To a Mountain in Tibet(43)
‘Where is home?’ He is gazing up at the mountain and the charnel ground, and I wonder for a moment if he means to make an end there.
But he says: ‘After perestroika my family came westwards, to Germany, where our people started.’ So he was returning to the paradigm of Western materialism. ‘Düsseldorf,’ he murmurs.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The true start of the kora is here, on the ridge between the great pole and the river, where the Kangri chorten isolates the mountain in its dark arch. The chorten’s base is piled with stones placed by pilgrims before their leaving, and Iswor adds a pebble at dawn, then circles the site clockwise, the prayer beads loosened around his wrist, insuring against danger.
These chortens find their origins far back in the Indian stupas that enshrined the incinerated corpse of the Buddha. But in Tibet they have changed shape and taken other meanings. Some contain funerary remains, but most enfold scriptures and relics, often too damaged to be used but too sacred to destroy. Ours is a ceremonious gateway, purifying the pilgrims’ path, and is built on a model now familiar, its square plinth mounting steps to a concave drum that ascends in turn to thirteen dwindling and compacted golden wheels, topped by a crescent moon cradling the sun.
These structures may be seen, predictably, in many ways. Their five chief components, from earthbound base to aerial sun, signify the Buddhist elements, as prayer flags do. But they double as the initiate’s path to enlightenment, and a crowning disc on the sun’s orb transmutes solar wisdom and lunar compassion into pure truth. Tantric initiates discover in the chorten an eidolon of the seated Buddha, and see its central axis–most chortens enclose a vertical beam–as a symbol of Meru-Kailas, or a male archetype infusing a female body.
We step through the chorten’s passage towards a vision of the mountain. Strings of yaks’ teeth hang from the ceiling, brushing our shoulders, and two rotting yaks’ heads dangle above. Enclosed in the drum above us, invisible relics confer benediction. Then we walk out into the holy valley. Its floor is lacquered green where yaks and jhaboos are grazing. A few pilgrims are strung like beads along it. And here, around the meadows called the Golden Basin, the cliffs start to close magnificently in. Their bluffs break into seams of tangerine and pink, then shiver up like ruined towers to merge with the mountain walls, pouring down shale.
Beside us, hermit caves sprinkle the heights under the charnel ground, where pilgrims are climbing, wild-haired and young. Who had meditated here? Bonchung, perhaps, the early Bon wizard; or Milarepa, the Buddhist saint who dispossessed him? But they do not know. The caves are narrow, with platforms built of loose stones. Worshippers have glued money and prayer beads to the ceilings, and someone has laid her necklace on a stone.
We tramp along an easy path in high spirits. The Lha river wanders alongside, crusted with ice. Kailas looms in solitary snow to the north-east. Along the wide, pebbled valley ahead of us, a figure is inching forward, levelling its length in the dust, rising, advancing three paces, falling again, arms stretched ahead. Even when we draw alongside, I cannot at first tell if this is a youth or a girl. By these painful means, the body touching every span of the path, a pilgrim may circle the mountain in three weeks, returning each dawn to the spot abandoned, marked with a stone. When the figure rises, I see that it is protected in a leather apron; and the hands, which lift in prayer before each obeisance, are strapped with wooden boards. Out of the dust she turns a blackened face to me, and smiles. If she is initiate, she sees on the path in front her tutelary Buddha, and gathers virtue with every salutation. While two bent women, too old to perform this rite themselves, precede the near-child with a thermos of tea, crouching in the dust before her and willing her on.
Iswor tramps past, as bemused as I, and says only: ‘Perhaps she has done something.’
We are entering a zone of such charged sanctity that any penance, or any crime, trembles with heightened force. Its few inhabitants, mostly monks, exist in a force field of intensified holiness, for their past incarnations have led them here. This domain is venerated even beyond Buddhists and Hindus. The surviving Bon worship their ancestral mountain here, circling it anticlockwise, and followers of the peaceful Jain faith–although I cannot identify any–reverence Kailas as the site where their first prophet passed away, and circumambulate it in the Buddhist way, carrying their prayer beads in little bags.
Pilgrims who complete thirteen circuits may walk the inner kora, a short, sometimes dangerous path that approaches the south face. But this is the closest anyone may go. Kailas has never been climbed. At 22,000 feet, it is not a giant by Himalayan standards, but it stands fearsomely solitary. In 1926, a British mountaineer, a Colonel Wilson of the Indian Army, with his sherpa Satan, reconnoitred the southern approaches to the peak, which Wilson likened jauntily to a bowler hat. After toiling up sunless defiles, he thought he identified a ridge that might reach the summit. But time was short. Aghast at the near-perpendicular scarp and the shaly abysses, the two men retreated, while a freakish storm of snow and lightning exploded over them.
It was almost twenty years before another British alpinist, Major Blakeney, fancifully imagined scaling the peak armed with little more than an umbrella; but his Tibetan guide adamantly refused. Then, in the mid-1980s, the great mountaineer Reinhold Messner planned its assault, while the Chinese temporised, and the matter petered out. Nobody since then has attempted the summit. The north face is sheer, perhaps unclimbable, and racked by avalanches, the south and west precipitous with shale and glaciers. Only the east, barely visible on the kora, may–or may not–offer a less fearful climb. But the ascent of Kailas is still interdicted above all by a people who will not disturb their gods.