Tserung fixed Shan with a contemplative gaze, looking more like a monk than Shan had ever seen him. “No one was living there,” he said, correcting Shan. “Only hermit monks. It was the holiest of ground. People went there to pray, as pilgrims, since before time itself. My grandfather always just called it the original valley, like it was there before everything else. I remember once my grandmother argued when he said that, and he told her don’t be silly, there had to be a first place, from which all creation flowed. He said it was the foundation place, that all the bones of the earth were anchored there. If that anchor were broken, then those bones would disconnect.”

Strangely, the words shook Shan. After a moment he nodded. “A place of great spiritual power. I was hoping to find references to it here, to help me understand it better.”

Tserung kept staring at Shan. “Are you going to stop what they are doing?” he asked in a hopeful tone.

“I want to understand it,” Shan said again. “No one can stop it.”

“Because the gods of Beijing are more powerful than the gods of Tibet,” Yara inserted.

Tserung weighed her words and cocked his head. “Or the gods of Tibet are just sleeping so soundly they haven’t awakened yet to what Beijing is doing.” He shrugged and ran his fingers through his long black hair. “I’ve seen passages about monks going to the valley to collect medicinal herbs, and monks going on summer retreat there, two or three hundred years ago. And many references to pilgrims traveling to the sanctuary of Gekho’s Roost. It was very important for pilgrims. They would stop in Yangkar to rest up for the long trek into the high mountains. Left handers, mostly, because the chronicles mention that they camped around the little chapel outside the walls.”

Shan chewed on the mechanic’s words. “You mean they were Bonpo pilgrims,” he said, referring to the practitioners of the old animistic religion that had prevailed in Tibet for millenia prior to the arrival of Buddhism from India. Bon and Buddhist practices had blended to create Tibet’s unique form of Buddhism, but some embraced the old traditions more than the new. Among those practices was the walking of pilgrim circuits, or koras, in a counterclockwise or left-handed direction, instead of the clockwise path of Buddhist pilgrims. Bon pilgrims would have been welcomed at the monastery, but they often had their own priests and their own chapels.

“I can look in earlier volumes,” Tserung volunteered.

“Yara and I can help for an hour or two,” Shan said. Tserung lifted a lantern and guided them back to the farthest chamber, where the oldest books lay.