To a Mountain in Tibet(37)
The bar-headed geese are flying again along the sands, and seem uncertain where to go. Beyond them the white folds of Gurla Mandhata balloon over the water. Farmers in the lower Indus valley, watching the geese take the river passage north to Manasarovar in spring, imagine they are heading for paradise. Perhaps these are the royal swans whose plumage, some say, turns to gold. Pilgrims are enjoined to worship them as Shiva, before pouring out water to the past.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In 1715 the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, travelling from Kashmir towards Lhasa, passed ‘a mountain of excessive height and great circumference, always enveloped in cloud, covered with snow and ice, and most horrible, barren, steep and bitterly cold…The Tibetans walk devoutly round the base of the mountain, which takes several days, and they believe this will bring them great indulgences. Owing to the snow on this mountain, my eyes became so inflamed that I well nigh lost my sight.’
He was the first known Westerner to set eyes on Kailas, where he nearly saw nothing more. Few who came after him were not moved. Even to mundane eyes its beauty was tinged with strangeness. Its apparent cone is in fact a steep pyramid, and each side faces a cardinal compass point. To the excitement of geologists, its mass is not Himalayan gneiss but an ancient Tertiary gravel lifted on granite: the highest such deposit in the world. For Kailas is the lonely relic of an age still earlier than the Himalaya, and was once the highest island in the dwindling Tethys Sea. As summer advances, the melting snows on the south face break across its illusory stairway to sketch a shadowy swastika. This venerable symbol–so corrupted in the West–recurs as a sign of good fortune all through India and beyond. In Tibet it survives alongside its more ancient opposite (whose arms hook backwards), and on the flank of Kailas it flowers like a portent.
As our Land Cruiser crosses the Barga plain towards the base of the mountain–in lumbering convoy with the British trekkers–there is no sign yet of any swastika, nor even of the lesion circling the mountain’s foot, inflicted by demons trying to drag it away. All around us the foothills are scribbled with juniper scrub, and the plain is newly green, where herds of horses drift. From time to time we see hearthrugs moving over the slopes. With quaintly hunched shoulders and bushy culottes, these are yaks. In their darkly dripping coats they stand out like rocks against the bleached grass where they graze, and we plan to hire one to replace Dhabu and Pearl. Once too I glimpse a lone goral–a Himalayan goat-antelope–wandering across the plateau, delicate and pale, as if lost.
As we draw closer, the mountain’s strangeness intensifies. The whole massif to its east leans faintly towards it, flowing in brown waves to the white pyramid under a wash of blue sky. Slowly we are approaching the settlement of Darchen, where pilgrims hire beasts for the mountain circuit. Here, traditionally, is the start of the pilgrimage. A century ago Kawaguchi found it a cluster of thirty stone houses. A curious treaty assigned its administration to the Maharaja of Bhutan, together with many local monasteries, but when a visiting British trade commissioner arrived in 1905, he found everybody drunk. Twenty-one years later his successor found everybody still drunk. Thirty years ago, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, the place was all but abandoned, emptied by persecution and winter storms. The only inhabitants were a deranged Tibetan couple who lived in the chapel of the decaying monastery.
From the military checkpoint that stops us short of it, Darchen looks ordered and compact. In twenty years it has become a town. But as we approach, it starts to fall apart. Its buildings separate down stony streets, which peter out uphill. We arrive at an open space where a few alleys converge. It is strewn with trash and broken stones. A wavering line of shops is here, Chinese and Tibetan side by side, where I buy some beer then wander the town in dismay. I pass run-down guest houses, Chinese army compounds, a leftover monastery. A lifeline of prayer flags loops over a squalid gully to the foot of the mountain. Meanwhile our alien permits are scrutinised by police, who at last ratify them, but any attempt to hire yaks is doomed. It is the eve of Saga Dawa, when pilgrims converge on Kailas, and the region has run out of yaks. The town is uneasy. It is over a year since the pre-Olympics riots in Lhasa, but the Chinese distrust of gatherings is running high. Access to this remotest province is always hard, but police have constricted it further, for fear of a huge congregation under the mountain.
Yet the pilgrims are filtering in. They trail curiously about the shops, shadowed by their tousled children, their gear heaped on their backs. The men go anonymous in assorted caps and anoraks, and I cannot tell how far they have come. But the sheepskin chubas of the women fall to their feet beneath aprons striped scarlet, green and oxblood red, and their hair hangs braided to the waist under scarves and little ear-flapped bonnets. When their faces are not masked against the dust, they are smiling.
A shopkeeper speaking mixed Mandarin and English tells me the town has grown more bitter. Three years ago, he says, a thirty-foot statue of Padmasambhava was raised on a nearby hill with the help of local monasteries. ‘In fact we all gave money for it. I paid money myself.’ He grimaces. ‘Then they put a cord round its neck and pulled it down.’ He whispers: ‘The Chinese army, of course.’
Their tread is heavy. We are close to a border disputed with India, and the barracks sprawl. From time to time squads of soldiers wielding batons and riot shields stamp through the streets, their march an open threat yet faintly absurd, their arms bullying wide. Camp followers are here too. Sad, rough women emerge beside me wheedling amo, amo, so that I wonder for a moment if they speak Italian, then remember the Mandarin for massage.