China Gray

Part 3: Characters After she left, Matt and I continued our conversation and talked well into the night. We woke the next day long after the sun had risen. We packed up camp, downed some water, and set off to a secluded temple a little bit further up the road. It was a temple that Matt had been to before and that volunteers before him had been to before.             The trail itself was simple. A deep forest and high peaks surrounded us in every direction, blocking any view down the mountain. Arriving at the monastery, we stepped into a small courtyard; to our right was a narrow abode with a dirt floor and a hunched over man tending to a small fire and a pot of water. He sat buried in the room’s shadows with the sparse outlines of a large bed nestled in the abode’s back corner.             To our left, a series of Bodhisattva statues sat only slightly lit from indirect sunlight, their chins glowing gold while the eyes sat in darkness. Beside the building that housed the statues