This volume follows the dramatic adventures and experiences of a Western pilgrim, Pere Dominic, who, while travelling through exotic regions and kingdoms in Central Asia and the Far East, is influenced by two main cultural streams, the Western and the Eastern, interacting (sometimes violently) in the Medieval and Renaissance eras. Forced by political and military upheavals to flee from the urban centres of his mission territory, Pere Dominic is rescued by a mysterious group of mountain dwellers, known simply as the Summit Residents, who slowly reveal many secrets of mountain asceticism and the warrior cults of their region. To them, he introduces the ways of thinking, as well as the technology of Western culture. The authors have joined the time-honoured tradition of integrating text and images to tell a story -- a tradition that finds many noble precedents in the carvings of ancient symbols and sculptures in stone, in Illuminated Manuscripts of the High Middle Ages, in the early printed books of woodblocks and type, expanding today into the complexity and refinement of new genres of narrative such as the graphic novel.