“Staying forgotten requires sacrifices,” Shan said, choosing not to mention that the Committee of Leading Citizens had erected their own sign and Shan had knocked it down with his truck and blamed a yak.

Pike gave a quiet laugh. “My life story in four words,” he said.

Shan paused, studying the American, but decided not to press for an explanation. Pike was a strong bull of a man, and his eyes burned with a penetrating intelligence, but Shan had begun to also see a deep sadness etched on his countenance. He was a man who had experienced a great deal of the world and seemed to have given up on much of it. He was a loner who seemed to have left behind the anchors that kept most lives on track, and now had lost his daughter in a forgotten land.

A melancholy grin flickered on Pike’s face as he watched Cao climb up the steps of the tower at the end of the square, and Shan realized the student’s energetic curiosity probably reminded Pike of his daughter. He made a sweeping gesture that took in the square and the buildings around it. “There are layers of time here,” the American declared. “The scale is all wrong. Once something much bigger occupied this space.”

Shan nodded. “A gompa, a monastery. The tower was part of the gatehouse.”

Pike weighed Shan’s words. “A major gompa. One of the big regional ones,” he suggested.

Shan nodded again. “Hundreds of monks, and a medical college in the hills above town. The army left only the tower, because it was a convenient watch post.”

“More of the forgotten landscape.”

“The Tibetans haven’t forgotten it. Sometimes I think they believe the old gompa is still here, invisible to all but the devout. On still nights when the wind isn’t blowing people say they can hear the old horns that called monks to prayer. Some of the old ones walk around the square in a crooked path because they say they are avoiding the sacred chortens that stood there for centuries, as if they could still see them. More and more of the devout are coming back because of those stories. Sometimes I see them sitting and praying in front of the empty spaces. On Buddha’s birthday last year flowers and boughs of juniper appeared in the night, laid out in squares where the old chortens were.”

Pike gazed at the empty space with a strange longing. “My daughter Natalie found something special in Tibet, Shan,” he confided. “She wrote me about it. She said she now understood that her job was to bring old ghosts to life. She said that what people didn’t understand was that the ghosts are us.”

The words sent a chill down Shan’s back. It sounded like something Lokesh would say. He wished he had been able to meet such a wise woman.