We Are Not Eaten by Yaks (17 page)

“Has the protector abandoned us?” frightened monks would ask the abbot in the morning. “Will we be destroyed?”

The abbot could not say, but he decided to take a pilgrimage to find out. As he walked for days and days, down from his mountain and into the hidden lands, he meditated, hoping that he would find guidance. He saw an image of these great waterfalls, of the pool beneath, and of three rainbows. He decided he would go to the place in his visions. He had arrived and now he would meditate.

“Ommmmm,” he said.

He pictured the ferocious protector-spirits of Tibet, in all their many forms. He pictured Dorjee Drakden. He pictured the Chitipati, the dancing skeleton twins who guard the burial grounds of eternity and protect the righteous from thieves. The Chitipati feared nothing, not even the other spirits. If the abbot could meditate on them to defeat fear, then so could all his monks, and so could all people. It was a big task he'd set for himself. He would need to concentrate. This was some of the hardest meditation a person could do. It was dangerous to invoke the ferocious protectors if you were not ready. He lit another butter lamp.

“Ommmm,” he said.
“Ommmmm.”

“Ahhhhhhh,” he heard in response.
“Ahhhhhhhhhh!”

His heart quickened. Could this be the response he had hoped for? Could this be the answer of the gods? What did it mean?

“Ommmmmm,”
he said again.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!”
he heard again. And again.
“Ahhhhhhhhhh!”

The voice was not from his head. It came from behind him. He sighed. His concentration was broken. All this strange shouting was quite distracting. He turned toward the falls to see what all the trouble was about.

Just then, he saw a small form fly over the edge. It looked like a monk shouting and waving his arms frantically. Behind the monk another small form fell, shouting. This one looked like a child with a school backpack. And it was tied to the monk. And then a third form, tied to the other two, also plunged over the edge of the falls. That one looked like a little girl. All three shouted as they fell.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

He watched the three figures, flailing and falling through the water and the mist, as they crashed into the deep pool. He waited to see what would happen next. Just as three heads popped out of the water, choking and gagging, he saw that the rainbow above them had split into three, just like he had seen in his vision.

This is what he was meant to see. These three figures would end the nightmares that had plagued his monks and would restore the protector to his place. The abbot packed up his lamps and rose. He had a long trek back to his monastery on the icy mountain. He could hardly wait to tell his followers the good news.

He couldn't actually imagine how a monk and two children had come to crash over the Hidden Falls, nor how they would be of any help, but he had long ago learned not to question the wisdom of dreams or rainbows, and certainly not to interfere with their plans.

He took one last look across the water, being careful not to be seen, and watched as the children climbed out of the water and yanked the sopping wet monk out behind them. They slumped down on the bank, exhausted, and the abbot was again tempted to run over and bless them, to ask them who they were and why they were there. He wanted to help them. But he resisted. All would be clear in time, he told himself, and they had their own journey to complete. He turned and started his trek out of the valley, walking as fast as he could. The three rainbows faded behind him.

OLIVER AND CELIA SCRAMBLED
out of the water at the bottom of the great waterfall. Their clothes were dirty, dripping and torn, and every inch of them was soaked. Oliver took off the wet backpack and set it on the rocks with a plop. They watched as three rainbows faded into the foam.

“We're alive!” Oliver shouted and jumped up and down.

“What?” Celia shouted. The roar of the waterfall made talking almost impossible.

Oliver just smiled and hugged his sister. A line of butterflies fluttered overhead, dancing and swirling in the air.

The twins had seen waterfalls on television before, but this was something else entirely.

“Wow,” Oliver said.

“Wow,” Celia said.

The water crashed down hundreds of feet into the pool in front of them. The mist and water and shimmering remains of the rainbows were beautiful. Celia couldn't help feeling bad that their father wasn't around to see it. He would have loved a sight like this. And she couldn't help but wonder if her mother had really been here. This was the kind of place that explorers loved to discover. Neither one of them could think of a TV show to compare this to. They were dumbstruck.

Lama Norbu sat on the bank of the river, exhausted, with his feet dangling in the water. The twins were so busy admiring the butterfly parade and trying to think of something they'd seen on TV that was as amazing as this waterfall that they didn't see him fiddling with the wet phone in his lap, banging on it and cursing under his breath. He eventually gave up trying to get it to work and tossed it into the river. Frank Pfeffer did not care about littering. He sighed and stood.

“We've arrived,” he declared, and pointed at the waterfall, as if the twins might not have noticed. “The ruined monastery is just behind this screen of water. We'll have to climb up the rocks over there to get to it.”

The twins were tired of climbing, because it always ended up with a lot of falling, but they were so close to their goal, they didn't complain. They just turned and started on their way up, scrambling and sliding over wet boulders.

They slipped behind the thunderous wall of falling water and found themselves in a large cavern. Sunlight passing through the waterfall made it look like glowing marble, rather than tons and tons of crashing water.

“Why would someone want to build a monastery down here?” Celia asked.

“It's kind of a cool place,” Oliver said. “I bet
Secrets of the Underworld
would love to do an episode here.”

“I never want to watch that show again,” Celia said. “I've had enough reality for a while.”

“Reality TV is different,” Oliver objected. “It's not as wet as real reality.”

Celia just shrugged. She couldn't understand boys sometimes.

The cave itself wasn't just rock and moss, like a normal cave. It had once been built into something. There were doorways that led into other passages. Some of the doorways were filled with broken doors hanging off their frames, others just had piles of rock and ash where wooden doors used to be. The walls were charred too, like someone had tried to burn down the inside of the mountain, and soot covered up elaborate murals painted on the walls.

Oliver and Celia were able to make out strange images of men sitting on clouds, and tigers leaping over hills and rivers, but the images were all broken and burned. There was a stairwell at the back of the cave that descended into the shadows and there was a statue in front of the stairs that looked like someone had tried to break it.

“This place is creepy,” Celia said, and Oliver did not disagree. He shivered.

The statue in front of them was of twin skeletons. Their mouths were open and filled with long, razor-sharp fangs. They were dancing and holding strange objects in their claws. They each had an extra eye in the middle of their foreheads and they each wore a crown of tiny skulls. Everywhere Celia stepped in the cave, she felt as if the skeletons were watching her through their third eyes. The eyes seemed to glow.

“The Chitipati,” Lama Norbu explained. “Guardians of the charnel grounds.”

“What's a charnel ground?” Oliver asked.

“The place where the bodies of the dead are burned.”

Both twins looked back at the statues and shuddered.

“Not cool,” Oliver said.

“This was the monastery of the Ferocious Protectors,” Lama Norbu said. “Here they prayed to the warrior-god Dorjee Drakden. These skeleton twins are meant to protect the righteous against thieves. If ever there were a place to hide the Lost Tablets of Alexandria, this would be it. We must try to decipher what your mother told us,” Lama Norbu said.

He pulled the page out from his robes. It was soaking wet and the ink had blurred. A few runny demon faces from the sketch were still visible, an arm or two, but little else.

“No!” the monk suddenly shouted, his face changed into a mask of rage. The children jumped. His voice echoed through the chamber, as if there were an army of monks shouting “No!” over and over. Lama Norbu didn't even look like a monk anymore. He looked younger and even taller, and angry. “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS? I HAVE NOT COME THIS FAR TO FAIL!”

“It's okay,” Oliver said consolingly. “It wasn't really a Lost Tablet. There are no—”

“Shhh,” Celia hushed her brother. Lama Norbu snapped his head toward the twins.

“You have no idea what you're talking about,” he shouted, and approached them angrily. “This page is real! It must be! I stole it from your mother myself!”

“What?”

“You stole—”

“We followed your mother here all the way from the Gobi Desert!” Lama Norbu shouted.

“What?” said Oliver.

“We?” said Celia.

“Me and Janice!” snapped Lama Norbu, who now didn't look at all like a monk.

“You mean you're Frank Pfeffer, from the Pfeffer/McDermott Expedition?!” Celia cried. She felt like a fool. She had known something strange was going on with this monk from the beginning.

“You're not a lama at all!” Oliver shouted. He remembered the way Celia had pressed his face into the word
toothpicks
on that statue in the library.

“Oh, will you shut up with this llama business! I explained that already.”

“I mean that you aren't a monk at all!”

“You've found me out,” Lama Norbu/Frank Pfeffer admitted with a dark smile. “Oh, it feels good not to pretend anymore. I really hate acting.” He stood up taller and peeled the thin white mustache off his face. His voice changed and he seemed to transform from an old monk to a much bigger man. An explorer. “Janice and I found your mother after her dirigible crashed. We wanted to help her, but she was too stubborn.”

“Dirigible?” Oliver mouthed at his sister.

“Blimp,” she responded.

“We told your mother that we would bring her home to her family in exchange for what she'd found, but she refused. She said that she was not about to turn over her discovery to ʹcommon grave robbers.' She actually called us that. And some other not very nice things.”

Oliver and Celia were now very worried. They had heard about grave robbers for years. They'd seen shows about them, of course. They were criminals who found ancient tombs and cemeteries and dug up bodies and stole whatever valuable things they found. On TV, it was kind of exciting and kind of creepy. But in real life, grave robbers were not exciting and were much worse than creepy. Their father had been clubbed on the head by grave robbers in Peru just a few months ago. It made his ears ring for a month. Oliver did not want to get clubbed on the head or have his ears ring. He needed his ears for hearing the TV. He liked his ears, even if Celia pulled him around by them sometimes.

“We were very insulted,ʺ Lama Norbu/ Frank Pfeffer said. “We are certainly not grave robbers.”

Oliver was relieved. His ears already felt safer.

“We only robbed
from
grave robbers. We let them do the hard work. . . . All that digging is not for me. Who wants to go hunting in caves for toothpicks? Ugh.”

Oliver was not relieved anymore. Someone who robbed
from
grave robbers was even worse than grave robbers.

“You're not even an explorer,” Celia said. “You're just a thief.”

“Don't sound so shocked. What do you think your parents do? They are famous for robbing graves. Just because they give what they find to museums doesn't make them any less grave robbers.”

“Our parents are
explorers
,ʺ Oliver said. Celia couldn't believe her brother was defending explorers. It was explorers who had gotten them into this mess.

“Whatever she was, we followed your mother all the way to this cave,” Frank Pfeffer said. “If she wasn't going to give us her discovery, we were going to take it from her. I waited for her to come out. I waited for days, but she didn't. Weeks passed. It was so boring, sitting for so long in this gorge, watching monks come and go. So I decided to flush her out. I started a little fire.”

“You started the fire?” Celia asked. “With our mother inside!”