Later a strange sound arose, the buzz of a stadium filled with people. On the platform in the center were three austere figures, seated at a table equipped with microphones. Behind them, off the platform, was an old woman with a mop and bucket. Shan jerked his head up. It was a dream. No, he realized with distress, it was a memory. He stared into the stars, but five minutes later was back in the stadium. A young, frightened man was on stage now, his eyes dull with drugs. A shrill, urbane woman behind him was reading a statement for him, an apology to the people.

Shan willed himself awake, shuddering at the recollection of the last murder trial he had attended. He forced himself to count the stars. He pinched himself. But in his fatigue he returned to the stadium. It was hushed now, and the defendant was on his knees before a Bureau officer. At the last minute, as the officer fired a bullet through his skull, the face changed to that of Sungpo. The old woman climbed the stairs and began mopping away the blood and tissue.

Shan groaned and was instantly in heart-pounding wakefulness. He did not drift off again.

Somewhere, much later, Sergeant Feng spoke again. "That soldier, Meng. He was on assignment to guard the cave. But not on that night."

"You asked?"

"You needed to know, you said. He probably traded duty hours. Happens all the time without the records being changed."

"Could we see him? Back at the barracks."

"Don't know," Feng said uncomfortably. "I'm assigned to the 404th. Those officers at Jade Spring- I don't know. They're tough as tiger's teeth," he muttered, then leaned forward as though he had to give full attention to the road.

"Sergeant," Yeshe ventured from the backseat. "Comrade Shan says the warden is deceiving me. That he plans to detain me again, to work on his computers."

A strained chuckle was Feng's only reply.

"Is it true?"

"Why ask me? The warden and I, we don't live on the same planet, you know what I mean? How would I know?"

"Just then, you laughed like you believed it."

"What I believe is that Zhong is one prick of a son of a bitch. He's paid by the people to be a son of a bitch. He doesn't talk to sergeants about his plans."

"But you could find out. Ask the staff. Everyone talks to the momo gyakpa."

Feng slowed the truck. "What the hell did you say?" he barked, suddenly surly.

"I'm sorry. Nothing. Just if you could ask. Maybe I could do something for you in exchange."

"Momo gyakpa? Fat dumpling?" Bitterness seemed to overtake his rage. "I heard it before," he said after a pained silence, much quieter. "Behind my back. Thirty-five years in the People's Liberation Army and that's what I get. Momo gyakpa."

"I'm sorry," Yeshe muttered.

But Feng was no longer listening. He rolled down his window and reached into the bag of dumplings that was to serve as their breakfast and lunch. "Momo." He picked up a dumpling and squeezed it as if it were something he was trying to kill. He hurled it out the window, then another, and another, throwing one with each protracted syllable. "Momo! Fucking! Gyakpa!" he yelled, with a choke of pain at the end. He stared out the window after the last momo. "Used to be called the Axe, for the way I could break things in two with my hands. The Axe. Watch out boys, the Axe is coming, they would say. Colonel Tan remembers those days. Run, the Axe is on leave tonight."

As soon as the light was strong enough to read by, Shan reached into the canvas bag that Madame Ko had left at the barracks. Three files, the files of the cases which had resulted in the executions of three of the Lhadrung Five. Lin Ziyang, Director of Religious Affairs, killed by the cultural hooligan Dilgo Gongsha. Xong De, Director of Mines for the Ministry of Geology in Lhadrung County, killed by the enemy of the people Rabjam Norbu. Jin San, agricultural collective manager, killed by Dza Namkhai, leader of the infamous Lhadrung Five.

He read the records for nearly an hour. At the end of each file, pages had been ripped out. Witness statements.

Blushed with dawn, the peaks seemed to hover, more a part of the sky than the shadowy earth. Are the only religious people on the planet those who live near mountains? Trinle had asked him once. "I don't know," Shan had replied, "but I know Tibetans would not be Tibetans without their mountains."

They began descending into the head of a long valley. Below them, down a mile of winding road, a complex of stone buildings surrounded by long empty pastures could be discerned through the dim morning light. Shan tilted his head as he realized what it was, and that although he had spent three years living with Tibetan monks he had never until this moment seen an active Tibetan monastery. So few were left.

Yet countless monasteries had been constructed in his mind. On the most bitter winter days, when the trucks did not leave the compound and the prisoners huddled back to back under their thin blankets to conserve body heat, with words the old yaks guided the others through the gompas of their youth. As the prisoners shivered, sometimes so violently that teeth were broken, Choje and Trinle or one of the others began the journey, describing how the dawn played on the distant stone walls of the gompa as the traveler approached, or how the sound of a particular bell resonated within the pilgrim long before the structure came into sight. The smell of jasmine on the path, the flight of a snowgrouse, the rustle of the musk deer that roamed unafraid in the gompa's shadow were not overlooked, nor the cheerful call of the watchful rapjung, student monk, who first spied the visitor and opened the gates.

With the prisoners' gompas long ago annihilated and few memorialized in photographs, the only traces left were in the memories of a handful of survivors. But by the time the tale was told- and a visit to a single gompa could be days in the telling- the gompa had been rebuilt in the hearts and minds of another generation. Not just the visual images, for the old yaks reveled also in the sounds and smells of their former homes. Not just the physical, for the human rhythm, too, would be recreated, down to the rheumy eyes of the blind lama who rang the bell or how novices, with wads of horsehair, scrubbed the stone floors that had grown too slippery from the butter offerings. There was a huge prayer wheel in a gompa that once stood in the southern mountains whose squeak reminded everyone of a flock of hungry magpies, Shan recalled, and its kitchen mixed the flowers of a certain heather with barley for a fragrant tsampa.

Sergeant Feng slowed the truck. "Probably got hot tea," he suggested, nodding toward the buildings. "Maybe we'll get better directions to Saskya. I don't know this road-"

"No." Yeshe interrupted with unusual bluntness. "Not enough time. Keep going. I know Saskya. Down the road twenty miles, up against the high cliffs at the end of the valley."

Feng grunted noncommittally and drove on.

Nearly an hour later Yeshe directed Feng onto a dirt road that led into a forest of rhododendron and cedar. After a few minutes a long mound of stones became visible, running perpendicular to the road and disappearing into the thickets. Shan raised his hand for Feng to stop, then leapt out, ran to the pile of stones and halted. There was something he recognized, though he had never been there before. From somewhere nearby came the tiny ring of a tsingha, the small hand cymbal used in Buddhist worship.

He felt something inside, a flutter of excitement. He had been there before, or somewhere much like it, in the winter tales of the old yaks. Slowly his knees collapsed and for a moment he knelt, his hands on the stones. Then he began cleaning the detritus from the pile of rocks. He picked up one, then another, and another. They had been squared off by human hands, and each had a Tibetan inscription, either painted or crudely chiseled on its surface. He was in the middle of a mani wall, one of the walls of stones inscribed with prayers constructed over the course of centuries by devout visitors and pilgrims. Each stone was carried from far away, one at a time, for the glory of Buddha. A mani stone was said to continue the prayer after the pilgrim left. He looked at them, stretching into the forest as far as he could see, the moldering, moss-covered prayers of generations.