As he surveyed the circle of monks a realization warmed his heart. Although these monks had been warned about Chinese and wearing robes, he knew by looking in their faces that they had no first-hand experience with licenses or government bureaucrats who pressed monks to report what their companions prayed for. Only the youngest of the monks had hesitated and looked at the peasant clothing. The monks in the circle were like the untamed, feral animals of the changtang, untouched and pure. A species near extinction.

The monks sat quietly, smiling radiantly at their visitors. "Welcome to Raven's Nest gompa," the bald monk said.

Jowa, to Shan's surprise, spoke first. "We are sorry for the intrusion," he said. "We came about the Yakde Lama."

To a man, the monks nodded and kept smiling.

"He lived here," the bald monk said. "He's coming back."

Jowa threw a triumphant glance toward Shan, then looked back at the bald monk. "The boy Khitai? He lived here?"

The monks looked at each other in confusion.

"The Yakde," the bald monk said with a shrug, as if not understanding Jowa's questions. "He would sit and meditate in the middle of herds of wild antelope," the man said in a bright tone. "He wrote a teaching on it. We have it, in his own writing. That was the Second. The Fourth remembered and came to borrow it, and he took it to Lhasa to show the Dalai Lama."

The Second Yakde, Shan quickly calculated, would have lived at least three centuries earlier.

Jowa did not press. He did something truly remarkable. He looked at the bald man and smiled- a serene smile, a monk's smile.

"The Ninth," Shan said after a few moments. "Did the Ninth come here?"

"Once," the monk said. "He spent some months here and wrote a teaching about what we do here. The Souls of Changtang Mountains, he called it."

Shan's mind raced. He should ask about Lau, about the waterkeeper. But his heart had another question. "Did the Yakde go south, beyond Lhasa?" he heard himself ask. "To a place called Lhadrung?"

The bald monk readily nodded. The man must be the kenpo, Shan decided, the abbot of the Raven's Nest. "The Third did, and the Fifth. To a hermitage, deep in a mountain. And the last time an army came," the abbot said, "men arrived from Lhasa. Wise men. They said, send your young monks away, to hide. Some went to that mountain place. The dropka brought horses and some of their children. They were going to fight this new army, the dropka said, and their children needed a place to go until the war was over." The abbot sighed and sipped his tea. "The next year we got a letter from one of our monks. They rode for weeks," he recounted, "only at night. Near a city there was great fighting, terrible bloodshed, and the invaders shot cannons into the mountains where our people were. In the end," he said slowly, "three of our monks arrived in the Lhadrung hiding place and two of the children. A young boy and a girl."

What had Gendun said- that he saw the Kunlun with a stranger's eyes but that he knew it in his heart? When he was young, his parents had given him to monks who took him away.

A bell sounded from down another corridor, and the monks handed their pages to the abbot and rose. Jowa stepped eagerly to the shelves, gazing upon the pechas, row after row of sutras and teachings. As the abbot arranged the pages into a stack and slipped them into a silk cover, he starting explaining details of the collection to Jowa.

Shan wandered down the corridor. A door to a room at the end was ajar. Bajys was inside, squatting before a long thangka that hung on the back wall of the room, an elaborate image of a man, not one of the Buddha forms, not even one of the many prominent teachers whom Shan had learned to recognize in such paintings. The floor of the room held a carpet far richer than those he had seen elsewhere in the gompa. Indeed, the entire room was appointed in a style far more elegant than elsewhere in the gompa. A robe with bright embroidery hung on one wall. A bronze figure of a lama, possibly the ancient teacher Guru Rinpoche, sat prominently on a table by the door.

"What is it?" Shan asked, not understanding anything Bajys had done since arriving at the gompa.

Bajys just smiled, the first smile Shan had ever seen on his face. There was a low wooden platform bed against the far wall. Bajys bent to straighten the bedding, then picked up a small bronze dorje, the small scepterlike object of Buddha ritual, on the table beside the bed and carefully wiped away its dust. He looked at Shan with surprise in his eyes, as if Shan had failed to see something important, something obvious to Bajys. He took Shan's elbow and guided him to the place where he had been squatting and nodded at the thangka.

Bajys had never been there before, Shan knew. He had not known about the gompa. But he had recognized the figure in the ancient painting.

"His eyes," Bajys said a tone of awe.

Then, with a catch in his breath, Shan understood. It was the Yakde. Bajys was looking at the boy lama in another body and had recognized him.

"It's his room," someone said over his shoulder. It was the bald monk, the abbot. "The room for when the Yakde visits."

Bajys looked at both men with a small, confused smile, then looked at the dorje in his hands, as if not understanding how it got there.

"How did you know to come here?" Shan asked Bajys. He had not had time to explore the entire structure. Something had guided him to the room. "You were never here before. But you knew it was his room."

"It was just the place I was going to," Bajys began, struggling for words. "I couldn't know," he said, looking at the dorje as he turned it over and over in his hands. The dorje was called the diamond vehicle by many Buddhists, symbolizing the anchor of enlightenment, the indestructible power of Buddhahood. "My eyes didn't know," he said in a tone of awe, as if perhaps the dorje had called him. "But my feet did." He looked up, clearly pained by his inability to understand what had happened but unable to stop grinning.

The abbot took Shan down one more flight of stairs, past a storeroom that held baskets of grain and dried dung. Shan paused at the door to the room, and saw that only a tenth of the space was utilized. From pegs on one wall hung huge coils of ropes. He remembered what Batu had said at the lama's field, that Khitai had told him old men came sometimes to fix the flag on the huge rock tower. Shan followed his guide onto a long terrace that was covered by the ledge above but open on three sides, supported only by pillars of mortared stones. Along the inside wall was a long line of mounted keg-sized cylinders of bronze and wood- prayer wheels. At the far end stood a large four-legged brazier, for burning fragrant offerings. Below, on the valley floor, Shan saw the wall of rocks he had noticed from above, and he realized that it was an old corral. The Raven's Nest hung above the corral, clinging to the side of the mountain, separated from the valley floor by a precipitous drop of at least two hundred feet.

"It must be a difficult thing, to be the abbot of such a place," Shan said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Your job. To be responsible-"

The man smiled shyly. "But I am not the abbot," he said in a tone of apology. "I am just the abbot's assistant. While the abbot is away I do his job."

"Away?"

"On the other side of the mountains."

Shan stared at the brilliant waters. Maybe it was true. They brought visions of truth. "How long ago?"