After the celebration ceremony in memory of his lost teacher, which went on past midnight, Curioso went away. Annette waited for him, fell asleep, woke, fell asleep again. In the light before dawn, he came in, drawn. He embraced her, and then went and sat in the window overlooking the valley. It was very quiet.
"Not to pry, mon cher, but what did happen that went so wrong?"
He smiled grimly and stretched his arms out to loosen his muscles. "Well, it is a bit complicated. Do you remember the monks we saw on the sheltered terrace, just before night fell?"
"Yes, they were making a painting, a mandala, yes?"
"Yes, it is a sand painting. It is a meditative form. It is a world you create, and then you brush it away. The brushing away is the important part."
"Because of impermanence?"
He looked out at the quiet space beginning to unfold again in the early morning, and then said, "Because it is dangerous."
He sighed and continued. "For some teachings, there is the idea of eliminating all temptations, all forms of delusion. For others, there is the idea of using the energies generated by those delusions, because they are so powerful, primal forces."
"Like sex," Annette said.
He looked in at her. "Absolument. These primal energies should not be shunned, that would be foolish, they will erupt again. What one must do is learn to handle them, like a surfer on a crashing wave. And then eliminate them. And one way of handling them is to learn to live in the world created by them. So that is a method, a very powerful, very dangerous method. When you become a student along this very powerful path, you are taught how to create vast worlds in the mind, the world of compassion, say, or the world of strength, or the world of anger. You create each world, its Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, its temples, its buildings, its animals and plants, its roads and cities, all of it, and you live in it. You learn its ways, its powers. And then you must destroy it like a sand painting, or --"
"Or you get locked into it."
"Yes. Or you get locked into it. You are pretty good, ma chere."
"Oh," she shrugged. "It is like the French and Paris. It takes you a long time to realise that there are other places in the world."
He laughed. "Yes. Only we are trying to save Paris, I hope. Anyway, so dangerous is this method and so powerful in the energies it releases, far more dangerous than those scrawlings of Lise Meitner's and yours, that that is why you need a guru, a teacher, for one can spend many years in building one imagined world of enrgy, and eventually lose oneself in it. The teacher is there to make you destroy it, to move you from that lesson in imagining to your next lesson, your next world, from power to compassion, say. I had -- have -- a brother, who came with me to another monastery, after the loss of Mallory, and we embarked together on the teachings, to cope, to learn. After long study, when he was far far ahead of me, he went into retreat in a cave far from where we were studying, and began to build a world, a world of pure whitehot anger. It happened that at that time I had to return to England for some time, and while I was gone the Geshe became deathly ill, he sent assistants, but no one could find him, so no one came to rescue my brother until it was too late. He had gone into the world he had created, and could not come back again. I came back, rescued his body, but the rest of him was gone."
The light of dawn flooded into the window.
"And?"
"And now he is the Black Master. He is bound on creating the world of whitehot anger in reality that he created in vision and that overwhelmed him. He feeds off it. And he grows in his power every day that the world succumbs."
Annette got up and came to the window. It looked so peaceful below. "Ah, mon cher, and so hard, your own brother. And he killed your beloved master too."
Curioso put his hand up against the edge of the open window, as if to keep himself from falling into the depths below. "No, my darling, no. It was I. I was the one who killed him."