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later, to hold the offerings brought by shepherds and farmers. So many had been brought that Jamyang had stored some in the rear of the shallow cave, under a piece of canvas.
    Shan walked along the offerings, touching several, pausing as one, then another, brought back a memory of Jamyang or Lokesh exclaiming over its workmanship. An old silver pen case inlaid with turquoise. A little jade dragon that looked more Chinese than Tibetan. A bronze figurine of the Compassionate Buddha set with jewels along its base, a purba —the short spikelike dagger of Tibetan ritual, a thick disk of jade with a wide channel cut through its center and flowers carved around its edge that looked strangely familiar, no doubt the base of a missing statue. He picked up the purba. A narrow brown ribbon had been tied around it. The purba had been on the altar for weeks, but not the ribbon. He fingered the ribbon uncertainly, wondering why it looked familiar. He suspected Jamyang had tied it on while he had cleaned the offerings just before dying, had tied it to the implement that was supposed to ritually cut through consciousness. He set it down uneasily, then moved to the canvas-covered pile in the shadows. Eventually the knobs would find the shrine, and the thief surely would return. The treasures would have to be taken away for safekeeping.
    He lifted the canvas. On top of the pile were the ribbon-bound printing blocks Jamyang had recovered from the thief. Shan had never seen the boards before. The ribbon. He glanced back at the purba. The ribbon tied to it had been taken from the blocks, as if the lama had wanted to draw Shan’s attention to them. It had been two weeks since his last visit to the shrine, when he and Lokesh had helped clean everything, including the objects in the little cave. The printing blocks had not been there then. He brought them out into the early morning light, laid them on the end of a bench, and untied the ribbons. He turned them over to reveal their inscriptions, then stared in shocked disbelief.
    They were not printing blocks. They were indeed old, indeed sacred, but they were not Tibetan. His hand trembled with excitement as he ran a finger along the carved characters. One of the two slabs was inscribed with a single vertical line of Chinese ideograms, of a very old style, the second with the identical characters plus small legends on either side of them. He looked up at the altar, realizing now why the jade disk had seemed familiar, then retrieved the disk. With an action that had been familiar in his youth, he pressed the two boards together, the writing facing outward now, and slid their ends into the channel on the disk. They fit perfectly, held erect by the heavy base. It was, impossibly, a Chinese ancestral tablet. In the distant, lost world of Shan’s childhood he had visited family shrines that had been lined with such tablets, each inscribed with the name of a dead ancestor, each reverently cleaned and prayed over by living relatives on festival days. The tablets, the old Taoist priests had explained, enshrined the souls of the dead. Shan had not seen one for years, for decades. He would never forget the day when the Red Guard had raided the family shrines of his neighborhood and made bonfires of all the tablets. An old widow down the street had been inconsolable, saying the Communists had incinerated the souls of her ancestors.
    Yuan Yi, the tablet said, mandarin of the third rank, died this fifty-ninth year of the Kangxi Emperor. The opposite side recorded the site of his burial, in Heilongjiang Province. Shan did a quick calculation. The mandarin, of very high imperial rank, had died in 1721 and been buried in the cold mountains of distant Manchuria. Jamyang had given up his most precious Buddhist artifact for a three-hundred-year-old Chinese spirit tablet. Shan replayed in his mind’s eye the moments on the slope with the thief. The man had held tightly to the tablets, had acted ready to fight for