"Look upon it as an adventure," she said. "Maybe this dust we're breathing contains some essence of Alexander, the beauty of Mumtaz Mahal, a few molecules of Gautama Buddha's physical body."

Richard reached into his bag and pulled out his light meter. Frowning, he glanced from it to the elephant pacing with ponderous grace just outside the window of the car. The gray bulk was somehow insubstantial in the dusk, the children that sat on its back only blots of shadow.

"Too dark," he said, and he thrust the meter back into the bag. "If we were on schedule..."

"Try to enjoy yourself, she said between her teeth.

"Sharon, I'm on assignment. I'm taking pictures of India on assignment for the Foundation. And we're not going to get to the Foundation guesthouse in time for me to do any work tonight."

She closed her eyes and for a moment succumbed to weariness. It would be so easy to sleep, to surrender to a dream. She opened her eyes and focused on the intricately folded turban of the Sikh driver.

"Mussoorie has been there for a long time; it'll still be there tomorrow," she said, trying again. "You know, I'm from Mussoorie and you have to show me."

His snort was humorless. With a sigh she turned to stare at the crowds thronging the street. The stench, the dust and smoke eddied in slow whorls through the window, coating her skin with sludge. Her hair straggled in annoying damp ringlets across her forehead. A beggar, a shapeless heap of rags, thrust a scrawny hand into the car and whined some incomprehensible Hindi epithet.

The Sikh accelerated, following the car ahead. "Shouldn't you turn on the headlights?" Sharon asked faintly.

The turbaned head nodded. "So sorry. Lights not working. Following car ahead, you see."

"That figures," Richard groaned. "Car broke down three times. Waited in Saharanpur for hours with a bloody flat tire, shut up in a bloody hot car with beggars like vultures waiting."

In Tibet, Sharon thought, the vultures are sacred. The Tibetans practice celestial burial, dismembering the bodies of the dead and feeding them to the carrion birds, freeing the soul for reincarnation, another trip around the wheel of life. Her neck crawled. Stop it, she ordered herself. Stop it. Surely here, on the other side of the world....

"That's India for you," she said, with a brittle brightness. "No parts for the cars, no one to fix them. The locals have learned acceptance, I guess. But we're almost there, and dinner'll be waiting."

Richard muttered scepticism. The dusk thickened. The city of Dehra Dun dematerialized behind them. The driver turned at a fork in the road, following close behind the tail lights of another car. And there, suddenly, were the mountains that had all day receded before them, a mirage closing the edge of the Punjabi plain.

These were only the foothills of the Himalayas, but to Sharon's midwestern American eyes they were themselves mountains. At the top, where the basalt cleaved the sky, flickered rows of yellow and white lights like Christmas decorations on some unimaginably tall tree.