"There was a Chinese woman who did my cleaning. Over sixty years old, a real delight. Like the gentle old grandmother I never had. My fiancee and I started going to her home after we knew her a year, took her family out of the city for picnics at the Ming Tombs and the Summer Palace. After a while we noticed she wouldn't eat much of the food we brought for her and she always asked if we minded if she would take her share away. Eventually we found out she was giving it to orphans at a school run by one of those religious groups the government hates so much. The government support for the school had been dropped because the group had publicly demonstrated for freedom of religion. So the children were living on two bowls of rice a day. One day she didn't come to work and I found out that she had been arrested, along with all the teachers at the school. It took me a week before I could find her in a jail. They had beat her and ruptured her spleen, trying to get her to disavow her belief in her religion." When he looked at Shan there was pain on the American's face. "I never had much religion, but like my fiancee said, people have a right to find their god, and worship it in their own way," he said quietly, looking into his hands now.

Shan nodded. In the end it was all that the Tibetans wanted to do.

"I used my diplomatic credentials to go to the Ministry of Justice and make inquiries about her, ask for her release. The Ministry told the ambassador and the ambassador ripped off my stripes and broke my sword."

"I'm sorry?"

"Did everything but fire me, because I had no authority to make such inquiries, because the U.S. keeps its hands off the way China treats her citizens. Said I'd be cleaning embassy bathrooms for the rest of my career. So my fiancee and I decided to quit. She left and got a teaching job in Colorado, and I went back on leave to get married and buy a house with her. Two months later I returned to interview for a job at the same university."

"But you didn't quit," Shan pointed out.

"No," Winslow said heavily, and looked out over the plain again before speaking. "It was winter when I flew back, in a bad snowstorm. The house was up in the mountains. On the way to the airport to pick me up she slid off the highway and into a river. Took them two days to recover her body. The morgue called me to ask if I knew she was two months pregnant." Winslow watched a hawk fly overhead. "I hadn't, but by then I had gone to the house. She had bought a set of baby furniture and had tied balloons all over it, to surprise me."

Shan studied the American's face. Winslow didn't seem the same ebullient man he had seen riding the yak the day before.

"I had nowhere to go, no roots anywhere, no family left alive. So I came back. Started volunteering for every shit job nobody wanted. Just to get away. Recover all the bodies for shipment home. Clean up after the ambassador's poodles."

Shan felt an emptiness welling within. Somehow the American's words made him remember his father, who had been taken from him by the Red Guard, after stripping him of his beloved job as a professor because he taught Western history and had friends in Europe and America.

"They shouldn't have arrested that old woman for helping orphans," Winslow said in a voice grown hoarse.

"What happened to her?"

"Died. She died in that jail and they sent her family a bill for cremating her."

Shan stared at the American's hollow face. Winslow's woes had started with government service in Beijing. Everything that happened in life was connected, Lokesh was fond of saying.

"But still," Shan said. "You came here without a body to collect."

Winslow offered a melancholy grin. "I lied to them, to my boss. The oil company had sent a copy of their personnel file on Larkin when she went missing. We figured there would be a body later, just not yet. I read the file. Same age as my wife. Marked by the company as a high achiever. Had been engaged to another company geologist, but he died in an avalanche in the Andes four years ago. After that she asked for the most remote assignments possible."

"So you felt"- Shan searched for words. "Lokesh might say you were on similar awareness paths."

Winslow's sad smile reappeared. "I told them I had a call, that her body had been sighted in the mountains. Only a little lie really. I'd be the one they would send eventually anyway."

They sat watching the wind wash the spring growth on the plateau. Finally Shan sighed and stood. "I've heard that noise, too, when the land speaks like a groan. A lama told me it happens sometimes, when the earth senses its impermanence. It just groans." Strangely, Shan remembered sifting grains of white sand in his hand. He felt an intense longing to be with Gendun, or at least to know he was safe.

As if on cue the land rumbled. The thunder came in three overlapping peals from the far distance. It seemed to be coming from the huge snowcapped mountain on the far side of the plain, the mountain that separated them from Yapchi Valley. But there were no clouds in the sky.

As the sound faded a shrill shouting replaced it, a torrent of furious Tibetan. Winslow pointed to a figure two hundred feet below on a rock spur that overlooked the plain. It was Dremu, his knife raised over his head, brandishing it toward the far side of the plain as if he were answering the strange rumbling.

The distance was too great for Shan to make out individual words but the anger in the Golok's voice was unmistakable. Anger at first, then a hint of fear, and finally what may have been desperation. Shan eased himself over the ledge they stood on and began climbing down.

Dremu was squatting when they reached him, throwing stones in the direction of the northern mountains. He spun about at their approach, then sheepishly looked in the direction of the horses. "All right, we can ride. Lhandro is taking that monk to the water by the trees," he said, and tossed a stone toward a pile of cans in the shadow of the boulder. "I found those up the slope at a campsite," the Golok said. "With a lot of bootprints, new boots. Expensive boots. Nothing else. It was a week old."

There were three empty cans, one of peaches, one of canned pork, and one of corn. Not Tibetan fare. The labels on the pork and corn were in English, the peaches in Chinese. Stuffed into one can was an empty wrapper for one of the protein bars they had seen below.

"How far are we from Yapchi Valley?" Shan asked.

"Maybe fifteen miles," Dremu replied.

"But why would the Americans be so far away from their oil project?" Shan wondered out loud, surveying the high ridge above them that defined the northern end of the plain. "What's beyond this? On the other side?"

"Nothing. A river. Steep ravines. Places only goats can walk."

Shan studied the Golok. "Who were you so angry with? Was it because of that sound?" He still knew very little about the fiery, bitter man, other than that the purbas had asked him to help.

"You wouldn't understand," the Golok said after a long silence.

"I think that sound made you angry. That sound like thunder."

"Thunder?" Dremu snapped. "You think it was thunder? Without a cloud in the sky? It was that damned Yapchi Mountain." He stood and raised his knife again, stabbing it toward the snowcapped peak. "It's the damndest mountain in the world. There's no mountain like it anywhere. Some say there's treasure buried in it, but I say it's full of demons." He had the air of a warrior about to do battle.