I have no story of a blinding conversion to humanism. It just didn't happen that way. During the Cultural Revolution, and when I transmigrated into hosts in Tibet, Vietnam, in Korea, in El Salvador, I experienced humans fighting, usually from the safety of the general's office. In the Falkland Islands I watched them fight over rocks. 'Two bald men fighting over a comb,' an ex-host commented. In Rio I saw a tourist killed for a watch. Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous. That is why I no longer harm my hosts. There's already too much of this poison.

Gunga spent the morning at the hotel, sweeping and boiling some water to wash sheets. Seeing Caspar and Sherry again from the outside was like revisiting an old house with a new tenant. They paid and waited until their rented jeep turned up. I bade Caspar goodbye in Danish as he slung his backpack in, but he just a.s.sumed Gunga was saying something in Mongolian.

As Gunga made the beds, she imagined Caspar and Sherry lying here, and then thought about Oyuun, and Gombo's youngest son. She thought about the rumours of child prost.i.tution spreading through the city, and how the police were being paid off in foreign money. Mrs Enchbat, the widow who owned the hotel, stopped by to do some bookkeeping. Mrs Enchbat was in a good mood Caspar had paid in dollars, and Mrs Enchbat needed to raise a dowry. While Gunga was boiling water for washing they sat down and shared some salty tea.

'Now Gunga, you know know that I'm not a one for gossip,' began Mrs Enchbat, a little woman with a mouth wise as a lizard's, 'but our Sonjoodoi saw your Oyuun walking out with Old Gombo's youngest again yesterday evening. People's tongues will start wagging. They were seen at the Naadam festival together. Sonjoodoi also said Gombo's eldest has got a crush on her.' that I'm not a one for gossip,' began Mrs Enchbat, a little woman with a mouth wise as a lizard's, 'but our Sonjoodoi saw your Oyuun walking out with Old Gombo's youngest again yesterday evening. People's tongues will start wagging. They were seen at the Naadam festival together. Sonjoodoi also said Gombo's eldest has got a crush on her.'

Gunga chose counter-attack. 'Is it true your Sonjoodoi's become a Christian?'

Mrs Enchbat considered her reply coolly. 'He's been seen going to the American missionary's apartment once or twice.'

'What does his grandmother have to say about that?'

'Only that it proves what suckers Americans are. They think they're making converts to their weird cult, they're just making converts to powdered milk whatever's the matter, Gunga?'

A riot of doubt had broken out in my host. Gunga knew I was here. Quickly, I tried to calm her. 'No. Something's wrong. I'm going to see the shaman.'

The bus was crowded and stuck in first gear. At the end of the line was a derelict factory from the Soviet days. Gunga had already forgotten what it had once manufactured. I had to look in her unconscious: bullets. Wildflowers were capitalising on the brief summer, and wild dogs picked at the body of something. The afternoon was weak and thin. People from the bus trudged their way past where the road ran out to a hillside of gers. Gunga walked with them. The giant pipe ran along on its stilts. It had been a part of a public-heating system, but the boilers needed Russian coal. Mongolian coal burned at temperatures too cool to make it work. Most of the locals had gone back to burning dung.

Gunga's cousin had gone to this shaman when she couldn't get pregnant. Nine months later she gave birth to boy twins, born with cauls, an omen of great fortune. The shaman was an adviser to the President, and he had a reputation as a horse-healer. It was said he had lived for twenty years as a hermit on the slopes of Tavanbogd in the far-west province of Bayan Olgii. During the Soviet occupation, the local officials had tried to arrest him for vagrancy, but anyone who went to get him returned empty-handed and empty-headed. He was two centuries old.

I was looking forward to meeting the shaman.

I have my gifts: I am apparently immune to age and forgetfulness. I possess freedom beyond any human understanding of the world. But my cage is all my own, too. I am trapped in one waking state of consciousness. I have never found any way to sleep, or dream. And the knowledge I most desire eludes me: I have never found the source of the story I was born with, and I have never discovered whether others of my kind exist.

When I finally left the village at the foot of the Holy Mountain I travelled all over south-east Asia, searching the attics and cellars of old people's minds for other minds without bodies. I found legends of beings who might be my kindred, but of tangible knowledge I found not one footprint. I crossed the Pacific in the 1960s.

Remembering my insane doctor, I mostly maintained a vow of silence. I had no wish to leave behind me a trail of mystics, lunatics and writers. On the other hand, if I came across a mystic, lunatic or writer I would sometimes talk with them. One writer in Buenos Aires even suggested a name for what I am: noncorpum noncorpum, and noncorpa noncorpa, if ever the day dawns when the singular becomes a plural. I spent a pleasant few months debating metaphysics with him, and we wrote some stories together. But the 'I' never became a 'We'. During the 1970s I placed an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the National Enquirer National Enquirer. The USA is even crazier than the rest of humanity. I followed up each of the nineteen replies I received: mystics, lunatics, or writers, every one. I even looked for clues in The Pentagon. I found a lot of things that surprised even me, but nothing related to noncorpa noncorpa. I never went to Europe. It seemed a dead place, cold in the shadows of nuclear missiles.

I returned to my Holy Mountain, possessing knowledge from over a hundred hosts, but still knowing nothing about my origins. I had tired of wandering. The Holy Mountain was the only place on Earth I felt any tie to. For a decade I inhabited the monks who lived on its mountainsides. I led a tranquil enough life. I found companionship with an old woman who lived in a tea shack and believed I was a speaking tree. That was the last time I spoke with a human.

'Come in, daughter,' said the shaman's voice from inside the ger.

Sun-bleached jawbones hung over the door. Gunga looked over her shoulder, suddenly afraid. A boy was playing with a red ball. He threw it high into the hazy blue, and watched it, and caught it when it fell. There was an Ovoo Ovoo, a holy pile of stones and bones. Gunga asked for its blessing and entered the smoky darkness.

'Come in, daughter.' The shaman was meditating on a mat. A lamp hung from the roof frame. A tallow candle spluttered in a copper dish. The rear of the ger was walled off by hanging animal skins. The air was grainy with incense.

There was a carved box by the entrance. Gunga opened it, and put in most of the togrugs that Caspar had tipped her the day before. She slipped off her shoes, and knelt in front of the shaman, on the right-hand side of the ger, the female half. A wrinkled face, impossible to guess the age of. Grey, matted hair, and closed eyes that suddenly opened wide. He indicated a cracked teapot on a low table.

Gunga poured the dark, odourless liquid into a cup of bone.

'Drink, Gunga,' said the shaman.

My host drank, and began to speak the shaman halted her with his hand.

'You have come because a spirit is living within you.'

'Yes,' both Gunga and I answered. Gunga felt me again, and dropped the cup. The stain of the undrunk liquid spread through the rug.

'Then we must find out what it wants,' said the shaman.

Gunga's heart pounded like a boxed bat. Gently, I shut down her consciousness.

The shaman saw the change. He picked up a feather and drew a symbol in the air.

'To whom am I speaking?' asked the shaman. 'An ancestor of this woman?'

'I don't know who I am.' My words, Gunga's voice, dry and croaky. 'I want to discover who I am.' Strange, to be uttering the word 'I' once again.

The shaman was calm. 'What is your name, spirit?'

'I've never needed a name.'

'Are you an ancestor of this woman's?'

'You already asked that. I'm not. Not as far as I know.'

The shaman struck a bone against another bone, muttering words in a language I didn't know. He sprang to his feet and flexed his fingers like claws.

'In the name of Khukdei Mergen Khan art thou cast hence from the body of this woman!'

Human males. 'And then what do you suggest?'

The shaman shouted. 'Be gone! In the name of Erkhii Mergen who divided night from day, I command it!' The shaman shook a rattling sack over Gunga. He blew some incense smoke over my host, and sprinkled some water in her face.

The shaman gazed at my host, waiting for a reaction. 'Shaman, I'd hoped for something more intelligent. This is my first proper conversation for a very long time. And you'd be doing Gunga more good if you used that water to wash her. She believes that the Mongolian body doesn't sweat, so she doesn't wash and she has lice.'

The shaman frowned, and looked into Gunga's eyes, searching for something that wasn't Gunga. 'Your words are perplexing, spirit, and your magic is strong. Do you wish this woman ill? Are you evil?'

'Well, I've had my moments, but I wouldn't describe myself as evil. Would you?'

'What do you want of this woman? What ails you?'

'One memory. And the lack of all others.'

The shaman sat back down and resumed his initial repose. 'Who were your people when you walked as a living body?'

'Why do you think I was once human?'

'What else would you have been?'

'That's a fair question.'

The shaman frowned. 'You are a strange one, even for one of your kind. You speak like a child, not one waiting to pa.s.s over.'

'What do you mean, "my kind"?'

'I am a shaman. It is my calling to communicate with spirits. As it was with my master, and his master before him.'

'Let me explore your mind. I need to see what you have seen.'

'The spirits do not commune with one another?'

'Not with me, they don't. Please. Let me in. It's safer for you if you don't resist.'

'If I allow you to possess me for a short time, you will leave this woman?'

'Shaman, we have a deal. If you touch Gunga, I will leave her now.'

I experience memories like a network of tunnels. Some are serviced and brightly lit, others are catacombs. Some are guarded, yet others are bricked up. Tunnels lead to tunnels, deeper down. So it is with memories.

But access to memories does not guarantee access to truth. Many minds redirect memories along revised maps. In the tunnels of the shaman's memory I met what may have been spirits of the dead, or delusions on the part of either the shaman or his customers or both. Or noncorpa noncorpa! Maybe there were many footprints, or maybe there were none. Or maybe evidence was there in forms I couldn't recognise. I deepened my search.

I found this story, told twenty summers earlier on a firelit desert night.

Many years ago, the red plague stalked the land. Thousands of people died. The healthy fled in its face, leaving behind the infected, saying simply, 'Fate will sift the living from the dead.' Among the abandoned in the land of birds was Tarvaa, a fifteen-year-old boy. His spirit left his body and walked south between the dunes of the dead.

When he appeared in the ger of the Khan of h.e.l.l, the Khan was surprised. 'Why have you left your body behind while it is still breathing?'

Tarvaa replied, 'My Lord, the living considered my body gone. I came here without delay to pledge my allegiance.'

The Khan of h.e.l.l was impressed with the obedience shown by Tarvaa. 'I decree that your time has not yet come. You may take my fastest horse and return to your master in the land of birds. But before you go you may choose one thing from my ger to take with you. Behold! Here you may find wealth, good fortune, comeliness, ecstasy, grief and woe, wisdom, l.u.s.t and gratification... come now, what will you have?'

'My Lord,' spoke Tarvaa, 'I choose the stories.'

Tarvaa put the stories in his leather pouch, mounted the fastest horse of the Khan of h.e.l.l, and returned to the land of birds in the south. When he got there, a crow had already pecked out Tarvaa's body's eyes. But Tarvaa dared not return to the dunes of the dead, fearing that to do so would be ungracious to the Khan. So Tarvaa took possession of his body, and rose up, and though he was blind he lived for a hundred years, travelling Mongolia on the Khan of h.e.l.l's horse, from the Altai Mountains in the far west, to the Gobi desert in the south, to the rivers of Hentii Nuruu, telling stories and foreseeing the future, and teaching the tribesmen the legends of the making of their land. And from that time, the Mongols have told each other tales.

I decided to go south, like Tarvaa. If I lacked clues in reality, I would have to find them in legends.

Jargal Chinzoreg is as strong as a camel. He trusts only his family and his truck. As a boy, Jargal longed to be a pilot for the Mongolian Air Force, but his family lacked the bribes to get him into the Party school in the capital, so he became a truck driver. This was probably lucky, in the long run: n.o.body knows what would happen if the handful of rusting aeroplanes that const.i.tutes the Mongolian Air Force were started up again. There's talk in the parliament of sc.r.a.pping the Air Force altogether, given Mongolia's glaring inability to defend itself against any of its neighbours, even lowly Kazakhstan. Since the economic collapse, Jargal has worked for whoever has access to fuel: the black marketeers, the theoretically privatised iron works, timber companies, meat merchants. Jargal will do anything to make his wife laugh, even put socks up his nose and chase her around the ger making a noise like a h.o.r.n.y yak.

The road we are travelling, from Ulan Bator to Dalanzagad, is the least worst in the country. It's usually pa.s.sable, even in rainy weather. The road is 293 kilometres long, and Jargal knows its every pothole, bend, ditch, checkpoint, and checkpoint guard. He knows which petrol pumps are likely to have petrol when, how much life is left in each of the parts of his thirty-year-old Russian truck, and possible sources for spares.

The horizon widens, the mountains toss and turn and then lie down until the gra.s.slands begin. There's a lonely tree. A signpost. A dusty cafe which hasn't been open since 1990. A barracks where the Soviet Army once did manoeuvres, desolate now with the plumbing and wiring ripped out.

The sun changes position. A cloud shaped like a marmot. Jargal wipes the sweat from his eyes, and lights a Chinese cigarette. He remembers a Marlboro a Canadian hitchhiker gave him last year.

A chestnut horse stands on a ridge, looking down at the road. There's a settlement beyond those rocks. The great sky marmot has become a cylinder valve. There's a rock shaped like a giant's head seventy kilometres outside of Dalanzagad. Many years ago a wrestler used it to crush the head of a monstrous serpent. The sky turns clear jade in the evening cold. Jargal lights another cigarette. Five years ago, around here just off this incline a truck rolled over with its cargo of propane gas. They say you can still see the burning driver running towards the road screaming for help that will for ever be too late. Jargal knows him. They used to drink together at the truckers' hotels.

Jargal sees the town lights in the distance, and he thinks of his wife on the day their first son was born. He thinks about the toy goat that his aunt, Mrs Enchbat, made for his baby daughter out of old sc.r.a.ps of cloth and string. She is still too young to talk well, but already she rides as if she were born in the saddle.

Pride is something I have never felt.

'You've never been interested in the old stories before.' The wizened man in an army jacket frowned. 'They were prohibited when the Russians were here. All we had was goats.h.i.t about the heroes of the revolution. I was a teacher then. Did I ever tell you about the time Horloyn Choibalsan came to our school? The President himself?'

'About fifteen minutes ago, you senile fart,' muttered a greasy listener. A radio in the bar playing pop songs in j.a.panese and English. Three or four men were playing chess, but had become too drunk to remember the rules.

'If I told any of the old stories in the cla.s.sroom,' the old man continued, 'I'd have been a candidate for "re-education". Even Gingghis Khan, the Russians said he was a feudal character. Now every bunch of gers with a covered p.i.s.spool is rushing to prove Gingghis was born by their their bend in the river...' bend in the river...'

'That's very interesting,' I said. Jargal was bored. It was uphill work for me to keep him here, polite. 'Do you know one about the three animals who think about the fate of the world?'

'I could tell you a few stories of my own, though. Did I ever tell you about the time Horloyn Choibalsan came to my school? In a big black car. A black Zil. I want another dumpling. How come you're so interested in the old stories all of a sudden anyway?'

'I'll get you another dumpling. Look, a nice big one... lots of lard. It's my son. He complains if I tell the same one twice. You know what kids are like, always demanding new things... I remember when I was a kid, about three animals who think about the fate of the world...'

The wizened man burped. 'There's no future in stories... Stories are things of the past, things for museums. No place for stories in these market-democracy days.'

Suddenly a shouting-match broke out. Chessmen whistled past. A window cracked. 'He came in a big, black car. There were bodyguards and advisers and KGB men. Trained in Moscow.' The drunk was standing on a table, shouting down into the foray. A man with a birthmark like a mask was smashing the board down on his rival's head. I gave up and let Jargal get us out of here.

The man in the museum looked at Jargal and me in astonishment. 'Stories?'

'Yes,' I began, He started laughing, and I had to stop Jargal taking a swipe at him. 'Why would anyone be interested in stories about Mongolia?'

'Because they are our culture,' I suggested. 'And I don't want you to tell me stories. I want information about the origin of the stories.'

Silence. I noticed the wall-clock had stopped.

'Jargal Chinzoreg,' said the curator, 'you are spending too long in your truck, or with your family. You always were a weird one, but now you're sounding like a crazy old man, or a tourist...'

A man wearing the smartest suit in Mongolia walked out of an office. The director was laughing the laugh of a man of no importance. The suit was carrying a briefcase, and chewing gum.

'We've got our stuffed birds,' continued the curator, 'our Mongolian-Russian eternal friendship display. Our dinosaur bones, our scrolls and the Zanabazar bronzes we could hide from the departing Russians. But if it's information you want, you've got no business here. I ask you!'

The suit drew level. Even though it was a dull day, he had already slipped on a pair of sungla.s.ses. 'You know,' he said, suddenly addressing us, 'what's-his-face down in Dalanzagad is putting together an anthology of Mongolian folk stories. It's a quaint idea. He's hoping to get it translated into English and flog them to tourists. He put a proposal to the state printing press last year. It was turned down no paper. But he's been doing some lobbying, and at the next meeting he might pull it off.'

The suit went. I thanked him.

'Now, Jargal Chinzoreg,' said the curator, 'will you please get lost? It's lunchtime.'

The manager shut his office door with a loud sigh of relief. Jargal looked at the curator's watch. 'But it's only ten-thirty.''Exactly. We'll reopen at about three.'

The moon was in the morning sky, a globe of cobweb.

'Sir!' Jargal ran across the empty road in front of the museum. The suit was getting into a j.a.panese-made four-wheel drive. Jargal was nervous: the owner of such a car must be a powerful man. 'Sir!'

The suit turned, his hand twitching inside his jacket. 'What?'