“This is the same as you gave to Lhakpa?” he had asked the astrologer.

“Everyone has the same destination in the end,” she had said enigmatically, then stepped inside and shut her door.

He studied his official public map, the military map marked by Lhakpa, and a satellite photo Zhu had given him before they had parted company in Lhadrung. Each told its own story. The public map delineated the road from the east, from Sichuan, in a long sloping line along the bottom that he knew was only a general approximation of the route. The photographic image, over a year old, showed only a flat compression of the landscape with peaks indicated by splays of white snow but clearly captured the Valley of the Gods, marked by its turquoise lake of glacial water and even a smudge of shadow where the standing stones stood. The military map showed the road in much greater, more accurate detail, had altitudes for several mountains, but its printed version showed no trails and none of the rough tracks like the one Shan now drove on. These had been carefully inscribed by Lhakpa, sometimes with tiny Tibetan annotations like antelope passage or fresh water here. He estimated he was ten miles southwest of the Five Claws project, and Lhakpa’s dotted lines over a steep saddle of land on the high mountain slope made it clear he would have to complete the last few miles on foot.

Scanning the terrain with his binoculars, he could make out more trails that traversed the verdant slopes, made by bharal and the more common mountain goats over the course of centuries, all converging on the massive peak, as if the animals too had been making pilgrimages. The peak itself was unmistakable, the jagged tower pointing toward the heavens, its western side split by the narrow pass where the Five Claws dam was being built. Something moved on the heights and he braced the lenses against a ledge rock to focus on a line of figures. They were so distant and the slope they traversed so mottled in shadow that it took several breaths for him to make them out, then he paused in surprise and looked at them with his naked eye. He was seeing something very rare for that sparsely populated quarter of Lhadrung County, something so improbable that he bent to study the figures again with his lenses. He was looking at a yak train, a convoy of eight or ten yaks loaded with packs, heading toward the deep mountains of Kham, the most rugged and inaccessible of Tibet’s regions.