To a Mountain in Tibet(38)

A huge wall of mani stones and whitewashed stupas marks where the pilgrimage begins, its parapets and towers festooned with flags and piled with yaks’ skulls. Round this derelict-looking monument the circling devotees are mostly ancient, too frail for the kora, the mountain circuit itself. Instead they hail the holy month by this creeping ambulation, murmuring an Om mani padme hum with every bead that drips from their blackened fingers. Sometimes they chant longer prayers, distressed or musical, flattening their palms together in still graceful supplication, or twirl hand-held prayer wheels. In the stupas the apertures are clogged with tiny clay Buddhas left by votaries to guide the dead, and the yak skulls are heaped even on nearby ledges. Between the black horns the bone blazes with mantras steering the beasts to a better afterlife, or inscribed in penance for their deaths.

We skirt the slope beyond, Iswor and I, shaking the dust of Darchen from us. Kailas is out of sight, hidden by dark outcrops. On a track below, still travelled by Land Cruisers and army lorries, Ram and our tents have preceded us to where the pilgrims are gathering for Saga Dawa. On this first, desultory stretch of the kora not a soul is in sight. A dry wind is flailing the rocks. For a hundred yards a mani wall follows our path along the flank of the hills, its stones all canted at the mountain, unbroken. To the south float the snows of Gurla Mandhata–with the spectral peaks of Saipal and Api beyond in Nepal–and flat-bottomed clouds are cruising the sky.

A single pilgrim appears marching far ahead of us, but faster than us, and vanishes. Once we come upon a rank of bronze prayer wheels turning in emptiness, and circle it happily. I had imagined such wheels contained paper leaves that fluttered loose when turned, but on this wind-hacked slope several have cracked open and I see inside–guiltily, as if glimpsing intestines–the pristine prayers coiled tight in cylindrical wads.

A stone flies into Iswor’s eye. We bathe it from my water bottle beside the lonely prayer wheels. Tortoiseshell butterflies dither about us. Then we start again, tramping over dry gullies. The way is flagged by cairns of ivory-white stones cast up by the conglomerate mountain, cairns to which pilgrims add a pebble in passing. By these we are gently ascending. We pass a stone pile more huge than normal. Then the poles of prayer flags, felled by the winds perhaps years ago, lie across our approach like a shattered stockade. Here at last, by a little plateau, Kailas swings clear of its own massif. The black, toppling ziggurat of a hill still intervenes, but beyond this, out of its dun foothills, the white summit moves up like the cone of a rocket. Here we stand at the first chaksal gang of the kora, a platform for ritual prostration, facing the mountain. It is strewn with whatever anyone can carry up: inscribed stones, yak horns, articles of clothing. But the pilgrims have gone before us. It is so quiet that the loudest noise is the buzzing of bees among the fallen flags. This sacred wreckage of skulls, stones and garments looks organic with the rocks where it lies. I sit on a boulder, waiting for someone to come, but nobody does. Iswor stares at the emerging mountain, one hand over his eye. The pale horizons of the Barga plain have been squeezed from sight behind us. An hour later we are descending to the holy valley of the Lha river, which flanks Kailas west and north. The canyon walls climb dark and serrated along it, and the wind has fallen.

We come over a hill to an amphitheatre of worn grass. An espalier of linked flags surrounds it, converting the valley to a vast, open-ended oval of suspended and dripping colour. In the centre an eighty-foot pole–three or four pine trees clamped end to end–hovers stupendously aslant, waiting to be raised tomorrow, and around it the crowds are already processing clockwise, several hundred of them, chanting.

But an apprehension is in the air. The lorries of the Chinese police and army have penetrated along the valley–they are lined up opposite us–and every twenty yards, in a cordon round the pole, a soldier is standing stolidly to attention. The police are sealing off an overhanging hillock, and the truncheon-wielding squads are tramping back and forth. But beyond the palisade of flags, the pilgrims camp oblivious among boulders, picnicking or praying. Traders have set up shop in tents, and a Chinese mobile clinic is processing people for swine flu.

The only building is a stone hut. Cramped into its dimness, seated at low tables, some twenty Kagyu monks are chanting and playing instruments. The noise is terrific. They are robed in a medley of crimson, maroon and mustard yellow, and they span all ages. The emblazoned hats of the senior monks taper up like cherry-red mitres, while the juniors’ flare into pharaonic crowns that overhang their faces a foot above. They motion me to sit with them. Their tables are littered with butter lamps, bells, bottles of cola, and the stiff leaves of sutras. Aligned in worship, they form a genial gallery of whiskered age and callow youth. Mostly their hair is cropped or bound in pigtails, but sometimes their cheeks drizzle beards and wispy sideburns, and their locks fly free around spectacles glimmering in stranded orbs. I wonder if it was one of these Kagyupa who took refuge in the hermit’s cave above Manasarovar, and rejoiced at the lama’s ‘heart return’.

Pilgrims crowd in, touching money to their foreheads before they leave it for the monks. A novice collects the notes in a box labelled Budweiser, while another ducks among the chanting heads to serve them supper–bowls of coagulated rice and radishes–which they eat with jovial slurping while they pray. And all the time the unearthly music continues, with its voices like insects stirring, the horns braying their melancholy, the tap of a curved stick on an upright drum, and the watery explosion of cymbals.