Shan had seen many ruined gompas in Tibet, the work of the army and, later, the Red Guard, who together had destroyed all but a handful of Tibet's six thousand monasteries and convents. But as he stepped out of the grove he realized that never- except for the huge complexes near Lhasa and Shigatse that had been the most conspicuous symbols of traditional Tibet- had he seen such total annihilation. Dozens of large buildings had once extended up the slope and out onto the floor of the plain to the edge of the stream. Nothing was left of them but ragged shards of foundations and, in a few piles, the shattered remains of stone walls. A line of stones extended around the perimeter, along the line of a thick high outer wall that survived only at the nearest corner, where a section nearly ten feet high towered over the ruins.
"Someone's planning to build something?" Winslow asked at his shoulder.
Shan glanced in confusion, then understood. Scattered among the old foundations were rectangles of small, precisely laid rocks. To the casual observer it might not appear to be so much a ruined gompa, but someone's plan for a new gompa.
"I forgot what it was like. I was just a youth last time I was here," Lhandro said in a hushed tone as he joined them. The village headman walked slowly along the line of the outer wall, as if frightened of crossing the line of rocks. "The army came with big cannons, led by Mao's children."
Mao's children. It was a euphemism for the Red Guard, the fanatical waves of Chinese youths unleashed by Mao Tse Tung during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard had destroyed libraries, universities, hospitals, and any other establishment identified with the reviled four "olds"- old cultures, old customs, old thought, and old habits. Sometimes they had commandeered entire units of the military for their campaigns of political cleansing.
"We all thought there must be rebel soldiers hiding in the mountains. Even the monks came out and stood on top of the walls as though curious to see how far into the mountains the guns would shoot. But the soldiers turned the guns on the gompa. They didn't warn the monks. Just began shelling. Soldiers set up machine guns and shot into the gompa. Like a war, though no one was fighting back. Some of the old buildings had cellars, temple rooms carved into the rock below them. It took two days before the soldiers decided no one could still be alive in the cellars. Then the Chinese conscripted everyone they could find for miles to work. Every man, woman, and child."
"Even the monks?" the American asked.
"The monks?" Lhandro asked, looking at the American with a melancholy expression. "That day, when they started shelling, was the last time I saw a monk for years. When they destroyed the gompas in this region they never gave the monks a chance to flee. Many here went to the lhakang, the main temple, and prayed until the end. Some went to the shrines underground. I was with the first group of workers sent here. We were slaves really, slaves for the army." He stared at the ruins with a hollow expression. "There weren't any whole bodies left, just body parts. But they made us put all the parts, all that was left of the monks, in two of the big holes that were the remains of the underground shrines. Then we had to cover them. There were no machines to use. We had shovels and hoes only. We buried the monks, then for six months we burned all the timbers and hauled away the rocks."
"The rocks?" Winslow asked.
"The building stones. Nearly every loose stone was put in trucks. So the gompa couldn't be rebuilt. The gompa was over five hundred years old, and the old books said it had taken fifty years to construct. Fires were lit and kept burning for days, with paintings and altars and books for fuel. Everything that was not metal or rock was burned. There were a lot of stones. Some went to be crushed for Chinese roads. Some to an army base fifty miles from here. We were sent to use them to build barracks there for the Chinese invaders. That took another six months. Everyone was a slave to the Chinese in those years." He spoke in the distant, matter-of-fact tone Tibetans usually resorted to when describing the tragedies of the Chinese occupation. Lhandro had to distance himself from the events or he would be unable to speak of them at all. "When we were done here we had to rake the ground smooth," he added in a near whisper. "They made us spread salt on the soil, so not even a flower would grow again."
"Christ," Winslow muttered, his face drawn in pain. His eyes settled on a circular depression of blackened earth thirty feet away. It was, Shan realized, a small bomb crater. "It's like it just happened."
But not entirely. New rocks had been brought, or dug out of the soil, and arranged to outline several of the old foundations. And four small buildings had been rebuilt among the ruins. Three of them were at the far side of the old compound, over three hundred yards away, and had the appearance of painstaking reconstruction. The fourth Shan saw only as he stepped closer to the surviving section of outer wall: a small sturdy stone and stucco structure consisting of two new walls built into the surviving corner section of outer wall. In front of its door sat a young boy, playing with pebbles. As Shan appeared the boy's jaw dropped and he darted away toward the restored buildings in the distance.
In the same moment Lhandro touched Shan's arm. He turned to see Lokesh standing, slightly bent, holding his belly as he stared at the ruins, as though he had been kicked. As they watched, the old Tibetan turned, or rather staggered about, to study the trees and then the slope above with an anguished expression. He faced the ruins again and stumbled forward, slowly at first, then more quickly until, with a sound like a sob, he broke into a trot toward the center of the ruins.
He ran with a curious gait, repeatedly slowing, looking about, turning left, then right, then jogging again, once even stopping to squat and lift a handful of the sandy earth, gazing at it forlornly as the particles trickled through his fingers, then lowering his hand until it touched the earth. At several places where Lokesh turned, Shan saw there was a narrow line of stones that recalled former foundations. But at most of his turns the earth was bare, although Lokesh seemed to perceive something. As if, Shan realized, he saw the buildings that once stood, as though he were navigating around them.
Suddenly his friend stopped, close to the slope, more than halfway across the ruins, and dropped cross-legged onto the ground. Shan took a few steps forward to join him. But then a figure emerged from the buildings at the far side, walking hurriedly toward them, the boy at his side.
"The keeper," Lhandro announced with a tone of relief. "He will help us. He will help the monk." The rongpa stepped forward and met the man a hundred feet away. Together they hurried off toward the injured monk, now lying on a blanket by the stream.
Shan stepped into the ruins, wandering along a long line of rocks before pausing near the center of the vast ruin by two low oblong mounds. A small cairn had been built on each, and along the perimeter of each were stones inscribed with Tibetan letters, some carved, some painted, with the mantra to the Compassionate Buddha: om mani padme hum. Mani stones, they were called. As he studied the first mound a deep sadness welled within him. Between the two mounds was a square, eight feet to the side, three feet high, made of stones and mortar. Someone was building a chorten, one of the seven-stage shrines, capped by a balloon dome and spire, that were often used to mark sacred relics. How many had there been, he wondered, how many monks at such a large gompa? Three hundred perhaps. Even as many as five hundred.