Part 4 (1/2)

He touches his features, as if confirming them. 'Good.'

I watch him depart, with Moti following. He turns back once and, from this distance, dares to lift his hand and smile. Iswor beside me says: 'That is a very simple man.'

Now that the horse is gone, we must use Tibetan transport on the far side to carry us to Taklakot, the region's traditional trading centre, and on to Kailas. But we cannot cross the frontier alone. Chinese suspicion brands the lone traveller here as maverick or spy. His solitude is otherwise inexplicable. Without a group he is too elusive, slips beyond control. But somewhere behind us marches the party of seven British trekkers under whose camouflage I hope to cross. They should be here by evening. Iswor carries a satellite phone by which he might have reached them, but he never turns it on.

We leave the hostel without regret, pitch our tents in rough ground among ruins in Hilsa's outskirts, and wait. The prospect of the trekkers touches me with foreboding. These past days I have felt a stressless self-diffusion, as if my own culture were growing lighter on my shoulders. I will not welcome its return in others. I have too much imagined these mountains as mine.

Iswor and I wander the derelict settlement alone. Only a few barley fields surround its no-man's-land, and every other structure is half-built or falling down. A desultory wind whips up the dust. The inhabitants all seem transient, here to exploit the border trade. No one was born in Hilsa. Yet the place is built on a sediment of Chinese waste: Pepsi-Cola cans and split trainers, cigarette cartons, Lhasa beer bottles, old tins of engine oil. Women and children digging foundations burrow among stones and trash together. Everyone is swathed anonymous against the dust. But for the first time in days I set eyes on a wheeled machine: a little Chinese tractor that must have driven over the bridge or through the water. There is even a wonky wheelbarrow.

We stop beside the bridge. On the far side stands the clean stem of a Chinese electricity pylonthere is no electricity in Hilsaand we hear the growl of earth-moving where the tarmac road is descending to the river. Iswor says quaintly: 'I am sad for looking.'

'What is it?'

'The Chinese...We do not have their future. We are not a developing people like them.' He keeps his back turned on Hilsa, frowning, as if its hovels parodied his life. 'Perhaps this place is forgot by us. Kathmandu is far from here. Even Simikot is far.'

Weeks later, when I visited Iswor's village birthplace high in the hills above Kathmandu valley, I understood a little. Circled by far mountains, its terraced maize and vegetables, cherry and peach trees touched it with an illusion of self-sufficiency. A small Hindu temple and a Buddhist stupa rested side by side. Doors and lintels showed old carving, and dark overlapping roof tiles turned the houses to ancient and precious reptiles nesting in the orchards.

Iswor's parents had migrated to Kathmandu in his childhood, but returned to the village for leisure and to manage their few fields. But his eldest brother Bishu was a celebrity. Iswor languished in his shadow. Bishu had climbed Everest with an Indian army team, and was dubbed a 'summiteer'. His job in a Kathmandu travel agency was well-paid, and he owned two houses and some land. When he visited from the city, the young men's hands clasped together in hero-wors.h.i.+p, and the old hurried to greet him. Walking one day in the June-scented pine woods above the village, he told me: 'Iswor's job is not so frequent, not so rich. I don't know what will happen to him. Maybe he will come back here and do farming...'

But Iswor didn't want to farm. He wanted to succeed in the cruel labyrinth of Kathmandu. 'The young are bored in the village,' he said. 'It's only two hours by motorbike from the city, so they go in and get jobs as clerks, drivers, anything.'

'And what happens to the villages?'

He said what I already know: that they become the ghetto of the unenterprising, the sick, the old. It was the same all over Asia. Sometimes the villages were sustained by women. Often they fell to absentee landlords. On their picturesque hillsides they started to go silent.

But you would not have guessed this that night. The young men danced and sang on a hillside by the blaze of a log fire: old Hindu songs, Iswor said, which they had learnt in childhood. A man with Down's syndromehis Mongoloid features subsumed among the Tamang faces round himgyrated alone in his dirty smock, frenzied by the music. Far into the night the youths went on singing and tapping their damphu damphu drums, and if an invisible divide existed between those who had returned from the city on holiday and those who had greeted them, it was blurred by allegiances deeper than success, and by the old remembered music under the village stars. drums, and if an invisible divide existed between those who had returned from the city on holiday and those who had greeted them, it was blurred by allegiances deeper than success, and by the old remembered music under the village stars.

The women kept away or watched shyly from the dark. The older wore bright saris. But no, Iswor said, he could not marry one, and repeated his refrain: 'They have no education.'

Only one girl gentled his voice when he spoke of her: his thirteen-year-old youngest sister, back in Kathmandu. 'I love her. I want to help her continue at school, even if my parents don't afford it. Her oldest sister will leave the home soon, and then she will be alone.' He grimaced into the dying firelight. Just as he was to Bishu, perhaps, so the small girl was to her elder sister. He spoke as if she were an orphan, or a shadowy afterthought. 'She will be very sad...'

His poverty seemed only to exacerbate this brotherly dream. She alone, it appeared, had touched his complicated heart.

The seven British trekkers trickle in at evening, and pitch their tents by ours. They are not the hearty group I had feared, but middle-aged and quiet. They have come for scenic beauty and physical challenge. Most are experienced trekkers. Their leader prefers his groups older, he says. Often the young are less fit, and do not know their limits. Our transient union brings luxuries. We eat in a dining tent on rickety camp chairs. From time to time the wind rattles its poles loose and collapses some canvas on to us. n.o.body complains or expects much. We feast on dumplings and omelettes, and morning porridge. Their sherpas rig up a modest lavatory tent above an excavated hole.

At evening, as I linger with Iswor by the Hilsa bridge, where the Karnali now flows brown with dust, the goat and sheep herds come barging and bullying across it, aborting all human traffic, until a column of yaks displaces them and I cross for a moment into Tibet. On this bank, beneath a sagging barbed-wire fence, a low plinth is carved China China in Chinese characters on its far side, in Chinese characters on its far side, Nepal Nepal in Nepali on the other. But the flimsy gate is closed. I sit down on the plinthone leg in Nepal, the other in Tibetand gaze where we will go, with luck, tomorrow. in Nepali on the other. But the flimsy gate is closed. I sit down on the plinthone leg in Nepal, the other in Tibetand gaze where we will go, with luck, tomorrow.

But few Western travellers entered by this secretive Karnali. They came by more accessible pa.s.ses from India in the west. The first European to set eyes on Mount Kailas, the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, in 1715, had toiled there from Ladakh, sometimes snow-blind and coughing blood. Had he and his companion not fallen in with the caravan of a Tartar princess travelling to Lhasa, they would probably have died. Some six weeks later, in consternation, Desideri pa.s.sed beneath a bitterly cold and cloud-wrapped Kailas. For days on end, he wrote, pilgrims circled the foot of this dread peak, whose sanct.i.ty was deepened by a certain Urghien (Padmasambhava), the founder of their religion. Here, centuries ago, the saint had meditated in a cave now celebrated by a few monks in a wretched monastery.

For five astonis.h.i.+ng years Desideri, a man of keen learning, preached among the Tibetans in mutual tolerance and curiosity. But in 1721 he was recalled to the Vatican. Bigotry and turmoil ensued, with Mongol invasion, and in 1745 the last missionaries were expelled from Tibet. As the years went on, the country's borders became encrusted with hopeful Christian outposts, longing to enter. When the land fell to Christ, some believed, the Last Day would dawn. But the Tibetans never allowed missions into the heart of their country again.

For a century after Desideri, no known European set eyes on Kailas. Then in 1812 the erratically brilliant veterinary surgeon William Moorcroft, with his shady companion Hyder Hea.r.s.ey, made their way here disguised as Hindu ascetics. Moorcroft, intent equally on exploration and pioneering commerce, purchased a herd of fifty pashmina goats to drive back into India, and combed the Manasarovar lake to discover if any of India's great rivers had its source there. Three years later he vanished into Central Asia, where his papers turned up piecemeal long afterwards, fomenting the mystery around his death.

The source of the great riversthe Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlejbecame an obsession in London and British India, and remained uncertain even into the early twentieth century. As if by divine intent, all four of them rose close to Mount Kailas, echoing 2,000-year-old Hindu scriptures. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century Tibet was being breached not by explorers but by army officers and civil servants on big-game hunting forays. Defying the ban by both British and Tibetan authorities, they slipped over the Zanskar pa.s.ses with their servants. On these illicit journeys the magnificent and controversial topography they were treading went largely unrecorded. They were more concerned with potting an Ovis ammon Ovis ammon or a wild yak, and they treated Tibetan law with cavalier disdain. One Scottish aristocrat even sailed a rubber dinghy on the sacred waters of Manasarovar, for which the local governor was beheaded. or a wild yak, and they treated Tibetan law with cavalier disdain. One Scottish aristocrat even sailed a rubber dinghy on the sacred waters of Manasarovar, for which the local governor was beheaded.

Yet Tibetan officials were often quaintly peaceful in their efforts to repel these foreigners. They complained that they themselves would be executed if they failed. One traveller reported a whole troop of soldiers who fell pathetically on their faces, drawing their hands across their throats in sign of their own fate. Even the bigoted Henry Savage Landor (grandson of the vile-tempered poet), who wrote a gaudy account of his ordeal, was only physically a.s.saulted after every other measure to turn him back had failed.

The true survey of Tibet at this time was achieved by Indian pandits, trained by the British and disguised as merchants or holy men. Their piously fingered rosaries were in fact recording distances, and their prayer wheels were stuffed with coded data. Even after the brutal British invasion of Tibet under Younghusband in 1904, travel for foreigners was no easier. In 1907 the Swedish explorer Sven Hedina man of self-blinding visionhad to enter by subterfuge. He then spent fifteen months following a thousand-mile broken arc of mountains eastwards across inner Tibet, and became the first European to reach the source of the Indusand to join the pilgrims circling Kailas.

Humbler travellers, of course, had been entering the country for centuries: pilgrims who left no record. In a land of bitter extremes, racked by armed dacoits riding hardy ponies and yaks, they were wretchedly vulnerable, protected only by their poverty. Some of the brigands were themselves on pilgrimage. Others routinely contributed a share of their plunder to the monasteries. The fastidious j.a.panese monk Ekai Kawaguchi, while circling Kailas, noticed a notorious bandit and murderer praying to the mountain in penance not only for his past crimes, but for those he expected to commit in the future.

Kawaguchi himself was one of the first and most perceptive pilgrims to recount his journey, in 1900. He was perhaps a spy; yet fervently pious. After surviving early vicissitudes (including a nomad girl's a.s.sault on his virginity), he prostrated himself a ritual 108 times on the first sight of Kailas, then broke into poetry and circled the holy mountain for four days in ecstasy.

But it was Hindu pilgrims who penned the most ardent journeys. Eighteen years after Kawaguchi, the swami Bhagwan Hamsa, a girlishly fragile figure, found his own salvation on Kailas. He too, in high-flown prose, survived countless perils on the way: cobras, ghosts, a l.u.s.t-crazed elephant, licentious mountain women. On Kailas he stumbled into the glacial cave of a yogi, with whom he spent three days, drinking only water, his head resting in the yogi's lap at night; and beside the frozen lake beyond the highest pa.s.s he received a vision of his personal, tantric saint, in whose presence he felt himself diffusing mystically away. The account of his journey later featured an enthusiastic preface by W.B.Yeats, whose poem Meru Meru described a world mountain where hermits, 'caverned in night under the drifted snow', might pa.s.s finally beyond illusion. described a world mountain where hermits, 'caverned in night under the drifted snow', might pa.s.s finally beyond illusion.

Tibet was still so little known that travellers could imagine it the haven of once-universal mysteries. Echoes of ancient Egypt were divined (some scholars still play with this idea), and the country was even rumoured the fountainhead of the Aryan people, so that Hitler's propagandists took a sentimental look at it. Tibet's present state might be wretched, but its past could be purified. Even the early Christian missionaries entertained fantasies, imagining themselves among a people of lapsed Christianity. The Dalai Lama, after all, enjoyed the veneration and infallibility of a pope (and was likewise mired in politics), protected not by the Holy Roman Emperor but by the Celestial Emperor of China. There were trinities of Buddhist deities. Tara, the G.o.ddess of compa.s.sion, recalled the Virgin. Protestant intellectuals later castigated Catholics and Buddhists together as idol-wors.h.i.+pping and relic-venerating, alike in their celibate monks, their ritual incense, sprinkled water and rosaries. Strangest of all, as if in mockery of the Eucharist, the oldest Tibetan sectsthe Bon and the Nyingmapreserved a 'life-consecration rite' in which the priest pa.s.ses a communal bowl of beer and flour pellets among the congregation.

This, perhaps, is a relic of the Nestorian Christianity that had penetrated deep into Central Asia by the sixth century. A thousand years later, Indian sadhus were returning from the north with unverifiable reports that Christian communities lived around Lake Manasarovar, and sparked hopes that somewhere deep in Asia the legendary kingdom of the Christian emperor Prester John survived.

Towards nightfall an old man falters across the Hilsa bridge. With fearful care a young monk, his son, guides his uncertain steps, enfolding his shoulders in one arm, clasping his elbow in the other, as he shepherds him over to Nepal. The bridge rasps and sways. The old man is grimly dignified, dressed in a jacket of embroidered Chinese silk with sheepskin tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. His gaze is set on the farther bank, where they find haven in a little walled rest house with rickety balconies.

Later a crowd gathers to stare up at the ridge to the south. Faintly I descry two wavering lines of bharal bharal, the rare blue mountain sheep. In the gloom I make out the s.h.i.+fting of their black-stockinged legs against the pale rock, and their backswept horns. Momentarily the young monk comes out too, to see what is happening. He speaks hesitant English. He escaped Tibet to India, he says, and is studying at Dehra Dun. He can never go backhe plucks his orange robes as explanationbut every year his father crosses the border into Humla for four days, and they meet in this no-man's-land, before parting again. Each year he wonders if the crossing of the bridge will be their last.

I remembered another monk I had met that spring. His monastery belonged to the Gelugpa, the sect of the Dalai Lama, and its terraced gardens flowed vivid above the Kathmandu valley. He was slight and pale. I might have been walking beside a ghost. Cuckoos were sounding in the valley beneath us, but the Kathmandu suburbs were already lapping at the hill's foot, and the murmur of road-building rose from the mists. The monk was young, like the monk of Hilsa, and he too had been severed from his past by the Chinese frontier.

He said: 'My family came to Lhasa from our village in Tibet eleven years ago. My father had saved up some Chinese money. We were walking, without papers. I was ten years old. In Lhasa my father and mother gave me over to six others. Then they went back, and I never saw them again. Our group travelled over the plains secretly. Sometimes, I remember, I walked. It grew very hard. Sometimes somebody carried me on his shoulders. It was bitter cold, November. We walked for one month and ten days. I cannot remember how we slept. No relatives came with me. I have none here. Here I left them all behind and became a monk.'

'You wouldn't go back?'

'If I did, the Chinese would take me. I've demonstrated outside the Chinese emba.s.sy in Kathmandu, and they photograph you. They must have my face on their files, many times. On the border they recognise us by our Tibetan names.' A gentle rain was falling, but he did not notice. 'My mother is fifty-four now, my father dead. I have two sisters there. The youngest I can't remember. But I have spoken to my mother on the phone.'

'That's something.' But I thought: she will just be a voice to him until she dies. Had his parents, I wondered, been too poor to keep their late-born son, or had they purposely released him into freedom?

He only said: 'I don't know.' Behind us novice monks were running out of their cla.s.srooms, shouting and tussling together. 'My family is this monastery now. This is my place. My father, my mother, my brothers, they are all here.'

CHAPTER NINE.

I wake to the foraging of mules in the nearby rubbish, where they seem to be munching cardboard, and to a Nepalese police helicopter that lands beside the river in a spiral of dust. Etiquette demands that Nepalese porters carry our baggage across the bridge, and that Tibetan porters relieve them on the far side. The muddy water roars between. The straggling barbed-wire frontier is being breached by bands of goats that scramble over and squeeze through it. As we step through the open gate into Tibet, the sun is hot in a cloudless sky. No official is in sight. We sit on piles of rocks outside two tents for monitoring swine flu, and wait. wake to the foraging of mules in the nearby rubbish, where they seem to be munching cardboard, and to a Nepalese police helicopter that lands beside the river in a spiral of dust. Etiquette demands that Nepalese porters carry our baggage across the bridge, and that Tibetan porters relieve them on the far side. The muddy water roars between. The straggling barbed-wire frontier is being breached by bands of goats that scramble over and squeeze through it. As we step through the open gate into Tibet, the sun is hot in a cloudless sky. No official is in sight. We sit on piles of rocks outside two tents for monitoring swine flu, and wait.

As the hours drag by, my expectation starts to wane. Only the antic.i.p.ation of change has tempered the squalid rootlessness of Hilsa, but this is now seeping away. The sun scorches down. Beside us the Karnali runs dark with the blown dust of the night. I start to fear that the border is closing, as suddenly as it did last year during the riots before the Beijing Olympics. The jittery fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight has only just pa.s.sed.

By noon there is still no sight of police or medical orderlies. Then we hear that an Indian pilgrim has died on Kailas. They are bringing his body down. Sobered, we go on waiting. An Indian woman, arrived by helicopter the day before, sits with us on the rocks, her breast heaving. She has been to Kailas five times, she says, but her lungs are weak and she cannot climb much more. This last time she has brought her ex-husband with her: a silent man retracted behind dark gla.s.ses and a greying ma.s.s of beard. I sense she wants to teach him something.