Remembering the bharal, Shan feared for the monk. He was helping the local people, Shan knew, transporting the sick, or supplies, or perhaps just looking for a good meditation rock. Perhaps letting Jampa look for a good rock.

"He's going to visit me, your friend," Winslow said suddenly as he watched the pair move toward the higher elevation.

"Gyalo?"

"Lokesh. He talked to me on the trail yesterday. He wanted to know everything I could tell him about Beijing. He said he had heard there were lights on the street that told you when to walk, and he wanted to know how to read them. He said he will be coming to the city in a few months, and asked if he could sleep on my floor. He asked if I could draw him a map to show where the Chairman lives."

Shan grimaced. "Lokesh doesn't understand."

"No," Winslow agreed. "But he said he is on the path his deity takes him." The American studied Shan's pained expression and shrugged. "I will do my best to watch over him when he comes," he promised, then moved down the trail that led back to the mixing ledge.

Anya and Tenzin were with Lin when they returned, the girl holding his hand again, Tenzin wiping his brow with a wet cloth. To Shan's surprise Lin's head moved, and his eyes fluttered open and shut. "He just does that," Anya whispered. "He doesn't speak. He doesn't focus. I am not sure where he is," she said solemnly. "He may not find awareness again," she added sadly.

But suddenly, as Tenzin wiped his brow, Lin's eyes opened wide. "You!" he groaned, and jerked his hand from Anya to grab Tenzin's neck, squeezing him, pulling him down. Tenzin, strangely, did not resist, even though Lin was clearly choking him. Then, as suddenly as they had opened, Lin's eyes rolled back into his head and his hand went limp, falling onto his chest.

"He has bad dreams," Anya said to Tenzin in an oddly apologetic tone.

Tenzin looked at the girl, expressionless, and began wiping Lin's brow again. A minute later, as Anya rose for fresh water, Shan knelt at the pallet and slipped his fingers into the pockets of Lin's tunic. There was no sign of Lhandro's identity papers. But he pulled out a folded photograph from a breast pocket, which he carried to the doorway to examine in the sunlight.

It was a grainy blurred black-and-white image, probably captured from a security camera. It showed two men in an office hallway, wearing the long work tunics of janitors and carrying buckets and mops. They were facing the opposite direction, but the taller, older of the men had his head slightly turned to look over his shoulder. The first man could have been Drakte. But there was no mistake about the second man in janitor's garb. It was Tenzin. In one of the buckets, Shan suspected, was the eye of Yapchi.

"You need to know something," Winslow said from behind him, with warning in his voice. He was pulling his binoculars from their case as Nyma appeared behind him.

"It's Lokesh," Nyma blurted out, stepping around the American. "Lokesh disappeared." He had left soon after Shan and Winslow had departed, Nyma explained, going down the narrow goat trail that led below, carrying only some cold tsampa and a water bottle, talking, seemingly speaking to people no one else could see. Shan darted out onto the ledge, pulling out his battered field glasses. He could see half a dozen trails as well as several long, gradual slopes where a man could climb without a trail. For the next hour he and Winslow scanned every trail, every flat rock where someone might sit to meditate. Shan ran down the trail where Lokesh had last been seen, stopping often to call his name. Nowhere was there sign of his old friend. Lin's soldiers knew Lokesh's face. If the colonel's men found him they would have no patience, no incentive even to give him to the knobs. They would work on him, frantically, as long as it took, with any tool they could find, to discover what had happened to their colonel.

Shan sank onto a rock at the top of the cliff, fighting the dark thing that seemed to be clenching his heart. He watched the sun disappear over the distant changtang, losing himself in the dark, threatening swirls of shadow on the horizon.

Suddenly someone touched him and his head jerked up off his chest. He had been asleep. The colors were gone from the horizon. It was nearly dark. Nyma knelt beside him, crying.

"Lokesh?" he asked in alarm.

She nodded, scrubbing away tears with the back of her hand. "He found him. He went into the mountains and found him. Lepka saw them coming, and said we must be near a portal to one of the hidden lands. We didn't understand, but then Winslow saw the two of them on a goat path above. It was Lokesh, walking ahead of him, and turning all the time, as if always trying to coax him forward a few more steps, like a wild animal being tamed." She looked back toward the hidden chambers.

Shan climbed to his feet, confused.

"It's a spirit creature," Nyma said. "It has to be a spirit creature come to save us."

He ran, and stumbled, falling to a knee, picked himself up and ran again. Inside, the main chamber was like a temple, filled with a reverent silence, the air sluiced with incense smoke. Lhandro and his parents sat near the wall, eyes round and excited. The headman's mother rocked back and forth, as Lhandro and Lepka silently mouthed their beads. Winslow sat in the furthest shadows, his countenance lit with an odd, puzzled joy.

At the foot of the pallet sat Lokesh, and at one side Anya still held Lin's hand. Opposite the girl, one hand stroking Lin's forehead, the other reading his wrist pulse, was an ancient Tibetan, older even than Lhandro's father. He appeared frail and strong at once, thin as a reed yet vibrant and serene in his countenance. He wore a tattered quilted worker's jacket over an equally tattered maroon robe, and on his feet were old black athletic shoes that were on the verge of disintegration. A sturdy staff leaned on the wall beside him.

Lokesh gave a small croaking sound as he saw Shan, then he reached out and grabbed Shan's hand in both of his own. Lokesh squeezed it hard, again and again. His friend seemed to be in the grip of some strange rapture. "It's Jokar Rinpoche!" Lokesh said when he was finally able to speak. "From Rapjung," he added, as if the ruined monastery was still routinely sending out old healers. "From before. The same Jokar," he whispered, as though someone might think it was a different incarnation of the lama.

It was the medicine lama, the apparition they had seen in the herb meadow, the lama, Shan knew, who had healed Chemi. He had convinced himself that the lama had to be real, that such a man, despite all odds, was walking the mountains, a flesh-and-blood vestige of another world, not a deity or demon or spirit creature. But in that moment, as the lama turned and lifted his hand toward Shan, for some reason Shan could not comprehend, it seemed his father was reaching out to touch him, and when the lama grasped his hand Shan gasped, and felt his breath rush out.

"Lha gyal lo," the lama said softy, with a small, familiar smile, then turned back to his patient.

They sat in silence as the lama worked, incense filling the room, wind fluting around the rocks overhead. Lepka broke into a low song. The purbas stood in the shadows with wary, bewildered expressions.

Shan rose and stepped backwards into the shadows. In the flickering light he saw Winslow in the corner, still grinning. In the nearest of the meditation cells Tenzin sat alone, and apart, in deep meditation. Shan sat at the edge of the light and studied the lama, and Lokesh- whose face still glowed in wonder, reverence mixed with the eagerness of a young student.