Stone realised early on in the journey that things weren’t going to come up to expectations. He’d seen Ying Ning’s photograph which purported to be the site of the Machine — a barren mountainside, devoid of life, with a high electric fence. But the landscape up to now didn’t look too promising. First of all they passed a town in the foothills which was billed as Shang-ri La in the tourist guides, but was in fact called Shang Li. Shang Li was a fairy tale vision of old China. Enchanting wooden buildings, temples and pagodas, and a nice line in covered bridges over a babbling river to frame the photo opps.
And the scenery got better, if less Disney-fied. When the bus halted at the town of Tieshi Lin, the Ironstone Forest of Semyonov’s scribbled notes, Stone had expected the blasted scrubland from the photograph. But Tieshi Lin was lush and forested. Ying Ning pointed like a botanist to the silver Yunnan pine, and Sichuan pepper plants with fuchsia-pink blooms twenty centimeters across standing out in the profusion of spring flowers.
They travelled the last fifteen kilometres in an ancient bus, painted in faded yellows, reds and blues, with large Buddhist swastikas. It reminded Stone of his time undercover in Pashtun tribal dress, riding the beaten-up trucks from Kandahar up into the thin air of the Pamir Plateau. The Afghan Death Zone, thousands of kilometres away on the other side of the Himalayas
By contrast, the colourful swastikas painted on its side marked this wagon out as the bus from the Buddhist monastery at Shanglan.
Stone stepped out and breathed in cool, fresh air. The monastery stood at the head of a forest valley with the Great Snow mountains rising behind to 7500 metres, way higher than McKinley, or even Aconcagua. A view so clear it made him pity the rest of humanity. A river burbled and sploshed down the hillside a hundred metres away.
At the Shanglan monastery was a Buddhist temple, surprisingly large, its frontage dominated by a red-painted wooden portal, seven metres high. In front stood a courtyard where a trio of teenage monks played and chased, and the open entrance to the temple. Wisps of incense smoke trailed amid a tinkling of bells and some chanting. The three boy-monks stopped dead as they spotted Stone and Carslake, dumbfounded to see Westerners. They stared at first, then chattered, edged forward and finally reached out their fingers to touch the white skin and Stone’s unruly, light brown hair.
Inside the temple was a group of monks at prayer. Three of the older monks looked lost in contemplation, eyes closed, lips moving in quiet incantation. But the younger monks looked out at the foreigners in excitement. They forgot their incantations, and their smiling eyes peered out through the incense smoke and tinkling of brass bells. A lone, aged monk caught Stone’s attention. He was outside the doorway in his robes, crouching on the steps and twirling a scripture reel as if oblivious, his face lined and wizened by the years, muttering his incantations.
Stone scanned the faces inside the temple. One monk looked different. In his mid-twenties, tall and muscular, the same height as Stone. The robes and the shaven head were the same, but there were no smiling eyes, no childish curiosity. His face and head had a muscular self-confidence, and he was staring at Ying Ning aggressively.
For while Stone and Carslake stood respectfully before the mesmerizing spectacle, Ying Ning was hand-on-hip, standing right over the crouching monk on the steps with a scornful pout. Stone saw her quite deliberately pull a cigarette carton from her bag, tap against it, then light up and smoke. Ash fell from her cigarette onto the old monk’s saffron robes. She made loud remarks to no one in particular, pointing at the monks with her cigarette. The boy-monks shrank away, but the old gentleman beneath her sat unmoved, eyes closed, spinning his scripture reel. Finally, getting no reaction, Ying Ning threw down the cigarette butt, and stalked off around the back of the temple.
Hilarious.
‘She has no right to do that, even if she has no respect,’ muttered Carslake.
‘She’s consistent at least,’ said Stone. ‘I didn’t exactly expect her to bake a tray of cookies for them.’
‘Bitch,’ said Carslake.
Someone else thought so, too. The strong, aggressive-looking monk had been staring at Ying Ning all along, and after seeing her little performance with the cigarette ash, he left his place and strode after her round the back of the temple.
Stone made a show of bowing in front of the temple, then walked off in silence.
Behind the temple in the trees were two long, low buildings, not ornate like the temple, but equally old. A couple of hundred years, Stone guessed. In the Manchu dynasty of three hundred years up to 1911, the Tibetans had enjoyed a privileged status in China. Most of their lovely temples were built at that time, many outside of Tibet in China proper. The two buildings were the living quarters for the monks. One comprised a dining hall, kitchens and workshops, and the other had tiny wooden cells for the monks — austere and windowless.
Stone oriented himself, and looked around at the lush hills and the valley. Could it really be the right place? It seemed preposterous that the barren landscape and the old mine workings where the Machine was hidden should be here.
‘Stone!’ The American voice of Carslake. He emerged through the trees with another monk, an intelligent-looking gentleman wearing glasses called Giyenchen. He spoke English, and invited Stone and Carslake to take tea with him. A novice monk materialized with a teapot and some cinnamon cakes for them.
Giyenchen’s face was one that stays in the mind. It had an aura of the saintly. A benign smile, an unknowable contentment. Giyenchen was in his mid-forties, Stone guessed, and his skin was brown and smooth, with small crow’s feet around the eyes from smiling. Neither young nor old. His head was shaven, of course, with signs of grey stubble by the ears, and he wore black-rimmed spectacles. It was a face which carried its own peace, as if the decades of incantations and meditation had been absorbed into the skin. Giyenchen looked kindly, benign, and also wise. His movements were slow and precise, as was his spoken English. Giyenchen gave the impression that words were moving through him from somewhere else, so impassive was his expression.
Stone took the opportunity to steer the talk in a suitable direction. ‘You are very lucky to live in this place. A heaven on earth.’
Giyenchen nodded and smiled.
‘I heard there were mine workings here,’ Stone continued. ‘But I cannot see any sign.’
‘You are most well informed,’ said Giyenchen. He showed some surprise but smiled through it. ‘There were indeed mines in this area, some years ago,’ he said, his words pouring in a smooth rhythm. ‘It was known as an area for rare minerals. For silver, gold and lead also.’ Stone was reminded of the place names on Semyonov’s scribblings: Silvermine Field, Ironstone Forest. ‘However, the mines themselves are long closed, and have not been on any map for forty years. It is good for us. But I ask myself how you knew this.’
‘I haven’t seen a map,’ said Stone. It was true. There were no decent maps, but Ying Ning had pieced together a map of the area from older ones. ‘Where are the mines? Are they covered over by the forest?’
‘Seven kilometres from here, over the hill to the Northwest,’ he said, smoothly once more. ‘But. It is forbidden to go there.’
‘Forbidden?’ said Carslake. ‘How come?’
‘Karma,’ said the monk. He didn’t hesitate, this guy. There was something robotic in his lack of reaction, his smoothness. ‘It is forbidden to the monks. We try hard, Mr Carslake, to keep our good karma. We pray, we recite the mantras, we read the sutras. We live with our minds pure and our bodies cleansed,’ he said, and his eyes closed. ‘I myself have not eaten meat for thirty-four years. Why should we make such efforts to be clean, only to pollute ourselves at the scene of such evil?’
‘Evil?’ asked Carslake, his eyebrows raised. ‘What evil?’
Giyenchen shrugged. ‘Is it evil, or poison or simply death? It does not concern us, and it pollutes us to think of it. If you saw that place, it would be clear to you. This place, this valley, gentlemen, is a sea of beauty and fertility. That is why the monastery is here. It is a place of abundance and joy, far, far from the samsara of the world, far from the cities and their cycle of birth and death and want and suffering. Our task as monks is to live in ignorance of this samsara.’
‘In ignorance of suffering, you mean?’ asked Stone. ‘That’s what samsara means, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Suffering and the bad things of the world. If we stay ignorant of suffering, if we avoid it, we may find enlightenment,’ said the monk, nodding benignly. ‘Nirvana is of this kind.’ There was silence again. Giyenchen sipped some tea and closed his eyes, as if looking at nirvana itself.
Sometimes, Stone wanted to close his own eyes. His life was the opposite of Giyenchen. It was about escaping one conflict by looking for another, escaping his own guilt by finding even greater guilt in others. Everywhere he saw suffering, because everywhere he looked for suffering. It wasn’t nirvana, or enlightenment. But in that second he felt he wanted to copy Giyenchen, and close his eyes on the conflict and suffering. It wouldn’t need a monastery. Just a regular job, a woman, a few friends. Close your eyes and it can happen, the monk seemed to say.
Stone looked at the smooth skin of Giyenchen’s closed eyelids behind the glasses. The closed eyes of the monk burned into him, more than the staring, glittering eyes of any assassin or terrorist. It felt like the monk had looked for a second on Stone’s guilt-scarred, wounded soul, just for an instant. And Stone hated it.
‘And that is why you will not talk of that place?’ asked Stone, glad to shake off the feeling. ‘The place which is forbidden?’
The monk nodded slowly. ‘If I tell you what I know of the place,’ he said. ‘The words pollute me, but they pollute you also. It is the place of samsara.’
‘Try us,’ said Carslake, ‘We’re polluted already. Trust me.’
In Stone’s case, Carslake could have no idea how true that was.
Giyenchen stood, and pottered about the room in silence, lighting more incense and candles as the darkness gathered outside. In the end he began to speak through the wisps of smoke, the glow of the candles on his smooth brow.
‘I can say these things,’ he said. ‘But I must beg you not to interrupt.’