Dalton Hardware cap and a whole floodplain of dry wrinkles broke out across his
broad forehead. Their archaeology had come to life.
Then the wind shifted, and there was that smell of cedar again.
This time the white smoke engulfed them, turning the ruins into a cupful of flags and
wood fog.
Then Abe smelled something else, too. An unpleasant, saccharine odor. It took him a
minute to place the smell. And then it came to him. Something had died.
Voices drifted in with the smoke. They came muffled, from a distant part of the
ruins.
'This way,' Li said with waning confidence. 'But we must stay together. We must
take care. There are dangers. There are bad stories.'
Abe wended his way through the smoke. The summit structure was not very large,
but they had to pick their way through so many clusters of prayer flags and mani
stones that it seemed enormous and mazelike. Abe passed another horned animal
skull embellished with paint and carved lettering, then another. The voices grew
louder.
At the rear of the old structure, a collapsed doorway opened out onto a wide flat
ledge on the outside. On every side of the ledge, the mountain dropped away, a
thousand feet deep. Far in the distance, Everest was blowing her afternoon plume.
Abe stepped through the doorway. Then he stopped, frozen, for they had emerged
into the middle of a funeral. At first Abe wasn't even sure of that. He had no idea at all
what they were doing.
Three Tibetan men had stripped naked a dead woman.
One of the men was holding a knife.
The woman's clothing lay in a heap.
The scene struck directly at Abe's mind, unbuffered by language or thought. A big
hand grasped his shoulder from behind, someone trying to come through the
doorway, and Abe heard the person gasp sharply.
A cedar fire was smoking away on one end of the ledge. Back against the dzong wall,
to Abe's left, sat what he took to be the woman's family, maybe eight people of
different ages. For a moment, deceived by the thick white smoke, Abe thought he saw
his monk seated on skins, droning his monotone into the empty blue. The smoke
shifted. His monk disappeared.
For a moment, some of the family members didn't see the climbers and kept on
muttering prayers. Then all was silence. They froze, as if ambushed.
The climbers stood paralyzed, too. The Tibetans considered them for another
minute or so. They were not welcome, that was clear. But Abe and the others were
too stupefied to be moved by the hostile glares.
'What's the traffic jam,' Thomas groused, squeezing through the doorway. Then he
saw the body and went still, too.
'Trespass.' Carlos said it firmly. 'This is trespass. We don't belong here.'
But before they could retreat, Li squeezed through the bunched climbers.
'Trespass?' he scoffed, and the fear was gone from his voice. He seemed oddly
triumphant, pleased by the climber's shock at this raw, strange sight.
'We are within the law,' Li said with growing confidence. 'We are not trespassing.
You can take photographs. Yes, it is within the law.'
The Tibetans didn't speak to one another. Each of them scrutinized the climbers and
especially their Chinese guide. Then as suddenly as they had stopped, the Tibetans
started again. They began droning mantras without syncopation, almost without
breath. The cedar smoke changed direction and fell into the valley.
'Come.' With great firmness, almost as if he were disciplining them, Li ushered the
climbers to one side. 'Please, sit,' he said, indicating the ground by the wall.
Abe was dumbly obedient.
'What is this?' Kelly asked, hunkering by the wall.
Stump spoke in a whisper. 'I don't know.'
Abe felt their fear and helplessness, too. That bare knife, the corpse, the wind and
prayers: He wondered what they meant to do.
'I've heard of this,' Carlos said, keeping his voice low. 'Daniel told me about it. He has
pictures. They call it sky burial.'
Robby squirmed, horrified. 'They push her off the edge, or what, man? What is this?
What am I doing here?'
Before Carlos could answer, before Robby could leave, the man with the knife bent
down and made a long cut. From just right of her lightly haired pubis down to the
inside of the knee joint, the butcher drew his blade fast and hard.
Kelly groaned aloud.
Abe squinted in the cedar smoke. He tried not to flinch, though, telling himself this
was the stuff of gross anatomy, nothing more. And they were travelers and this was
culture. He took out his camera. Somehow, looking through the viewfinder made it
easier to watch.
Quickly now, because they had begun, the corpse was tilted up on one hip. From the
pelvic saddle down, the butcher sliced again and the quadriceps flopped loose onto the
cold stone.
The knives were sharp and these men had obviously done this with human beings
many times before. It took just minutes before the woman's leg bones were bare
white sticks. Losing his revulsion, Abe marveled at how quickly a body could be
undressed of its flesh.
'They throw their poor and their dead children into the rivers,' said Li. He spoke
aloud with a tour guide's voice. 'Their monks are cremated or else buried in big hollow
tree trunks. But for many, many centuries, this is how the common Tibetans have
been. Cutting up their loved ones like chickens. Feeding each other to the animals.'
Gigantic blue-and-white vultures that had been wheeling in the abyss came closer
now and roosted, first one, then others, landing with ungainly hops.
Like a pack of grotesque schoolchildren, the birds gathered into a semicircle at one
corner of the ledge. While they waited with eerie pique, they nipped and nudged each
other and flexed their six-foot wings.
The birds began to unsettle Abe in a way that the butchers had not. The vultures
looked like a parody of their little band lined against the dzong wall.
Yet even as Abe and the other climbers sorted through their guilt feelings, they kept
on snapping photos. Robby was firing away with a little black Samurai. Its
motor-driven telephoto lens pumped in and out with electronic frenzy. Abe's own
camera was bulky and old, which kept his picture taking slow. It made him seem
studied, even reluctant.
'Go closer,' Li encouraged him. But Abe didn't.
One man finished stripping the woman's arm bones clean. The other two began
working on the flesh already cut away. They sliced it into pieces and threw it to the
vultures. As the birds shoved about for bits of meat, their big dry feathers rattled.
Li was grimly jubilant.
'Now you see,' he said, 'we have come to the edge of the world. And they are
barbarians.'
8
It was nearly June and summer was loosening the countryside. The moraine thawed a
little more every morning, and their separate islands of tundra grass turned spongy.
Abe found mud on his shoes. It was a sign. The earth itself was compromising. The
separate elements – the mountain, the wind, the cold, the ice, the sunlight – were
reaching a sort of peace, mixing together, melding. It was a season for changes and for
the Ultimate Summit the changes came swiftly.
First, Gus brought the word down to Base, catching them at noon in the olive-green