To a Mountain in Tibet(23)
The low-clinging cloud has lifted behind us, and suddenly we are walking in sunlight, our shadows sharp underfoot. The mountains stand in thinner, clearer air. All across the horizon now they shine in unearthly clarity, piled on one another in pyramids and flying buttresses of snow. To the north the peaks of the Nalakanka Himal harden in the sunlight, and confront us like a cold amphitheatre on the naked track.
Soundlessly above me, a lammergeyer comes flying out of the pass on motionless wings. The craning of its head shows clear from far below, and its slim, buff body gleams like a brass torpedo between dusky underwings. With no beat of its ten-foot wings, it quarters the slopes below me in leisurely glides, perhaps seeking a thermal on which to rise, then plummets from sight.
We follow its flight path with awe, then turn uphill again. A cold wind hits us as we near the head of the pass, and out of nowhere a light, hard snow is falling. A few minutes later we are lying under a cairn of pallid stones on the summit. It is crowned by bleached tangles of prayer flags. They are strung across the path like old clotheslines, and rasp and stretch in the ice-filled wind. Every traveller who passes tosses another stone on the man-made heap, and sometimes shouts a greeting to the local gods. But we are alone. The snow trickles like blossom over us. The prayer flags are Buddhist, of course, but the spirits of the place are older than faith, and spiteful. The nyen live on mountaintops close to the sky. The cairns are their altars. They unleash blizzards and avalanches, brew up blinding mists. It is wise to offer them a stone. More trouble still are the tsen, who materialise out of thin air. They were said to be powerful in the days of Shang-shung kings, around Kailas, and they ride red-skinned and armoured through the mountains, shooting plague-tipped arrows. Iswor offers them a second stone, and we lie back at peace under the falling snow.
It is not hard to see in these spirits a memory of Tibetan raiders, who centuries ago descended the passes in chain mail, their faces daubed with ochre. Such traces of a militant people defy the later image of a remote and otherworldly theocracy, but the country’s early history suggests a people in love with war. In the seventh and eighth centuries, when the Tang dynasty reached its height, the Tibetan armies with their Turkish auxiliaries marched through the Chinese empire and sacked the capital, Changan, a thousand miles to the east. For generations Tibet stood on a war footing, and its armour was the finest in the world. The Chinese wrote in awe that impenetrable chain mail sheathed the elite spearmen–even horses–from head to toe, and that in battle they never retreated, but a new rank of soldiers moved implacably into the place of the fallen. They could field 200,000 men at a time, it was said, and despised a tranquil death. For two centuries they dominated the southern Silk Road oases, reaching even Samarkand, so that the Arab caliph Haroun-al-Rashid sought alliance with the Chinese against them. Southwards they thrust beyond Nepal and crossed the Indian plain to invade Burma.
Even after Buddhism filled the land with monasteries, the monks protected their faith with arms. Alongside lives of prayer and meditation, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were rife with monastic civil war, sometimes waged in league with Mongol chiefs, and the Dalai Lamas (if they were not murdered in childhood) were complicit in violence even into the early twentieth century. Travellers often noted in the Tibetan men an earthy emotionalism, quick to draw a dagger, and into the mid-century dacoits and predatory nomads, armed with matchlocks and Russian revolvers, were the plague of pilgrims.
A few paces over the Nara-la, the snow is thinning away. As we crest the pass, an enormous mountain barrier rises to meet us. Nothing sounds but the wind in our ears, even the purling of snow water gone. Here, where the Nepalese Himalaya drop in giant steps to the plateaux of Tibet, the last mountain walls, slashed by gullies, climb vertiginously north toward Kailas and the peaks beyond, lit by the gleam of glaciers in mid-air, and ridges hollowed with unmelting snow.
Under these obliterating skylines we descend a widening valley, where the Karnali, re-emerging from impassable gorges, cuts a corridor at last into sunlight. Between one step and another a stark change comes down. Centuries of monsoons have exhausted themselves over the heights behind us, and on this bitter counterscarp only blackened scrub survives. Precipitously beneath us the last grey-pink ravines of Nepal plunge to the Karnali, then level out towards another country. All becomes light and sky. Far to our north-west there opens up a land of planetary strangeness, empty of life, under a void of brilliant blue. We are gazing at a tableland that was once the Tethys Sea. Forty-five million years ago, as the tectonic plate of India–then a separate continent–crashed into the underbelly of Asia, and the Himalaya erupted to the south, this primordial ocean drained away. Marine fossils still exist in the Tibetan plateau, betraying that the highest country in the world was once an ocean.
As we struggle down the fault line of this momentous convulsion, a new vista eases open. In this rarefied air, where a person may be distinctly descried ten miles off, I glimpse with a catch of the heart the violet-tinged steppes of Tibet shelving north-west. Beyond them, an unbroken line of mountains glimmers across the horizon under cauliflower clouds that look as static as they are; while in the distant north floats the 25,000-foot Gurla Mandhata, which shines above the holy lake of Manasarovar. In its vivid stillness the land might be a painted backdrop slotted into the valley cleft beyond us. The artist wanted to express an inhuman tranquillity, and thought up this.
The country is fearsomely alone. The same geologic clash that created the Tibetan plateau circled it with the mountains that protect and desiccate it: the Karakoram in the west, the desert-swept Kunlun to the north. Even in the more vulnerable east, hundreds of miles of near-empty upland divide Tibet from the nearest easy habitat. Of its few million inhabitants, most are crowded into the more fertile valleys of the south-east. Compared to these, the far west, where we are going, is still more pitilessly dry and cold. In this thinned air, three miles above sea level, drastic temperature changes crack boulders and pulverise cliffs. The sun’s radiation is so intense that its heat surges from the earth to draw in icy winds and dust storms that sandpaper the land smooth. In a single day snowfall may alternate with thunder, hail and blistering sun.