To a Mountain in Tibet(34)

The origin of these rivers baffled explorers for centuries. Ironically the first European to reach Kailas, the Jesuit Desideri, evaluated them more accurately than anyone who followed him for a century and a half (although he misplaced the source of the Ganges). Even the assiduous William Moorcroft was deceived by the vanishing channel of Ganga Chu.

But the explorer who bestrode the whole region was the remorselessly driven Sven Hedin. At once impelled and flawed by a lust for adulation, he cast himself in the mould of a sublime hero. He allowed nothing–not official prohibition, sub-zero temperatures nor the death of men and beasts–to divert his course. In 1907 he reached Manasarovar from the east after an illicit journey that filled in 65,000 square miles on the blank map of Tibet. Within a few weeks all but six of his hundred pack mules and ponies had perished. When at last he caught sight of the blue sheen of Manasarovar, he burst into tears. He spent a month on its shores in an investigative frenzy. To the dismay of the Tibetans, he assembled a cockleshell boat and launched on to the water. The god of the lake would pull him under, they said. They believed that at its centre Manasarovar bulged into a transparent dome, and that even if Hedin mounted it he would capsize in the waterfall beyond. Instead, he took soundings on both Manasarovar and Rakshas Tal, cruising for hours. He imagined himself the first to sail here. He knew nothing of the Scotsman whose debut in a rubber dinghy had caused the death of the local governor fifty years before.

When at last he returned to Europe, trumpeting his discovery of India’s river sources, and of the mountains he named Trans-Himalaya, Hedin received a mauling from the society that had once most ardently supported him, the world’s premier body of geographers, the Royal Geographic Society in London. He defended his claims with magisterial arrogance, and partial success. But only his siting of the Indus source proved indisputable (the Brahmaputra had been located by a jaunty British hunting party forty years before), and his mountains were redefined as a broken and nebulous massif unworthy of a Himalayan name.

In the cold British gaze Hedin had undermined his own achievements by exalting them. He retired to Stockholm, bruised and furious. He publicly supported Kaiser Wilhelm through the First World War, and Adolf Hitler in the Second, losing the love of his Swedish compatriots. He secured the release of several concentration camp victims, yet remained unrepentant of his Nazi sympathies. His fame darkened, and faded, and he died in near-obscurity in 1952, bequeathing his research to his estranged countrymen.





CHAPTER ELEVEN

At night, the silence of the lake is pricked only by the faint cries of water birds in their sleep. The sky is white with stars, and with the waxing moon of Saga Dawa, the Buddhist holy month, which frosts our scattered camp. Hindus say the shooting stars are sky gods who descend to bathe in Manasarovar. An Indian pilgrim tells me later that her night was disrupted by flashing lights and strange cries.

Towards dawn I wake breathless to a world turned crimson. From one horizon to another the lake is a long slash of fire, and the sky lightening with lurid strata of red and pale gold. Easy to imagine this an apocalyptic fracture in the order of things, a portent of sacred chaos, or at least a fanfare for the dawning holy month. I stand outside my tent, distracted by some dream I have forgotten. Far to the south, over Gurla Mandhata, the clouds are congealed black, as if it were a zone of clogged, perpetual night, and all along the shoreline the grebes and sandpipers float or stand in the molten water, half of them still asleep.

The sky is paling to common day as I walk south along the littoral. Redshanks skitter about the sands, and the black-headed gulls fly back and forth and fuss in the shallows. Here and there the cliffs above me are pocked with caves. For centuries hermits have meditated around the lake, drawn to its lonely power. The whole region is riddled with their dwellings. I scramble up and find an entrance framed by rough-layered stones. Inside the cave is empty, but half ceilinged by timbers, and three votive scarves, quite new, hang on the rocks outside.

In the scarp above I glimpse a dwarfish doorway closed in plastered stones. A flurry of rock pigeons startles upwards as I clamber higher. The lake tilts and gleams below. A wafer-thin door swings in the cave entrance, once closed by a twist of wire that has dropped into the dust. As I edge it open, I feel suddenly uneasy. There are rumours of yogis still caverned round the lake–near Cherkip a solitary nun has only just left. I peer into half-darkness. I wonder momentarily if somebody has died here. By my hand a rusted stove is wedged deep in the cave wall, its chimney pipe wobbling up to a hole in the rock. But the cave is deserted. Its ceiling glints black like the vault of a coal mine. The smells are of dust, and the only noise is the sloshing of waves below. On a rock ledge deeper inside I come upon a bag of rice and another of salt, and a torch without a battery. Nearby lies a pouch of salinated earth, reverently gathered from the shores of the lake. Whoever was here, I realise, intended to return. But that, I think, was long ago.

The only clue hangs on a sheet of cardboard torn from a noodle carton propped against one wall. Some photographs of monks sag from its peeling sellotape, and beneath them dangles the notice of a ‘heart return’ ceremony in Nepal in the year 2000 for a Karmapa lama–‘Jamgon Kongtrul the Great’–who had passed into nirvana a century before.

So the hermit, perhaps, had belonged to the Kagyu sect, whose monks start meditating young, and which had once produced austere ascetics. I stare down from the cave entrance, imagining him climbing the cliff towards me, but the shore stretches empty. In such solitudes advanced yogis deepened their powers. And they were not precisely alone. Their discipline had been passed down, teacher to pupil, in long lineages of arcane knowledge, and all around them abandoned caves blazed with the holiness of their predecessors. Their near-magic practice arrived from India as early as the eighth century, and it became the heart of Tibetan faith. Their path was called vajrayana, the Thunderbolt or Diamond Vehicle, named from the hard swiftness with which it dispelled ignorance, and its scriptures were the esoteric texts named tantra. Its yogis–whether monk or layman–became a religious elite; but theirs was a dangerous and half-secret way. Within a single lifetime–a shockingly brief span to conventional Buddhists–the adept might overleap the toil of reincarnations and enter nirvana.