To a Mountain in Tibet(2)

And so, in the West, it still seems. The most sacred of the world’s mountains–holy to one fifth of the earth’s people–remains withdrawn on its plateau like a pious illusion. For years I had heard of it only as a figment. Isolated beyond the parapet of the central Himalaya, it permeated early Hindu scriptures as the mystic Mount Meru, whose origins go back to the dawn of Aryan time. In this incarnation it rotates like a spindle at the axis of all creation, ascending immeasurable miles to the palace of Brahma, greatest and most remote of the gods, and plunging as deep beneath the earth. From its foot flow the four rivers that nourish the world, and everything created–trees, rocks, humans–finds its blueprint here. In time the mystical Meru and the earthly Kailas merged in people’s minds. Early wanderers to the source of the four great Indian rivers–the Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra–found to their wonder that each one rose near a cardinal point of Kailas.

So people discovered the heart of the world. It was a site of astral beauty, separated from its companion Himalayas as if by divine intent. To the pious, the mountain radiates gold or refracts like crystal. It is the source of the universe, created from cosmic waters and the mind of Brahma, who is yet himself mortal and will pass away. The sun and the planets orbit it. The Pole Star hangs immutable above. The continents of the world radiate from its centre like lotus petals on a precious sea (humans occupy the southern petal) and its slopes are heady with the gardens of paradise.

But the God of Death dwells on the mountain. Nothing is total, nothing permanent–not even he. All is flux. In the oceans around Kailas-Meru, beyond a ring of iron mountains, countless embodiments of Meru, each identical to the last, multiply and repeat themselves, dying and resurrecting into eternity.



Around me in the Karnali valley, nothing yet disturbs these dreams. The infant Ganges steepens and roars out of a cleft far on the skyline. The sherpa is trying to sing.

Kailas, I know–the solid, terrestrial peak still invisible ahead–stands in starker terrain than this, stripped of everything but worship. It enters history quickened already by centuries of overlapping divinities. About a millennium ago the pagan gods in charge of the mountain were converted to Buddhism and became its protectors. A few slipped through the net, of course, with even a flying sky goddess, and linger still. But a multitude of Buddhas and bodhisattvas–saints who have delayed their entry into nirvana in order to help others–flew in to occupy the high crags and summits, lighting up the mountain with their compassion. Then the Buddha himself arrived and nailed Kailas to earth with his footprints before it could be carted off by a demon.

The mountain is swathed in such a dense and changing mystique that it eludes simple portrayal. It was on to such a peak that the first Tibetan kings descended from the sky (eventually to be cut off and stranded). Hindus believe its summit to be the palace of Shiva–the lord of destruction and change–who sits there in eternal meditation. But it is unknown when the first pilgrims came. Buddhist herders and Hindu ascetics must have ritually circled the mountain for centuries, and the blessings accruing to them increased marvellously in sacred lore, until it was claimed that a single circuit expunged the sins of a lifetime. The mountain was dangerous to reach, but never quite inaccessible. Only in the nineteenth century did Tibet itself, swayed by a xenophobic China, become a forbidden land. And Kailas kept its own taboos. Its slopes are sacrosanct, and it has never been climbed.

But in recent years it has been protected less by sanctity than by political intolerance. In 1962, four years before the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese banned all pilgrimage here (although devotees still circled it secretly), and only in 1981 were the first Tibetans and Indians permitted to return. Twelve years later a few trekkers were tentatively allowed to cross the mountain borders between Nepal and Tibet.

My own small journey is one of these. The negotiation of permits–I am entering a military zone–has been fought by an agent in Kathmandu; but the Chinese suspicion of lone travellers compels me to join a group of seven British trekkers on the border–we will separate at the foot of Kailas–for the charade of not entering western Tibet alone. My Nepalese horse man too, a Thakuri from Humla, will leave us at the frontier. But Iswor, my guide, and Ram, the cook, will cross to the mountain with me. They are Tamangs, sturdy people close to the Tibetans, and now they march tactfully behind or ahead of me, their backs piled with over fifty pounds of gear each.

Iswor speaks fractured English. He has the thick shoulders and strong, bandy legs of his people, but at twenty-seven he is young for this job, and shy. Sometimes I imagine a fragility in him, not physical, but lodged in sudden, cloudy preoccupations. But he follows me with almost tender concern. When the track widens he comes alongside and proffers his water bottle by way of breaking silence. His Tamang people left Tibet more than a thousand years ago to settle in the mountains west of Everest, then scattered all through Nepal, and as we talk, I realise that he is not a highlander at all. His village is in the hills near Kathmandu, where his father, a cook, moved when the boy was three.

‘The tradition in our village is like with Sherpa people. We came as horse soldiers, I don’t know when, long ago. Now we go into trekking. Guides and porters. That’s what we are, Tamangs.’

‘But now you live in Kathmandu!’ I warm to him, but my voice sounds edgy. Kathmandu is sunk in a turmoil of mass rural immigration, broken infrastructure, political corruption.