He slept fitfully, often awakened with nightmarish visions of Gendun in peril, Gendun lying broken at the bottom of a cliff, Gendun in the hands of Public Security, interrogators standing by with electric cattle prods. He was roused when the truck made a sudden, wide turn onto a rough gravel track, then drifted off again, the eastern sky already grey with the hint of dawn.

It wasn't the morning light that broke the deep slumber that finally came, nor the stopping of the truck, but the braying of a large animal at the side of the vehicle, a sound so explosive that Shan sprang out of his sleep and slammed his head into one of the opposite barrels.

"End of the road," Jowa called out from behind the truck, where he stood with Shan's canvas bag. Shan stumbled to the open tailgate, holding his throbbing head, and nearly stumbled onto Lokesh as he stepped down. The old Tibetan was bent over at the rear of the truck, peering around the corner with a glint in his eye. He acknowledged Shan with an anxious nod and looked back around the truck.

As he surveyed the new landscape, Shan touched his forehead, absently noting that the fingers came away with a trace of blood. In the dim dawn light he could see that they were in what seemed to be a maze of huge boulders and outcroppings. Pockets of snow lay scattered among the rocks. No, not snow, he realized as he stared at one of the bright patches. It was sand.

He stepped around the truck and froze. Standing eight feet away was a tall brown creature with a long face and two large humps on its back, wearing a leather harness. A Bactrian camel. Lokesh ventured forward, shielding himself behind Shan as he peered over Shan's shoulder. The camel looked up at them, snorted, emitted another loud bray, then shook itself, creating an unexpected jingle. Small bells were fastened to the ends of the harness.

Lokesh burst into a low, wheezing laughter. Shan turned and stared in confusion at his old friend. The laughter could mean that Lokesh was scared, or confused, or even, on rare occasions, that he was filled with joy.

An angry syllable shot out from the shadows behind them. The camel seemed to recognize the voice or the word, and took two steps forward with an expectant look. Shan looked back for the source of the voice. He could see past the boulders more clearly now, into a gravel wash that descended slowly through the maze of outcroppings toward a series of smaller rocky ridges and long, low mountains covered with gravel and clumps of grey-green vegetation.

"Ai yi!" Lokesh exclaimed in a loud whisper, and stepped closer to Shan as though for protection. The smaller boulders were coming to life. The rising sun had given shape to several of the patches of darkness Shan had seen by the rocks. They were flesh, not stone, silent figures huddled under cloaks of gray and brown. They began to rise slowly, hesitantly, as if the sun's warmth had stirred them from hibernation. But as the faces drew up Shan could see they were not sluggish, only wary.

"Jowa!" one called, and stood up straight, throwing off his cloak. It was a Tibetan, a man several years younger than Jowa, wearing a strip of maroon cloth tied around his sleeve. It was a mark of defiance for monks broken by the government, a swath of color marking the robe that only those with a certificate from the Bureau of Religious Affairs were legally permitted to wear. The Tibetan looked from Jowa back toward a tall man in a fleece vest whose thick black hair was speckled with grey and partially covered with a brimless brown cap. Lingering in the shadows at the tall man's side was a third figure, thin as a post, a man with a stern face and restless eyes, who was wearing denim jeans and canvas running shoes. His nose was crooked, as if it had been broken.

The young Tibetan sprang forward and embraced Jowa, who quickly turned and pointed over the mountaintops, toward the direction they had come. Jowa produced a stub of a pencil from his pocket and began marking on a crude map the youth pulled from his pocket. The youth nodded when Jowa was done and climbed into the driver's seat of the truck. A moment later the engine sputtered to life, and with a reluctant groan the old Jiefang edged forward, then gained speed as it maneuvered up the twisting track that led back over the mountains.

"He will watch for Gendun," Jowa said to Shan in a hollow tone. "If he sees Tibetans on the road, he will ask them to watch also."

As the truck disappeared, Shan fought a wave of emotion. The truck was his last connection to Gendun, the last link to the new life he had built in the high ranges of central Tibet, to the monks who had become the only real family he had known since the Red Guard had killed his father more than thirty years before. It was time for Shan to leave the mountains, one of the monks had told him that night at the mandala. Not forever, perhaps, but for a while, to gain distance. To understand who he was, the monk had meant. Shan wasn't a monk, though he lived with monks. But he also wasn't Chinese anymore, not a Beijing Chinese. Consider it a pilgrimage, another monk had said. But Buddhists were sent to the sacred peak of Mount Kalais or other holy sites where the spirits of deities resided. Shan's pilgrimage was to death and confusion, to places where perhaps only sorrow and distrust resided.

They had meant to honor him with their trust, he knew. But in that moment he felt no honor. He felt only fatigue and fear. Fear for Gendun. Fear for the boys who had been killed for reasons no one knew. Fear that he would be stopped before he fulfilled the trust. Imagine you are in a spirit palace, one of his Buddhist teachers had once said, with a hundred doors before you. Only one door is yours, but how long will it take to find it? He sensed the hundred doors today, and all but one led to failure. He fought the tempation to run for the truck, to catch it and climb back into his barrel.

The two strangers stepped forward, then froze at the sound of hooves rushing on the gravel slope below. A rider wearing a tattered felt coat and red wool cap appeared on a brown and white horse, dismounting in a fluid vaulting action before the horse had stopped. The rider stood silently in front of the front of the older man, offering a respectful nod, then pulled off the cap. It was a young woman, with black hair tied in two short braids behind her ears. The camel brayed, then bolted toward her, pushing past Shan and Lokesh so abruptly that Lokesh was knocked to the ground. The woman gave the camel a brief but affectionate stroke on its head, then trotted to Lokesh, extending a hand to help him to his feet.

"Grandfather," she said softly in Tibetan, using the term in the old style, as a form of respect for elders. "Please forgive her, she is but a bata, a yearling, and still has much to learn." Her voice was filled with a quiet strength.

The high pitched wheezing laughter seemed to overtake Lokesh again. "I saw one in a painting once," he said, still sitting in the dirt, shaking the woman's proffered hand as if she had intended to introduce herself. "I said it was one of the mythical creatures, a shape some deity had taken in someone's vision." His grin seemed to encompass his entire face. "My wife said no, it was just a horse with a broken back."

"Oh no, grandfather," the woman said, with twinkling eyes. She was young, Shan saw, no more than twenty-five, and where the rising sun hit her hair there seemed to be red in it. "She's just a donkey who ate two turtles."

The woman gently lifted Lokesh by his shoulder, brushing away the gravel from his back. The two remaining men began moving quickly, retrieving another camel and several small, sturdy horses from behind the rocks. The older man checked the saddles of two of the horses, then led the animals toward Shan and Lokesh, but stopped as he reached the woman's side. "You can't be here, Jakli," he said sternly. "It is too dangerous for you."