Bone Mountain Read Free Page B

day a warm wind came, and the ice began to melt. On the third I watched as a hole opened, just big enough for my hand to fit through.”
    Shan gazed about the circle at the three men who sat with them. Lokesh offered his lopsided grin, made crooked years earlier when the boot of a knob had broken his jaw. He looked from Lokesh into the smiling countenance of Gendun, who solemnly nodded at Nyma, then at Shan, as if to confirm that yes, this would be the night, yes, despite the torment raging elsewhere in Tibet, in their little remote outpost all was right with the universe.
    Beside them, in a tattered maroon robe, sat Shopo, who had tended the illegal hermitage since being driven from his monastery twenty years earlier. “It has all become the right thing,” he observed serenely. Nyma’s contribution was the perfect offering for completing their work, made all the more powerful by the reverence she had shown the mountain. She had not taken the vermilion sand, but had waited for the ice to melt, had waited for the mountain to offer it to her.
    Shopo lifted the pouch and reverently poured its contents into a clay pot. As he raised the pot toward the sky, a tall man with a narrow, downcast face appeared around the corner of the nearest building, carrying a large leather sack over his shoulder. It was Tenzin, who had been at the hermitage when Shan and Lokesh had arrived, carrying his day’s collection of the yak dung they used for fuel. Tenzin stared woodenly at the clay pot, placing one hand over his gau, the silver prayer amulet that hung from his neck, then nodded and continued toward the hut where he stored the fuel.
    “Lha gyal lo!” Shopo called toward the heavens in a joyful voice. “Victory to the gods!” He rose from the blanket, both hands cradling the pot, and carried it into the compact stone structure that housed half a dozen meditation cells and the hermitage’s lhakang, Shan and his companions close behind. Silently acknowledging the Buddha on the altar at the rear wall, Shopo set the pot on a cedar plank that held ten similar pots and several long, narrow bronze funnels, then turned toward the multicolored, seven-foot circle that covered the center of the stone floor, a reverent awe filling his face.
    It was called the Vajrabhairava, the Diamond Terrifier, one of the rarest forms of the intricate mandala sand paintings that had been part of Tibetan ritual for centuries. It had frightened Shan at first, when he heard Gendun explain that the deity they were invoking was one of the fiercest of all the Tibetan deities, and he watched now as the dropka woman halted and grimaced at the old thangka of the Diamond Terrifier, which Lokesh had hung in the lhakang. Some may have thought it meant Shan and his friends were on a path of demons and destruction but Shan had learned how such severe images were used by the lamas as symbols of higher truths, and he knew now not to see violence in the image, but hope. The Diamond Terrifier was the form wisdom assumed to challenge the Lord of Death when it sought to take humans before they achieved enlightenment.
    At first Shan and Nyma had listened for hours every day as Gendun orally painted the complex mandala, describing it inch by inch from memory. Finally, a month earlier, Shopo and Gendun had laid out intricate chalk lines on the stone floor, outlining the foundations of the wheel. It had been thirty years since Gendun had helped create this particular mandala, taught to him by a lama who had been ninety years old at the time, but he recalled its many symbols perfectly. The mandala held dozens of symbols, each made by pouring a few grains of sand at a time with the chakpa, thin five-inch-long funnels. Indeed, every image, even every color, was a symbol, and each symbol had a teaching associated with it. Shan gazed upon the grounds of the symbolic palace at the center, divided into intricate quadrants. The white east held the wheel of dharma, the yellow south wish-giving