phone before stepping to the edge of a nearby ledge.
Shan was gripped by the cold fear he always felt when he heard the voice on the other end of the line. They weren’t friends, they weren’t allies, merely two men who had been chewed up and spit out by Beijing. After a difficult opening, during which the colonel threatened to hang up, then warned Shan that his photo was being distributed by one of the most rabid Public Security officers in all of Tibet, it took less than five minutes to explain what he desired and another five minutes before a much friendlier, female voice returned with the information he had sought. The colonel’s matronly assistant relayed the requested information, then recited the phone number twice. Shan gestured for a pen and wrote it on a slip of paper. “Have a wonderful day,” she called out as he disconnected.
He went to Gao’s side and held the phone as Gao had before, so both could hear. Shan asked for Heinz Kohler. “Mr. Kohler has gone to the border on business. He will be back in a few days. Is there a message?” They were not only the same words but it was the same young female voice they had heard on their first call to Lhasa.
“I don’t understand,” Gao said after Shan had hung up.
“I asked about his scientific colleague. Then I asked if there was a private, confidential listing for a Heinz Kohler residence in Lhasa. His old colleague moved to a retirement home on the southern coast over a year ago. The number the colonel gave me was the private line of the Kohler apartment in Lhasa. Only nothing is private to a man like the colonel. Heinz has an apartment at the top of the hotel. The woman who spoke to you wasn’t working for the hotel, she has an arrangement with the switchboard. She’s living in Kohler’s apartment.”
Gao snatched the phone from Shan’s hand and without a word marched up the trail, which was turning into a wide causeway leading to another tunnel near the top of a high cliff.
Shan followed at a distance, recalling the words of the old groundskeeper, Trinle. The mountain sought people out. It was true. Here before him was the mystery of the murders, the mystery of Abigail Natay, the mystery of the lost gold, the mystery of Gao. The mountain had already dealt with the mystery of Bing. Shan looked up at the summit, surrounded by patches of snow. They were nearing the end of the climb. Somewhere between where he stood and the top, all mysteries would end.
The station at the top of the windblown section of trail might have been constructed as a classroom for Abigail. The walls of the high rectangular cavern, sealed at the far end, were smooth, covered with paintings, though only along the top of the walls, ending nearly eight feet above the ground. Below the paintings were more of Abigail’s own drawings, though not only Abigail’s. At least one other hand, which had written nearly illegible passages in Tibetan, was evident. Halfway down the cavern a rope hung from the ceiling. Yangke pulled it, producing the pleasing peal of a heavy bell chime.
“It’s a dead end,” Hostene declared. “A deception. We missed a hidden turnoff.” But he seemed in no hurry to leave as he paced along the walls, perplexed. Had his niece also been deceived?
Oddly, Abigail’s chalk marks looked faded, as if they had been there for years. As Yangke began reading the Tibetan words out loud, Shan fought mounting unease. Several cavities punctuated the upper walls, some like small bowls, others holes without visible ends. Light filtered through a perfect circle chiseled at the top of the rear wall, which displayed no paintings. Below it was a dark shelf, an opening that ran the width of the cave, nearly two feet high. Shan pointed to a chalk mark he had never seen before, a circle divided by a horizontal line through the center, vertical lines running down from the center line to the edges.
“It’s an old sign,” Hostene said, “seldom used. I think it means House of Water.” He looked at Shan and shrugged.
Shan studied the way the living rock had been carved to make two pillars at either side of the narrow entrance, the stone around them chiseled away to make two high concave hollows in the entrance wall. He picked up two pieces of gravel and tossed one into each of the hollows. The one on the south side bounced back, the other disappeared without a sound. He looked up to see Gao standing outside the chamber on the entry path, which for fifty feet had been laid with flat, tight-fitting pavers. Gao stared over one edge, where the low wall that lined the paved portion of the path had crumbled away.
“What are those?” Gao asked, pointing to a heap at the bottom of the high wall they stood on.
“Sticks,” Shan suggested. “When a tree gets blown off the slope above it ends up down there eventually. They tumble to the bottom and the sun bleaches the sticks white like that.”
“Except we have climbed above the tree line,” Gao said in a worried tone.
The wind began to pick up, bending the sparse clumps of grass that grew between the stones.
The moan came abruptly, starting as a low humming sound, then quickly elevated in pitch and volume to an unsettling noise that seemed to come from the rock wall at the end of the chamber.
“A throat chant!” Yangke gasped. “It’s as if the mountain is chanting!”
It did seem as though the rock itself were speaking, like the beginning of one of the eerie prayer chants practiced by some of the old monks. Gao pointed to the circular hole at the end of the chamber that Shan had noticed earlier. Shan spoke into Yangke’s ear and a moment later Hostene and Gao were helping him up onto Yangke’s shoulders. When he straightened, his head was level with the hole above the long shadowed shelf. The sound grew so intense that he put one hand over an ear, using the other to steady himself as he studied the hole. Then he signaled for his friends to lower him.
“There’s a wooden sleeve fitted inside the hole, with thin slats like reeds in it,” he reported. “The hole widens past the sleeve. It’s a sound funnel, and its been tuned to make this sound.”
“But what is the sound?” Gao asked. “Why that sound?”
Yangke and Shan concentrated on listening.
Yangke’s eyes lit with realization. “A seed sound,” he said, referring to one of the root sounds used in Tibetan ritual.
Shan cocked his head, telling himself it was not possible. But the sound was unmistakable now. Each gust renewed the syllable. The sound mesmerized the four men. The monks of five centuries past were speaking to them.
Hostene, his expression of wonder growing, clamped his hands over his ears. Gao stared not at the hole above now, but at the entryway. Shan pulled Yangke into a corner, where the sound was less intense.
He asked, “What does it signify?”
“The color blue,” Yangke said, “And the direction north. And-” The sound grew louder now, accompanied by something new, a low rushing rumble.
The image of the white sticks below flashed through Shan’s mind. “Run!” he shouted, pushing Hostene and Gao forward, pointing Yangke toward the entry. They were halfway down the chamber when the shelf below the hole erupted. There was indeed one more meaning to the seed syllable. Water.
It burst out of the wall with the force of a tsunami. As the makers of the chamber intended, they would not have time to run down the path to safety below. Shan pushed Yangke into the shadow behind the north pillar. The Tibetan understood instantly, and pulled Hostene into the narrow cleft before the wall of water reached them. Shan grabbed the collar of Gao’s jacket as the scientist was swept off his feet, then braced himself in the opening of the cleft. He had to extract Gao from the torrent, he had to get them both higher, for the water was rapidly rising and would not stop, he knew now, until it reached a level just below the old paintings, eight feet from the floor of the chamber.
He pulled on Gao’s collar, not daring to use both arms for fear of losing his balance. By the time he had pulled Gao inside the cleft, their heads were under water. Blind in the swirling blackness, Shan let his feet lead him. They found a narrow step, then another, and another. He slipped, almost losing Gao. Then hands reached down and tugged him upward.
He found himself lying on the floor of another cave. He struggled to his hands and knees, his stomach heaving up the water he had swallowed, Gao beside him coughing up water too as Hostene slapped his back.
“They weren’t white sticks,” Gao said once he regained his breath.
“No,” Shan agreed. They were the flotsam of centuries of pilgrims who had not been so fortunate, the bones of what had been perhaps twenty or thirty bodies.
They spoke hurriedly, in tones of disbelief, comparing theories, until at last they understood what the ancient monk engineers had done. The bell. The bell rope would always be pulled by a pilgrim, for bells drove away evil spirits. But the rope not only tipped the bell, it activated a mechanism, releasing a cover over the wind funnel and then something else above, releasing a gravity-activated gate on a dam that connected to the wide opening at the
