"You didn't know he spoke Tibetan, did you? You didn't know he used the cave."

She leaned forward with the binoculars, trying to see the man better.

"When he stood that day, did you see how tall he was?"

She lowered the glasses and searched his face, then drew in a sharp breath. "The waterkeeper," she gasped. Her lower lip went between her teeth and she raised the binoculars once again. "All those times," she whispered. "I could have asked for a blessing."

He looked at her, worried.

They walked back in silence and drove away.

As they climbed the long gravel-strewn slopes that led to the mountains, Jakli's mood lightened, and she spoke of familiar sights, pointing out where her clan had once camped, where she had once rescued a stranded lamb, where Lau had once shown her a nest of pikas. Once she stopped and pointed, almost breathless, toward movement on a hill in the distance. A small herd of wild horses. She climbed out and called something in the tongue of her clan, words lost in the wind. A horse prayer, she explained with a sheepish grin when she returned, to keep them from the Brigade.

They reached another road, which she eased onto warily, her eyes restlessly watching for approaching traffic, then slowly began climbing toward the snow-capped peaks as Shan continued to fade in and out of wakefulness. Once he awoke and the truck was stopped at the base of a huge grey cliff, with a meadow of asters on the opposite side of the road. Jakli was kneeling at the roadside, looking up at the tree-topped cliffs, holding a handful of flowers. He watched as she bowed her head and laid the flowers at the base of the cliff. When she returned he pretended to be still sleeping.

He faded back into slumber, and when he awoke it was late afternoon. They were driving in an unfamiliar landscape, amid mountains framed by a sky of deepening purple. He studied the ways the mountains folded into high mysterious valleys, the crags that spun upward as though they were giant hands pointing to heaven. He opened the window and tasted the chill rarefied air, fresh from icefields above. His memory did not know the terrain but his heart recognized it.

"How long have we been in Tibet?" he asked Jakli.

"The border isn't well defined here. Maybe five, ten miles ago."

"You must be exhausted. Let me drive."

"You don't know the way. Not much further."

They topped a high ridge and slowed to gaze on its fifty-mile view of the changtang plateau. In the far distance a large brown shape shifted and flowed across the grassland, a herd of wild animals. Antelopes perhaps, or even kiangs, the fleet mulelike creatures that still roamed the plateau. A few minutes later Jakli stopped the truck and stepped out into the wind. "I haven't been here in four years," she said. "There are no maps for it. Do you see it?"

"I've never been there," Shan said, and he turned to look toward the north. A pang of guilt swept through him. He had left the waterkeeper, and the zheli children, and Gendun.

"Senge Drak," Jakli explained. "It means lion rock. Shaped like a lion."

They studied the surrounding peaks, then climbed back inside, and Jakli eased the truck onto a narrow track that mounted the next ridge in a long, low ascent. At the top she stopped again and pointed. The mountain they were climbing unfolded to the south in a long U shape. They had reached the center of the ridge and were facing the opposite arm, a long bare ridge that ended in a huge cliff with the contours of a face. On top of the face were two outcroppings that might have been ears. Far below a small ridge jutted along the edge of the base, giving the appearance of a leg at rest.

In another hundred yards the track ended and Jakli parked the truck under a huge overhanging rock. Together they covered the truck with a dirty grey canvas she found in the cargo bay and began walking along the narrow goat path that traversed the steep slope. After a few steps she stopped and threw a pebble into the shadow of a second overhang. The pebble bounced back with a metallic clank. A second truck had been hidden at the head of the path.

Shan detected a subtle pattern of shadows on the face of the cliff as they approached it. Not all the shadows were just clefts in the rock, some were openings, portals that had been cut out of the cliff-face. The Lion Rock, Shan realized, was an ancient fortress, one of the dzong that once guarded Tibet. The dzong had been built into the formation, utilizing the lines of the towering rock to blend with the mountain, which commanded a view far out into the changtang and the pass through the Kunlun.

"It was so far away from the heart of Tibet that the government overlooked it," Jakli explained. "Or maybe the PLA just didn't think it worth bothering with. Couldn't be bombed from the air like most of the dzong. And it had been abandoned for centuries. No invaders would come from this direction. No meaningful armed resistance could be mounted from it. It doesn't stand in the way of anything."

They hiked to the end of the path as the remaining daylight quickly faded. Jakli paused to gaze at the last blush of crimson to the west, as if sending a silent prayer that way, then led Shan into a darker patch of shadow that was the entrance to the dzong. Following the dim light of butter lamps, placed at long intervals along an entry corridor, they arrived at a narrow door of heavy hand-hewn timber. As Jakli pushed it open, its iron hinges groaned loudly.

"Their alarm system," she said as she bent and led Shan through the door. Not just an alarm system, Shan saw, as he studied the door. It was so low that most of those entering would need to bow their heads, exposing their necks to a defender's blow, and so narrow that no more than one intruder could enter at a time. In an age when soldiers fought with swords and arrows, one or two defenders could hold off a small army at such an entrance. Jakli put a restraining hand on his arm after two steps. They would wait in the room.

The empty chamber was perhaps forty feet wide, the far side lit by a dozen butter lamps on a long table of hand-hewn timbers. To the right the wall sloped with the natural curve of the rock, as if the room had once been a natural cave that had been expanded. The wall beyond the table was hung with old carpets, which were slowly moving. From the draft that flickered the lamps Shan surmised that the carpets covered openings to the outside, the portals he had seen from the path.

He walked slowly along the hanging carpets. Some weren't just carpets, he discovered, they were thangkas depicting scenes of life in a monastery. The hangings by the portals were nearly threadbare, eroded by the wind. In one space a simple black felt blanket had been hung. Suddenly the hairs on Shan's neck moved. Someone was watching, from the other end of the room. Seeing nothing but shadow he lifted a lamp and ventured toward the darkness.

After five steps he froze. Two huge unblinking eyes stared back at him, level with his own. The serene head of the figure was slightly cocked, as if in inquiry, and one of its hands clutched a bell. It was a seated Buddha, carved so as to appear to be rising out of the living rock, so that although the head was nearly complete in circumference, at the bottom, where its legs were folded into the robe, the remarkable Buddha was little more than a bas-relief.

As he approached he saw that the rock on which the Buddha sat had been sculpted to simulate an altar, on which the figure seemed to be resting. On either side large niches were carved to receive offerings, their tops coated with the black soot of torma offerings, the butter figures that were burned on festival days.