were so worn, a clear sign of an abundant print run. Here time was immutable, immutable as dogma, and I started trying to gauge the three years Tumchooq had spent here engraving—in relief or intaglio—two lines a day, not to mention the years he spent in the kitchens and the paper mill. He might never have launched himself on the same trail for which his father had already suffered so much, the pursuit of the integral version of the torn manuscript, if he had had the least idea of the patience this titanic Long March would require. I found it difficult, almost impossible, to imagine the look on Tumchooq’s face when he first engraved a whole plate, bringing it up to the light to check a few details, then taking off his watchmakers glasses to appreciate his work as a whole, the solemn letters, the exquisite widening of lanceolate forms, the contrast between the width of a vowel and the narrowness of a consonant, between thick vertical strokes and fine horizontal ones, the clarity of a small ligature, the assurance of the strokes, the accuracy of the diacritical symbols. No one is left indifferent by the beauty of a printing plate. Then he would deliver it to the printing workshop, a layer of ink was applied to the surface, a sheet of blank paper laid over it and, by lightly brushing over the back of the paper, the page was printed. It was removed straight away The letters in relief on the cut-away surface of plate appeared black, shining and still moist, on the white background of the paper. Only the chapter headings, whose letters are carved out of the wood, are printed in white on a black background.
The sun was only just up, the meticulously swept path with not a single fallen leaf on it glittered beneath my bare feet, and each of my footsteps, I was aware, was an act of meditation. With its sand and its occasional stones positioned here and there, as if among the extinguished, collected, cooled ashes of our passions, without the least spark of an ember to reignite them, that little path was like the life of whoever walked along it. Perhaps its maker wanted it to remind us that our footprints, like the happy days of our lives, disappear with the first gust of wind, without leaving any trace at all. I suspected this path of sand had been made by Tumchooq himself, because it was so like the “sea of stones” at the chateau at Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet that I visited as a teenager, a “sea” devised by Paul d’Ampère, who later described its soft lapping of waves to his son.
That sandy track took me right to the entrance of the Cave of Treasure, where its keeper, an elderly monk, was cleaning an antique printing plate with sandalwood pulp. When I arrived he lit a cube of camphor on a copper dish and, gesticulating furiously to make himself understood, invited me to run the tips of my fingers through the flame and bring them up to my forehead. Then, without a word, he opened the door and let me in.
The cave was enormous, unfathomably deep, and filled with shadow, if not complete darkness. Daylight barely reached inside, filtered through a single gap carved through the rock and half-covered with vegetation, but it went astray somewhere along the way and was swallowed up before reaching the floor. By this pale glow, which could be mistaken for moonlight, I made out the silhouette of a gigantic multi-tiered stupa standing in the middle of the cave: at the top of its prodigious height a gold roof twinkled.
All of a sudden, as if hallucinating, I heard the click of an electric switch and the edifice, lit up from the inside by countless lamps, appeared in all its splendour. Its pyramid-shaped base and each of its eight levels borne on pillars were made of finely sculpted white marble, but the walls were of glass, affording glimpses of shelving, which went right up to the ceiling on each level and was laden with engraved plates, all tightly packed together, like thousands and thousands of hefty volumes of an encyclopaedia, the largest in the world, an encyclopaedia in raw wood, overrunning the eight levels of that stupa and its shelving, which carried on as far as the eye could see, into infinity for all anyone could tell. Its prison of rock cut it off from the outside world, erased the