He retreated, pacing uneasily around the ruins again, wary of the precipitous drop at the edge of the cliff, then retrieved his backpack, settled onto a flat boulder, and began scanning the mountain with binoculars he had borrowed from Tsipon’s depot. The shrine was on the long ridge that cradled Tumkot, curling out from the south, allowing him to look out over the sheer drop in front of him to the adjacent slopes, though still not high enough for him to be able to see the ice field that lay atop the imposing escarpment of the main mountain.
A family of goats walked single file up the far rock face, past a patch of blooming heather. A large bird of prey landed on a spine of rock over a grassy ledge. Far below, at the foot of the mountain, shepherds with dogs pressed a herd of sheep into the little hidden valley where he and Ama Apte had mourned with the dead mule. He looked back up at the top of the ridge and began systematically sweeping downward with his eyes, nursing his growing conviction that there must be a hidden trail over the top that the mule had descended, either with or closely followed by the murderer. He saw the patch of grass above where the mule had fallen, on a shelf less than a third of the way up the steep rock wall. No matter how sweet the grass, surely the affectionate old creature had not gone up from the valley after the long strenuous day, passing the village, passing the woman who so tenderly cared for him.
He watched a coasting raven, then the family of goats for a moment, comforted that the pace of natural life in the mountains continued despite the chaos below. Then he froze. The patch of heather the goats had passed was gone. He urgently searched the slope behind them, trying to follow the thread of shadow that marked their trail along the near vertical wall, then saw there were several threads, multiple trails, some leading up, some stretching along the flank of the escarpment, coursing around the ridge toward the Yama shrine.
When at last he found the speck of color it seemed to be impossibly distant from where he had first seen it. But then he realized the patch of color was running. For a frantic instant he thought that he might be watching a yeti, that the creature had seen him, was coming to attack him. Then the figure stopped and stepped onto a formation that jutted out from the wall and spread his arms. He stood there, motionless in the updraft, his red robe fluttering around him like some hovering bird, then he spun about and bounded cat-like to the next jutting rock, where he repeated the performance. The man wasn’t running to Shan, he was running for joy.
Shan glanced back at the shrine, knowing he risked missing the thief if he left, then trained his glasses on the trails in front of the monk, calculating that the man was making a circuit on the ridge, out to the end of the trails then back to the massif. Shan selected a prominent ledge half a mile away where the trails converged, then he too began to run.
When the man in the red robe reached him Shan was sitting at the outer edge of the shelf of rock that marked the intersection of the two main goat paths, his legs folded under him in the meditation position, gazing out over the valley below. He did not turn, did not move except to fold his hands into a ritual gesture, the earth-touching mudra, as he began a quiet mantra. The man approached, so close Shan feared he might try to shove him off the cliff, then stepped to his other side, touching him tentatively with the toe of a tattered high top boot before retreating to pace back and forth behind Shan.
As his movements slowed, Shan turned and extracted two objects, offering them on his palm to the man. The leathery, weatherbeaten face that looked back at him had deep, moist eyes that softened as they saw Shan’s offerings: a small cone of incense and a box of matches. Wordlessly the man lifted them from Shan’s palm, lit the incense, and set it on a little black patch of soot Shan had noticed when he sat down. Incense had been used there before.
As the Tibetan sat on the opposite side of the fragrant cone, he too extracted something, not the prayer beads Shan half expected, but a chillum, one of the deeply curved wooden smoking pipes traditional in the mountain tribes. He lit the pipe, returning the matches to Shan with a nod of thanks.
After several puffs on the pipe, the man opened and shut his mouth, then made a low rumbling sound in his throat. It was the way of many hermits Shan had encountered in Tibet. They often had to remember how to speak with other humans.
“You made a mudra,” the hermit finally said in a raspy voice. It was not an accusation but an expression of curiosity. “You spoke the mani mantra.” He puffed again on his pipe. “Do you think you are heard?”
Shan looked back over the mountains. “The way I reach the Buddha,” he said, “is the way the Buddha reaches me.” The words had been part of his first lesson with his old lama friend Gendun.
The hermit nodded, as if Shan had passed his first test, and Shan turned and dared to examine the man tarchok as he cupped his hands around his chillum and puffed repeatedly to encourage the embers to burn in the thin air. He was a compact, sturdy man, perhaps ten years older than Shan, his robe patched in several places, his ankles naked under his heavy boots, his topknot tightly braided and doubled over, fastened with red thread.
“When I visit the shrines near Chomolungma, people who are not Tibetans come sometimes,” the hermit observed. “But they always have better clothes than you,” he added whimsically.
Shan could not resist a grin.
“They ask me many questions.” Now that the hermit had found his voice it was slow and melodious. “Though in the end they are all asking the same thing. They want to know how to find peace.” He worked on his chillum again, letting the smoke drift out of his mouth. “I tell them the only peace you find up on a mountain is the peace you bring with you.”
For a moment Shan wanted to forget everything, to bask in the wisdom of the old hermit, who was so much like his friends in Lhadrung. But then the hermit spoke again.
“On this mountain, though, there is no room for strangers. Strangers just die. When the incense burns down you must leave.”
Shan’s throat went dry. The man was no longer speaking like a hermit, but like a sentinel, a protector demon. “My name is Shan,” he said. “I seek a ghost, and one who makes ghosts.”
“I am called Dakpo. I speak for the mountain. When she wakes she will shake you off like a flea.”
“I am no intruder,” Shan ventured. “I am the corpse carrier, named by the astrologer of Tumkot.”
It sounded like a line from a fairy tale, but the words gave the hermit pause. He puffed on his pipe, studying Shan intently. “I saw you on the road burying your first corpse under rocks.”
Shan looked up in surprise. On his first visit to the base camp he had stopped to remove the corpse of a dog from the road. He had given it a quick burial under a mound of stones, whispering a prayer to send the dog on its way.
“I said to myself, there is a man who appreciates death.”
Shan hesitated, biting down the questions that leaped to his tongue. Dakpo had not been on the road itself, and the slope on the far side of Tumkot mountain was said to be impassable. He replayed the words in his mind. Had the hermit just told Shan why he had been selected as corpse carrier?
Shan pointed to the valley below. “There, against the wall, you can still see the soot of the pyre. When we burned her uncle, only Ama Apte and I were there but I sensed someone else close by. He was a friend of yours too. If I had not lost the corpse our mule friend would still be alive. It is a heavy debt I owe, Dakpo. To the corpse, to your old friend, to the mountain. I must be allowed to pay it.”
The hermit’s brow furrowed. He cast a mournful gaze toward the barely discernible smudge on the distant cliff face and puffed again on his chillum. “His name was Kundu. I knew him all my life,” he said at last. “It is a rare honor, when a friend comes back the way he did.”