Trinle silently lit more butter lamps and turned to Shan. "Do you know the term gomchen?" he asked, as casually as if they were together in their hut at the 404th. "It is little used these days."

Shan shook his head.

"A hermit of hermits. A living Buddha, on a lifetime hermitage," Trinle said.

"It was the Second who decided the gomchen had to be protected," Tsomo continued. "A sacred trust. A small remote holy place had to be selected, to shelter his home so deeply that the secret would always be kept."

"The Second?" Shan asked in confusion.

"The Second Dalai Lama."

"But that was nearly five hundred years ago."

"Yes. There have been fourteen Dalai Lamas. But only nine of our gomchen." Trinle's voice, almost a whisper, was filled with uncharacteristic pride.

Tsomo was at the manuscript now. He opened it to a page marked with a strip of silk. The serene smile returned to his face as he read.

The nuns uncovered the tray and set bowls of tsampa and tea beside the manuscript. It wasn't a black panel on the wall, Shan realized. It was a hole in the wall, an access to a room beyond. He remembered the small solitary window high in the face of the cliff.

"You care for a hermit here," he said in a whisper.

Trinle put his finger to his lips. "Not a hermit. The gomchen," he said, and silently watched as Tsomo and the nuns prepared the food. When they were done, Trinle joined them in kneeling on the floor and prostrating themselves toward the cell, chanting as they did so.

No one spoke until they had climbed down the long flight of stairs and reentered the small chapel where Shan had discovered Trinle.

"It is hard to explain," Trinle said. "The Great Fifth, he said the gomchen was like one brilliant diamond buried in a vast mountain. Our abbot, when I was young, said the gomchen was all that was trying to be inside us, without the burden of wanting."

"You said there was a trust. A gompa that protects the gomchen."

"It has always been our great honor."

Shan looked up, confused. "But this place. It is not exactly a gompa."

"No. Not Yerpa. Nambe gompa."

Shan stared. "But Nambe gompa is gone." Choje had been the abbot of Nambe gompa. "Destroyed by army planes."

"Ah yes," Trinle said with his serene smile. "The stone walls were destroyed. But Nambe is not those old walls. We still exist. We still have our sacred duty to Yerpa."

Shan, numbed by Trinle's announcement, thought of Choje back at the 404th, performing his own sacred duty to protect Yerpa. He became aware that Tsomo was sitting beside him. "He writes very beautifully, when he is not meditating," Tsomo said. "About the evolution of the soul."

Shan remembered the manuscript in the antechamber. The gomchen communicated with them by writing religious tracts in the manuscript. "How long has it been?" Shan asked, still awed. "Since the bolts were tightened."

Trinle seemed hard-pressed to answer. "Time is not one of his dimensions," he said. "Last year he recorded a conversation with the Second Dali Lama. As if he were there, as if it had just taken place."

"But in years," Shan persisted. "When did he-"

"Sixty-one years ago," Tsomo said. A flash of joy lit his eyes.

"It was a very different world," Shan observed reverently.

"It still is. For him. He does not know. It is one of the rules. Outside is irrelevant. He only considers Buddhahood."

"At night," Tsomo said with a strangely longing tone. "He can watch the stars."

"You mean he doesn't know about…" Shan struggled to find the words.

"The troubles of the secular world?" Trinle offered. "No. They come and go. There has always been suffering. There have always been invaders. The Mongolians. The Chinese, several times. Even the British. Invasions pass. They do not affect our good fortune."

"Good fortune?" Shan asked, his voice breaking with emotion.

Trinle seemed genuinely surprised at Shan's question. "To have been able to pass the current incarnation in this holy land." He studied Shan. "The suffering of our people is unimportant to the work of the gomchen," Trinle said with new concern in his voice as he studied Shan. It was as though he felt a need to calm his visitor. "He must not be burdened with the world. That is why there was so much concern, the first time you met Tsomo."

"When I met Tsomo?"

"Consultations were made. Had he been contaminated? we asked."

"If it is unimportant inside, it must be kept unimportant outside, I told them," Tsomo offered.

Suddenly, with painful clarity, Shan understood. "He could die soon, the gomchen."

"At night we can hear him coughing," Trinle said heavily. "There is blood sometimes in his basin. We offer more blankets. He will not use them. We must be ready. Tsomo is the tenth."

The announcement sent a shiver down Shan's spine. He stared, speechless, at the vibrant, wise youth who soon would be locked into the stone forever. Tsomo returned his stare with a broad smile.

They walked Shan back to the library where Yeshe, still wide-eyed, was poring over the manuscripts. As Trinle and Tsomo joined Yeshe, Gendun appeared at the door.

"I believe Prosecutor Jao was killed to protect Yerpa," Shan said abruptly, before they entered the room.

"The prosecutor had many enemies," the old monk observed.

"I mean, I believe his murder was committed on the Dragon's Claw to protect the gomchen."

Gendun shook his head slowly. "Every morning we have a prayer. A blessing of the wind, to be gentle on the birds. A blessing of our shoes, to keep them from treading on insects."

"What if there were other Tibetans who wanted to protect you, who cared less than you about killing insects?"

The old man looked very sad. "Then the trust imposed on us by the Second would have been broken. We could not accept being protected by a violation of a holy vow."

Shan moved around the room and paused at the row of windows, Gendun joining him a moment later. The small pool was lit by the sun now. Near the water, lying in the sunlight, were four figures on blankets. They were not meditating, but lay as though debilitated, without the strength even to sit.

"You have sickness here?" he asked the monk.

"It is the price we pay. In recent years there have been new diseases which our herbs cannot cure. Sometimes we get pockmarked faces and fevers. We sometimes move to the next life at an early age."

"Smallpox," Shan said in alarm.

"I have heard that name, from the valley," Gendun nodded. "We call it rotting cheek."

He studied the frail forms below him with a sense of helpless horror. What was it Li had said when he mocked Dr. Sung? Sometimes in the mountains they contract diseases that had disappeared in the rest of the world. He had a sudden, waking nightmare, in which all the monks had died of disease, and left the gomchen sealed in his chamber. He blinked away the vision and turned back to the room. Gendun had stepped to the table beside Yeshe. Shan was unattended for the moment. The monks were all with Yeshe now, who was firing a barrage of excited questions at them as he studied another ancient manuscript. Shan quietly moved out of the room.

The hallway was clear. He ran up the first flight of stairs to the landing and stepped into the dimly lit passage. He pulled one of the butter lamps from its niche in the wall and opened the first door.