This then was where the hail chaser had called to the skies and done his dance, where two soldiers had died, where Huan had arrested the old Tibetan for murder. Shan sat on a boulder and studied the scene. It was at the crest of the highest ridge that reached out from the massive snowcapped peak above, which itself was the highest summit for scores of miles to the south, probably the highest until the mighty Himalayas, which were visible as a gray smudge on the horizon. It would be a cloud catcher, where moisture-laden clouds that had made it over the barrier of the Himalayas would pile on, colliding with the frigid air of the peak. It didn’t require sorcery to know that if hail was going to fall anywhere in the surrounding countryside, it was likely to be on this slope.

As he approached his truck he saw two stone pillars matching those of Shiva’s drawing. They led to a little flat overlooking the vast landscape, beside a spring that bubbled up out of the ground, surrounded by more of the overgrown cairns and a jutting ledge that made a roof under which three or four people could have slept. It would have been a stopping place on the pilgrims’ path. It also had to be where the hail chaser would have sheltered when the hail had pelted down on the nearby convoy. Not just pilgrims had stopped there, for Shan found the faint traces of hoof prints. He turned and studied the landscape to the south, then lifted his binoculars, locating more gray blots on the land below. The distance was too great to make out specific structures, but he knew the pattern of the blots, and he realized he had looked at these same snowcapped peaks many times during his years behind razor wire. The gray blots were Tan’s prison camps. On the day of Yankay Namdol’s release the hail chaser had come in this direction, on horseback, with the young woman who released prayer flag kites over the dam construction site.

Shan folded his legs into the meditation position and sat in the pilgrims’ flat, facing the high mountains, reciting first the mani mantra then the mantra Shiva had written at the bottom of his chart, a mantra that invoked the mountain deities. Eventually he rose, parked his truck off the road, and pulled his pack from the back seat. He emptied his water bottle from Yangkar and refilled it in the pilgrims’ spring, then proceeded up the trail. He might have driven another two or three miles, but this was the respectful approach, as a pilgrim trying to meet the mountain god on his own terms.