I climb to my old lookout, happy and sad in the dim instinct that these mountains are my home. But “only the Awakened Ones remember their many births and deaths”,22 and I can hear no whisperings of other lives. Doubtless I have “home” confused with childhood, and Shey with its flags and beasts and snowy fastnesses with some Dark Ages place of forgotten fairy tales, where the atmosphere of myth made life heroic.
