Текст книги "Bone Mountain"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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"What lama?" Shan asked in alarm, leaning over her. Surely she did not mean Gendun, or Shopo, both of whom had been in the hermitage the night before.

The dropka shook her head. "I don't know. Those old people didn't make sense, they were so scared. They were shy of speaking about him. A ghost lama, they called him. Sometimes ghosts are real, they said. They were very upset. The lama disappeared before dawn. The old man said the knobs must have taken him. But the woman insisted otherwise. She said ghosts always fade away when the sun rises."

The wind blew harder, screeching around the outcropping. The woman stared at her palm, where a drop of blood had fallen. Shan looked up in surprise, searching for its source, then she lifted a trembling hand and touched his cheek, her fingers coming away bloody.

"You're injured," she said softly.

"It's only hail," Shan said.

The woman's eyes cleared, and she pulled away the rag Lokesh was using to clean her own face to clean Shan's. "I didn't understand," she continued. "But you said you needed to know. I had to find you, because of the danger it may mean for the eye." She paused and clenched Shan's arm again. "It was knobs who wounded Drakte, it must have been. Our Drakte, he would have fought knobs to protect a lama." She twisted to see her horse. "And that," she said, pointing to the crude wooden saddle. "I wanted you to have it. We couldn't keep it because those knobs are coming and maybe some night that thing…" She swallowed hard and looked away, as though unable to speak of the dobdob.

Shan stood and lifted a pouch from the saddle, the pouch Drakte had carried to the hermitage the night before, the pouch with the sling and ledger book.

Suddenly the storm was over. The air cleared, and sunlight burst across the barren landscape. But the woman's words hung over them like a portent of another, far worse storm.

Nyma looked to Dremu, as if expecting him to lead them on. But the Golok was gazing with hooded eyes, shifting from the dropka woman to her horse to Tenzin. When he felt the nun's stare he forced a thin smile, then ventured around the corner of the rock with the field glasses. "Soldiers kneeling on the hood of the truck," he reported a moment later. "Maybe the windshield was shattered. They'll probably give up for the day."

"Go," the dropka woman pleaded. Threads of blood still streaked her cheek. "I will watch Shopo and the Pure Water Lama."

Tenzin dumped a small mound of yak dung beside her and ignited it. As she gestured for them to hurry, they reluctantly climbed onto their horses.

Shan paused as the others rode away. "Tell those riders behind us to go back," he said. "Tell them to help protect the lamas."

When Shan emerged around the outcropping the truck was moving back in the direction it had come, toward the south. "Was it the 54th Mountain Brigade?" he wondered out loud.

Dremu grunted but offered no answer. Nyma stared at the ground, her lower lip between her teeth. The Golok circled his horse about them, looking not toward the lake but behind them, before setting off down the western slope. Shan settled his horse into a slow walk at the back of the column, keeping Lokesh before him. The army was in front of them but there was no turning back, for behind were the knobs and the furious dobdob.

In another hour they crested the last of the low hills that surrounded the lake and gained an unobstructed view of the vast turquoise waters. The twenty-five-mile-long lake seemed alive as the waters shivered in the wind and sun. Nyma pointed out several low dark shapes scattered along the distant shoreline, mere dots on the horizon, the heavy felt yurts of the dropka clans who had brought their sheep to the rich spring pastures.

They rode through meadows dense with spring growth, splashing through countless rivulets of runoff from the mountains, until they reached the lake and dismounted near a huge raft of black and white geese that floated offshore, their white crowns gleaming in the sun. Bar-headed geese the Tibetans called them. The wind ebbed and their chattering filled the air.

Suddenly Lokesh leapt past him, arms extended, and ran into the cold waters of the lake, laughing like a child, pushing through the water until it reached his knees. "Aw! Aw! Aw!" he cried toward the birds, then turned toward Shan with a huge grin. "It's a sound my mother used to make to geese. It's good luck, she always said, to see so many geese resting on water. It means the spirits of the air are in harmony with the spirits of the water."

His mother. Lokesh almost never spoke of his mother, who occupied a special, sacred place in his heart, much as Shan's father did in his. Lokesh's mother had died in 1940, the year that the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama had arrived in Lhasa, a year of great celebration and affirmation of the old ways. She had led a perfect life, Lokesh once said, and died at the perfect time, for afterwards came the decades of darkness and destruction.

The old Tibetan bent and splashed water on his face, then gestured for Shan to join him. Shan hesitated only a moment, then stepped into the lake beside his friend. "Aw! Aw! Aw!" Shan cried toward the geese, hands upraised.

Lokesh laughed heartily. "Lha gyal lo!" he called out joyfully toward the birds.

Shan washed his face in the frigid water, then cupped some in his hand to drink.

"No," Lokesh warned, touching Shan's arm. "Too salty. Drink from the streams."

Shan tasted a drop on his finger and confirmed Lokesh's words, then surveyed the landscape again. Lamtso was one of the great basin lakes that were spread across the eastern changtang, lakes that had no outlets and therefore concentrated the salts and other minerals that washed off the surrounding mountains.

The Golok found a boulder and sat, drinking his chang as Nyma and Tenzin collected rocks for a small cairn to honor the nagas before moving on. "Auspicious start," Nyma observed repeatedly as she worked, then paused to watch Tenzin. The mute Tibetan, whom she had stayed beside since the hailstorm, put a frantic energy into building the cairn. Her face clouded with concern, Nyma stepped to her horse pack, reached in, and extracted a mala, her spare rosary, which she extended toward Tenzin.

Tenzin looked at the beads but his eyes seemed unable to focus on them. His jaw worked up and down as if something inside was trying to speak, perhaps trying to remember the mouthing of a mantra. Ever since Drakte's death he had been more distant than ever, more withdrawn into his strange personal anguish. Shan knew survivors of the gulag often lived this way. An event would trigger a door inside and some nightmare from his imprisonment would be relived. Nyma pressed the beads into his hands and led Tenzin to his horse as Dremu trotted away.

They had followed the lakeside trail for only twenty minutes when Dremu halted at the top of a hill and dismounted, staring down the far side with a worried expression.

Shan dismounted and followed the Golok's gaze toward a white vehicle, a heavy compact minibus of the type sometimes used to convey passengers between Tibet's cities. It had apparently arrived from the southeast by means of a narrow dirt road, and had just turned onto the rough track that paralleled the shores of the lake. Two men sat on a large flat rock in front of the vehicle, one in the maroon robe of a monk, the other dressed like a businessman in a white shirt and tie, while three men in monks' robes struggled to free the left rear wheel, which was mired in mud.

"Better to go around," Dremu warned.

But Shan was already striding down the hill as the Golok spoke.

The men on the rock watched Shan with disinterested expressions as he approached. With his broad-rimmed hat and tattered coat, he looked like just another dropka. The man in the tie was a middle-aged Han, bald on the top of his head, his remaining hair thin and long on the sides, combed back. The small black eyes that looked out of his wide, fleshy face seemed as brightly polished as his shoes. A cigarette dangled from the man's lips. The Tibetan he sat with had thick, neatly trimmed hair, and wore a robe unlike any Shan had ever seen, for it was fringed with gold and appeared, implausibly, to have a monogram embroidered over its left breast. Between them on the rock was a bottle of orange drink and what seemed to be a plastic bag of sunflower seeds.

The Han exhaled a long plume of smoke toward Shan as he approached the rock, as though to warn him away. Shan offered a hesitant nod and stepped around the two men, slowing to read the six-inch-high Tibetan and Chinese characters painted on the side of the bus. New Beliefs for the New Century, they said, and below them in smaller letters an adaptation of a familiar slogan: Build Prosperity by Breaking the Chains of Feudalism.

He looked back toward his companions. Lokesh and Nyma followed, but Dremu and Tenzin had retreated, so that only their heads were visible above the crest of the hill. Nyma approached the rock with the two men, then froze and cast a nervous glance up the hill as if thinking of fleeing. Shan saw a small legend stenciled on the driver's door: Bureau of Religious Affairs.

"Howlers!" Nyma whispered in alarm as she reached him. It was what many of the purbas called the members of the Bureau, for the strident way they often addressed Tibetans. At first the howlers had screamed at tamzing, the criticism sessions that had long been the Party's favorite tool for political correction. Now, with tamzing losing favor in Party circles, they continued to be howlers, just in subtler ways, fervently preaching to Tibetans about the socialist sins of traditional Buddhism.

Shan's throat went bone dry as he glanced back at the Han in the tie. These were the men who granted, and revoked, the licenses of nuns and monks; the ones who anointed gompas based on the political correctness of their inhabitants; the ones who opened or shut monasteries with the stroke of a pen and granted the right to practice spirituality as though they were courtiers granting political favors.

Nyma pressed her hat low over her head and stepped close to Shan. The chuba she wore hid her makeshift robe.

The three monks were struggling to free the wheel, a small trowel and a long jack handle their only tools. Two of the men, spattered with mud, knelt by the wheel as the third, a stocky monk with the thick arms and broad hands of a laborer, carried stones from the hillside to the mired wheel.

"A flock of sheep was on the road," the broad-shouldered monk explained as he dropped the stones by the bus. The other two monks, both younger than the first, cast sharp glances at the man as though warning him not to speak. "They couldn't wait, so they drove around them, off the road. I don't know which made them angrier, getting stuck or the way all of those sheep stopped and stared at them after we went into the mud." Nyma gave a small sound of amusement and nervously looked back at the men on the rock.

"Digging around the wheel just moves the mud around," Lokesh suggested to the mud-spattered monks. "You need to make the wheel grip something," he said, pointing approvingly to the stack of rocks collected by the third monk, then followed the stocky man toward the hill to collect more.

They were a mobile education unit, the monk explained as Shan joined them on the hillside, bringing news of government programs to the local population. "Counting the barley fields," the monk added.

Shan stared out over the landscape. It was a land of herders. He doubted there was a barley field within fifty miles. "But you're from a gompa," he observed.

"Khang-nyi." It meant Second House. "The only gompa for a hundred miles." He paused and looked at the men on the flat rock. The wind had died, and a cloud of cigarette smoke hung about them. A puzzled expression crossed the monk's face, as though the two men on the rock confused him. He bent to retrieve another stone.

"What kind of government programs?" Shan asked.

The monk looked at Shan uncertainly. "Build Prosperity by Breaking the Chains of Feudalism," he recited in the formal tone of a mantra, as though to correct any wrong impression he may have made, and carried away his stones.

Ten minutes later, the vehicle freed, the men on the rock stretched lazily and stepped toward the front doors of the minibus. As Nyma and Lokesh hurried back up the hill, the one wearing the elegant robe reached inside the bus and pulled out several pamphlets, handing one to Shan.

"Have you come to understand, comrade?" the man asked abruptly. His eyes burned brightly above a hooked nose that gave him a hawk-like appearance. His companion stepped closer and pointed sternly to the words on the cover of the pamphlet: Serene Prosperity.

Shan stared at the men uncertainly. For some reason he remembered being stopped years earlier on a Beijing street by an earnest young woman in a brilliant white blouse, who handed him a pamphlet and asked, "Do you believe?" This team from Religious Affairs were also missionaries of a sort, for the godless agency that regulated the deities of Tibet.

Serene Prosperity. He stared at the words. They had the sound of a cruel joke played on the Tibetans. Suddenly Shan realized the man in the white shirt, the howler, was staring at him. "This is a land for herders," the man observed. "The ones they call dropka." He seemed to have suddenly recognized Shan as a fellow Han. His small black eyes moved restlessly back and forth, scanning the hill behind, though his head did not turn.

Shan sensed the muscles of his legs tensing, as if something in him expected the howler to coil and strike.

"You have companions who are hiding from us," the elegant monk observed in a casual tone. "So shy, like pups, running when a vehicle comes." His voice was smooth and refined, an orator's voice. "These people need to understand," he added, as if enlisting Shan's aid, "they need our help." Then he handed Shan the pamphlets remaining in his hand. "I am their abbot. Khodrak Rinpoche."

Shan found himself staring at the man. He had never heard a monk introduce himself as a revered teacher.

"They need our protection," Khodrak said. "Are you a school instructor?" The government sometimes sent Han instructors among the nomads, riding circuits through the vast pasture lands. "They don't understand what is at stake," he continued, not waiting for an answer. "The Bureau of Religious Affairs is the key to their prosperity. Misinterpretation of events is dangerous."

Shan didn't understand a word the men were saying. The Han in the white shirt acted anxious, on the edge of anger; the abbot as if engaged in some form of political dialectic with Shan. They both assumed they could confide in Shan. In their world Han did not travel with Tibetans on the remote changtang voluntarily, so he must be on government duty.

"News comes slow this far away from the highway," Shan ventured.

The two men exchanged a puzzled, uncertain glance. "Director Tuan suffered a terrible loss," Khodrak said, indicating his companion with a nod. "His deputy, a man named Chao, was murdered in Amdo town. We all must work to prevent the wrong kind of reaction."

"A Deputy Director in Religious Affairs was murdered?" Shan asked the question slowly, fighting the chill that crept over his limbs. The purba at the river had said an official was killed but had not known it was a howler. It was the worst possible news, the kind of news that brought martial law to a district, for Religious Affairs was a favored child of Beijing, its most important political vehicle in Tibet.

Khodrak nodded gravely. "Killed in a stable near his office. Deputy Director Chao is a martyr to our noble cause. You must be watchful. Important things will be happening."

A senior howler had been killed and the reaction of his superior and the abbot was to distribute propaganda among the herders. Shan tried to make his bone-dry tongue move. He raised the pamphlets Khodrak had given him. "I will do what I can," he said, and backed away.

The stocky monk lingered a moment at the rear of the vehicle, wiping mud from his hand with a tuft of grass as the others climbed inside. Shan offered him the rag he carried in his back pocket as a handkerchief. The man declined with a grateful nod, then leaned toward Shan. "Be careful with their words," he said in a low, confiding tone. "The abbot is really looking for a man with a fish."

Shan studied the monk in confusion. "You mean the killer? From the lake? A fisherman?" It made no sense. The Tibetans of the region almost never ate fish, would never take fish from a holy lake.

"Warn the dropka, warn my people," the monk said urgently, then quickly joined the others. He had not even fully shut his door when Director Tuan gunned the engine and the minibus roared away.

Shan stared at the minibus as it disappeared down the track that ran along the shoreline. Had the monk been suggesting that a man with a fish was connected to the killing? But Religious Affairs did not conduct murder investigations, Public Security did. And the knobs were chasing an old lama. Did they think the lama was the murderer?

He handed one of the pamphlets to Lokesh as they reached the top of the hill. Inside was a photograph of the Chairman of the Communist Party, crudely interposed over the image of the Potola in Lhasa, above several paragraphs of small print. Dremu reached out and grabbed the brochure from the old Tibetan, inserting it in his pocket without opening it. "Firestarters. The howlers always have good paper for burning."

Shan quietly scanned his own brochure before folding it into his pocket. It was a polemic about the economic disadvantages of devoting resources to religious reconstructions, complete with tiny graphs. He glanced back at the words at the top of the paper: Serene Prosperity. Below them was the full official title of the campaign: Religious Serenity Must Be Built on Economic Serenity. A perennial gripe of political officers was that Tibetans undermined the economy by giving a disproportionate share of their meager incomes to the reconstruction of gompas. Where contributions were limited to no more than two percent of income, one chart purported to demonstrate, prosperity soon followed.

Shan stared back in the direction the minibus had taken. Have you come to understand, the strange monk with the gold fringed robe had asked him. Shan understood nothing. The stocky monk seemed to be warning Shan, suggesting that Tuan and Khodrak were engaged in a subterfuge, that they were actually looking for a man with a fish. In all his years in Tibet Shan had never even seen a fish.

By mid-afternoon the five riders crested a small knoll to see a long rolling plain that gleamed white from salt encrusted on its surface, at the center of which lay a busy camp containing four white tents and three black ones. Dremu told them to wait as he rode toward the camp. They watched as a man in a derby emerged from one of the white tents, shouted at the Golok, then picked up stones and threw them at him. Dremu wheeled his horse and trotted back.

"This is the place," he declared with a satisfied tone, and gestured for Shan to lead the way toward the yurts.

It was a salt camp, Lokesh explained excitedly, as they dismounted amid several small children who darted among the horses, rubbing their noses and helping Tenzin loosen the saddles. Shan untied his saddle bag and relinquished his mount to a beaming girl whose cheeks were smeared with red doja cream, one of the dropka's defenses against high altitude sunlight. As he took a tentative step into the camp a sweet pungent scent wafted by, the smell of yak butter being churned.

Several men and women worked at the shoreline, using short wooden pestles to break the rough crust of salt into coarse pieces, then pushing the salt into piles with crude rakes. Others were packing the salt into small colorful woven pouches which were fastened together in pairs with stout cords. Like saddlebags, Shan thought as he noticed a woman sewing the bags shut, though too small for horses.

The man in the derby who had yelled at Dremu stood at the flap of a white tent near the center of the camp, a brown and white mastiff at his side, motioning them toward the fire that lay smoldering in a ring of stones by his feet. Shan and Lokesh passed a stern grey-haired man in a tattered chuba sitting at the entrance to one of the tents, a heavy staff across his legs. A dropka woman wearing a bright rainbow-pattern apron sat by a solitary yak, tethered to a stake, working a long wooden cylinder with a handle protruding from its open top, a dongma, one of the churns used to mix the tea, butter, and salt for the traditional Tibetan beverage. Her hair was arrayed in dozens of braids, each ending with a bead, a style that had been worn for centuries by devout women, always using one hundred eight braids, one for every bead of the Buddhist rosary. She acknowledged them with a casual, disinterested nod. Shan surveyed the little village and realized it was actually a series of camps, separate fires and separate tents brought together by the salt.

The man at the white tent eagerly searched the line of new arrivals as they walked toward his fire, his brown eyes gleaming with anticipation as he lifted his hat, revealing a head of shaggy black hair streaked with grey. A birthmark in the shape of an inverted, slanted U was conspicuous on his neck above a necklace of small turquoise stones that supported a large silver gau. Suddenly his face lit with a smile. "Nyma!" he exclaimed as the nun dismounted and darted to him. "Blessed Buddha, it is true!" They embraced tightly before Nyma gestured toward Shan. The man straightened, suddenly very sober, and silently inspected Shan.

Shan removed his own hat and returned the man's steady gaze.

"You are the virtuous Chinese," the man observed skeptically. He abruptly raised his hand and gripped Shan's chin in his calloused thumb and forefinger, turning his head from left to right as though measuring Shan for something.

"Just a Chinese who was asked to help," Shan replied impassively. He was accustomed to being greeted with taunts by unfamiliar Tibetans.

The man frowned in apparent disappointment. "I was expecting someone taller."

Shan found a grin tugging at his face.

"His back used to be straighter," Lokesh offered in the same dry tone used by the stranger, "before they forced him to build lao gai roads."

The man acknowledged Lokesh with a solemn nod, then called out, cupping his hands toward one of the salt teams, to announce their arrival. "I am called Lhandro," he said, smiling now, and gestured toward the small knot of men approaching the white tent. "We from the Yapchi Valley offer you welcome."

"Yapchi?" Shan asked in surprise, and found himself glancing toward the saddlebag that contained the chenyi stone. "But it's more than a hundred miles to the north."

Lhandro just kept smiling, letting Nyma introduce her companions as another man emerged from the tent, holding a dongma of fresh tea. Shan studied the tents as the Tibetans exchanged greetings. They were all of the traditional yurt style, but only the heavy black felt ones were for dropka, those who lived year-round on the plains. The white tents were of canvas, of the kind used by those who lived in settlements but occasionally camped in the mountains or high plains. Lhandro and his companions were not herders. They must be rongpa, Shan realized, farmers who tended crops in the Yapchi Valley.

As bowls of frothy tea were distributed Lhandro pointed toward the white, crusted plain. "Our people have been coming here for centuries. The government gave us little boxes of Chinese salt, with pictures of pandas on them, and said we were slaves to feudalism for coming here." He shrugged. "But Chinese salt makes you weak. We said we like the taste of Lamtso salt." He squatted with Nyma and began speaking in low, confiding tones. Lhandro was not giving her good news, Shan saw. Nyma stared at the farmer in dismay, uttered something that had the cadence of a prayer, and hung her head in her hands. The nun seemed to remember something and it was her turn to speak in a grim tone to Lhandro. The rongpa's face sagged and he glanced back in alarm at Shan. She had, he knew, explained about Drakte's death, and the purba's strange warning before he died. At last, as Nyma began speaking with the others from her village, Lhandro stepped back to the fire, his face clouded with worry. The nun spoke loud enough now for Shan to hear snippets of her conversation. She was speaking of their encounter with the white bus. One of the men hurried away, apparently spreading a warning among the other tents. Howlers might come. Several of the salt breakers stopped and darted into their tents. The dropka sometimes kept things on their altars the howlers did not approve of. A woman ran to the man who sat like a guard with his staff, and he stepped inside his tent momentarily, then reappeared, standing, staff at his side like a sentry.

An adolescent girl wearing her hair in two braids, her eyes nearly as bright as her red doja-smeared cheeks, approached the ring of stones with a small drawstring bag. She had a conspicuous limp, and her left leg seemed to twist below the knee. For a moment she and Nyma exchanged huge smiles, then silently, fiercely embraced. When they finally separated, the girl dropped her bag by the fire and opened its top. Tenzin stepped over and prodded the load with an approving nod. It was dung for the fire, and the mute Tibetan held up a piece with the air of connoisseur, as if to confirm it was yak dung, the best of the fuels typically used on the high plateau. Unlike sheep or goat dung it did not need the constant work of a bellows to keep a flame. Tenzin emptied the girl's bag, silently raised his own leather sack, carried from his saddle like a treasured possession, and walked out toward the pastures. Shan watched the enigmatic man. It was as if collecting dung had become the escapee's calling in life, as if the Tibetan with the aristocratic bearing had decided that his role in society would be to keep other people's fires burning.

Shan saw that the red-cheeked girl with the braids was watching Tenzin, too. She finally turned and cast a shy, sidelong glance toward Shan, then limped toward a man in a ragged fox-fur hat who was digging with a shovel fifty yards from camp. The man was surrounded by several small piles of earth.

"I thought the salt was taken from the surface," Shan said in a perplexed tone. As soon as the girl arrived at his side, the man handed her something and she turned in excitement to run with a crooked, shambling gait to the tent where the old herder stood guard.

Lhandro followed his gaze, then gestured in the opposite direction. Shan turned to see an old woman sitting on a hill above the camp.

"Tonde," Lhandro said, referring to the sacred objects that Tibetans sometimes retrieved from the earth. They could be arrowheads or shards of pottery or carvings in the shape of ritual objects. Once a prisoner in Shan's camp had found a corroded bronze buckle he had proclaimed to have belonged to Guru Rinpoche, the ancient teacher, and built an altar for it out of cardboard.

"Holy men have been coming to this place for a thousand years. That old dropka woman, she found a piece of turquoise carved into a lotus flower which she says has great power. Yesterday she said a Chinese airplane came and she used the tonde to scare it away," he said solemnly, then shrugged. "But she's nearly blind with cataracts."

"Our Anya," Lhandro continued after a moment, nodding toward the limping girl, "Anya saw her waving her fist at the sky and said it was just a goose that had lost its way from the flock. Now the old woman says if the soldiers come close she'll call another hailstorm against them."

Shan and Lokesh exchanged a glance. The army patrol they had seen had been many miles from the camp. The people of the changtang always seemed to have their secret ways of knowing things.

"Don't underestimate the tonde," a voice interjected from behind them. They turned to see the woman in the rainbow-colored apron carrying a leather bucket past their tent. "Some are just pieces of pretty stone, perhaps. But others," she studied Shan a moment then stepped closer. "They say it was a tonde in the hands of a monk that destroyed that Chinese mountain."

"Destroyed a mountain?" Shan asked.

"In the far south, near Bhutan," the woman said with a nod. "One of the army mountains. Their slaves had dug it out, and soldiers had arrived with their machines." The woman meant one of the massive military installations that gulag prisoners were often forced to construct for the People's Liberation Army, carving out vast networks of tunnels inside mountains, mostly along the southern border. Some had become barracks for entire divisions of Chinese troops, some depots for equipment, others sophisticated listening and command posts.

"That mountain, they filled it with computer machines and radios and army commanders. But they didn't know one of the prisoners was an old monk with a tonde that had belonged to that mountain deity. He could talk to that deity and explain what had happened. When that deity finally understood, the mountain fought back," the woman declared with a satisfied air.

Shan gazed at her expectantly, but she spoke no more.

"There was some kind of collapse," Lhandro said, glancing uncomfortably at the woman. "The newspapers said nothing, but people talk about it everywhere. The tunnels fell in, the machines were destroyed. Some soldiers were trapped and killed, and many Tibetan workers. Afterwards the army went on alert, rounded up local citizens for questioning. But experts from Beijing came and said it was just the wrong mountain to use. The Himalayas are unstable, they said, and something inside shifted."