"Whenever possible. Only a tiny sample of tissue, to be sent to labs in the United States and Switzerland that are secretly helping us. We need a statistically significant set of DNA data." Najan squatted and leaned against the wall, looking at the mummy Shan had exposed. He felt the spell too. "We don't think they would mind. The first time, we had a Kazakh here, one descended from the people of Karachuk. He went inside, alone, while his grey dog kept watch outside. He said words over the dead ones and explained to them. He said afterward that the old ones would be proud to help."

Shan smiled. He had met the one who spoke to the dead. Osman.

"It is so dangerous, what you do," Shan said after a long silence. "They would call you a traitor. They would say you are collaborating with foreigners to undermine the state. Don't you have a family?"

A sad smile grew on the scientist's face. "I come from a Uighur clan. When I was young, I had uncles, many uncles. I loved my uncles and aunts and cousins. My uncles would sit around the fires and drink kumiss and tell stories of the clan from back to the time of the great khans. We rode fast horses on festival days and performed ceremonies that had been done for a thousand years. They taught me the names of the spirits that watch over animals and how to hold their eagles."

"Eagles?"

"Hunting eagles. My clan was famous for its hunting eagles. They were raised from hatchlings, as part of the family." The Uighur drew deeply on his cigarette. "But there are no more uncles and aunts. I have only one child, because the government said so. My daughter will be permitted by the goverment to have but one child. Without brothers and sisters there are no more uncles and aunts, no cousins. Festival days aren't the same, some are even forgotten altogether. My uncles are dead. No more hunting eagles. No one remembers all the stories. Maybe I do it for them." Najan pulled on his cigarette, then nodded at the mummy with the beard. "This one, he was someone's uncle."

They walked back down the tunnel together. Najan showed Shan a second row of cells, containing another dozen mummies. They were arranged by age. One cell held those known to be from a two-thousand-year-old burial site, another even older mummies. Or parts of mummies, for most of the cell's contents were pieces of bodies, all that were left in some graves after the storms, and time, did their work. The first cell, where Shan and Najan had sat, contained bodies from a known Tibetan garrison town, from the end of the first millenium.

"I was frightened at first," the Uighur said. "Now, I just come sometimes and sit with them. I know that these people lying here, they would approve."

"Do you know the old tablets?" Shan asked after a moment.

Najan put his palms together horizontally and slid them apart, as though opening one of the wooden tablets. "The Kharoshthi texts? Sure. They were first uncovered a hundred years ago, by European archaeologists working the ruins of Niya. We found dozens here, in a cell at Sand Mountain."

"Public Security knows about them," Shan told him.

The Uighur scientist shrugged. "It was just a matter of time before they found out."

"They're looking for a trail to get to the source, to get to the rebels working with foreigners. Major Bao thinks that maybe he found a connection through Lau."

"But Lau has gone beyond speaking."

Except, Shan reflected bitterly, in the last few minutes of her life, when she had undoubtedly spoken through a haze of drugs and pain. It seemed more certain than ever that this had been the secret her killer had wanted, that Bao was on a relentless, bloodthirsty drive to expose the dissidents and their foreign collaborators. And if so, Bao wasn't after all the zheli, but only the boys, finding and killing the boys, because it was a zheli boy named Micah who was the link to the American scientist.

"Bao spoke about the Antiquities Institute."

Najan gave a bitter smile as he finished his cigarette. "They tried to get me to work for them once. Wanted me to prove to the world that the Kharoshthi writing is actually a form of ancient Chinese. They're not scientists, they're propaganda agents, dedicated to fostering the myths. They tell the newspapers that Niya Gazuli was faked by foreign subversives. They would try to prove that cavemen in Africa ate with chopsticks if they thought they could get away with it." He shook his head sadly, then nodded toward Shan and headed back in the direction of the laboratory.

The cell with the thousand-year-old Buddhists had a new visitor when he returned. Lokesh had brought in several lamps and uncovered all the faces. He was reciting a mantra, a prayer for the souls, Shan thought at first, then he saw the joy in his friend's eyes. It was a celebration, not a mourner's chant.

Shan sat across from Lokesh, one of the mummies between them, the man with the dark red beard. Around the man's neck was a chain, bearing a gau that lay on his chest. He wore a heavy vest, with a small pocket from which a cup made of cow horn protruded.

Lokesh looked up with a huge grin. "He waited a thousand years so we could meet him."

Shan started to say that the man's soul had long departed, but he knew his friend understood. It wasn't that he was paying homage to souls that may have been reincarnated twenty times since leaving these frail bodies. It was just that these people were so real. In that moment, if the man had sat up on his blanket, Shan would not have run. He would have wanted to clasp the man's hand.

"Look in the blanket, Xiao Shan," Lokesh said excitedly, lifting a corner of the felt covering the man's lower body. "I know him."

Shan studied his friend uncertainly, then looked back at the mummy. "I don't understand."

"I mean, I know he was man of good deeds. He was a man who had suffered and didn't mind the suffering. He was a man who understood the things that we understand. Look."

As Lokesh raised the felt Shan saw that around the mummified wrist was a string of beads. A Buddhist rosary. Lokesh pulled the blanket away further and pointed to two thick rectangular objects with cracked leather straps, placed beside the man's hips, where the man's hands could reach them if he extended his arms. They were the hand blocks used by pilgrims, the smooth wooden blocks with leather straps into which a pilgrim inserted his hands to protect them while making ten thousand prostrations on the ground each day. Shan had seen identical blocks used by pilgrims along Tibetan roads, along the sacred Barkhor path in Lhasa. From a standing position they would kneel, then place the hands on the ground and drop to a completely prone position, reciting a mantra as they did so, then rise, take one step forward, and repeat the process.

"There's writing on the blocks," Lokesh said. "Tibetan, in the old style. I studied it. It tells his story. This man," -Lokesh seemed almost overcome with emotion as he spoke- "he was going to Mount Kailas," he continued, referring to the holiest of Tibetan places, the father mountain at the edge of the Himalayas. The first of the mountains, the Tibetans called it. "He was going to leave these blocks on the mountain after completing a circuit of prostrations around it, as an offering for the spirits of his daughter, who had died falling from a horse, and his wife, who had died giving birth to his daughter."

Lokesh looked at Shan and sighed. Something had happened, something had stopped the man hundreds of miles from his destination. "He had come far," Lokesh said, admiration in his voice. "His home, it says, was Loulan, one of the old cities, gone now, at the eastern edge of the desert. He had come almost halfway."