To a Mountain in Tibet(26)
The seven British trekkers trickle in at evening, and pitch their tents by ours. They are not the hearty group I had feared, but middle-aged and quiet. They have come for scenic beauty and physical challenge. Most are experienced trekkers. Their leader prefers his groups older, he says. Often the young are less fit, and do not know their limits. Our transient union brings luxuries. We eat in a dining tent on rickety camp chairs. From time to time the wind rattles its poles loose and collapses some canvas on to us. Nobody complains or expects much. We feast on dumplings and omelettes, and morning porridge. Their sherpas rig up a modest lavatory tent above an excavated hole.
At evening, as I linger with Iswor by the Hilsa bridge, where the Karnali now flows brown with dust, the goat and sheep herds come barging and bullying across it, aborting all human traffic, until a column of yaks displaces them and I cross for a moment into Tibet. On this bank, beneath a sagging barbed-wire fence, a low plinth is carved China in Chinese characters on its far side, Nepal in Nepali on the other. But the flimsy gate is closed. I sit down on the plinth–one leg in Nepal, the other in Tibet–and gaze where we will go, with luck, tomorrow.
But few Western travellers entered by this secretive Karnali. They came by more accessible passes from India in the west. The first European to set eyes on Mount Kailas, the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, in 1715, had toiled there from Ladakh, sometimes snow-blind and coughing blood. Had he and his companion not fallen in with the caravan of a Tartar princess travelling to Lhasa, they would probably have died. Some six weeks later, in consternation, Desideri passed beneath a bitterly cold and cloud-wrapped Kailas. For days on end, he wrote, pilgrims circled the foot of this dread peak, whose sanctity was deepened by a certain Urghien (Padmasambhava), the founder of their religion. Here, centuries ago, the saint had meditated in a cave now celebrated by a few monks in a wretched monastery.
For five astonishing years Desideri, a man of keen learning, preached among the Tibetans in mutual tolerance and curiosity. But in 1721 he was recalled to the Vatican. Bigotry and turmoil ensued, with Mongol invasion, and in 1745 the last missionaries were expelled from Tibet. As the years went on, the country’s borders became encrusted with hopeful Christian outposts, longing to enter. When the land fell to Christ, some believed, the Last Day would dawn. But the Tibetans never allowed missions into the heart of their country again.
For a century after Desideri, no known European set eyes on Kailas. Then in 1812 the erratically brilliant veterinary surgeon William Moorcroft, with his shady companion Hyder Hearsey, made their way here disguised as Hindu ascetics. Moorcroft, intent equally on exploration and pioneering commerce, purchased a herd of fifty pashmina goats to drive back into India, and combed the Manasarovar lake to discover if any of India’s great rivers had its source there. Three years later he vanished into Central Asia, where his papers turned up piecemeal long afterwards, fomenting the mystery around his death.
The source of the great rivers–the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlej–became an obsession in London and British India, and remained uncertain even into the early twentieth century. As if by divine intent, all four of them rose close to Mount Kailas, echoing 2,000-year-old Hindu scriptures. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century Tibet was being breached not by explorers but by army officers and civil servants on big-game hunting forays. Defying the ban by both British and Tibetan authorities, they slipped over the Zanskar passes with their servants. On these illicit journeys the magnificent and controversial topography they were treading went largely unrecorded. They were more concerned with potting an Ovis ammon or a wild yak, and they treated Tibetan law with cavalier disdain. One Scottish aristocrat even sailed a rubber dinghy on the sacred waters of Manasarovar, for which the local governor was beheaded.
Yet Tibetan officials were often quaintly peaceful in their efforts to repel these foreigners. They complained that they themselves would be executed if they failed. One traveller reported a whole troop of soldiers who fell pathetically on their faces, drawing their hands across their throats in sign of their own fate. Even the bigoted Henry Savage Landor (grandson of the vile-tempered poet), who wrote a gaudy account of his ordeal, was only physically assaulted after every other measure to turn him back had failed.
The true survey of Tibet at this time was achieved by Indian pandits, trained by the British and disguised as merchants or holy men. Their piously fingered rosaries were in fact recording distances, and their prayer wheels were stuffed with coded data. Even after the brutal British invasion of Tibet under Younghusband in 1904, travel for foreigners was no easier. In 1907 the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin–a man of self-blinding vision–had to enter by subterfuge. He then spent fifteen months following a thousand-mile broken arc of mountains eastwards across inner Tibet, and became the first European to reach the source of the Indus–and to join the pilgrims circling Kailas.
Humbler travellers, of course, had been entering the country for centuries: pilgrims who left no record. In a land of bitter extremes, racked by armed dacoits riding hardy ponies and yaks, they were wretchedly vulnerable, protected only by their poverty. Some of the brigands were themselves on pilgrimage. Others routinely contributed a share of their plunder to the monasteries. The fastidious Japanese monk Ekai Kawaguchi, while circling Kailas, noticed a notorious bandit and murderer praying to the mountain in penance not only for his past crimes, but for those he expected to commit in the future.
Kawaguchi himself was one of the first and most perceptive pilgrims to recount his journey, in 1900. He was perhaps a spy; yet fervently pious. After surviving early vicissitudes (including a nomad girl’s assault on his virginity), he prostrated himself a ritual 108 times on the first sight of Kailas, then broke into poetry and circled the holy mountain for four days in ecstasy.