Cassie switched her attention from Griffin to the twins. She still had a few more questions about their qualifications and didn’t want to get sidetracked no matter how interesting the discussion of polyandry might be. “It makes sense that Home Office tagged you two to guide us to Mount Kailash. If you’ve been interviewing families out in the sticks, you must know this terrain pretty well.”
“We do,” they both answered.
The pythia frowned. “But we also need security back-up. Have you had any training in self-defense?”
The twins looked at one another in surprise.
“Didn’t we tell them that we’re both martial arts experts?” Rabten asked. “Or that we’re both pretty good with firearms?”
Rinchen shook his head. “I don’t think that ever came up.”
“Or that we’ve handled artifact transfers under the radar before?”
“Nope. That didn’t come up either, bro.”
“Oh.”
At that moment, the waiter returned with their entrees.
While the plates were being handed out, Cassie leaned toward Griffin and whispered jokingly, “Well, they’re not Erik, but I guess they’ll do in a pinch.”
The scrivener smiled at her and winked. “Quite.”
Chapter 39—Simply Breathtaking
In the town of Darchen at the foot of Mount Kailash, Cassie lay on her hotel bed struggling to fill her lungs with air. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been warned, she told herself. Most people had difficulty adjusting to the extreme change in altitude. Given her famously sensitive nervous system, she’d felt dizzy and light-headed ever since they’d left Kathmandu.
When she and Griffin had originally planned their journey, she’d pointed out that there were direct flights from Lhasa to an airport about two hundred miles east of Darchen. They could have reached their destination in about a day. Griffin rejected the idea because he said the four-day trip from Kathmandu would allow them time to acclimate to the altitude. Cassie now realized that four days weren’t going to be nearly long enough. If they had taken a direct flight from Lhasa, the abrupt change in altitude might have killed her outright.
As it was, their staged journey had been challenging enough. To begin with, they’d flown in a tiny plane from Kathmandu to a town called Nepalgunj. The ride lasted a mere hour, but there was only one flight per day. After an overnight layover, they’d rushed to catch the sole flight of the day that would take them to their next stopping point. It left at 6 AM, but since the weather was cloudy, the plane was delayed a few hours. The twins repeated a bit of folk wisdom about not flying through clouds in the Himalayas because the clouds had rocks in them. Cassie took their advice to heart and waited without complaint until the plane was cleared for departure.
They spent that night in the stark rural village of Simikot. The pythia thought back fondly to the good old days when she and her teammates had stayed in five-star hotels. Given the paucity of guest houses along their route, they were lucky to have a roof over their heads at all. Sleeping accommodations invariably consisted of mattresses flung on bare floors with all four of them in the same room. The cinderblock buildings in which they were housed had no indoor plumbing and drinking water needed to be boiled before consumption. A shower was out of the question.
Meals always included yak butter tea which tasted more like salty broth than a beverage. The staple food was barley flour noodles—bland but filling. Stoves were fueled by dried chips of yak dung. The local people had little enough to go around even for themselves, much less for tourists. Cassie made sure that the Arkana team gave far more money than was asked in exchange for the humble bed and board they received.
When they left Simikot, their last bit of air travel involved a forty-five-minute helicopter flight to the equally barren Nepalese town of Hilsa. While there, the twins managed to procure the use of two Land Rovers for the rest of their trip. Rabten took the wheel of one and Rinchen the other. They apparently knew the terrain and the local people quite well. When the pythia questioned the need for two vehicles, Rinchen reminded her that if their quest was successful, they would have to part ways at Kailash. The twins would take a separate route through Lhasa in order to smuggle the artifact out of the country, leaving Cassie and Griffin to return the way they’d come.
The Arkana group drove across the bridge that officially divided Nepal from Tibet. After the Chinese border guard checked their papers and put them through the other formalities of entering the country, they were allowed to continue on their way. Although flying from Kathmandu to Hilsa had been uncomfortable, driving on land didn’t offer any improvement. The roads in western Tibet were unpaved and bumpy. Their SUVs churned up so much dust that even if they’d wanted to roll down the windows for fresh air, it wouldn’t have been possible. Thankfully, it was only a short trip to Purang where they stopped for the night. Tibetan guest houses proved to be no better than what the group had already experienced in rural Nepal.
On the final morning of their trip, they drove three hours to Lake Manasarovar where they paused
