The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [5]
To tell the truth, the actual monks seemed to me to be the least interesting feature of my environment when I was eight or nine years old. I was much more entranced by the storms and the peculiar transactions of the snow, by the abrupt changes of temperature and texture to which the air was subject whenever I passed out of the safe interior of the hometree, and by the precarious meltwater ecology of the valley floor. My friends, however, were not at all interested in weather reports; they wanted to know about the mysterious mystics and sages who had once occupied the edifice on the mountain and still practiced their arcane rituals in the southern part of the valley. It was not that my friends could not imagine precipitous slopes, or snow, or hectic atmospheric conditions; the problem was that I had no way to persuade them that my actual experience of such phenomena was very different from their virtual experiences.
“Yes,” Pyotr would say, “of course I know what cold feels like. We have cold in Moscow too. But we don’t have monks.”
“Of course I can imagine thin air,” Marianna would assure me. “It’s just a matter of barometric pressure. But I can’t imagine religion.”
They were wrong about being able to imagine what Himalayan cold and Himalayan air felt like, but there was no way to prove it. I thought they were equally mistaken in their assumption that the monks and their beliefs were interesting, given that the few I saw in the distance always seemed so utterly mundane, but I couldn’t prove that either and soon capitulated with inevitability by ceasing to try.
The continued curiosity of my friends eventually compelled me to find better answers to their questions, but throughout my formative years—from six to sixteen, say—even the “better” answers were wholly invented. I made up different tales at different times, and my accounts became far more elaborate as my sources of inspiration expanded in number and quality, but it was all fantasy. I knew little or nothing about what my allegedly Hindu neighbors believed or did, and nothing at all about what might once have gone on in the allegedly Buddhist community set so high on the looming slope as to be beyond reach.
None of my co-parents ever visited the complex at the far end of the valley, nor did any of them attempt to learn the language spoken by its inhabitants. None of them would ever have dreamed of trying to climb the mountain that separated them from the place they called Shangri-La, for want of any better name. They had brought their child to remotest Nepal so that he might live in the presence of magnificent strangeness, not that he might penetrate its secrets. By the time I left the valley I understood, vaguely, that they had installed me there because they thought that the valley might teach me to be humble in my humanity, to show me the last vestiges of the untamed earth that had shaped my ancestors, and to give me a proper sense of the value of my emortality. While I was actually there, however, it was simply the place I was in, monks and all. My view of it was conditioned by the knowledge that all the other people of my own age with whom I was encouraged to socialize in VEs had anchorages in reality that seemed more desirable to me because they lay far closer to the heart of human society. I was never lonely as a child, but I knew that I lived in a lonely place, fit only for mad monks, and that I had been put there on purpose.
“But it’s not a lonely place,” Papa Domenico assured me, on one of the rare occasions