The turtle truck lurched across the desert like a small boat on a rough sea, rocking and pitching as it broke across the waves of sand. Jakli worked hard at the wheel, frequently adjusting the angle against the dunes, dodging patches of light-colored sand, always warping back in a northeasterly direction, toward the heart of the desert. She had stopped as she had left the road, looking at Shan with a grave expression. "The Taklamakan," she said, gesturing toward the endless expanse of sand. "It's an old word, from before the time of writing. Because so many people have died out here. It means once you go in, you never come out."

But Shan already felt mired in a place with no escape. The American was not his responsibility, he kept telling himself as he gazed at the desolate landscape, not his mystery to solve. He had Lau and Gendun and the dead boys and now the waterkeeper, and he had no room on his back for the dead American. It was only by some grim chance that he had stumbled upon the body. The American had nothing to do with Lau and Khitai. Perhaps his death was part of the strange game between the knobs and the prosecutor or even connected to Ko Yonghong, who had boasted about his American consultants. More likely, it was the work of the boot squads, who brought subversives from all over China to a place like Glory Camp. But still the death of the American hovered near like a dark shadow. He had begun to accept what the natives of the region kept telling him, that it was a shadow land, a forgotten place, a land between worlds, where people lived like ghosts in shadows and life was very cheap.

"You seem to see things I do not," Shan observed, uncertain whether it was anger or just a hard-edged alertness that had settled into Jakli's eyes. Even after she had agreed to take Shan to the place where Lau died, Fat Mao had argued against it, complaining that she had to return to the hat factory, that the place called Karachuk would be too dangerous for Shan. Fat Mao had returned them to the garage by then, where Akzu had been waiting, sharing a skin of kumiss with the surly mechanic. Akzu had pointed toward the high ranges and raised his voice. Finally, when Jakli had promised to return to the factory after delivering Shan to Karachuk, he had embraced his niece and knelt to pray facing west, toward the Muslim holy city.

"By rights, we should not be in the desert in a truck," she said after a moment. "Only with camels is it safe, and even then the inexperienced often die. But we have only a short distance, and this close to the mountains we can drive most of the way on the old river bed," she said as she guided the vehicle down a short bank of sand onto a wide, level channel of packed sand. "The key is to avoid the soft spots."

"If we don't?"

"The desert can swallow a truck as easily as a man or a camel." As if on cue a pile of white bleached bones appeared on the bank of the dead river. It contained a long skull and heavy ribs and was pointed in the direction of the snowcapped mountains. "It's always been this way, since the early Silk Road. Some people got wealthy from the passage. Some people just died."

After almost an hour Shan discerned a line of shadows on the horizon. Irregular and large, they seemed like misshaped buildings one moment, eroded rock formations the next. For a moment, from a distance, Shan believed that they were creatures bent under heavy loads.

At a curve in the riverbed Jakli accelerated and shot straight across the bank, directly toward the formations, then, half a mile away, turned ninety degrees to drive parallel to them toward the south. "The Silk Road," she said abruptly. "Do you know much of it?"

"The school texts," Shan said with a shrug.

His words brought a grimace to her face. "They will tell you it was a region of terrible class struggle, of great oppression, of temples for the worship of wealth built on the backs of slaves," she said, slowing the vehicle to steal a glance at the mysterious shapes. "Our history texts," she said, slowly shaking her head, "they are like studying beautiful paintings from the back of the canvas." She gestured toward the shapes. "The glorious Karachuk. Ignored by our teachers because it was not Chinese. But it is because of places like this that I have learned not to curse the Taklamakan. The very elements that make the desert so treacherous have preserved its treasures."

Jakli's expression grew lighter as she eased the truck toward a low, flat ridge. Following her gaze Shan saw an ancient wall. "Karachuk was an oasis on the southern arm of the Silk Road," she explained, "when the ice fields in the mountains still fed the river enough to keep it flowing all year. A major city once, praised for its fertility and hospitality in the ancient texts. Uighurs lived here, and Kazakhs and Tibetans. Life was so pleasant that many travelers lingered for months or years, even for the rest of their lives. The old writings spoke of it, but it was lost centuries ago in a grandfather sandstorm, a karaburan. Then ten years ago another storm came and the top of it was swept clean."

Shan could clearly see now that the shapes were the remains of man-made structures. A pressed earth wall the color of the sand rose in spots to a flat top and elsewhere had crumbled, revealing in its gaps small sand hummocks whose orderly placement suggested buildings. As Jakli crested the dune that extended south of the wall like a giant drift of snow, a huge form of distinctly human features greeted them. It was a statue of a reclining Buddha, twenty feet high at the shoulder, leaning on an elbow to face the southern mountains, toward Tibet. Most of its head was gone. Only the mouth, curved in a serene smile, remained above the neck.

"I had forgotten that the Buddhists were here," Shan said slowly. Buddhists. Perhaps he had begun to find a trail after all, a trail of hidden Buddhists. The Muslim boy who wore a rosary. The secret Tibetan classroom in Lau's cave. The waterkeeper in the rice camp. A headless Buddha in the desert.

"It was all Buddhist, for hundreds of miles north and east. Then Muslims came from the west and Chinese came from the east," Jakli explained. "I have read the journals of a traveler from the east," she continued after a moment. "Xuan Zang, his name was. He passed through the kingdom of Karachuk on a pilgrimage to India, as an envoy from your emperor. Twelve hundred years ago. The kingdom's census showed five thousand souls living here, in a luxury and peacefulness unknown in what was then China. Grapes hung from arbors above every doorway. Households had peach and pomegranate trees near the street, and the king ordered that a passerby had the right to pluck a ripe fruit for refreshment, but only one." Jakli looked in his direction with a wry smile. "Now that was enlightened communism."

She pointed toward the south, where the tops of the high ranges could be seen on the horizon. "But they owed everything to the ice fields in the mountains, which fed the rivers and irrigation channels that flowed here. Then the ice fields began to shrink. People began to move closer to the mountains as the water disappeared. By the time the sand storms came it was already mostly deserted. I remember when the the storm uncovered the city. People said it was the work of God, to remind us of who we are. Others said it was the work of the desert spirits, who were inviting us back."

There was one more dune, smaller, that ran diagonally along the southern end of the ruins, in front of a gap in the old walls near the Buddha. Jakli accelerated over the low mound. The front wheels of their vehicle left the sand, and with a heavy lurch they landed in the ghost city of Karachuk.