Walid and Omar help Nicolas dismount and carry him through the gates and towards the noise. Nicolas senses his men’s discomfort – they have fallen among mysterious pagans: the profusion of gods, the sculptures of threatening deities, the colours and strangeness of the temple carvings. The noise grows louder and more disturbing until they emerge into the temple courtyard. Monks in maroon robes, crested red hats and devil masks are dancing in the courtyard before a huge audience of local people who regard the interlopers with intense but unthreatening curiosity.

Nicolas reassures his men: it is the annual festival, an auspicious time to arrive. But he doesn’t fully believe it himself.

To his astonishment, a man he takes to be the senior abbot welcomes him in English and indicates to his men that they should bring their master to an upper storey.

Nicolas is carried with great care up two flights of stairs and into a private chamber with a flagstone floor. It is fragrant with the earthy smell of incense. He is placed on a low, soft bed and given a bowl of salty, greasy tea to drink and two pellets of a herbal substance that he can’t identify, but which induces almost immediate profound and dreamless sleep.

‘I convalesced at the monastery for three weeks.’

Coming to – is it hours or days later? – the first thing Nicolas sees is a smooth young face, as round and congenial as a harvest moon. It belongs to a novice monk in red robes who gives his name as Sonam.

Sonam fusses around Nicolas, propping his leg on pillows, applying a splint, which he fixes expertly in place with tight bandages. The pressure of the dressing immediately relieves the ache in the limb, but Sonam indicates in gestures that Nicolas is not to stand up. He turns his back while Nicolas uses the chamber pot and then carries it smilingly away as though its contents are rare and precious. A few minutes later he returns with a tray of food: barley porridge in a lacquered bowl; a teardrop of barley flatbread; and butter tea, which Nicolas will mentally make palatable by pretending it’s his mother’s chicken soup.

Nicolas is remarkably hungry, but pauses to bow his head over the tray to say a brief grace. Half a century later, he still can’t think about the accident without a shiver of dread. ‘Nineteen times out of twenty, such a thing ends in death,’ the old man tells his listener.

Vincenzo accepts this estimate is probably accurate, but he also understands that Notovitch is making a grander assertion: his arrival at the monastery was more than lucky; it was providential.

At the end of the meal, Sonam takes the tray and mimes sleep by inclining his cheek onto his folded hands. It will be almost a week before the two men realise that they both speak Hindi.