"Then one day I saw an old man who was supposed to be painting a chapel and I criticized him for working so slowly. He smiled and said he did the best he could. He showed me his hands, which had no thumbs. He had been a lama once, he said, but the Chinese soldiers had cut off his thumbs with pruning shears so he could not say his beads. We talked for hours that day and the next day he brought a young woman who told me more, about her brother who was imprisoned for having a photograph of the Dalai Lama, and the next day that woman brought a man she called a purba."

The passage continued for several pages, with Tenzin's recollections and confessions about revered teachers he had helped send away to Beijing for political instruction after speaking in support of the exiled government, of helping the government redraw maps to eliminate reference to pilgrimage sites, even of how he had learned from two old lamas named Gendun and Shopo that compassion could be shaped out of sand. They had showed him how to start over, Tenzin wrote, by learning to respect yak dung.

"I sinned against my people and my soul," the last paragraph read. "My government lied to me and I lied to my inner deity. I used up much of my human incarnation to help make others' lives miserable. When you speak of enemies of Tibet speak of the abbot of Sangchi. When you speak of lower creatures trying to burrow through darkness to light speak of a pilgrim named Tenzin."

Shan stared at the closing words a long time before he closed the book. When he finally rose he laid the book beside the Buddha, in full view of the Rapjung lamas. "I think it is dawn," he said quietly.

Tenzin, looking gaunt and hollow again, followed him along the line of the old men, paying homage to each with a prayer, then they climbed out of the chamber, leaving Jokar in his beloved mountain, resting at last on the chair of Siddhi.

Chapter Twenty

When Shan and Tenzin crested the ridge above Yapchi three hours after sunrise they stopped, staring in confusion. The valley had been transformed. Not only had Jenkins's levee failed, water was still pouring down the slope in a long, steep cascade. It had washed the soil away until it found bedrock, creating a new riverbed down the slope. The little pond around the derrick had become a huge body of water, nearly a mile long.

Shan paused, leaning on the staff in his hand, Jokar's staff. He had not intended to bring the staff away from the burial cave but without conscious effort his hand had closed around it as he stepped back in front of the large thangka, as though the staff had willed itself into his hand. He had paused uneasily, studying the weathered staff that had served the medicine lama for so many decades, then he had hefted it and carried it out. Jokar and Shan knew someone who needed a staff.

"The valley is being made again," Tenzin said in a tentative, perplexed tone.

Shan sat on a rock, a sense of unreality washing over him. The army and the venture were surely going to stop the water, to plug the cascade on the mountainside. But a war had been waged in the valley, and they had been defeated by the mountain. Workers drifted toward the camp, dragging tools behind them like broken soldiers leaving a battlefront. A bulldozer lay on its side near the bottom of the slope, half submerged in the new riverbed where the bank must have collapsed. The derrick was in the middle of the little lake, listing nearly thirty degrees, the valley floor underneath it destabilized by the water.

The only work underway seemed to be at the camp itself. The field where the celebration had been planned was a chaotic mass of men and equipment. The rope for the banner had broken loose so that the tattered Serenity slogan flew high in the sky, like a kite. Workers were frantically throwing ropes, barrels, buckets, and tools into the cargo bays of trucks. Half the trailers were gone. As Shan watched, a heavy truck gunned its engine and eased one of the trailers up the road that led out of the valley. The venture was retreating.

"They were going to make a miracle," Tenzin said in an awed voice. "It was what Lokesh said in Larkin's cave."

Shan studied the contours of the valley. It was indeed being made again. When the lake reached the northern end of the camp the road would become its outlet and the road itself would be washed out, converted to a stream, cutting the valley off from any access by trucks or tanks, or any other vehicle. At its southern end the water would reach to a few hundred yards of the village ruins. It had already turned the small knoll with the burial mound into a little island. At the rapid rate the water was accumulating, in a few more hours it would entirely cover the mound and reach the digging, the site of the Taoist temple. The wound that had lain open for a century would at last be sealed. Wash it, bind it, bind the valley, the oracle had said with their beloved Anya's tongue.

Shan discovered that Tenzin had folded his legs under him and was sitting with his head cocked, mouth half open, his eyes full of wonder.

There were others gripped by the same spell farther down the slope, sitting on a ledge overlooking the oil camp. Shan found Jenkins there, with Larkin and a dozen others who had the look of venture managers, including two wearing the suits of the visiting dignitaries. Tibetans, too, slowly drifted toward the ledge, all looking at the camp with the same confused expression.

When Melissa Larkin saw him she stood and approached him on unsteady legs. Shan sat and waited for her.

"They said you had gone to look for Winslow, and Jokar," Larkin said. "I was worried. Cowboy had such a strange look in his eyes last night. Like he was being pulled apart, or pulled away."

"I found him," Shan said quietly. "He had run out of his pills. He's not coming back. There was a place he had to go to with Jokar."

Somehow Larkin understood. Her legs gave way and she sat heavily beside him. Her hand went to her mouth and she bit a knuckle. Tears welled in her eyes. Her head sagged and she buried it in her arm, braced against her knees.

"He wanted you to know, only you," Shan said when she finally looked

Larkin smiled through her tears. "I thought he was just some lunatic bureaucrat when I first heard about him. Then when we met, it was…" Her voice drifted off and she stared at the birthing lake. "There was this connection between us. That night up in the mixing ledge, he said that maybe we had known each other in another incarnation. I thought he was joking. But lately I don't know what's a joke and what is…" She looked away a moment and rubbed her tears away on her sleeve. "He told me about his wife. I told him how my fiance had died in an avalanche. I warned him, I didn't think I could ever again…" Tears streamed down her cheeks. Jenkins, sitting thirty feet away, stared at her absently. "He came to collect my body but in the end… because of me," she sobbed.

"No," Shan said. "It was where he was meant to be," he added, and told her of Winslow's note. This is where I belong, this time, the American up. had said. "He would have come," Shan ventured, "to see you at that sacred lake."

Larkin nodded, gave a forlorn smile, then stared back at the lake. "Nothing happened the way I expected," she said toward the water. "Even this," she said, nodding toward the water. "We never expected so much water."

"Once, when I was young, I had a teacher," a frail voice said.

They turned to see Lepka standing close, gazing at them with sad, moist eyes. "He said there were places on earth where souls are magnified, ripening places he called them, because souls ripen faster there. He said when many people gather in such places it feeds the power of the ripening place, so that great events can happen, and the lives of many people get settled. He said this was such a place, and it was why the lamas never called it Yapchi Mountain, why they had their own name for it, an old name that has been lost. No one has used it for many years."