The Messiah Secret - James Becker [114]
Bronson stepped towards her and hugged her. ‘Did I ever tell you how amazing you are?’ he said.
Angela grinned. ‘We’re not there yet,’ she said, pushing him back. ‘And this “silent” area is pretty large. It could cover quite a big part of this side of the valley.’ She pointed towards the valley wall to the west. ‘It’s most likely that cliff which diverts the wind. It’s probably just blowing right over our heads.’
‘But we must be close,’ Bronson said. ‘Come on – let’s keep searching.’
They moved on, further up the valley floor, checking all around them as they went, looking for anything that could possibly match the last half of the penultimate line of the text that had brought them halfway around the world – “the darkness formed of man” – anything, in short, fabricated by human beings rather than a product of nature.
Bronson saw it first. In a small plateau just off to their left he caught a glimpse of a small square structure. He stopped dead.
59
‘That can’t be it,’ Angela said firmly. To their left was a small, cubical building. The stones that made up its structure were the same texture and colour as the surrounding rocks, which was why neither of them had noticed it before. But now they could see it, they also saw the single oblong opening in its front wall – a doorway without a door.
‘What?’
‘I need to explain something about Lamaist monasteries,’ she said, sitting down in front of it. ‘Most of them, and certainly all the larger ones, actually consist of two buildings or groups of buildings, in two different places. There’s the main structure, like Diskit Gompa that we saw down below, where the two rivers meet, and a second, much smaller building. This is usually quite some distance – maybe three or four miles – from the monastery proper, and usually at a higher altitude. It’s like a simple cell, with almost no facilities, and it just provides shelter and a place to sleep.
‘Before a monk can become a lama, he is required to spend quite a long period of time in a building like this. He’s supposed to meditate in the solitude, completely undisturbed. The monastery provides him with basic food and drink, which is delivered once a day, so that the monk doesn’t have to disturb his meditations by preparing meals. It’s a bit like the forty days and nights of solitude Christ is supposed to have spent in the desert in Judea after being baptized. And I’m pretty certain that what we’re looking at here is the separate house of meditation that belonged to the Namdis Gompa monastery.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Bronson muttered. ‘But it fits the text so well. It’s in this weird area of silence, and it’s clearly man-made, not to mention dark inside.’
‘I agree. It was probably built here precisely because this particular spot is inside this sort of cone of silence, so the constant noise of the wind also wouldn’t disturb the meditation of the monks. But you’ve got exactly the same problem with the dates, Chris – they just don’t work. We can take a look inside it, by all means, but it was definitely constructed far too late to be what we’re looking for.’
They walked across to the small building and peered into it, but it was empty, just four bare stone walls. There was a tiny cubicle in one corner that had possibly functioned as an earth closet, and a flat stone bench that was presumably intended to be a bed. But apart from that, there was nothing else.
‘So what now?’ Bronson asked, sitting down beside Angela on the bench.
Angela sighed. ‘I still don’t think we should be looking for a building, because it just wouldn’t be still standing now, not after all this time. I was hoping we’d find a cave, something like that.’
Bronson stiffened. ‘I passed one a few minutes ago,’ he said.
‘Where? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You’d just waved me over,’ Bronson said mildly, getting up and pulling her to her feet, ‘and I thought you’d found something right here.’ He pointed out to the east, back the way he’d come.