the light.
'Folk art,' Li said. 'I am reminded of primitive cave paintings.' For all his gab, The
L.O. seemed to be getting nervous, as if they were straying into dangerous regions.
'You guys smell the pine smoke?' asked Carlos.
Stump pointed to the top of the mountain.
Now Abe saw white rags of smoke and smelled the smell again. The smoke was
whipping down from a crumbling building which crowned the very summit.
'We are on time,' Li said.
The trail led up to a breach in the crowning structure. The mountainside dropped
away beneath the breach. Loose rocks spilled down from this gap, the leftovers from
the old wall. Using their hands, the climbers cautiously pulled up through the breach.
Nothing could have prepared Abe for what lay within the walls.
'Oh lord,' breathed Jorgens.
It was a lost world in here.
A manmade forest of prayer flags surrounded them. It engulfed them, a dense
breathtaking grove of red and yellow and blue and white squares of cotton. Each flag
was blockprinted with Tibetan prayers. Each fluttered rapidly upon a thin willow
branch that was bunched with many dozens of others. More of these bunches were
planted in haphazard piles of mani stones. Some were new and bright, others bleached
and rotted by the sun.
The summit structure was barely eighty feet across and even less wide. But no
cathedral in the world could ever compete with this holy place, broken, bare to the
sky.
For a minute the climbers just stood where they'd surfaced through the breach,
listening to the cotton stroking infinity. Kelly's mouth was wide open. Robby doffed his
Dalton Hardware cap and a whole floodplain of dry wrinkles broke out across his
broad forehead. Their archaeology had come to life.
Then the wind shifted, and there was that smell of cedar again.
This time the white smoke engulfed them, turning the ruins into a cupful of flags and
wood fog.
Then Abe smelled something else, too. An unpleasant, saccharine odor. It took him a
minute to place the smell. And then it came to him. Something had died.
Voices drifted in with the smoke. They came muffled, from a distant part of the
ruins.
'This way,' Li said with waning confidence. 'But we must stay together. We must
take care. There are dangers. There are bad stories.'
Abe wended his way through the smoke. The summit structure was not very large,
but they had to pick their way through so many clusters of prayer flags and mani
stones that it seemed enormous and mazelike. Abe passed another horned animal
skull embellished with paint and carved lettering, then another. The voices grew
louder.
At the rear of the old structure, a collapsed doorway opened out onto a wide flat
ledge on the outside. On every side of the ledge, the mountain dropped away, a
thousand feet deep. Far in the distance, Everest was blowing her afternoon plume.
Abe stepped through the doorway. Then he stopped, frozen, for they had emerged
into the middle of a funeral. At first Abe wasn't even sure of that. He had no idea at all
what they were doing.
Three Tibetan men had stripped naked a dead woman.
One of the men was holding a knife.
The woman's clothing lay in a heap.
The scene struck directly at Abe's mind, unbuffered by language or thought. A big
hand grasped his shoulder from behind, someone trying to come through the
doorway, and Abe heard the person gasp sharply.
A cedar fire was smoking away on one end of the ledge. Back against the
to Abe's left, sat what he took to be the woman's family, maybe eight people of
different ages. For a moment, deceived by the thick white smoke, Abe thought he saw
his monk seated on skins, droning his monotone into the empty blue. The smoke
shifted. His monk disappeared.
For a moment, some of the family members didn't see the climbers and kept on
muttering prayers. Then all was silence. They froze, as if ambushed.
The climbers stood paralyzed, too. The Tibetans considered them for another
minute or so. They were not welcome, that was clear. But Abe and the others were
too stupefied to be moved by the hostile glares.
'What's the traffic jam,' Thomas groused, squeezing through the doorway. Then he
saw the body and went still, too.
'Trespass.' Carlos said it firmly. 'This is trespass. We don't belong here.'
But before they could retreat, Li squeezed through the bunched climbers.
'Trespass?' he scoffed, and the fear was gone from his voice. He seemed oddly
triumphant, pleased by the climber's shock at this raw, strange sight.
'We are within the law,' Li said with growing confidence. 'We are not trespassing.
You can take photographs. Yes, it is within the law.'
The Tibetans didn't speak to one another. Each of them scrutinized the climbers and
especially their Chinese guide. Then as suddenly as they had stopped, the Tibetans
started again. They began droning mantras without syncopation, almost without
breath. The cedar smoke changed direction and fell into the valley.
'Come.' With great firmness, almost as if he were disciplining them, Li ushered the
climbers to one side. 'Please, sit,' he said, indicating the ground by the wall.
Abe was dumbly obedient.
'What is this?' Kelly asked, hunkering by the wall.
Stump spoke in a whisper. 'I don't know.'
Abe felt their fear and helplessness, too. That bare knife, the corpse, the wind and
prayers: He wondered what they meant to do.
'I've heard of this,' Carlos said, keeping his voice low. 'Daniel told me about it. He has
pictures. They call it sky burial.'
Robby squirmed, horrified. 'They push her off the edge, or what, man? What is this?
What am I doing here?'
Before Carlos could answer, before Robby could leave, the man with the knife bent
down and made a long cut. From just right of her lightly haired pubis down to the
inside of the knee joint, the butcher drew his blade fast and hard.
Kelly groaned aloud.
Abe squinted in the cedar smoke. He tried not to flinch, though, telling himself this
was the stuff of gross anatomy, nothing more. And they were travelers and this was
culture. He took out his camera. Somehow, looking through the viewfinder made it
easier to watch.
Quickly now, because they had begun, the corpse was tilted up on one hip. From the
pelvic saddle down, the butcher sliced again and the quadriceps flopped loose onto the
cold stone.
The knives were sharp and these men had obviously done this with human beings
