Part 3 (1/2)

In the valley below Muchu, the Karnali river bends suddenly north through impa.s.sable gorges, and will rejoin our track only on the Tibetan frontier. Meanwhile Iswor points us to where the tributary of k.u.muchhiya falls steeply from the west. On the ridge beyond Muchu we pa.s.s a mani wall and a chortenone of those stupa-like cenotaphs that Tibetan peoples cherishand reach a half-derelict police post. The site had been abandoned to Maoist guerrillas long ago, but for two years now a twelve-man police squad from Kathmandu had reluctantly returned: slight, dark men, isolated and perhaps a little afraid. A wary sergeant scans our permits and sends us on.

We go steeply down. Log bridges carry us to the tributary's north bank. It is almost noon. The land is stripped of trees. The river whitens far ahead of us, splaying round stranded boulders. Only patches of scrub hold to the nearer hills, which have often eroded to whorls of naked rock, and the shale makes yellow forks against the mountains.

As our path steepens up the valley, Iswor asks: 'How are you feeling?' He sounds concerned. 'Are you okay?'

Yes, so far I am. But I listen to my body now. Old wounds gently remind me of themselves, like voices echoing: a knee cartilage damaged since boyhood, an ankle ligament torn in Syria, a fractured spine from a road accident. They return only in nudges and twinges, but I recognise them with suppressed unease: who would evacuate us out of these hills?

I tell myself and Iswor: 'I'm fine. Absolutely fine Absolutely fine,' and for some reason we laugh.

The journey does not nurture reflection, as I once hoped. The going is too hard, too steep. Every footstep on the stone-littered track needs a tiny, half-conscious decision, and brings its attrition unnoticed. Only in dreamlike intervals, perched on a rock while Iswor rests his load, can I imagine the path as oddly intimate to me, like a memory trace.

You look back down the valley and wonder: how did I come so far? A few minutes ago, or perhaps an hour, you pa.s.sed a trader's sheltera sheepskin draped between rocksand now it has dwindled to a fleck below you. Perhaps, after all, you have walked this path unawares, drugged by the rhythm of your boots, as if dreaming, and only a pa.s.sage of startling beauty or hards.h.i.+p wrenched you awake. In this thinning air you even imagine you may be nearing the end. But the speechless white mountain ahead is not Kailas, of course. Kailas, in your reverie, hangs like a stage prop out of sight, waiting. As the crow flies it is barely fifty miles away: but in another country, another ether.

To Hindus, 'departure for Kailas' is a metaphor for death.

A young Tibetan monk from Yalbang overtakes us, making for Taklakot, where he will buy Chinese shoes for his monastery. He is travelling fast, in plain clothes, without a pa.s.sport. He is buoyant and sure. He will slip past the border guards incognito, he says, no problem. But among the rough traders along the way he looks innocent and placeless, as if nothing has ever touched him. He wears a bobble hat and carries a furled umbrella. He left his home long ago, he says, and walked to the Yalbang monastery. 'Compared to my teacher, I love my parents only a little now.' He signals this dwindled affection with two narrowing fingers, and smiles. 'My teacher is my true father.' After a while he strides ahead alone along the mountain, singing with mysterious merriment. You might imagine he comes from a land free of evil. Travellers have always marvelled at the Tibetans' light hearts, as they think them. As long ago as the tenth century the Arab geographer Masudi wrote of a people beyond the Himalayas who laughed even in bereavement.

The monk shrinks to a dot ahead of me. He has taken Iswor with him, talking cheerily, and I see them ascending farther and farther where the track dissolves into the debris of an avalanche. By the time I reach it they are high above me, still climbing. Its petrified flood has become our stairway upwards. Its rocks look raw and new, as if the carapace of the mountain had been ripped open in a vertical wound. For hours, it seems, I am toiling upwards. The stones s.h.i.+ft and grate underfoot. My body no longer seems quite my own. The landslide is so long and steep that I dare not look up for its end. Instead I fix my eyes on a boulder fifty yards away, perhaps, and reach it like a swimmer in a storm. For long minutes I am slumped on rocks, gasping, my legs gone. I turn my back and stare down at the distant river and flayed hills, calming my heart, wondering why I am doing this, before standing upright and starting again. Now the rock fall seems to be pus.h.i.+ng physically against me. The sun blazes above. I start counting my steps, and even the stones under my feet: grey, cinnamon red, intricately veined. Then my trekking pole snaps in the shale. I think: if things are like this at 11,000 feet, how will they be at over 18,500, where I am going? Now, for fear of losing heart at the gully opening ahead, I barely lift my gaze from the rocks a step in front of me.

Slowly I am invaded by a different, profound tiredness, less muscular fatigue than an overwhelming longing to sleep. It is a little like despair. If it were not for glimpsing Iswor waiting above, I might curl up among the rocks and close my eyes. As it is, with suppressed alarm, I wonder for the first time if I will finish this journey.

Suddenly, in bewilderment, I feel the air too thin to sustain me. It is changed, empty. But there is nothing else. I am inhaling in panicky gasps. Nothing remains but this thread of oxygen. It is not enough. Barely enough. Faint, I am lying on stones. The air is receding from me, everything depleted. My breath is rasping sobs.

For long minutes I remain inert as my lungs calm and the fear fades. A memory rises, a pang of sadness, which for a moment I cannot locate. I stand up gingerly and open my mouth to the faint breeze. But the air in my memory is normal. It is her heart that is failing. My own breath stills. Only with consciously deepened inhalations has the shock pa.s.sed, and the fragile trinity of heart, lungs and blood composed itself.

As she calls out for air, I hook the oxygen mask over her face, and turn on the cylinder. Her hands come up to clasp it, comforted. I can give her twelve minutes, the doctor said, after that it is dangerous. But when I remove the mask, my mother's hands go on clutching it. It is as if I were taking away her life. Later she says: 'Next year I won't be like this. Next year I'll be looking after you.'

In the hospital ward, beyond the curtains closing off the bed, the voices of other patients ring out normal, ugly. A woman upbraids her daughter for visiting her late. Another says she wants to go back to East Grinstead, where her sister can nurse her. A visiting husband recounts a failed burglary at his office. Somebody says: 'I know I'm self-pitying, but I can't help it...'

But she hears nothing. Only sometimes her hand clasps mine.

In the ward at night: the wheezing of oxygen, moans and dreams. Winking lights. Who or what is she clasping? Am I still there? The nurses know less than I do. Somebody cries out in another ward.

Morning voices outside our curtains again. I am angry that they will live on.

She lies at last in silence, turned to the window, and her face is young again.

At evening we near the foot of the Torea pa.s.s. I hear my breathing with remote amazement. I remember ancient juniper trees along the way, shedding their bark in swathes, like the remains of some long-discarded incarnation. Ram has set up our tents on a plateau above the track. I fall into mine without eating or undressing, and sleep for nine hours.

CHAPTER SIX.

In his monastery's garden in Kathmandu, Tas.h.i.+ talked of the retreat from secular life not only as a deliverance from hards.h.i.+p but as the path to a kind of purity. He imagines his native Bhutan to be the heir and guardian of Tibetan Buddhism.

'They say we are like Tibet used to be. In my village the moment you step out of doors you sense people's faith. In the marketplace, on the street. It's not like here in Kathmandu. Here, the moment I'm beyond the monastery gates the beggars come crowding in and people are hara.s.sing you to buy things. And so you feel pity. You want to please them, you want to give, but you cannot. In my village there's nothing like that. We were a family of ten, and we were happy. But I haven't been back for four years. When the winter holidays come, only I am missing.'

'Is it so far?'

'Yes, it's far. Once a year I speak to my mother on the phone, just to hear her voice.' He smiled. 'I miss them.'

'Why did you leave?'

'Our lives were very poor. When I saw how my parents worked in the fields, and how they had to take my eldest sister out of school to join them, I knew I didn't want that life. I don't know how much my father had to cheat and lie in order to feed useight children. He had a job looking after the company armoury, but would leave it to catch fish whenever he could. He must have caused suffering to many fish, to feed us...What do Christians say about things like that?'

I rummaged in my memory. But Jesus's apostles left the lake of Galilee not out of pity for fish, but concern for humans. Tas.h.i.+'s face had an almost contrite gentleness. When I looked at him, I wondered how compa.s.sion formed. But he answered that Buddhism was a science, that compa.s.sion could be taught, that you could train for it. Just as you could steer yourself away from s.e.x, if you had the will.

I asked: 'Have you never wanted to marry?'

'In the village I have married friends, happy with their children. But it's not for me. Marriage means trouble. I couldn't cope with it.'

He laughed without embarra.s.sment. I could not tell what, if anything, this artless reply concealed, from me or from himself. He folded his robes more closely round his shoulders. 'I was fifteen when I thought: I want to be a monk.'

The poverty from which Tas.h.i.+ fled is printed on all these villages of the high Himalaya, whose idyll is a mirage. Beyond 11,000 feet, erosion gashes half the slopes, and stains them with arteries of drifting scree. My group goes in happy disorder, Ram swinging a can of paraffin, Dhabu clutching the ludicrously awkward stove before him like a totem, Pearl his horse sauntering in front, piled with the tents. In this stripped land I soon see them moving effortlessly a mile or more ahead of us.

We are ascending an empty valley. On either side the snow ranges no longer s.h.i.+ne beyond dark-wooded foothills in a dimension of their own, but barge straight down in naked spurs into the abyss where their snowmelt joins the river. As the sun clouds, the air grows cold. Iswor has exchanged his shorts for army fatigues, and is worrying about his hair ('It looks like a yak's coat'). When we cross the 12,000-foot Torea pa.s.s, my earlier breathlessness is only a memory. The land is starkly beautiful. The clouds that push from the side valleys hang almost at eye level. The high snows, closing off our pa.s.sage at either end, rea.s.semble as we walk, sliding aside to reveal mountains higher still. The valley is tightening round us. In the stunted scrub the birdsong thins to plaintive clicks and cheeps, and then to silence.

Into this stillness the traders come swinging round the mountainsides behind their files of mules and horses. We follow their trail for hoursthe soles of discarded shoes, excrement, dribbles in the dust (the animals urinate on the move), sc.r.a.ps of faded cloth and broken harness. They are all Bhotias and local Tibetans now, swarthy, wild-faced men whose backs are sheathed in fleeces and yak pelts and foreheads rumpled by headbands to steady their toppling loads. They camp where they can, in caves and abandoned sheep pens. One of them stops dead on the path before me ('He hasn't seen a Westerner before,' says Iswor) and fixes me unbudging with a black, fascinated stare, while his s.h.a.ggy train of jhaboo jhaboosa hybrid of the sleepy Indian cow and the recalcitrant yakwanders on untended.

On the far side of the river a tortuous and faded trail takes its own way to Tibet westwards above the dwindling k.u.muchhiya. It was by this route that Gyato w.a.n.gdu, the last Khampa freedom fighter against the Chinese, led his tiny force towards the safety of India. The Khampa warrior tribesmen of eastern Tibet had fought the Chinese occupation ever since 1956, and retreated at last to guerrilla bases over the Nepalese border, nurtured by the CIA. But as the Western rapprochement with China began, the United States withdrew its support, and in July 1974 the Dalai Lama asked the depleted warriors to lay down their arms to the Nepalese army. They did so with proud reluctance. Some of them preferred suicide by drowning or slitting their throats. Only their charismatic leader w.a.n.gdu, with a handful of followers, made as if to obey, then rode defiantly away. The Chinese and Nepalese armies hunted him down, and it was by the goat track climbing westwards from where we walked that he opted for a drastic short cut to India and safety. Some twenty miles beyond, and barely five miles from the border, he was ambushed by the Nepalese and fell in a hail of bullets: the last, hopeless spark of his people's armed resistance.

Now at the track's foot the village of Yari is soft with fields of barley and millet. It is a tiny, scattered place where the Bhotia squaws and their ruffianly men, sporting scant turbans, have cleared the earth for crops, piling the excavated rocks alongside, and the valley higher up alternates tilled brown fields with tracts of brilliant green, where wooden conduits bring down water.

After a mile this oasis falls behind. We are approaching 13,000 feet, and a chill wind is blowing fine dust up the valley behind us. Our way snakes across balding scrublands. The track is seared to rubble. Above us the last rivulets drop from the high snows, nudging stones down slopes already cobwebbed with shale. Once we hear goatherds whistling to their flocks far below.

As we go higher, the horizon ahead starts to mesmerise. The snowfields that gleam through the valley cleft resemble an isolated mountain (in fact they are part of a range) and bring a surge of excitement. By the time we pitch our tents under the Nara pa.s.s, a heady expectation has set in. For this 15,000-foot defile is our last barrier before Tibet. Now a cold, light rain comes down. I lie in my tent, waiting for it to pa.s.s, and imagining the view from the summit of the Nara-la tomorrow. The intimation of change that frontiers bring, a whisper even of revelation, is heightened in this rarefied air by the unearthly aura still shed from Tibet. All myth, I know, should have been wiped from the despoiled country long ago. Yet under this last, formidable pa.s.s the afterglow continues of a land breathing an air of its own, and entered through a mystic gap in the mountains and a breach in time. I open my map to see how close we are. The rain clatters like hail on the tent roof. Even on the map's large scale the frontier is only a little finger's breadth away.

This feel of entering a sanctuary has not only moved travellers but has haunted the Tibetans themselves. For centuries they have envisaged a holy land of their own, invisible or inaccessibly remote. The precise location of this kingdom of Shambala is uncertain, but it is said to lie encircled by impa.s.sable snow peaks somewhere north of Kailas. Yogis have thought it a three-month journey beyond the mountain, but the path is so elusive that pilgrims find themselves wandering hopelessly. Some even have a notion that Shambala floats in another dimension of time, as if through a galactic wormhole, and can be accessed only by ice doors in the Himalaya. Patterned like an eight-petalled lotus, radiating tributary kingdoms, it has been ruled for two and a half millennia by a dynasty of G.o.dly kings who reside in a jewel-built palace, as at the heart of a gorgeous mandala. No word for 'enemy' or 'war' is known here. Its founding king was taught by the Buddha himself, and as his subjects grew more selfless, so their country faded from human sight. Yet its rulers continue to watch over the human world, and after 400 years, as that world falls deeper into ruin, the last redeemer king will ride out from his sanctum to inst.i.tute a golden age.

In the West, even before the fictional creation of Shangri-La, people toyed with the idea that Shambala geographically existed. The nineteenth-century Hungarian scholar de Koros reckoned he had pinpointed it by astronomic calculation, and in the late 1920s the Russian Nicholas Roerich undertook a long, earnest expedition in constant apprehension of it.

The origins of the myth may lie in the memory of some lost homeland, perhaps the kingdom of Shang-shung around Kailas, subsumed by war in the eighth century. But more likely it entered Tibet from India two and a half centuries later, in the mystical scripture called the Kalacakra Tantra, which details the meditational pathway to Shambala. This teaching, long precious to Tibetan Buddhism, has today accrued a poignant promise. To some, the Chinese ruin of their homeland portends the coming salvation. The Dalai Lama, who believes that a hidden Shambala actually exists, has many times given the Kalacakra initiation in public, gathering souls towards a paradise of several meanings. To those with purified eyes, Shambala exists on earth, while tantric adepts reach its holy land in meditation. But still others imagine it an empire of the future, to be established in the year 2425, when the peace-spreading armies of the last king burst from their mountain cloister.

Meanwhile other sanctuaries pervade the land. The secret entrances to these beyul beyul, it is said, were described in buried treasure texts by Padmasambhava, and will be revealed in times of peril. A few beyul beyul have already been discovered and settled by expectant communities in the remote Himalaya. To the mundane eye they are no more than tranquil valleys; but to the initiate they s.h.i.+mmer with mystic potential. After the Chinese invasion, it is said, certain lamas led their disciples into the wastelands in search of these have already been discovered and settled by expectant communities in the remote Himalaya. To the mundane eye they are no more than tranquil valleys; but to the initiate they s.h.i.+mmer with mystic potential. After the Chinese invasion, it is said, certain lamas led their disciples into the wastelands in search of these beyul beyul, following the abstruse directions of sacred texts. Some gave up in despair, but others, it was rumoured, entered cliffs and waterfalls, and vanished beyond human time for ever.