Shangri-La was the name of the Nepalese city in the mountains. It was a holy city where an ancient force field from the future held it in stasis of slow motion, never aging quite as fast as the rest of the world. The caravan of pilgrims with their tribal mountain guides and primitive mountain survival gear and a bunch of furry ox-like creatures the professor had said were aurochs but he was wrong. He didn’t know what they were really called and amid the stories of Yeti the abominable snowman the primeval reference was made and the nickname stuck. The two dozen aurochs were doing wonderfully as they carried canopies, lanterns, ammunition, stoves and firewood for the eight pilgrims to Shangri-La and their self sustaining mountain guides who numbered equal to them but seemed to survive on their own somehow independent of the trappings of civilization brought by the strangers from the lands of white men.
Regen was their leader and carried the maps. He unfolded them in camp and showed them to the professor, the doctor, the scientists and the other expedition members besides their native guides. A Fibonacci-sequence and use of a compass drawing instrument and some math had yielded a retracting nautilus that showed where Shangri-La would be at its epicenter. They all agreed it was worth risking their lives to investigate whether or not it was truly there.
The guides were superstitious and talked of a race of giant beings translated by the professor to be Yer-en. They were usually peaceful, tall and powerful white-furred ape-men of massive proportions. Occasionally the mountain people had run-ins with the creatures but incidents were often sketchy in detail. They would say that a Yer-en had carried off their wife screaming into the night or attacked lone climbers by throwing large snowballs at them to try and knock them off a cliff or even sneaked into a village and smothered a celebrated newborn with the frosty black kiss of the frozen mountainside. Yer-en were blamed for nearly everything that went wrong. A broken ox-cart axle could be blamed on a pot hole called a Yer-en’s footprint. A cheating husband could say a Yer-en made him do it. Gambling debts were considered money owed to a Yer-en. Also Yer-en’s were appeased with cakes in windowsills and revered as holy mountain hermits. Relics of the creatures such as skulls and pelts were kept sacred in monasteries and finally before and during long journeys libations of what the professor called ‘sake’ are made as offerings to the Yer-en and were left in yak bladders unfrozen in small ‘cairns’ as the professor would have it or basically small stacks of rocks in the lee of snowfall. The true purpose is divined to be that these are supplies deliberately left to ‘assist’ someone who is lost and finding their way back home. The alcohol isn’t the best thing scientifically speaking to fuel a body and keep you warm but it seems to and also it won’t be a block of ice when you find it like water would. The clever libations to the Yer-en are thinly disguised supply cache. Why would you want an eight foot tall camouflaged ape-man following you and getting drunk? The guides eventually decided that Yer-en was watching them and warned of avalanches and treacherous glacier country up ahead where the snow falls a hundred feet per night and comes down from the sky in handfuls. The guides went back, presumably partying with Yer-en the whole way back down the mountain. If they arrived home sloshed they could blame Yer-ens for their inebriation. This concept was recalled as the Yeti Fall.
Soon after the guides left Regen and his men began to lose their pack animals one by one to the dangers of the frozen hell. Then half their party and supplies fell into a crevasse between two glaciers and spanned only by a bridge of ice which collapsed after Regen and the professor and the doctor and a scientist had all crossed already.
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They kept going, their supplies dwindling. Out of food and unable to tote the heavy gear without the help of the aurochs they succumbed the hunger, thirst and the cold in turn. Regen who ate the least snow lasted the longest and as he staggered forward, frostbitten and with a frost encrusted beard and his breath becoming less visible as he grew cold and numb saw light. He saw it in the distance and then he reached a small summit and looked below. It was the valley of Shangri-La far below. He had made it. The place glowed strangely as though the dark snow dropping skies didn’t apply to it. Step by step Regen descended until he reached the ancient city. It was in a different time. A time bubble around it held a sky from a primordial and antediluvian decade and day when the sky was bright and sunny. But juxtaposed behind the light from a brilliant sun was the black clouds of the snow mantled mountains beyond. Evidence of the warm sunny day were all around, bright light and warmth but beyond the bubble of space-time trapped in those moments long ago and moving much slower than the world around where glaciers and mountains and dark-skies had grown.
Regen was amazed and so happy that it was real. But then the hallucination wore off. He rolled over and realized he lay at the bottom of a rocky canyon maybe a half a mile into the earth. His legs and back were broken and his skull fractured but he had survived the tumbling and protracted slide into the earth. The angle was so sharp and twisted the flesh searing winds and dunes of snow couldn’t reach him and he lay in the glow of strange blue fungus. He felt something crawl into his mouth, a slug probably. So this was Shangri-La. A warm mist frost in tissue-like-bubbles around the frozen trench.
A sulfur-hot-springs was down here warming this spot as it had since the dawn-of-time. Two strange elements from the center of the earth were present and mixed in the bed of the mineral water. The interaction distorted time and created vast heat which dissipated throughout the many geysers of boiling super-heated-steam eventually reaching the clouds and becoming cold again high in the atmosphere. The wind currents were slight, however, as though the steam carried its own trans-dimensional rules.
Regen laughed and coughed out some blood. He realized that the world around was aging rapidly as he lay there dying. He had maybe an hour left of life. Another slug crawled into his mouth. Maybe longer, he realized. He didn’t feel as though he were dying. The pain was becoming a tingling sensation. Finally his whole body went numb as it would if it had been shocked by an electric field of some kind.
Regen contemplated that he must be in some prehistoric moment long before Shangri-La was built here in the distant future. The distortion was relative. Outside he had seen the future Shangri-La. Once he entered it he was there, days after it opened in the earth. Was this place the Garden-of-Eden, perhaps? Or maybe it was literally the gene-pool. He laughed again and realized his voice sounded younger somehow.
No he had it all wrong. This place wasn’t as he had theorized. The facts added up. Another slug wriggled its way down his throat. It felt wonderful. He was reverse aging.
Not the Gene Pool or Garden but the Fountain-of-Youth. It all made sense to him as his mind became younger and more childlike and the slugs kept feeding him the manna-like-lichen-moss of the cave he found himself in deeper still in the earth. It was now a closed chamber.
Time did work differently and relatively in Shangri-La.
It was true after all, Regen realized as the chamber grew hot and womb like.
Here in Shangri-La time flowed entirely in reverse.