Jake Atlas and the Quest for the Crystal Mountain

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  Her voice broke, and she clutched her amulet.

  “Say it,” the woman snarled. “Say what we did. Say it or I’ll cut her throat.”

  I was trying hard to keep up. This woman had worked with my parents here in Tibet, but something had gone wrong. She’d stayed here ever since, shuffling around the city to seek forgiveness for … something.

  But even as I listened, my eyes shot around the chamber. I’d gone into that zone again, instinctively making a plan to save my sister. The floorboards were loose and old; if I stamped on the right one, its other end would knock the rack of candles into the woman. It might distract her, give me a chance to grab Pan.

  But again Dad seemed to know what I was thinking. He stepped in front of me, blocking my path to the lady and my sister.

  “You’re not going to hurt anyone, Takara,” he said. “So put that knife away and let’s talk. Do you think we want to be in this place any more than you do? It was the only way we could find you. Besides, you didn’t have to come. You want to know why we’re here as much as we need to tell you, so let’s stop this nonsense and just talk.”

  The woman threw Dad a long, hard glare. I was about to burst past him to try my plan, when the knife finally slid away from Pan’s neck.

  Pan staggered forward, glaring at Mum and then Dad through wild hair. She was furious, and not because of the knife. Our parents had always told us they retired when we were born, but this woman said they were here fourteen years ago – a year before Mum got pregnant. That was when they’d stopped.

  They had lied to us. They’d given up for another reason.

  “What the hell is going on?” Pan gasped.

  11

  We met the beggar in a restaurant close to the Jokhang Temple, a grubby place for backpackers called the Hard Yak Café. Students with dreadlocks and beaded necklaces eyed us over flat whites and travel guides. They looked baffled to see an average-looking family sitting with a local pilgrim.

  I sat with Mum, Dad and Pan, squeezed into one side of the table, while Takara eyed us from the other side. Her face was as dirty as the café floor, and her forearms were all muscle and wire. That made sense if she’d spent fourteen years crawling around the ground on a pilgrimage.

  Mum ordered heaps of Tibetan food – steamy little dumplings called momos, fried yak jerky and tasty-looking doughnut balls made of a flour called tsampa. I was up for trying it all, but I didn’t get a chance. As soon as it arrived, the crazy lady pulled the plates to her and began to scoff the lot.

  The café owner, who had the biggest smile I’d ever seen, poured us cups of yak butter tea. That was totally disgusting. It tasted like bacon-flavoured milk, and to make it worse the guy hovered nearby with the pot. Every time I took a sip – just to be polite – he topped up the cup, so the torture never ended.

  Takara wiped her mouth with one of her shawls. “So, why are you here?”

  “Because we need to be,” Mum replied.

  “That’s not good enough,” the woman grunted.

  “Does it really matter to you?” Dad asked.

  With a dirty nail she tried to pick a bit of dumpling from her gold tooth. “You know that others have tried to get me back into the game, to help them find artefacts. I refused them all. Why should you be any different?”

  “Because we’re trying to do the right thing,” Mum said.

  “What do you know about the right thing?”

  Mum sighed, rubbed her eyes. “Takara, do you really think after everything that happened, we’d come out of retirement, come back here, if it wasn’t important?”

  Again the woman grinned, although her smile had no joy in it. “Do your darling children know what you did here all those years ago?” she hissed.

  “We know,” Pan said.

  It was a lie, but we had to act like a team. “That’s why we’re here,” my sister added. “To make amends.”

  Takara slurped yak butter tea, waved for the manager to top up her cup, and then shoved two more dumplings in her mouth. “I don’t think you really know anything,” she mumbled. “What is it you want, anyway?”

  “The Drak Terma,” Dad told her.

  She stopped eating, her mouth still stuffed with dumpling, as if her jaw had frozen. She stared at us one by one, seeking some sign that she had misheard.

  “You’re joking?” she asked, finally.

  “No,” Dad told her. “Before… Before you retired, you were the world’s expert in esoteric Buddhist literature. Does the Drak Terma exist?”

  Takara swallowed a last bit of food, then pushed her plate away. Either she was finally full or she’d just lost her appetite. “Mount Kailas,” she said. “That’s not where you’re going, is it?”

  “We have a clue that points in its direction,” Mum explained. “Or, rather, to some sort of secret that the mountain holds. We need to know what the Drak Terma says about it.”

  “This secret,” Pan pressed, “is about a catastrophe that wiped out an ancient civilization. It may happen again and kill millions.”

  Takara sneered, as disbelieving as she was unimpressed. “What catastrophe?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Dad said. “But there is an organization that want to find out too, and hide the information. They want to manage this disaster to control the world’s population. They are coming here and they will destroy this place to find what they’re after. But not if we find it first.”

  She gave another derisive snort, but there was something new in her yellow eyes – fear, maybe, or at least concern.

  “Have you seen all the soldiers around this city?” she asked. “The Chinese government is not going to allow some organization to come here and—”

  “They’re more powerful than any government.”

  I was the one that spoke, but Takara’s eyes stayed on my parents. Whatever their history was together, she believed what they said.

  “It sounds like you owe this place a debt,” Pan added. “You can settle it by helping us stop those people from tearing Tibet apart and letting millions die.”

  Takara sat staring into the last of her yak butter tea, as if seeking answers in its curdled surface. She gestured to the manager for a top-up, and drank the whole cup before she finally looked again at my mum.

  “The Drak Terma exists,” she said.

  “Where, Takara?”

  “In a monastery.”

  “Which one?”

  “First, you must make me a promise. You will ask the monks for permission to view it. If they refuse, that is your answer. You will respect their decision and leave.”

  “Of course,” Mum replied.

  I sat up, glaring at Mum – was she crazy? We needed to see that document no matter what the monks decided. Maybe Mum knew that I’d protest, because she spoke again quickly.

  “You have my word, Takara. You have all of our words.”

  She and Mum held the longest stare, like they were having a blinking contest, and then Takara waved for the manager to top up her drink again.

  “Very well,” she agreed. “I will draw you a map. But there is something else you should know.”

  She slid a hand into her shawl and dug out a crumpled sheet of paper. A crooked, glinting smile cracked across her face as she slid the page across the table.

  “You’re popular,” she said.

  Dad’s glasses slipped down his nose as he read the sheet, but he didn’t nudge them back. “You were sent this?” he asked.

  “I still receive certain communications from the treasure-hunting community.”

  Mum snatched the paper. As she read it her fingers tightened, crumpling the page even more. “My God,” she breathed.

  “What is it?” Pan asked.

  “You were wrong that the People of the Snake are coming after you,” Takara snarled. “It’s far worse than that. They have called an open hunt on you.”

  “Is that bad?” I asked.

  Her grin spread wider than ever, and her golden tooth gleamed, giving
her the look of a jack-o’-lantern.

  “Bad barely touches it,” she said. “You’re in a whole new world of trouble now.”

  12

  It was incredible how quickly we left Lhasa. I barely had time to buckle my seatbelt and squabble with Pan for space before buildings and bridges were replaced by valleys and mountains.

  The road followed a river, and then we drove into a landscape slashed with valleys of shattered grey rock. Occasionally, when the hills parted, we caught glimpses of a much steeper skyline – jagged snow-covered peaks jutting through far-off cloud.

  After a couple of hours of driving the only signs of life were a few whitewashed farm houses, the odd shaggy yak and dusty, red-cheeked children who scampered along the side of the road yelling “Tashi delek” and sticking out their tongues. I leaned out of the window of our hired jeep and tashi-deleked back until Mum snapped at me, as if one of the kids might be a hunter seeking the reward on our heads.

  Mum hadn’t said much since we’d met Takara. An open hunt had been declared on us. Every professional treasure hunter in the world had been offered the same reward: a quarter of a billion dollars for each of us, dead or alive. But every time I tried to ask about it, Mum cut me off with the same reply: “It’s nothing to worry about”.

  That would have been reassuring if she wasn’t acting like there was a lot to worry about. As we drove she kept instructing her smart-goggles to switch from infrared view to thermal camera to zoom as she scanned the hillsides for danger.

  “We’re too exposed here,” she muttered. “These valleys are too wide, John.”

  She said that as if there was something Dad could do about it. I sat forward and peered through the windscreen. The valleys were actually narrowing, the steep grey slopes closing in on either side.

  “Do you think someone is watching us?” I asked.

  “No, I do not think we are in any danger at all,” Mum replied.

  “What about Kyle and Veronika?”

  In Honduras we’d clashed with a couple of hunters called Kyle and Veronika Flutes. We’d stolen their treasure, blasted them with stinging bullet ants and caused one of them to be attacked by a wild jaguar. They had good reason to come after us, even without the reward.

  “Well, yes,” Mum conceded, “I think they might be tempted. But no one else.”

  “Because all the others are probably somewhere else looking for treasure?” Pan asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “Treasure worth a billion dollars?”

  “I… No, that’s unlikely.”

  “So why wouldn’t they come after us instead?” I wondered.

  “Well, yes, it’s possible some will reason that,” Mum agreed.

  “Is it possible they all might?” Pan said.

  “I suppose.”

  “How quickly could they get here?”

  “Very quickly,” Dad added. “If they were already in Asia.”

  “Could some be here already?” I asked.

  “Yes. That’s possible.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” Pan summarized. “There could be any number of treasure hunters coming after us, and they all might be here already? Didn’t this start with you telling us everything was fine?”

  “Everything is fine!” Mum barked. “Just sit back, will you?”

  I wasn’t so worried, not then, anyway. We were headed to a remote monastery two hundred miles west of Lhasa, where Takara had told us the Drak Terma was kept hidden, and no one else knew our destination. To be honest, the whole open hunt thing hadn’t had much of an impact on me.

  Which, looking back, was really dumb.

  The road grew steep as we zigzagged up to a pass at the end of the valley. To one side was a steep rock wall, to the other an almost sheer drop that really freaked me out. Each time we turned so the drop was on my side, I leaned across the seat into Pan as if my weight might otherwise tip us off the edge. My sister screamed and whacked me, Mum snapped at us and Dad yelled that he was trying to concentrate on the road. To make things worse, parts of the path were strewn with rocks that had tumbled from higher up. As Dad steered around them, I swear the jeep’s tyres nudged over the edge of the road.

  “You’re going to kill us, Dad! Mum, I think you should drive.”

  “Sit back, Jake!”

  “Just let me out, I’ll meet you at the top of the pass.”

  “If you want to get out of the car, that’s fine by me.”

  “No, Pandora, it is not fine. Everyone be quiet.”

  “Great, I’ll just sit in silence while we fall off a mountain. Look, it just happened again! Are you trying to kill us, Dad? That’s it, isn’t it, you’re after the reward! Steer away from the edge. Away, like this.”

  “Jake, don’t you dare touch the steering wheel! Although, John, we were quite close to the edge just then…”

  We drove down to another valley. Around us the hills were so high that I had to lean down just to see their tops. Fractured grey slopes rose to wavy ridges speckled with white. I thought it was snow, but my smart-goggles showed structures of small stone steeples with golden peaks that gleamed against the deep blue Tibetan sky.

  “Are those monasteries?” I asked.

  “No, they’re chortens,” Pan explained. “Buddhist memorials. They contain the ashes of holy men.”

  Tibet must have had a lot of holy men, because I saw at least a hundred of those chorten things as we continued along one valley and down another. Shadows stretched and the mountains changed from slate grey to pastel pink as the sun sank low over the ridges. The temperature was changing too, a creeping cold that we felt even inside the jeep. I didn’t much fancy going outside, but our ride ended halfway along the valley, where the road was blocked by the debris from an avalanche. Dad parked the jeep behind the rise of boulders.

  “Are we near the monastery?” I asked.

  “As close as we can get by car,” he replied. “It’s a ten-hour hike from here.”

  I peered in each direction along the valley. “Which way?”

  Dad pointed the only way I hadn’t looked: straight up the mountain. “That way.”

  “We go light,” Mum said. “Take only what you need.”

  “Going light” was a phrase I’d come to dread. It made sense, especially at high altitude, to carry as little as we could, to preserve our strength. But it meant no luxuries – no chocolate bars, no pillows, and coffin-size tents for sleeping. Basically, it meant we were grumpy all the time.

  We’d been in a rush to leave Lhasa, where Mum had claimed we were sitting ducks, and get to the mountains (where we still seemed like sitting ducks, only with fewer places to hide). But we’d had time to gather a few supplies. We’d found a sports store and kitted ourselves out with trekking gear: boots, rucksacks, tents and hiking trousers. None of it was high-tech, but at least we wouldn’t be trekking into the Himalayas in jeans and trainers.

  Mum gave us one of her safety lectures as we each packed a rucksack with the things we’d need for the hike.

  “Stick together,” she insisted. “Watch your step, focus on the ground ahead of you, never switch off or daydream. Don’t think these mountains are harmless just because they’re not steep.”

  I gazed up the slope we were about to climb, an almost vertical mass of broken rock and scree.

  “Not steep?” I asked.

  There should be a word between “hill” and “mountain”. It doesn’t seem right to call these mountains, compared to some of the peaks I’d soon see in Tibet, but they weren’t just hills either. Hills are gentle, grassy things criss-crossed with footpaths. These were grumpy, ugly beasts with no paths at all. Climbing them at high altitude taught me there should be a new word for “knackering” too.

  The higher we hiked, the more I became convinced that I could taste the lack of oxygen, like it had a flavour I was desperately missing. My breaths grew shallower, and raspy.

  Dad must have heard how frantic my breathing had become because as he reac
hed to help me up some rocks, he lifted me with one hand, plonked me down on a ledge, and sat beside me.

  “Breathe calmly,” he said. “The worst thing you can do is panic.”

  Mum agreed that we should take a rest, and we pulled off our rucksacks and sat together. We sipped water and watched a huge bird sweep up through the dusk, its wings the size of ironing boards. Dad slapped on his smart-goggles and watched it glide back across the valley.

  “That’s a Himalayan griffon vulture,” he said.

  It was the first animal I’d seen outside of Lhasa, apart from yaks, and it seemed weirdly out of place. Until then the landscape had been lifeless, the mountains eerily still, as if we were explorers on another planet. But I sensed that this place was far from dead. Maybe I was being paranoid, but it really felt like we were being watched…

  By the time we reached the ridge, my lungs felt like they had shrunken to the size of raisins, and my legs as if they’d been pumped with petrol and set on fire. Then, suddenly, the pain was replaced by what I can only describe as pure joy. I wiped sweaty hair from my eyes and stared at the most spectacular view I’ve ever seen.

  Ahead, the landscape rippled with valleys like those we’d driven along, scattered with red and gold from the setting sun. Beyond them, the horizon was sharp and fanged where a range of mountains – real mountains, the scary, snowy, super-steep ones – snarled up through pink cloud. Ice walls and glaciers reflected the dusk, so they looked like bonfires, pulsing and glowing as the sun dipped to kiss their peaks.

  “The Himalayas,” Pan breathed.

  “Which one is Mount Kailas?” I asked.

  “We can’t see it from here,” Dad replied. “It’s further west.”

  Mount Kailas must have been seriously far away, because it seemed like I could see the whole world from that ridge.

  “Come on,” Mum said. “We’ll camp in the valley down there.”

  It sounds strange, but going down the other side of the mountain was almost tougher than climbing up. The surface was so broken that it was difficult to find a footing. Our boots slipped in scree, causing us to slide. It took over an hour to reach the valley, and another twenty minutes for our parents to agree on the best place to camp. By then the sun had vanished behind the mountains, as darkness swallowed the valley.