on the floor holding their sides.
It's very difficult to stay angry when a room full of bald guys in orange robes start giggling. Buddhism.
Gaspar made us wait two months before taking us on the special meditation pilgrimage, so it was well into winter before we made that monumental trek. Snow fell so deep on the mountainside that we literally had to tunnel our way out to the courtyard every morning for exercise. Before we were allowed to begin, Joshua and I had to shovel all of the snow out of the courtyard, which meant that some days it was well past noon before we were able to start drilling. Other days the wind whipped down out of the mountains so viciously that we couldn't see more than a few inches past our faces, and Gaspar would devise exercises that we could practice inside.
Joshua and I were not given our blankets back, so I, for one, spent every night shivering myself to sleep. Although the high windows were shuttered and charcoal braziers were lit in the rooms that were occupied, there was never anything approaching physical comfort during the winter. To my relief, the other monks were not unaffected by the cold, and I noticed that the accepted posture for breakfast was to wrap your entire body around your steaming cup of tea, so not so much as a mote of precious heat might escape. Someone entering the dining hall, seeing us all balled up in our orange robes, might have thought he stumbled into a steaming patch of giant pumpkins. At least the others, including Joshua, seemed to find some relief from the chill during their meditations, having reached that state, I'm told, where they could, indeed, generate their own heat. I was still learning the discipline. Sometimes I considered climbing to the back of the temple where the cave became narrow and hundreds of fuzzy bats hibernated on the ceiling in a great seething mass of fur and sinew. The smell might have been horrid, but it would have been warm.
When the day finally came for us to take the pilgrimage, I was no closer to generating my own heat than I had been at the start, so I was relieved when Gaspar led five of us to a cabinet and issued yak-wool leggings and boots to each of us. "Life is suffering," said Gaspar as he handed Joshua his leggings, "but it is more expedient to go through it with one's legs intact." We left just after dawn on a crystal clear morning after a night of brutal wind that had blown much of the snow off the base of the mountain. Gaspar led five of us down the mountain to the village. Sometimes we trod in the snow up to our waists, other times we hopped across the tops of exposed stones, suddenly making our training on the tops of the posts seem much more practical than I had ever thought possible. On the mountainside, a slip from one of the stones might have sent us plunging into a powder-filled ravine to suffocate under fifty feet of snow.
The villagers received us with great celebration, coming out of their stone and sod houses to fill our bowls with rice and root vegetables, ringing small brass bells and blowing the yak horn in our honor before quickly retreating back to their fires and slamming their doors against the cold. It was festive, but it was brief. Gaspar led us to the home of the toothless old woman who Joshua and I had met so long ago and we all bedded down in the straw of her small barn amid her goats and a pair of yaks. (Her yaks were much smaller than the one we kept at the monastery, more the size of normal cattle. I found out later that ours was the progeny of the wild yaks that lived in the high plateaus, while hers were from stock that had been domesticated for a thousand years.)
After the others had gone to sleep, I snuck into the old woman's house in search of some food. It was a small stone house with two rooms. The front one was dimly lit by a single window covered with a tanned and stretched animal hide that transmitted the light of the full moon as a dull yellow glow. I could only make out shapes, not actual objects, but I felt my way around the room until I laid my hand on what