“New theories occurred to her, and new interpretations. Sometimes she would be in the middle of studying one painting and find she had to go back to another she had visited two days before. I always offered to accompany her, but sometimes she refused. She said she would have to jog to cover the distance and didn’t want me to risk twisting an ankle. She didn’t think I shared her fervor for her work,” he said remorsefully. “When you spend your life behind a blanket I guess it’s hard to drop it, even to those who come back to the family.”
“A blanket?” Shan repeated.
“My wife used to say that in the last years before she died. There were many like me, like Abigail, who lived with the old ways when we were young and then went into the world to pursue careers outside the tribe. We chose other ways to live. On the map I didn’t go far, just a couple hundred miles, but it may as well have been ten thousand. Law school, prosecutor’s office, the state court. An entirely different universe from the one I grew up in. You learn not to speak with anyone about the sacred ways, the old ways, partly because they are secret, but also because they are mocked, because other people want to turn them into trinkets to use in schemes to make money. You learn to pull the Navajo blanket up and never speak about those things. If someone wants to discuss the Navajo you speak about the artists who make the blankets and pots, no more. I had two chants but I didn’t use them for nearly thirty years, except behind my own closed doors, to keep them alive.”
“Chants?”
Hostene, fixing his leathery face on the distant clouds, was silent so long Shan thought he would not reply.
“It is the way we speak with our holy ones. Something like a prayer, something like a song. One can last for days. The chanter recites from memory. The chants are handed down from one generation to the next, taught in quiet, dark places. Abigail said the Tibetans do the same thing. It has a very old feel to it, the learning of such things. I used to get shivers walking into the hogan, the house, of my teacher.”
“You mean you were a priest?”
“We have no priests. We have our chanters, the singers. If you need healing for a sickness caused by witches you go to the chanter of the Ghostway. If you want to protect your crop against frost you find the singer of the Starway. You always start with the Blessingway, to open the door to the holy ones.” He glanced self-consciously at Shan, as if surprised by his own words. They were not speaking only of blankets and pottery now.
“This was what Gendun was doing in that stable,” Shan observed. “For many days, he invoked the gods on your behalf, almost without stopping, every line he spoke different, every line from memory.”
Hostene scooped up a handful of loose earth and tossed some into the wind.
Shan said, after a moment, “Your niece was usually shown under trees in the videos, because the paintings were meant to be stops on the kora, resting places for pilgrims, offering water and shade. This high up on the mountain there aren’t many groves.”
But he had not realized how many there were until the two of them began seeking them out. They spent the rest of the daylight hours investigating a dozen groves scattered across the slope. Shan kept alert for signs of miners. They were approaching the mysterious place called Little Moscow that Yangke had mentioned to him. In late afternoon they paused in the shade of an outcropping to study the videos again, rewinding, fast-forwarding, noting a distinctive rock formation here, a gnarled stump there. A butterfly materialized before them, its scarlet and yellow wings quivering as it alighted on the camera. The Navajo froze. There was sadness in his gaze, as if the creature reminded him of the missing woman, but his eyes were also suffused with the same gentle childlike wonder Shan often saw on Lokesh’s face.
Shan did what he could to explain the images he recognized on the little screen, although often the Navajo woman on the tape explained them just as quickly. Fierce protector demons dominated many of the rock paintings. Four-armed Mahakala, Shrivi mounted on a horse, Rahula with a bow, dressed in human skins. Devotional images of the early Tibetan kings were depicted. Abigail had learned her icons well, accurately pointing out the details of the ritual hand gesture-a downturned hand in the earth-touching mudra-made by one ancient king, the gesture called Turning the Wheel of Law made by a blue-skinned saint. At several points she paused and drew Navajo images, discussing the similarities between the fierce deities embraced by both peoples and the taboos that had grown out of their beliefs.
It was midafternoon when Hostene touched Shan’s shoulder, then silently directed him down a nearby side path, into a rough gully that was devoid of any paintings, then into a maze of twisting, overgrown paths marked with inconspicuous chalk marks, low to the ground, at each turn, and finally through a narrow slit in two rock walls, onto what looked like a goat path. They emerged into a natural bowl abutting the rock spine that divided the mountain. At the base of the spine was a high pile of jagged stones, recently splintered, some blackened. They were at the old mine, or what was left of it.
“We could have been killed when the bolt of lightning struck,” Hostene said.
Thirty feet in front of them was the twisted, scorched iron frame of an old chest. On a rock wall opposite the debris was a large faded painting of a fierce protector demon riding a blue wolf, painted so its eyes seemed to follow the observer as he walked around the bowl’s circumference.
Shan studied the pile of rocks, the twisted iron, the splinters of old beams thrown across the clearing. “I have never seen lightning do such a thing.”
“We had nearly finished our work here and were examining a painting of a blue bull god some distance away. Professor Ma said he had left a set of cleaning brushes here. He retrieved the brushes, and when he returned he asked who had moved the equipment. Someone had taken all the old iron pieces, the trunk, straps for a forge, an anvil, old chisels and pry rods and piled them up in front of the tunnel, then added iron pry rods at the top of the pile, strapping three together like a flagpole.”
“Or, more likely, a lightning rod,” Shan said. He bent and scrutinized one of the scorched rocks, holding it under his nose. “Someone put explosives under the pile and used the lightning as a detonator. Whenever it went off whoever did this would be far away and could have an alibi. And they didn’t care who was nearby when it exploded.”
Hostene went to the far side of the pile and squatted, pulling away stones frantically, as if something had told him his niece might be underneath. Then, abruptly, he stopped, shuddering, gazing with a weary expression at the destruction.
“What had you found here?” Shan asked.
“Words painted on tunnel walls. Tashi and Abigail translated them but I never asked what they said. We had seen so many old writings already.”
“And gold?” Shan suggested.
“Not much. Just little nuggets here and there that seemed to have fallen in cracks or behind rocks and been forgotten. Abigail became very angry the first time Tashi touched one.”
“But he did take some-eight nuggets for the cairn by your camp.”
Hostene nodded. “Tashi changed her mind. He said it was the right thing to do, that it was what the old monk miners intended. He said it was how you recharged the prayers. That’s the word he used, ‘recharged.’ ”
“How much gold did you take?”
“Enough for four or five cairns, I guess. It wasn’t our gold, we all agreed we had no claim on it, that it would be wrong to do anything else with it. It wasn’t stealing. It was in line with what Abigail called the reverence of her work.”
Shan asked for the camera again, and found a scene of Abigail in front of the mine, speaking of Tibetan artisans who rendered exquisite goddesses out of gold, then of the Tibetan and Navajo shared reverence for turquoise, which they incorporated into both jewelry and holy images. The demon represented in the sole painting at the site was stated to be the main guardian of the powerful land deity that inhabited the mountain. Hostene lingered only a moment after handing the camera to Shan, then went to the head of the trail, impatient for Shan to finish.
But Shan kept watching. The scene at the mine ended, the screen turned blue for a moment. Then he saw the image of a lichen-covered rock and what might have been a shadowed painting beyond.
“The camera lesson is done. Stop playing and listen to me,” a female voice declared in English. It was Abigail
