life.”
IN THE MORNING, outside the cave, Lokesh would not speak to Shan, would not look him in the eye.
Dolma transferred some apples and apricots from her own bag to Shan’s pack, handed him one of the pilgrim bags Trinle had brought from the cave. “He says this is not what the track to the gods is for,” she said in a strained voice, “that you must stop this, that you cannot turn it into some sort of contest between predator and prey.”
“We have no choice.” Shan lifted one of the pilgrim staffs and looked at his old friend, who stood on a rock, facing the sunrise.
“He says,” Dolma continued, “that he wished they had taught you better. He says you know that if you follow the upper kora more people will die than if you did not. He says if he has a chance to remove Gendun he will do so. He says he does not know if the old hermitage is safe now, that he will not be able to leave word of where they are going.”
A wave of tremendous sadness surged inside Shan. Was this how he would leave his Tibetan friends, the two men who had become like family to him? They had given him life when he had none. Now it felt as if he was betraying their teaching. He remembered a dream he’d had days earlier in which a phantom saint had told him his life would end on this mountain.
He and Yangke and Hostene had started up the trail, eyes on the summit, when Shan was stopped by the sound of hurried footsteps behind him. It was Lokesh, looking strangely frail. The old Tibetan lifted his beloved gau from his neck, the amulet that contained a prayer signed by the Dalai Lama, and placed it around Shan’s neck. Then he went back to the camp.
They walked for a while before Shan stopped to spread the map out on a rock. Shan had marked each of the pilgrim’s stations they knew of. “It’s a puzzle laid out five hundred years ago,” he said. “One station must point to a spur that goes upward.”
Yangke fixed his gaze on the summit. It had been ringed with clouds all morning, the crooked pinnacle at times protruding from the top like an island floating in the sky. “You heard Trinle. The only ones who survived were the ones who failed.”
“You forget the lamas,” Shan said. “The lamas went up and down.”
“We’re no lamas,” Hostene muttered. He had emptied his leather pilgrim bag and was examining its contents. It held only a flint, an odd Y-shaped piece of wood, a butter lamp, and a coil of yak-hair rope.
Shan studied the maze of ravines before them. “Abigail recorded half a dozen pilgrim stations at this level. Once there would have been more. The most important one would have been the most difficult to find.” He pointed to a clump of trees half a mile away on the table of rock that hung over the ravines.
Yangke’s face darkened. “You must have a death wish,” he said. But then he lifted his pack and began walking toward the trees.
“Why do you think this is the one?” Hostene asked as they halted near the lip of the ravines, directly above Little Moscow. Shan had taken out Abigail’s video camera and was manipulating its controls.
“A pilgrim could get lost for hours, even days, in the ravines. The lamas wanted to make it difficult. They wanted to discourage as many as possible.” He stepped into a shadow near the lip of the ravine, instructing Yangke to warn him if any miners became aware of the intruders above them. When he brought the faded painting beside Bing’s cave into focus, the first thing he saw was a caricature of Chairman Mao someone had painted over the fresco. He began filming, zooming in and out, ducking as two miners lingered in conversation in front of the rock, then filming the empty place where the piece had fallen out of the painting, finally the piece itself, braced against Bing’s front door.
“But you are only guessing this is the key,” Hostene protested. “We should be climbing.”
“It was you who made me understand.”
“Me?”
“Your stick figures. The old gods you went to meet as a boy. The earliest Buddhists in Tibet were followers of the Thunderbolt. That’s what this place was about: the thunder gods, finding the mouth of the thunder gods. If you want to find thunder what do you look for?”
Hostene knotted his brow. “Lightning.”
Shan nodded as he squatted by a tree, out of sight of the ravine now, and replayed the film he had just shot. There had been another video, among those now missing, taken by Hubei’s brother, who could venture into Little Moscow when Abigail could not. He stopped when he reached a frame that displayed the entire painting. The saint in the middle was surrounded by a dragon with a ball-shaped object in its claws. Several sacred signs, including the ritual umbrella at the top left corner, composed of tiny oval marks, could be made out. “The images at a kora station had many purposes,” Shan explained. “One was to provoke contemplation, perhaps create fear. Another, sometimes, was to explain where the pilgrim was to go next. At most stations I think the mantra was for the pilgrim’s soul. This one was for his feet.”
“You lost me.”
Shan pointed to the beast. “When I was young my father taught me twenty different traditional words for dragon in Chinese. But in Tibetan there is only one term, druk. It is also the sound of thunder. Thunder comes from dragons. The druk is also the guardian of treasure.” He pointed to the sphere in the dragon’s claws. “The pearl is the seed of thunder, which is fertilized by the druk.” Here he pointed to the strange shape that appeared as an upside-down mountain on which a miniature demon sat. “These are called
“So far as we are concerned, clearly,” Hostene said, his impatience mounting.
“Impossible to get to without an umbrella.” Shan traced the dotted lines of the umbrella. “If you draw a line through the center of the pearl, the eye of the dragon, and the single demon, they point directly to the summit of the mountain.” He demonstrated by freezing a wide shot of the painting with the summit in the background, then pointed to the umbrella. “At first I thought it was a primitive image of a white parasol, one of the sacred offerings. But it is more. It points the way.” He pulled out the piece of plaster he had carried since it had fallen on his first visit to Little Moscow and handed it to Yangke. “The ovals that make up the lines are footprints.” He paused at the look of wonder on Hostene’s face.
“We use them, much like this,” the Navajo said. “The path of our holy people-this is how we depict it in our sandpaintings, with little footprints.”
Shan quickly counted under his breath. “Taking into account the pieces of plaster that have fallen out, I estimate the shaft of the parasol is composed of thirty-five to forty ovals, or footprints. The arcs joining it at the top each contain ten prints. It’s an index, a scale. Each of the footprints on the shaft equals ten steps.”
“To where?”
“The umbrella points the way,” Shan said again. On the video screen, directly beside the fresco was a series of small shadows, alternating up the ravine wall, though several had been destroyed by miners’ chisels. “Climbing holes. Start directly over those holes and walk in a straight line for, say, four hundred paces.”
“A pilgrim was supposed to comprehend this?” Yangke asked.
“Only a few. The most persistent. A pilgrim might spend weeks on a kora. Some would sit at a painting like this for days.”
“The most contrite,” Yangke suggested. “The most desperate.”
Shan followed his gaze, then quickly stowed the camera away. Hostene was moving along the rim of the ravine at a steady trot.
It took them a long time to find the second marker. They crept to the opposite side of the rim, above the painting, taking care not to be seen by those below, then walked three hundred fifty paces, debating the length of a Tibetan’s stride centuries earlier. They fanned out, each man counting off another fifty paces. Finally, they discovered another painting, nearly faded to oblivion, this one depicting the thirteen possessions of an ordained monk, with the monk’s staff drawn in tiny footprints pointed almost directly up the slope. The painting map called for another six hundred paces, toward a now familiar grove of trees. They found themselves in front of the ruined fresco with the ancient painting underneath. The footprints were tiny along the border surrounding the serpentine god, but Shan found them, and understood finally why the larger fresco had been constructed over the painting. No one had made it to the upper path for seventy years. The lamas had hidden the way by blocking the ancient explanation from view. In the early twentieth century more than a few oracles had predicted calamity for Tibetan
