this much,” his father protested.
“That we put on bodies and take them off again. I have had many bodies.
Soon I shall be getting rid of this one as well. And then it will be time to find another.”
“But you’re my father!” Christopher protested in his turn.
“You died years ago. This isn’t possible.”
“What is possible, Christopher? What is impossible? Can you tell me?
Can you put your hand to your heart and say you know?”
“I know that if you are my father, if you are the man I knew as a child, you can’t be ... the reincarnation of some Tibetan holy man. You were born in England, at Grantchester. You married my mother. You had a son. A daughter. None of this makes sense.”
The old man took Christopher’s right hand and held it firmly in his own.
“Christopher,” he said, ‘if only I could explain. We’re strangers now, you and I; but believe me that I’ve never forgotten you. It was never my wish to leave you. Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know what you wished. I only know what happened.
What they told me happened.”
“What did they tell you?”
“That you disappeared. That you left camp one night and could not be found in the morning. After some time had passed, it was assumed you were dead. Is that true? Is that what happened?”
The old man let go of Christopher’s hand and turned away from him a little.
“After a fashion,” he said in a quiet voice. He was a small man, dwarfed by the tombs of his predecessors. His lined and wrinkled face showed signs of great weariness.
“It is true, but only after a fashion like most things in this world. The deeper truth, the truth they could not guess, much less tell you, was that Arthur Wylam had been dead long before he walked out of his tent that night. I was a shell, I was empty, there was absolutely no substance to me, none at all. I acted, I performed my duties, such as they were, I passed for a man. But inwardly, I was already dead. I was like one of the ro-langs people believe they have seen in these mountains.
“When I left the camp that morning, I didn’t know what I was doing, where I was going. I remember very little, to be honest. All I know is that there was nothing more for me in that life. I’d exhausted everything it had to offer and found it rotten at the core.
All I wanted to do was walk. And that is exactly what I did. I walked and climbed and stumbled for days, deeper and deeper into the mountains. I had no food, I had no idea how to find any, I was lost, and my mind was in total confusion.”
He paused, remembering, tasting again the emptiness and the horror of those days.
“They found me at a place called Sepo two monks from Dorjela. I was in a state of collapse, close to death. Nothing extraordinary, really a dying man, cold, hungry, with his mind in tatters.
But in Tibet, nothing is quite ordinary either. They find signs in everything in a meteor, a monstrous birth, a bird circling a hill.
It is often the tiny things that draw their attention the shape of a child’s ears, the way the thatch lies on a farmer’s roof, the path smoke takes as it rises from a chimney. Things you and I would not even notice. We have grown out of touch.
“The place they found me at was a junction where two glaciers met.
There was a sharp peak to the east and a steep precipice to the west. On the day they found me, two vultures had been seen nearby, just hovering. I rather think they were waiting for a meal once I was finished. All simple things those but they took them as signs. They said there was a prophecy, that the new abbot of Dorje-la would be found in a place of that description. To this day, I don’t know if that was true or not, if there was a prophecy or not.
But they believed it. And afterwards ... I came to believe it too.”
Christopher broke in, still not comprehending.
“But you weren’t a child,” he said.
