To a Mountain in Tibet(49)
Before we leave, Iswor, suddenly nervous, wants to pray to the goddess Tara, who owns the 18,600-foot pass that we must scale tomorrow. In the chief shrine her white body is so garlanded in jewellery that even the eyes that open on her hands and feet are blinded. But a third eye gazes from her golden forehead in a face of vapid sweetness, and the blue lotus of compassion floats behind her. Other pilgrims have sought assurance too, and the fingers of her right hand, raised in mercy, are so clotted with votive money that their gesture is lost. Iswor places two lamps at her foot, bows and whispers to me: ‘Light one for your future.’ Then he finds his ponderous backpack again, and we go out into the rasping cold.
From here as we descend through the twilight, the north face of Kailas breaks on the dimming sky. Two closer mountains–the pyramids of Vajrapani and Avalokitesvara, the peaks of power and benevolence–frame it like twin sentinels. Tantric adepts, inspired by the mountains’ symmetry, are enjoined to celebrate this moment in the mandala of Supreme Bliss, where Hindus envisage Shiva and Buddhists whatever deity is guiding their salvation. Beyond, a third pyramid mountain, sacred to Manjushri, the destroyer of ignorance, completes a triad to symbolise the attributes of the Buddha, while still farther east, beyond our narrowing path tomorrow, there hangs the pass of the compassionate Tara, to whom we lit our feeble lamps.
As we turn closer against the mountain, the Lha valley disappears northwards, towards the source of the Indus, and we are climbing steep up the dark moraine of a tributary. Beside us, as if by the revolution of a giant wheel, the mountain’s western face, with its vast hammocks of snow ledge, has followed the smooth beauty of the southern face out of sight, and into their place has risen this curtain of sheer terror. For the first time the whole mountain is exposed above us. From crest to foot it falls 5,000 feet in a near-vertical precipice. Nothing softens its chill descent. Its scarp is jet black, barely seamed with ice. Near its crest the snow plummets for hundreds of feet in razor sheets, and white pendants like inverted fans overlap one another six or eight high, descending in ghostly tiers to the abyss.
Trembling in my hands, the only guide to the mountain likens this face to the ‘north wall of the Eiger from Grindelwald’. Perhaps it is a submerged memory of this mountain that has chilled me for long minutes. Grindelwald was where my sister died, killed by an avalanche at the age of twenty-one. Between rock and snow, skiing. In the shadow of the Eiger. My lungs feel lined with cold. Ancient glaciers have scoured the ravines around into granite walls. For years my stricken mother could not speak of her, her memory under silence. We are climbing into near-darkness. The temperature has dropped far below freezing. I am shivering as if my padded anorak and thermal layers are muslin. Buddhists discern on the north scarp of Kailas a devil leading a pig, and the palace of a serpent king. But I have stopped looking.
My father is at the police station, I in the hotel lobby, where my mother asks some strangers to pray for us. It is only now that I feel afraid. My mother never importuned anyone. We sink our faces in our hands, waiting. For an hour, perhaps, or a minute, there is no news from the mountain. Then the door opens on my father, who says: ‘It’s no good…no good.’ He folds my mother in his arms.
It is years before her smile straightens, or I travel among mountains.
Our tent is pitched against a narrow ledge, anchored by boulders. A night wind comes scything up the valley. We bolt down noodles and warm tuna, then ease into our sleeping bags, fully dressed. Ram is quiet, tired, and Iswor’s head is throbbing with the first signs of altitude sickness. I can give him only aspirin. Tomorrow we will be climbing another 1,600 feet within three hours, and I wonder when the first nausea may hit us all. I try to sleep, but instead I lie febrile and clear-headed, listening for Iswor’s sound. Breathing is shallower at night, and the pain intensifies. But I hear nothing, and in this impoverished air my thoughts veer into delirium. All night the wind sets the tent flaps slapping against my head. I imagine I hear voices outside, and clouds rolling over the mountains.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Before dawn, when I emerge from our tent, the sky is still ablaze with stars, the wind has vanished, and the silence is the utter, pristine silence of a great desert. But we are more than 17,000 feet high. The air seems so thin that my voice would shatter it. Even my breathing, deeper than usual, sounds too loud, so that I sit down on a rock to quieten it, and wait for the faint white light to seep into the valley below.
Iswor wakes with his headache gone, sturdy and confident again. Ram cooks up three fried eggs–a luxury–and dismantles the tent around us. The coffee goes cold as we drink it. My head is light, not quite mine, but my body shakes off any aches, and a visceral excitement muffles the alarm of the high pass ahead. We set out into the pallor of an invisible sun, risen far below our horizon. We have fourteen miles to go before dark.
The basin where we climb is still deep in snow, covering the frozen Drolma-la river. A sunken bridge lies wrecked in its prison of ice. In front of us, as we gingerly cross the snow-field, the mountains north of Kailas come to the valley in flying buttresses. Behind, the massifs beyond the Lha Chu are powdered in the first morning cloud. The cold is bitter. Under our feet we hear the wakened river echoing in its ice tunnels, descending unseen.
After a while a moraine named the Valley of Incense opens to our south. A ridge like the section of a vast amphitheatre closes it off, lifting in a long spine to the summit of Kailas, which has transformed again, half-hidden in ashen cloud.