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He and Padma sat on the floor in the doorway, and the four of them ate sugar cookies like kids at a sleepover.

“These are good,” Frank said. “I’ve been getting so hungry this winter.”

“Oh yes,” Sucandra said. “You get much hungrier in the cold.”

“And much colder when you’re hungry,” Padma added.

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “We learned that both ways, didn’t we?”

“Yes.”

Frank looked at them. “The Chinese?”

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “In their prison.”

“How long?”

“Ten years.”

Frank shook his head, trying to imagine this and failing. “How much did you get to eat?”

“A bowl of rice a day.”

“Did people starve?” Frank said, looking at the remaining cookies on the plate.

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “Died from hunger, died from cold.”

Padma nodded. “Others survived, but lost their wits.”

“Maybe we all did.”

“Yes, no doubt.”

“But I know who you mean when you say that. We had this old monk, you see, who was shitting some kind of tapeworm. Long red thing, segmented. Like millipede without legs. We knew this because he cleaned them up when it happened, and brought them to the group to offer them to the rest of us as food.”

“He claimed Bön spirit was inside him making food for us.”

Frank said, “So what did you do?”

“We chopped the worms up very fine and added them to the rice.”

“No doubt it added some protein to our diet.”

“Not much, it was more a gesture.”

“But anything helped at that point.”

“It’s true. I kind of got to looking forward to it.”

They grinned at each other, looked shyly at Frank.

“Yes. It helped us feel like we were together. People need to be part of a group.”

“And to help the old monk. He would get very distraught.”

“But then he died.”

“Yes, that’s right. But then the rice seemed to be missing something!”

ONE MORNING WHEN IT WAS SPRING and all, cool and green and sweet, like some May day remembered from a distant past that they had assumed would never come again, Charlie drove out to Great Falls and met Frank and Drepung. Frank was going to teach them the basics of rock climbing.

Anna did not thoroughly approve, but Frank assured her he would make it safe, and her risk-assessment realism impelled her to concede it was probably all right. Charlie, only momentarily disappointed that he had lost this best excuse to back out of it, now parked next to the other two, and they walked out the short trail to the gorge, carrying two backpacks of Frank’s gear and a few tight loops of nylon rope. After coming to an overlook, the trail paralleled the clifftop, and they followed it to a spot under a prominent tree, which Frank declared was the top of a good teaching route.

It was a new route, he said, for the great flood had greatly rearranged Great Falls, tearing new routes all up and down the south wall. When that much water ran over rock it tore at it not only by direct friction but also by a process called cavitation, in which the water broke into bubbles that were in effect vacuums that sucked violently at the cracks in the rocks, cracking them further, so that big blocks were plucked out rather than worn away. The walls of Mather Gorge had been plucked pretty hard.

Frank uncoiled one length of rope and tied it off around the trunk of the tree. He pointed down the cliff. “See the flat spot down at the bottom? On the right here, you can basically walk down to it, like on stairs. Then you can climb the wall over here, or there. It’s like a climbing wall in a gym.”

The knobby black rock was schist, he said. The gorge was an unusual feature in this region; there was another smaller one on the Susquehanna, but mostly the eastern piedmont lacked this kind of rocky outcropping. It had been cut in discrete bursts, the geologists had found, perhaps in the big floods that punctuated the end of ice ages. Their recent flood was a minor scouring compared to those.

Now they stood on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the river’s white roil and rumble. “There’s almost every kind of hold represented on this wall,” Frank continued.