From the same story cycle as Monastery. I was enthralled by the accounts by folks like Marco Polo and nineteenth-century explorer Sven Hedin who described the hardscrabble lives of Cental Asian nomads -- the Mongols, the Kyrgyz, the Uzbeks. In high-altitude terrain with no trees, there were once tribes who got their every worldy need from the body of the Yak, which itself lives by scraping lichens from the surface of rocks.