Shan waited a moment, until Chemi was only thirty feet away, then the noise of the machine drove him inside. He could see none of his companions, even though they had entered the cleft only moments before. His eyes adjusting to the dim light, he saw that the gap was more than a split in the rock- it was a narrow winding passage that led steeply upward. He followed a small trail, worn from the hooves of mountain creatures. After fifteen feet he discovered that he was inside a narrow fissure in the cap of the mountain, with walls that opened near the peak hundreds of feet overhead.
"It wasn't military," a voice said behind him. Chemi was there, looking out into the daylight as she spoke. "And it was low, below the trail, like it was searching the ridges where the bombs went off."
Shan took another step forward. There was still no sign of his friends.
"Did they fall?" Chemi asked in alarm. "They can't just disappear."
A shaft of sunlight lit the ground thirty feet in front of them. He stepped toward it uneasily as Chemi called out Anya's name. There was no reply. There was no sound at all. No wind blew in the chasm. No bird flew. No water fell. Chemi pulled his sleeve and pointed with alarm toward the pool of light which lit a wide crack in the floor. They stepped to the edge of the crack. It seemed to have no bottom. He kicked a pebble over the side and heard nothing.
"One of them could have slipped in and the others fell trying to help," Chemi said in a tight voice. "A place like that, they would just fall," she added, as though the chasm would have no bottom.
Shan stepped back without thinking, as though recoiling from the thought.
"They're gone," Chemi moaned, and she looked up mournfully toward the patch of sky at the top of the chasm.
Shan steadied himself by holding onto a pillar of rock. After a moment he realized his fingers were touching striations in the rock. He bent and blew into the tiny cracks, packed with dust, then pulled out his water bottle and poured some of the liquid over the pillar. Instantly the cracks took on definition, darker lines against the grey surface. They were Tibetan script, intricately carved into the pillar. Remember this, he read, we are made of nothing but light. It was a version of an ancient teaching, that the essence of life is luminosity, meaning awareness.
He looked up from the pillar in confusion. Beyond the pool of light the trail curved away toward a darker patch of shadow. He heard a small sound, the murmur of an animal, and ventured along the curve toward the darkness, following the trail up a short embankment beside which lay a row of small rocks on the ground. They were strangely smooth and flat, appearing as if they had been melted and folded. He knelt beside one and touched it. It wasn't rock, but dust he touched, dust the color of the rock. He lifted the object, still puzzled, and froze as he saw that it was a dust encrusted piece of cloth. It was a lungta, a prayer flag, made of silk, once red, painted with the mani mantra and a small horse. The dust fell away in flakes under his fingers, like a layer of ice, and he wondered, awed, how many decades it might have taken in the windless chasm for such a crust to accumulate. Not decades, more likely centuries. The flag had been sewn onto a strand of yak-hair rope, expertly woven, that had rotted away at each end. He looked at the line of tiny mounds, each another encrusted lungta. They pointed to the pillar with the writing. They had been tied to the pillar, he suspected, and affixed to the wall beyond him, in the darkest part of the shadow; not to flap conspicuously in the sky, but perhaps, in another age, to guide visitors. He turned and stepped further into the shadow, toward the wall where the line of flags would have ended. The darkest point was where two walls came together. There was something like a shadow inside the shadow. And the animal sound again.
He stepped into the blackest part of the shadow and found himself in the narrow entrance of a cave, which he followed, Chemi a step behind, feeling with his hands for eight feet as it curved sharply. Dim light appeared ahead of him, and suddenly he stumbled, nearly falling over Anya, who sat on the stone floor, murmuring softly in the detached voice he had heard her use for her animal songs. Beyond her stood the American, his electric lantern in his hand, shaking his head as he stared at the wall in front of him. Only Lokesh moved. The old Tibetan was circling the chamber they had discovered, uttering syllables of glee, his eyes shining with excitement. On a rock ledge that ran along the far end of the cavern, twenty feet from Shan, sat over two dozen elongated objects, in four stacks, each capped top and bottom with wooden slabs and bound together with cloth and strips of silk. The caps on those on top of each stack were made of rosewood, and carved with intricate patterns, some of flowers and leaves, others of wild animals.
As he stepped to Lokesh's side his old friend lifted the top of one of the box-like objects and with shaking hands pulled back the straps and cloth that covered its contents. It was a peche, a Tibetan book, in the traditional form of long unbound leaves of paper printed with wood blocks. "The Gyuzhi," he read in a whisper, then looked at his companions and explained that the Gyuzhi, or Four Tantras, was the most renowned of the ancient medical texts, written a thousand years earlier. He lifted the first leaf and read in silence for a moment, then pointed to the lines in the center of the page. "Possession of Elemental Spirits is caused by performing repeated sins, opposing thinking worthy of honor, failure to control the torment of sorrow." He looked up and grinned. "The causes of insanity, it means."
The excitement on his face was slowly replaced with solemn reverence as he replaced the leaf and the cover and repeated the process at the next peche, then two more. Winslow stepped forward and silently held the light at Lokesh's shoulder as the old man described the contents. "A teaching on medicinal stones," he said of the first, then explained that another was on medicines from fire elements, and the third about the use of stars to determine the most effective dates for mixing pills, written the year that the construction of Rapjung had begun.
At last Lokesh looked up and swallowed hard. "They thought- we didn't-" he began, his voice swelling with emotion again. His hand closed around the gau that hung from his neck and he cast a grateful glance back at the thangka that hung directly over the peche. On it was a Buddha figure painted blue, holding a begging bowl, the right hand outstretched in a gesture of giving. Vaidurya, the Medicine Buddha. "We thought some of these books were dead."
The purbas maintained a chronicle of Chinese atrocities they called the Lotus Book, which they had shared with Shan more than once. It listed details of lost gompas, lost lamas, lost treasures, and of those Chinese who had been known to commit the acts which had annihilated so much of traditional Tibet. Tibetan peche were listed too, sometimes, for the texts were always hand printed, and therefore never in wide circulation. Some texts were unique to the gompas which had produced them, and such texts and the wood blocks they were printed from were often among such gompas' most revered treasures. When the People's Liberation Army and the Red Guard had destroyed Tibet's gompas they had destroyed the peche within, destroying not only the texts but those who knew the contents of the texts. The Lotus Book recorded that huge bonfires had been made consisting only of the wooden printing blocks of ancient texts, and how the peche themselves had often been transported for use in the soldiers' latrines. Those peche known to be lost were listed in the Lotus Book as dead, with a summary like an obituary, often the last mention of the last work of a scholar who may have lived centuries before.