Beautiful Ghosts

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There are sounds in Tibet heard nowhere else in the world. Hollow moans inexplicably roll down the slopes of snowcapped peaks. Rumbles like thunder course through valleys under cloudless skies. On moonlit nights in the mountain wilderness Shan Tao Yun had heard tiny ringing tones floating down from the stars.

At first, lying on his gulag prison bunk, Shan had felt fear at hearing such eerie sounds. Later he had decided they had to be the workings of the thin, high altitude atmosphere and the wind, of shifting ice formations and temperature changes between summits and valleys, had concluded there were scientific explanations. But after five years Shan was no longer certain. After so long in Tibet, he had abandoned most of his prior beliefs about the workings of the world.

Certainly the wrenching sound that now rose across the bowl in the mountains could have no explanation in the physical world. A young woman standing near Shan groaned, clapped her hands to her ears, and ran away. The first time he had heard the sound that came from the red-robed man sitting thirty feet away, Shan, too, had shuddered and wanted to flee. Throat chanting, the monks called the strange grinding moan, but Shan preferred the description used by his old friend and former cellmate Lokesh. Soul rattling, Lokesh called what Surya, the old monk, was doing, explaining that in the world below, souls were often so undeveloped that the only time the sound was heard was in those near death as the soul struggled for release. But in Tibet no one spoke in fearful tones of the death rattle. Here the sound was for the living. Here the devout had learned to make souls speak without tongues.

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