To a Mountain in Tibet(29)

Fifteen miles later we are driving into Taklakot. I look out in bafflement on wide, half-empty streets. They are almost silent. This is Tibet, I tell myself, I am in Tibet. But the town has a lunar placelessness. A millennium ago it was the capital of an independent Tibetan kingdom, and in time its soft cliff caves were home to monks and merchants. It became the crossroads of Indian pilgrims and Nepalese traders bargaining rice, palm sugar and half the artefacts of the lowlands; of the local Drokpa Tibetans exchanging their immemorial wool and salt; of Khampa nomads selling brick tea.

But now the town has the gutted feel of other Chinese frontier places. In the modern district–a cross-hatch of arid avenues–the vanguard of a new civilisation is dourly in place: China Post, the Agricultural Bank of China, China Mobile. Here the Tibetan shops, with their whitewashed fa?ades and roof lines of compacted twigs, go side by side with Chinese restaurants and hair salons, but none seems to be doing business. Their cavernous interiors are barely lit, and several look abandoned. Soldiers in fatigues and plimsolls are waiting outside the Li Fei nightclub–for this is a garrison town–and police cars are nosing out of the lanes.

We arrive at a sterile compound where travellers are insulated in dormitories and stark bedrooms. Its gates are plastered with warnings against swine flu. We might have slipped back to the time before Deng Xiaoping, when foreigners and Chinese–let alone Tibetans–were segregated. Our baggage is emptied again, and our permits in this sensitive area are scrutinised once more by the military. They have grown more nervous, more oppressive, since the riots last year.



I walk out into the chill of evening. Somewhere beyond these streets, above the unseen river, the ancient market district spreads under cliffs, and I grope there by compass, losing myself in the dead ends of alleys, crumbling walls, concrete barracks. At last a few willow trees clear a view. Below me drops the ravine of the Karnali, where the putty-soft cliffs, jagged and split by meltwater, are riddled with caves that are still inhabited. At their feet the white stucco of Tibetan houses, sliced by tapering doors and high, barred windows, appears magically complete. I cross light-hearted over the suspension bridge and wait for the bazaars–hectic with Indian, Humla and Tibetan interchange, trussed clouds of wool, hillocks of rock salt–to break furiously around me.

But I enter a ghost town. A few doorways are still gay with murals, but most stand derelict, their rooms gutted beyond, their windows blocked, the tin pelmets swinging broken from their lintels. As I ascend the street past range after range of these phantom shops, a cold wind gets up from the west. Scarcely a soul is about. Here and there, as in some surreal dream, a rotted billiards table stands upended in the dust.

I ask a group of Tibetan women what has happened, but their Mandarin is worse than mine. The summer market has not worked for two years, they say, banned by the Chinese. They gesture back at the district behind me. Everything has been transferred to the modern zone. They smile in resignation.

A mani wall, the height of a man, wavers to the street’s end. Thousands of inscribed stones, the colour of dull rose, are laid one upon another, topped by rose-painted yak skulls. The wall protects nothing, of course, and keeps out no one. It is an act of mass devotion, to be circled praying (although it is deserted) and its immured prayer wheels piously spun.

Beyond it the white walls of Tsegu Gompa, ‘the Nine-Storeyed Monastery’, emerge from a cliffside pocked with windows and gaping doorways. Galleries beetle over the scarp on sagging piers, but their stairways are cut deep inside the cliff, so that the ochre-splashed balconies disappear and re-emerge across the rock face as in a dilapidated palace.

I climb shivering through the courtyard gates, and call up to no one I can see. Only a ceremonial pole rises from the court. After a long time a shaven head peers down from above, then withdraws. I shout up that I’d like to enter, but nothing happens. I wait bleakly in the dying light. I wonder: will all monasteries exclude me like this? On the balconies the prayer wheel bells tinkle faintly in the wind. Cautiously the head reappears, vanishes again. Then a door opens in the cliff. The monk looks young and frightened. He speaks nothing I understand. He leads me by other doors along a passage sliced into the scarp, then steeply upwards through a cave by an iron ladder in near darkness. One after another, I am groping through a series of airless sanctuaries whose ceilings lour black with lamp smoke, their crevices stuck with Chinese bank notes. In the dimness the walls drip with sacred banners, many faded and rotting, and behind them, perhaps precious in these thirteenth-century shrines, the wall paintings lie so obscure under grime that I can make out nothing.

In the central chapel the benches for praying monks, with the abbot’s throne, are toy-like replicas of those in grander monasteries. But the young monk has grown nervously proud. He names the statues to me–although most, in the version he gives, I do not know. They sit in cracked plaster, their blue and orange bodies clouded in yellow scarves. In this darkness they inhabit only pools of chance light, disclosing faces of gaudy indifference: cheap jewellery, bulging eyes, anemone lips. Sometimes a crowd of lamps trembles beneath an altar, although only the monk nurtures them. Here he points out the Sakyamuni Buddha, and here Padmasambhava, whose dead-white face trickles a black moustache, and whose androgynous consort flanks him in painted gold.

It is dusk as I cross back over the river to the compound to sleep. Behind me the riddled cliff face rises black above the valley, while far beyond it the once-great monastery of Shepeling lifts in ruins under the wakening stars. Sixty years ago this powerful hermitage sprawled along the ridge beside the fortress of the district governor, the ‘Lord of Purang’. It housed some 170 monks, a school for novices, a vast library and 400 precious banner paintings. In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese army artillery levelled it to dust, leaving only the roofless slivers and stubs dissolving into the night above me. A few monks, I later heard, had crept back to the ruins, but this desecrated skyline still loomed unrepented in the dark, like a warning to the divided town below.