I'VE SAID BEFORE THAT I'm not going to tell you where it is. That's easy enough. Even when you've been there, you can't say where you were, just as the third Panchen Lama predicted:

A person who travels the world looking for Shambhala cannot find it. But that does not mean it cannot be found.

The place itself—Ed Bernbaum's likely prototype, the kingdom that Tibetans meant when they described Shambhala—sits out in the plain desert, at the very bottom of Asia, beneath sea level, in a heat sink that had melted me 18 years before. But it was cool and overcast when Seamus and I finally soared out of Urumqi, squeezed into a shared taxi for hours with three Uighur men reeking of alcohol. In a town that shall remain nameless, we switched transport, heading either southwest, or northeast, or some other direction, depending. Find your own way.

The kingdom provided a number of shocks when we finally reached it. It was of course the size of it that stunned us first. The city had been the richest in Asia in its heyday, and looked it: The enormous curtain walls of the outer fortress ran out through the haze for miles in a giant circle. They towered over us, cut with gates, formidable and imposing. Hundreds of buildings were still standing, some two stories high, in a warren of alleyways, temples, and inner palaces.

The biggest, brightest, most prosperous Buddhist kingdom, it seemed to have risen out of the sand, dispensing doctrines of mystery and fulfillment, and then vanished into the desert again. The city was converted to Islam in the 13th century, sacked by Mongols, then buried forever by European sailing ships that made the Silk Road irrelevant. Tibetans were left to worship a place that no longer existed.

Now nothing lived here, not even rats. No king or guardian deity greeted our arrival, only a ten-year-old boy who, even after we paid him, continued to badger us for money so relentlessly, so loudly, so unreasonably, that Seamus finally threw rocks at him. Soon we were left alone, the few tourists and guards departing with dusk.

Workers leaving the Silk Road ruins that may have inspired Tibetan tales of Shambhala (Seamus Murphy)