To a Mountain in Tibet(27)
But it was Hindu pilgrims who penned the most ardent journeys. Eighteen years after Kawaguchi, the swami Bhagwan Hamsa, a girlishly fragile figure, found his own salvation on Kailas. He too, in high-flown prose, survived countless perils on the way: cobras, ghosts, a lust-crazed elephant, licentious mountain women. On Kailas he stumbled into the glacial cave of a yogi, with whom he spent three days, drinking only water, his head resting in the yogi’s lap at night; and beside the frozen lake beyond the highest pass he received a vision of his personal, tantric saint, in whose presence he felt himself diffusing mystically away. The account of his journey later featured an enthusiastic preface by W.B.Yeats, whose poem Meru described a world mountain where hermits, ‘caverned in night under the drifted snow’, might pass finally beyond illusion.
Tibet was still so little known that travellers could imagine it the haven of once-universal mysteries. Echoes of ancient Egypt were divined (some scholars still play with this idea), and the country was even rumoured the fountainhead of the Aryan people, so that Hitler’s propagandists took a sentimental look at it. Tibet’s present state might be wretched, but its past could be purified. Even the early Christian missionaries entertained fantasies, imagining themselves among a people of lapsed Christianity. The Dalai Lama, after all, enjoyed the veneration and infallibility of a pope (and was likewise mired in politics), protected not by the Holy Roman Emperor but by the Celestial Emperor of China. There were trinities of Buddhist deities. Tara, the goddess of compassion, recalled the Virgin. Protestant intellectuals later castigated Catholics and Buddhists together as idol-worshipping and relic-venerating, alike in their celibate monks, their ritual incense, sprinkled water and rosaries. Strangest of all, as if in mockery of the Eucharist, the oldest Tibetan sects–the Bon and the Nyingma–preserved a ‘life-consecration rite’ in which the priest passes a communal bowl of beer and flour pellets among the congregation.
This, perhaps, is a relic of the Nestorian Christianity that had penetrated deep into Central Asia by the sixth century. A thousand years later, Indian sadhus were returning from the north with unverifiable reports that Christian communities lived around Lake Manasarovar, and sparked hopes that somewhere deep in Asia the legendary kingdom of the Christian emperor Prester John survived.
Towards nightfall an old man falters across the Hilsa bridge. With fearful care a young monk, his son, guides his uncertain steps, enfolding his shoulders in one arm, clasping his elbow in the other, as he shepherds him over to Nepal. The bridge rasps and sways. The old man is grimly dignified, dressed in a jacket of embroidered Chinese silk with sheepskin trimmings. His gaze is set on the farther bank, where they find haven in a little walled rest house with rickety balconies.
Later a crowd gathers to stare up at the ridge to the south. Faintly I descry two wavering lines of bharal, the rare blue mountain sheep. In the gloom I make out the shifting of their black-stockinged legs against the pale rock, and their backswept horns. Momentarily the young monk comes out too, to see what is happening. He speaks hesitant English. He escaped Tibet to India, he says, and is studying at Dehra Dun. He can never go back–he plucks his orange robes as explanation–but every year his father crosses the border into Humla for four days, and they meet in this no-man’s-land, before parting again. Each year he wonders if the crossing of the bridge will be their last.
I remembered another monk I had met that spring. His monastery belonged to the Gelugpa, the sect of the Dalai Lama, and its terraced gardens flowed vivid above the Kathmandu valley. He was slight and pale. I might have been walking beside a ghost. Cuckoos were sounding in the valley beneath us, but the Kathmandu suburbs were already lapping at the hill’s foot, and the murmur of road-building rose from the mists. The monk was young, like the monk of Hilsa, and he too had been severed from his past by the Chinese frontier.
He said: ‘My family came to Lhasa from our village in Tibet eleven years ago. My father had saved up some Chinese money. We were walking, without papers. I was ten years old. In Lhasa my father and mother gave me over to six others. Then they went back, and I never saw them again. Our group travelled over the plains secretly. Sometimes, I remember, I walked. It grew very hard. Sometimes somebody carried me on his shoulders. It was bitter cold, November. We walked for one month and ten days. I cannot remember how we slept. No relatives came with me. I have none here. Here I left them all behind and became a monk.’
‘You wouldn’t go back?’
‘If I did, the Chinese would take me. I’ve demonstrated outside the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu, and they photograph you. They must have my face on their files, many times. On the border they recognise us by our Tibetan names.’ A gentle rain was falling, but he did not notice. ‘My mother is fifty-four now, my father dead. I have two sisters there. The youngest I can’t remember. But I have spoken to my mother on the phone.’
‘That’s something.’ But I thought: she will just be a voice to him until she dies. Had his parents, I wondered, been too poor to keep their late-born son, or had they purposely released him into freedom?
He only said: ‘I don’t know.’ Behind us novice monks were running out of their classrooms, shouting and tussling together. ‘My family is this monastery now. This is my place. My father, my mother, my brothers, they are all here.’
CHAPTER NINE
I wake to the foraging of mules in the nearby rubbish, where they seem to be munching cardboard, and to a Nepalese police helicopter that lands beside the river in a spiral of dust. Etiquette demands that Nepalese porters carry our baggage across the bridge, and that Tibetan porters relieve them on the far side. The muddy water roars between. The straggling barbed-wire frontier is being breached by bands of goats that scramble over and squeeze through it. As we step through the open gate into Tibet, the sun is hot in a cloudless sky. No official is in sight. We sit on piles of rocks outside two tents for monitoring swine flu, and wait.