LATE THE SECOND NIGHT IN Tibet, we ground heavily up a gentle plain that seemed endless, finally crossing the Shung La pass, at 17,060 feet, where it was snowing, hard. By midnight we were 5,000 feet lower, sharing an icy motel room with our driver. It was a modern caravansary, the parking lot packed with the Toyotas and Mitsubishis of Lhasa travel agencies. Breakfast was conducted chiefly in Dutch.

That afternoon, we passed a sign for an airport, then some heavy-machinery dealerships, and then the driver began shouting: "Potala! Potala!" But all I could see were billboards for cell-phone companies and the Bank of China. My guidebook insisted that this first sighting of Lhasa would take my breath away, but the altitude had already done that, and I only glimpsed a sliver of dirty white monastery between ads.

I'd been prepared for the letdown by Patrick French, author of the brilliantly unromantic Tibet, Tibet, who describes the city all too accurately as another Chinese provincial capital of bath-tile constructions and strutting businessmen. The temples were those of Adidas and Nike; tanks paraded through the streets; Beijing had sent its usual gift of vast imperial avenues and train service. The infamously successful new rail line to Lhasa had just opened, bringing 300 or more people a day into the city once thought to be the most isolated on earth. The most common reaction was that of the Spaniards, whom we encountered one night in a hip Korean restaurant with subdued lighting. "Somos triste," the hefty one hissed. We are sad. "We hate it," the other admitted.

To the extent that we idealize a place, we impoverish it, reducing reality to a list of shortcomings. If I ever reached Shambhala, I'd probably be more crushed than the Spaniards.

Lhasa still has some Lhasa. The heart of the old Tibetan quarter is the great Jokhang temple, a magnificent whirlwind of prostrating pilgrims, chanting toddlers, old nomads tottering on canes, and Chinese tourists in Che Guevara T-shirts making clandestine cell-phone checks. Brutish dob dob monks, the security, used knotted cords to lash the legs of women in short skirts or anyone who hogged a shrine or fell asleep in a corner. The loose and happy mob circled the interior, clockwise, beneath a worn fresco of Shambhala. Under a single dim bulb I could see the king receiving tribute and dispensing justice from his throne, inside the city, inside the kingdom, which was hidden deep inside the two rings of snow mountains mentioned in prophecies. Below him, the armies of Shambhala rode forth to smash hordes of barbarians; an elephant scythed through the ranks of the deluded materialists.

In the warm and airy summer palace, which the Dalai Lama fled in 1959, there was another round painting of Shambhala, directly across from his final throne (although, in his private bedroom, the young man preferred a lithograph of three cute kittens). And, finally, in the frigid and dark Potala, the winter palace, a monk led me to a dirty wall painting of the kingdom, partly hidden by a chest of drawers that might have held the DL's socks and undies. Here the army of Shambhala was vast, a huge array of horse archers riding out to destroy some enemy hiding behind the dresser.

The Dalai Lama is an unprecedented popularizer of the Shambhala prophecy, teaching Kalachakra doctrines to tens of thousands in mass initiatations all over the globe. A world weary of synthetic Shangri-La has responded, giving the ancient legend New Age life. Seamus and I had checked in to the House of Shambhala, a boutique hotel full of red draperies and hot-stone massage therapy owned by a lean American financier named Laurence Brahm, who'd left behind a Hong Kong career to pursue his own 21st-century quest for Shambhala. An ascetic hedonist, Brahm slept on the roof (I almost stepped on him, heading to my dawn meditations) but surrounded himself with beautiful women and the comforts of his hotel.

Fluent in both Tibetan and Mandarin, Brahm had written a book on Shambhala. By his radically simplified accounting, Shambhala will remain hidden during the rules of 25 kings, each lasting one century. Since the Buddha was born about 2,500 years ago, Brahm argues that our present times are the end of the world. Waving the latest casualty counts from Iraq, he referred me to the Mahabharata:

That did sound familiar.

Brahm was part of a noble tradition of Westerners seeking revelation in Shambhala, one that ran back to the 1620s, when Jesuit missionaries climbed up from India, chasing reports of a powerful kingdom they called "Xambala." By 1880, the seekers had hit New York, in the person of Madame Helena Blavatsky, a Russian spiritualist claiming to be in secret communication with the kings of Shambhala. Her disciple Nicholas Roerich, an eccentric painter, tried twice to reach the kingdom—once, in 1925, outfitted by Abercrombie & Fitch, and again, in 1934, on a hunt for "drought-resistant grasses" funded by a secret backer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. F.D.R. took some heat for what would come to be known as the Guru Scandal, while Roerich blithely carried on, spotting UFOs and eventually declaring a mountain in Kazakhstan to be Shambhala.

Today dozens of Web sites and volumes propound theories linking Shambhala to Atlantis and the "real" builders of the pyramids. The most ridiculous of this genre is also the most popular: an execrable follow-up to James Redfield's bestseller The Celestine Prophecy called The Secret of Shambhala, in which a groovy, energy-emitting Westerner rescues the world from apocalypse by meditating his way to the hidden kingdom.

At night, on the hard beds of the House of Shambhala, I attempted my own groovy energy emitting. Dream travel is a recognized way of reaching Shambhala (the "Great Fifth" Dalai Lama had a dream in which a dancing girl showed him the way), and before leaving home I had assembled a Dream Team of eight completely serious women, including my wife, several college friends, an ex-girlfriend fond of reading my tarot cards, and a professional dream interpreter, Gordana, who held sway over the coven. For three consecutive nights in Lhasa, Gordana instructed, I was to imagine myself on the roof of the Jokhang. The Dream Team would meet me there, sometime after midnight, also dreaming, and together we would try to head off to Shambhala.

All three nights, I slept like a hammer in the thin air. I had one brief vision, of a woman not my wife, and then, my stomach rolling with hunger, dreamed that I was opening our last can of tuna from Kathmandu. No sign of my wife. Or my ex-girlfriend.

It didn't matter. Everybody declared the experiment a success, sort of, and we moved on.