Jowa grabbed his arm, and Shan turned to follow his gaze toward Bajys, who had dropped to his knees by a flat rock that was immersed in the shadows. Bajys wore a look of wonder, the way Lokesh sometimes looked when his eyes saw between worlds. Shan took a hesitant step forward.

It was a rock, only a rock, or rather a large roundish boulder on top of a flat rock. But the rock had a smile on it.

They heard the hollow tapping again, louder, and it made Bajys crouch down, as if cowering. Shan drew closer, and the smile in the rock grew larger. Bajys wasn't cowering, he realized. The dropka was bowing.

A grey arm extended out of the boulder, holding the bottom of a short wooden staff, and as the base of the staff hit the rock they heard the tapping sound again. The raven spoke and hopped closer.

Shan knelt, then Jowa knelt, and as they watched, the boulder seemed to inch forward, its smile growing still bigger.

"Ai yi!" Bajys gasped.

The darkness above the smile stirred and two eyes appeared.

It was a man, an ancient man wrapped in a grey sheepskin cloak and a conical cap of the same material, shaped to cover the back of his neck and to hang low over his eyes, so that they were obscured when his head was bent. The eyes studied each of the three men in turn, sparkling with energy. The man tapped his staff again.

"After the snow my stick always rings," he said with amazement in his eyes, and he tapped it again for sheer pleasure. His voice was hoarse and slow, as if long out of practice. His skin was grey parchment, his fingers long and gnarled, as though made of jointed pebbles.

Shan looked at Bajys and Jowa. The Tibetans seemed overpowered by the old man.

The man's head drifted up and his eyes fluttered closed for a moment. "When the wind stops," he whispered, "listen to the water. You can hear it shimmering."

"We are looking for the gompa," Shan said with a quiver in his voice.

The man's head cocked to one side, and he laughed, a deep laugh that ended with a series of wheezing sounds. Then he abruptly rose, as if he had been pulled up by some unseen force. He stepped between Shan and Jowa and stopped, looking at the raven. The bird cocked its head at the man, turned toward the lake, and disappeared, not flying but jumping over the side of the ledge.

The man laughed again, stepped into a patch of shadow, and, incredibly, began to shrink.

Bajys gasped, then rose and stepped forward as if he might help the stranger. But the man had disappeared into the rock.

"A sorcerer," Bajys gasped.

"No," Shan said with slow realization. "Stairs."

They moved into the shadows and found a narrow set of steps, carved into the living rock and worn hollow in the center from centuries of use. Bajys darted forward and disappeared down into the shadows. Jowa and Shan exchanged an uneasy glance and followed.

It wasn't a cave they entered, as Shan had expected, but a dimly lit room of stone and mortar walls built against the cliff face. The light of a single butter lamp lit the room, below a long thangka of a brilliant blue Buddha. The Primordial Buddha, it was called- the Buddha of Pure Awareness. A brazier, laced with cobwebs, stood near the base of the rock steps. The wall opposite the rock face and the wall at the far end of the room each had a single heavy wooden door. Shan tried the nearest one. It opened slowly, with a groan of its iron hinges, into a chamber lit by a window that looked out over the valley.

From two wooden pegs driven into the mortar a rod was suspended, holding the remnants of an old jute sack over the stone window casement. There were cushions along the wall. On one cushion sat a small bow, like that he had used at Senge Drak. Though obscured with dust Shan could see that several cushions were made of silk, richly embroidered with shapes of conches, fish, lotus flowers, and other sacred symbols. It had the feel of a small dukhang, a monastic assembly hall, where lessons might have been given.

He stood silently as Jowa walked along the walls, feeling the reverence that permeated the chamber. "I think you have found it," Shan suggested. "One of the Yakde's gompas."

A small bronze Buddha, no more than eight inches high, had been placed on a stool near the window, facing the valley, as if to let him see the water that looked like sky. Or perhaps, Shan thought, so he could keep watch.

Jowa stood by the little Buddha. It, too, was covered with dust. He took the tail of his shirt and wiped clean not the Buddha but the stool around it, the way a monk would clean an altar without disturbing its sacred objects. When he was done he looked up at the door and back to Shan, both men realizing in the same moment that Bajys had not joined them.

They stepped back into the first chamber, then opened the second door. It opened silently into a dim passage. They followed it past half a dozen meditation cells and then descended another set of ancient stone stairs. The mountain, Shan realized, as he studied the steps and stone of the passage, did indeed descend in a series of huge stairlike ledges. What he had seen from the top had been the rock slab roofs of the structures built on those ledges.

A door at the bottom of the second set of stairs opened into a long passage, much warmer, its air hinting of incense and butter and the slightly acrid smell that came from braziers fueled by dried chips of animal dung. They passed more cells and opened a heavy timber door with ornate iron work, stepping into a large room that was brightly lit by two windows, one sealed with a frame of panes made of blown glass, uneven and bubbled, the other covered with a piece of transparent plastic sheeting that rattled in the wind.

There were half a dozen men in the room, all in faded maroon robes, seated in a circle around a large smoldering brazier. Several held the long rectangular leaves that came from pecha texts, and they appeared to have been reading to one another. One of them, now shorn of his cap and cloak, was the ancient man with the parchment complexion from above. Bajys, to Shan's surprise, was serving the monks tea, as if he were hosting them, as if he were a novice of the gompa, a familiar of the household.

Carpets, threadbare in spots, were laid on the floor, overlapping so that none of the stone floor was exposed. The walls were panelled in fragrant wood.

As Shan stepped forward, the men stared at him with wide-eyed expressions of curiosity. A bald man several years older than Shan but clearly the youngest of the group glanced at the back wall where clothing hung on pegs. The slight movement of his eyes confirmed Shan's suspicion that the monks were unlicensed. When Chinese came, the monks put on the clothes of peasants.

Jowa exchanged a glance with Shan. He had seen it too. The last gompa Shan had visited had a banner over its gate that read Buddhism Must Resonate with Chinese Socialism. It had been raised by the Democratic Management Committee of the gompa, the body appointed by the Bureau of Religious Affairs to supervise the gompa's affairs. Committee members, carefully screened by political officers before being appointed by the government, were responsible, among other things, for assuring that all monks signed certificates promising not to take part in political activity.

The tension in the room broke as Bajys stepped forward with tea for Shan and Jowa, and they silently sat with the monks in their circle. This gompa had no Democratic Management Committee, no political certificates, no licenses for its monks. If discovered by the government its residents would be arrested and sentenced to hard labor. Some monks, like Jowa, walked away from their gompas instead of signing political certificates and applying for Beijing's permission. Shan knew many who had signed, strong, devoted teachers who argued that a piece of Chinese paper made no difference, and others who insisted that no one could ever be the same after signing, that the act was like a dark stone cast into the waters of their serenity, rippling outward, changing forever the face of their inner god.