Love In No Man's Land

by Duo Ji Zhuo Ga

  ‘I know this is a mountain cave – what’s come over you, Zhuo!’

  ‘I’m saying… I’m saying… Didn’t your uncle say that the Four Medical Tantras and his medical notes were hidden in the mountain cave?’ Zhuo Mai was clearly enormously excited since he stuttered as he spoke.

  Cuomu clapped her hand over her mouth.

  From the time they’d entered the cave, their curiosity had made them forget their reason for coming to the mountain in the first place.

  ‘Let’s look for it! Come on – quick!’ Zhuo Mai put his gun on the ground and began searching the chamber.

  The stone chambers only had so many places to put things and it didn’t take long to complete their search. They scoured chamber after chamber but didn’t think to leave any markers to help them find their way out. When they found themselves back at a chamber they’d searched before, they realised the seriousness of the situation. They were lost.

  ‘It seems we’ve come back to where we started,’ Zhuo Mai said dejectedly when he saw the murals.

  ‘Let’s check how much meat we have left and work out how long it will last us,’ Cuomu said, setting the pack down on the stone seat. ‘We still have a little less than half what we started with. We haven’t touched yours, so there’s enough for two or three days. The main thing is water. We’ve been in here for hours, but we haven’t found water anywhere.’

  ‘There has to be an exit, otherwise the air wouldn’t be this fresh. We’ll search slowly and methodically.’ Zhuo Mai picked up a stone. ‘We have to mark our route so that we don’t pursue a passage we’ve already been down. In all mazes, as long as you keep going in one direction, you can always find the exit. Let’s start by going left.’

  Cuomu agreed and slung on her pack again.

  They entered the left-hand passage, lighting the lamps as they went. After about ten minutes, they came to a very large chamber, like a great hall, inside which were some shadowy silhouettes that looked like seated monks. Cuomu, who was in front, leant against the wall and motioned for Zhuo Mai to join her.

  ‘What should we do?’ Zhuo Mai craned forward to look. The great hall had no lamps, and though the lamps along the passage gave off a faint light, they could only see part of the hall. It was silent and had a mysterious air about it.

  ‘It looks like they’re studying, but they’re not making a sound. Let’s go over and look,’ Cuomu said, slowly moving forward.

  When they got to the entrance to the hall, their shadows stretched across it, blocking out some of the light and making the place seem even dimmer. All of the people were sitting cross-legged facing the inside of the room. They looked very much like monks reading the scriptures, but their clothes were those of common herders.

  Zhuo Mai coughed lightly, bowed and said, ‘I’m sorry, brothers, we were caught in an avalanche and ended up in here by accident. Please forgive us.’

  There was a deathly silence. Apart from their own breath, there was no other sound in the hall. Zhuo Mai and Cuomu looked at each other in surprise.

  ‘I’m sorry, brothers…’ Zhuo Mai raised his voice and repeated his words, bowing once more. His voice echoed around the hall.

  But still no one replied. The silhouettes didn’t move but maintained their dignified posture as if in meditation.

  Cuomu strode forward to one of the silhouettes. She put out her hand and tugged at the man’s clothes. ‘Brother!’

  Her finger poked through the clothing as the fabric immediately disintegrated and streamed to the ground in a flurry of dust. She stared in disbelief at the spot she’d touched, which was now a hole. The rest of the clothing seemed to have remained undamaged. She grabbed another exploratory handful, and once again the clothes turned to dust at her touch. She lightly tapped the figure’s head and, finding it was a white skull, was so frightened she cried out.

  Zhuo Mai hurried forward and scanned the hall with his torch. Everything – the beams, the floor, and even the mysterious people – was covered in dust. He craned his neck to look at the seated people. ‘Oh my goodness! Cuomu… they’re all dead!’

  Cuomu trembled and her teeth chattered. ‘All of them… all of them… are… are dead…?’

  ‘Yes, all—’

  Zhuo Mai hadn’t even finished his sentence before Cuomu ran out screaming and rushed straight into someone’s arms. She became even more frightened, kicking, wriggling and screaming, ‘Demon! Demon!’

  ‘Cuomu, Cuomu, it’s me, Gongzha!’ Gongzha held the sobbing Cuomu close and stroked her face.

  ‘Gong… Gongzha?’ Cuomu’s face was deathly pale; she was still in shock.

  ‘Yes, I’m Gongzha – I’m not a ghost.’ Looking into her eyes and seeing her distracted expression, he couldn’t help tenderly drawing her into his embrace and lightly patting her back. ‘There, there… I’m here now. Don’t be afraid. You have me. I’m here now. I came to find you.’

  ‘Gong… Gongzha, Gongzha…’ Recovering herself, Cuomu hugged him round the waist and wept.

  ‘You must really have a death wish, coming here,’ Gongzha said, rather melodramatically.

  ‘If I don’t have you, I really don’t care whether I live or die,’ Cuomu said softly and sadly, staring into his eyes.

  Gongzha held her close. ‘I’m sorry, I really am – it was all my fault.’ He knew Cuomu was still his. He wanted to tell her that without her he too was a walking corpse. His heart was bursting and he flushed to the roots of his hair.

  Zhuo Mai came into the passageway and was very excited to see Gongzha. ‘How did you find this place, Gongzha?’

  ‘When you didn’t return yesterday, I came up the mountain to look for you. I tracked some bears in the valley and they led me here. I was lucky to run into you,’ Gongzha said, holding Cuomu and looking at Zhuo Mai.

  ‘Did you see that image in the valley? The ones the bears trampled?’ Cuomu had finally calmed down and now raised her head embarrassedly from Gongzha’s embrace.

  ‘I did. Was it really done by bears?’

  ‘They trampled it with their feet – we saw them do it,’ Zhuo Mai said. ‘The lead bear had a white circle on its forehead exactly like the image. We thought it was Kaguo, but we weren’t certain.’

  ‘I came into this cave because there’s an image at the entrance that’s exactly the same as the one on Kaguo’s head,’ Gongzha told them. ‘And there’s a painting of Cuoe Temple being built on the wall of one of the other chambers. There are also lots of paintings about bears, and in one of them the image on the bear’s forehead is very clear.’

  ‘Kaguo… what does she have to do with all of this?’ Zhuo Mai furrowed his brow.

  ‘We can’t work that out right now.’ Gongzha shook his head, instinctively clasping Cuomu’s hand, and then asked, ‘How did you get in here?’ His gesture dissipated the tension between them, and both their hearts were filled with affection once more.

  Zhuo Mai explained what had happened.

  Gongzha looked at them with surprise. ‘Did you see the chain?’

  ‘We did! We came from that direction.’

  ‘In which case you must have come in under the boulder.’

  ‘Maybe. We were digging through the snow towards the boulder; originally we were hoping to dig as far as the boulder and then up.’

  Gongzha thought for a while. Then he asked Cuomu, ‘What did you see just now that scared you so badly?’

  ‘That… that hall… has… has ghosts!’ she said, stuttering and trembling at the memory of what she’d just seen.

  ‘It has ghosts? Woman, are you sure you haven’t lost your mind?’ Gongzha looked at her with amusement.

  ‘There really are ghosts! Those people appear to be just sitting there quietly, but if you touch them, they turn to dust and… and they’re all skeletons!’ Cuomu said, unconsciously inching closer to Gongzha. She’d been cool and collected on the hike up, because she was used to the grassland and the mountains. And anyway, even if she didn’t have her man by her side, s
he could still hold up the sky. Women could occasionally allow themselves to be weak and to cry, but only in front of the man they loved. She had never seen or heard of anything like what she’d just encountered and of course she’d been afraid, but she hadn’t wanted to let Zhuo Mai see that. Now all was well: her man was with her, and he could take care of everything; she didn’t need to be strong anymore, she could show her vulnerable side.

  ‘Let’s go and look,’ Gongzha said. Taking Cuomu’s hand, he walked forward.

  Once inside the hall, they shone their two torches all around it. Gongzha saw that there were large butter lamps along the walls, so he went over with a lighter and used oiled paper to light them. The hall quickly became much brighter, but the shadows seemed that much more mysterious.

  11

  The hall was vast. There were four stone pillars in the centre and six lines of cushions with six people seated in each line. Each person sat in the same position: legs crossed, both hands resting on their knees, their head bowed. Some had shrugged off just one sleeve of their sheepskin chuba, others had tied both sleeves around their waist. At the front, one man sat on a high stone chair facing the others, his palms pressed together. There were only a few skulls in the hall; most of the faces were still intact, their eyes closed in a placid expression.

  ‘Could it be that all these people died at the same time?’ Gongzha swept his eyes over the vast hall; the way the different shadows were thrown together was a bit eerie.

  ‘Gongzha, it looks like there’s writing here!’ Zhuo Mai shouted from the other side.

  Gongzha walked over. Cuomu held on to him, never more than a few centimetres behind.

  On the wall were red Tibetan letters, written in a neat script.

  Gongzha shone the weak light of his torch on the wall and read quietly:

  ‘In the Year of the Earth Ox, the Jialong people invaded Nacangdeba. The clan elder ordered that all the old people and all the women and children be sent to the place the Buddha had prepared. We, the soldiers of Nacangdeba, remained behind to defend the grassland. We swore to heaven that we would guard it with our lives. The Jialong are at the foot of the mountain and have blocked every route out. They want us to surrender and become serfs. The cave has no meat or tsampa. Cuoe Grassland is the heaven left to us by our ancestors and we lost it. The grassland is no more; it has been stolen from us. We have no way to fulfil our promise, so we have retreated from the grassland to honour the vow of our ancestors: “As long as the grassland is here, our soldiers will be here. If the grassland dies, we will die. We are the fearless soldiers of Nacangdeba and we will follow our ancestors’ footsteps to Shambhala.”’

  ‘Nacangdeba? What does that mean?’ Zhuo Mai asked.

  ‘I’ve heard our area used to be called Nacangdeba and afterwards it was renamed Shenzha, because the terrain was like a pair of bellows,’ Gongzha explained, looking at the script on the wall. ‘After the Liberation, the government combined our area with Shigatse’s Yayaodi, Bazha, Zhunbutaerma and Jialong into the county we have today.

  ‘The Jialong were many and aggressive and they made their living by going on raids. There was a gang of them active in No Man’s Land. They used to say they were just hunting there, but they were actually looting other areas. After each raid they’d rush back to No Man’s Land and hide their plunder. Then, once the news had died down, they’d take it back to their homes bit by bit. Of course, that’s just hearsay.’

  ‘“As long as the grassland is here, our soldiers will be here. If the grassland dies, we will die.”’ Cuomu read the words quietly. ‘The grassland hasn’t died – we still have new grass every year, and the yaks and sheep still wander everywhere, but these soldiers can’t see it.’

  ‘According to this, the Nacangdeba were invaded by the Jialong and the women and children were sent away,’ Zhou Mai said. ‘So where did the people who now live around Cuoe Lake come from? Are you the descendants of the Jialong?’

  ‘Cuomu’s uncle once told me a story,’ Gongzha replied. ‘He said that the herders of Cuoe Grassland used to live in the Shuanghu area of No Man’s Land; at that time, Cuoe Grassland was occupied by a demon. Every day, the demon would eat children’s hearts with fish meat and he turned the beautiful grassland into a wasteland of sand and stone. After a while, King Gesar could stand it no longer, so he came to Cuoe Grassland and fought the demon. They did battle for three days until finally King Gesar cut off the demon’s head. The grass grew again and the sun returned, and it was then that the herders started to migrate over.’

  ‘That’s just a myth,’ Zhuo Mai said. ‘If the Jialong were in Cuoe, they must have had a reason to leave, right? Did they just give up or were they chased off? Could it be that the Jialong took over the grassland, developed it, and made it what it is now?’

  ‘I remember hearing Aba say that my grandfather’s grandfather was originally from the foot of Mount Tajiapu in No Man’s Land,’ Cuomu said, ‘and that the clan moved here when they discovered the water and the grass were good.’

  ‘My father’s old home was in Shuanghu, near Siling Lake. This is really quite strange: I remember Shida’s family is from Wenbu, and they even had a visit from some Wenbu relatives once. Didn’t they, Cuomu?’

  ‘Yes, they did, and there was a girl with them of about my age, called Danwangmu. She said they lived beside the sacred Dangreyong Lake. Their direction for circumambulation isn’t the same as ours; we go clockwise and they go anti-clockwise,’ Cuomu said.

  ‘Anti-clockwise? So they follow Bon practices rather than Tibetan Buddhism?’ Zhuo Mai asked, looking at Cuomu.

  ‘Probably, seeing as only Bon go anti-clockwise.’ Gongzha looked at the writing on the wall again. The letters were vivid, as if they’d been written yesterday. ‘It says only the soldiers remained and that the old people, the women and the children went to the place Buddha had prepared for them. Which means the Nacangdeba weren’t completely wiped out by the Jialong.’

  ‘So the people living around Cuoe Lake are the descendants of the Nacangdeba who moved back?’ Zhuo Mai asked. He shook his head. ‘In which case, where did all the Jialong on the grassland go?’

  ‘I don’t know. We can have a think about it and ask the clan elder once we get back to the encampment. From what it says here, when the Jialong attacked, the defenders were outnumbered and eventually retreated here. Let’s search carefully and see if there’s any more writing,’ Gongzha said, sweeping his torch over the wall.

  Zhuo Mai took his torch and walked off. He was particularly interested in the corpses; he wanted to figure out exactly how they died and how come the bodies had neither decayed nor fallen over in all the years since.

  ‘Gongzha, Cuomu…’ He gripped his torch and stared at the ground. He called again loudly and as the other two came over, he pointed and said, ‘Look!’

  A few faint letters were visible in the torchlight:

  The smoke is rising and the door to Shambhala has been opened. I must go. Duojilamu, my woman, you must raise our child. When he’s grown, he must avenge his father and drive the Jialong off our grassland.

  ‘There are more here,’ Zhuo Mai said as he checked the ground in front of each corpse. ‘Gongzha, there’s writing in front of each person – are these their last words?’

  ‘It looks like it. They must have written them just before they died. It seems that they died from inhaling some sort of poisonous smoke, and they were all suicides,’ Gongzha said. He walked up to another of the corpses, looked at the words and read: ‘“The Jialong are demons from No Man’s Land; they eat everything. The Buddha will punish them.”’

  Gongzha frowned. ‘They came from No Man’s Land – that makes sense. That group is still around – they hunt Tibetan antelopes and sell their wool.’

  ‘The poachers of today are their descendants?’

  ‘Not all of them. But some are, or that’s what I’ve heard. They mostly stay in No Man’s Land now, because they don’t dare come out raiding anymore. So now th
ey’ve changed to hunting antelopes. It would be difficult to find them.’

  ‘But the No Man’s Land of back then and the No Man’s Land of today that you’re talking about must have been very different places,’ Zhuo Mai said. ‘The population back then was very small and there were many places deep in Changtang where there was no human life at all. The herders were free to move where they wanted and the tents were scattered over a vast area. It was normal not to see anyone for tens of kilometres or even a hundred kilometres.’ His thoughts turned in another direction and he began muttering to himself. ‘What kind of smoke could kill people so peacefully? If the dosage was properly controlled, could it be used as an anaesthetic?’ He was always interested in the medical angle of things.

  ‘Thieves always hide in the places where Buddha’s light does not shine.’ Cuomu leant against Gongzha, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘So many people, all dead in a moment. Why did the Jialong block all the routes off the mountain? To not even give them a single way out – that’s crueller than the wolves.’

  Gongzha squeezed her hand even more tightly. ‘When people turn cruel, they can be ten times worse than any animal on the grassland. Come on, let’s see what else Zhuo’s found. He really is as curious as a lamb.’

  Zhuo Mai was standing stunned in front of the stone chair that towered over the rest. On its back was the symbol of a white ¤ with stark, protruding lines. The person on the chair was sitting cross-legged; the lines on his face were clear and his expression was as serene as if he were alive.

  Gongzha was no longer surprised to see the symbol. From the moment he’d entered the mysterious cave complex, he knew it had something to do with the marking on Kaguo’s forehead, though he still didn’t know what. Were the people who made the cave the remnants of the Nacangdeba? He assumed the person on the chair was the Nacangdeba’s clan leader, but why would the strange ¤ be cut into the back of it? Could it be that the Nacangdeba had used this image to worship Kaguo’s ancestors?

  Gongzha still hadn’t collected his thoughts when Zhuo Mai gave a sudden yell, even louder than before; the sound echoed around the chamber and the light from his torch wavered back and forth as if he’d been frightened by something. ‘Gongzha, you two must come and look at this!’