Buddhists, and begged that their treasures be safeguarded. The lamas had tried to protect the mountain in their own way. But the person who had hammered away the plaster had not been interested in protecting anything.
“Abigail knew,” Shan said to Hostene. “She kept coming back here.”
The Navajo nodded. “She suspected. But she would never destroy the fresco.”
“No,” Shan agreed as he bent over the details of the little demon panels along the side of the painting. He pointed in turn to the tiny swords in four little hands, all pointing in exactly the same direction, and began counting the ovals. “Five hundred paces,” he said a few minutes later, and pointed in the direction indicated by the swords.
They soon found themselves in one of the gorges at the foot of the summit and began passing small ravines with narrow, snaking walls that sprang out like fingers from the base of the summit. Shan began noticing black smudges near the entry to each ravine. He squatted and touched one. Soot.
“What does it mean?” Yangke asked.
“Someone made it this far but didn’t know where to go next. He tested each ravine, then marked it with scrapings from a butter lamp.”
Lichen was chipped away from the corners of several rocks, some with new growth appearing. They had been stripped a year or more before, no doubt by someone in search of another painting. Yangke pointed out small piles of ashes at regular intervals, and held some under his nose. Someone had been burning incense to attract the help of the deities.
“Look for fresh tracks,” Hostene suggested.
After twenty minutes Yangke gave a low whistle. They found him before an undulating, wind-carved rock. “A self-actuated demon,” the Tibetan declared. It took a moment for Shan to recognize in the ridges of the stone the shape of one of the tiger demons used by the Bon monks, even longer to notice that the colorations below the stone were not patterns of lichen.
Yangke knelt and began pointing to the barely readable letters. “Worm,” he said, then “god.”
“Becomes,” Shan made out, then stumbled over vague markings that were too far gone to read.
“Worm. Becomes god,” Yangke said in a puzzled voice. “Trinle said something about that.”
The words echoed in some dusty chamber in Shan’s mind. “Even the lowly worm eventually becomes a god,” he announced. “It’s a saying the oldest lamas use in teaching.”
The three men exchanged perplexed glances, then began searching the two ravines closest to the faded message.
“Nothing,” Yangke reported after several minutes.
Shan bent to the Tibetan’s boot and touched it. His finger came away with grains of black sand. “There are no sand deposits up here,” he observed.
“You’re wrong,” Yangke said, and led them down the passage to a small sand-filled depression.
Shan kneeled, running the sand through his fingers. “This was brought here.”
“What does it mean?” Yangke asked once more.
Shan removed his pack and rolled up his sleeves. “It means we become worms.”
Using their hands as shovels, they soon exposed a low hollow in the stone below ground level, then a narrow tunnel running through it filled with sand, a tunnel that, oddly, seemed to have been carved not by chisel but by water. Shan offered encouragement to a hesitant Hostene by explaining that this had been where Abigail had asked for her supplies from town to be left.
“But Abigail can’t have come through here. The sand hadn’t been disturbed,” Hostene pointed out.
As he spoke, a sharp back draft of wind shot off the face of the mountain. In seconds it had refilled their excavation by several inches, answering his question.
When they reached the other side, they scraped the sand from their clothes. Directly opposite them on the rock wall was an image of another demon, his yellow eyes still vivid enough to be unsettling. Shan silently gestured them onward and a moment later they were at the base of the unattainable summit, looking up with disbelief into a fold in the cliff face. The builders of the path had indeed shown worms how to meet gods.
The color began draining from Hostene’s face. Yangke paced nervously back and forth, shaking his head.
A chain of huge hand-forged iron links, each as long as Shan’s forearm, hung in a long channel that seemed to have been gouged out of the rock wall. The chain was anchored to the rock near their feet by a thick iron staple and to the side of the mountain by long iron pins, which held it steady sixteen inches from the rock face.
“There’s no end to it,” Yangke said, looking up.
“It’s just in shadow,” Shan said, struggling to keep his voice calm. The end of the chain vanished into blackness nearly two hundred feet above them, where there might be an overhanging cave.
“It’s so old,” Hostene said. “The chain can’t be safe.”
“It’s survived from the age of Tibet’s great bridge builders,” Shan suggested. “Special forges turned out chains like these for suspension bridges. Most of them lasted for centuries.” He studied the big, uneven links uncertainly. They showed little evidence of corrosion or rust. “This one has been mostly protected from the elements.”
“How old do you think it is?”
“Three, maybe four hundred years.”
Hostene stared at the shadows above with a bleak expression, then lowered his pack. “We can’t take everything.”
“We are meant to carry what the pilgrims carried,” Yangke said. “A blanket, a staff, our bags.”
“Abigail would have carried more,” Hostene remarked.
“Perhaps not much more,” Shan said, gesturing toward the deeper shadows at the very base of the summit, where there was a small patch of color. Under a blue nylon parka they found a small mound of objects. A handful of ballpoint pens bound by a rubber band. A small cooking kit. A sweatshirt. A water bottle. Hostene opened his pack and began making his own pile, including the video camera. Shan watched for a moment, then began sorting through his own possessions.
Helping each other, the three soon had rolled their leather bags into their blankets and fashioned carrying straps out of the yak-hair rope. Hostene and Shan stared at the staffs, so awkward for a climb up the chain, then followed Yangke’s example, securing them in the carrying straps around their necks.
They stood, gazing up, realizing how easy it would be for any of them to fall to his death. Seeing the fear on Hostene’s face, Shan was about to suggest they reconsider when Yangke set a foot into the first of the links and began climbing.
At first they seemed to totter between heaven and hell, one moment reaching upward for the uncertain shadows above, the next slipping, fearfully clutching the metal to keep from falling onto the sharp rocks below. The links were rough and misshapen but wide enough for a foot or, when fatigue struck, for an elbow to be pushed through so that, locking arms, they could safely hang long enough to catch their breath. The old chain bore their combined weight without complaint.
As they climbed Shan began seeing a pattern in the clumps of vegetation that clung to the wall beside the chain, interspersed with open holes chipped in the rock, several of which contained bird nests. This kora was much older than three or four centuries. Before the chain’s construction, holes had been chiseled in the rock as handholds to help pilgrims climb the wall.
They climbed together into the high channel of smooth rock. It had once been a waterfall, Shan realized, as he entered the vertical tunnel, a watercourse inside the mountain that had, by the hand of man or nature, been diverted, leaving the tunnel and a smooth vertical track for the chain, which reached its upper terminus alongside an open ledge. They had found the bed of the old stream. The rock wall of its bank sloped away at the top, leaving a five-foot gap between it and the side of the mountain. Hostene and Shan climbed upward, overlapping themselves on the upper chain. Yangke, who had preceded the older men, tried to reach the trail leading up the mountain with an extended foot.
“I cannot jump that,” Hostene said anxiously as he gazed down at the rocks far below.
Shan, with his head at Hostene’s ankles, studied the rock wall. Then he took the staff from his back and began probing a small patch of shadow that was darker than the rest, inches below the path. The end of the staff sank in nearly a foot. Shan threaded the staff through the opposite link in the chain and thrust it back into the wall.
Yangke, watching from above, announced that he had located another hole, four feet above the first. They
