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paused.
    “Great danger.”
    To me?”
    “Yes.   To you.”
    “Is that why we are fleeing to Gharoling?   Is that why we left at night?”
    The old man sighed.
    “Yes We will be safe there.   Khyongla Rinpoche understands.   If if anything should happen to me, lord, make your way to Gharoling.   They will expect you there.   Do not attempt to return to Dorje-la.   Do not go anywhere but Gharoling.   Do not trust anyone but Khyongla Rinpoche and those he advises you to trust.”
    Silence fell again as the boy digested what he had been told The world was proving to be a harder place than he had once thought it.   Then his voice broke into the old man’s thoughts again.
    “Is it my other body” he asked.
    “Is he responsible for this?”
    Tobchen shook his head.
    “No, my lord.   I am sure he knows nothing of you.   At least I think not.   When it is time, he will be told.”
    “Would he try to kill me if he knew?”
    The lama did not answer immediately.   So many incarnations, he thought.   They began as children and grew old and died.   And were born again. An endless cycle.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “I think so.   I think he would have you killed ‘
    Kalimpong
    Kalimpong, northern India, January 1921 Kalimpong dozed in the thin January sunshine.   It dreamed of wool and cotton and bright Kashmiri shawls, of Chinese silks, deer antlers and musk, of Indian sugar, glass, and penny candles, of long, jangling caravans coming down from the Chumbi valley out of Tibet, of traders bringing their wares in gunny sacks from the plains of India.   But on the high passes to the north, snow fell in easy splendour, thick and white, falling in a trance like the substance of dreams on rocks as cold as sepulchres. For two weeks now, no-one had dared to venture over the Nathu pass. Trade had been brisk with the arrival of the last caravan from Gyantse, but now it had fallen off again, and the tiny market town waited for word that the large consignment due from Lhasa was at last on its way.
    Christopher Wylam let the clear air fill his lungs.   He felt better in Kalimpong.   The town itself was little more than a trading-post on the outskirts of an empire, an entrepot for traders coming down from Tibet with wool and yak-tails to exchange for cheap manufactured goods and more expensive fabrics.   But it stood on the edge of mystery.   In the air, Christopher could already taste the snow and ice of the Himalayas.   They lay on his tongue like a flavour remembered from childhood, at once familiar and exotic, conjuring up memories of silent journeys in the dim, falling snow.
    He had only to lift his eyes to see the mountains themselves standing silently in the distance beyond green foothills.   They rose up like ramparts barring access to the great Tibetan plateau beyond, a forbidden kingdom jealously guarded by its protector deities.   And, more prosaically, by armed Tibetan border guards.
    As he stepped down from his pony, the spices and perfumes of the bazaar brought back to him vivid memories of his father.   He remembered walking here with him, followed by their chaprasst, Jit Bahadur.   And behind would come his mother dressed in white, carried in an open dandy on the shoulders of four impeccably dressed servants.   That had been in the days when his father was stationed nearby as British Resident at the native court of Mahfuz Sultan.
    Arthur Wylam had been an important man, appointed to his post by the Viceroy himself.   The Wylams had been Anglo-Indians for three generations: Christopher’s grandfather William had come out with the Company just before the Mutiny and had stayed on afterwards as an ICS District Magistrate in Secunderabad.   Young Christopher had been brought up on stories of the great Raj families the Rivett-Carnacs, the Maynes and the Ogilvies and had been told repeatedly that it was his duty, as it would one day be that of his own son, to add the name of Wylam to that illustrious