He fell back into the dark, silent hell, then smelled ginger in his hallucination. His father was walking in the shadows ahead of him, excited because they were going to watch the sun rise from an old Taoist temple. They met a kind old Englishman whom his father introduced as a professor of Chinese history, who joined their journey. Later his father stopped and asked if he were tired. He rubbed Shan's cheek with his hand. His hand was wet. It was rough. It smelled foul.

Shan opened his eyes and cried out. The tongue of a silver camel was licking his face. Then he sat up, awake in his old body, and the animal twisted its head and looked at him with an expression of disbelief. With a gasp of unexpected pleasure, Shan realized that somehow he knew the animal's name: Sophie.

A figure appeared at the entrance to his chamber, then stopped and ran away, calling out excitedly.

A moment later Jakli ran in, Lokesh two steps behind her. His old friend knelt and clasped his frail hand over Shan's own, a huge smile on his face. Jakli held a large dipper to Shan's lips and insisted he drink again and again.

"How?" he asked, and found his throat was rough and gravelly, unprepared for speech.

Both his friends explained at once, and gradually he understood that it had not been the old ones they had seen but Marco and Deacon, wrapped in heavy felt blankets, tied to Sophie, who lay like an anchor on top of the nearest dune. It was an old trick of the desert clans. The anchor had to stay on top, where the wind hurt the most, because below, out of the strongest wind, was where the sand filled, where everything was buried. Marco and the American had pulled them inside the shelter of their blankets, then followed their ropes to Sophie, where they had waited for three hours, using Sophie as their windbreak, all five rolled in the blankets like a giant cocoon. When the howl of the wind had stopped, they had looked out to find themselves on a flat expanse of sand, the nearest dune a quarter mile away. The truck had vanished.

"Thank your god," Marco said, "that it was only a little one, just a small storm."

Jakli poured water on a cloth and wiped Shan's head. "You hit your skull on the truck," she explained. "A concussion, against the bumper."

"How long?" he asked in confusion.

She sighed and shook her head. "Almost two days. I'm so sorry," she said with pain in her eyes.

He wondered about her apology a moment, then realized she meant it was a day too late. He gazed at her dumbly, his mouth open. He would not be going to Nepal and a new life, he would not meet the old professor after all. "And this place?" he finally asked.

"Sand Mountain. Marco was already here. Osman called him on the radio and said to watch for us because of the storm."

"The radio?" Shan croaked. His throat still felt parched despite all the water.

But no one seemed to hear. They were looking up at the entrance to the chamber, where Marco stood with a lean sandy-haired man. Jacob Deacon.

"Is the great investigator ready to talk?" the Eluosi barked out from thirty feet away.

"He's too tired," Jakli protested.

"It's all right," Shan said and extended his hand to Lokesh. But as he started to rise dizziness overwhelmed him, and he dropped to his knees.

Marco walked to his pallet and stood over him, stroking Sophie's neck.

"A few more hours' rest," Jakli said. "This afternoon."

Marco nodded reluctantly. "If Sophie and Jakli say wait, I wait. But a few more hours only." He moved back into the shadows.

"This afternoon?" Shan asked. "But it is night."

"This is a cavern," Jakli explained. "A water station. A monastery even, long ago."

"A water station?"

"The aqueducts under the sand. The karez- they brought water from the mountains when there were still huge ice fields. The textbooks from Beijing say that engineers from Nanjing and Sian built them but the old stories and the walls say otherwise. Men from Persia came to build them during your Tang dynasty, in exchange for the precious stones and fruit from our land. The walls have paintings of them."

A thick, worn book lay beside his pallet. "Someone was reading to me," he said. He picked it up. The Travels of Marco Polo, in English.

"I was," Deacon said. "Warp's idea, she says it helps bring an injured brain back."

"Warp?"

Jakli put a finger to his lips. "There will be time later for explanations." She handed him the ladle again.

Shan drank. His thirst seemed unslakable. "The water still flows from the mountains?"

"A trickle, enough to keep Sand Mountain alive."

"But it must have been a thousand years."

Jakli nodded and pushed him gently back down on his pallet. "Now sleep again. We will be near."

But when he awoke the chamber was empty. Carefully, wary of summoning the pain that came with sudden movement, he picked up the clay lamp by his pallet and began to explore.

The chamber was roughly forty feet on each side. Two of the walls had been plastered and held life-sized paintings of stern men with blue eyes and long reddish hair and beards that were squared at the bottom. Their faces somehow reminded him of the woman in the poster, Niya. They were offering gifts to other figures who stood in front of horses, scores of tiny horses painted out of scale. Down the tunnel that led out of the room he saw half a dozen meditation cells. He looked in one and stepped back quickly. Two figures lay asleep under blankets of rough sacking.

The tunnel parted. To the right he saw lights and heard several voices. He stepped to the left and soon emerged into another large chamber. Sophie stood there with two other camels. On the sand floor beyond was a bright patch, reflected from a passage at the end of the chamber. Sophie greeted him with a soft wickering sound, and he rubbed her neck a moment, then followed the curving passage for twenty feet and emerged into brilliant sunlight.

Shielding his eyes, he stepped into the desert. The sky was a brilliant cobalt, devoid of clouds. He quickly discovered that the Sand Mountain was a long outcropping of sandstone, much bigger than the one that held the temple at Karachuk, perhaps two hundred feet high and over half a mile long. There was a ruin near the top, an old sentinel tower of cut stone. He walked halfway up the path that led to the tower and sat on a rock, then stretched and filled his lungs. The air was pure and clear, with no scent of the death it had carried two days earlier. In the far south a long line of white hovered on the horizon. Not a cloud, he knew, but the high Kunlun, where Gendun sat inside the mountain, waiting.

Two days, he thought. In two days the killer could have found another boy.

When he went back inside, through the small fissure hidden in shadow, Jakli was sitting at the entrance, bent over a wooden bowl, rubbing something with a brush of brass wire. She did not notice him until he knelt beside her.

"I'm sorry," she said, lowering the brush. "I should have taken you back to Senge Drak. You had a new life to go to. It is my fault."

"I think in that storm," Shan said after a moment, looking out the opening toward the desert, "in those moments when the blackness overtook us, I think I gave up that life."

She looked up and nodded solemnly, as if she perfectly understood, as if it had been the bargain Shan had made with the deities of the desert, the price he had paid to keep them all alive.

He gestured toward the bowl and she gave a sigh of exasperation, then rubbed the object in her hand with an oily cloth and held it up for Shan's inspection. "Virtue medallions," she said. "Deacon uncovered them by one of the altars."