They are visiting yet another stuppa. This one is swarmed by monkeys.

“Rach,” he says. “Rach. Rachel, I’m tired.”

She doesn’t hear him. She’s nose deep in her copy of Lonely Planet. So he just stops. The foot traffic, monks and pilgrims and tourists, circumnavigates clockwise around him.

A month in Nepal had seemed a good idea. Rachel had accumulated a month off from her analytics job with RBS. He had finally finished his dissertation, eighteen months late.

“A month to escape the cacophony. To live outside the bubble,” he said, sitting in her kitchen. They were sharing a bottle of whiskey; it was Friday night. They were sitting on the countertops, facing one another. “To escape the solitude of devices. I’m surrounded by stuff that’s supposed to make me less lonely and all it does it make me lonely.”

“So let’s go someplace,” she said, pouring more whiskey into her glass; she drank it neat, no ice. “Someplace cut off.”

So Nepal had seemed a good idea. But now he missed spending his entire Saturday drinking beer and watching football. And Rachel complained incessantly about the bugs, about the sweat, about the lack of hot showers…about everything, really. Truthfully, he's right there with her; if he smells curry once more, he might vomit. He craves fried food, slathered in ketchup.

He slumps to the ground. Rachel’s somewhere halfway around the stuppa, swallowed by the crowd. The pilgrims and tourists circle, some chanting, some photographing. It's impossible to discern one from another. The tourists have adopted the garb of the pilgrims - the robes and woven hats and prayer flags - and the pilgrims are enamored of technology, the ability to document their journey. What he‘s feeling, he thinks, is in fact a deeper loneliness than the solitude of devices. That was like being stranded in the desert: at least there he had solid ground under his feet. This is like foundering in the middle of the ocean, flailing his feet for something and finding only bottomless leagues.

A monkey skitters up to him, mucus drizzling down its tiny snout. He takes out his camera, snaps a few photographs. Here he is, discovering that the life he despised is, really, the life he wants. Or, and perhaps this is worse, it’s the only life that he is capable of living anymore.

Clive is always falling behind, forcing her to come back for him, forcing her to drag him along at a reasonable pace. She tries to find him in the crowd, closing her guide book. Nowhere to be found. She’ll go on without him then. She traces her fingers along the prayer wheels, their bronze skins smoothed by generations of fingers reaching out, turning them. Clive lectures her about materialism, about her being so spoiled. Yet he’s the first one in line, every morning, to get on the hostel’s computer.

A pretty young monk in vibrant maroon robes catches her eye and smiles at her. Rachel returns the smile, curtly. The monk, her head shaved, takes Rachel by the hand.

“You look lost,” she says in nearly perfect English.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re doing it wrong,” the monk says, still gripping her hand. “Like this. Slower.”

Rachel shuts her eyes, lets the monk guide her in a gradual parabola around the temple. She hears the scrape and skirr of feet, the prayer wheels whirring. Copper bowls sing their electric elegies from the surrounding balconies. They resound and thud, deep and varied as the voices of men. The monk’s palms are clammy. Wind gently tumbles down from the Himalayas, chilled, and the prayer flags whip, unfurl, slowly tatter.

She feels nothing, as if some vast presence moves through her seeking a place to hide, but finding only eroded surfaces and closed rooms.

She opens her eyes.

Cloud shadows swim and undulate over the stuppa’s gold dome, its elaborate wooden screens.

“Do you feel anything?” she asks the monk, unexpectedly.

“Yes.”

“What?”

She laughs. It’s the laugh of a teenage girl, flirtatious without intending to be. “Something,” she says, shrugging. “It has no name.“ She hooks her arm through Rachel’s.

“Do you feel it all the time?”

“All the time?”

Rachel nods. She sees Clive, photographing a monkey, talking to it, resembling a fucking lunatic.

“No, not all the time. It vanishes. But it always comes back. But I get scared, when it’s gone, that maybe it won’t.”

“Come back?”

“Yes.”

The monk steers Rachel away from the foot traffic, which occupies an invisible gravitational field, methodically orbiting the stuppa and its flags and wheels. They descend a stairwell, into a dark room that smells of incense. It takes her eyes a moment to adjust, and in that moment she’s stung with fear, awaiting the blow of a knife or a club, expecting to be incapacitated. She would never be this trusting in London. Or if the girl weren’t dressed in a monk’s robes. Her robes looked awfully nice, now that she thinks of it. She stops in the middle of the room, her heart drumming and throbbing through her neck. She suddenly wants, very badly, to be sitting at her desk in her anonymous glass cube in central London, surrounded by anodyne lights and benign faces, the quiet logic of commerce. What she needs is the reliability of analytics, numbers to be sorted; that’s the labyrinth to be lost within.

“I’m sorry,” she says, before bolting back up to street level. She’s briefly blinded again, this time by sunlight. The singing bowls resound, plangent as bells. A hand grabs her by the shoulder, and she jumps. It’s the monk, of course. She hands Rachel prayer flags, wrapped securely in plastic. Rachel rummages through her pockets and produces five hundred rupees. But the monk demurs, backing into the dark maw of the stairwell.

Rachel strides across the swollen vein of pilgrims, forever circling. Clive’s still sitting, chatting with monkeys.

“A peace offering,” she says, holding the prayer flags out. He looks up to her and smiles. They met like this. He was sitting on the ground at Cambridge, writing. Rachel is not a bold person, but it was one of the first days of spring, warm and bright, and she felt moved by some spirit - that’s how she told it to him after the fact - to ask this funny, reposed boy with a big nose and big glasses, what he was writing. And he looked up and gave her that smile, the one he gives her now, and she thought - though she isn’t usually prone to such grandiose flights of romance - that this was the man she would marry.

“I’m writing a poem,” he said.

“A poem about what?”

“Why don’t you sit down and I’ll read it to you.”

So she had.

Now, he pulls out his camera. The monkeys disperse.

“Clive, no. Don’t. Do you have to document every fucking little thing? Can’t you just let some things go?”

He takes the photo anyway. She tosses the prayer flags into his lap and opens her guide book.

“Hey. I’m sorry. You looked beautiful. Very beautiful.”

“That’s impossible.” She closes the book. “I haven’t showered in three days. My face is breaking out, terribly. I’m bloated from all this fucking curry. My clothes are covered in dirt and grime and god knows what else. I stink like shit, like literal shit, like everything else in this city. I am not beautiful. Not now. And you are not allowed to think otherwise.”

“Well, I respectfully disagree.”

They follow a long broken causeway that traces the rim of a valley. The highway is clogged with pilgrims and travelers moving in both directions. The road, which is being widened, is full of rubble and debris. The houses and buildings along the way resemble faces whose noses and lips have been abscised. It is the eighth day of Dashain. In the courtyards at roadside are the dismembered corpses of goats and water buffaloes. The stench of blood and flesh is overwhelming. The bodies of the water buffaloes are imposing and immense. Men with curved blades work quickly to flay and quarter the corpses. Impromptu markets spring up around the dead animals, gatherings marked by pools of viscous black blood. Hunks of meat are passed between men. The crowd presses slowly forward between the rubble and the dead. There are also makeshift altars erected along the highway, incandescent pujas where men sit and pray, and where women lovingly twine marigold blossoms into vibrant vermillion garlands.

And what would be a really interesting story - if I were a more courageous writer, or more diligent, or more curious - would be a story about one of these women. Take for instance, Amdowa Jamyang, who is slipping a garland over Rachel’s head while Clive takes a photograph. Jamyang was born sometime around 1935 to a nomadic tribe of Golok Tibetans. Her father, like most Goloks, was a part time shepherd and full time bandit. In 1941, when Ma Bofang launched his seventh, and final, offensive against the Tibetan people she watched her father get his eyes cut out because he refused to pray to the east, and Mecca. That is one of her earliest memories. That night, after her father and the other men of the tribe were decapitated and their bodies thrown into a ditch, the women of the tribe were forced to dance, by torchlight, on the bodies of their husbands and sons while the warlord and his lieutenants watched, clapping, singing, before they opened fire with their sub machine guns and mowed down Jamyang’s mother and the other women. While Bofang marched further into the interior, Jamyang and the surviving children were left to fend for themselves. They wandered. Eventually they made their way to Lhasa, where Jamyang settled and soon took up studying at Sera monastery. She spent long afternoons in the courtyard, debating. Then came Mao and the seventeen point plan. People starved in the streets, their ribs exposed, skinny as dogs. Jamyang and a few other nuns fled for a monastery in Nyemo. She remembers sitting in the back of a truck, whipped by wind, and seeing plumes of smoke rising above the plateau as the monasteries of Lhasa burned.

I should note that by now Rachel has lost Clive behind her in the crowd. She keeps scanning the unfamiliar faces pushing up behind her, looking for the one face she knows. Clive, meanwhile, is lost in his camera. He regrets, in the first days of the trip, symbolically throwing his IPhone into the Koshi river, a gesture that already seems foolish and painfully puerile. Plus, he desperately wishes he could upload some of these photos directly to Instagram.

In 1962, Jamyang and five other nuns paid a guide to sneak them out of Tibet and into Nepal. They packed lightly and left under the guise of a medical trip to Shigaste. In Shigaste they spent a week camping in the forest while their guide scoured the city for transit. To avoid being detected, they couldn’t make a fire. They subsisted on rice porridge. From there they spent three days packed into the bed of a truck, driving over broken roads and phantom roads on the way to Old Tingri. They were buried beneath hay and goat skins, and had only a cup of water between them for the three tumultuous days. There was enough room for one woman to unfurl her body for a few minutes or hours - who could tell the difference between minutes or hours under there? - at a time. The other four lay coiled like snails or snakes. They had to piss and shit and sleep where they lay. The stench was fetid, and soon all five were vomiting, too. Jamyang had made this journey once by train, as a girl, and it had seemed the most magical, incredible thing at the time, the country rolling by. While her muscles cramped and her stomach roiled, she tried to recall that journey. It took enormous concentration, considering the discomfort and the smells and sounds of her friends retching, but eventually she remembered an image from that journey: the cliffs and the chatoyant waters of the lake outside Golmud. Shortly after that she remembered the countryside's shallow rivers that were splayed upon the landscape like the veins on the insides of her wrists. She remembered the steppe and the distant mountains like sleeping bodies, and the awesome clouds like canyons or imaginary cities. She lost herself in hallucinations. Time bent in on itself so that a single second seemed denser than the bottom of the ocean, and then, a heartbeat later, it expanded, broader than the ever expanding universe. When they finally arrived, Old Tingri was a wasteland, an outpost at the end of the world. It was the most forlorn place anyone could imagine. Set between stunted, squalid mountains, it was literally one road with one line of buildings to both the north and south of the road. The buildings were no more than shanties or huts, their walls graffitied and crumbling. Drifts of trash accumulated like snow upon any open ground. Stray, mangy dogs roamed and picked through the garbage.

In case you’re wondering, right now I have the English - who could just as easily be Americans from New York, or French from Paris, or Canadians from Toronto, or Australians from Melbourne - ascending the valley’s leeward side, driven forward by the momentum of the crowd. Rachel is gripping Clive’s hand the way an acrophobe holds onto the railing at the top of a tall building. It’s approaching dusk. Clive has an unexpected erection. Kaleidoscopic kites fly over the city’s hilly, flat-roofed skyline. Oil lamps burn in the temples and pagodas. Katmandu, the coruscant, crepuscular city.

From Old Tingri the nuns walked south, into the towering Rongxiaxiang gorge. They walked for fifteen days along the barren slopes, skirting the bones of goats and yaks, crawling on hand and knee over fields of broken scree. They ate the sparse shrubs that grew on the gorge’s walls. They traveled, mostly, by night. One night, while they were walking, Jamyang saw what she thought was a fire burning behind them, back up the valley. The sight filled her with terror. After a moment the light snuffed out, and she thought, I’m hallucinating. The next night, Jamyang fell behind the group. It was a moonless night. The landscape in front of her was lunar. It was craters of black and deeper black. The sky was a tapestry of stars. Far below, reflecting the stars and shimmering, was a soundless river. She couldn’t see the silhouettes of her friends in front of her. She moved quickly to catch up, fearing she would be left behind. Suddenly a man stopped her. His features were obscured by the night. He put a hand on her shoulder. He turned her around, and pointed her in the opposite direction. At dawn, she found her friends, asleep. At some point, she supposed, they must have crossed the border. The next night, she saw another fire behind them. They were being followed. They started to move during the daytime. Jamyang and the other nuns were constantly checking behind them, looking for movement against the barren landscape. They would mistake rocks for human forms, or human forms for rocks. Jamyang’s mind was too exhausted to make sense of the situation. She would stare at a rock for enormous swaths of time, unable to discern if it was moving or not. The next day, they were unable to deceive themselves. Those small shapes had grown bigger. They were people, moving with alacrity, in their direction. For most of the day, the guide urged them on, and the nuns, whose shoes had long since worn away, crawled with bloody, bruised feet over the rocks as quickly as they could. But it was no use. The party gained on them, and gained. Eventually the nuns’ spirits broke. One of them collapsed in exhaustion. “It’s hopeless,” she said. “They’re going to catch us.” What could they possibly want with five nuns? Jamyang wondered. The rest of the nuns collapsed, too. All they could do was wait while the silhouettes of three men grew more distinct against the horizon.

In her guide book Rachel locates the blurb she wants. It’s a walking tour that will take them off the main drag. They spend five minutes crisscrossing a block, squeeing through the blanket of people, looking for a small passageway between buildings. Some of the crowd is chanting now. The prayer bowls are rattling and humming like great voices of the dead coming up from the depths of the earth. They find the alleyway. It’s through a small, ornate gate that they have to duck to fit through. The passage is dimly lit by paper lanterns, and less crowded than the main street. They’ve forgotten about Jamyang - who was really just window dressing, roadside texture, a breath of authenticity as I send my two comfortable, white protagonists on their rather easy journey to salvation - and neither of them will ever think about her again. But Rachel will remember the carvings on the first gate, the Indian faces agape with horror or pleasure. And Clive will remember the way Rachel instinctively pulled him to her as they moved further from the main street, further from that flowing conduit of pilgrims and into the quiet, fragrant depths of this dank, uric alley.

The three men were Maoists. They carried a tattered red banner with them, which seemed quite a waste of energy. Their clothes and boots were covered in a patina of grey dust, the same grey dust that blanketed the nuns and their guide. The Maoists leader was the shortest one, a stocky petulant man who spoke quickly, sharply, in a clipped dialect that Jamyang could barely understand. His face was chapped with wind. It struck her as handsome. The other two were boys, brothers probably, skinny tall kids with wispy moustaches and coats that were too short for their torsos. The leader talked to the guide, peppering him with questions, and every so often the Maoist would bury the butt of his rifle in the guide’s gut, or crack it over his back. Soon the guide was coughing blood. One of the nuns was whimpering. We have no money, she kept whispering, we have nothing, absolutely nothing. One of the brothers finally walked over and kicked her with the toe of his boot, shattering her jaw. She lapsed in and out of consciousness. The three Maoists conferred. The leader motioned to one of the nuns with the muzzle of his rifle. “Go on,” the others whispered. “Go on.” It was an opalescent day. The river far below them was prismatic. The first nun knelt down, her hands folded in her lap. The leader pressed the gun into the back of her neck. Before Jamyang could muster the strength to say anything the shot echoed between the walls of the valley, dissipating and reverberating, mutating, and the girl’s body tumbled soundlessly down the gorge. The leader motioned for another one of the nuns. “Wait,” Jamyang said, standing. “Wait.” The leader looked at her quizzically. “You?” he asked. “No,” she said. “Not here.” The leader let his gun fall to the rocks. He took a knife out, a long blunt blade, and pressed it against the back of her neck and led her behind an outcropping of rocks. He undressed her. He licked her all over. She remembers the heat of his tongue. The two brothers came back, too, to watch, while the leader bent Jamyang away from him, her bare knees eviscerated on the rocks. He fucked her quickly, and she bled everywhere. Then he let the two brothers take their turns with her and then he fucked her again. After it was over he took the blade and he stuck it into her cunt as far it would go. The whole time she’d refused to scream, but she let out high pitched gasp, a sound she couldn’t have imagined herself or anyone else ever making. When she regained consciousness the Maoists had gone; the guide had joined them. The three surviving nuns had made a fire and they had cauterized Jamyang’s wound. They burned their dead sister during the night. The next day they walked south without any hope of emerging from the valley. That night, on the wind, Jamyang could smell the sweet, fecund aroma of forest. Two days later they reached Namdu, which was little more than a collection of rice terraces and shacks. They spent a week there amongst the high valley rhododendrons that were flowering, the wild roses, and the endless terraces that were thousands of years old and would outlive all of them. It was an architecture that could not be more perfect, Jamyang thought. And then she thought of the Maoist’s tongue on her skin. Such warmth against the cold. She would remember that every single day until she died.

The English find yet another gate. This gate is even smaller than the last one, even older and more Baroque. No one seems to be paying it any mind.

“I’ll go first,” Clive says. He slips his body through the egress. It’s like sneaking into a basement window. Inside there is no light but for a very frail, sepulchral glow from the alleyway. On the far side of the passage there is a brighter, but still sickly light. He can’t tell how wide the passage is, or how high, or if there’s anyone in here.

“Hello?” he calls and his voice echoes hollowly, dissolving into the darkness. He helps Rachel through the gate. Slowly his eyes are beginning to adjust. The passage is about eight feet high, and as wide as a small river.

“What is this?” Rachel asks.

“What does your book say?”

“I can’t read in the dark.”

“Oh. Well what do we do?”

“Come on,” she says. They’re utterly alone. Rachel leads him by the hand through the gothic silence towards the far opening. He can feel her heart racing in the palm of her hand. They stop at the threshold of this last gate. There is nothing between them now but silence.

Rachel steps through first.

“Wow,” she says quietly, as if to herself. “Wow.”

“What? Hey, Rachel, what? Rach? Rachel, are you there? What is it?”

All he can do is step through. Inside is something that he will remember for the rest of his life.