Part 7 (1/2)

'Yes, it was very dangerous. Chinese soldiers found us, and many of our blessed ones were killed. I was shot myself...' Wounded, he was left for dead. But a nearby family hid him, and he crossed the border to Mustang after twenty-two days, walking by night.

He dismissed all this as long ago. Since then he had outlived his monastery, obliterated by Red Guards, and founded it anew on this green hill in exile. Time was long here. Like the Dalai Lama (who was ten years younger) he meditated alone for hours every day. He looked grounded and content. 'We Bon are older than Buddhism,' he said, 'far older. We go back to the time of shamanism, and n.o.body knows when that began. And long before Buddhism came to Tibet in the eighth century, these were our texts, our culture...'

I forgot, for a moment, that Kailasonce the mountain temple of his faithhad been annexed to Buddhism (there are famous legends reflecting this). Lulled by the Rinpoche's fluent, careful English, by the monastic peace and memory of the mountain, I asked how he perceived its holiness now, and he spoke as he must have taught hundreds in exile, remembering a lost Tibet.

'In the beginning Kailas was just rockrocks and stones. Without spirit. Then the G.o.ds came down with their entourages and settled there. They may not exactly live there now, but they have left their energy, and the place is full of spirits. The best way to describe the G.o.ds, I think, is as colonisers. Each one settled his special region, his peaks and ranges, and there his spirits rested after him. And these became places of power.'

No hint of Western rationale, it seemed, inhibited this story. He spoke of G.o.ds as he might of urban politics or nomad settlements, with bald certainty. 'Kailas was only ice at first,' he went on, 'then it became a conch sh.e.l.l, pure white, and one day it will be a desert, everything in transition...All the same, you know, it is a place for the others. There is a different mountain more sacred to us Bonpo. It is farther to the east, named Mount Bonri. That's where you will find us, yes, circ.u.mambulating counterclockwise. Although there is nothing important in this. It is just our custom.'

Often his mouth hung tentatively open, as if it might twist into laughter, and I had the sense that despite his seeming certainties, all for him was fleeting, conditional, and might translate into something else, so that as he spoke on about the divinities, my attention drifted irreverently, wondering if the cuckoo that sired his G.o.d Shenrab was optatus optatus or or saturatus saturatus, or if the transition of Kailas from glacier to desert was not the future of all our planet.

He had travelled to Kailas himself, he said, long ago. 'I did the kora six times. But it was winter, the wrong time of year. And I was very young. That region of Shang-shung is very cold, and we walked on compacted snow. It is not my Tibet.' He asked suddenly: 'Was it green when you were there? Was there any spring?'

'Yes, in the valleys.'

He was smiling. He wanted to remember his country in flower. He said: 'Perhaps you love those mountains, but I do not. I come from another region, from the east. It was always green there.' For a little while, before he retired to meditate, he became a homesick old man, remembering, enquiring. Had I been east of Lhasa? Had I been to Kham? Seated in the humidity of Kathmandu, he wanted to hear of the green yak pastures of his home, of the horses grazing, and the waterfalls unfreezing on the high hills.

The pink walls of the Amitabha valley, which have steered Iswor and me ever closer to Kailas, now break stupendously apart, and all at once, barging out from behind separating crags, the mountain hangs above us, close and violent. The smooth dome has gone, and the whole western face is slung into ma.s.sive eaves of black rock, tiered one upon the next like a gigantic paG.o.da. Its curving overhangs descend concentrically to glacial ledges that shelter basins of pure snow, while above the white fields banked on its summit flies a wind-driven dust of silver.

It is only noon, but the people have thinned away. I do not at first understand this. Often I see nothing ahead in the wide, turning valley but the solitary speck of Iswor, as it was in Nepal, and some Austrian trekkers strung out on the trail. Where have the pilgrims gone?

But others are approaching now, moving counterclockwise, many astride ponies or yaks. As they draw near, I see that they are not Bon, but Indian Hindus, turning back. They straggle in a sad army. Their Tibetan drovers whistle and shout alongside, but the pilgrims ride in silence, hooded and swathed, their faces in shadow. They do not speak as they pa.s.s. Many look utterly spent, the men's faces like dark ash, frosted in moustaches, their eyes lowered. Some of them clutch canisters of oxygen, which they will jettison, when empty, among the rocks. For an hour or two there seems nothing on the mountain but a few blond trekkers muscling forward and this train of dark pilgrims descending.

The wind has turned to cutting ice, blowing from Kailas. The mountains ahead show bare flanks or broken scripts of snow. A figure descends alone, bulked in a brown anorak and balaclava, stopping to zip her hood under her eyes. Her party comes from Bangalore, she says, in India's far south, and nothing prepared them for this. Her voice is light and gutted in the wind.

'I don't know what happened to us. Our people were so sure they could do it. We went through government tests for our healthlungs, heart, everything. Maybe some of our group avoided them, I'm not sure.' She sounds less tired than stunned. Of her face, encased by hood and dark gla.s.ses, I can see nothing but wisps of escaped hair, greying, and the scarlet tika tika outlined black on her forehead, which looks somehow tragic. 'We numbered sixty-eight when we started, but half of us turned back at Lake Manasarovar because of healthpoor chests, coughing blood. Two of us died there, one a woman of just forty. Something happened in her breast. So we began to feel afraid. We are not used to this cold. I suppose you in the West are used. I am full of sadness now. The rest of us went on and got up to seventeen thousand feet, and then we couldn't climb further. Our nerve was broken. That is why we turned back before finis.h.i.+ng our outlined black on her forehead, which looks somehow tragic. 'We numbered sixty-eight when we started, but half of us turned back at Lake Manasarovar because of healthpoor chests, coughing blood. Two of us died there, one a woman of just forty. Something happened in her breast. So we began to feel afraid. We are not used to this cold. I suppose you in the West are used. I am full of sadness now. The rest of us went on and got up to seventeen thousand feet, and then we couldn't climb further. Our nerve was broken. That is why we turned back before finis.h.i.+ng our parikrama parikrama. I am very sad now, and rather ashamed.'

Behind her the last of her party is pa.s.sing down the ravine. A woman in flowery pantaloons sits half fainting on a horse led by a fierce herdsman, her husband walking alongside, trying to hold her.

The woman beside me takes off her dark gla.s.ses from alert, rather beautiful eyes. She says: 'All the same, Lake Manasarovar was wonderful. We all waded in a little and washed its water over us, from the head down anddo you know?we never felt it cold, but quite warm, because of its sanct.i.ty.' She smiles to herself. 'At least we had that.' Then she resumes the long descent of the valley, wrapping her arms around herself, not looking back.

I walk on with vague foreboding, listening to my body. Hindu pilgrims seem to have reached Kailas pitifully ill-prepared ever since ragged Shaivite renunciates straggled here in the nineteenth century, begging. In the 1930s the pilgrim numbers mushroomed, and every year several thousand caste Hindus were attempting the parikrama parikrama, their kora. Long after the hiatus of the Cultural Revolution, in 1981, a few hundred pilgrims, chosen by Indian government lottery, moved over the Lipu Lekh pa.s.s west of Nepal. These sponsored pilgrims now number a thousand a yeara fraction of those who enter the lotterybut other tour operators ignore official precautions. Health stipulations are routinely flouted. The pilgrims are often middle-aged business people, modestly pious. I had seen them crowded into dormitories in Taklakot. Many are from the south, from lowland cities like Bangalore and Chennai: devotees of s.h.i.+va. Yet often they are flown from Kathmandu to Lhasa, ascending almost 8,000 feet in an hour, then truck four days west to reach Manasarovar exhausted at 15,000 feet. In the past few days, eight have died on the mountain.

The valley is edging up more steeply now, the wind intensifying. The black-white scarps of Kailas glitter cruelly close. Mountains in many cultures have been coterminous with death. In Indian myth, Yama, the first man to die, climbed a mountain over 'the high pa.s.ses', showing the way. High above me, released by some melted snow shelf, an ice-bound stream crackles into life and runs glittering down the cliff. I wonder what it means to die here. Some Buddhists say that merit is annulled if the kora is not complete, as if the anticlockwise descent were a slipping back in time. Yet perhaps the Hindu party, touched by the lake waters, feel purified. The track ahead of me is empty of anyone to ask. But as the last pilgrim drops from sight under the gleam of Kailas, the beliefs of many peoplesfrom ancient Egypt to aboriginal Australiaseem starkly natural. The mountain path is the road of the dead. The a.s.syrian word for 'to die' was 'to clutch the mountain'. Many Altaic peoples imagine their souls departing up a mystic range. And in j.a.pan, the traditional funeral cortege still departs with the cry: 'Yamaguki! We go to the mountain!' We go to the mountain!'

As the track bends north-east, the ethereal sandstone disappears. The slopes turn black with granite, and the mountain's lower ridges break into unstable spikes and revetments. Their ribs are slashed in chiaroscuro, and their last outcrops pour towards the valley in the fluid, anthropomorphic shapes that pilgrims love. The spine and haunches of a ma.s.sive stone beast, gazing at Kailas, are hailed as the Nandi bull, holy to s.h.i.+va; another rock has become the votive cake of Padmasambhava.

To the west, beneath the last black and orange cliffs of the Amitabha basin, the second chaksal gang chaksal gang prostration platform spreads under wind-torn flags, where the Buddha nailed Kailas to earth with a footprint that still indents the stone. Soon afterwards the trail is trickling through the meadows of Damding Donkhang, and nomad tents are pitched along the stream. Gradually the way starts bending east. A frozen tributary departs up the Wild Yak Valley, leaving the Lha contracted almost to pure ice. Now the mountain's western face is revolving away from us, and we glimpse another face more awesome and absolute, softened for a while by the intervening crag of Vajrapari. Within an hour Iswor and Ihe tired beneath his double load, uncomplainingare clambering up to Drira p.h.u.k Gompa, the Monastery of the Cave of the Yak Horns. Small and rough-stoned as the others, it is locked against the desolate valleyside among huge boulders, facing the mountain. prostration platform spreads under wind-torn flags, where the Buddha nailed Kailas to earth with a footprint that still indents the stone. Soon afterwards the trail is trickling through the meadows of Damding Donkhang, and nomad tents are pitched along the stream. Gradually the way starts bending east. A frozen tributary departs up the Wild Yak Valley, leaving the Lha contracted almost to pure ice. Now the mountain's western face is revolving away from us, and we glimpse another face more awesome and absolute, softened for a while by the intervening crag of Vajrapari. Within an hour Iswor and Ihe tired beneath his double load, uncomplainingare clambering up to Drira p.h.u.k Gompa, the Monastery of the Cave of the Yak Horns. Small and rough-stoned as the others, it is locked against the desolate valleyside among huge boulders, facing the mountain.

Halfway up Iswor turns with a quaint thumbs-up sign and cries out: 'Are you happy?'

I answer, not knowing: 'Yes! Are you?' But I am somehow uneasy.

'If you are happy, I am happy!'

A boy-monk hurries us in, and the harshening wind drives us from the courtyard and the flag-streaming terraces. We cannot stay here. The pilgrims' rooms are full, although we see n.o.body, and Ram has pitched our tent still higher up against the snows, where we will acclimatise near 17,000 feet and try to sleep.

In the temple the familiar skylight, fringed with tankas, is darkening towards evening. The altar is crowded with miniature stupas in barley or buckwheat, some painted, left by pilgrims who have gone. The tables blaze with artificial flowers, and tiers of scalloped niches hedge the walls in faded yellow and gold. Here, banked in their toy-like cas.e.m.e.nts, the divinities sit in near-darkness. I glimpse their Olympian smiles and hands hovering in blessing, the fall of necklaces. Their folded legs and torsos glimmer gold. Each niche is fringed with pilgrims' money.

Drira p.h.u.k was once the richest of the little monasteries round Kailas. Kawaguchi found that it housed several senior lamas, and in 1935 the scholar Giuseppe Tucci came upon a woodblock printing press here, from which the monks copied out a rare pilgrim's guide for him. Now I find its monks curled among cus.h.i.+ons, warmed by a yak-dung oven. Iswor tries to talk with them in Tamang, and I in Mandarin, but they speak neither. Two of them doze while anotheran eerily beautiful youth with long locks and girl's handsbrings us tea with salt and yak b.u.t.ter, then falls asleep.

Their monastery, in its strange way, commemorates the kora itself. In the thirteenth century the sage Gotsampa was the first to circ.u.mambulate the mountain, lured along this valley by a dri dri, a female yak. He followed her into the cave above us, and found the imprint of her horn on the rock where she had vanished. She was, he realised, a dakini dakini in disguise, a fairy sky-dancer named Senge Dongpa. As he settled in the cave to meditate, she returned to minister to him, and thereafter generations of Kagyupa hermits settled here. So he became the founder of the kora. in disguise, a fairy sky-dancer named Senge Dongpa. As he settled in the cave to meditate, she returned to minister to him, and thereafter generations of Kagyupa hermits settled here. So he became the founder of the kora.

Now the only monk awake, an eager acolyte with hedgehog hair, takes us deeper into the rock face by a pa.s.sage bright with painted bodhisattvas. They gaze from blue-washed cas.e.m.e.nts and float in fresco across the walls. The cave is a slanted overhang of living rock, where the saint's seat has smoothed to an altar. Under the monk's guiding hand, I feel in its ceiling the long, tapering groove where the dri dri's horn parted the cliff. A gilded statuette of Gotsampa still meditates here, barely visible in the glow of a lone lamp. I crouch before it. The monk points to a figure encased nearby. 'Senge Dongpa!'

I stare at her in amazement. The dakini dakini is not the fairy seductress I had imagined, but a demon G.o.ddess with a pig's face and lewd fangs, waving a sword. She has transformed into the Lion-faced Celestial Angel of this upper valley, as fluid as her rocks. As I turn away, an old pilgrim stoops beside us with a gift of b.u.t.ter to replenish the lamp, and asksIswor saysthat he be remembered in the monk's prayers in this place of power. is not the fairy seductress I had imagined, but a demon G.o.ddess with a pig's face and lewd fangs, waving a sword. She has transformed into the Lion-faced Celestial Angel of this upper valley, as fluid as her rocks. As I turn away, an old pilgrim stoops beside us with a gift of b.u.t.ter to replenish the lamp, and asksIswor saysthat he be remembered in the monk's prayers in this place of power.

Before we leave, Iswor, suddenly nervous, wants to pray to the G.o.ddess Tara, who owns the 18,600-foot pa.s.s that we must scale tomorrow. In the chief shrine her white body is so garlanded in jewellery that even the eyes that open on her hands and feet are blinded. But a third eye gazes from her golden forehead in a face of vapid sweetness, and the blue lotus of compa.s.sion floats behind her. Other pilgrims have sought a.s.surance too, and the fingers of her right hand, raised in mercy, are so clotted with votive money that their gesture is lost. Iswor places two lamps at her foot, bows and whispers to me: 'Light one for your future.' Then he finds his ponderous backpack again, and we go out into the rasping cold.

From here as we descend through the twilight, the north face of Kailas breaks on the dimming sky. Two closer mountainsthe pyramids of Vajrapani and Avalokitesvara, the peaks of power and benevolenceframe it like twin sentinels. Tantric adepts, inspired by the mountains' symmetry, are enjoined to celebrate this moment in the mandala of Supreme Bliss, where Hindus envisage s.h.i.+va and Buddhists whatever deity is guiding their salvation. Beyond, a third pyramid mountain, sacred to Manjushri, the destroyer of ignorance, completes a triad to symbolise the attributes of the Buddha, while still farther east, beyond our narrowing path tomorrow, there hangs the pa.s.s of the compa.s.sionate Tara, to whom we lit our feeble lamps.

As we turn closer against the mountain, the Lha valley disappears northwards, towards the source of the Indus, and we are climbing steep up the dark moraine of a tributary. Beside us, as if by the revolution of a giant wheel, the mountain's western face, with its vast hammocks of snow ledge, has followed the smooth beauty of the southern face out of sight, and into their place has risen this curtain of sheer terror. For the first time the whole mountain is exposed above us. From crest to foot it falls 5,000 feet in a near-vertical precipice. Nothing softens its chill descent. Its scarp is jet black, barely seamed with ice. Near its crest the snow plummets for hundreds of feet in razor sheets, and white pendants like inverted fans overlap one another six or eight high, descending in ghostly tiers to the abyss.

Trembling in my hands, the only guide to the mountain likens this face to the 'north wall of the Eiger from Grindelwald'. Perhaps it is a submerged memory of this mountain that has chilled me for long minutes. Grindelwald was where my sister died, killed by an avalanche at the age of twenty-one. Between rock and snow, skiing. In the shadow of the Eiger. My lungs feel lined with cold. Ancient glaciers have scoured the ravines around into granite walls. For years my stricken mother could not speak of her, her memory under silence. We are climbing into near-darkness. The temperature has dropped far below freezing. I am s.h.i.+vering as if my padded anorak and thermal layers are muslin. Buddhists discern on the north scarp of Kailas a devil leading a pig, and the palace of a serpent king. But I have stopped looking.

My father is at the police station, I in the hotel lobby, where my mother asks some strangers to pray for us. It is only now that I feel afraid. My mother never importuned anyone. We sink our faces in our hands, waiting. For an hour, perhaps, or a minute, there is no news from the mountain. Then the door opens on my father, who says: 'It's no good...no good.' He folds my mother in his arms.

It is years before her smile straightens, or I travel among mountains.

Our tent is pitched against a narrow ledge, anch.o.r.ed by boulders. A night wind comes scything up the valley. We bolt down noodles and warm tuna, then ease into our sleeping bags, fully dressed. Ram is quiet, tired, and Iswor's head is throbbing with the first signs of alt.i.tude sickness. I can give him only aspirin. Tomorrow we will be climbing another 1,600 feet within three hours, and I wonder when the first nausea may hit us all. I try to sleep, but instead I lie febrile and clear-headed, listening for Iswor's sound. Breathing is shallower at night, and the pain intensifies. But I hear nothing, and in this impoverished air my thoughts veer into delirium. All night the wind sets the tent flaps slapping against my head. I imagine I hear voices outside, and clouds rolling over the mountains.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Before dawn, when I emerge from our tent, the sky is still ablaze with stars, the wind has vanished, and the silence is the utter, pristine silence of a great desert. But we are more than 17,000 feet high. The air seems so thin that my voice would shatter it. Even my breathing, deeper than usual, sounds too loud, so that I sit down on a rock to quieten it, and wait for the faint white light to seep into the valley below.

Iswor wakes with his headache gone, st.u.r.dy and confident again. Ram cooks up three fried eggsa luxuryand dismantles the tent around us. The coffee goes cold as we drink it. My head is light, not quite mine, but my body shakes off any aches, and a visceral excitement m.u.f.fles the alarm of the high pa.s.s ahead. We set out into the pallor of an invisible sun, risen far below our horizon. We have fourteen miles to go before dark.

The basin where we climb is still deep in snow, covering the frozen Drolma-la river. A sunken bridge lies wrecked in its prison of ice. In front of us, as we gingerly cross the snow-field, the mountains north of Kailas come to the valley in flying b.u.t.tresses. Behind, the ma.s.sifs beyond the Lha Chu are powdered in the first morning cloud. The cold is bitter. Under our feet we hear the wakened river echoing in its ice tunnels, descending unseen.

After a while a moraine named the Valley of Incense opens to our south. A ridge like the section of a vast amphitheatre closes it off, lifting in a long spine to the summit of Kailas, which has transformed again, half-hidden in ashen cloud.

Yesterday I wondered why the pilgrims seemed so few, but now I realise. Many start long before dawn, and complete the kora in less than two days. Sometimes they camp among the rocks. And already by early morning other pilgrims are coming up the snow valley behind me. They climb in scattered groups of two or three, old people marching with sticks and prayer wheels, nomads driving laden yaks. They go in a motley of novelty and tradition, some in long coats that sag open at the throat and bulk above sashed waists, others in peaked caps and quilted jackets. They look unquenchably happy. Sometimes they greet me as they pa.s.s, as if their faith was mine. They tramp over these stones in cheap trainers and slipper-thin shoes. Makes.h.i.+ft bundles hang across their shoulders on fraying rope. You marvel at their speed, their delight: they, who have suffered the dislocation of everything they value. The old, especially. You think of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese war on faith, and you wonder what they have suffered, what inflicted. But their smiles, when they break, seem those of children. Among the women a slash of vivid ap.r.o.n may show, or a glint of smothered jewellery. Some carry babies on their backsinert under bobble hatsor shepherd children tenderly beside them.