The Abominable: A Novel

Friday, May 15, 1925

The high priest comes for us—I can’t say “wakes us” because neither J.C. nor I has slept a minute all night—sometime around 4:30 a.m. Norbu Chedi has chosen to sleep outside in the cold and wind, and I can’t say I blame him. The candle the priest is holding, like so many others in the Rongbuk Monastery, consists of ghee butter in a tiny bowl. It smells terrible.

I’ve realized through the endless night that I hate the smell of everything in this supposedly sacred place. It’s not because of filth—Rongbuk Monastery is one of the cleanest places I’ve seen in all of Tibet—but rather because of some mixture of the underlying scent of unwashed bodies (Tibetans tend to bathe once a year, in the autumn), the reeking ghee lamps, a heavy musky odor of incense, and the very stones of the building, which seem to have a coppery smell, like freshly spilled blood. I chastise myself for this last thought, for the Tibetan Buddhists here are nothing if not nonviolent. In the beyuls nearby—the sacred valleys made loci of dharma energy by the white magic of Guru Rinpoche so many centuries ago—the animals have been left unmolested for so many generations, the Deacon has told us, that undomesticated mountain sheep will come into your tent, wild swans will come to eat out of your hand, and the white wolf of the Himalayas is said not to kill his prey there.

A monk appears in the dimness, and we follow him and his flickering ghee lamp through the labyrinth of rooms. Norbu Chedi is still knuckling his eyes as a second priest joins us.

I’d assumed that the funeral rites would be in the monastery proper, but the priests lead us out a back door and down a path worn into the very stone. Our silent procession passes through a maze of high boulders, and we begin climbing. Wherever this ceremony is going to be held, it’s at least half a mile from the monastery.

Finally we stop in an open area where four Tibetans—very poor by the look of their rags—wait near a strange flat stone. Behind the large altar stone (for so I think of it), higher boulders rise on edge and seem to have some sort of large gargoyles carved into them.

The first priest speaks, and Norbu Chedi translates: “The priest says that these four men are the grandfather, the two sons, and the grandson from the family of the Ngawang Tenzin, and they are the Breakers of the Dead for Babu Rita. The priest says that you may sit there during the ceremony.” Norbu Chedi gestures to a long, flat boulder and turns to leave.

“Wait!” says Jean-Claude. “Aren’t you going to stay for the ceremony?”

Norbu speaks over his shoulder. “I cannot. I am not of Babu Rita’s family. And I do not choose to see a sky burial.” He continues on into the dark maze of boulders, disappearing with the two acolytes who’d led us here.

It’s getting vaguely light in the east now, but it’s going to be a cloudy, cold day. I’ve brought an extra sweater which I’d tugged on during the night, but neither it nor my flannel shirt nor the thin Norfolk jacket keeps me warm. I wish to hell I’d brought my Finch duvet in my rucksack rather than just a few bars of chocolate and the sweater. I see that J.C. is also shivering.

We nod a greeting to the Ngawang Tenzins—an old man, presumably the grandfather, with white bristles sprouting everywhere on his wrinkled face, two overweight, middle-aged men with only two eyebrows between them, and a rail-thin boy who might be a teenager but who looks very young. None of the Ngawang Tenzins shows any response to our nods. We seem to be waiting for someone.

Eventually four other priests, obviously higher in the monkish hierarchy than the acolytes who led us here, appear from the boulder maze. The monastery itself is out of sight somewhere downhill behind us. For some reason, I’d expected Dzatrul Rinpoche himself to officiate at the sky burial. But evidently the mere Sherpa of white sahibs doesn’t rate funeral officiating by the Holy Lama and reincarnation of Padma Sambhava.

Behind these priests come four lower-caste acolytes carrying the body of Babu Rita, still on the improvised stretcher on which we’d brought him to the monastery. The priests have the four ends of the litter on their shoulders, and the white tent canvas that had served as a shroud for Babu has been replaced by a white gauze, perhaps silk.

They set the stretcher on the broad, low stone around which the Ngawang Tenzin family—whose title Norbu Chedi had interpreted as “Breakers of the Dead”—stand waiting.

Meanwhile, the predawn light has come up enough that I now see that what I thought were gargoyles carved into the tall boulders behind the altar stone are nothing of the kind. They’re living bearded vultures. Huge ones. They do not move. Their rapacious gazes remain fixed on the small form under the white gauze sheet.

J.C. and I stand there in a brief but freezing drizzle while the four priests and the four acolytes sing their harmony-free chants while two of the high priests circle the great stone holding Babu Rita’s shroud-wrapped body, occasionally sprinkling some white powder onto it.

Finally the priests quit chanting and step back into the shadows of the boulder maze where the stretcher-bearer acolytes wait in silence. But no one leaves. The three generations of the Ngawang Tenzin family—the Breakers of the Dead—have stayed respectfully removed from the stone circle, barely visible in the shadows, through the entire ceremony.

“Is that it?” I whisper to Jean-Claude. “Is the sky burial over?”

“I don’t think so,” my friend whispers in turn. I sense something ominous in his voice.

The Ngawang Tenzins open several tanned leather bags and black cloths that are filled with sharp-edged tools: long, curved filleting knives, meat cleavers, handsaws, a small axe, a large hatchet, and other blades as well as massive stone-headed hammers.

Immediately they set to work.

They pull off the white shroud to show poor Babu Rita naked beneath the sheet. His brown form, lying on his back, palms down, eyes already somewhat sunken into their sockets, looks very small indeed. J.C. and I instinctively look away, trying to afford our Sherpa friend a shred of dignity. We needn’t have bothered.

The grizzled grandfather Ngawang Tenzin works quickly with a long filleting blade in one hand and a large hatchet in the other. In less time than it takes to write about it, he’s cut off both of Babu’s hands, then both feet, and then decapitates him with two strong blows of the hatchet.

The middle-aged Ngawang Tenzin hacks and saws off what is left of Babu Rita’s arms and legs. The sound of the saw cutting through bone and joints echoes off the high boulders. The teenaged Ngawang Tenzin now gets busy, using a smaller hatchet to cut off the dead Sherpa’s fingers, then using one of the stone hammers to smash those fingers into even smaller pieces. And then the pieces are pounded into pulp.

The three older men are now working on Babu’s torso. Our Sherpa comrade’s heart, lungs, liver, intestines, and other internal organs are unceremoniously scooped out and tossed into a stone bowl. The grandfather Breaker of the Dead uses a metal bar to crack the ribs into pieces. Flesh is flensed from bone. The Ngawang Tenzin men and boy turn what’s left of Babu Rita onto his front and pry and chop and leverage away what had been his vertebrae. These they also smash and mash. The sounds these efforts make are…unique.

When all the morsels are small enough and pulverized enough, the boy has the honor of tossing the pieces, one at a time, to the waiting vultures. The ugly carrion eaters will flap down to a piece that’s dropped between their high boulders, but there’s none of the usual vulture fighting and flapping associated with their dining on the dead I’ve heard described in Africa or somewhere. It’s as if these bearded vultures, old veterans of sky burials, know that there will be enough to go around.

When Babu Rita has been reduced to bite-sized pieces—including his head and skull pounded flat, the eyes gouged out and thrown to the waiting vultures, his brain mashed to a gray gruel by the teenaged Breaker of the Dead—they wash off the worst gore from the butcher’s stone with several pails of water thrown across it.

And then the four Breakers of the Dead leave. The eight monks and acolytes from the monastery have already left—sometime while J.C. and I were watching the butchers’ work in silent horror.

Jean-Claude nods and we also leave, making a wide arc around the monastery proper, silently joining Norbu Chedi down the hill a bit, where he waits with our three ponies. No one says a word as we begin kicking the little ponies in the ribs to hurry them back north toward Base Camp and into the maw of a coming storm.

In the past, the trip between Rongbuk Monastery and Base Camp on our little ponies has taken us less than two hours. But today in the whirling, blinding snow, even with the strong, cold wind at our backs, it takes us more than three.

Neither J.C. nor I speaks during the first half of the trip home.

Finally Norbu Chedi says, “I have seen several sky burials, Sahibs. I did not wish to see another.”

Jean-Claude and I have nothing to say to that.

In the last hour, as we approach the half-frozen river not far below the moraine and Base Camp, J.C. says to me, “I suppose it makes sense, culturally, practically, since the ground in most of Tibet is frozen solid ten months of the year.”

“Yeah,” I say. But I don’t really mean it.

After a long silence, Jean-Claude turns to me. When he’s sure that we’re out of earshot of Norbu Chedi, who’s gone ahead, he whispers, “If I buy it on this mountain, Jake, make sure I’m buried in a crevasse or just left where I lie. All right?”

“I promise,” I say. “And you do the same for me, okay?”

J.C. nods and we say nothing else during the last fifteen minutes of our snowy pony ride to Base Camp.