Part 8 (1/2)

The track is steepening. The yaks and jhaboo jhaboos that had been following the stream bed are lumbering among the pilgrims now. Often I stop against a boulder, gasping for breath, fearing the first spasm of alt.i.tude sickness, which does not come. Ahead stretches a long stadium of mountains whose rocks show black against a thickening carpet of snow. All colour has been wrung out of it. Only the sky s.h.i.+nes intermittent blue above the flow of ridges into the valley. In this icy air the people are so swathed and goggled that among the fast-moving Tibetans, swinging their strings of prayer beads, their staffs, their thermoses of b.u.t.tered tea, it is hard to tell Indian from German, Austrian, even a pair of Russians. A herdsman has brought his two mastiffs with him, collared in red wool, for their merit.

The boulders become teeming sites of veneration. We walk through a broken labyrinth of granite: rocks the size of cottages, powder grey, sh.e.l.l pink. Milarepa defeated his Bon rival here by stacking a third giant boulder on to the wizard's second one, and left behind this toppling pillar, stamped with his footprints.

To the pilgrims there are no mute stones. They disperse and sit familiarly among them. There are boulders that they squeeze between to test their virtue, another that they crawl beneath. The rocks become the judgement of the mountain. One outcrop, named the Place of Black and White Sins, forms a crude tunnel through whose symbolic h.e.l.l the pilgrim must crush himself before returning down another pa.s.sage to a higher state. In such crevices the living stone senses the purity of any body pa.s.sing through, and may contract so violently that the guilty are half entombed.

Three pilgrims, sitting pleasantly together, remember a time when the twin rocks facing them came to judgement. They speak to Iswor haltingly in Tamang, but they cannot enter the rock pa.s.sage. It looks impa.s.sably narrow, and is blocked solid by ice. The thinnest person may be trapped here, they say. The rock knows everything. Two years ago they levered a fat friend through. 'He was as tall as you!' they cry at me, and disintegrate into helpless merriment. One of them pushed, two of them pulled, and after half an hour, they say, the man emerged thinner, sinless but bloodied and half suffocated. Could I not wait for the ice to melt?

But the track carries us up again, and the mountain valley closes unsoftened around our strange, heterogeneous trickle of beasts and humans drawn up like iron filings to the pa.s.s. We go through intermittent sunlight. Whenever it clouds, the air freezes round us. The crust of snow, printed with yaks' hooves, is crisp and hard underfoot, even in June. A sharp wind has risen. Far ahead of us, the path elongates along the hillsides, until its pilgrims become snow and granite. We are climbing through a monochrome limbo. Hundreds of cairns and inscribed rocks litter the track and bristle on the skylines. Among their boulders the scarlet scarves of women flicker and disappear again. I am barely an hour from the summit. Somewhere to our right the Drolma river has died away. Impa.s.sive trains of yaks, some with blond heads and tails, are marching up behind me, their cloven hooves smiting the rocks, and their ridersanxious Hindusclinging to padded saddles. And once a whiskered ancient in threadbare trainers, overtaking me at ease, clasps my shoulder in a shaking hand that kindles a shock of warmth.

We come to a sacred rivulet where yaks are drinking. Its tributary is sought above all by butchers, who here wash away the sin of killing animals. Iswor has stopped too, so swathed in scarves that he shows only a pair of watchful eyes. He says: 'We can't stay long at this height. My head...'

Another man is walking behind me: a pilgrim, with his wife and child and beast. Recent centuries have not touched him. He has his own. He sees with a bright, focused intensity. He has come from lake country to the north, or perhaps from farther, and the distance brings merit. He prostrates often to the G.o.d mountain, and the earth feels hot under him. The prayer's words are strong, although he does not understand them, and the G.o.ds breathe back from the summits. He has remembered everything the village shaman spoke of, and placated the klu klu in the stream, in case they are there. The water's coldness comes cleansing to the touch. He puts it in a phial for his sick mother. That is what he has come for, and for the black earth-lords to spare his barley crop, and for the calving of the third yak. These are the great things. His wife, whom he shares with his brother, has other thoughts. Women's. He knows what they are, he thinks. in the stream, in case they are there. The water's coldness comes cleansing to the touch. He puts it in a phial for his sick mother. That is what he has come for, and for the black earth-lords to spare his barley crop, and for the calving of the third yak. These are the great things. His wife, whom he shares with his brother, has other thoughts. Women's. He knows what they are, he thinks.

In the last monastery he burnt rhododendron leaves and a juniper twig while the G.o.d's eyes watched him in the lamplight: Chenresig, the many-armed (was that he?). He had offered enough tsampa tsampa to alert the G.o.d's attention, he was sure. And lit a b.u.t.ter lamp. Then he had asked that the Chinese leave Tibet; they had taken his grandfather to a camp somewhere, and returned him dead. He remembers his father crying. There was the Great Elephant Cave too, full of hermits' feats, where he poured out some to alert the G.o.d's attention, he was sure. And lit a b.u.t.ter lamp. Then he had asked that the Chinese leave Tibet; they had taken his grandfather to a camp somewhere, and returned him dead. He remembers his father crying. There was the Great Elephant Cave too, full of hermits' feats, where he poured out some chang chang from his thermos. The monk gave him a pill baked from holy clay, which cost a little. At the cemetery he snipped a woollen patch from his from his thermos. The monk gave him a pill baked from holy clay, which cost a little. At the cemetery he snipped a woollen patch from his chuba chuba, and left it there. He felt lighter after this. His wife left a bead. So the G.o.d of death might spare them worse futures. They are clean now.

Our path swerves up through glacial debris to the last ascent. The hills beneath us look rough-skinned, half-created. Their only colours are those we bring, and a sudden, copper-red stain of lichen over the boulders. My head is free of pain, but light, faint. The fear of sickness has faded, and a breathless fatigue rises instead. I climb no more than ten paces before stopping again, heaving for air. The merest extra effortto mount a ledge or overstep a stoneexacts this gasping price. I wait for the panicky breathlessness of my avalanche ascent to return, but it does not. I fix my eyes on the ground beneath me, patterned with a dull glitter of snow. My feet march like somebody else's. I steer them from rock to rock. They climb past boulders newly dressed in votive clothes, and oxygen canisters discarded in the clefts. A tuft of hairhuman or yakdrifts at my ankles. A horse's skull s.h.i.+nes in the snow.

People die here. Many think it safer to ride than to walk. Kawaguchi, racked by headaches, and even Sven Hedin ascended the pa.s.s on yaks. The accident-p.r.o.ne Swami Hamsa was almost swept to his death in an avalanche. Others drowned in the freezing river below Drira p.h.u.k, before a new bridge was built in 1986. The Hindu dead are routinely flown back to India, but others remain on the mountain. Hedin noticed a corpse tumbled into a crevice like a bunch of rags, and recent pilgrims stumbled on the eviscerated torso of a girl.

Even the Tibetans falter sometimes, and fall forward on the boulders, the women's dark, bright-ringed hands clenching the stone. The Indians ride ashen-faced on their ponies, their mouths masked. Out of the pa.s.s ahead an ice-cold wind is blowing. Our breath rasps with weakness or prayer. It dies among the clink and shuffle of hooves and boots. I stop to write these notes, crouched on my knees. My fingers have gone numb, my handwriting broken. Now, as I try to read it, I see only words blurring like cuneiform into the damp from sleet or streaming nostrils. A pilgrim beside me cries out something, but whatever meaning I understood has faded illegibly from the page. So has my worry about Iswor, gone fast ahead. The wider landscape toothe shapes of surrounding peakshas wandered into gibberish.

The sage Gotsampa, pioneering the kora, became the first to ascend the pa.s.s. After straying along the Secret Path of the Dakinis, he was lured here by a posse of twenty-one blue wolves. As he followed them in wonder they dissolved one into another until only a single beast was left, which disappeared into the rock face on the crown of the pa.s.s. Then the hermit knew that he had been guided by a vision of the twenty-one Taras, emanations of the G.o.ddess of compa.s.sion. This was her hill of salvation. Beyond it the way plunges for over a thousand feet into the valley. But here, at the 18,600-foot zenith of the kora, in a moment of blinding transition, pilgrims might pa.s.s into purity at the axis of the world.

Now hoa.r.s.e cries sound above us in the wind, and a hillock of brilliant colour bursts from the gap above. I climb on a wave of relief. The slopes ease apart under a porcelain sky. A few minutes later I am walking through a blaze of prayer flags. They are festooned so thick on everything around that only at their top does the double summit of the boulder sacred to Tarathe Flaming Rockbreak free in a surge of granite. The poles from which the flags once flew have long crashed under their weight before the gales that fly through the pa.s.s, leaving this formless ocean of parched and vivid pennants heaped on boulders all around. Pilgrims trying to circ.u.mambulate the sacred stone flounder among ropes and shrouded rocks. Only here and there, if you part the brilliant curtain from the stone, do you glimpse the mantras blazoned in crimson and yellow, with money glued by b.u.t.ter to the surface, or hanks of hair, even people's teeth. Stubbornly I plunge across the boulders through this undergrowth. My feet snag among thrown-off clothes, shoes, dishes and animal skulls lying on half-melted ice. But an infectious victory is in the air.

Exhausted pilgrims sit in groups. They feast on tea and roasted barley. Others tear aside the flags to touch their palms and foreheads to the rock. A circle of men crouch in prayer that sounds like purring cats. Two monks sit facing one another in silence, and Hindu pilgrims are pa.s.sing round their prasada prasada sweets in dazed celebration. From time to time a new arrival breaks into a joyous shout. Prayer leaves scatter in the air and blow away. And once a pair of shamans, their torn robes fringed in scarlet and gold, their hair flying wild, leap up to hurl sweets in dazed celebration. From time to time a new arrival breaks into a joyous shout. Prayer leaves scatter in the air and blow away. And once a pair of shamans, their torn robes fringed in scarlet and gold, their hair flying wild, leap up to hurl tsampa tsampa into the wind, and cry on and on: into the wind, and cry on and on: 'Lha-so-so-so! Lha-so-so!' 'Lha-so-so-so! Lha-so-so!' Victory to the G.o.ds! Victory to the G.o.ds!

I slump between their groups, washed in their happiness. Among these stark precipices the artificial riot of flags throws up an almost violent wave of prayer, touching and defiant. Even the farther outcrops are draped in banners where the pawprint left in the rock by Gotsampa's wolf shows clear to the eye of faith.

The twenty-one dissolving wolves proclaim the G.o.ddess of the place. To the Tibetans this protean deity is Drolma, the G.o.ddess of liberation, and it is she who forgives their sins and returns them newly pure to the world below. In her favourite guises as the Green and the White Tara, the divinities of motherhood and action, she sits on a throne of lotus and moon, and sometimes extends one leg in readiness to act. But her body may go through rainbow colours, and as the twenty-one Taras (who look almost identical in fresco) she diffuses into multiple benevolence, and she has the power to descend unscathed into h.e.l.l. Above all she is the deity of pity, born from the tears of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compa.s.sion, as he wept at his powerlessness to comfort all living things. Call on her name, evoke her mandala, and she will fly in to the rescue. Her statues speak. She is the mother of the Tibetan people, and has moved through their mortal history as a pious queen or consort, so that illiterate pilgrims know her pet.i.tion, which is being breathed against her prayer-hung rock as I watch.

It is the custom to leave some object on Drolma's pa.s.s, and to take something else away. Iswor, who is waiting for me, has brought a string of prayer flags from Darchen, and together we stretch them among the others. But he is feeling vaguely ill again. Under the scarf-swathed cap, the dark gla.s.ses, the glisten of sun cream, I imagine his face too pale. He wants to go down fast, but is ashamed to abandon me. He carries a heavy pack; I, almost nothing. I urge him away.

For a while I linger, reluctant to leave, although the sun has clouded. Other pilgrims are starting to trickle away. I wait, as if something might happen. But there is only the sandpaper wind and the paling sky. The air is thinner than any I have sensed. The euphoria of those around me lifts into momentary chanting that touches me like a benign contagion.

Deep in one pocket I find the sandalwood incense-sticks that Tas.h.i.+ had given me to burn for him on the pa.s.s. He had said: 'I think I will never reach there myself. But you will have gone for me.'

I scrutinise the packet in the hardening wind. It reads: 'Not only to please the Buddhas and Guardian divinities, but also to satiate the ordinary beings from the six realms and pacify demons and obstacle makers (sandalwood and secret substances).'

I have forgotten to bring matches, but a fervent youthprayer beads in one hand, a camera in the otheroffers me his cigarette lighter. After a long time I ignite a sheaf and shelter it among some flags. I call up Tas.h.i.+'s memory in the teeth of the wind. Then I start down.

One mile and 1,400 near-vertical feet to the valley below, and I am starting too late for comfort. The trail plummets over flint-sharp rocks, down the spine of a precipitous ridge with no end in sight, nothing to soften the grey wreckage underfoot, no hint of gra.s.s or flower. The path is too steep for yaks, and the ponies go riderless.

But almost at once the tarn of Gaurikundamong the highest lakes in the worldappears in a basin just below. Dark under its cliffs, ringed by the cloudy jade of softening ice, its centre is still pure snow, and the way down to it so arduous that few pilgrims attempt it. Buddhists call it the Lake of Mercy. It is the bathing pool of the sky-dancers, and of the G.o.ddess Parvati, wife of s.h.i.+va, who seduced him by her ablutions. Only in late summer do hardy pilgrims clamber down to collect the water, and pour it over their heads as a freezing baptism.

I pa.s.s a fresh sari, beautiful in purple and gold, discarded on the path. Nearby a sad-faced Hindu lies propped among rocks, gazing at the lake. He calls out to me: 'How far is it to the valley? How many hours?'

I hazard a guess. He is an Indian from Malaysia, and has never seen anywhere like this. 'I didn't understand, I thought it would be easy. Yet here I am.' He looks finished. 'But the others have gone.'

'Gone where?'

'Only seven of our group made it, out of twenty-three.'

'But you're over the hardest now.'

'We were told that if we bathed in Manasarovar, and finished the parikrama parikrama of Kailas, everything would be all right...' of Kailas, everything would be all right...'

'That you would gain merit? Perhaps moksha?' This is the Hindu nirvana.

'Perhaps.' But the word comes so drained, so disheartened, that it seems irrelevant. It is the long descent ahead that obsesses him. 'The other six have gone in front of me.' He touches my arm. 'Will there be horses at the bottom?'

'Yes, there will be horses.' I am guessing again. 'And the way will be level.' That much I know. 'It's a river valley. Beautiful.'