Jake Atlas and the Quest for the Crystal Mountain Read online

  “This is Tibet,” he said.

  “Tibet?” Pan asked. “As in … Tibet?”

  “Yes. That word you translated, Kailas, is the name of a mountain there.”

  “A mountain?” I asked. “You mean in the Himalayas? So that’s where we’ll find the Hall of Records. Simple.”

  Mum sighed in a that’s-a-very-disappointing-thing-to-hear kind of way. “It’s never simple, Jake,” she said. “You should know that by now.”

  “Nothing about Tibet is simple,” Dad explained.

  As he spoke, his fingers moved across the hologram map, zooming in and out of features in the landscape. I noticed the twinkle in his eyes; he loved these little lectures.

  “Mount Everest is here. This is the border with Nepal, and this one is with India. Here’s Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, where this train is taking us. It’s 11,450 feet above sea level, so there’s far less oxygen than in most other places. The air is so thin you could get altitude sickness just walking to the shops.”

  “Where’s Mount Kailas?” Pan asked.

  “All the way over here, in the west of Tibet. There is only one road that far, and it will be guarded – if not by the People of the Snake, then the Chinese army.”

  “Hang on. I thought this was Tibet, not China?”

  “Tibet is China, Jake,” Pan said. “The Chinese invaded it in 1950. A lot of Tibetans fled over the Himalayas. Others fought back, but they didn’t stand a chance. The rest just try to live as best as they can under Chinese occupation.”

  “Well, that sucks, but what’s so special about Mount Kailas?”

  “Everything, to millions of people,” Dad replied. “Three different religions – Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism – regard it as the place where the world began, a home of gods. To many of those people it’s known as the Crystal Mountain.”

  “Crystal?” I asked, thinking of the coffins we’d found the emerald tablets inside, all made of gleaming carved crystal. “Why’s it called that?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Dad said. “There are legends that the mountain contains crystal caves…”

  I edged even further forward. “Does it?”

  “No one would know,” Dad muttered. “No one has climbed Mount Kailas.”

  That was weird, but good news. If no one had explored this mountain, maybe there were secrets there to be found. Just the thought of scaling a Himalayan peak made my stomach churn – I wasn’t good with heights – but I’d worry about that when we got there.

  “So we need to find this mountain and search its caves for the Hall of Records?” I suggested.

  “No one climbs Mount Kailas,” Mum said. “It’s sacrilegious.”

  “But not to us,” I shot back. “We’re not Hindus or Buddhists or … that other one you said.”

  “That doesn’t matter, Jake,” Mum insisted. “We respect those faiths. Anyway, Kailas is unclimbable. Its sides are sheer walls of rock and ice. Even the world’s best mountaineers say it is impossible, not that they would try. There is no way up Mount Kailas.”

  Dad did a sort of mumbled grunt and a slight shrug. Pan and I had spent a long time learning to decipher our parents’ secret gestures. We knew this one well; Dad’s way of discreetly disagreeing with Mum.

  “So there is a way?” Pan asked.

  “No,” Mum said.

  “Maybe,” Dad said.

  “Let’s go with maybe,” Pan decided. “Which way?”

  “It’s just a rumour, a legend,” Dad replied.

  “It’s mumbo jumbo,” Mum said.

  She flapped a hand as if to swat away a fly. Mum never liked talking about things she called “mumbo jumbo” – ghosts and aliens and stuff like that. It was strange; we were risking our lives to hunt for an ancient civilization that had come long before even the Ancient Egyptians, but at least once a week Mum muttered that the whole idea was mumbo jumbo.

  Dad, though, loved mumbo jumbo. He always tried to sound academic about it, but weird X-Files stuff made his eyes glimmer and caused the dimple in his chin to crease up.

  “Not necessarily, Jane,” he countered. “What about the Drak Terma?”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “In Buddhism, terma means ‘hidden knowledge’,” Dad said. “A terma is a record of ancient wisdom that’s kept secret from the world because it’s thought to be dangerous. One of these, known as the Drak Terma, is said to reveal a secret way inside Mount Kailas, to a store of ancient knowledge.”

  “You mean, knowledge about a lost civilization?” I asked, my pulse quickening. “That’s why Kailas was written on the emerald tablet. So that’s definitely where we’ll find the Hall of Records.”

  Dad gave Mum another look – a raised eyebrow and a tilt of his head that signalled something like “they may be right, but I shouldn’t agree, should I?”

  Mum shook her head, but she couldn’t dismiss it entirely. “Even if the Drak Terma does exist,” she said, “no one knows where it is.”

  Dad made that mumbly-grunty noise again. “One person might.”

  Now it was Mum’s shot in the tennis match of secret looks. This one was a winner, a long hard stare as she wound her necklace so tight around her palm that her fingers turned white. They knew more than they were saying – a lot more. I was about to ask, when the train came to a sudden stop and I tumbled off my bunk. Shouts rang along the corridor, and guards marched past our cabin.

  Immediately, Mum grabbed a rucksack and rooted through it for bits of kit. “John, blow the train lights,” she hissed. “Everyone, put on your goggles, switch to NVG. We’re going up to the train roof. We can fire a zip line from there to—”

  “Wait.” Pan pressed her face to the window. “It’s not about us.”

  Further along the train, Chinese army officers were grappling with a red-faced American man in pyjamas. The guy was furious, yelling about mistaken identities. His wife and two sons huddled close by, struggling to work out if this was a nightmare.

  “It’s the family whose tickets I swapped with ours,” Pan muttered.

  In the window reflection, I saw Mum and Dad look at each other – this time there were no secret signals, just a long hard stare.

  “We’re safe here,” Mum said, finally. “By the time they work out the mistake we’ll be in Lhasa. Just keep the lights out and stay quiet.”

  Pan climbed back to her bunk and pulled her hood over her head, but I kept watching. As the train pulled away, the police led the distraught family to a van, the dad now in handcuffs.

  “They’ll be OK, right?” I asked.

  “Just try to sleep, Jake,” Mum replied. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”

  8

  Remember what my dad said about the air being thinner in Tibet?

  It didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. I mean, how can air be thin? You don’t really think about air unless you’re drowning or suffocating. Then it’s all you think about, like in that tunnel in the Great Pyramid when that sand was… That doesn’t matter. My point is, I don’t usually think much about the air I breathe.

  That changed the moment I stepped off the train. Lhasa Railway Station is 3,650 metres above sea level. I could still breathe, but each breath felt as if someone was squeezing my lungs, just slightly, like a little warning.

  Along the platform, passengers pressed their hands to their chests, feeling the same discomfort. Only a few – locals, I guessed – didn’t seem to notice.

  “Just breathe normally,” Mum said. “Give your body time to adjust. Come on.”

  My parents wore disguises – wigs and glasses that looked a bit silly – and they talked to each other in fluent Russian as we carried our bags towards the security check, where a line of grim-faced officials glared at us from glass booths. We were the first to approach, which wasn’t very smart if our plan was to blend in.

  “We’re Russian,” Mum hissed.

  “What? I can’t walk any slower than this.”

  “No. We’re Russian, remember? Stop speak
ing English.”

  “Do we even look Russian?”

  “How do Russians look, Jake?”

  “I don’t know, Pan! More Russian than us, I’d guess.”

  One of the guards beckoned us, and reached a hand through a hole in his booth.

  “American?” he grunted.

  We shook our heads.

  “English?”

  I nodded, and then shook my head. Pan gave me a shoulder nudge.

  “Rooskee,” Dad said, handing over our fake passports. “Ya plokha gavaryoo pa angleeskee,” he added.

  The guard glared at him, and then at the documents, and back and forth about a dozen times, as I grew increasingly certain that there was a Russian look, and it looked nothing like us.

  “First time in Tibet?” he asked.

  Pan and I nodded. I noticed a slight hesitation from Mum, and a glance at Dad, but they nodded too.

  The guard watched us for another long moment. Then, slowly, he reached for something under his counter. He rose and opened the door to his booth.

  “Step closer,” he ordered.

  None of us moved. My mind went into that zone again, instinctively making a plan. The man had a slight limp, so I’d go for his knee – a sharp kick, enough to take him down so we could escape.

  Maybe Mum was thinking the same thing, because she edged forward. I noticed her fist curl, her jaw lock. The guard raised a strip of white silk, his grip tight on its edges, as if he might use it to strangle us. I braced myself to go for him…

  The guard reached out and draped the material over Mum’s head.

  It was a scarf!

  “Welcome to Tibet Autonomous Region,” he said.

  We all grinned, trying not to laugh, as the guy gave each of us a white scarf, stamped our documents and waved us through.

  “What was that about?” I whispered.

  “It’s a khadas,” Dad told me, under his breath. “A Tibetan prayer scarf.”

  As I stepped outside I had to stop myself from reaching for my smart-goggles. Tech like that would give us away, but I really needed sunglasses. It was cold, late winter, but crazy bright. The sky was a whole new kind of blue, pure and rich and deep. In every direction I saw mountains: grey-brown hunchbacked giants. In the high-altitude air they looked incredibly sharp, like we’d upgraded an old TV to a new plasma screen.

  “It’s amazing,” I said.

  “Wait until you see the stars at night,” Dad replied.

  I glanced at Pan, who threw me the same curious look. Mum and Dad had definitely been here before. I wanted to ask more, but we had to focus on what was going on right then. The People of the Snake might have beaten us here. They could be anywhere, around any corner.

  “Just relax,” Dad said.

  He didn’t seem relaxed. We feared we were being watched, but everyone was watching us: taxi drivers, pedicab riders, a scrum of tour guides waggling signs. Chinese police officers leaned against a concrete pillar topped with a bronze statue of a horse doing a four-legged jump.

  The taxi driver had his foot down the whole way into Lhasa, as if he was desperate to reach a dying friend. It was annoying. We were always in a rush, fleeing from some bad guy or racing to some ancient shrine. These moments, when I actually got to see a new place, were precious. I didn’t want to miss a thing.

  We crossed a sleek, arched bridge over a river, and entered Lhasa, where the driver was forced to slow down to navigate narrow, mazelike streets. I leaned into the window, my excited breaths misting the glass. I saw businessmen in coffee shops, and shaven-headed monks in blood-coloured robes gathered around a street seller roasting corn.

  Most of the buildings looked the same: white and square and simple. Few were higher than two storeys, which made sense. If you’re surrounded by the Himalayas you don’t want to boast about your size.

  Only one building was taller. At first we only glimpsed it between houses, on its perch at the top of a craggy hill. Gleaming white walls rose to a bright red palace crowned with golden domes that flickered in the sun.

  “The Potala,” Pan breathed.

  “The what?”

  “The Potala Palace,” she explained. “It was the home of the Dalai Lama before he fled the Chinese invasion.”

  “The who?”

  “The Dalai Lama. You’ve heard of him, right?”

  “Maybe?”

  “Jake! He’s the spiritual leader of Tibet. Sort of like the Pope for Buddhism, but less rich.”

  The driver braked sharply, swearing at a huge, hairy cow that blocked the road.

  “Yaks,” Dad said. “They’re sacred to Tibetans.”

  “They don’t seem sacred to this driver,” Pan muttered.

  “They’re not; he’s Chinese.”

  The driver dropped us off at the hotel and accelerated away with a screech as we stood and stared. We’d visited a few countries recently, but the hotels were always the same: “nothing fancy”, as Mum put it, which meant cheap and shabby. They were usually one-star places – if they got lucky on star-grading day – where Mum and Dad thought no one would look for us. I’d fallen asleep staring at damp patches on walls and listening to mice scuttle behind bed boards. But this hotel…

  “It’s incredible,” Pan said.

  It was called the Shangri-La, and it was properly five-star. A fake Chinese gateway led to a courtyard with a marble fountain and bushes sculpted in wavy lines. Inside, the lobby was all polished wood and plush furniture. Everything seemed to shine, even the reception staff’s perfect teeth.

  Dad checked us in, talking in weird broken English, like it was his second language.

  “How will we pay for this place?” I whispered.

  “We won’t,” Mum replied.

  “Eh?”

  “We don’t pay for our hotels, Jake.”

  “Eh?”

  “We use the People of the Snake’s money. The Snake Lady gave us their bank card when we worked for her in Honduras, remember?”

  I remembered, but that was months ago.

  “We kept using it,” Mum continued. “Sami runs tracking interference on it so they can’t use it to locate us. But we assume they don’t notice, because they’ve not cancelled the account.”

  “Hang on,” Pan said. “The People of the Snake have been funding us?”

  “They have.”

  “So why have we been staying in such horrible hotels?”

  “Well, for one, I don’t want to raise children who only know luxury. You’ll grow soft. But also, those were good places to lie low.”

  “Lie low,” I muttered. “Yeah, the mattresses were usually on the floor.”

  “So why are we upgrading now?” Pan asked.

  “We’re supposed to be Russian millionaires, so we can hardly stay in a backpacker hostel. Just don’t get used to it.”

  I didn’t want to get used to it or it would break my heart to stay anywhere else. We booked a suite, where our rooms were linked by a lounge with a colossal TV and a balcony with a view across the city. The beds were as big and bouncy as a trampoline and the bathroom had a Jacuzzi. That was exactly what I needed after the long train ride, but as soon as I ran the tap Mum yanked the plug out.

  “No washing,” she said.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Hot water weakens your circulation, which can cause illness, which you do not want at high altitude. There’s not enough oxygen to recover.”

  “So we don’t wash?”

  “You can wash your hands.”

  I did, and then sat for a while on the toilet. We’d only had squat loos in China, so this was proper luxury. By the time I went back into the lounge, Mum had her laptop out, and Dad had set up his holosphere on a table. They talked in low voices, scrolling through hologram web pages and discarding them with frustrated flicks.

  We needed to find an ancient document – the Drak Terma – that revealed some sort of secret on Mount Kailas, maybe the Hall of Records. Only, we didn’t even know if the document even exi
sted. Dad had suggested someone here in Tibet might have a better idea, and it looked like they were working on a way to find the person.

  “Hang on, have you two made a plan?” I asked.

  “Just some research,” Mum replied, dismissively. “John, the first number is for Tibet Vista Tours.”

  Dad called the phone number and spoke in his fake bad English. I looked at Pan, but her shrug suggested she was equally confused as we listened to Dad book a tour of Potala Palace under our fake Russian name, Zolotaya.

  “Are we going sightseeing?” Pan asked.

  “Not exactly,” Dad said as he hung up.

  Mum gave him another number, and then another. It was baffling; they booked us on the same tour with twenty different travel companies, giving each the same name and meeting place outside the palace.

  Mum closed her laptop. “I think that’s all of them,” she said.

  “Are you going to tell us what that was about?” Pan asked.

  Mum didn’t – she never did. Whatever was happening, it related to her past life with Dad and their work as treasure hunters before me and Pan were born. They rarely spoke about those times. Sometimes Dad would break into a story from the old days, but Mum always shut him down. I never understood why; they were the good guys in all of the stories we had heard. But sometimes I wondered if there were other stories, ones they didn’t want us to hear.

  “So we’re booked on the same tour with every company in Tibet,” Pan said. “Why?”

  “It’s a signal of sorts,” Mum revealed.

  “To the person we need to find?”

  “First, let’s get some rest.”

  Typical Mum, all mysterious. It drove Pan crazy, but I didn’t mind. She wasn’t blocking us out of the plan; she was just keeping her cards close to her chest for a while.

  We got room service – burgers and chips – and drank more water, but the fancy hotel room lost its appeal after a couple of hours. Pan read every book on the shelves: volumes on the history of Tibet, Buddhism, and even one on Tibetan language, which I think she hoped to learn in one night. I just stared beyond the balcony, to where the Potala Palace rose above the city like a red-and-white mountain, as frustration boiled inside me. We were so close to finding out where the emerald tablets led. I didn’t want to sit around a hotel room, no matter how swanky it was.