Jake Atlas and the Quest for the Crystal Mountain Read online

  I moved along the line of bronze drums, leaning closer to inspect each one. It was the first time I’d noticed their carvings. Some were signs from an ancient language, but there were other symbols too – flowers and shells, and fish with big lips that seemed to be kissing. But not all of the wheels were quite the same.

  “Look at these drums, Pan. On most of them the carvings are only worn on one side, the side facing out.”

  “They’re worn by the wind,” Pan agreed. “So those wheels never get turned.”

  “Yeah, but these two drums are different. Look, they’re worn all the way round. Only these two are ever turned.”

  “You mean, to open a secret entrance?”

  “Maybe, by setting them into a certain position.”

  “OK, but what position?”

  That was the key question, but I sensed the answer was here if we kept thinking. “What are all these carvings, anyway?” I asked.

  Pan turned one of the wheels, examining the markings. “It’s Sanskrit,” she said. “The letters are a prayer mantra. Om Mani Padme Hum. It means “Hail to the jewel in the lotus”. It’s what Buddhists repeat when they pray, to open a path to heaven.”

  “Or a secret entrance?” I muttered. “What about these other symbols?”

  “Those are the eight ashtamangala, lucky symbols that represent parts of the body. This conch shell stands for teeth, these fish are eyes…”

  “Is there one for the heart?” I interrupted.

  “Yes, this one here.”

  Pan turned the wheel to the symbol. It looked like one of Mum’s phone doodles, a little grid of criss-crossing lines.

  “This is the never-ending knot,” Pan told me. “The heart.”

  My breath misted the symbol as I leaned close to see. “Pan, do you remember what that old lama said about Mount Kailas?”

  Pan thought for a moment, then grabbed my arm. “Jake! He said it was a place in the heart!”

  It had seemed a weird thing to say at the time, but maybe it made more sense now. I rushed to one of the two wheels that the monks had turned and positioned it so the heart symbol was facing inward, and then did the same to the other one.

  “OK,” I said. “You take one, I’ll take the other. We’ll turn them at the same time, until the heart faces out.”

  “Turn them anticlockwise,” Pan added.

  “Why?”

  “Buddhists always turn them clockwise,” she explained. “If these open something, the monks wouldn’t want anyone stumbling on the secret by spinning the wheels. But no one would spin them anticlockwise.”

  “Good thinking,” I agreed. “OK: three, two, one…”

  We turned the wheels and stepped back, looking along the ledge and then around the mountainside. I’d hoped a door might open, or something. We tried again, this time turning them clockwise, and then again rotating them slower and then faster. But nothing happened.

  Icy wind rattled the prayer wheels, but otherwise – silence.

  “The monks have finished praying,” Pan said. “If they spot us up here they’ll kick us out. Then we really will have no chance of seeing the terma.”

  She was right, but this had been my only plan. Was it really over? Six months of treasure hunting and it all ended on this freezing mountain ledge? I cursed and slapped one of the prayer wheels so it spun again.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back.”

  As we moved for the rope bridge, its wooden planks began to tremble. I looked up, fearing an avalanche, but all I saw was stillness and stars.

  “Jake…” Pan breathed.

  I followed her gaze back to the prayer wheels. A section of the drum line, just four wheels, had risen like a tollgate, revealing an entrance into the mountain. It was just a crack in the cliff, half the height of a door, but it was a crack that the monks had gone to a lot of trouble to hide…

  18

  “How dangerous can this really be?” I whispered.

  That was a dumb thing to say, but I meant it at the time. We’d been in secret caves before, but ones carved by ancient civilizations whose hobbies included ripping out your heart while you were still alive. This one was carved – or guarded at least – by Buddhist monks, who weren’t famous for their bloodthirstiness. What was the worst that could happen?

  Like I say, I wish I’d paused to think about that.

  “Stay close,” Pan hissed.

  I was already so close that I could feel my sister shaking as we edged deeper into the curving darkness. The passage into the mountain was so narrow that we’d had to shuffle in sideways, and even as it widened, my shoulders still brushed against cold rock on either side. Our goggles were set to night vision, so we saw each other’s breath as green ghosts. Beetles as big as mice scuttled into cracks. Above, bats stretched their wings as they settled down to sleep. The ground was squelchy with their poo.

  I began to worry that this was just an ordinary cave, but as the passage opened further, the walls changed. Gruesome carvings leered at us from the rock. They were like scenes from a horror film – people impaled on spikes or being burned alive by devils, all painted in garish primary colours.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  Pan stroked the carvings, fascinated. “They’re self-manifested images.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Buddhists believe that images of gods form by themselves.”

  “But… They don’t actually, right? Someone must have carved them. I bet it was that crafty lama.”

  “He’s not crafty, Jake.”

  “He’s shifty, Pan. He’s hiding the Drak Terma. What gods are these, anyway?”

  “I think they’re protector deities,” Pan muttered.

  “Well, what are they protecting?”

  I felt a familiar tingle in my belly as I edged further along the passage, a sense that we were close to a discovery. Pan, though, sounded more worried than ever, as if the carvings had spooked her more than she was letting on.

  “So you don’t think the lama was telling the truth?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “The guardian spirit of Mount Kailas.”

  I’d known what she meant, I’d just been trying not to think about it. There was an open hunt against us, and the People of the Snake would be coming to Tibet soon. We had enough to worry about without adding monsters.

  “Nah,” I said. “He just made that up to scare us off. If there’s some guardian monster out to get anyone who wants to climb Kailas, why’s it not here now? We’re trying to steal the Drak Terma after all, and that’s—”

  “Jake, watch out!”

  Pan grabbed my arm and yanked me back from a long drop into darkness. We’d reached the end of the passage, where a moat-like chasm guarded the core of the mountain. A rope bridge crossed to another ledge, somewhere beyond which gaslights flickered. The bridge was about fifty metres long and totally decrepit. Its planks were rotten, and in the middle it sagged heavily down into darkness.

  Pan peered into the abyss, and then shuffled back. “That’s deep. You go first.”

  I cursed, but I could hardly complain; this was my plan, after all. I breathed in, calming my nerves as I took my first step onto the bridge. The rotten plank creaked with a noise like a wailing ghost. The wood was old and damp, but it took my weight. I gripped the rope rails tighter, and edged slowly across the bridge. The wooden planks groaned even louder.

  Then, another sound.

  A hiss, like a valve being released, echoed around the darkness. Warm air rushed from below, prickling my skin, and the whole bridge began to shake.

  “Jake?” Pan called. “What’s going on?”

  Between the planks, I saw light flicker at the bottom of the chasm. “Looks like a flame,” I said. “Maybe someone’s down there.”

  “Someone making a hissing noise?”

  “It sounds more like gas.”

  “Gas? Jake, this valley sits on a gas reserve. The monks use it for their lights, r
emember? Maybe we’ve triggered some sort of trap.”

  “Maybe, but that fire is all the way down there and we’re all the way up—”

  Right then a jet of flame blasted out of the side of the chasm. Pan tumbled back, snatching hold of the rope just in time to stop herself from falling. I clung on tighter as another rush of fire shot from the rock wall.

  “Jake, the bridge is on fire!”

  “I know, Pan! What happened to Buddhists being harmless?”

  I helped her up and we scrambled for the end of the bridge as more fire jets streaked from behind us, from in front of us, from either side. The flames below were rising too, filling the chasm. We were only halfway across the bridge – could we make it to the other side?

  “Keep moving, Jake!”

  One of the planks gave way and I fell through, just managing to grab the ropes to stop myself plummeting into the inferno. Another fire jet rushed above me, right where I’d been standing. Below, the rising flames licked my boots as I hung below the bridge.

  “Grab my hand!” Pan cried.

  It wasn’t easy to climb back up, with dragon-breath blasts of fire shooting from every direction. Half of the bridge was alight – ropes burned and planks fell into the flames. The whole thing was going to collapse. I didn’t know if we’d burn to death or if the fall would kill us…

  “Pan, run!”

  We charged across what was left of the bridge, praying we got lucky. The fire was right beneath us, like a rising sea lashing at a jetty. Another rush of flames blocked our path to the ledge. We were trapped – fire sprayed from every direction. But it was only a few metres to the ledge.

  “We have to jump!” I yelled.

  “Jump through fire? I’m not a circus animal, Jake!”

  “There’s no choice! Now, Pan. Come on!”

  Against all my instincts, I ran for the flames, slammed a boot on the last plank and jumped. Fire singed my hair and lashed from below. I landed on the ledge and tumbled over, swatting frantically at smoke on my arm. I looked up in time to see Pan burst through the flames. She crashed into me and we rolled over, cursing and gasping as the last pieces of the bridge fell into the moat of fire.

  We’d survived, but our escape route was gone. We were trapped in this mountain, with no idea if the thing we were searching for was even here. I remembered what my dad had said, about how the lama may just have been testing us to see if we could be trusted. If that was true, then we’d well and truly failed. I prayed it turned out to be worth it.

  19

  Fire roared higher around the chasm as my sister and I staggered back along the ledge. I shrieked, swatting more flames on my trousers, and then grabbed Pan and shrieked louder as I whacked her back to put out a fire on her shoulder. The whole time Pan just stayed silent, glaring at me like it was all my fault. It was all my fault, but she’d really perfected that glare.

  I shrugged apologetically.

  “At least it’s not so cold now,” I said.

  “We shouldn’t have come here,” she replied.

  I knew what she meant; she hadn’t wanted to break our promise to Takara and go against the monks’ wishes. Neither had I, but we hadn’t had a choice. We couldn’t sit around and hope they eventually decided to show us the Drak Terma. We had to go after it before the Snake Lady and her goons arrived and took control.

  “Look, we’re here now, anyway,” I said, “so we may as well carry on. It must be close.”

  She muttered something too rude to write, but followed me through another tunnel to a circular chamber in the heart of the mountain. It was a natural cavern, with a huge domed ceiling and a floor covered in scratches, as if it had been slashed by a giant tiger. Gas lamps hissed on the walls, between dozens of alcoves filled with scrolls.

  “It’s a library,” Pan gasped. “Do you think this is where they keep the Drak Terma?”

  Maybe, but there were thousands of scrolls. “So, which one is it?”

  It was a headache to me, but Pan looked delighted. She rushed around the cavern, pulling out scrolls and blowing away dust to see their writing.

  “Jake, this is incredible. We’d need months to read all of these.”

  “We only need to read one, Pan, and we’ve got minutes.”

  “Well, we can narrow it down, at least. The document we’re looking for is far older than any of these. It pre-dates Buddhism.”

  “So how does that help? They all look old.”

  “No, most of them can’t be more than two thousand years old.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re written on paper, Jake. Paper was invented around the year 100 in China, about the same time that Buddhism reached this area. But we think the Drak Terma is much older than that.”

  “So it must be written on something other than paper,” I realized.

  I was glad Pan was here with me; I never would have known that. “So what are we looking for?” I asked.

  “Maybe it’s written on bamboo strips. That’s what people used for documents before paper. I’ll start looking over here.”

  I rushed to the other side of the chamber and scanned the alcoves with my smart-goggles’ torch. I crouched low, then rose to tiptoes, running the light along piles of ancient documents. The longer I looked, the more frustrated I grew. My curses echoed around the chamber.

  After about ten minutes we met in the middle of the room.

  “Swap over,” Pan said. “One of us may have missed it.”

  I doubted Pan would have, and I was sure I hadn’t. Besides, would the Drak Terma really just be shoved in among all these documents? The old monk had told us that they had built this whole monastery to protect it.

  Unless…

  I crouched and ran a hand along one of the grooves that covered the rock floor. Something was beginning to occur to me.

  “Pan? The monks built this monastery to guard the Drak Terma, right?”

  “So?”

  “What if he meant it literally?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I was still trying to work it out. “We assumed he meant they built this place and brought the terma here, right? But what if it was the other way round? This was the only place they could build the monastery, because the Drak Terma was already here.”

  My torch beam swept the walls until I spotted a wooden ladder against one of the alcoves. I ran to it and scrambled up, turning so my light beamed down across the floor.

  “There!” I cried.

  The Drak Terma wasn’t a scroll, and it wasn’t written on bamboo. It was carved on the cave floor, hundreds of letters scratched across the rock floor.

  This cavern was the Drak Terma.

  “No wonder the monks kept this place secret,” Pan said. “It looks like Sanskrit, the ancient Tibetan language. Can you get a photo?”

  I blinked three times and my goggles snapped a high-res image of the floor. The writing would probably only make sense to our parents, but I didn’t know how we were going to explain how we got it. I just hoped they understood. They had kept their word, even if I hadn’t.

  “We did it, Pan,” I breathed. “We got it.”

  “Yeah, but how are we going to get out of here?”

  “You are not getting out,” a voice replied.

  I turned too quickly, fell down the ladder and thumped to the floor. Rolling over, I watched a small, ragged figure shuffle into my shaky torchlight. Yellow eyes glared and a gold tooth glinted.

  “Takara?” Pan gasped. “What are you doing here?”

  A smile spread across Takara’s filthy face, jagged and sharp, like a crack in the rock. “I think that question is better asked of you,” she snarled.

  I scrambled up, eyes fixed on the woman. “You know why we’re here,” I said.

  “Did the monks permit you to see this place?”

  “I… We haven’t stolen anything.”

  She shuffled closer, glaring at us with those burning yellow eyes. It seemed impossible that someone fille
d with such rage could be grinning. Her voice rose, echoing around the cavern.

  “You gave me your word,” she roared, “and you gave them your word. You have broken both, as I told them you would.”

  I stared, trying to make sense of what she was saying. “You got here before us?” I asked.

  “You warned them we were coming,” Pan said. “But why? You know how important this is.”

  “I know what it means to give your word and break it,” she spat.

  “OK,” I conceded. “We’re sorry. No one needs to know.”

  “I knew you would betray me. You are your parents’ children, in every respect.”

  “What do you mean?” Pan demanded. “What happened between you and them?”

  “So they haven’t told you?”

  Our silence was her answer. The fire went out in her eyes and her grin spread even wider; whatever she was about to say, she was delighted to be telling us.

  “I was their contact in Asia,” she began. “I worked for many treasure hunters, providing whatever they needed for their missions. Your parents came here, to Tibet. They had been hired to search for an important artefact for a museum. A golden urn.”

  “A golden urn?” Pan said. “That was the meaning of the Russian name we used to contact you. Zolotaya.”

  “Yes, zolotaya,” Takara agreed. “The golden urn is a sacred vessel used to choose the next Dalai Lama, the true leader of Tibet. The museum had information that the Chinese army planned to steal it, so that there would be no more Dalai Lamas. Losing it would crush the Tibetan people. Your parents came to find the urn, to protect it from the army. That was what they believed, anyway. I challenged them on their sources, but they gave me their word and I trusted that.”

  “But it wasn’t true?” I asked.

  Takara looked away. For a moment the bitterness in her voice was replaced by something like sadness. “I… I joined them on the mission. We located the urn in a secret chamber in the Jokhang Temple.”

  “The room we met in?”

  “Yes, but when we tried to meet the contact from the museum to hand over the urn, no one was there. That was when we heard the first gunshots.”