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or
    evidence of devotion. It was
impossible to tell if they were inhabited.
    While most
of their traveling companions entered brief courses of study with local lamas,
Peter and Kate confined their religious investigations to a few tours of the
major temples, including the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s Memorial Shrine and a
viewing of his mummy in the Central Cathedral. The week provided a relaxing
conclusion to their journey, after the crowds and clamor of the plains; and it
was mercifully undisturbed by any further events like that which had marred
their first night in Dharamsala.
    The
afternoon before their departure, as they were descending from a nearby peak,
Kate looked down the road and saw a procession coming slowly toward them. It
looked like a religious parade.
    “Let’s sit
here,” Peter said, indicating a large granite boulder on which some patient artisan
had painted hundreds of tiny images of an ivory divinity who appeared to have
a thousand arms and a multitude of heads.
    “Who is
that?” Kate asked.
    “Avalokiteshvara.
The Tibetans know him as Chenrezi, the god of compassion. He’s their patron
saint. Each Dalai Lama was supposed to be his incarnation. And here’s his
mantra, the infamous Om mani
padme hum , which translates as something
like, ‘Hail to the jewel in the lotus.’”
    “You know
everything, don’t you, Peter?”
    “Well, I
don’t know what it means,” he said.
    “The jewel
is Buddhism, isn’t it? And the lotus is the world?”
    He shrugged.
“There you go. I know everything, but only superficially.”
    They
clambered up the backside of the boulder and perched on the chill rock as the
procession came slowly up the hill. With it came the unearthly howling of
trumpets, the rapid thumping of a hide drum, and the continual chanting of
several monks. Pheasants cried out in the forest; a splay-winged shadow swooped
over the road and vanished into the trees.
    The main
figure in the procession was a huddled shape seated in a litter between two
long poles. Two strong men carried the litter between them, trudging red-faced
up the hill. Ahead of them went a youth in a claret monk’s robe, carrying a
tall banner embroidered with mystical symbols. Behind the litter came several
more monks, chanting tirelessly. A gray-haired man in tattered clothes walked
at the side of the litter, blowing on a thin trumpet of bone and twirling the
drum in his hand so that two beads strung to the rim of the drum were made to
hit the taut hide like a constant patter of rain.
    On the other
side of the litter marched a man with slumped shoulders and a defeated air.
When he glanced over at the litter, revealing thin features emaciated by grief,
Kate recognized the man who had chased the three-eyed murderer down the stairs
and paused beside her in the hallway.
    Only then
did she realize what rode in the litter.
    She put her
hand on Peter’s arm. “It’s a funeral for the man who was shot,” she said. “It
must be.”
    He didn’t
move; his eyes narrowed. She followed his gaze back to the funeral procession
and saw that the jolting pace had shaken the huddled rider into disarray. He
was wrapped in a white sackcloth that had covered him completely a moment
before; but now the laces had come undone and the sack was falling open. Every
step caused the sack to droop wider. Kate caught sight of a gray head inside
the swaddling.
    As the
procession passed below the boulder, the foremost bearer stumbled in a rut. The
trumpet shrilled in Kate’s ear. The body in the litter sprawled out, limbs
jerking like a marionette’s. She had a glimpse of an old man’s face. The eyes
and mouth were packed with what looked like brown dough. She felt a stirring in
her belly, nausea. The second bearer stumbled in the same rut and the corpse
flopped backward, arms flung out wildly in a semblance of life.
    The dead man
lay back in the litter, one arm having fallen limp across his breast with the
forefinger pointing at the boulder. The