To a Mountain in Tibet(19)
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,’ 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 passed a trader’s shelter–a sheepskin draped between rocks–and 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 passage of startling beauty or hardship 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 passport. 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 shift 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 pushing 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 passed, 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.’