The preoccupation with death and rebirth appeared to form the crux of the Buddhist mindset. It seemed to me that the nomads took refuge in Buddhism as a means of understanding and conquering death. I had realised the clarity with which they accepted the impermanence of life. I had seen the strings of white prayer flags fluttering on the opposite bank of the Machu river and knew that it was a water-burial site. I had heard the terrible tales of the tribeswomen performing sky burial for their dead men on the mountain.

But the process of dying I had heard about seemed as mystical as the shamanic rituals. Certain mystic initiates are capable of maintaining a lucid mind during the dissolving of their personalities. They can even pass into the next life fully conscious. An ordinary man, however, is guided down the path of death by a lama. He explains to the dying man the nature of the journey on which he is about to embark and reassures him. Then the lama's task is to command the spirit out of the top of the man's head with a cry of 'Hik!' followed by 'Phat!' The disembodied entity may then begin its journey through a series of visions, guided by his character and past actions. This is the intermediate state, Bardo. After three days, when the lama has induced the spirit to leave the corpse and abandon its attachment to the world, the body is tied up and carried to the sky burial site. It is dismembered, the organs removed, the limbs cut off, the bones pounded to powder with rock. The dead man's body is a last generous offering to the other sentient beings of the earth: the vultures, wolves and birds. Or the fish who consume a waterborne corpse.

After death a person embraces a new life. If they have accumulated enough merit they will be a good person. If not, they may come back as an ant, or worse. Annay was always careful where she trod. Whatever their state of rebirth, the dead person's name is not spoken in the same way again. I had referred to a late relative of Annay's by his name and had been corrected. I had also seen photographs with faces scratched out. Although the younger generation, more familiar with new technology, accepted pictures of the dead, it seemed that older nomads were unsettled by them and preferred, as they always had, the vividness of a mental picture. I wondered what Amnye and Annay had thought of the pictures I had shown them of my grandmother.

I realised that the intricacies of the Buddhist doctrines were not the main preoccupation of devout people like Annay and Ama-lo-lun. It appeared, as with most nomad women, that their main preoccupation was with living a compassionate existence, reciting the mantra, visiting the monastery. They saw the lama as being like a god, representing the Buddha, and I recognised the importance they attached to the offerings they made to him. Buddhism had brought the nomads morality and spiritual liberation and they worshipped the Buddhist deities, but I knew that the tribesmen's hearts were more closely bound to the mountain gods. Annay was always scolding Amnye for not going to the monastery often enough, but a nomad man needs to feel invincible: he calls upon the mountain warrior for his own protection, in battle against his enemies or the elements. The younger men, like Tsedup's brother Gondo, were especially reliant on the protection of the mountain gods. Gondo would climb Archa and scream to the wind over his fire-offerings for success in gambling. There was no place for a lama in these matters. If Gondo sought refuge in the holy man he would be entering a moral debate and would probably be encouraged to cease his negative actions. The mountain gods were not morally judgemental.

I had been privileged to listen to both the soft murmur of a mantra and to the war-cries of wild men on a mountain peak. If the nomads could live with this rich contradiction, so could I.

Nine. A Trip to Town

It was the first day of autumn, a sad day. Tsedo and Amnye were in serious discussion over breakfast, their conversation riddled with numbers. They were talking about the herd. Today the annual head count was due. Each family member was allowed by law to own only ten yaks, twenty sheep, and half a horse. Though what a nomad could do with half a horse, I had no idea. There were eleven family members in Amnye's tent and now he had a dilemma on his hands. According to his calculations, he had too many animals and today he would have to sell ten yaks, thirty sheep and four and a half horses to the Muslim slaughterers.

It was a difficult task deciding which ones should die. Many had been promised a safe life by the family and could not be sold. My yak, Karee Ma, was one such lucky beast. They knew each animal's name, and I listened as they recited the roll-call and determined their fate. It seemed inconceivable that every sheep could be so clearly identified, since they all looked more or less the same to me, but it added poignancy to the proceedings. Hardest of all to judge was which horse should go. The nomads loved their horses. When I had met Tsedup, he had told me that his family had fifty horses, five hundred yaks and a thousand sheep. But this was only a memory. He was shocked to discover that while he had been in England, the government had introduced new laws to control land division and livestock ownership. The vast herds that used to roam the great grasslands for hundreds of miles were now depleted and had been sectioned off by barbed-wire fences.

At this time of year, the only contented people were the slaughterers. With every nomad bringing animals to town to sell, they controlled the prices. The market would be saturated and such competition meant no profit for a man like Tsedo. For him, there was nothing to be gained but a few paltry yuan. In fact, it was difficult to see how the nomads made their money. I knew that Amnye received a small salary for his post as local councillor and that must have been the family's major source of income. They were big producers of cheese, wool, leather and butter, but they seemed to use most of this for their own subsistence and didn't appear to sell much. The butter was part of their staple diet; any surplus was stored in the family tent, in a skin-covered wooden box for the winter, donated to the monastery, or used to make butter lamps for the altar in the tent. The sheepskins were kept for making tsokwas, the thick winter tsarers, and the wool was spun and woven into dobshair, the textile hanging used to cover the items stored at the back of the tent, or felted to make mattresses, clothes, saddle-blankets or dalin, saddle-bags. The cheese was eaten or stored – it was so hard it didn't go mouldy. Sometimes it was traded for fruit and noodles when the Chinese entrepreneurs' three-wheeled truck brought provisions from the town to the tribe. The yak wool was spun and used for weaving the tents and braiding ropes. Only the occasional yak hide and some sheep's wool had made their way to town, as far as I had observed.

I had recently watched the men complete the shearing. They rounded up the sheep into a corral, which had once been 'houses' for the nomads during the Cultural Revolution. The ugly stone and concrete constructions looked like small railway arches, about twenty in a row. They punctuated the landscape all over Machu, like lines of abandoned gravestones. I found it difficult to believe that these tribal nomads, whose home was the land, had been forced to inhabit such dungeons. But today they had a new function. I had watched the sheep bleat and riot with brainless terror beneath the arches, as the men grabbed their horns and wrestled them, one at a time, to the ground. A man or boy stood on the horns while another sheared swiftly with huge scissors, sharpened with spit and stone. Once the wool had been cut, it was flung on to a huge pile and twisted into long skeins, while the sheep fled, bouncing comically into the air.