'Look,' she would say, 'there is no way to mark the sounds of Chinese in this alphabet, not really. And no doubt the same is true the other way around!' She gestured at the rivers' confluence. 'You have said the two peoples can mix like the waters of these two rivers. Maybe so. But see the ripple line where the two meets. See the clear water, still there in the yellow.'

'But a hundred li downstream. Ibrahim suggested.

'Maybe. But I wonder. Truly, you must become like these Sikhs you talk about, who combine what is best from the old religions, and make something new.'

'What about Buddhism?' Ibrahim asked. 'You say it has already changed Chinese religion completely. How can we apply it to Islam as well?'

She thought about it. 'I'm not sure it's possible. The Buddha said there are no gods, rather that there are sentient beings in everything, even clouds and rocks. Everything holy.'

Ibrahim sighed. 'There has to be a god. The universe could not arise from nothing.'

'We don't know that.'

'I believe Allah made it. But now, it may be that it is up to us. He gave us free will to see what we would do. Again, Islam and China may have two parts of the whole truth. Perhaps Buddhism has another part. And we must find whole sight. Or all will be desolation.'

Darkness fell on the river.

'You must raise Islam to the next level,' Kang said.

Ibrahim shuddered. 'Sufism has been trying to do that for centuries. The sufis try to rise up, the Wahhabis drag them back down, claiming there can be no improvement, no progress. And here the Emperor crushes both!'

'Not so. The Old Teaching has standing in imperial law, the books by your Liu Zhu are in the imperial collection of sacred texts. It's not like with the Daoists. Even Buddhism finds no favour with the Emperor, compared to Islam.'

'So it used to be,' Ibrahim said. 'As long as it stayed quiet, out here in the west. Now these young hotheads are inflaming the situation, wrecking all chance of co-existence.'

There was nothing Kang could say to that. It was what she had been saying all along.

Now it was fully dark. No prudent citizen would be out in the streets of the rude little town, walled through it was. It was too dangerous.

News arrived with a new influx of refugees from the west. The Ottoman sultan had apparently made alliances with the steppes emirates north of the Black Sea, descendant states of the Golden Horde that had only recently come out of anarchic conditions, and together they had defeated the armies of the Safavid empire, shattering the Shlite stronghold in Iran and continuing east into the disorganized emirates of central Asia and the silk roads. The result was chaos all the across the middle of the world, more war in Iraq and Syria, widespread famine and destruction; although it was said that with the Ottoman victory, peace might come to the western half of the world. Meanwhile, thousands of Shiites Muslims were headed cast over the Pamirs, where they thought sympathetic reformist states were in power. They did not seem to know that China was there.

'Tell me more about what the Buddha said,' Ibrahim would say in the evenings on the verandah. 'I have the impression it is all very primitive and self concerned. You know: things are the way they are, one adapts to that, focuses on oneself. All is well. But obviously things in this world are not well. Can Buddhism speak to that? Is there an "ought to" in it, as well as an "is"?'

Ifyou want to help others, practise compassion. If you want to help yourself, practise compassion." This the Tibetans' Dalai Lama said. And Buddha himself said to Sigala, who worshipped the six directions, that the noble discipline would interpret the six directions as parents, teachers, spouse and children, friends, servants and employees, and religious people. All these should be worshipped, he said. Worshipped, do you understand? As holy things. The people in your life! Thus daily life becomes a form of worship, do you see? It's not a matter of praying on Friday and then the rest of the week terrorizing the world.'

'This is not what Allah calls for, I assure you.'

'No. But you have your jihads, yes? And now it seems the whole of Dar al Islam is at war, conquering each other or strangers. Buddhists never conquer anything. In the Buddha's ten directives to the Good King, non violence, compassion and kindness are the matter of more than half of them. Asoka was laying waste to India when he was young, and then he became Buddhist, and never killed another man. He was the good king personified.'

'But not often imitated.'

'No. But we live in barbarous times. Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. Islam will use force, the Emperor will use force. They will rule the world. Or fight over it, until it is all destroyed.'

Another time she said, 'What I find interesting is that of all these religious figures of ancient times, only the Buddha did not claim to be a god, or to be talking to God. The others all claim to be God, or God's son, or to be taking dictation from God. Whereas the Buddha simply said, there is no God. The universe itself is holy, human beings are sacred, all the sentient beings are sacred and can work to be enlightened, and one must only pay attention to daily life, the middle way, and give thanks and worship in daily action. It is the most unassuming of religions. Not even a religion, but more a way to live.'

'What about these statues of Buddha I see everywhere, and the worship in the Buddhist temples? You yourself spend a great deal of time at prayer.'

'Partly the Buddha is revered as the exemplary man. Simple minds might have it otherwise, no doubt. But these are mostly people who worship everything that moves, and Buddha is just one god among many others. They miss the point. In India they made him an avatar of Vishnu, an avatar who is deliberately trying to mislead people away from the proper worship of Brahman, isn't that right? No, many people miss the point. But it is there for all to see, if they would.'

'And your prayers?'

'I pray to see things better.'

Quickly enough the jahriya insurrection was crushed, and the western part of the empire apparently at peace. But now there were deep seated forces, driven underground, that were working all the while for a Muslim rebellion. Ibrahim feared that even the Great Enterprise was no longer out of the question. People spoke of trouble in the interior, of Han secret societies and brotherhoods, dedicated to the eventual overthrow of the Manchu rulers and a return to the Ming dynasty. So even Han Chinese could not be trusted by the imperial government; the dynasty was Manchu after all, outsiders, and even the extremely punctilious Confucianism of the Qianlong Emperor could not obscure this basic fact of the situation. If the Muslims in the western part of the empire revolted, there would be Chinese in the interior and the south coast who would regard it as an opportunity to pursue their own rebellion; and the empire might be shattered. Certainly it seemed that the sheng shi, the peak of this particular dynastic cycle (if there were any such thing) had passed.

This danger Ibrahim memorialized to the Emperor repeatedly, urging him to infold the Old Teaching even more firmly into imperial favour, making Islam one of the imperial religions in law as well as fact, as China in the past had infolded Buddhism and Daoism.

No reply ever came to these memoranda, and judging by the contents of the beautiful vermilion calligraphy brushed at the bottom of other petitions returned from the Emperor to Lanzhou, it seemed unlikely that Ibrahim's would be received any more favourably. 'Why am I surrounded by knaves and fools?' one imperial commentary read. 'The coffers have been filling with gold and silver from Yingzhou for every year of our rule, and we have never been more prosperous.'