An hour later they stopped suddenly as Lhandro, about to lead them over the crest of a ridge, raised his hand. "It's one of them," he said with a weary tone. "We'll have to wait."

Shan followed the rongpa to the crest of the ridge to see a loaded cart moving slowly along the trail ahead of them pulled by a sturdy black yak. A stocky man in a robe walked alongside the yak, his hands moving as if he were conversing, trying to make a point to the animal.

"He's so slow," Nyma said, now at Shan's side. "We will waste half the day waiting."

"I have no fear of a man who speaks with his yak," Lokesh announced from behind them and pushed past, continuing down the path.

In a quarter hour they were close enough to see that the cart's cargo was yak dung and moments later the yak halted and twisted its massive head in their direction.

"It's a long way to go, to dispose of all this fuel," Shan observed as he reached Gyalo.

"No one said how far to take it," Gyalo observed. He surveyed Shan and his friends and studied the trail behind them.

Shan introduced the others, and Lokesh offered some of the food from the gompa. The monk ate two momo dumplings, then offered an apple to the yak.

"Where are you bound?" Shan asked.

The monk shrugged and gestured to the sky. "It's a good day in the mountains," he said, and began to massage the yak between the ears. "Jampa here will let me know when we get there."

Jampa. One of the names of the Future Buddha.

Shan studied the man a moment as Gyalo took a long swallow from Lokesh's water bottle, then walked around the cart. The old wooden shovel Shan had used lay on top of the load. He turned the shovel and saw that the wooden blade covered a depression in the pile, a hole.

"No one is following," he said quietly.

"What's that?" Gyalo called out, cupping his ear toward Shan.

"Just speaking to our friend," Shan said and, as Nyma gasped in surprise, a hand emerged from the pile of dried dung. Shan took the hand and steadied the figure that rose up in the cart.

"Tenzin!" Lhandro cried, as the tall man stood and cast an anxious smile toward his friends before he climbed down.

"Where did you-" Nyma blurted out, then ran to embrace the mute Tibetan. "How did you- How could you have known? Why did they-" the questions rushed out as she held Tenzin at arm's length. Tenzin looked at Shan as though for help, then the nun grinned and laughed at herself for asking for explanations from the man who could not speak. She began wiping the dirt from his face with one of her sleeves.

"I was sleeping with Jampa under the moon," Gyalo explained. "I thought if I woke up in the night I would just leave," he said, stroking the shaggy yak again. "We don't mind the night. We talk about the stars. Last night, in the early hours- maybe two, three o'clock- Jampa put his nose in my ear. I cuffed him at first but he pushed harder and I sat up and moaned because there was this ghost by the cart. Jampa and I knew he needed help, though he didn't say a word. Jampa and I knew what needed to be done. We loaded him- Tenzin, you say?" he asked in an aside to Nyma. "We loaded Tenzin in and slipped away. Not a soul moving anywhere. An hour later, as we cleared the first ridge, one of those soldiers' trucks drove in from the highway." He looked at Shan with questions in his eyes.

Shan studied Tenzin a moment longer, sighed and looked toward the northern mountains. "We will go on, ahead," he said to the monk. "Thank you for helping our friend." He studied the cart a moment. "Near the end of the plain there is an old ruin of a gompa. A family lives there now. They have much to do and little time to look for fuel. This could last them many weeks."

"Rapjung," Gyalo said with a nod. "I know it. The old First House." He glanced back toward the south, as though to be certain no one else was listening. "Norbu was not just a traveling station in the old days, it was also a hospital where people from far away came to consult the healers who descended from the high plains and mountains. But after Rapjung was destroyed, the hospital was torn down and the new buildings put up," he said sadly, looking at Shan. Shan recalled the old foundations he had seen by the chapel.

"What is it you are trying to escape?" the monk asked in a slow, measured tone, and studied each of them in turn. He had the sound of an old lama.

"We don't know," Nyma answered in a haunted whisper.

"There are birds up there," Lokesh said in a tentative voice, "that have never seen the world below." He gestured toward the tall peaks, wearing his crooked grin. His tone was earnest, and pointed, almost urgent. "This month they are hatching babies. If things go well their babies will never need to see the rest of world either."

As if it understood Lokesh, the yak twisted its huge head toward the mountains. It seemed to be looking for birds. Gyalo rubbed the tuft of hair between the animal's ears, following its gaze. After a moment he turned with a troubled smile. "Go with Buddha."

They reached the trail junction in another hour and Lhandro led them up a steeply ascending path, newly churned with the hooves of sheep. The long Plain of Flowers disappeared behind them and new landscapes to the north and east opened to their view. They sat and ate cold dumplings on a flat rock that commanded a view of miles over a ragged brown and grey landscape of rock and gravel through which ran narrow lines of shrubs, marking the courses of small rivers that wound eastward toward a patchwork of tiny squares in the far distance, fields green with sprouting barley.

Lokesh pointed out a thin, high waterfall that cascaded over a steep rock face more than two miles away. He was tracing the course of the narrow river it fed as it tumbled down a gorge when Lhandro gasped.

"Tara protect us!" the rongpa moaned, and motioned to a point farther down the river, where it flowed out of the gorge. "The deities are truly angry!" He paled and clenched his gau.

As Shan followed Lhandro's arm in confusion, first Lokesh, then Nyma groaned. The water in the river was red. Not the entire river, but a long patch of the water was bright crimson. Shan quickly calculated the distance and size of the patch. It was sixty or seventy yards in length and covered the entire breadth of the stream.

Nyma turned to Shan with fear in her eyes. "What is it?"

But Shan had no explanation. "Sometimes," he said weakly, "there are algae that make the ocean look red."

Lokesh and Lhandro nodded, not because any of them thought it could be algae, Shan knew, but because it offered the suggestion that there could be a natural explanation.

They watched the red patch in silence until it disappeared behind a bend in the river.

Lokesh raised his finger again and traced the course of the river from the waterfall to where it had disappeared. With a hollow expression, he turned and followed a frightened Lhandro, who had begun jogging up the trail. The rongpa, Shan knew, had taken it as an omen of something terrible to come.

Nyma lingered beside Shan as Lokesh moved on, watching the river with a grimace of pain. "The mountains are bleeding," she said, then turned and followed Lokesh. Shan took a step toward the trail, where he saw Tenzin kneeling at the overhang, near the edge. He had constructed a small cairn of stones and as Shan watched in silence the Tibetan poured water onto a patch of earth. He stirred the little pool and used the mud to write on the rock face beside the cairn. Om amtra kundali hana hana hum phat, he wrote. It was known as one of the fierce mantras, a powerful invocation of cleansing.