Portal Within Shangri-La

The jhankri stepped forward from the throng, as Rabten and Tinley watched excitedly. He swayed with intention, setting his bells, clustered on a knotted cord, a-ringing. Edmund remembered from the ethnographies that he had read that these were tied for meditative purposes. He let out a single note, one which Edmund recognized as C major, the resonant frequency of Earth, as he recalled, he saw it in some Theosophical paper or other.

The jhankri paced around the circle of his faithful, eyeing the squadron with suspicion and his elderly with purpose. Eventually, he called to them, asking if there was one among them who wished to be released from the world of mara. A man of about the jhankri’s own age, missing a few teeth and wearing a saffron robe, came forward. He was dragged away by two large, hirsute men clad in furs. The old man laughed, smiled, as much as he could, and even chatted with his bearers.

Heard from a distance, not because of volume but rather the nature of the acoustics in the sacred space, (shaped by the peaks and valleys about them) was a deep sigh, not just from oxygen escaping the old man's lungs, but of the kind usually associated with relief.

Hours passed in a blur of intuitive seeming tones and incense. Finally, the air took on a heretofore unknown stillness and the jhankri intoned, “he is ready.” Then the burly men returned,each with several birds resembling something between an eagle and a vulture on their arms. In their beaks the birds still clutched scraps of what seemed to be leather.

Choje whispered pointedly to Abdi that, “Those birds represent samsara, the cycle of birth and death, an integral part of the prison of illusion that is Mara.” Turning momentarily from his work with preternatural reflexes, the jhankri responded,

“Indeed, that is why we slay them to denote your friends’ passage out of it and into our sanctuary.” Edmund wondered secretly if it were some sort of dramatized lamentation about “this, their exile,” as his Brethren would call it. He then whirled around again and returned to his rite. At this, the jhankri took a farming implement of some kind, its blade dulled from years of use, and with it, swiftly hacked off the head of the bird, and then the next, and then the next, and so on until seven of them had been killed. Even though most of the blood had dripped into grooves on the floor that seemed to be patterned into concentric circles, some of it still spurted onto his robes, marring the saffron.

Recollecting again the ethnographies, Edmund was struck by the similarities between the jhankri’s calling and his own with the Fellowship. They were both called to render themselves unclean, from the perspectives of their broader communities, to facilitate acts of great positive cosmic import. He felt compelled to marvel at the Deity who was so Benevolent as to allow this sacrifice to manifest across cultures,