To a Mountain in Tibet(47)
Often his mouth hung tentatively open, as if it might twist into laughter, and I had the sense that despite his seeming certainties, all for him was fleeting, conditional, and might translate into something else, so that as he spoke on about the divinities, my attention drifted irreverently, wondering if the cuckoo that sired his god Shenrab was optatus or saturatus, or if the transition of Kailas from glacier to desert was not the future of all our planet.
He had travelled to Kailas himself, he said, long ago. ‘I did the kora six times. But it was winter, the wrong time of year. And I was very young. That region of Shang-shung is very cold, and we walked on compacted snow. It is not my Tibet.’ He asked suddenly: ‘Was it green when you were there? Was there any spring?’
‘Yes, in the valleys.’
He was smiling. He wanted to remember his country in flower. He said: ‘Perhaps you love those mountains, but I do not. I come from another region, from the east. It was always green there.’ For a little while, before he retired to meditate, he became a homesick old man, remembering, enquiring. Had I been east of Lhasa? Had I been to Kham? Seated in the humidity of Kathmandu, he wanted to hear of the green yak pastures of his home, of the horses grazing, and the waterfalls unfreezing on the high hills.
The pink walls of the Amitabha valley, which have steered Iswor and me ever closer to Kailas, now break stupendously apart, and all at once, barging out from behind separating crags, the mountain hangs above us, close and violent. The smooth dome has gone, and the whole western face is slung into massive eaves of black rock, tiered one upon the next like a gigantic pagoda. Its curving overhangs descend concentrically to glacial ledges that shelter basins of pure snow, while above the white fields banked on its summit flies a wind-driven dust of silver.
It is only noon, but the people have thinned away. I do not at first understand this. Often I see nothing ahead in the wide, turning valley but the solitary speck of Iswor, as it was in Nepal, and some Austrian trekkers strung out on the trail. Where have the pilgrims gone?
But others are approaching now, moving counterclockwise, many astride ponies or yaks. As they draw near, I see that they are not Bon, but Indian Hindus, turning back. They straggle in a sad army. Their Tibetan drovers whistle and shout alongside, but the pilgrims ride in silence, hooded and swathed, their faces in shadow. They do not speak as they pass. Many look utterly spent, the men’s faces like dark ash, frosted in moustaches, their eyes lowered. Some of them clutch canisters of oxygen, which they will jettison, when empty, among the rocks. For an hour or two there seems nothing on the mountain but a few blond trekkers muscling forward and this train of dark pilgrims descending.
The wind has turned to cutting ice, blowing from Kailas. The mountains ahead show bare flanks or broken scripts of snow. A figure descends alone, bulked in a brown anorak and balaclava, stopping to zip her hood under her eyes. Her party comes from Bangalore, she says, in India’s far south, and nothing prepared them for this. Her voice is light and gutted in the wind.
‘I don’t know what happened to us. Our people were so sure they could do it. We went through government tests for our health–lungs, heart, everything. Maybe some of our group avoided them, I’m not sure.’ She sounds less tired than stunned. Of her face, encased by hood and dark glasses, I can see nothing but wisps of escaped hair, greying, and the scarlet tika outlined black on her forehead, which looks somehow tragic. ‘We numbered sixty-eight when we started, but half of us turned back at Lake Manasarovar because of health–poor chests, coughing blood. Two of us died there, one a woman of just forty. Something happened in her breast. So we began to feel afraid. We are not used to this cold. I suppose you in the West are used. I am full of sadness now. The rest of us went on and got up to seventeen thousand feet, and then we couldn’t climb further. Our nerve was broken. That is why we turned back before finishing our parikrama. I am very sad now, and rather ashamed.’
Behind her the last of her party is passing down the ravine. A woman in flowery pantaloons sits half fainting on a horse led by a fierce herdsman, her husband walking alongside, trying to hold her.
The woman beside me takes off her dark glasses from alert, rather beautiful eyes. She says: ‘All the same, Lake Manasarovar was wonderful. We all waded in a little and washed its water over us, from the head down and–do you know?–we never felt it cold, but quite warm, because of its sanctity.’ She smiles to herself. ‘At least we had that.’ Then she resumes the long descent of the valley, wrapping her arms around herself, not looking back.
I walk on with vague foreboding, listening to my body. Hindu pilgrims seem to have reached Kailas pitifully ill-prepared ever since ragged Shaivite renunciates straggled here in the nineteenth century, begging. In the 1930s the pilgrim numbers mushroomed, and every year several thousand caste Hindus were attempting the parikrama, their kora. Long after the hiatus of the Cultural Revolution, in 1981, a few hundred pilgrims, chosen by Indian government lottery, moved over the Lipu Lekh pass west of Nepal. These sponsored pilgrims now number a thousand a year–a fraction of those who enter the lottery–but other tour operators ignore official precautions. Health stipulations are routinely flouted. The pilgrims are often middle-aged business people, modestly pious. I had seen them crowded into dormitories in Taklakot. Many are from the south, from lowland cities like Bangalore and Chennai: devotees of Shiva. Yet often they are flown from Kathmandu to Lhasa, ascending almost 8,000 feet in an hour, then truck four days west to reach Manasarovar exhausted at 15,000 feet. In the past few days, eight have died on the mountain.