Ibrahim took Widow Kang by the wrist, very loosely, fingers cool and light against her pulse, at which sensation her pulse quickened; surely he could feel it. But he had her look into the candle flame, and he spoke in Persian, Arabic and Chinese: low chanting, with no emphasis of tone, a gentle murmur. She had never heard such a voice.

'You are walking in the cool dew of the morning, all is peaceful, all is well. In the heart of the flame the world unfolds like a flower. You breathe in the flower, slowly in, slowly out. All the sutras speak through you into this flower of light. All is centred, flowing up and down your spine like the tide. Sun, moon, stars in their places, wheeling around us, holding us.'

In like manner he murmured on and on, until Kang's pulse was steady at all three levels, a floating, hollow pulse, ber breathing deep and relaxed. She truly appeared to Ibrahim to have left the room, through the portal of the candle flame. He had never had anyone leave him so quickly.

'Now,' he suggested, 'you travel in the spirit world, and see all your lives. Tell me what you see.'

Her voice was high and sweet, unlike her usual voice. 'I see an old bridge, very ancient, across a dry stream. Bao is young, and wears a white robe. People follow me over the bridge to a… a place. Old and new.'

'What are you wearing?'

'A long… shift. Like night garments. It's warm. People call out as we pass.'

'What are they saying?'

'I don't understand it.'

'Just make the sounds they make.'

'In sha ar am. In sha ar am. There are people on horses. Oh there you are. You too are young. They want something. People cry out. Men on horses approach. They're coming fast. Bao warns me ' She shuddered. 'Ah!' she said, in her usual voice. Her pulse became leathery, almost a spinning bean pulse. She shook her head hard, looked up at Ibrahim. 'What was that? What happened?'

'You were gone. Seeing something else. Do you remember?'

She shook her head.

'Horses?'

She closed her eyes. 'Horses. A rider. Cavalry. I was in trouble!'

'Hmm.' He released her wrist. 'Possibly so.'

'What was it?'

He shrugged. 'Perhaps some… Do you speak any – no. You said already that you did not. But in this hun travel, you seemed to be hearing Arabic.'

'Arabic?'

'Yes. A common prayer. Many Muslims would recite it in Arabic, even if that was not their language. But.

She shuddered. 'I have to rest.'

'Of course.'

She looked at him, her eyes filling with tears. 'I… can it be why me, though ' She shook her head and her tears fell. 'I don't understand why this is happening!'

He nodded. 'We so seldom understand why things happen.'

She laughed shortly, a single 'Ho!' Then: 'But I like to understand.'

'So do I. Believe me; it is my chief delight. Rare as it is.' A small smile, or grimace of chagrin, offered for her to share. A shared understanding, of their solitary frustration at understanding so little.

Kang took a deep breath and stood. 'I appreciate your assistance. You will come again, I trust?'

'Of course.' He stood as well. 'Anything, madam. I feel that we have just begun.'

She was suddenly startled, looking through him. 'Banners flew, do you remember?'

'What?'

'You were there.' She smiled apologetically, shrugged. 'You too were there.'

He was frowning, trying to understand her. 'Banners…' He seemed lost himself for a while. 'I…' He shook his head. 'Maybe. I recall it used to be, when I saw banners, as a child in Iran, it would mean so much to me. More than could be explained. As if I was flying.'

'Come again, please. Perhaps your bun soul too can be called forth.' He nodded, frowning still, as if still in pursuit of a receding thought, a banner in memory. Even as he said his farewells and left, he was still distracted.

He returned within the week, and they had another session 'inside the candle' as Kang called it. From the depths of her trance she burst into speech that neither of them understood – not Ibrahim as it happened, nor Kang when he read back to her what he had written down.

He shrugged, looking shaken. 'I will ask some colleagues. Of course it may be some language totally lost to us now. We must concentrate on what you see.'

'But I remember nothing! Or very little. As you recall dreams, that slip away on waking.'

'When you are actually inside the candle, then. I must be clever, ask the right questions.'

'But if I don't understand you? Or if I answer in this other tongue?'

He nodded. 'But you seem to understand me, at least partly. There must be translation in more than one realm. Or there may be more to the hun soul than has been suspected. Or the tendril that keeps you in contact with the travelling hun-soul conveys other parts of what you know. Or it is the po soul that understands.' He threw up his hands: who could say.

Then something struck her, and she put her hand to his arm. 'There was a landslide!'

They stood together in silence. Faintly the air quivered.

He went away puzzled, distracted. At every departure he left bemused, and at every return he was fairly humming with ideas, with anticipation of their next voyage into the candle.

'A colleague in Beijing thinks it may be a form of Berber that you are speaking. At other times, Tibetan. Do you know these places? Morocco is at the other end of the world, the west end of Africa, in the north. It was Moroccans who repopulated al Andalus when the Christians died.'

'Ah,' she said, but shook her head. 'I was always Chinese, I am sure. It must be an old Chinese dialect.'

He smiled, a rare and pleasant sight. 'Chinese in your heart, perhaps. But I think our souls wander the whole world, life to life.'

'In groups?'

'People's destinies intertwine, as the Quran says. Like threads in your embroideries. Moving together like the travelling races on Earth the Jews, the Christians, the Zotti. Remnants of older ways, left without a home.'

'Or the new islands across the Eastern Sea, yes? So we might have lived there too, in the empires of gold?'

'Those may be Egyptians of ancient times, fled west from Noah's flood. Opinion is divided.'

'Whatever they are, I am certainly Chinese through and through. And always have been.'

He regarded her with a trace of his smile in his eye. 'It does not sound like Chinese that you speak when inside the candle. And if life is inextinguishable, as it seems it might be, you may be older than China itself.'

She took a deep breath, sighed. 'Easy to believe.'

The next time he came to put her under a description, it was night, so they could work in silence and darkness; so that the candle flame, the dim room and the sound of his voice would be all that seemed to exist. It was the fifth day of the fifth month, an unlucky day, the day of the festival of hungry ghosts, when those poor preta who had no living descendants were honoured and given some peace. Kang had said the Surangama Sutra, which expounded the rulai zang, a state of empty mind, tranquil mind, true mind.

She made the purification of the house rituals, and fasted, and she asked Ibrahim to do the same. So when the preparations were finally finished, they sat alone in the stuffy dark chamber, watching a candle burn. Kang entered into the flame almost the moment Ibrahim touched her wrist, her pulse flooding, a yin in yang pulse. Ibrahim watched her closely. She muttered in the language he could not understand, or perhaps another language yet. There was a sheen on her forehead, and she seemed distraught.

The Surangama Sutra: spuriously Sanskrit, originally written in Chinese and titled 'Lengyan jing'. The awareness it describes, changzhi, is sometimes called Buddha nature, or tathagatagarbha, or 'mind ground'. The sutra claims that devotees can be 'suddenly awakened' to this state of high awareness.